> As Wilson writes in his expansive and somewhat baggily written introduction, now—amid increasingly dire ecological and political conditions—we can see our own world in Faust more clearly than ever before. For Faust, he writes, is “about a world which had taken leave of God but did not know how to live.”
Man has a natural inclination to worship something. For most of human history, that has been the divine/supernatural/metaphysical. Nowadays, rationalism and materialism have become the main objects of worship. But rationalism and materialism do not have answers to the existential questions and crises that humans face.
Similar to Christ saying that "man cannot live on bread alone", man cannot live on materialism alone - spiritual nourishment is a very real and necessary thing.
Well, yeah. That’s just the central problem of modernity and it’s been the preoccupation of the last two hundred years of philosophy and literature: c.f. existentialism and many other isms. Nietzsche and Dostoevsky and a legion of other philosophers and novelists address this exact question. There’s a lot of answers out there that don’t require signing up to an old religion, you can go and take your pick!
> There’s a lot of answers out there that don’t require signing up to an old religion, you can go and take your pick!
There appear to be a few dubious presuppositions at play here.
The first is religious indifferentism. That is, that is makes no difference which you pick, or that what you pick is simply a matter of "what's 'right' for you". The question of truth never enters the picture. This makes religious belief a matter of utility: I believe X because I derive some kind of perceived or real benefit from believing X.
The first problem with religious indifferentism is exactly that it is indifferent to the truth. If you believe something because of the utility it provides, it means you don't really believe in that thing. You believe in the utility of the thing. So while a Christian will believe that Christ is God Incarnate because he believes this to be true, an indifferentist wouldn't really believe Christ in God, but he might "use" that belief. There is a lack of integrity, a kind of bad faith, at work here. The pretense of this lack of integrity never produces any peace or alleviates the misery of nihilism plaguing the indifferentist. He's still where he started.
While Nietzsche and others had valuable insights (and misconceptions), he and most others did not themselves find a solution to the basic problem of nihilism.
> There is a lack of integrity, a kind of bad faith, at work here.
It's possible for people to believe two conflicting things at the same time. Especially in this context.
Like someone could be psychologically dependent on believing that Christ rose on the third day even though the rational part knows that that's biologically impossible. This isn't a bug, it's a feature
Religions deliberately target things like this where there's cognitive dissonance. Because once there's cognitive dissonance it creates this weird emotional reaction for people. When they go the religion route they're just chasing this high
That's very handwavy and unconvincing TBH. I can't imagine who'd argue that humans "worship" rationalism and materialism, that's a pretty big stretch of the word.
What definition of the word do you use?
That man has a natural inclination to it is another pretty big assumption, whether "natural inclinations" are even a thing at all has been debated for centuries
You're committing the same fallacy that many do which is to lump them all under "gods" and then make it a problem of distinguishing which of these possible beings exists.
But this fails to distinguish between a being and Being. You and I are beings, beings among many. The pagan gods, personifications of various natural phenomena, were like us, in this sense: they were beings among, only more powerful. Being, on the other hand, is the verb to be. You exist, I exist, all the beings of the world exist. The pagan gods, I submit, do not exist, save as fictions.
So how do you relate to your existence? We all exist, so it isn't particular to you. And you are not the cause of your own existence, here and now. Rather existence is something prior to any particular existing things in the order of causes. This cause, this existence, this Being itself, is God, and you can know quite a bit about it, analogously, through unaided reason and without appealing to authority.
> Man has a natural inclination to worship something. For most of human history, that has been the divine/supernatural/metaphysical. Nowadays, rationalism and materialism have become the main objects of worship. But rationalism and materialism do not have answers to the existential questions and crises that humans face.
This paintbrush is far too wide. I think many of us have, at least from time to time, felt something between an inclination and need to worship, and many of us feel that all their lives, but I would assert (and die upon this hill) that many lose that [inclination..need].
Personally, I felt it most strongly in my late teens up until my mid twenties when my questioning of everything was at its strongest and my, uh, personality? resolve? acceptance? not sure... was insufficient counter. Like The Stranglers said, I wish(ed) I was a believer, they spend less time being sad.
Eventually, my mechanistic reductionist self made peace with both the many unknowns and the utter ridiculousness of life. The universe is a cold, harsh place, and even our little goldilocks corner of it has an overwhelming imbalance to it, a ruthless "unfairness", at least when viewed through the lens of a humane equity.
