6. The Faust Idea

There could be nothing more dismal than to think about the widespread acceptance of views such as those expressed by a prominent authority a few years ago, that if Goethe were alive today, he would probably leave his Faust unwritten. We will recoil when we see such views emerging here and there, and we can only take comfort from the fact that, as a rule, everyone, scholar and artist, man and woman, youth and adult, is attached to the work in question with equal love and interest. In view of the latter, and also in view of the fact that Schiller and Schelling were enchanted by the unfinished fragment, we must surely ask ourselves: What is it that makes Goethe's Faust so dear to all educated people? It is surely not because Faust draws on an old folk tale, on folk beliefs. These are so far removed from our way of thinking that we may well assume that we are much more likely to be familiar with Goethe's Faust than with the folk tales.

But what we all associate with reading Faust is a great, world-embracing idea. An idea that has certainly grown on the heights of humanity. Schiller immediately noticed this and wrote to Goethe: “Because the fable is and must be garish and formless, one does not want to dwell on the subject, but be led by it to ideas. In short, the demands on Faust are both philosophical and poetic.” It is clearly stated therein that Faust definitely requires philosophical consideration.

Now nothing seems more daring than to speak of a Faust idea. At the time when Hegel's philosophy was the prevailing one in Germany, such an idea would certainly not have been received with offense and displeasure. But now it is different. Hegel is seen as nothing more than a dreamer and fantasist who, “regardless of all his meandering, has nevertheless exposed himself in a sufficiently tangible way.” Hegel calls the absolute idea, and to him nature is this idea in its otherness. To a modern philosopher, this seems like fantasy; Hegel appears as an ignoramus who has created such nonsense because he has not looked enough into the sciences. But it seems to me, although I certainly did not want to condone a lack of familiarity with the positive sciences, that it was good for the development of Hegel's teaching that its originator was less concerned with the details of the individual sciences, because in this way he retained a certain impartiality. It has now become fashionable to declare an idea to be a fiction – as Heine did, calling everything stupid that man imagines an idea – and simply to throw it overboard. I will now explain, by means of a very simple fact, how much one contradicts oneself unconsciously by doing so. I will cite a fiction with which modern natural science operates quite openly and in no other sense than Hegel with his idea, without running the risk of being labeled “religious sectarians” or philosophers with “the most unnatural contortions of the rational sentence structure” for their method in deductive and inductive logic or in a critical history of philosophy.

But to return to the fiction I mentioned above. This fiction is nothing more and nothing less than - mathematics. Anyone who believes that all ideas are the excrescences of a diseased human mind can consider mathematics, which is essentially the same thing only in a certain respect, to be nothing else either. And the application that natural science makes of mathematics to the objects of exact knowledge is confusingly similar to that which Hegel makes of his logic to nature. If Hegel calls nature the idea in its otherness, then one could justifiably call those things that modern natural science deals with in mechanics, in the mechanical theory of heat, as mathematics in its otherness. A man who is a complete and utter follower of modern so-called philosophy does indeed declare that the world is nothing other than the in praxi of mathematics in theory, but in doing so he is inconsistent enough to declare the real philosophical point of view to be standing on one foot and any nonsense to be a Hegelianization. These remarks are not intended to dispute the right of mathematics, which has existed for many centuries, but only to justify the justification of an ideal treatment of a given complex of things in general. —

And now that one obstacle has been removed, I can turn to the central idea itself.

I have called it universal, and I would ask you to take this word in a very special sense. For someone who is so impressed by mathematical magnitude that all human deeds seem small and insignificant by comparison, the Faust idea cannot be global. But we admire much more than the soulless world of nature; we admire the inspired spiritual world of man, and there we will indeed feel the full magnitude of the Faust idea.

We must never lose sight of the one thing that is uniquely human: the striving for the highest that we know at all. This striving is manifested not only in knowledge, but also in feeling and will. I will take the idea for the time being for the [breaks off]