Nietzsche, Schopenauer And Faust

26 Pages 6579 Words

driven from this epistemological despair to a graver position, one which sees him seem to shun life itself. His sense of futility is quite well expressed in the following:

“Not like the gods am I-profoundly it is rued!
I am of the earthworm’s dust engendered brood,
Which blindly burrowing, by dust is fed,
And crushed beneath the wanderers tread.” (Faust: lines 652-55)

Faust is then gripped, not only with a sense of despair of knowledge, but a deeper existential despair at the meaninglessness of human existence. Does that idea then, not present to us a strong resemblance to a Schopenhauerian conception of existence i.e. as ultimately unsatisfactory and to be turned away from? What has been written above certainly does give the impression that Schopenhauerian pessimism is present here. However it can, in fact, be quickly asserted that this position is not Schopenhauerian. How can such a sweeping assertion be justified? Does Faust not represent a denial of will? Is he not afflicted by a will-denying pessimism brought on by the dead ...