Believing in some greater thing does nothing to resolve or address that, though some take solace in believing in some teleology or ultimate reward. Or punishment.
Neither does anything for me and neither is necessary to my life.
> Similar to Christ saying that "man cannot live on bread alone", man cannot live on materialism alone - spiritual nourishment is a very real and necessary thing.
Hard disagree. You might say that my deep breaths and long stares in the woods are spiritual, but I will respectfully disagree. I do not worship those woods, or the lakes or camping with friends or moments of great discovery or satisfaction, whether there or at work, and I find nothing "spiritual" in them.
I accept and rejoice in their being internal affectations, basal responses, and I am quite happy with my reptilian brain. I don't need any sense of anything external or greater or other to celebrate moments of beauty or discovery or to condemn moments of cruelty and injustice.
Please do remember that there are other very different views of the world.
Materialism and our reptile brains are all we've got. I'm content with that. (Unless and until I watch the news, but that is another subject altogether.)
It seems to me that Mephistopheles' offer was a no brainer for Faust.
Who in their right mind would reject an offer of unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures?
Presumably if Faust refuses Mephistopheles’ bargain, he must resign himself to a life haunted by unfulfilled longing, existential frustration, and the bitter realization that some mysteries will forever remain beyond his grasp. Or worse, his life could descend into base forms of evil and criminality, which seems likely given what he did to Gretchen.
Marlowe's "The Life and Death of Dr. Faustus" was written 300 years before Goethe's version.
In Marlowe's version Faust goes to hell.
I always found Goethe's ending to be unsatisfying, and prefer Marlowe's where Faust not only accepts, but embraces his fate to be a far better resolution.
Goethe's Faust does not make a diabolical bargain, he makes a bet: that all the power and pleasure and knowledge Mephistopheles can offer him will not slake the longings of his soul, that nothing will pierce his world weariness with one moment of which he could will that it last forever. He regards magical power, the traditional object of the Faustian pact, quite lowly (as shown in the witch's scene).
An interesting point, but it's not really a fair comparison: Jesus was the son of God and able to perform miracles, so maybe he felt he could afford to reject an offer of all the riches in all the kingdoms of the world (which tbh Jesus must have known that Satan was lying about anyway). Whereas Faust was just a man.
No me neither, but that's not the story. The deal was that Mephistopheles would come back at the end of Faust's life to claim his soul. As Faust dies, Mephistopheles tries to claim his soul, but angels intervene. Because of Faust's relentless striving and Gretchen's intercession, he is redeemed and ascends to Heaven.
So Faust enjoyed his life of pleasure and knowledge and got away with making his Mephistophelean deal.
Unless you are a crazy narcissist confident that you will get away with it, their point still stands. It's hard to put a price on your own soul since it's unclear what it actually means but it seems it involves going to a seemingly hostile place called Hell
> I've never heard of queen Victoria having Habsburg ancestry
AFAIK, the only Hapsburg to come near her throne was Phillip II of Spain, husband of Queen Mary (16th C).
Ah! I just checked, and the article now contains the following: Correction: This article has been updated to reflect that Queen Victoria was of Hanoverian, not Hapsburg, descent.
> As Wilson writes in his expansive and somewhat baggily written introduction, now—amid increasingly dire ecological and political conditions—we can see our own world in Faust more clearly than ever before. For Faust, he writes, is “about a world which had taken leave of God but did not know how to live.”
Man has a natural inclination to worship something. For most of human history, that has been the divine/supernatural/metaphysical. Nowadays, rationalism and materialism have become the main objects of worship. But rationalism and materialism do not have answers to the existential questions and crises that humans face.
Similar to Christ saying that "man cannot live on bread alone", man cannot live on materialism alone - spiritual nourishment is a very real and necessary thing.
Well, yeah. That’s just the central problem of modernity and it’s been the preoccupation of the last two hundred years of philosophy and literature: c.f. existentialism and many other isms. Nietzsche and Dostoevsky and a legion of other philosophers and novelists address this exact question. There’s a lot of answers out there that don’t require signing up to an old religion, you can go and take your pick!
> There’s a lot of answers out there that don’t require signing up to an old religion, you can go and take your pick!
There appear to be a few dubious presuppositions at play here.
