Faust – in the beginning was the deed

Faust, the epic play by Goethe, is one of the greatest works of art of all time. It has intrigued and inspired generations across the world and will continue to do so for generations to come. In this article, Josh Holroyd explores some of the key themes of this dialectical masterpiece, including human nature, the struggle for knowledge, and the relationship between good and evil.

[This article was originally published as part of issue 48 of In Defence of Marxism magazine – the quarterly theoretical magazine of the Revolutionary Communist International. Subscribe and get your copy here]

There are certain works of art and literature which rise so far above the plain of everyday existence that they permanently alter the cultural landscape, framing our horizons to the degree that passers-by will orient themselves by their peaks without even knowing their names.

The works of Homer, for example, were used as the source material for much of Greco-Roman religion and culture more than a thousand years after he lived, while those of Shakespeare have permanently shaped the English national identity.

At first sight, this might appear to contradict the materialist understanding of history. After all, art cannot exist independently of society, just as the mind cannot exist without the body. How, then, can art shape society?

Ultimately art reflects life, but by holding up a mirror and showing people what they are, and what they want to be, art can react back upon society and affect the course of history.

The greatest art can do even more than that. If all the art of bygone eras did was to reflect its own time then the art of the ancient world would only be of historical interest. But this is patently not the case. The greatest works of art continue to resonate because they offer a glimpse of something more universal, a deeper truth that informs our understanding of what it means to be human.

Faust: A Tragedy in Two Parts, the epic play by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, can be placed firmly in this category of truly great art. Goethe’s influence on German culture has been compared to that of Shakespeare on that of the English. And of all his works, Faust has had the most widespread and lasting effect. It has inspired countless works of art, music, literature and film all over the world.

To cover everything contained in this ‘unperformable’ play is a hopeless task. But if the exploration of a few of the most powerful ideas contained in Goethe’s masterpiece can encourage readers to dive into the text themselves, it will have served a very worthwhile purpose.

Storm and stress

Goethe was born in Frankfurt, then a ‘free imperial city’ of the Holy Roman Empire, in August 1749. He grew up in a rapidly changing world.

Germany was awakening from the dark slumber that had followed the carnage of the Peasants’ War (1524-25) and the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48). Across the German-speaking world, a growing intelligentsia eagerly sought out inspiration from the scientific, historical and artistic works of other nations and ages. As Goethe writes in his autobiography, Poetry and Truth:

“The German, having run wild for nearly two hundred years in an unhappy tumultuary state, went to school to the French to learn manners, and to the Romans in order to express himself properly.”^[1]

French literature was particularly influential during Goethe’s childhood, and the dominance of French culture in Germany at the time meant the dominance of French ‘neoclassical’ theatre. But this, in turn, produced an opposing reaction amongst German artists.

French classicism had produced titans of the stage like Corneille, Molière and Racine, but by the late eighteenth century it had become staid, formalistic, and strictly regulated by the cultural establishment of the Académie Française.

The Académie mandated that to be considered ‘proper’ theatre, plays were to be in five acts in Alexandrine verse; tragedy and comedy were not to be mixed; the ‘three unities’ of action, time and place, were to be strictly observed; the play should be ‘believable’, and therefore not include mythical or magical figures like ghosts, fairies, etc.; and it should seek to enlighten the audience in good morals and decorum, meaning the sinful must always be punished and the good rewarded in the end.

A new generation of German writers rebelled against this stale regime of ‘good taste’. They longed for something new, something natural, and above all, something that was their own.

An important figure in this new literary movement was the philosopher-poet Johann Gottfried Herder. Among many other profound and influential ideas, Herder emphasised natural feeling and folk tales over formal rules of composition. He would have a big influence on Goethe, who met Herder in Strasbourg whilst studying law in 1770.

Goethe’s first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, published in 1774, embodied the restive mood that was developing in society and established him as a household name. Its story of a brilliant but tortured individual who takes his own life struck such a raw nerve in Germany that it inspired hundreds of copycat suicides.

These and other works came to characterise a new movement in German literature, known as Sturm und Drang (meaning ‘storm and stress’). What is significant about Werther and other works of this genre is the ‘storm and stress’ in question is less to do with historical storms such as wars and revolutions, and more the internal, psychological tumult inside the individual.

