Understand: we can never really experience what other people are experiencing. We always remain on the outside looking in, and this is the cause of so many misunderstandings and conflicts. But the primal source of human intelligence comes from the development of mirror neurons (see here), which gives us the ability to place ourselves in the skin of another and imagine their experience. Through continual exposure to people and by attempting to think inside them we can gain an increasing sense of their perspective, but this requires effort on our part. Our natural tendency is to project onto other people our own beliefs and value systems, in ways in which we are not even aware. When it comes to studying another culture, it is only through the use of our empathic powers and by participating in their lives that we can begin to overcome these natural projections and arrive at the reality of their experience. To do so we must overcome our great fear of the Other and the unfamiliarity of their ways. We must enter their belief and value systems, their guiding myths, their way of seeing the world. Slowly, the distorted lens through which we first viewed them starts to clear up. Going deeper into their Otherness, feeling what they feel, we can discover what makes them different and learn about human nature. This applies to cultures, individuals, and even writers of books. As Nietzsche once wrote, “As soon as you feel yourself against me you have ceased to understand my position and consequently my arguments! You have to be the victim of the same passion.”
7. Synthesize all forms of knowledge—
The Universal Man/Woman
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) grew up in an unhappy home in Frankfurt, Germany. His father had a failed career in local politics that had left him embittered, and he had become estranged from his young wife. To make up for his own lack of success, Johann’s father made certain that his son received the finest education possible. He learned the arts, the sciences, numerous languages, various crafts, fencing, and dancing. But Johann found life in the house under the watchful eye of his father unbearable and stultifying. When he finally left home to study at the university in Leipzig, it was as if he had been set free from prison. All of his pent-up energies, his restlessness, his hunger for women and adventures, were suddenly released and he went wild.
He lived the life of a dandy, dressing in the most fashionable clothes and seducing as many young women as he could find. He threw himself into the intellectual life of Leipzig; he could be seen in all of the taverns arguing about this or that philosophy with professors and fellow students. His ideas went against the grain—he ranted against Christianity and yearned for the pagan religion of the ancient Greeks. As one professor noted, “It was the well-nigh universal opinion that he had a slate loose in the upper story.”
And then young Johann fell in love, and any remnant of self-control was finally gone. His letters to friends about this love affair caused them great concern. He swung from elation to deep depression, from adoration to distrust. He stopped eating. He proposed marriage, then broke it off. To many it looked like he was on the edge of madness. “I’m going downhill faster every day,” he wrote to a friend. “Three months will see the end of me.” Then suddenly in 1768, in the middle of all this, he collapsed. He awoke to find himself bathed in blood. He had suffered a lung hemorrhage, and for days he was near death. To the doctors, his recovery seemed miraculous; fearful of a relapse, they made him return to his home in Frankfurt, where he was to be confined to his bed for many months.
As he emerged from his illness, young Goethe felt like a different person. He was struck now by two ideas that would remain with him for the rest of his life. First, he had the sensation that he possessed a type of inner spirit that he named his daemon. This spirit was an incarnation of all of his intense, restless, demonic energy. It could turn destructive, as it had done in Leipzig. Or he could master it and channel it into something productive. This energy was so powerful that it made him swing from one mood or idea to the opposite—from spirituality to sensuality, from naïveté to craftiness. This daemon, he decided, was a spirit implanted in him at birth and it encompassed his whole being. How he managed this daemon would determine the length of his life and the success of his endeavors.
Second, coming so close to death at such an early age made him feel the presence of death in his bones, and this feeling stayed with him for weeks after recovering. As he returned to life, he was suddenly struck by the strangeness of being alive—of possessing a heart and lungs and brain that functioned beyond his conscious control. He felt that there was a life force that transcended the individual incarnations of life, a force not from God (Goethe would remain a pagan his entire life), but from nature itself. In his convalescence he would take long walks in the country, and his personal sense of the strangeness of life was transferred to the sight of plants and trees and animals. What force brought them to their present, perfectly adapted states of life? What was the source of the energy that made them grow?
Feeling as if he had been reprieved from a death sentence, he experienced an insatiable curiosity for this life force. An idea came to him for a story based on the famous German legend of a scholar named Faust, who desperately wants to discover the secret of life, and who meets an incarnation of the devil named Mephistopheles who helps him in this quest in exchange for possession of his soul. If ever the restless Faust experiences a moment of contentment and wants nothing more from life, then he is to die and the devil will own his soul. Goethe began to take notes on this drama, and in the dialogues he wrote between the devil and Faust he could hear his own inner voices, his own demonic dualities talking to each other.
