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
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Notes
István Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (London: Merlin Press, 1970), 17.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 3.173.
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Random House, 1965), 64.
G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 96.
David MacGregor, The Communist Ideal in Hegel and Marx (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 37.
Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (New York: Humanity Books, 1999), 41.
Cited in Georg Lukcas, The Young Hegel (1938), retrieved from http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/youngheg/lukacs35.htm (May 7, 2005)
J.W. von Goethe Laust Parts I and II trans. Stuart Atkins, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Subsequent references are to this edition.
Henry Crabbe Robinson, On Books and Their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley, 3 vols. (London: Dert, 1938) 1.369.
Harold Bloom, “Introduction” to Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003), 5.
J.W. von Goethe, My Life: Poetry and Truth, trans. Robert R. Heitner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
Alan P. Cottrell, “The Resurrection of Thinking and the Redemption of Faust: Goethe’s New Scientific Attitude,” in Goethe’s Way of Science: A Phenomenology of Nature (New York: SUNY University Press, 1998), 262.
Kenneth D. Weisinger, The Classical Façade (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988), 31–32.
Neil M. Flax, “The Presence of the Sign in Goethe’s Faust,” PMLA 98 (1983), 183–203, quotation from 185.
Jaroslav Pelikan, Faust as Theologian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 76.
Marc Shell, Money Language and Thought: Literary and Philosophic Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era (Johns Hopkins UP, 1993).
Goethe, On Mathematics and its Misuse 1826, cited in John R. Williams, The Life of Goethe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 258.
Hans-Christophe Binswanger, Money and Magic: A Critique of the Modern Economy in the Light of Goethe’s Faust, trans. J.E. Harrison (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 9.
Cited in William R. Newman, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 51.
Elias Ashmole, Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, in Stanton J. Linden, The Alchemy Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 227.
Franco Moretti, Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez, trans. Quintin Hoare (New York: Verso, 1996), 629.
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© 2007 David Hawkes
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Hawkes, D. (2007). Faust and Enlightenment. In: The Faust Myth. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230603424_6
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