Nietzsche, Schopenauer And Faust

26 Pages 6579 Words

“Enter: Philosopher, and lo!
He proves to you it must be so…”
(Faust: 1928-29)


Can Faust, pre and post Mephistopheles, be seen in an either Nietzschean or Schopenhauerian light?



Introduction.
This piece of work grew out of reading chapters four and five of Walter Kaufmann’s book The Owl and the Nightingale. These chapters deal largely with Goethe and his relation to Faust and Faust’s redemption; the following two quotes are largely responsible for the enquiry:

“…Schopenhauer found the quintessence of human nature-indeed, of the universe-in Faust. His metaphysical conception of the ultimate reality as relentless striving, blind will may be considered a cosmic projection of Faust’s ceaseless aspiration.” (Kaufmann p54, 1959)

And

“…the clue to Faust’s redemption should be found in Goethe’s faith and not in Faust’s moral merits.” (Kaufmann p68 1959)

Kaufmann believes Goethe’s faith to be that, concurrent with his anti-otherworldliness, striving in life is the only redemption we have. This prompts a dissonance between equating Faustian striving with a Schopenhauerian position, whilst trying to equate Faust’s redemption with his continuing striving. To be fair to Kaufmann, none of his argument turns on the truth or falsehood of this dissonance, yet nevertheless it remains the notion that sparked this particular enquiry. Prompted originally by this, the paper expands the enquiry to examine Faust’s position both pre and post Mephistopheles, comparing his position first with Schopenhauer and then with the early Nietzsche (a la Birth of Tragedy). The structure is roughly as follows.
The first part begins by delineating Faust’s position as we find at the start of the text. The despairing state that we find him in is given first a Schopenhauerian reading and then a Nietzschean one. The Nietzschean reading is longer and deals with Faust as an incarnation of Socratism (leading to nihi...