This spoke to the adolescent angst of the German bourgeoisie: highly educated, feverish with dreams of high deeds, but irrelevant both economically and politically, still clinging to the coat-tails of the old feudal aristocracy. Goethe himself would write of the German middle class:

“Here we have to do with people for whom life is actually spoiled by a lack of things to do…”^[2]

Faust bears all of the hallmarks of this style. In the work, every rule of ‘classical’ theatre is abandoned with relish. Comedy and tragedy flow repeatedly into one another and frequently coincide. The play leaps between completely different places, periods and plot lines without even the pretence of a single coherent narrative. And as for the moral edification of the audience, this question continues to be a topic of furious debate even to this day.

Weimar Classicism

Subjective striving and the preeminence of feeling over formal, abstract reasoning are powerful themes throughout the work, and particularly in its first part, as is the discovery of the divine in the beauty of nature. In these themes, Faust aligns very closely with the Romantic movement, which conquered the whole of Europe following the Great French Revolution.

However, Goethe disavowed Romanticism very early on. He scorned its subjectivism and its prettification of medievalism, which became particularly prominent amongst the movement’s German adherents. Instead he would pioneer his own genre of ‘Weimar Classicism’, along with his close friend and collaborator, the poet Friedrich Schiller.

In Weimar Classicism, Goethe attempted to marry the dynamism and individualism of Romanticism with the firm belief in objective truth and lawfulness that characterises classical art, shorn of the artificial limitations of form within which it had become confined. Faust stands as the defining work of this genre, in which the tension between individual, subjective striving and the very real limitations of objective, external reality, takes centre stage.

Truly epic in both scale and subject matter, Faust spans a total of over 12,000 lines, which switch between different metres and rhyming schemes, and draw on references from classical mythology, the Bible, as well as important scientific and philosophical debates of the time. The German poet, Heinrich Heine, got it right when he said it was “as wide in its compass as the Bible”.^[3]

The length of the play, and at times the bewildering structure of its plot, has led it to be widely considered as impossible to perform in full on stage. In addition to this, modern readers have sometimes found the rich and multi-layered symbolism of the work, particularly in its second part, intimidating. But there is no reason for anyone to be put off.

Most editions will provide helpful interpretive notes, meaning any reader can have a basic understanding of Goethe’s cultural and philosophical references. But equally, readers can ignore these altogether and just dive into this magical world, drawing their own conclusions as they follow Faust on his adventures. There is plenty that is beautiful, thought provoking and laugh-out-loud funny, to keep the reader engaged.

The whole point for Goethe was not to illustrate some single, narrow idea, but “rich, motley, and highly multifarious life”. If reality does not conform neatly to an abstract schema then why should art? The whole always remains “incommensurable”, as Goethe put it in conversation, adding that, like an unsolved problem, it “constantly lures mankind to study it again and again”.^[4]

Faust likewise confronts the reader as an unsolved problem, an infinite universe contained within a finite number of pages, which invites and rewards repeated reading and study.

A universal human tragedy

The story of Faust was already a well-known legend by Goethe’s time. In the 1570s several of the legends circulating about a mysterious figure called “Faustus” were collected and published as a single book, which by 1600 had been translated into several other European languages.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the story of Faustus was invariably told as a form of morality play, of which Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is a famous example. In Marlowe’s telling an impatient scholar turns to magic and succeeds in conjuring a devil, ‘Mephistophilis’, with whom he cuts a deal: Mephistophilis will serve Faustus for 24 years, after which his soul will be claimed by Lucifer. After a series of magical adventures, Faustus is at last taken away by devils as he repents and begs God for mercy.

Goethe first encountered the story as a child, when he saw it performed as a puppet play. He began to develop the idea of a play based on the Faustus legend early on. But Goethe’s treatment would differ markedly from that of his predecessors.

Goethe first began writing Faust in 1771 and would not complete its final part until a few months before his death in 1832. In the intervening 61 years, Europe experienced a deep and irreversible revolution in every single aspect of social life: philosophical, political, artistic, scientific and economic. Goethe was an active (if not always enthusiastic) participant in every single one of these revolutions, and Faust would eventually contain his reflections on all of these subjects, making it truly the work of its age.

