I know it won’t be easy but I look forward to developing my skills and becoming more consistent with my work.

This idea comes from the WordPress “Blog a Day” challenge, although I’ve relaxed the commitment a bit to fit my schedule. I don’t know that I’ll be following the daily post suggestions (http://dailypost.wordpress.com/) all that closely, since I want to use the challenge to develop my understanding of course material and theory. That means I’ll largely just be getting back to the focus of this blog- but perhaps with a little more inspiration.

Here’s to a “writerly” 2011!

http://menwithpens.ca/writing-dragons

So says my friend, himself a pretty accomplished writer, I’d say. And I know I’ve heard similar advice before, but maybe I have to revisit this idea, of writing, not without a purpose or goal, but “just because.” So that’s what I’m doing. And y’know, I’ve never thought of writing to the Beatles before. Who can focus on fustration, anxiety, or deadlines when “Across the Universe” is playing in the background. That’s what I thought.

But instead of writing something unrelated, I’m going to try and get back to why I picked this subject matter. I’m writing for a history class. Okay. So why do I like history? I guess I’ve always been pretty inquisitive-I’ve always been interested in understanding the past. I can remember reading books about First Nations cultures in grade five, reading encyclopedias about China and Japan in grade six and seven, reading about paleolithic discoveries in Siberia and France even earilier.  My interests were pretty eclectic back then-I would be learning something in class and spend hours of my free time searching for more books on the subject, and reading whatever I could find. I recall spending hours reading about ancient Egypt so I could come up with the best sarcophagus picture for my grade 7 art class. I played that Civilization video game whenever I went to visit my uncle (we didn’t have our own computer at the time). It just seems like history has always been a part of my life.

Perhaps I just had a drive to understand everything-even things I wasn’t being told in class. I needed to go beyond the subject matter (I guess I was bored?), and later this evolved into a more sophisticated need to understand, at least on some level, structures, processes and politics that shaped our world.  I developed an urge to question what was common sense, I sensed I had at best, a partial knowlege of the world, and I started to reconsider (at least superficially) the sources of this knowlege (these were my punk rock years.  ) . I knew that there was so much going on in the world that I barely understood, and I wanted to know why we weren’t being told these things. Particularly, this translated into a curiosity about the media- I wanted to know what we weren’t being told in the news and why.

This feulled my “alternative media” phase -At this point I was reading Punk Planet to get a different perspective on the issues I kept hearing about, yet didn’t feel I entirely understood. In doing so I went beyond the Eurocentric focus of my classes and discovered political issues and struggles that were going on around the world. I joined social justice groups and started learning about women’s issues in Afghanistan (and this was before 9-11). Some combination of my environment, and my own curiosity, created this drive to know more about the issues shaping the world.  At this point I was more concerned with present-day political conflict than past civilizations, but the underlying drive behind everything I was reading was this-in order to understand what’s going on now, you need to understand what lead up to it. (I was quite interested in the Middle Eastern conflict at the time, and this point was especially salient in this case-there was no way to understand what was going on with Iraq (a contentious issue, even before the 2003 invasion, due to the sanctions imposed on the country at the time), without understanding history behind the Amercan’s foreign policy, why the country was strategically important, etc.). And this urge to understand kept me looking back into the past.

 Admittedly, until recently I was largely concerned with 19th and 20th century history (my child hood interests notwithstanding). It’s only been in the last year or so that I’ve gone further back. Not that there’s a lockstep relationship between ancient and modern world history, I just wanted a broader approach. I realised I never fully understood, for example, why fuedalism took shape, why the Roman Empire fell, how Christianity expanded, and so on-these were formative aspects of western society, but in my urge to understand non-western cultures, I’d kind of passed over them in my studies. I started to get the sense that I wanted the full “liberal” education, that there was a reason some texts, ideas, etc, are “canoncial,” and I didn’t want to continue being functionally illiterate in important aspects of my cultural heritage. I’d also been studying modern european and particularly, colonial history, and realising I couldn’t really understand the 19th century European social structure unless I had a better understanding about how it took shape. There was an intellectual hole that needed plugging, and I’m trying to do it by studying the forerunners to the industrial captialist system that I’ve taken for granted.

