Thomas Metscher – Goethe’s “Faust”: Modern figuration of contradiction

There is certainly a lack of interest among left-wing intellectuals in Weimar Classicism. The focus on the avant-gardism of Brecht or the Frankfurt School has set a precedent, so to speak. In addition, there are – by no means unfounded – aversions towards the legitimizing propagation of the classical-humanist heritage that was cultivated in the first “socialist” republic on German soil. With Thomas Metscher, who sees himself as a representative of both philological and philosophical literary criticism, “a critical-dialectical philology”, a competent, differentiated opposing voice now comes forward. His voluminous volume “Faust and the Dialectic” invites you to examine well-rehearsed routines.

Dialectics as a guide

Metscher’s work is the result of a 50-year engagement with the Faust material. The book therefore builds on an impressive series of earlier publications – for example in the magazine “Argument”, which now appears to be successfully fighting for survival. In eight chapters, which Metscher calls books, he deals with the reception history of “Faust”, develops the “dialectics of Faust poetry” in a differentiated manner and examines the polyphonic aesthetic structure under the title “Summa poetica” in order to finally bring the work into perspective to classify the great “world-historical” struggle between socialism and barbarism. What makes “Faust” so interesting that the material Metscher – similar to the author of the tragedy-comedy (Goethe spoke in a letter to Alexander von Humboldt in 1832, not without irony, of a strange concoction, an obvious riddle, with regard to his “Faust”) and very serious jokes) – has not let go for half a century?

First of all, there is the work’s rather unique impact history. Metscher vividly describes the change from a heroic interpretation of the Faust figure (the “Faustian man” as a human subject and border-crosser) to the archetype of the inhumane and misogynistic aggressor. To this end, he deals intensively with the interpretations of Heinz Schlaffer, Rüdiger Scholz and Oskar Negt, although he certifies that the latter has contributed little new after Georg Lukács and Gerhard Scholz. Metscher also has critical objections to Albrecht Schöne’s much-praised Faust edition, while he appreciates the philological and meticulous pioneering work of Michael Jaeger.

Unlike Schlaffer, for example – who sees Faust as an allegory and poetic realization of a negative dialectic that is alone adequate to the modern world and who denies the work (even Faust’s death monologue) any utopian dimension – Metscher makes the dialectic the guide, the key to his interpretation. Its most important elements are, on a logical level, the principle of contradiction and, on an ontological level, processuality, which, in Hegelian terms, leads beyond negation to the abolition of opposition. According to Metscher’s thesis, “The basic definition of Goethe’s aesthetic process” and his aesthetic appropriation of the world is: “Dialectics as the art of contradiction, opposition as the real movement of being.”

Against undialectical reduction

In Goethe, there is consequently a large number of contradictory figurations: in addition to Faust and Mephistopheles, for example Gretchen and Faust, Helena and Faust, the feudal world as a masquerade, the highly complex figuration of the classic Walpurgis Night or the Arcadian utopia in the combination of the ancient and modern worlds. In the fifth act of the second part, Faust appears as a colonizer and imperial bourgeois, but also Philemon and Baucis. And in the work’s epilogue, the mountain gorge scene as a comedic counterpart to the prologue, Gretchen appears as a “virgin, mother, queen/goddess.”

Maximizing complexity is the necessary consequence of Goethe’s process, which places high demands on the viewer and the literary scholar. “On the whole, ‘Faust’ stands out compared to other works of its era by its much greater complexity,” says Metscher. With “the conscious inclusion of not only artistic-aesthetic, but also historical-cultural contradiction structures,” Goethe therefore delivers a “totality of the experienced world that far exceeds the scope of meaning of traditional literature, even of the highest rank.” On the formal level, this corresponds to an aesthetic plurality, the moving, contradictory synthesis of all “natural forms of poetry” (Goethe) and all forms of theater from ancient dramas to French comedy, Shakespeare to Mozart opera. Given this complexity, the scope of the present studies is easily justified.

Metscher objects to an undialectical reduction of Faust to a global player of the ugly capitalist form of progress.

Metscher opposes an undialectical reduction of the Faust figure, for example to a global player in the ugly capitalist form of civilizational progress. For him, Faust is an “amalgam of different figures” in which there are elements of the Promethean, the rebellious, medieval scholarship, productive educational history as well as modern, problematic capitalist rationality and also patriarchy. In short: Faust is both citizen and bourgeois, representative of the Janus-facedness of capitalism.

Goethe’s female characters are left to develop the utopian element of the Faust figure, something that earlier, mostly male, interpreters did not understand. In the end, the god of the prologue turns out to be a theater god and the female staff dominates the mountain gorge scene of the epilogue. For Metscher, the “Is saved” at the open end of the drama is not to be interpreted as the voice of the Lord, but rather a female voice, the first voice in the mountain gorge scene. Gretchen, the most tortured of all drama characters, ultimately becomes Faust’s savior, a Faust without magic, without a devil. It represents the new day of a social utopia becoming reality.

Goethe’s work, as Peter Hacks was the first to recognize, is therefore, correctly understood, not a theodicy, but an anthropodicy, “a promise of the future” in which a new being is possible that rejects the principles of power and violence. Goethe’s turn to the immanence of the sense is in the tradition of Spinoza, who brought God out of the transcendent heaven with his formula “natura sive substantia sive deus” (nature or substance or God), but also of Saint-Simon’s utopian socialism and the concept of love Mozart’s musical theater.

The big confrontation modeled

Metscher emphasizes the following leitmotif: “Contrary to research, Goethe was by no means unfaithful to his radical origins.” Metscher’s book thus encourages us to rediscover the radicality and modernity of Goethe’s “Faust.” In the final chapter he connects the work with the tradition of great utopian literature, namely with Thomas Mann’s Faustus novel and Peter Weiss’ “Aesthetics of Resistance.” Metscher convincingly argues that Goethe’s last great work prefigured the confrontation between humanity and barbarism, realism and nihilism, Marx and Nietzsche, “which will determine the coming century.”

In July of this year, the philosopher, literary scholar and controversial plural Marxist Thomas Metscher turned 90 years old. His extensive work has been successively published by Mangroven Verlag in Kassel in recent years, creating something of a small edition of his work. With his Faust studies following Lukács and Hans Heinz Holz, after many years of appropriating and penetrating the material, he has created a respect-demanding opus that deserves resonance.

Thomas Metscher: Faust and the Dialectics. Studies on Goethe’s poetry. Mangroven-Verlag, 610 pages, hardcover, €40.