Faust and Enlightenment

Abstract

The Faust story’s temporary relegation to popular entertainment which we discussed in chapter two, reflects the enlightened skepticism and liberal optimism of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Few secular intellectuals any longer believed in the literal existence of the devil, and the idea of selling one’s soul to him seemed impossibly far-fetched. As the eighteenth century waned, however, the concept of the soul’s alienation began to be discussed in philosophical, rather than theological terms, and this was particularly true in the discourse of political economy. In the words of Istvan Meszaros: “The secularisation of the religious concept of alienation had been accomplished in the concrete assertions concerning ‘saleability.’”¹ The commodification of human activity as “labor” introduced the alien significance of exchange-value into a previously sacrosanct domain. As Karl Marx put it in On the Jewish Question:

human alienation was accomplished through turning everything into alienable, saleable objects in thrall to egoistic need and huckstering. Selling is the practice of alienation. Just as man, so long as he is engrossed in religion, can only objectify his essence by an alien and fantastic being; so under the sway of egoistic need, he can only affirm himself and produce objects in practice by subordinating his products and his own activity to the domination of an alien entity, and by attributing to them the significance of an alien entity, namely money.²