Nietzsche, Schopenauer And Faust

26 Pages 6579 Words

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The second part begins giving an account of the wager that Faust makes with Mephistopheles and also a literary explanation of Faust’s redemption. This is followed by an account of Faust’s striving and redemption in relation to the wager; again first a Schopenhauerian reading is given followed by a Nietzschean one. In both cases the Schopenhauerian comparison with Faust is found wanting whilst the Nietzschean far more adequate. The piece concludes with summary and some further comment.


1.
We begin this enquiry with Faust in his study. Before we make any assertions of our own the following lines should be noted, for they will hopefully serve to help us make our first inroad to this enquiry:

“I have pursued, alas, philosophy,
Jurisprudence and medicine,
And help me God, theology,
With fervent zeal through thick and thin.
And here, poor fool, I stand once more,
No wiser than I was before.” (Faust: lines354-59)

These lines serve as an introduction to Faust’s predicament. Faust the academic and scholar is disturbed by the realisation that for all his learnedness, he knows nothing. Faust clearly feels an aversion to self-deception about the privileged status of his scholarly knowledge and desires to escape the dead learning in which he is embedded (and as scholar, embodies). We shortly after see Faust marvel over the sign of the Macrocosm (six pointed star signifying the cosmos in its metaphysical entirety), indicating this desire to know deeper things about the nature of existence, he says of it thus:

“Ah-what enchantment at the sight of this
Suffuses every sense, what lovely verve!
I feel new burgeoning life, with sacred bliss
Reincandescent, course through vein and nerve.”(Faust: lines 430-34)

This initial stage, in a position of self-aware epistemological despair. It seems the only security of knowledge he has is that he cannot truly know anything of the universe in itself. Faust is ...