Ambiguities in Goethe's Faust

It took precisely one hundred years after Goethe's death before the first serious and comprehensive attempt was made to interpret Goethe's Faust, a Tragedy (in two parts) as a coherent whole rather than a collection of fragments which earlier commentators thought the poet put together haphazardly. In 1932 Heinrich Rickert's book was published under the title Goethe's Faust: its dramatic unity. However, the author was a philosopher. He and others since have tried to see the unity of the poem in a philosophical or theological idea. This idea simplified would be of man a quest, falling into error, and finally redeemed. Aside from ignoring Goethe's warning that he had not strung the life of Faust on the thin and meagre thread of a single idea running through the whole, the idea of quest, error, and redemption implies two things: 1) the notion of the moral perfectibility of man, 2) the classical idea of tragedy, according to which the hero endangers his perfection, and mars his progress through error or guilt, but is purified through repentance and transfigured as he loses his life

Art · FAUST · Linguistics · Literature · German Literature and Culture Studies · Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel · Philosophy · Philosophy and Historical Thought