In this context, and under the influence of Schiller in particular, Goethe would rework Faust from a Christian morality play into a universal human tragedy. Faust would no longer be an evil exception to serve as a warning to the rest of society. Instead, in Goethe’s hands he would become an idealised representative of humanity in general, and his quest would become an allegory for the whole of human experience.

Goethe characterised the central, driving principle of Faust’s character as follows:

“Ideal striving to achieve an influence upon and a feeling for the whole of Nature.”^[5]

How does this epitomise the human condition? What emerges clearly in the play is that beneath this philosophical language lies the problem of consciousness, and the relationship between our subjective ideas and the objective world outside of our heads.

One of seventeen illustrations for Goethe's Faust (1828), Eugène Delacroix

Human beings are just as much a part of the natural world as anything else. Like all animals we interact with the rest of nature in order to continue living, and to produce future generations. But unlike other animals, we develop ideas about the world and our place in it, and on the basis of these ideas we build hopes and dreams, which all too often bear little to no relation to the real state of affairs.

In this way, we try to ‘leap’ over the world; we strive with all our might to transform our conditions on both an individual and social level, in defiance of the limitations imposed on us by any external authority, including the laws of nature or society.

Our striving beyond all limit leads us ever onward, which necessarily leads us to moments of bliss and glory, but also to failure and despair. This, for Goethe, is the inherent tragedy of all human existence, in his words: “the secret point, which no philosopher has yet seen and determined, in which the idiosyncrasy of our ego, the pretended freedom of our will, collides with the necessary course of the whole”.^[6]

But this constant conflict between subjective will and objective necessity is not only present in our relations with the outside world: it is present inside of us all, in the relationship between mind and body, thinking and being.

“Two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast”, laments Faust:

“The one holds fast with joyous earthly lust

Onto the world of man with organs clinging;

The other soars impassioned from the dust,

To realms of lofty forebears winging.”^[7]

Just as our ideas cause us to overleap the world, we try to overleap ourselves, denying and repressing the natural, ‘bestial’ side of our nature in the pursuit of something higher. As a result of this constant internal struggle, we pass from joy to grief, from beauty to repulsiveness, from good to evil and back again, without ever escaping our predicament as long as we live.

Simply put, the play asks, “Can we really know the world and master our conditions? Can we ever truly rid ourselves of error and sin?” These questions are not just pondered by philosophers; we ask them of ourselves in our own way, every single day.

Theory and practice

In keeping with the original Faustus legend, our Faust begins his quest for knowledge in the moth-eaten world of the medieval scholar. We first encounter him in a dusty, book-lined study in the dead of night. For ten years he has pursued all of the theoretical disciplines available to a scholar of the Middle Ages: Philosophy, Law, Medicine and, “God help me”, Theology.^[8]

Faust’s goal is not simply to accumulate a heap of dry ‘facts’. Rather, he hopes to gain an insight into something deeper: the fundamental laws of nature, “the inmost force that bonds the very universe” as he puts it.^[9] Here Goethe introduces a problem that philosophers have wrangled with for thousands of years.

Everything around us is constantly changing, impermanent and imperfect; even ourselves. The social world of human beings is worse still. And amidst all this cruelty, contradiction and pain, people have always sought out something true: laws or principles that lie behind the unreliable world of appearances and dictate the essence of things.

This striving for truth has taken many forms throughout the history of humanity, depending on the conditions of the time: magic, religion, philosophy and science all originate from it, with each representing a higher stage in our social development.

The birth of natural philosophy in Ancient Greece was a revolutionary event in the history of human thought. For the first time, it was boldly asserted that we could comprehend the laws of nature on its own terms, without the mediation of spirits, spells or divine intervention.

For thousands of years after, philosophers from Plato to Descartes insisted on the ability of human beings (or at least a select few) to penetrate the ‘veil of experience’ and perceive the ‘real’ world beyond using pure thought and logical deduction.

