Hegel’s Faust

In one of the most audacious yet widely accepted incursions of philosophy into the literary field, a long line of Faust criticism insists on an analogy between the role of negation in Goethe’s drama and in the first masterpiece of the great dialectician Hegel. In this assessment, repeated by such eminent thinkers as Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, and Karl Löwith, Faust travels through ever-wider fields of activity that parallel the step-by-step development familiar to readers of the Phänomenologie des Geistes.¹ Faust’s ascension to heaven at the end of Faust II would indicate a divine blessing of this journey that marks the successful Bildung of a subject who finally finds himself. In this article I argue that the interpretive logic of this school of Faust criticism has its unacknowledged model in Hegel’s own citation of the drama in the Phänomenologie des Geistes. Engaging Hegel’s appropriation thus makes an important contribution to our understanding of its role in the drama’s reception history. At the same time, the very process of explicating this model reveals an important contrast between the type of negation staged in Faust, which leaves its victims exposed, and the type described in the Phänomenologie, which processes the injuries of spirit as stages in the emergence of a reflective subject.

A brief sketch of the Hegelian line of criticism from its idealist to materialist incarnations allows us to see what is at stake in the way it links negation and violence in Faust. The idealist interpretation, indicated by Karl Löwith but developed in greater detail by Winfried Marotzki, focuses on negation as a logical operator that creates a subject.² Specifically, Marotzki argues that Mephistopheles acts as the negative principle that keeps Faust moving and allows him to reach higher levels of formation (“Bildung”).³ Drawing on a famous phrase in the preface to the Phänomenologie, he writes that “Das Verweilen beim Negativen ist der Pakt mit Mephisto, der für Faust Mittel der Subjektwerdung ist” (Marotzki 154). In this formulation, the pact serves as an instrument for a higher goal: it does the work that allows the becoming of the subject. Ultimately, according to this interpretation, Faust uses the negative to achieve the freedom Hegel gives to spirit when it returns to itself as absolute knowledge. Ernst Bloch’s description of this process adds specificity by describing the subject’s development in terms of a series of new beginnings. He writes that “[e]s ist nicht derselbe Faust, der in Auerbachs Keller, der im Kaiserpalast anfängt.”⁴ In other words, identity dissolves and reconstitutes itself over the course of the drama. Moreover, Bloch emphasizes that like Hegel’s spirit, Faust always progresses to a higher level.

Faust himself must be repeatedly destroyed in order to begin again. But how can this be possible when Faust causes, but does not suffer, the violence of the drama? Lukács provides the clearest response to this question, maintaining the emphasis on negation and subject formation seen in Marotzki and Bloch, but expanding its focus from Faust himself to his impact on the world. This external focus leads him to a recognition of the violence that comes on stage with the negative. He names Faust’s specific victims and addresses each in some detail. In the cases of Gretchen and Helen, Faust’s investment in the other character necessarily propels him forward upon their loss. Furthermore, Lukács argues that Faust commits not to creating himself alone but to changing the material environment in his land-reclamation project. Violence, while recognized, thus finds its subordinate place in the move to greater meaning: Faust’s murder of Philemon and Baucis (indirect as it may be) proves his willingness to sacrifice for the future.⁵ The subject in Lukács’s materialist reading constitutes itself socially and historically but still operates on the assumption of negation that results in an eventual return, albeit a return projected into the future.

Critical work in this tradition almost always mentions that Hegel quotes Faust in the section of the Phänomenologie titled “Die...