So I guess, despite my frustration, I still love history, I still feel I *need* to understand these things. Now hopefully this motivation will get me through my paper…

I guess that’s why it’s called prewriting- its imprecision reflects its exploratory nature. I know my main idea is buried under all this expository superfluity-now how do I tease it out?

When I got here I was tired, but once I saw my mom and Dave, I was happy to see my family again, to see my cats, to see Jesse, to experience a place that was familiar, realising that Calgary would always be home, no matter how my heart wanders. I greeted everyone familiar with a new kind of fondness, I appreciated them in a new way. The house, the stereo, my room, everything felt “just as it should.” I’ve arrived, changed but still grounded in this place.

When I awoke from my nap, after dreams of flat topped roofs, Jony’s family, the transplanted European architecture of el centro, after experiencing all my photos replaying in my dreams, it really sank in that this was it. I was home, and with it came a profound sense of missing all that Buenos Aires was, and all it represented in my thoughts and heart. I greeted real life again with a profound sense of lonliness, but not the kind I had experienced in Bs. As., which stemmed from my inability to communicate anything but the simplest of thoughts and requests. This kind of lonliness stemmed from a deep sense of loss, of realizing that the trip was over and my immediate sense of connection and identification with the place and the people I met there was severed, and would I become increasingly detatched with the passing of time. Each subsequent moment represented a loss of memories, and with it a loss of my experiences, lessons and connection with Bs. As.

When I had left on the flight, I’d cried a little as left Jony’s family, wondering if I would ever see them again, acknowledging how deeply they’d imprinted themselves on my heart. Yet at the same time, I felt that the reality of leaving had not completely sank in. I knew the real sadness would come later once I could fully comprehend what leaving really represents. What I felt at the airport was a sense of loss, a sense that, “this is it,” but also an anticipation that the full acceptance of the implications of this would come later.

As I acknowleged the start of my severance from this place, that this would only accelerate in the loss of memories, I recalled a quote from Wendell Berry. He had said our transportation technologies had made it so easy to travel from place to place; yet the mind itself was not attuned to keep up with the rapid progression of physical experience that rapid travel allowed. Our bodies are keyed to 100 km/hr, but to fully experience a place we need to walk in order to allow our minds to fully appreciate and experience where we are, to fully account for the progression from place to place as we travel. Our modern travel leaves us with a sense that our minds are still stuck in the places of the past while our physical senses are already elsewhere; this is a part of jet lag, and even culture shock. We simply just can’t keep up because our minds, the way we process sensory information, haven’t kept up with the pace of travel. So I knew that on the surface I knew we were leaving, but I knew that at this time I would not be able to fully comprehend the profound sense of changing from one reality to another, from the reality of life as it had come to be in Bs. As. and the reality of life in Canada.

Nonetheless, as the plane left, Jony handed me my camera, and it felt by now so familiar and strangely trustworthy to me, as if it were an old friend. I took pictures out the plane’s window with a new kind of urgency, as if it was my camera’s responsibility to forstall the inevitiable forgetting of this place, and I needed it to create as many tangible records as possible. I watched a film on the plane that was set in Buenos Aires, only to see what had become my second home one last time. I wasn’t ready to lose it yet, and I’m still not ready, though I know by now I am losing B.A.

It wasn’t until I woke up with memories of my dreams of Bs. As., of photos, people and life there, and the accompanying sense of sadness, lonliness and loss, that I recognized that at this point, my mind and heart had finally caught up, that I was starting to accept and process my new reality. My new reality was grounded in Canada, grounded in my family, my old friends, obligations and responsibilities, grounded even in the appearence of these familiar surroundings. What had been a welcome sense of “being home” when I first saw my old house, was after my nap also a source of profound sadness. I made mate and drank it the Argentine way, as if by establishing in Canada what had become a familiar routine over there, I could also maintain my psychological sense of conenction to that place, as if I could cement my memories of that place for good and prevent what I knew would be an inevitable forgetting.