This ‘metaphysical’ philosophy, meaning ‘above’ or ‘beyond’ the physical, became extremely influential during the European ‘Age of Enlightenment’ in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Giant strides forward in mathematics and the natural sciences inspired enormous confidence in the powers of the human mind to grasp the objective laws of matter. But ironically, the more the sciences continued to develop, the more the philosophers began to be plagued by doubt.

If the essence of things are only perceived in the mind, then how can we say they have any real, objective existence outside of our minds?

Take the following example: We watch the sun rise in the east; light illuminates the scene before us; we feel a new warmth. All this, we reason, is connected: as the earth turns, the place where we are standing comes closer to the sun, and as its rays reach us we sense them as light and heat. But how can we be sure that this is actually true? How can we be sure there is really a ‘sun’ at all?

In the eighteenth century, a wave of ‘sceptical’ philosophers answered firmly that we cannot. First the Bishop Berkeley and then David Hume explained that, as we can only gain knowledge of the world through our senses, the only way we can try to verify our ideas about natural phenomena is through those same senses. Therefore, all we can ever really know is our own subjective experiences, trapped in our own little worlds, in complete ignorance of what, if anything, lies beyond.

Influenced by Hume, the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant put forward a similar conclusion. He said that logically speaking, there must be something out there, otherwise we wouldn’t have any sensations at all, but we could never truly know anything about it. All we can do is organise our experiences in a way that makes sense to us using inborn ideas, such as those of space and time.

Having promised insight into universal, eternal truths, philosophy had thus turned into its opposite, denying the possibility of any truth whatsoever. Faust encapsulates this crisis when he exclaims:

“By ups and downs and tos and fros

I have led my pupils by the nose –

And see there is nothing we can know!”^[10]

Faust despairs. He cannot see any way out of the metaphysical trap he has fallen into. For his sake, and for the sake of the plot, it is vital that he should find a way out.

A new generation of German philosophers attempted to do precisely that in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. These would eventually be known as the ‘German Idealists’. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who worked with Goethe at the University of Jena, ‘solved’ the problem by taking Kant to his logical conclusion: We can know the world because we – or more accurately I – are all there is; the world is something that our consciousness creates.

Fichte’s subjective idealism attracted a great deal of enthusiasm, as it chimed with the Romantic passion for the individual that was swelling amongst the German intelligentsia at the time. But Goethe was never convinced.

Through Faust, he gives a different answer, which would have revolutionary implications for all of philosophy:

“In the beginning was the Deed!”^[11]

Goethe was a great lover of the Dutch philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, whom he claimed to read “as my bedtime prayer”.^[12] And like Spinoza he firmly believed there is nothing outside of, or ‘above’ nature. The essence of things is therefore to be found in the world of things.

Knowledge of the world cannot be found through introspection, removing ourselves from the very world we seek to know. Nor can it be found by cutting it up into parts and describing each in isolation. This was precisely the error of the ‘mechanical’ materialism that had emerged during the eighteenth century:

“Who would know and describe a living thing,

Seeks first to expel the spirit within,

Then he stands there, the parts held in his grasp,

Lost just the spiritual bond, alas!”^[13]

The materialists of Goethe’s day approached matter as something static, fixed – something dead. But for precisely this reason they could not explain the source of motion, life or consciousness. It was this side of reality that the German Idealists developed in their philosophy, but they proceeded from mind, or spirit, rather than matter itself.

For Goethe, the ‘essence’ or ‘organising principle’ of a thing is to be sought in its life: the whole course of its development and the totality of its interrelations. This can be comprehended, or glimpsed at least, through experience. But not only experience as the passive receiving of sensations: knowledge of our living world can only be found by being a living part of it, through real, sensuous activity:

“Grey is all theorising, but evergreen is the golden tree of life.”^[14]

Albeit in a poetic form, Goethe here takes a step beyond not only Spinoza but all of the philosophy of his own time. And with this brilliant and inspiring idea he also helped to pave the way for the dialectical materialist philosophy of Marx and Engels.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1828), Joseph Karl Stieler

In his brief but groundbreaking philosophical notes, Theses on Feuerbach, the young Marx writes that neither mechanical materialism, nor idealism conceived of reality in terms of “real, sensuous activity as such”. He continues:

“The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth – i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.”^[15]

With Faust’s bold invocation of “the Deed”, he takes his first step from theory to practice, from sterile contemplation to full-blooded, active life. The rest of the play will take Faust through all that human life has to offer: romance, art, wealth, politics, war and more.