Several years later, Goethe began life as a lawyer in Frankfurt. And as before in Leipzig, his daemon seemed to take control of him. He hated the conventional life of a lawyer, and he hated all of the conventions that seemed to dominate social life and to disconnect people from nature. He entertained deeply rebellious thoughts, which he channeled into an epistolary novel—The Sorrows of Young Werther. Although the story was loosely based on people he knew and on a young friend who had committed suicide over a failed romance, most of the ideas in it came from his experiences. The novel promoted the superiority of the emotions, and advocated a return to a life of sensation and to living closer to nature. It was the precursor of the movement that would come to be known throughout Europe as Romanticism, and it created a powerful reaction in Germany and beyond. Overnight, young Goethe became a celebrity. Almost everyone read the book. Hundreds of young people committed suicide in imitation of the despairing Werther.
For Goethe, this success surprised and baffled him. Suddenly, he was hobnobbing with the most famous writers of his time. Slowly, the daemon reared its ugly head. He gave himself up to a life of wine, women, and parties. His moods began to swing wildly back and forth. He felt a rising disgust—at himself and the world he was frequenting. The circle of writers and intellectuals who dominated his social life annoyed him to no end. They were so smug, and their world was as disconnected from reality and nature as that of lawyers. He felt increasingly constricted by his reputation as a sensational writer.
In 1775, a year after the publication of Werther, he received an invitation from the duke of Weimar to stay in his duchy and serve as a personal adviser and minister. The duke was a great admirer of his writing, and was trying to recruit more artists to his rather dull court. For Goethe, however, this was the opportunity he was waiting for. He could say good-bye to the literary world and bury himself in Weimar. He could pour his energies into political work and into science, taming that damnable inner daemon. He accepted the invitation, and except for one later trip to Italy, he would spend the rest of his life in Weimar.
In Weimar Goethe had the idea of trying to modernize the local government, but he quickly realized that the duke was weak and undisciplined and that any attempt at reforming the duchy was doomed. There was too much corruption. And so slowly he poured his energies into his new passion in life, the sciences. He focused on geology, botany, and anatomy. His years of writing poetry and
novels were over. He began to collect a large amount of stones, plants, and bones that he could study in his house at all hours. And as he looked deeply into these sciences, he began to see strange connections between them. In geology, changes in the earth occur with great slowness, over immensely long periods of time, too slowly to be observed in the span of a single lifetime. Plants are in a continual state of metamorphosis, from the most primitive beginnings of the seed to the flower or tree. All life on the planet is in an ever-present state of development, one life form growing out of another. He began to entertain the radical idea that humans themselves evolved from primitive life forms—that was the way, after all, of nature.
One of the main arguments of the time against such evolutionary theory was the nonexistence of the intermaxillary bone in humans. It exists in all lower animals in the jaw, including primates, but at the time could not be found in the human skull. This was paraded as evidence that man is separate and created by a divine force. Based on his idea that all of nature is interconnected, Goethe could not accept such a hypothesis, and through much research he discovered remnants of the intermaxillary bone in the upper cheekbones of human infants, the ultimate indication of our connection to all other life forms.
His style of science was unconventional for the time. He had the idea that there existed a form of archetypal plant that could be deduced from the shape and development of all plants. In his study of bones, he liked to compare all life forms to see whether there were similarities in the construction of parts such as the vertebral column. He was obsessed with the connections between life forms, the result of his Faustian desire to get at the essence of all life. He felt that phenomena in nature contained the theory of their essence in their own structure, if we could only grasp it with our senses and our minds. Almost all scientists at the time ridiculed his work, but in the decades to follow it was recognized that he had developed perhaps the first real concept of evolution, and his other work was the precursor to such later sciences as morphology and comparative anatomy.
In Weimar, Goethe was a changed man—a sober scientist and thinker. But in 1801 another bout of illness came close to killing him yet again. It took years to recover, but by 1805 he felt his strength returning, and with it a return to sensations he had not experienced since his youth. That year initiated one of the strangest and most amazing periods of productivity in the history of the human mind, stretching from his midfifties to his late sixties. The daemon he had repressed for several decades broke loose once more, but now he had the discipline to channel it into all kinds of work. Poems, novels, and plays came pouring out of him. He took up Faust again, writing most of it in this period. His day was an almost insane medley of different studies—writing in the morning, experiments and scientific observations (which were now expanded to chemistry and meteorology) in the afternoon, discussions with friends about aesthetics, science, and politics in the evening. He seemed to be tireless, and to be going through a second youth.
Goethe had now come to the conclusion that all forms of human knowledge are manifestations of the same life force he had intuited in his near-death experience as a young man. The problem with most people, he felt, is that they build artificial walls around subjects and ideas. The real thinker sees the connections, grasps the essence of the life force operating in every individual instance. Why should any individual stop at poetry, or find art unrelated to science, or narrow his or her intellectual interests? The mind was designed to connect things, like a loom that knits together all of the threads of a fabric. If life exists as an organic whole and cannot be separated into parts without losing a sense of the whole, then thinking should make itself equal to the whole.