Already I can feel that the reality and demands of here are already replacing my connection and identification with that place, and it feels like the part of me that really connected with Bs As is already slipping away; hence as time passes I’m losing a piece of myself as memories fade. I experience this right now almost as a mixture of acknowlegement and sadness, as my mind is now accustomed to home and all its trappings and familiarity, I inevitably mourn for the loss of reality as it had come to be over there. After all, my routine over here is much more worn, experienced, well-trodded and tenacious than the life , routine and connections I’d established over there, and simply by being in my familar surroundings, this place almost accelerates the forgetting of Bs. As. And yet I still know that this is home, that I need to be here now, that my trip wasn’t always fun, to say the least, and I was ready to leave. So what would I like to write now, how can I recall all that I’d learned, experienced and felt as I was over there? It will be impossible to record it all, but is there a place to start?

It forced me to push myself, and in doing so I experienced a mental state I usually only find in the (supposedly self-less) postures of yoga. It was a feeling of losing hold of my identity in the sense that I was unwittingly detaching myself from habitual fears and self-defeating, critical attitudes by virtue of the fact that there was so much else on which to focus: the ideas on those pages, the effort involved in keeping balance.

My imagination became entranced by this idea of a constantly renewing search for self perfection, one which neccessarily requires a stripping off of old identities, seeing the connections between this philosopher who seemed to have, from what I could understand, a problematic ethic – from a slave’s perspective, anyway, he might argue -and this dicipline of compassion and connectedness to others that yoga embodies. It was because right then, at that momement they fundamentally shared for me this ethos of self-overcoming. In that sense, they shared this urge to progress, a pushing forward of the self.

Philosophy pierces my mind these days; I unpack Sarte’s intentionality, Nietzsche’s superman and Goethe’s classically-infused, critical romanticism against a background of the questions that plauge me at the level of everyday life: given that we all have to grow up sometime, how does a person do this while maintaining the sense of youthful bravado that seems to fuel confidence and creativity?

As I notice myself aging I find the creative urge is slipping away. At one time I wrote “just because”-to unpack my thinking and determine my own beliefs about world events, philosophy, art culture, subculture, that whole host of topics that might engage the curiousity of young minds, minds that need to do something with all that free time. This paralyising fear, I don’t remember always experiencing it. Maybe I’m not recalling my younger self accurately, but it seems like at one time I wrote voraciously because I just had to, it never occured to me that it was bad, or at least I never feared my  writing was so bad that I wouldn’t share it anyway, which is something I routinely do these days. In class I stop myself before I say what I fear may be the “wrong answer.” I kill my latent thoughts before I start to write what might just be another “bad idea”-though I’m simulteanously plauged with an awareness of the irrationality of this behavior. I’m writing now because I’m compelled by an urge to prove to myself I won’t let fear get the best of me.

What is it about aging that has killed my creativity? Is it time? I find these days there’s never enough, there’s too many obligations, my heart is weary the moment I awake. I lose my enthusiasm for the things I love; I lose the nerve to get up and try again. What do I do to maintain that creative urge? We all need on some level, don’t we? It becomes a vicious circle when people drop the things they love as life makes ever increasing adult demands, the passion those activities spark will diminish, and with it, the motivation to start that new project. Fears creep in and it’s harder to get them out, to put them in thier rightful place as a check on the romantic, creative  impulse, not a killer of it. On some level we requre a bit of foolish impulsiveness in order to make; every act of creativity is a daring that neccessitates confidence.

And this is the fundamental appeal of these authors for me; it’s not so much an issue of metaphysics, or history that intregues me the most, but the way these authors speak to my own fears and dare me to clean up my own house. They challenge me to articulate where those fears came from and force me to account for their stranglehold on my life.