Sympathy for the devil

Having resolved to throw himself into a life of action, Faust is immediately confronted by the demon Mephistopheles (often shortened to ‘Mephisto’), who will accompany Faust throughout almost all of the ensuing drama.

To Faust’s question, “What are you called?”, Mephisto replies:

“That spirit which eternally denies!”

“And justly so,” he adds, because “all that exists deserves to perish”.^[16]

Mephisto’s only goal is to destroy everything. Symbolising the “spirit of negation”, he is the perfect counterpart to Faust’s insatiable creative striving.

But Mephisto is constantly frustrated in his quest to annihilate all existence. The land and sea remain in spite of all the forces of destruction ranged against them. And as for life:

“There’s just no curbing it, no quelling,

I’ve buried them in droves past telling,

Yet ever newly circulates fresh blood.”^[17]

Life and death, creation and destruction, being and nothing; each flows from one to the other in a constant unity, which leads neither to absolute nothingness, nor ‘pure’ being without limit.

For Goethe, it is this constant confrontation between opposing forces (‘polarity’) that produces development. Existence is in fact a constant state of coming into being and passing away, of ‘becoming’. And this becoming is development towards higher and higher forms.

This beautifully dialectical philosophy suffuses the entirety of Faust. It is therefore not surprising that the great dialectician, Hegel, wrote to Goethe, “When I survey my intellectual development, I find you everywhere interwoven therein and might well call myself one of your sons.”^[18]

Faust’s relationship with Mephisto offers a vivid reflection of precisely this dialectical process of development, which is taking place within Faust’s own dual nature. Mephisto constantly tries to drag Faust down into a life of “shallow insignificance”. This takes the form, on the one hand of tempting him with earthly delights, and on the other of nihilistically ridiculing all of Faust’s lofty pretensions, often in a way that contains more than a glimmer of truth.

But even when he gives in to temptation, Faust cannot help but seek something beyond it. With every step, Faust passes from error to truth and from truth to error. But he is never reduced to the point from which he started; he learns. After each disaster he is horrified by the consequences of his actions and tries to correct his error. Taking up this partial truth he then extends it beyond its limits and it turns into a fresh error, but crucially on a higher level of understanding.

What is true of Faust can also be said of humanity as a whole. It is precisely with this idea in mind that Engels described the history of science, amusingly but with full justification, as the replacement of idiocy “by new, but always less absurd, idiocy”.^[19]

This has revolutionary implications, not only for our philosophy of knowledge, but for morality as well. Good is not simply the avoidance of all evil. As ‘the Lord’ states in the play’s ‘Prologue in Heaven’ :

“Man errs ever the while he strives.”^[20]

If to sin is to err, then to avoid all sin is to end all striving. But to live is to strive.

Just as knowledge develops through error, good develops through sin, and vice versa. Mephisto describes himself as “part of that force which would do ever evil, and does ever good”.^[21] We can see this from the beginning. After all, it is Mephisto who finally leads Faust out of his study and into the world. In this way, rather than condemning him, Mephisto actually saves him.

Hegel also put forward a similar idea, perhaps under Goethe’s influence. But he would develop it further by applying it even more explicitly to the history of human society. As Engels explains:

“With Hegel, evil is the form in which the motive force of historical development presents itself. This contains the twofold meaning that, on the one hand, each new advance necessarily appears as a sacrilege against things hallowed, as a rebellion against condition, though old and moribund, yet sanctified by custom; and that, on the other hand, it is precisely the wicked passions of man – greed and lust for power – which, since the emergence of class antagonisms, serve as levers of historical development – a fact of which the history of feudalism and of the bourgeoisie, for example, constitutes a single continual proof.”^[22]

Throughout Faust we see examples of this process, whereby good produces evil, and evil produces good.

Society

When at last the devil has coaxed Faust out of his study, Goethe paints a rich portrait of society. And although the play is mostly set in the sixteenth century, it actually offers a devastating critique of society in Goethe’s own lifetime.

