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c h a p t e r 5 The Scientific Self: Identity in Faust Faust has already appeared in these pages as a document of Goethe’s engagement with the problematic morality generated by rousseau’s interior self. Now, in the wake of the epistemological problems raised in the classical dramas and Goethe’s initial struggles to represent interiority, it is time to consider the representational issues in Faust, which was first published in 1790 as a fragment , then elaborated during the 1790s into Faust, part 1 (published in 1808). as the drama that engaged him for the remainder of his life, it is perhaps not surprisingly a summa of Goethe’s thinking about representing interiority in drama. Because the second part of the play, mostly written in the 1820s and published only in 1832, unfolds and elaborates ideas implicit in the first part, it reflects a further development and clarification. Hence it is appropriate to discuss both parts together at this point. Furthermore, both parts bring the same new factor into play in thinking about knowing the hidden inner self, namely Goethe’s thinking about scientific method, which in the 1790s was almost obsessive. For precisely in the period when he was coming to terms with rousseau and interior identity, he was also coming to terms with Kant’s philosophy and with his strong commitment to scientific investigation. His most important essays on science date from the 1790s, so that the drama of Faust the scholar qua scientist is central to our topic. at issue here are the connections Goethe establishes in this text between theatrical representation and his scientific epistemology. Questions surrounding Faust’s identity have always been central to the Faust legend: the Faust of the chapbook is, after all, a sinner who barters his soul for knowledge. One way to think of the modernity of Faust is to say that Goethe substitutes interiorized identity for soul, and self-knowledge for knowledge in the traditional schema. The problems raised by rousseau’s inte- 78 experiments in subjectivity riorized identity in Faust, part 1, have already been discussed: the issue is not inability to know the moral code, but the relationship between epistemology and morality, between knowledge and action. But Goethe takes the problem a large step beyond rousseau, for the connection of human striving to the eternal motion of nature in Faust ties the essential ineffability of the interior self to the ineffability of the cosmos (or, in Kantian terms, the ineffability of the transcendental ego to that of the thing in itself). Faust faces a double dilemma—to know the unknowable self and to know unknowable nature. If science is the way of knowing nature, and theater, as the last chapter implies, of knowing the self, Faust needs them both. The transition from the third to the fourth act of Faust, part 2, reveals how deeply the problem of identity in this tragedy of knowledge remained imbricated with science. In act 3 Faust marries Helen of troy in what is essentially a play within the play whose actors, props, and costumes are elaborately assembled before the eyes of the audience. at the end of the act, Helena dissolves in Faust’s embrace and her dress becomes a cloud that carries him away from Greece. Mephistopheles in the meantime removes the mask he has worn during the act to reveal that Faust’s entire affair with Helena has been pure theater. at the beginning of act 4, the cloud deposits Faust at the top of the alps and withdraws eastward, looking ever more like a recumbent goddess, or even Helena, as it goes. Then a different cloud, a wispy high one, appears that Faust readily identifies with Margarete, his ideal beloved in an almost equally theatrical experience from part 1.1 The descriptions of the billowing cumulus cloud associated with Helena and the cirrus that represents Margarete derive from the cloud classification system of Luke Howard (1772–1864) still basically in use today.2 Goethe deploys it to represent the two women whom Faust has cast to represent his own ideals, and thus, in a certain sense, his own self. The prominently located cloud imagery thus connects identity both to science and to theater. Because they change shape so freely and are so difficult to describe objectively, clouds are a particularly good image for connecting problems of identity and objective knowledge. By linking the clouds to Faust’s two beloveds, Goethe pushes the basic problem to the...

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