The Sorrows of Young Werther
The nature and function of freedom is a central theme of The Sorrows of Young Werther. But to answer the deceptively simple question - is Werther free? – requires we first approach the messy problem of definition. By my count, freedom manifests in four different forms throughout the novel’s episodes and debates: the first, I’ll call “socio-political”; the second, “moral”; the third, “spiritual”; the fourth “eternal.” In this week’s reading response, I’ll try to create a taxonomy of these forms. From there, we might be better situated to ask: is Werther free?
Socio-Political Freedom: Goethe Ain’t Interested
Let’s begin with “socio-political” freedom. Are Werther’s actions and desires constrained by external forces that we might deem oppressive or constricting? Hardly. Werther is the happy beneficiary of a feudal class system that was alive and well in 18th century Germany (or, more precisely, those parts of the old Holy Roman Empire that would unify as “Germany” a century later). Under this system, as Werther writes, “differences of class are necessary” (24 December). “Necessary” here means something more than “necessary for maintaining order.” Class differences are “necessary” in the sense of inevitable, fated. In professing these views, Werther is implying an essential connection between natural inequality and political equality - precisely the “essential connection” that Rousseau deems “highly unbecoming to reasonable and free men in search of the truth” in his Origins on the Discourse of Inequality.
Werther is not interested in Rousseau’s equality. He acknowledges that class differences “work greatly to [his] own advantage,” and is happy that they do. But beyond that, his only problem with an unequal class structure is that it prevents people of different strata from socializing together. This comes off less as a principled objection than a personal complaint. Werther’s real issue with social barriers seems to be that they make it more difficult for Werther to mingle with whomever he pleases. When he criticizes “people of some standing” who “always keep coldly aloof from the common folk,” we are not to mistake this for the stirrings of egalitarian sentiment. The letter continues: “I know we are not equal, nor can be” (15 May).
Of course, it works both ways. The same inequality separating Werther from the lower classes separates him from the nobles above. This is made more than clear in Book Two, when Werther lingers too long at the kindly Count C’s house after dinner. Various ladies and gentlemen of the nobility begin to arrive for a regular weekly assembly, and Werther, caught up in conversation, forgets to excuse himself, causing a minor scandal. In a different kind of novel - a novel about social striving - we might cite this as evidence of Werther’s lack of freedom. But he wants nothing to do with the high society that snubs him. He “cannot abide this breed” of people whose “entire souls are occupied with protocol and ceremony, who devote their devious creative energies, for years on end, to moving one place higher at the table!” (8 January). Werther sees no value in moving up the social ladder, so it makes little sense to say he is “not free” to do so.
And economic freedom? Near the end of Book I, Werther leaves Lotte to take a job at the embassy. Before long he is describing his unhappy situation in characteristically dramatic terms: he is in chains, he is caged, he is a slave, etc. But the “yoke” Werther has to bear is easily enough removed. He does not actually need his job to survive - he can always ask his mother for money, or take a handout from a prince. And so, when the work becomes too burdensome, he walks away.
In Goethe’s novel, then, the question of “free” or “not free” must be pursued on other planes. A degree of financial independence and an abundance of leisure time are seen to be pre-conditions for the pursuit of another kind of freedom, but nothing more.
Moral Freedom: Beyond Good and Evil
In Werther’s debate with Albert on suicide (and later, in his defense of the murderer) Werther comes surprisingly close to endorsing a Nietzschean vision of morality that appears “beyond good and evil.” “Why is it,” Werther asks,
“that when people speak of things they must promptly pronounce them foolish or clever, or wicked or good! Whatever does it all mean? Have you really grasped the true and inmost nature of action? Can you really give a definite account of the reasons why it happened, and why it had to happen?”
Contra Werther, Albert wants to uphold the possibility of universal judgments: “You will grant that certain actions are wrongful . . . no matter what their motives” (12 August). He goes onto defend “the ability to think rationally” and control the passions (ibid). His position seems to adhere to the Kantian view of freedom we saw in last week’s readings: it is a freedom founded on independence from external forms of authority – namely the state and religion – but it is not just a negative “freedom from”; in Kant’s eyes, true freedom is achieved by employing one’s rationality in accordance with universal laws. And it would seem to be the same for Albert. The free life is the moral one.