The Holy Roman Empire is depicted as falling apart at the seams, the emperor dissolute and out of touch. A rival emperor arises – a reference to Napoleon Bonaparte – and the old emperor is only able to retain his throne with the aid of demonic forces. In the end, the old order is restored, but is even weaker and more corrupt than before. Such was Goethe’s estimation of the restored monarchies of Europe after Napoleon’s defeat in 1814.

As for the powerful religious establishment, the Church is depicted as bigoted and greedy. “Nature is sin, the Mind is Satan”^[23], warns the Chancellor of the Empire. But lands and tithes? That is a different matter. As Mephisto comments, sarcastically:

“The Church has a superb digestion,

Has swallowed whole countries without question

And never suffered from stomach pains…”^[24]

Goethe also explores the economic sphere of society in Faust. By the time that Goethe completed the second part of the play in 1831, the first tentative beginnings of industrialisation were being made in Germany. Goethe mirrors this development in the play when Faust strives to put his knowledge to practical use through the transformation of nature, raising virgin land out of the sea using a system of dykes.

But Goethe was under no illusions about the new, capitalist world order that was beginning to take hold. World trade is depicted as plunder and piracy:

“For commerce, war, and piracy,

They form a seamless trinity.”^[25]

Here the parallel with the plunder and colonisation of the world by the emerging capitalist nations of Europe is obvious. As Marx would later write in Capital:

“... capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”^[26]

The family

Arguably Goethe’s sharpest critique strikes even deeper, at the family hearth, the so-called foundation of civilisation.

Margaret [Gretchen] (Alone at Her Spinning Wheel) (1828), Frank Cadogan Cowper

The ‘Gretchen tragedy’, which forms the most important part of the drama in Part One of Faust, contains some of the most devastating scenes ever written in verse or prose. One critic has described Gretchen as “the most powerful female character in German literature”.^[27] Marx seems to have shared this assessment, as he listed Gretchen as his “heroine” in 1865.^[28]

Interestingly, unlike most of the play, the Gretchen tragedy has no link to the original Faustus legend in any of its iterations. It was a completely new addition by Goethe, and one drawn from real life. On 14 January 1772, a young woman by the name of Susanna Margaretha Brandt was publicly executed in Frankfurt for the crime of infanticide. Goethe himself attended the execution and some details from Brandt’s case made their way into Faust.

Goethe clearly introduced the seduction of Gretchen by Faust, and its catastrophic consequences, because he felt that it said something that needed to be said, and that his universal human tragedy would be incomplete without it.

Up until the introduction of Gretchen, the conflict between subjective striving and objective limit is expressed only in the form of Faust’s largely intellectual striving for knowledge. With Gretchen we are introduced to a striving that is very different but equally human.

As Faust gets to know Gretchen, we learn of her modest petty-bourgeois life, of its burden of household tasks – “day in, day out, the same old thing” – but above all of its narrowness. Gretchen’s world comprises a little house and a garden, the marketplace and the confession booth, where she has “mere nothings to confess”.^[29]

“What bliss in this imprisonment!”^[30], comments Faust, naively picturing a happy household, full of children. In fact, Gretchen leads a lonely existence, with her father dead and brother away soldiering. A little sister, whom Gretchen fed and raised herself, died young. “I had a deal of trouble with the little thing,” Gretchen says in passing, “But I would have it all again, twice more instead.”^[31]

The love that Gretchen holds within is too great for the limits placed upon her. Faust’s arrival shows her a love and a life beyond her domestic confinement, and awakens Gretchen’s own inherent striving. In her own way she is an equal counterpart to Faust. She might not have his high-flown philosophical vocabulary, but what does that matter?

Ultimately it is this striving that dooms Gretchen, not because it is inherently wrong or sinful, but because it collides violently with the ingrained customs and prejudices of the society in which she lives. After she falls pregnant with Faust’s child, Gretchen overhears the malicious gossip of jealous girls, who relish the thought of publicly humiliating any woman who tries to marry after having a child out of wedlock.

