Goethe, Nietzsche, and Wagner: Their Spinozan Epics of Love and Power (review)

In this ambitious and attractively pugnacious study, T. K. Seung links Goethe's Faust, Wagner's Ring of the Nibelungen, and Nietzsche's Zarathustra as "epics" that recast Spinoza's philosophy of nature and our relation to it. The figure at the centre of each work is a "Faustian" subject who, as Seung puts it in his preface, goes "through the trial of individuation to realize that the individual self can be fulfilled only in a greater self" (xvi). Pausing at times to frame his interpretations historically, Seung builds his case as he proceeds from one scene or chapter to the next through each of the three works. The result is a project that, with its own epic sweep, tells one history of modern Western selfhood.

At the heart of Seung's thesis is the idea that the heroes of these works are caught in the struggle to overcome their alienation from nature. Faust's high-vaulted Gothic study recalls a medieval aspiration for divinity that Goethe's frustrated hero abandons instead for the dream of a union with the forces of life. As he will tell Mephistopheles, he has little interest in the Beyond (l. 1660); his longings are earth-bound. Though grammatically masculine, as Seung points out (12), the Earth Spirit (Erdgeist) who appears before Faust in his study represents an eroticized feminine Nature on whom the scholar projects his violent longings. "With this great Spirit, Goethe founded the German chthonic dynasty," Seung writes. This (gender-bent) Earth Spirit will appear in revised form as Erda in the Ring cycle, as Life in Zarathustra (13).

Seung uses the notion of parody – which he understands as a "solemn and reverent" form of imitation (xv, 244) – to describe what he sees in these works as "a series of struggles to improve upon the poetic rendition of Spinoza's conception of human destiny in the care of Mother Nature" (xv). In his play, Goethe transforms Spinoza's "totally amoral world" by "installing the feminine principle and creat[ing] ethical space with the concept of the communal self" (156). Critics of the last decades (including this reviewer) have tended to treat skeptically Faust's closing vision of a community defending the earthly paradise that he has conceived for it (ll. 11559–80) and the notion that his words represent a transformative moment of insight and conversion. Seung instead argues that since Faust is a tragic hero, he must experience a moment of peripety (102) and that this reversal shows itself in his final utopian dream (111). Elsewhere we are told that Faust's career is one of "endless ascending" (91). But Goethe does not depart from Spinoza entirely. Whereas the upward trajectory and the religious imagery of the play's final scene appear to promise that Faust will be redeemed in a Christian heaven, Seung concludes that such an ending would be "incompatible with Spinoza's naturalism" and would "ravag[e] the thematic integrity of the entire epic" (xi). Accordingly, he interprets the play's last scene "as a psychodrama of what was taking place in [Faust's] psyche during his utopian vision just before his death" (xi). There may be "no direct textual evidence" for this reading, Seung allows (141), but he throws down the gauntlet to his readers with a spirited "why not?"

Zarathustra and the Ring can be read as psychodramas as well (364), but these works revise Spinoza in their own ways. Unlike his predecessor Faust, Zarathustra is the product of a secular culture; and Faust's communal self betrays an ethical dimension that Nietzsche will shed in "restor[ing] Spinoza's world to its original state" (269–71). Similarly, Nietzsche will dispense with the wickedness of Wagner's Nibelungen (363). Each story, however, reveals a process of Faustian striving shaped by its encounter with a feminine life principle; and each narrative concludes with a kind of return to the natural...