Has Man ever asked himself why he’s worth saving?
This weekend I started reading Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The version I’m reading has been translated into English by Stuart Atkins and has a brief introduction by David E. Wellbery. Wellbery does a great job outlining how Faust is a unique work by Goethe, given that it was written over such a large period of his life and an explosive moment in Europe’s history. The text is broken into two parts, with the second part consisting of five, separate acts. I plan on reviewing Goethe’s Faust over the next week, not by breaking each scene down but by exploring philosophical questions that come to mind as I read his work. So, let’s begin.
Faust’s first part, I think, compels its readers to ask the following question: How do we justify caring for ourselves? Having just finished reading Foucault’s essential works, I entered Faust looking for a clean slate, to settle into something that maybe wasn’t as heavy but still intellectually stimulating. By whatever fortune you may call it, once I’d made it through the first few scenes, and certainly by the point Faust contracted with Mephistopheles, Foucault’s – through Socrates to Alcibiades – injunction was reeling within my head: Epimeleia heautou (Care for yourself)!
We initially find Faust in his shallow study with vaulted ceilings, bored of philosophy, law, and medicine, looking through arcane tomes and a magic book. He seemingly finds a reprieve when he conjures the Earth Spirit, yet she abandons and denies him. Left in despair, he seeks death. He looks to the shelves surrounding him and spots a bottle filled with poison that he hopes will negate his suffering – and him – in the process. Yet, just as he’s about to bring the liquid to his lips, Easter morning’s bells chime and he’s reminded that on this day – the day he planned on annihilating himself – Christ has risen.
This pattern, I believe, repeats itself throughout a large portion of the first half of Faust. Seeking reprieve from his grief in Earthly delights that will not entreat him, he is reminded of himself. In turn, he seeks annihilation, a way out, an escape. Yet, he does not find it. Surreptitiously, that thing he loved – just as it appears lost – is saved. Faust consistently seeks and finds – for a time – solace and reprieve in Earthly delights only to lose them. We can see this pattern repeat itself when Faust meets Margarete in the garden -- echoing his desire for the Earth Spirit -- and when he seeks intellectual solace in a cave (an Earthly womb) only to be reprimanded there by Mephistopheles, negation sin, death -- he can never bind himself to someone like Margarete, the Earth Spirit. Nature consistently entices Faust and reminds him of his limitations, which he will not embrace. Yet, those things he loves -- they are saved.
Faust – I believe – has trouble accepting himself. He’s renowned in the town he calls home for saving people with his Father’s aid from the plague. Yet, Faust’s father and Faust poisoned people rather than healing them. They would go from house to house and put the ill out of their misery. The people, none the wiser, cheer him for this. Rather than engorging his ego on these laudations, Faust inverts his gaze to the horrible creature he sees himself as and – then – outward, to the ignorant surrounding him. He is adulated by his students – such as Wagner – for his knowledge, intellect, and wisdom, but Faust – like Oedipus – knows himself too well. He cannot see the being that others see in him because he has come to know himself without learning how to care for himself. And so, he tucks himself away in his dusty study, filled with men’s artifacts, yet lacking – almost completely – in that spirit that could give him the hope he’s yearning for.
He’s restless and doesn’t want to settle down, and this is precisely the necessary condition that establishes the contract between himself and Mephistopheles.
“If I should ever say to any moment: Tarry, remain! – you are so fair!
then you may lay your fetters on me,
then I will gladly be destroyed!
then they can toll the passing bell,
your obligations then be ended—
the clock may stop, its hand may fall,
and time at last for me be over!” (p. 44).
Faust represents a being of pure becoming; unbounded chaos, consumption, desire, wanting, seeking, striving, struggling. He’s the antithesis of the being that made him: God. God – for all intents and purposes – lacks nothing for He’s everything. He is pure being. Knowing the kind of man he is, fettered by sin and negation, Faust cannot accept himself as God’s creation. As he looks at himself in the mirror, rather than seeing himself as he wants to be or the image of God, Faust sees the opposite. Faust sees Mephistopheles. This image is not just my conceit, either. Mephistopheles dons Faust’s clothes in the same scene the contract is established and discusses Logic, Metaphysics, and Medicine – at least – with one of Faust’s students. Towards the end of this sordid conversation, Mephistopheles – dressed as Faust – has this to say to the student:
“Follow the ancient saw, and my cousin the serpent, and I warrant your likeness to God will some day perplex you.” (p. 52)
Faust is running from himself because he cannot understand how a creature like himself can be worthy of God’s love. Yet even if you do not want to accept the argument about God’s love -- from an ethical perspective, Faust cannot justify caring for himself. He’d rather be unbounded becoming, negation, chaos, and contradiction, eternally consuming, searching, striving, and struggling than come to settle down for one moment, look upon his life, and start cleaning up the pieces.
Faust also will not accept that he’s living a lie. In an easily overlooked dialogue between Mephistopheles and himself about how to win Margarete over, Mephistopheles proposes to Faust that he lie to her about the death of Martha’s love. Faust doesn’t want to do this – he tries to argue about how he’s not a liar. Yet Mephistopheles knows him too well:
“You saint! If this is not just like you!
is this the first time in your life
that you’ve committed perjury?