And this is where my thesis comes in. I think I always want the thesis to be that “Aha!” idea that comes with sufficient poring through books and books, stacks of ideas. I want it to demonstrate some perfection of book learning, without a tinge of the messiness of process, of everyday life, of imperfect self.  However, in actuality it usually occurs in rather effortless way, dispite all my attempts to force the idea it will never come at the moment when I think I need it most, but afterwards when I’m doing something else.

When I think about it, the thesis is really an after-effect of all that labour; it takes time for the mind to suss out what’s really at stake amongst a miscalleinity of ideas and research. It will always have “process” written all over it, but this is a neccessary requirement of original work, not something to avoid or stifle, and certainly not an esxcuse to stifle the work itself.

All this time I’ve been wanting to detach my writing from my life, but when these writers are discussing nothing less significant than the status of the self and what happens as we start to become aware of ourselves as distinct entities, there’s no way to make the work not-me, something other than a synthesis of my intellecutal and workaday life. It simply hits too close to home. By engaging with these authors, I’ve neccessarily had to come to terms with so much fear that lives inside my own mind-the process of writing anything will do that to me-but these authors make that processes much more profound, because in truly engaging with these authors I have to confront the fact that I can no longer run away from myself.

And at times I answer that challenge through an exceptional bout of fear-based paralysis, because I’m afraid my own mind will never do such great works justice. Yet there’s this quiet voice in the back of my mind that keeps telling me that to retreat out of fear is to totally miss the point of these works. And this is where this fascination with courage and bravado, embodied by these  works, fits in. It’s this ethos of action, of not knowing the answer and doing it anyway, that redeems all cowardace; action is the best shot we have at freeing outselves from ourselves.

What these authors are fundamentally driving at, I think, is the following. Hegel argues that the whole of history is the process of individuals, the sum total of humanity, becoming more aware that they exist as separate, distinct entities apart from family obligations, tradition, fuedal relationships, etc: moderinity is about the reification of the self.

According to Hegel, I now have the ability to think of myself as this discrete human being, I can conceptualize the existence of something so novel and problematic as free will, because I am the product of this long march of civilizational progress to self-awareness.  Over time we have come to think of ourselves as distinct from community, class, family or territorial leadership, and with that we’ve developed a sense of having individual interests.

From this perspective, even angst is a privilege of modern self-conciousness, angst being nothing more than the self turning inward and worrying about its condition. Angst is like turning to the self for guidance and worrying because the self can’t come up with a satisfying answer. Hegel would argue, I think, that there was a point in society where we all just acted, we didn’t worry about what to do. Most of us looked to tradition and authority, who I guess would have been slightly more self-aware, yet would also have thier own conventions of ritual and tradition to which they’d turn. Every once in awhile you’d get a figure like Socrates who questioned all convention, and while they set the stage for greater self awareness they threatened a status quo reliant on the old ways for any meaningful thought and action.

Self-conciousness becomes revolutionary because it enables freedom, as a concept, to become not only desireable, but feasable. We’re  longer living for God or even our own community, our wills either become our own, or we come to think of something so novel as a “will” being the possession of something so novel as an “individual”-even if we haven’t figured out what to do with it yet.  From here it becomes possible to live in our own minds, from our own minds-and here you get the scientific revoultion, where the rational mind becomes the basis of knowing, and later on, the first person author, the autobiography, where the self is doing nothing but exploring its own mental state (Ong aruged the second point, Hegel argued the first). As far as I understand, an idealist might argue that this newfound sense of self-the concept reasonable individual-goes a long way to perpetuating the great changes in material existence throughtout history. All of a sudden we can trust our own reasons for acting, and now we can do anything, discover anything.

The Enlightenment assumed that by refocusing authority on the individual, we would not only start to desire freedom but become better able to achieve it. but fundamentally in our own minds-in the sense that the mind is the beginning and end of all inquiry, and the fragmented, yet striving for freedom self-living the vestiges of Condercet’s thought, perhaps?-is what we mean when we speak of the “modern mind.”

