READING GOETHE AT MIDLIFE

Subtitled ‘ancient wisdom, German classicism and Jung’, this fascinating study explores the history of the idea of the midlife crisis and its relevance for today, using as a starting point Goethe’s major late poem Primal Words - Orphic and relating this to Jung’s work on the stages of life or what he called in German Lebenswende - literally the turning-point of life. Interestingly, Jung’s exact contemporary Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) was also influenced by Goethe in his own way, especially by what he referred to as his elemental thought, directly arising from and related to life experience rather than abstract categories. Schweitzer gave four lectures around the centenary of Goethe’s birth, collected in a short book, to which I often return. I imagine that most readers are in the second half of life, and I remember being struck when I first read Modern Man in Search of a Soul by Jung’s remark that the fundamental issue of his patients in this stage was finding a spiritual outlook on life. And as Goethe remarked, ‘the point of life is life itself.’

The headings of the five stanzas of the poem are hugely significant: Destiny (Daemon), Chance (Tyche), Love (Eros), Necessity (Ananke), and Hope (Elpis). Goethe himself wrote a commentary, some of which is quoted below, to which the author adds an informed background and extensive context. This all has universal relevance to every human life in every time. We are all born [stamped/gestempelt] with a ‘necessary, limited individuality of a person, determined at birth,’ which gives us certain inborn powers and peculiarities, or character, which is nevertheless ‘hemmed in in its workings, and hindered in its tendencies.’ Then there are particular circumstances of background and culture, which provide the context for the emergence of ‘a deeper fundamental longing.’ Love introduces a further dynamic factor of desire and attraction, the noblest form of which is devoted to the One, as was the case with the troubadours. Necessity takes the form of constraint and constriction, while Hope opens us up to new possibilities. Jung himself had achieved a great deal of success by the age of 40, but these worldly satisfactions are no longer sufficient when we heed the Call of the Self in the midlife crisis.

The author covers a wide range of writers on the topic of the stages of life, including Seneca, Cato, Fichte, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Hesse, Stefan George and Milton Erikson. Daryl Sharp writes that ‘those who have a midlife crisis are caught in the grip of an inner necessity – the psychological imperative to embark on the journey of self-discovery.’ (p. 73) This was precisely the case with Goethe and Jung, while for Schweitzer the period coincided with his internment during World War I. For Jung, it is no longer a question of adapting to the outer world, but to the inner world representing the totality of the personality, culminating in die Erleuchtung des Selbsts – the illumination of the Self. This also represents the birth of death as a deep personal longing for peace. Goethe’s life was an exemplar of what Jung called individuation, and at each stage in his life he was reborn; indeed, he emphasised the centrality of metamorphosis, being able to die and become (Stirb und Werde). For me, this is quintessential – TS Eliot’s ‘deeper communion’ - and is at the same time a further integration, both symbolically and in actual life. Even the greatest writers struggle with this epistemological gap between idea and experience.

Both Goethe and Jung lived out the contrast between the Apollo and Dionysus, the rational and intuitive, the scientific and the Gnostic/mystical/alchemical, the official and unofficial, classical and romantic, what Jung called the spirit of the times, and the spirit of the depths. Goethe’s Faust is Jung’s Red Book. Emil Staiger conveys the power of Primal Words – Orphic with his observation that these stanzas represent ‘everything that the poet and scientist has ever said about human beings, compressed with great power into a few lines.’ The last 70 pages take readers into the depths of the poem and enable us to reflect on how these lines apply to our own lives. The author makes the interesting observation that Jung (unlike Freud…) has very little to say about sexuality, even though it was important to him personally, as it was to a greater extent for Goethe, especially at the time of his Italian journey.

Goethe draws a crucial distinction between willing and wanting. He sees the good will as the main fundament of ethics, while wanting reflects character in an amoral fashion. The dialectic between freedom and necessity provides the linchpin of drama and tragedy – Goethe observes that the plays of Shakespeare revolve around an invisible point ‘where the characteristic quality of our being, our presumed free will, collides with the inevitable course of the whole.’ (p. 215) Our highest freedom is a form of obedience to universal and divine laws, which means ‘that we chime in harmony with the ethical order of the world [and can] thereby come to be at peace with ourselves.’ The words of the Delphic oracle, ‘Know Thyself’, need to be supplemented with Pindar’s ‘become who you are’ – with the reminder that who we all are is in fact the One. Inner freedom can be consent to necessity – for Hegel, necessity and freedom may contradict each other, but they do not exclude each other. We constantly move between these polarities – Goethe’s Faust says that only the one who earns freedom on a daily basis merits life. Meanwhile, his poetry eloquently demonstrates how art has the capacity to bring the eternal into the transient, the transcendent into the immanent. There is a great deal of wisdom to be gleaned from these pages, as I hope I have illustrated.