What matters?

The struggle between reality and a detached quest for objective, or pure, beauty has been a theme to many of my recent thoughts and experiences. I mentioned in another entry that I'd read Goethe's Faust last year and this weekend I've been thinking a lot about that play and Schubert's Lieder, which I listened to in-between scenes. It made a deep impact on me, not because of the relevance it still has in the world today, so long after it was written, but also in the way he deals with the rather well-known dichotomy body/spirit or even science/art. Within that larger discussion there are several running themes which, according to me, have particular resonance when analyzed through a sociological prism but more importantly, the role men and women play today, the way men in particular see themselves and whether they've been able to interiorize relatively dramatic changes in society and their relationship with women. Finally...redemption. Is it possible? How? On whose terms?

Goethe’s Faust challenges the neoclassical view of art while retaining elements of eighteenth-century rationalism. Faust is himself a product of the Enlightenment, deeply knowledgeable about philosophy, law, and medicine. But to him, this knowledge does not uncover Nature’s grand design; the knowledge he has acquired is a burden to him because it is something external to him…to his experience…his age…and…his emotions. What he is looking for is an internal experience, something which could awaken in him an emotion that inspires a glimpse of the essence of the Universe, rather than knowledge acquired through observation of the outer world.

He is aware of the dichotomy within him, though; of two distinct ‘souls’ competing with each other: one sensual, the other striving for “purity of mind”. This inner struggle contrasts thought and emotion, continually propels him into a state of constant striving for a kind of understanding of the Universe he knows to be infinite; yet he only has finite resources. Romantic irony.

Contrasts appear throughout the play, and the next important one occurs when Faust and Wagner see a dog, but Faust sees things that Wagner doesn’t which could allude to contrasts between certainties and uncertainties, an important break from Enlightenment ideas about the acquisition of knowledge of the outer world through the senses. This moment in the play can also be seen from the point of view presented by Novalis that “[the artist] sees actively and not passively, […] has vivified the germ of self-formative life” while the non-artist “[speaks] only through the intervention of external prompting, and [his] spirit…seems to…submit to the constraint…that all change presuppose an external cause” (Donnachie&Lavin, Anthology II, p. 211), another important break from the eighteenth-century view about the artist... who conformed to what had come before, rules, examples... and a kind of Frozen Walt Disney of Art.

Throughout the play, the struggle between the senses and inner experience is present. Worldly and Transcendental. Parisian salons and debauchery on the one hand and a quest for eternal, real (though not platonic!) love which may reveal (though this is not quite the right word here) Infinite.

When the dog transforms itself into Mephistopheles, Faust searches for a word for what he might be, accompanying semantically the shift occurring physically. The variety of euphemisms subverts definition: Mephistopheles affirms to be “Part of the power which would/work only Evil, but produces Good”, but only a part. He then proposes a pact, though Faust mentions it first(!): he will serve Faust in this (the material) world if Faust serves him in the next. Faust lacks interest in the next world, because he is interested in the here and now, in knowledge acquired by an experience inside himself, so agrees to the pact. But Faust and Mephistopheles have been talking on different levels… Worldly gratification is all Mephistopheles has in mind, while what matters for Faust is a more profound metaphysical totality.

This illustrates a particularly peculiar inner struggle: Mephistopheles here could be said to represent one of Faust’s souls, the one of the senses, “slaking his appetites like an animal”; it does not understand “the other” soul which “strives for purity of mind”. The soul with which Faust enters the pact is represented by Gretchen. She symbolizes the very striving for awareness of the Universe’s Essence which encapsulates romantic irony once more, that is, the knowledge that finite resources (reason) cannot possibly grasp the infinite, the unknowable. When Mephistopheles is present, Gretchen feels hostile to him, repulsed even; she even becomes uncertain of her love for Faust, and her whole moral sense feels threatened and tainted by him. The irony of the situation increases and Faust’s inner struggle becomes more intense because the very nature of the pact means that Faust will never be rid of Mephistopheles who becomes an alter ego. He impersonates Faust’s own critical faculties, effectively becoming interchangeable with Faust’s sensual soul. Gretchen achieves a process, in the end, “of acceptance and repentance” and submits to judgement on earth…placing hope for atonement in heaven; and still she fears for Faust as long as he cannot dispense with Mephistopheles. Faust never manages to get rid of Mephistopheles, who was never able to fulfill the terms of the pact, thus Faust is saved by the value of his relationship with Gretchen, in other words, by continuously striving for that glimpse of the eternal which Mephistopheles could not provide. The struggle between the “two souls” is ever present, never-ending. Open-ended.

It is remarkably optimistic and beautiful. Despite being categorized -- or lumped together I should say -- with the Romantics, I think this play is a testament to humanism, in spite of its not v orthodox approach to Enlightenment view of science and the scientific method. I puts the human being at the centre, accepting his flaws and praising his qualities; it does not condemn, it is not hopeless and full of despair; it points out that most people are doing their best even if, sometimes, the methods used may lead to failure.