Each part of this school has a specific memory attached to it. It was Thursday Den night and as I walked there from Kines I remniscinisced about my residence days, when it would have seemed feasable to wait in a stupid line to drink at the Den. At the time, I wanted to have the “university experience” and part of that was doing as much campus socializing and partying as humanly possbile, all while keeping the grades up. I found myself in social sciences, past ss10 where I had that memorable English class with Dr. Cervelli, and I couldn’t study in there partly because I associate that place with memories of my first year enthusiasm, and going back there would force me to really ask those unanswerable questions of why I can’t bring myself to feel that way anymore. I also didn’t want to taint that spot with my current confusion, I wanted to carve that space out in my mind as a place I could walk by and still experience a tinge of that inspired feeling. It occured to me that even my new locker is accross the hall from my first year locker, and I interpreted it to mean that I had somehow come full circle. I needed to answer those questions that the memory of a younger, less weary version of myself inherently posed.

I sat in the room adjascent to ss110, and of course as I studied those questions followed me into my books, weaved themselves through what I was reading at the time: what happened? Someone had told me once that I came here a kid and left an adult, and in a sense that does represent a kind of answer. But then does that mean adulthood is neccessarily associated with this heaviness?  Responsibility is more a dull weight these days than an opportunity, because I have dragged so many balls and chains around my legs for so long, and it never lets up. Am I allowed to ask the weight to let up slightly? Can I do that? I thought of my conversation with a soci prof years ago; I asked him why I couldn’t I ever find a satisfactory answer to anything when I write? And he responded, do you want knowlege or satisfaction?

So I returned last night to that inevitable trade off, one that has always stuck with me as I’ve worked through my degree. Why is it that knowlege doesn’t breed happiness? Didn’t Goethe ask a variant of the same question? We are always running to our books with the fantasy that we could find that elusive “something more” if we could just accumulate sufficient knowlege. But the addiction to knowing functions just like any other. The consumer lust that at least partly fuelled the morgage crisis is diametrically opposed to that subtle truth belying every credit card statement: There will always be more things to buy, and resources are finite. The will to debt contradicts the main rule of economics: life is full of tradeoffs. Resources are scarce. Unwilling to admit to this the mind tirelessly runs after this or that item until it burns itself out. The will to knowlege works similarly. You run until you’re gasping for breath.

But there’s something deeper to it than that, and this is where economics doesn’t provide us with too many answers. I noted earlier that we’re lusting for knowlege, or stuff, or experience because we’re running after that “something deeper.” Economics assumes that as we can procure more goods and services, then we maximize our utility and everything is fine. The problem comes when we lack the resources to fuel the greed, when we don’t balance the need for stuff in the present with the need for stuff (and security) in the future. We’re trading off future self-suffienciency for present gratification. Debt is problematic since it’s a function of bad planning, an unwillingness to own up to the trade-off that scarcity neccesitates. But what about the object of our addiction? What if we’re not maximizing our utility, regardless of whether or not we can afford to keep trying? Put bluntly, what if shopping, or experience, or even that unquestioned good of knowlege and achievement never give us the utility we demand of them? What if the mind was designed in such a way that these things will never satisfy, yet the world is designed in such a way that there is always something new to lust over, and so we keep striving and striving and striving, because even though we know there will never be enough, we dare ourselves to go for that “something more?” The buddhists call the result “suffering.” I call it meloncholy, but it’s all the same.

But maybe knowlege is unsatisfying for another reason. I was thinking about it last night, and maybe the accumulation of knowlege binds itself with an ever increasing amount of stories and identities that we associate with that knowlege in some way. So as we study we tell ourselves stories about the kind of person we are, and our self-evaluation is usually bound to the tides of relative success and failure in academic achievement. We tell ourselves stories about the people we’re training ourselves to become. We become increasingly attatched to identities as students, professionals, academics, and so on. The mind, plastic as it is, imbibes these stories through thier repetition in the same way that it learns concepts and jargon: through habit and routine. But after awhile these stories become truths, just like the assumptions of our disciplines become taken for granted over time. We stop questioning them.

