Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and Philosophy ed. by Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge and C. Allen Speight

Abstract

Reviewed by: Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and Philosophy ed. by Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge and C. Allen Speight Juliana de Albuquerque Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge and C. Allen Speight, eds. Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 276 pp. This collection edited by Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge and C. Allen Speight contains ten essays by leading scholars in the fields of Philosophy and German studies on the importance of Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship for the history of ideas generally and to current philosophical debates. Reading this book brought to my mind both the works of Stanley Cavell and Martha Nussbaum on the relationship between literature and philosophy. Cavell's suggestion in The Claim of Reason that philosophy can be regarded as a set of texts demanding interpretation, and Nussbaum's remark in Love's Knowledge that the style of a text is itself a statement about the kind of knowledge it deals with, show how we can study Goethe as a philosopher despite his denial of a claim to this label. Reading Goethe as a philosopher or even just as a writer whose work influenced philosophy then and now raises important questions about what it means to do philosophy within the confines of academia, about the role of narrative, reading, and [End Page 188] textual interpretation in the activity of the philosopher, and about the relative value of specific literary genres (and here I would include the academic essay) for exploring the experience, performance, and formation of individual identity. The first essay of the book by Eckart Förster sheds new light on Goethe's influence, especially of his philosophy of nature, on Hegel's philosophy. This topic has been covered by others in the past, including, notably, Walter Kaufmann; unlike Kaufmann however, whose approach is primarily historical, Förster focuses on presenting Goethe as a pioneer in the study of the spiritual foundations of nature in modern times, showing how Goethe can be recognized as a philosopher in his own right and as someone who develops a scientific method that emphasizes the role of transitions in the study of nature. Stephen Houlgate's essay takes a similar approach. However, rather than emphasizing the influence of Goethe's philosophy of nature on Hegel as does Förster, he considers the reception of Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship in Hegel's lectures on aesthetics. Central to Houlgate's reading, as well as to a broader understanding of the relationship between literature and philosophy, are Hegel's comments on the modern novel as "the modern bourgeois epic" and the question of whether Hegel's approach to the novel does justice to the complexity of Goethe's Meister. The two other essays that particularly drew my attention are by Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge and Charlotte Lee. Eldridge's text considers the interplay between the novel form and the role of the experience of contingency in Goethe's Meister. She argues with Schlegel that Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship has an organizing effect on readers by helping them critically reflect on the relationship between its parts and whole that could extend itself to the way that readers deal with their own efforts at organizing themselves: "the novel's model of managing contingency through narrative direction is fundamentally lifelike: there is no point in human life where all contingency has been permanently banished, and the task becomes one of sorting out themes and threads, values and projects, of thinking about how one might go about structuring one's experience." Charlotte Lee's essay, on the other hand, deals with agency and embodiment in Goethe's Meister, allowing us to form a more nuanced opinion about the ways in which characters may be said to express power and powerlessness in the novel. According to Lee, movement and physical vigor are not, of themselves, guarantees of power. Along with the insight that many expressions of agency in the novel are not intended to change the status quo, this conclusion pertaining to embodied movement is particularly important for an understanding of the way that gender is portrayed in Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. Both Eldridge's focus on contingency and Lee's emphasis on the fragility of agency in Goethe...