Goethe's Faust: poetry and philosophy at the crossroads.

• Author: Ricci, Gabriel R.
• Position: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Critical essay

1. Philosophical Poets

In lectures from 1910, subsequently published as Three Philosophical Poets, George Santayana provisionally placed Goethe among the philosophical poets. He had no reservation including Dante and Lucretius in this class of poets. Their major works situated them both within the reigning philosophical systems of their day: Santayana viewed Lucretius' De Rerum Natura as the culmination of antique naturalism, and he regarded Dante's Divine Comedy as the embodiment of medieval supernaturalism. Though Santayana unequivocally placed Goethe's Faust within the context of Teutonic romanticism, with its idiosyncratic interpretation of the Bible and what he called an attitude marked by the "self-trust of world-building youth," still Goethe's "thoughts upon life were fresh and miscellaneous." (1) Santayana found only incidental philosophies and existential strategies in Faust, which he viewed as representative of romanticism's preoccupation with the subjective immediacy of experience. Nonetheless, they encompass a pragmatic charter and philosophical outlook which, it can be said, underpins Faust's redemption.

There is much that is still alive in Santayana's philosophical explication of Goethe's Faust, especially Goethe's appeal to the understanding to be derived from phenomena themselves. The phenomenological entreaty to engage things themselves (zu den Sachen selbst as Husserl put it or zu dem Leben selbst as it appears in Goethe's Faust) is the source of one of the philosophical outlooks in Goethe's Faust. In addition to Faust's unconventional exegesis, which Santayana explored, there are other instances of Faust's phenomenological prescriptions which signal more than a carefree romantic approach to life. But, it is in Faust's unorthodox interpretation of the first lines of the Gospel according to John that we find the centerpiece of an activism that emerges out of Faust's initial disaffection in Part I, and which culminates with Faust's grand civil engineering project in the final moments of his life in Part II.

Faust's redemption is intuitively abhorrent since there are so many lives that are sacrificed through his alliance with Mephisto. His effort to console the condemned Gretchen with the injunction to let the past remain in the past, and his final project which destroys the endearing couple Baucis and Philemon are each sufficient to question the grace bestowed on Faust. The subject of Faust's redemption has occupied critics from the beginning. (2) I make no effort to survey the literature, nor do I merely dwell on Faust's redemption. I only wish to revisit Santayana's insights in order to flesh out the philosophical nature of Goethe's Faust.

Santayana prescribed that Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe ought to be measured by the standards that each helped advance. However, for one's own cultivation he recommended taking something from each of their worldviews. Goethe's deliberations lacked the systematic drive of the naturalistic conception of an organismic world, and fell short of the dramatic mythology of a pilgrim's tortured moral journey. Taking something from Goethe's worldview has philosophical value precisely because it is an alternative to the doctrinaire bracketing of reality demanded by the dogmatics of supernaturalism and the clinical spirit of naturalism. Accordingly, it does not conceive truth as the result of a deductive process on the basis of received assumptions. The reproof of philosophy in the opening lines in Faust's study should not be regarded as a refutation of the search for meaning and truth. Rather, it is a challenge to orthodox philosophy with its imprimatur of tradition. While this point is unmistakable, Santayana knew that we could not overlook the eternal perspective that incites Faust's craving for the infinite and the pure activity that he imagines after death (705). Though there is something of Hegel's dialectical enmeshment of the finite and infinite typical of unhappy consciousness in the Phenomenology, there is also the appeal of the Spinozistic vantage point of sub specie aeternitatis with which Faust is periodically enraptured. In the end, though, the allure of the eternal vantage point loses out to a pragmatism enhanced by the fervor of a carpe diem disposition. This distrust of convention is not the methodical Cartesian prescription to call all our received opinions into question, but a nihilistic bravado that embraces even the moment that risks fading into nothingness (719). The distrust of convention, which reaches a nihilistic pitch for Faust, first comes in the form of turning away from the linguistic bonds that hold society together.