The first is religious indifferentism. That is, that is makes no difference which you pick, or that what you pick is simply a matter of "what's 'right' for you". The question of truth never enters the picture. This makes religious belief a matter of utility: I believe X because I derive some kind of perceived or real benefit from believing X.
The first problem with religious indifferentism is exactly that it is indifferent to the truth. If you believe something because of the utility it provides, it means you don't really believe in that thing. You believe in the utility of the thing. So while a Christian will believe that Christ is God Incarnate because he believes this to be true, an indifferentist wouldn't really believe Christ in God, but he might "use" that belief. There is a lack of integrity, a kind of bad faith, at work here. The pretense of this lack of integrity never produces any peace or alleviates the misery of nihilism plaguing the indifferentist. He's still where he started.
While Nietzsche and others had valuable insights (and misconceptions), he and most others did not themselves find a solution to the basic problem of nihilism.
> There is a lack of integrity, a kind of bad faith, at work here.
It's possible for people to believe two conflicting things at the same time. Especially in this context.
Like someone could be psychologically dependent on believing that Christ rose on the third day even though the rational part knows that that's biologically impossible. This isn't a bug, it's a feature
Religions deliberately target things like this where there's cognitive dissonance. Because once there's cognitive dissonance it creates this weird emotional reaction for people. When they go the religion route they're just chasing this high
> But rationalism and materialism do not have answers to the existential questions and crises that humans face.
That's the crux of it. Nothing and no one has those answers. Some isms acknowledge that, most don't.
There's a middle ground between claiming you have a final answer, and ignoring the question entirely.
The best spiritual disciplines provide a _framework_ for exploring existential questions.
How have you come to this conclusion?
That's very handwavy and unconvincing TBH. I can't imagine who'd argue that humans "worship" rationalism and materialism, that's a pretty big stretch of the word.
What definition of the word do you use?
That man has a natural inclination to it is another pretty big assumption, whether "natural inclinations" are even a thing at all has been debated for centuries
I should've said the worship of the temporal (material reality, etc.) rather than the spiritual.
What has the spiritual ever done for us? We know nothing of gods that we didn't learn from other men.
But men do not respect other men nearly as much as they respect the gods and the supernatural
Exactly, so what you're saying is that extolling spirituality is just a way to garner unearned respect.
You're committing the same fallacy that many do which is to lump them all under "gods" and then make it a problem of distinguishing which of these possible beings exists.
But this fails to distinguish between a being and Being. You and I are beings, beings among many. The pagan gods, personifications of various natural phenomena, were like us, in this sense: they were beings among, only more powerful. Being, on the other hand, is the verb to be. You exist, I exist, all the beings of the world exist. The pagan gods, I submit, do not exist, save as fictions.
So how do you relate to your existence? We all exist, so it isn't particular to you. And you are not the cause of your own existence, here and now. Rather existence is something prior to any particular existing things in the order of causes. This cause, this existence, this Being itself, is God, and you can know quite a bit about it, analogously, through unaided reason and without appealing to authority.
> What has the spiritual ever done for us?
That question is premature for you.
Well, can you spill some of the things you know about it using unaided reason?
It’s not any less vague. Again, what definition of “worship” do you use? It’s certainly not any of the dictionaries
Metaphysics and religions don’t have answer either.
They just stop asking questions at a certain point.
But that is sufficient for people with limited time and resources which is most people.
You forgot: " and curiosity ".
The sentence is otherwise correct.
> Man has a natural inclination to worship something. For most of human history, that has been the divine/supernatural/metaphysical. Nowadays, rationalism and materialism have become the main objects of worship. But rationalism and materialism do not have answers to the existential questions and crises that humans face.
This paintbrush is far too wide. I think many of us have, at least from time to time, felt something between an inclination and need to worship, and many of us feel that all their lives, but I would assert (and die upon this hill) that many lose that [inclination..need].
Personally, I felt it most strongly in my late teens up until my mid twenties when my questioning of everything was at its strongest and my, uh, personality? resolve? acceptance? not sure... was insufficient counter. Like The Stranglers said, I wish(ed) I was a believer, they spend less time being sad.
Eventually, my mechanistic reductionist self made peace with both the many unknowns and the utter ridiculousness of life. The universe is a cold, harsh place, and even our little goldilocks corner of it has an overwhelming imbalance to it, a ruthless "unfairness", at least when viewed through the lens of a humane equity.
