One may say that the benefit of tragedy is that one gets to witness man self-destruct without having to self-destruct on one’s own. Lessons learned without having to go through the actual act of the crime. Tragedies were incredibly prevalent during the time of the Greeks, and some tragic stories, like that of Faust have pervaded through centuries. Goethe’s Faust, in particular, played with the notion of tragedy, in addition to the question of its usefulness.
The self-consciousness of the play is immediately presented to the audience, who is in fact necessary to the construction of the play as a whole, in the three prologues to the tragedy; the dedication, the prelude in the theatre, and the prologue in heaven. With these three prologues, Goethe presents, in reverse order, the beginning of the world of the play with heaven, the actual creators of the play with the theatre, and a reflection on the play itself with the dedication. In order to create a unified image, the image must account for one looking at the image, hence the dedication. The reversal of the order creates another level of tension, of the feeling of moving back and forth between two poles to the point where you’ve created a sphere.
The entire play pulls and pushes between microcosms and macrocosms, and these opening scenes are microcosms of the play as a whole. The dedication calls forth appearances, the theatre presents the beings who create the appearance, and in heaven, light is called forth as the principle for distinguishing appearance. A play striving to be about unity cannot help but begin by first creating what man uses to distinguish unity; the appearance of unity, the creators of that appearance, and the principle of light for distinguishing that appearance. The very first lines of the dedication call forth the idea of appearances, and almost seem to be picking up where something was left off; “You come back, wavering shapes, out of the past/ In which you first appeared to clouded eyes./ Should I attempt this time to hold you fast?” (1-3) Words such as “pictures” and “shadows” come up as well, bringing to mind the image of Plato’s cave, where everything is appearance and shadows, and one must turn around and climb to reach what is real. But despite these reflections on appearances, the word “heart” appears three times in the dedication, which is only thirty-two lines long. Even appearances are rooted in love and passion, and even understanding is an appearance. If the aim of the play and of Faust is to revise understanding, right from the beginning the dedication calls to attention the veil of appearances; the heart is always where appearance is rooted.
This is one of the things that makes Faust the character so intriguing and tragic. He is the actor in this tragedy, in this world, but he is also a spectator of the physical manifestation, the appearance, of his own tragedy. The play begins at nighttime in Faust’s isolated study, where he sits by himself, restless, condemning the fact that “we can know nothing” (365). He is sitting in the cave, and he knows he is in the cave. This is a play about the problem of perception, and it begins with Faust lamenting because of this problem. He wants to externalize “what secret force/Hides in the world and rules its course/ Envisage the creative blazes/ Instead of rummaging in phrases” (382-5). Faust is well studied in philosophy, jurisprudence, medicine, and theology, but none of these have led him any closer to the truth he wishes to behold. He understands that he has failed in his attempt to understand the true nature of the world, but he does not understand why. Faust never reveals his motives behind wanting to know and see the secret force that rules the world. The passion at the root of his intentions is never revealed; he wants to understand the motion of the world without taking into account his own motion which is a part of the world.
If tragedy is the ego’s experience of itself as an individuated being from nature, and a tragic play is the appearance of this experience, Faust is unique because it is the appearance of Faust’s experience not only for the audience, but for Faust himself. Faust wants to understand the motion of the world, the becoming of the world, which is what the Erdgeist represents, but he does not incorporate his own becoming; he individuates himself.
Mephistopheles reintroduces striving into Faust’s world. Striving is the heart of man, which is what Faust has been denying all this time. However, this striving only comes up as failures. This is what forces man to keep striving. This is the tragedy of life, the tragedy of the play, and the tragedy that Faust is a participant and a spectator of.
Faust is the image for the tragedy of human individuation because he assumes the image of his individuality, yet of all things that Faust seeks to know, he does not seek himself. He begins with the assumption of a unified being. The only method in which Mephistopheles may turn Faust’s eye upon himself, upon his conscience, is through suffering. Only then will Faust question his consciousness, and rather than disparage his alienation, see it as something essential to feeling at all. Without alienation, how is one to know what it feels to be united?
Nowadays tragedy may not be entirely disparaged, but its necessity is no longer felt as it once was. We prefer triumphant phoenixes rising from the ashes than a man with makeshift wings falling to his death. It’s important to always strive for comfort, ease, and speed. There’s no longer a tension to move us forward. Our ends have become our means; progress for the sake of progress. And while the dichotomy of ‘image’ and ‘reality’ has long been abandoned as a method for describing our current world, the tension it sets up is no doubt useful, even now.
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