Goethe's Faust

Faust "How uselessly I've laboured to collect
The treasures of the human intellect,
And now I sit and wonder what I've done.
I feel no new strength surging in my soul
I'm not a hairsbreadth taller, I'm not one
Step nearer to the infinite goal"

A significant theme emerging from the first volume of Goethe's Faust is the contrast between a life of study, deep introversion, observation and a life of direct action, involvment, raw emotion. Herman Hesse took this one theme, one contrast, and wrote a brilliant novel centred almost entirely on it, Narcissus and Goldmund.

I feel this theme addresses a fundamental element of human experience. As humans we have constructed complex, complicated cultures; epigenetic worlds. We are able to involve ourselves in these worlds and in some way detach ourselves from the physical, genetic world.

I think some people can involve themselves in an epigenetic world too much and lose connection with raw reality and direct experience. Thus it is understandable that Faust would, after years involvment in this world, want to break away from it. He undertsands that full, deep knowledge doesn't derive entirely from book learning.

Goethe's Faust and the Religious/Atheist Debate

Margareta "Then you don't believe?"

Faust "My sweet beloved child, don't misconceive
My meaning! Who dare say God's name?
Who dares to claim that he believes in God?
And whose heart is so dead
That he has ever boldly said:
No, I do not believe?
Embracing all things,
Holding all things in being,
Does He not hold and keep
You, me, even Himself?
Is not the heavens' great vault up there on high,
And here below, does not the earth stand fast?
Do everlasting stars, gleaming with love,
Not rise above us through the sky?
Are we not here and gazing eye to eye?
Does all this not beseige your mind and heart,
And weave in unseen visibility
All round you its eternal mystery?
Oh, fill your heart right up with all of this,
And when your brimming over with bliss
Of such a feeling, call it what you like!
Call it joy, or your heart, or love, or God!
I have no name for it. The feeling's all there is:
The name's mere noise and smoke - what does it do
But cloud the heavenly radiance?"

This passage sheds interesting light on the religious/atheist debate and to me provides one of the best takes on it.

Goethe was receptive to the awe-inspiring complexity of existence and interpreted his experiences in a subtle way, without succumbing to simplicity and dogmatism. With the purity and clarity of a child he realised and understood the sheer brilliance that things exist "Are we not here and gazing eye to eye?"

Significantly Goethe addresses the limitations of language, in describing the complexity of nature and reality, "the name's mere noise and smoke"

In order to address the multifarious nature of reality and the religious question Goethe writes in paradoxes. "Who dares to claim that he believes... whose heart is so dead that he has ever boldly said: no, I do not believe". The answer to the religious question lies in between two clearly defined, one-dimensional poles. The structure of his poetic language is also paradoxical, "weave in unseen visibility"

More points should, undoubtedly, be added to the religious/atheist debate. Such as the oppression of institutional religion and the point that religious stories or concepts, such as God, represent aspects of the human psyche and can therefore be illuminating.