From that moment, Part One bends irresistibly and unbearably towards its horrifying denouement. But what is particularly significant is that the source of all the horror in the play has nothing to do with its various witches, devils and other supernatural creatures. In fact, it comes from the ‘good folk’ and moral establishment, who sit in judgement over her and all women, maintaining a reign of terror that destroys the mind in order to enslave the body. As Mephisto puts it, chillingly:

“She is not the first.”^[32]

Evolution and revolution

Despite his withering criticism of society as he found it, Goethe’s politics were very far from revolutionary. Indeed, he participated in the invasion of revolutionary France by the king of Prussia and his allies. In his own words, “Nothing is more repulsive than the majority”.^[33]

Goethe was a profoundly dialectical thinker, and a firm believer in evolution, not only of life but of everything in the universe. But his conception of evolution was of a gradual process; he subscribed wholeheartedly to the principle that ‘Nature knows no leaps’. Therefore, according to him, mankind should strive to emulate the natural course of gradual sedimentation by restricting its revolutionary leaps to the minimum.

In this, Goethe was of course wrong, both about history and about nature. As Hegel explained, leaps and revolutions are an inherent and necessary part of all development. And social revolutions are not simply the eruption of some dumb mass; they are the collective striving of millions to overcome the fetters imposed on them, and transform their conditions.

However, Goethe’s gradualism was by no means unique to him; it was the dominant outlook of the bourgeoisie at the time, following the trauma of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. It was also particularly ingrained in the mentality of the German bourgeoisie, which found itself constrained by absolutism and semi-feudal backwardness, and yet remained completely dependent on and subservient to the aristocracy and state bureaucracy.

Even a giant cannot stand higher than his age. Goethe was giant among giants, but he could not escape this law of history. We can hardly blame him for that.

It takes a genius to hold a mirror up to a people, or more specifically a class, with such beauty and truth. If the one doing the reflecting himself possesses the flaws of that class it only helps to make the reflection clearer. But Goethe did more than simply reflect his own time.

Like Aristotle, or Marx, he captured something deeper, a truth that spans generations and will continue to do so for generations to come. And what is more revolutionary than that?

Progress

No part of the play has caused more consternation and debate than its conclusion, which was deliberately crafted to raise just as many questions as it answers, if not more.

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (c.1818), Caspar David Friedrich

Does Faust deserve to be saved or condemned? Does Mephisto succeed in quenching Faust’s striving nature? And does Faust ever achieve the insight into the essence of things that he longed for at the beginning of the play?

The shortest and simplest answer to all of these questions would be: “Yes and no”.

Faust’s contradictory conclusion succeeded in provoking critics on both the right and the left, just as Goethe had expected. Radical believers in human reason were baffled by Goethe’s heavy and explicit use of religious, especially Catholic symbolism in the final scene; while religious conservatives rightly suspected that they were having their leg pulled, and indignantly protested against any interpretation that did not condemn Faust as a hopeless sinner.

Matters are arguably worse today. Conservative critics desperately try to transform Goethe’s allegory for all of human life into a tedious and misanthropic lecture against ambition and striving. Meanwhile, postmodernists claim that it was never meant to mean anything. As Rüdiger Safranski writes in his otherwise worthwhile biography of Goethe: “it’s all only a game, a beautiful sham contaminated by nothingness”.^[34]

It should not come as any surprise that the modern literary establishment has no idea what to do with Faust; the modern bourgeoisie has absolutely no use for it.

Ultimately, at the heart of Faust and its concluding scenes is a simple and optimistic message about human nature and progress. It is an ode to the ceaseless creative striving of human beings in love, art, science, in the transformation of nature and ourselves, carried out in an innumerable succession of generations.

This progress is contradictory by its very nature. As Goethe himself explained, in “world history and human history – each problem solved creates a new one to be solved”.^[35] We pass from error to truth and back to error in turn, but ultimately towards a greater and greater understanding of the universe and our place in it.

In the end, Faust does not achieve final, absolute knowledge, and nor can we; no generation of human beings will ever know everything there is to know about the universe. Knowledge is therefore not an end point to be arrived at but a process, the very striving that constitutes the essence of Faust’s character.

