[HN Gopher] Goethe's Faustian Life
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Goethe's Faustian Life
Author : lermontov
Score : 32 points
Date : 2025-05-21 04:56 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.commonwealmagazine.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.commonwealmagazine.org)
| SSJPython wrote:
| > 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.
| croes wrote:
| Metaphysics and religions don't have answer either.
|
| They just stop asking questions at a certain point.
| geodel wrote:
| But that is sufficient for people with limited time and
| resources which is _most_ people.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| You forgot: " and curiosity ".
|
| The sentence is otherwise correct.
| williamdclt wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I should've said the worship of the temporal (material
| reality, etc.) rather than the spiritual.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| What has the spiritual ever done for us? We know nothing of
| gods that we didn't learn from other men.
| quotz wrote:
| But men do not respect other men nearly as much as they
| respect the gods and the supernatural
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Exactly, so what you're saying is that extolling
| spirituality is just a way to garner unearned respect.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| You're committing the same fallacy that many do which is
| to lump them all under "gods" and then make it a problem
| of distinguishing which of these possible beings exists.
|
| But this fails to distinguish between _a being_ and
| _Being_. You and I are beings, beings among many. The
| pagan gods, personifications of various natural
| phenomena, were like us, in this sense: they were beings
| among, only more powerful. Being, on the other hand, is
| the verb _to be_. You exist, I exist, all the beings of
| the world exist. The pagan gods, I submit, do not exist,
| save as fictions.
|
| So how do you relate to your existence? We all exist, so
| it isn't particular to you. And you are not the cause of
| your own existence, here and now. Rather existence is
| something prior to any particular existing things in the
| order of causes. This cause, this existence, this Being
| itself, is God, and you can know quite a bit about it,
| analogously, through unaided reason and without appealing
| to authority.
|
| > What has the spiritual ever done for us?
|
| That question is premature for you.
| williamdclt wrote:
| It's not any less vague. Again, what definition of
| "worship" do you use? It's certainly not any of the
| dictionaries
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| How have you come to this conclusion?
| mistrial9 wrote:
| > a natural inclination to worship something.
|
| uh really? Barbarism and brute force have succeeded many times.
| fallinditch wrote:
| 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.
| SSJPython wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| tickerticker wrote:
| ^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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| If you believe saintlike people are in their right minds -
| many. I use "saintlike" in a secular sense; I myself am an
| atheist.
| timoth3y wrote:
| 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.
| ginko wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| That is odd.
| fidrelity wrote:
| 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.
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