Faust
Faust is someone who devotes himself to science and finding the truth in this world. After dealing with this all his life, when he approached the end of his life, he still had nothing, and this situation led him to depression. Faust is a confused, contradictory scholar who calls himself crazy. It gains its importance by placing bets on God and Satan. Every day he asks himself why God abandoned him and left him alone. Goethe’s Faust begins with a conversation between God and Satan in the sky. While God is proud of Faust, who is sane lives his life on his path, and avoids sinning, Satan says that man is two-faced and can easily tempt Faust’s mind. They place a bet on this and a chain of events begins that will drag Faust to even worse destruction.
habe nun ,ach philosophie,
juristerei und medizin,
und leider auch theologie!
durchaus studiert mit heissem bemühn.
da steh ich nun,ich armer tor!
und bin so klug als wie zuvor..
Goethe’s Faust is described as the tragedy of modernity. It hits us very hard what kind of dilemma we are facing between the new and the old (construction and destruction). It is a work that preserves man’s belief in God.
Dramatic poem consisting of 2 main parts and a total of 12111 lines. The first part of the book is more gripping and exciting. The second part requires a serious mythology repertoire.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I came across and read this book at the age of 23, right in the middle of these issues. It came at the time I needed it the most and after reading it, I cannot talk to anyone and comment on it enough because many points need to be discussed and clarified. I know that God did not place Faust before me in vain. I believe it is a completely different way of life telling me that you are on the right path and you are learning.
While I didn’t know the ending of the book, whether Forgiveness was possible or not gnawed at me and gave me distress. Because I believe in Forgiveness and forgiveness, this is how I can keep my soul alive. Without God, I was lost and thought God had abandoned me. Faust is unable to see God and signs Satan’s contract with his blood and is dragged into destruction by the sins committed in pursuit of worldly pleasures. He has no hope left and finds himself in even more bottomless darkness. He is told that his sins will not be forgiven and the sad end awaits him… Here is Faust from two sides. He is a character caught in the middle of such crises and the only thing he is looking for is meaning.
It is inevitable that many sufferers will be led down many wrong paths, and once one gets into this depression it is very difficult to come back from there. The only thing we have in this whole process is our free will. We, and only we, choose which path we will walk.
However, when looked at carefully, Satan’s real place among people is clearly visible. Ultimately, he is neither strong nor weak. Both its strengths and weaknesses are related to our stance. He only has a mouth, which he uses very well, but the final word is still ours. In other words, the path followed is the path we chose, the decision made is the decision we made, and what we get as a result, good or bad, is what we deserve. In short, Faust is someone who made his decision of his own free will, and even though he regretted it later, he had to bear the consequences. We wish there was a second chance for him at the end of the book, but this comes from the goodness within us. Because Faust’s end is nothing more or less than he deserves. This has nothing to do with the Devil or God.
Actually, Satan did not make Faust do these things. There was always a desire to do these things somewhere inside Faust. Satan only pushed him.
He is a character evil enough to bargain with the Devil, but human enough to regret it to death. Faust is a character who cannot handle himself and cannot live with himself. I don’t know which is more pathetic; to do nothing or to regret what you did?
heiße magister, heiße doktor gar,
und ziehe schon an die zehen jahr
herauf, herab und quer und krumm
meine schüler an der nase herum -
und sehe, daß wir nichts wissen können!
das will mir schier das herz verbrennen.
zwar bin ich gescheiter als alle die laffen,
doktoren, magister, schreiber und pfaffen;
mich plagen keine skrupel noch zweifel,
fürchte mich weder vor hölle noch teufel -
dafür ist mir auch alle freud entrissen,
bilde mir nicht ein, was rechts zu wissen,
bilde mir nicht ein, ich könnte was lehren,
die menschen zu bessern und zu bekehren.
So how should one proceed? Where should we go in a universe full of so many unknowns, if all the maps we look for and look at take us from place to place and we can never reach the final conclusion? What should we do to develop and know the secret of everything?
Well, I think there is no such thing. Life is not a meaning to be found, but life itself is a meaning. It is a journey and the meaning is actually this whole process. Look, I’m not saying it’s momentary happiness, happiness isn’t a good meal or being in the arms of your lover. It means trying to be on the right path and improving yourself until the end of your life, including the momentary happiness you experience, which will provide you with permanent happiness for a lifetime. Your body and mind actually know what they want. You can achieve true happiness by not choosing the easy way to find happiness.
Improvement has a dark side and it is necessary to destroy to create. However, anyone who leaves a huge destruction behind to achieve success will not be able to achieve what he wants. There should be no shortcuts to the right path.
Everything in life is a trade-off.
“ We have every right to sigh when we realize that some people have the ability to effortlessly extract from the maelstrom of their own emotions the deepest insights that we others have to reach through painful doubts and endless trials.”
-Freud
Human beings generally ask themselves these 2 questions:
- Is there life after this or will we perish?