Many years after the publication of Faust: Part Two, Engels would describe this contradiction – between the fundamental knowability of the universe and the impossibility of humanity ever actually attaining complete knowledge of it – as “the main lever of all intellectual advance”, which “finds its solution continuously, day by day, in the endless progressive development of humanity.”^[36]

In these words Engels was giving a perfect, scientific expression to the poetic heart of Faust’s conclusion. And it is precisely this that the literary experts of the modern bourgeoisie can never hope to understand. They tossed the great lever of progress to the side a long time ago. It remains for the working class to pick it up.

But where does that leave Faust as a universal human tragedy? With such a hopeful ending can the play be considered a tragedy at all? Really, it’s too early to say; the story hasn’t ended yet.

Anyone looking to draw a moral lesson from this should turn to the ‘Prologue in Heaven’ at the start of the play, and carefully consider the Lord’s instructions:

“By ever active, ever live creation

In love’s enchanting fetters be you caught,

And that which sways in wavering revelation,

May you compact it with enduring thought.”^[37]

Go out. Act. Strive to change this world. And use the knowledge that you acquire to make something that will last for generations. In the beginning was the Deed.

References

^[1] J W von Goethe, Poetry And Truth From My Own Life, Vol. 1, George Bell and Sons, 1913, pg 229-230

^[2] Quoted in R Safranski, Goethe : Kunstwerk des Lebens, Carl Hanser Verlag, 2013, pg 155, tr. D Dollenmayer

^[3] H Heine, ‘The Romantic School’, The Prose Writings of Heinrich Heine, Arno Press, 1973, pg 115

^[4] J W von Goethe, Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret, George Bell and Sons, 1875, pg 507

^[5] J W von Goethe, C Hamlin (ed.), Faust, Norton, 2001, pg 515

^[6] Quoted in R Safranski, Goethe : Kunstwerk des Lebens, Carl Hanser Verlag, 2013, pg 100, tr. D Dollenmayer

^[7] J W von Goethe, C Hamlin (ed.), Faust, Norton, 2001, pg 31

^[8] ibid. pg 12

^[9] ibid.

^[10] ibid.

^[11] ibid. pg 34

^[12] R Safranski, Goethe: Life as a Work of Art, Liveright, 2017, pg 311

^[13] J W von Goethe, C Hamlin (ed.), Faust, Norton, 2001, pg 51

^[14] ibid. pg 53

^[15] K Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, The Revolutionary Philosophy of Marxism, Wellred Books, 2021, pg 51

^[16] J W von Goethe, C Hamlin (ed.), Faust, Norton, 2001, pg 37

^[17] ibid.

^[18] G W F Hegel, ‘Hegel to Goethe – April 24, 1825’, Hegel: The Letters, Indiana University Press, 1984, pg 709

^[19] F Engels, ‘Engels to C Schmidt, October 27, 1890’, Marx, Engels, Lenin: On Historical Materialism, Progress Publishers, 1976, pg 301

^[20] J W von Goethe, C Hamlin (ed.), Faust, Norton, 2001, pg 10

^[21] ibid. pg 36

^[22] F Engels, ‘Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy’, Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works, Vol. 26, Progress Publishers, 1990, pg 378

^[23] J W von Goethe, C Hamlin (ed.), Faust, Norton, 2001, pg 143

^[24] ibid. pg 77

^[25] ibid. pg 317

^[26] K Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961, pg 760

^[27] J W von Goethe, C Hamlin (ed.), Faust, Norton, 2001, pg 376

^[28] K Marx, ‘Karl Marx’s “Confession”’, printed in International Review of Social History, Vol. 1, 1956, pg 108

^[29] J W von Goethe, C Hamlin (ed.), Faust, Norton, 2001, pg 71

^[30] ibid. pg 73

^[31] ibid. pg 86

^[32] ibid. pg 126

^[33] Quoted in F Engels, ‘German Socialism in Verse and Prose’, Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works, Vol. 6, Progress Publishers, 1976, pg 266

^[34] R Safranski, Goethe : Kunstwerk des Lebens, Carl Hanser Verlag, 2013, pg 623, tr. D Dollenmayer

^[35] J W von Goethe, C Hamlin (ed.), Faust, Norton, 2001, pg 547

^[36] F Engels, Anti-Dühring, Wellred Books, 2017, pg 50

^[37] J W von Goethe, C Hamlin (ed.), Faust, Norton, 2001, pg 11