But the buddhists would say that the accumulation of stories, myths we tell ourselves about who we are, are also deterrents to liberation. In my own experience, the identities and stories I have told myself about the kind of student I am, or the kind of future I expect to have, have been particularly damning, but they were also a function of struggle, the function, perhaps, of a slightly older mind that maybe can’t bounce back from setbacks as quickly. However, most people I know become jaded at the end of university regardless of circumstances.

It occured to me that identities can be heavy. They are a both a kind of knowlege in themselves, and in the context of educational pursuits a product of the accumulation of subject matter knowlege. So if we are to accept the tradeoff between knowlege and satisfaction, we could say that this phenomenon exists because our mind is structured in such a way that it will never be satisfied by pursuing ever more, and yet because the world seems to provide us with so many things to potentially be known, we keep searching and find ourselves dizzy, warn out because our finite bodies could never satisfy an infinite lust (and here’s where the concept of hypperreally has at least some small sway-at least because there is a kind of schizophrenia implied here as an effect). Knowlege is also unsatisfying because with it comes an accumulation of stories and identies that stifle our mental flexibility as much as they give us the illusion of knowing something concrete about ourselves.

But we didn’t sign onto this, right? I still don’t think that all my discussion of economics and buddhism really answered why we need to keep running after…whatever it is…and why it doesn’t satisfy, and if the mind is structured in such a way that accumulation alone will never satisfy it, than what will? And here’s where I get to part 2 of my blog, it’s namesake, where Goethe and diCicco have coffee in my mind.

Hungry ghosts and a search for certanty. the modern man. fear and despair…

And there’s still the issue of what would be a definition of a successful critique of a technologized society, and how I argue for the validity of my definition as opposed to any other-how can I be sure that my definition is logical and not a mish-mash of criteria that sounded connected/relevant in my head, but doesn’t fare so well once I start trying to apply it in my discussion of the authors?

Also, I find I’m going on a separate tangent of trying to incorporate a bit of a critique of the “multi-barrelled” nature of this assignment question, which doesn’t so much tell me how to proceed, but rather, confuses me because I get stuck trying to unpack all its assumptions *and never seem to get around to* discussing, comparing and critiquing the works themselves. Why can’t I just let most of this question go, which is what Dr. Brent seems to be suggesting, and just do more of a compare/contrast? Why can’t I take the option of simplifying things for myself when it’s given to me? Argh.

So there’s the nature of my confusion, I think, at least up to this point.

In the opening scene Faust is looking back on his life and considering what the scholarly path has given him. He’s had the perfect humanistic education-Law, Medicine, Philosophy-the Western cultural and intellectual tradition is at is fingertips. However, he laments “the impossibility of knowledge”-unlike Socrates, the current limits of human understanding are not an invitation to a world of perpetually unfolding discovery, nor are they a cause for Faust to interrogate the received assumptions of those around him in hopes of improving the common citizen’s moral and intellectual development. Rather, this lack of knowledge is cause for a crisis of a particularly personal kind- a reason for Faust to question the value of his life’s work thus far. He notes, “[...]all joy is torn from me [...], I cannot presume to make use of my learning/I cannot presume I could open my mind/to proselytize and improve mankind.”

And admittedly, Socrates was not out to “proselytize,” in the sense of advocating a particular moral doctrine or epistemology-he was interested, it seems, in the power of reasoned inquiry more generally. But he had an optimism that Faust lacks. In Faust’s moment of despair he seemingly does nothing less extreme than to reject the western intellectual tradition itself-from the explanatory power of deductive logic to language’s privileged purchase on reality.  Gone is the Enlightenment image of human perfectibility, epitomized in Condorcet’s assertion that “[...]truth alone will obtain a lasting victory [...] nature has joined together indissolubly the progress of knowledge and that of liberty, virtue and respect for the natural rights of man.” For Ricci, both Faust’s despair and relief stem from realizing that “[...] nothing perfect will ever accrue to man.”