Friends and acquaintances noticed a strange phenomenon in this twilight period of Goethe’s life—he loved to talk about the future, decades and centuries ahead. In his Weimar years he had added to his studies, reading many books on economics, history, and political science. Gaining new insights from these readings and adding to them his own reasoning, he loved to predict the tide of historical events, and those who witnessed these predictions were later shocked at his prescience. Years before the French Revolution he had predicted the fall of the Bourbon monarchy, intuiting that it had lost its legitimacy in the eyes of the people. Participating on the German side in battles to overturn the French Revolution, and witnessing the victory of the French civilian army at the battle of Valmy, he exclaimed, “Here and now begins a new historical era; and you can all say you have seen it.” He meant the coming era of democracies and civilian armies.
Now in his seventies, he would tell people that petty nationalism was a dying force and that one day Europe would form a union like the United States, a development he welcomed. He talked excitedly of the United States itself, predicting that it would some day be the great power in the world, its borders slowly expanding to fill the continent. He discussed his belief that a new science of telegraphy would connect the globe, and that people would have access to the latest news by the hour. He called this future “the velocipedic age,” one determined by speed. He was concerned that it could lead to a deadening of the human spirit.
Finally, at the age of eighty-two, he could sense that the end was near, even though his mind was sparking with more ideas than ever before. He said to a friend that it was a shame that he could not live another eighty years—what new discoveries he could make, with all of his accumulated experience! He had been postponing it for years, but now it was time to finally write the ending to Faust itself: the scholar would find a moment of happiness, the devil would take his soul, but divine forces would forgive Faust for his great intellectual ambition, for his relentless quest for knowledge, and would save him from hell—perhaps Goethe’s own judgment on himself.
A few months later, he wrote his friend, the great linguist and educator Wilhelm von Humboldt, the following: “The human organs, by means of practice, training, reflection, success or failure, furtherance or resistance…learn to make the necessary connections unconsciously, the acquired and the intuitive working hand-in-hand, so that a unison results which is the world’s wonder…The world is ruled by bewildered theories of bewildering operations; and nothing is to me more important than, so far as is possible, to turn to the best account what is in me and persists in me, and keep a firm hand upon my idiosyncrasies.” These would be the last words he would write. Within a few days he was dead, at the age of eighty-three.
For Goethe, a turning point came in his life with the great success of The Sorrows of Young Werther. He could not help but be dazzled by his sudden fame. The people around him were clamoring for an encore. He was only twenty-five at the time. For the rest of his life he would deny the public such an encore, and none of his subsequent writings would approach the success of Werther, although in his last years he was recognized as Germany’s great genius. To deny the public what it wanted was an act of tremendous courage. To decline to exploit such fame would mean that it would probably never return. He would have to give up all of that attention. But Goethe felt something within him that was much stronger than the lure of fame. He did not want to be imprisoned by this one book, devoting his life to literature and creating a sensation. And so he chose his own unique and strange path in life, guided by an inner force that he called his daemon—a spirit of restlessness that impelled him to explore beyond literature, to the core of life itself. All that was necessary was to master and channel this spirit, implanted in him at birth.
In the sciences, he followed his unique path, looking for deep patterns in nature. He extended his studies to politics, economics and history. Returning to literature in the last phase of his life, his head now teemed with links between all forms of knowledge. His poetry, novels, and plays were suffused with science, and his scientific investigations were suffused with poetic intuitions. His insights into history were uncanny. His mastery was not over this subject or that one, but in the connections between them, based on decades of deep observation and thinking. Goethe epitomizes
what was known in the Renaissance as the Ideal of the Universal Man—a person so steeped in all forms of knowledge that his mind grows closer to the reality of nature itself and sees secrets that are invisible to most people.
Today some might see a person such as Goethe as a quaint relic of the eighteenth century, and his ideal of unifying knowledge as a Romantic dream, but in fact the opposite is the case, and for one simple reason: the design of the human brain—its inherent need to make connections and associations—gives it a will of its own. Although this evolution might take various twists and turns in history, the desire to connect will win out in the end because it is so powerfully a part of our nature and inclination. Aspects of technology now offer unprecedented means to build connections between fields and ideas. The artificial barriers between the arts and the sciences will melt away under the pressure to know and to express our common reality. Our ideas will become closer to nature, more alive and organic. In any way possible, you should strive to be a part of this universalizing process, extending your own knowledge to other branches, further and further out. The rich ideas that will come from such a quest will be their own reward.
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