A Lesson for us all from an Uncommon Man?
While he is a man of great interest to many Network members, so much has already been written about him that some readers may sigh, 'not another book about Goethe!' What makes this book unusual and valuable for the general reader is its theme: learning about his efforts, indeed according to the author, his success in leading a largely fulfilled and happy life, we may be enabled ourselves to attain happiness. Although we read much about his life, his ideas and his works, all this is used to illustrate his lifelong attempt to create a unity between the inner and the outer, between the subjective and the objective, and by so doing to find a way to lead the 'perfect inner life'.

John Armstrong points out that Goethe does not link this project with Òloving God or the avoidance of sin or the purity of one's intentions. Instead this ideal of inner quality [is] brought back into connection with the world of experience, with intellectual curiosity, with politics and administration, with art and history and travel. [Goethe is] suggesting to himself that there is no necessary opposition between the world and the spirit. (p 102) What he wrote below a drawing of Charlotte von Stein reveals his own aspiration: 'she sees the world as it is, and yet through the medium of love'.

And this closely relates to the concept of wholeness, a quality which Schiller perceived in Goethe. His multifarious activities, amongst them government business, art criticism, writing poetry, plays and novels, doing science, flirting, taking exercise, are all, Schiller claims, expressions of a single unified personality, in other words a multiplicity in unity rather than a constructed and spurious unity in multiplicity. Unlike Goethe, most of us are 'specialised fragments of competence', rather than what we should strive to become: 'whole, rounded people'.

This theme, well encapsulated in the book's subtitle, is fleshed out in a fast moving, sometimes unorthodox account of the salient features of Goethe's life and works. The book is divided into ten parts, each consisting of a number of short chapters, many no more than a page or two in length. This format makes for a lively read, and the author is skilled at drawing out wider significance from particular incidents. Anyone who wants a stimulating yet easy to assimilate introduction to a fascinating man may read this book. However, two issues deserve comment: Goethe's science, and the significance for him of mystical and esoteric knowledge and experience.

Goethe claimed to value his science above his literary work. Many of us consider that his observations, most of his conclusions, and above all his methods contain significant lessons for the contemporary world. John Armstrong leaves this largely to one side, while analysing perceptively the difficult question of Goethe's virulent antagonism towards Newton. He comes though to a rather strange conclusion: rather than attacking Newton Goethe would have better expended his powers by tackling the issue, as relevant in his day as in ours, of the alienation of science from everyday life and experience. But surely that is exactly what Goethe was illustrating and writing about through most of his career. For example, Newton analyses light in terms of (supposedly) objective waves and frequencies whereas Goethe does not allow his explanations or his hypotheses to escape from the phenomena, from the lived subjective experience of light and colour. Both explicitly (for example in the essay entitled The Experiment as Mediator between Object and Subject) and implicitly by the practical and direct nature of his scientific activities he is illustrating over and over again that science need not, indeed should not, be alienated from everyday life and experience. In our day Rupert Sheldrake exemplifies the strength of this approach in challenging presuppositions in a way that most likely heralds a breakthrough in the methodology of science.

Although the book is remarkably full of detail, no mention is made of Goethe's place in the western mystical tradition. We do not hear about the Fairy Tale, about the transcendental poetry, about The Legacy, about The Mysteries, or indeed much about the culmination of the Wilhelm Meister novel or the second part of Faust. Nor, in conformity with contemporary academic convention, is any mention made of Rudolf Steiner. Perhaps this is related to the authorÕs need to stress the 'healthy mindedness' of Goethe's approach to life. We learn a lot about his struggles with the vicissitudes life brings, but little about what might be termed without judgement his shadow side. He is held up as an example to us of how to achieve happiness in the world full of suffering: an orderly domestic and personal life, balance, appropriate renunciation, a measured and active curiosity. This is all very well, and it is useful to have this reading of Goethe so clearly and sensitively laid out. But it would be a shame if a reader coming to Goethe for the first time were to believe that there are not other less well illuminated yet intriguing facets to this many-sided man.

Dr. Julian Candy is a retired psychiatrist.