Goethe's Faustian Life
28 comments
·May 21, 2025SSJPython
libraryofbabel
Well, yeah. That’s just the central problem of modernity and it’s been the preoccupation of the last two hundred years of philosophy and literature: c.f. existentialism and many other isms. Nietzsche and Dostoevsky and a legion of other philosophers and novelists address this exact question. There’s a lot of answers out there that don’t require signing up to an old religion, you can go and take your pick!
lo_zamoyski
> There’s a lot of answers out there that don’t require signing up to an old religion, you can go and take your pick!
There appear to be a few dubious presuppositions at play here.
The first is religious indifferentism. That is, that is makes no difference which you pick, or that what you pick is simply a matter of "what's 'right' for you". The question of truth never enters the picture. This makes religious belief a matter of utility: I believe X because I derive some kind of perceived or real benefit from believing X.
The first problem with religious indifferentism is exactly that it is indifferent to the truth. If you believe something because of the utility it provides, it means you don't really believe in that thing. You believe in the utility of the thing. So while a Christian will believe that Christ is God Incarnate because he believes this to be true, an indifferentist wouldn't really believe Christ in God, but he might "use" that belief. There is a lack of integrity, a kind of bad faith, at work here. The pretense of this lack of integrity never produces any peace or alleviates the misery of nihilism plaguing the indifferentist. He's still where he started.
While Nietzsche and others had valuable insights (and misconceptions), he and most others did not themselves find a solution to the basic problem of nihilism.
williamdclt
That's very handwavy and unconvincing TBH. I can't imagine who'd argue that humans "worship" rationalism and materialism, that's a pretty big stretch of the word.
What definition of the word do you use?
That man has a natural inclination to it is another pretty big assumption, whether "natural inclinations" are even a thing at all has been debated for centuries
SSJPython
I should've said the worship of the temporal (material reality, etc.) rather than the spiritual.
williamdclt
It’s not any less vague. Again, what definition of “worship” do you use? It’s certainly not any of the dictionaries
CamperBob2
What has the spiritual ever done for us? We know nothing of gods that we didn't learn from other men.
barbazoo
> But rationalism and materialism do not have answers to the existential questions and crises that humans face.
That's the crux of it. Nothing and no one has those answers. Some isms acknowledge that, most don't.
superb-owl
There's a middle ground between claiming you have a final answer, and ignoring the question entirely.
The best spiritual disciplines provide a _framework_ for exploring existential questions.
lo_zamoyski
How have you come to this conclusion?
croes
Metaphysics and religions don’t have answer either.
They just stop asking questions at a certain point.
mistrial9
> a natural inclination to worship something.
uh really? Barbarism and brute force have succeeded many times.
null
fallinditch
It seems to me that Mephistopheles' offer was a no brainer for Faust.
Who in their right mind would reject an offer of unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures?
Presumably if Faust refuses Mephistopheles’ bargain, he must resign himself to a life haunted by unfulfilled longing, existential frustration, and the bitter realization that some mysteries will forever remain beyond his grasp. Or worse, his life could descend into base forms of evil and criminality, which seems likely given what he did to Gretchen.
timoth3y
Marlowe's "The Life and Death of Dr. Faustus" was written 300 years before Goethe's version.
In Marlowe's version Faust goes to hell.
I always found Goethe's ending to be unsatisfying, and prefer Marlowe's where Faust not only accepts, but embraces his fate to be a far better resolution.
tickerticker
^Who in their right mind would reject an offer of unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures?
The bargain had a quid pro quo...you get knowledge and pleasure in exchange for perpetual servitude to a bad guy. I wouldn't make that trade
fallinditch
No me neither, but that's not the story. The deal was that Mephistopheles would come back at the end of Faust's life to claim his soul. As Faust dies, Mephistopheles tries to claim his soul, but angels intervene. Because of Faust's relentless striving and Gretchen's intercession, he is redeemed and ascends to Heaven.
So Faust enjoyed his life of pleasure and knowledge and got away with making his Mephistophelean deal.
IAmBroom
If you believe saintlike people are in their right minds - many. I use "saintlike" in a secular sense; I myself am an atheist.
SSJPython
> Who in their right mind would reject an offer of unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures?
Christ Himself rejected various temptations by Satan when he was in the wilderness.
fallinditch
An interesting point, but it's not really a fair comparison: Jesus was the son of God and able to perform miracles, so maybe he felt he could afford to reject an offer of all the riches in all the kingdoms of the world (which tbh Jesus must have known that Satan was lying about anyway). Whereas Faust was just a man.
ginko
>The Victorians––Hapsburg-descended Queen Victoria and Saxon Prince Albert among them––were steeped in Goethe.
I've never heard of queen Victoria having Habsburg ancestry and I can't find any details on this other than AI hallucinations.
cafard
That is odd.
fidrelity
Reading Faust in school left a lasting impact on me and an appreciation for the language as a tool of art.
I believe many are not even aware of the amount of proverbs coming from that classic:
Des Pudels Kern - the poodles core/crux of the matter
Gretchenfrage - the essential question
... And many more that I won't bother trying to translate.
> As Wilson writes in his expansive and somewhat baggily written introduction, now—amid increasingly dire ecological and political conditions—we can see our own world in Faust more clearly than ever before. For Faust, he writes, is “about a world which had taken leave of God but did not know how to live.”
Man has a natural inclination to worship something. For most of human history, that has been the divine/supernatural/metaphysical. Nowadays, rationalism and materialism have become the main objects of worship. But rationalism and materialism do not have answers to the existential questions and crises that humans face.
Similar to Christ saying that "man cannot live on bread alone", man cannot live on materialism alone - spiritual nourishment is a very real and necessary thing.