- How should we best live the life we have achieved?
After his deal with the Devil, Faust finds the answer to the first question because he has to sell his soul to the Devil after he dies. Faust, who devoted his life to science and learning and tried to find meaning with God, but could not find a final answer, begins to follow Satan’s path for the answer to the second question.
auch hab ich weder gut noch geld,
noch ehr und herrlichkeit der welt;
es möchte kein hund so länger leben!
drum hab ich mich der magie ergeben,
ob mir durch geistes kraft und mund
nicht manch geheimnis würde kund;
daß ich nicht mehr, mit sauerm schweiß,
zu sagen brauche, was ich nicht weiß;
daß ich erkenne, was die welt
im innersten zusammenhält,
schau alle wirkenskraft und samen,
und tu nicht mehr in worten kramen.
He pursues worldly pleasures for a long time, and his deepest desires to commit sins comes to light. All these artificial things prepare Faust’s end because he leaves only destruction behind and he cannot be happy in any way. He is thrown from place to place with the burden of the mistakes he makes every time.
Faust is not an unbeliever; rebellious. I think that the in-betweenness of the enlightenment thought regarding faith (or the transition period) is effective in the formation of character. When belief in God, far from religious discipline, comes together with human models whose individuality begins to come to the fore, the issue of man’s confrontation with God comes to the fore. Like a child staring at his parents, Faust confronts God. All bargains with the devil are for show. In Goethe’s Faust, it is not the devil but actually God himself, with whom Faust is in a showdown.
Actually, it is a humane attitude to find the character of a person who does not accept, examines, and wanders around the boundaries pathetic. Faust, whose regret and loneliness give me this feeling, is of course not ordinary; he is alone in the reader’s imaginary world, within his own universe, and concretely, and inevitably creates a kind of catharsis.
This is actually more than a lesson theatre, but we cannot deny that it contains this kind of deviation and side path. While trying to understand Faust, trying to identify with him, or, on the contrary, trying to purify yourself from the Faust within you, I think is a handicap of reading Faust. I prefer to approach it with a more professional eye.
In fact, although we have stepped into a world aimed at the individual, I think that this superhuman character cannot be perceived in the way Goethe wanted, through an individual perception. Because no one can be like Faust, it’s very difficult when you can’t even be Faust. In other words, he is not a person, but a system, an entity.
Was auch immer unser Geist hervorbringt, von erhabener Schönheit,
Fremdstoffe vermischen sich immer auf seltsame Weise;
Wenn wir in dieser Welt das Gute erreichen, sehen wir das
Das sind eigentlich Illusionen und Wahnsinn.
Diese erhabenen Gefühle, die uns Vitalität verleihen,
Sie erstarren im Chaos der Welt.
Ultimately, Faust, who finds himself in the dark with remorse for the terrible destruction he left behind in the first game, and whose well was treacherously dug by Satan, is found in nature by angels and purified from his sins. The devil is staked and Faust, cleansed of all his evil, rises to the sky with the angels. Just before this scene, Faust wakes up in the middle of nature, looks at the sun, and is dazzled. The sunlight reflected where Faust was, and the light reflected on the waterfall revealed the rainbow. This scene actually tells us this in many ways: The truth is similar to this event, it is impossible to see it with the naked eye, and life is in these reflections. All this mortal life is just a symbol; we cannot see the truth, but we can only know it through its reflections.
Goethe wrote Faust in exactly 64 years and devoted his life to this work.
And just before he died, his last words were:
“Light, more light.”
In summary, Faust is in an internal conflict while questioning the meaning of his life. While he escapes from ordinariness, he also questions his moral values and gets lost in an existential void. This internal conflict makes the reader think about the complexity of man and leads him to understand the difficult struggle Faust goes through. Faust’s pact with the devil is a metaphysical representation of desires and ambitions. Man’s unlimited desires lead to a deep thought about the complexity of life and the costs of desires through this agreement with Mephistopheles. The conflict of Faust’s desires, his hunger for knowledge, and worldly pleasures opens a door to understanding the depths of human nature. Faust’s hunger for knowledge constitutes a fundamental theme of the work. However, the relationship between the search for knowledge and enlightenment raises philosophical questions such as whether knowledge itself is limited and the effects of enlightenment on the human spiritual state. Faust’s being left alone with existential questions, questioning the meaning of life and questioning the basis of his own existence constitute the existential depth of the work. Faust’s agreement with Mephistopheles provides a thought-provoking backdrop to moral dilemmas. The limitlessness of human desires, the conflict of these desires with ethical values, and the internal conflicts Faust experiences as a result of the agreement lead to a deep thought about moral decisions and their consequences.
Note: While blending all the information I read with Faust, I also included in my article the translations of a small part of the ideas I came across from other languages and whose ideas I adopted. Thank you for offering different perspectives and helping me convey them to you.