Have you not, with bold impudence, defined,
and in the most forceful language too,
God, and the world, and all that moves therein,
and what goes on in human minds and hearts?
Yet if you really searched your soul, you would confess
you knew as much about these matters
as now you do about one Schwerdtlein’s death.” (p. 78)
Holding Faust to the image he’s made for himself – Faust does see himself as a liar – but unwilling to acknowledge (at first) what Mephistopheles is calling him, Faust calls Mephistopheles a “liar” and “sophist.” Mephistopheles waves this away – he’s not the only one, he says. In addition, he uses Faust’s averment that he sincerely loves Margarete against him. How can Faust “sincerely” love Margarete and establish his relationship with her via deception? Not only would he be getting close to Margarete by lying to Martha about her husband’s death, but he would also be lying to himself. Based on the contract established between himself and Mephistopheles, he cannot settle down – he can never find peace in the moment; he can never be bound to someone as sweet and good as Margarete. If he truly and sincerely loves Margarete, he will bind himself and settle down with her. Yet, he cannot without breaking the contract he’s made with the devil himself. There’s no sincerity in Faust’s love for Margarete, only a selfish wish. By the end of the scene, he resigns himself to lying to Martha because “[Mephistopheles is right] – [he has],” or so he thinks, “no other choice.”
Still, Faust’s desire to escape – and Mephistopheles’ desire to ensnare him – leads him into Margarete’s arms, whose tragic end is both her and Faust’s fault. He gives Margarete the sleeping medication for her mother, who is poisoned by Margarete after she (presumably) gives her one too many drops of the sleeping draft so that they can be together; Faust kills Valentine in self-defense as he charges at Mephistopheles and Faust for ruining his sister’s chastity and sundering his ego; and out of immense guilt for her transgressions and fear of God (His judgment and wrath) she drowns her and Faust’s out-of-wedlock child. Yet, even after Faust turns from the festivities of Walpurgis Night, riding to Margarete’s aid on his steed with Mephistopheles’ powers at his disposal, freeing her from her chains (after she’s imprisoned for the murder of her child and mother), she does not want to escape. She does not want to return to nature and go into the wild where she sees the image of the judgmental mother. She, instead, remains in prison, accepting her fate, judgment, and death. But she is not condemned; she is saved. In accepting her limitations, she finds salvation. Thus, caring for herself – caring for ourselves – meant accepting her limitations.
The motif repeats itself, but this time its end is inverted. Margarete is confined by her actions, imprisoned – not by her thoughts in her study as Faust was – but by men for her sins. Yet, instead of seeking solace in the judgmental Earth Spirit (who would only reject her), paralleled by the judgmental mother, she accepts her limitations, she accepts death – as Faust was about to do while poisoning himself – only to be raptured to heaven – like Faust by Easter morning’s bells – with full acceptance – unlike Faust.
Faust, unlike Margarete, cannot accept his limitations and I’m not sure Man (generally speaking) can either. The Faustian spirit refuses to accept itself as it is – being. Its identity is pure becoming – chaos – but such a metaphysic necessitates a species of being, just as it necessitated a species of being for Foucault. A being of becoming that – by interacting with itself – unleashes itself as becoming, chaos, potential, i.e., creation and destruction. By unleashing itself as becoming, it only reacts with itself as being once again, re-instantiating what it created, ever-anon. Faust, like Man, is stuck in a cycle. Faust cannot bear to look upon himself and see himself created in God’s image; he cannot justify caring for himself because he is a fetid being of death and hunger, but if he does not…
In the modern world, what heaviness does eternal damnation have? When contemporary Man faces himself, sees himself as the liar he is, the duplicitous and contradictory creature he is, the pseudo-intellectual he is, a being of destruction, death, excuses, base desires, sloth, lust, wrath, addiction… what weight does Hell have for him, what weight does his soul have? Like Faust, modern man can spiritually universalize everything, even as he comes face to face with the accuser himself. “All is God,” Faust – the modern man – might say, even as he sits in his bed, stuffing his face, watching erotic movies, and falling asleep with food at his side, in his own filth, only to awake in the morning to repeat the rituals that affirm his “authentic” self. As he stews in his corruption like a pig stuffing himself with his own feces, he sees himself as the highest being he can be. For this “modern” man, since there’s no Good, no ultimate Good for him, filth and hedonistic delight are his salve and demise, slowly leading him towards the final moment he ritualistically manifests every day. Like a parasite, his desires feed him, only to show themselves – in the end – for what they truly were: A reflection of the Nothingness within him. His honest ennui – which he cloaks with pleasure and fruitless activity – belies the image he’s made for himself.
Still, salvation is there. Margarete’s fidelity to the Good, to God – for modern man – is there. Her willingness to accept herself as the awful creature she is so she can properly care for herself and obtain heavenly acceptance is there.
Man might be able to bear many crosses – far heavier than anything he ought to bear – but can he bear himself?
Bibliography
Von Goethe, J. W., Atkins, S. (Editor), Wellbery, D.E. (Introduction) (1994). Faust I & II. Princeton University Press.