Ricci (2007) notes that initially, Faust is “nihilistic”-if the Enlightenment thinkers assumed the perfection of knowledge was necessarily connected to a moral code of restraint, then Faust rejects both knowledge and virtue. Disillusioned, he feels no need to deny himself pleasure in exchange for the academic’s stoic, detached way of life. Faust has scrutinized nature through every means possible, from microscope to metaphysics, and knowledge is found wanting every time. No longer guided by the measured, disciplined pursuit of intellectual achievement, Faust sees no need to hold back from engaging in every experience the world has to offer.

But what causes this disillusionment? Early in Part 1 Faust discusses two interrelated frustrations that clue the reader into the reasons his search for understanding has proven fruitless. Faust notes he has resorted to sorcery in an attempt to experience, in a quick and direct way, the secrets that years of study failed to provide. Through spell casting he hopes to hear the voice of spirit itself in order to “[...] spare the sour sweat that I used to pour out/in talking of what I know nothing about.” Deductive logic, analyzing artifacts, these ways of understanding have become stale to him.  he turns to spirit hoping it will provide a more a salient way to “[...] grant me to learn what it is that girds the world together in its inner most being/that the seeing its whole germination, the seeing/ of its workings, may end my traffic in words.” In a single passage Faust disconnects knowledge from language while at the same time professing a desire to understand the deep structures of nature. While he wants to understand at a deeper level, language, he feels, is not synonymous with either thought or understanding.

To sum: Toil, language, and later, detachment from the natural world figure as crucial themes in Faust’s first speech. However, while Faust rejects the knowledge systems of western scientific and philosophical tradition he does not reject knowledge per se. However, he does call into question the limited way that the world has been traditionally understood in western thought: the deductive, scientific, analytical kind. As Ricci notes, “the regimented way that logic […] controls thought and makes deductive schema seem like necessity is the antithesis of the direct communication with phenomena that Faust seeks (Ricci, 2007).” And while Faust’s rejection of received paths to knowledge ties to Romanticism’s “preoccupation with the subjective immediacy of experience,” Faust’s attitude is more than a “carefree romantic approach to life (Ricci, 2007).” Through Faust, Goethe tries to link the Romantic search for experience and self understanding to an activist ethic-in more than one sense. He recalls, for me, William Blake’s social conciousness and anticipates Sarte’s admoniton that action is everything.

Faust’s search represents a phenomenological approach to understanding in the sense that it emphasizes the experiential meaning of things. Faust, accepting that “the experience of the sublime is as gift that cannot be hastened by the exertion of the epistemological will or the manipulation of language (Ricci, 2007),” strives to move beyond reductionistic classification systems and give nature the room it needs to reveal itself on its own terms. The apparent randomness of the situations he encounters seem to reflect this search for a new kind of understanding: he hopes that by subsuming himself in a variety of “meaning saturated” events, from lust, to travel, to self-edifiying activism and so on-he can really learn how to see deeply into reality. This “truer” understanding, for Faust, requires that he also ignite the subjective aspect of the self largely rejected in western forms of inquiry: the body, the senses, the awareness of how a personality reveals itself as historically situated while it also seeks to know definitively.

However, Faust’s journey raises ethical considerations as well; the consequences of his rejection of Gretchen, the war that results from his service to the Emperor, the old couple that die as a consequence of Faust’s search for perfect land. And at the same time, Mephistopheles, while ultimately “defeated” in the narrative, is an important foil for Faust, engaging his desires while questioning the sincerity when he professes any claims to virtue (for example, when he proclaims, right before he signs the deal with Mephistopheles, that he’s suspicious of promises that originate from evil). And throughout, Goethe seems to construct a narrative that maintains a kind of incredulity towards its protagonist. Goethe seems to suggest that we can’t take Faust’s chosen mode of inquiry at face value; but I need to wrap my mind around this a bit more.

Work cited:

Ricci, R. (2007). Goethe’s Faust: Poetry and Philosophy at the Crossroads.