Werther sees this sober vision of morality as a potential constraint on what, in one letter, he calls “extraordinary men who accomplish great things” (26 May). These are the men in whom the “torrent of genius” pours forth (ibid). Such men are capable of acting in a way that is “according to genuine motives” instead of being “governed by biscuits and cake and the rod” (22 May). Here Werther bestows ultimate value on actions that are neither calculated to satisfy basic needs (biscuits and cake), nor subservient to the wishes of others (the rod). But what, then, would an action that comes from “genuine motives” look like? For Werther, the answer is any action that is “true to human nature” (26 May). As the novel makes clear, this means actions unconstrained by rules and reason.
The novel presents a series of binaries to demonstrate the point. We are treated to the child vs. the adult, the madman vs. the “good and peaceable fellow,” and the genius vs. the “respectable gentleman.” What the child, the madman, and the genius have in common, is that they are all at odds with human reason, having not yet attained it, lost it, or learned to ignore it. In place of reason, their actions are shaped by “the true feeling of Nature and its true expression” (26 May).
Spiritual Freedom: Art and Love
By now it should be clear that, for Werther, freedom is not to be found in a more equal society or in the correct application of moral reason. I have tried to establish that, counter to the standard enlightenment view, Werther sees freedom as located in “the true feeling of Nature and its true expression” (26 May). But what does that mean? And what form does this “true expression” take? Werther mentions two possibilities: art and love. Both, if subjected to rules and reason, “will be done for” (ibid).
Another question now emerges: how, in the realms of art and love, should one give voice to this “true expression?” Werther himself does not always seem sure; he is often preoccupied by the question of what to do with his feelings. On the hand, he wants to enjoy them with his whole heart, to lose himself in the flow; on the other hand, he wants to give them form as an artist.
In both cases, something is always missing. There is no such thing as the perfect representation, as Werther frequently laments: “I am often filled with longing, and think: ah, if only you could express this, if only you could breathe onto the paper in all its fullness and warmth what is so alive in you” (10 May). Nor can there be such a thing as total communion with Nature. So long as one still has a “self” to lose in Nature, one will always be separate from that Nature. The longing to “surrender the whole of our being, and be filled with all the joy of one single, immense, magnificent emotion” will always frustrated by man’s return to “dull consciousness at the very moment he was longing to be lost in the vastness of infinity” (June 21; December 6).
The language here is very reminiscent of literature that would emerge almost two centuries later under the banner of “the absurd.” The absurd, as Camus puts it in The Myth of Sisyphus, is “that nostalgia for unity, that appetite for the absolute” that will never be sated in the face of the world’s “denseness and strangeness.” For the existentialists, this irreconcilable gap is simply part of “the facts.” But for Goethe and the Stürmer und Dranger, total harmony of self and full communion with nature is a real goal – ever-failing, ever-renewed. Freedom is no longer the watchword for the Enlightenment’s rational, self-defining subject; it is the ideal of self-realization through harmony and communion with Nature.
Eternal Freedom: The Open Vein
While Werther is in love and full of joy, his distance from the infinite is tolerable. In the summer months of his acquaintance with Lotte he has “all the pleasure that can be Man’s,” and though his love is never consummated, he is able to channel his excessive feelings into his imagination (May 21). As Werther explains to Wilhelm, he is able to create “a world from within for himself . . . and then, confined as he may be, he none the less still preserves in his heart the sweet sensation of freedom” (22 May). But that same letter ends on a darker, foreboding note. What Werther also preserves in his heart is “the knowledge the he can quit this prison whenever he wishes.”
It is here that the dark side of freedom’s coin emerges. As I wrote above, so long as one still has a conscious “self” to lose, one will always be separated from the Nature one wants to lose oneself in. One solution to this problem is to lose oneself entirely: to die. As Wilhelm’s passions are increasingly stymied and he loses touch with “the sweet sensation of freedom,” this dark inversion of his desire for consummation takes root. It is first explicitly mentioned in a letter on March 16th:
“People tell of a noble breed of horses that instinctively bite open a vein when they are exhausted and feverish, in order to breathe more freely. I often feel the same, and am tempted to open a vein and so find eternal freedom.”
Ultimately, Werther succumbs to this temptation. On his deathbed, Goethe makes a subtle allusion to his earlier description of the noble breed of horses:
“To crown it all, a vein was opened in his arm; the blood flowed; he still continued to breathe.”
Is Werther free, then? In the end, yes. Eternally so.