Modern Novel and Ancient Philosophy: Ch. M. Wieland’s “Geschichte des Agathon”

Abstract

German criticism which studied Wieland’s Geschichte des Agathon focused, on the one hand, on the contents of the novel, trying mainly to identify the canonical elements of the Bildungsroman genre; on the other hand, German studies have taken into consideration purely formal and narratological aspects of the work, concentrating on the figures of the narrator, the reader, etc. This essay intends to conjugate these two interpretative proposals in an unprecedented way and to demonstrate how in the Wielandian novel the content and the formal aspects overlap organically, if we take into account the “philosophical” nature of the work. Reading Wieland’s Geschichte des Agathon on the background of the author's interest in the Hellenistic philosophical doctrines and the spiritual exercises practiced therein, the essay interprets the novel as a sort of spiritual exercise that, by virtue of its “psychagogic” character, intends to cause an inner transformation of the reader trough the experience of reading, involving him/her not only intellectually, but in a total, “spiritual” way, stimulating emotional and cognitive responses. As emerges from the essay Philosophie als Kunst zu Leben and Heilkunst der Seele betrachtet, according to Wieland the anthropological proposal of ancient philosophy seems to be still valid for the eighteenth century because it’s able to conjugate in a holistic way senses and intellect, healing the dysfunctions of modernity: this seems to be the very “performative” and “philosophical” aim of the novel.