Believing in some greater thing does nothing to resolve or address that, though some take solace in believing in some teleology or ultimate reward. Or punishment.
Neither does anything for me and neither is necessary to my life.
> Similar to Christ saying that "man cannot live on bread alone", man cannot live on materialism alone - spiritual nourishment is a very real and necessary thing.
Hard disagree. You might say that my deep breaths and long stares in the woods are spiritual, but I will respectfully disagree. I do not worship those woods, or the lakes or camping with friends or moments of great discovery or satisfaction, whether there or at work, and I find nothing "spiritual" in them.
I accept and rejoice in their being internal affectations, basal responses, and I am quite happy with my reptilian brain. I don't need any sense of anything external or greater or other to celebrate moments of beauty or discovery or to condemn moments of cruelty and injustice.
Please do remember that there are other very different views of the world.
Materialism and our reptile brains are all we've got. I'm content with that. (Unless and until I watch the news, but that is another subject altogether.)
> But rationalism and materialism do not have answers to the existential questions and crises that humans face.
idrk what rationalism means here, like the hegelian type of rationalism has an answer here, the end goal is self-consciousness
> a natural inclination to worship something.
uh really? Barbarism and brute force have succeeded many times.
It seems to me that Mephistopheles' offer was a no brainer for Faust.
Who in their right mind would reject an offer of unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures?
Presumably if Faust refuses Mephistopheles’ bargain, he must resign himself to a life haunted by unfulfilled longing, existential frustration, and the bitter realization that some mysteries will forever remain beyond his grasp. Or worse, his life could descend into base forms of evil and criminality, which seems likely given what he did to Gretchen.
Marlowe's "The Life and Death of Dr. Faustus" was written 300 years before Goethe's version.
In Marlowe's version Faust goes to hell.
I always found Goethe's ending to be unsatisfying, and prefer Marlowe's where Faust not only accepts, but embraces his fate to be a far better resolution.
Goethe's Faust does not make a diabolical bargain, he makes a bet: that all the power and pleasure and knowledge Mephistopheles can offer him will not slake the longings of his soul, that nothing will pierce his world weariness with one moment of which he could will that it last forever. He regards magical power, the traditional object of the Faustian pact, quite lowly (as shown in the witch's scene).
> Who in their right mind would reject an offer of unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures?
Christ Himself rejected various temptations by Satan when he was in the wilderness.
An interesting point, but it's not really a fair comparison: Jesus was the son of God and able to perform miracles, so maybe he felt he could afford to reject an offer of all the riches in all the kingdoms of the world (which tbh Jesus must have known that Satan was lying about anyway). Whereas Faust was just a man.
If you believe saintlike people are in their right minds - many. I use "saintlike" in a secular sense; I myself am an atheist.
^Who in their right mind would reject an offer of unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures?
The bargain had a quid pro quo...you get knowledge and pleasure in exchange for perpetual servitude to a bad guy. I wouldn't make that trade
No me neither, but that's not the story. The deal was that Mephistopheles would come back at the end of Faust's life to claim his soul. As Faust dies, Mephistopheles tries to claim his soul, but angels intervene. Because of Faust's relentless striving and Gretchen's intercession, he is redeemed and ascends to Heaven.
So Faust enjoyed his life of pleasure and knowledge and got away with making his Mephistophelean deal.
Unless you are a crazy narcissist confident that you will get away with it, their point still stands. It's hard to put a price on your own soul since it's unclear what it actually means but it seems it involves going to a seemingly hostile place called Hell
>The Victorians––Hapsburg-descended Queen Victoria and Saxon Prince Albert among them––were steeped in Goethe.
I've never heard of queen Victoria having Habsburg ancestry and I can't find any details on this other than AI hallucinations.
> I've never heard of queen Victoria having Habsburg ancestry
AFAIK, the only Hapsburg to come near her throne was Phillip II of Spain, husband of Queen Mary (16th C).
Ah! I just checked, and the article now contains the following: Correction: This article has been updated to reflect that Queen Victoria was of Hanoverian, not Hapsburg, descent.
That is odd.
Reading Faust in school left a lasting impact on me and an appreciation for the language as a tool of art.
I believe many are not even aware of the amount of proverbs coming from that classic:
Des Pudels Kern - the poodles core/crux of the matter
Gretchenfrage - the essential question
... And many more that I won't bother trying to translate.