2. When Spirits Speak to Spirits

   Faust's spiritual experiment conceived of an innovative dialogue with Nature, a relationship in which one must patiently wait for Nature to reveal its secrets. This procedure is an alternative to the invasive manipulations in which life must first be wrenched from Nature before it can be "understood." In the opening "Night" scene, as Faust's vanity is mocked by a grinning skull, he rejects all the scientific paraphernalia that had promised to open the door onto Nature's secrets. Perhaps in an allusion to his defiance of Newtonian physics, which he thought reduced the world to empty abstractions, Goethe has Faust renounce the instruments that had served his father in a previous era (670-80). He intuits that Nature discloses itself in an act of phenomenological self-presencing, when it pulls back its veil to reveal secrets that otherwise would remain concealed. Faust almost immediately pronounces his frustration with words. To him, they are as useless as so much discarded junk. He envisions, in spite of his despair, the possibility of knowing how the world is held together from within (382-84). The idea of an inner nexus that holds the world together appears repeatedly in the motif of weaving. The metaphor of weaving and the loom is first

   symbolized in the Earth Spirit who echoes the mythological Fates. The model of weaving also corresponds to Goethe's real scientific investigations in his Vorwort zur Morphologie in which he expressed the methodological intention of grasping the totality of a phenomenon through an apprehension of its inner-related living parts.(3) This "seeing into" a phenomenon is a melding of thought and sense perception. Goethe was unabashed about the value of this metaphor; he announced in correspondence at the end of his life that he required the symbolism of weaving to represent lived experience.(4) In Part I of the Faust story this motif appears like a philosophical refrain.

   The folly of studying life forms and expressions of life only when they are dead or remnants of the past is dramatized by Mephisto's seduction of the student who has come to see Faust for academic advice. Mephisto's telling promise that he will teach him to know the difference between good and evil (2047) is preceded by a litany of misleading suggestions in which he counsels the student to first eliminate the vital bonds that hold things together (1936-40). The mechanistic worldview presumed by such methodologies is partially the source of Faust's deep frustration, and Mephisto has planted the seeds of alienation in the earnest student. The very things that made Faust vulnerable are presented to the student as the ideal curriculum. The hub of this curriculum, learning to reduce everything to a system of classification and substituting words for thoughts, had been the very thing that made Faust yearn to escape to the open fields in order to commune with the vital forces of Nature (414-18). Mephisto, in his flagrant sardonic style, informs the student that such a course of study will rigidly dress his intellectual spirit in Spanish boots, a device used during the Inquisition to break the body and spirit. The regimented way that logic, the subject that is first recommended to the student, controls thought and makes deductive schema seem like necessity is the antithesis of the direct communion with phenomena that Faust seeks. In an extended metaphor of weaving, Mephisto compares logic to a textile mill in which a master weaver ingeniously turns out his masterpiece. One simple movement of the loom, as with the elucidation of a suppressed premise in an argument, effortlessly produces a domino-like effect which appears as a necessary outcome of the initial simple movement (1920-30). When the student questions Mephistopheles' theory that a word can substitute for an idea, he senses the pathological sarcasm which underpins Mephistopheles' dark nihilism. Faust's original self-awareness, it should be said, originates with the insight that he had grown accustomed to relying on language and words as signs of intellectual insight.

   The deceitful self-trust of will and volition that mark Faust's search was made possible only when he acknowledged that his words were designed to mask his ignorance. All the disciplines that he had studied resulted in no real profit. Even more depressing is the realization that he cannot presume to correctly know anything, nor can he presume to enlighten his students. He is a joyless shell of a man with a life that no dog would choose.

   There can be no argument with Santayana's claim that Goethe, through the plight of the Faust character, offers nothing like a systematic philosophy. For the most part, systematic philosophy is dispassionately inherited and has traditionally upheld conventional worldviews. Goethe's Faust is not only plagued with a resentment that dismisses feeling at home in society; he wantonly abandons the convention of mere words in order to seek a new alliance with Nature. Santayana's characterization of Goethe as a proponent of the immediacy of experience distinguishes his outlook as phenomenological in the sense already described. The doctrine of the immediate circumscribed by this outlook is opposed is opposed to both Lucretius' scientific and...