Russian Studies in Philosophy, vol. 49, no. 4 (Spring 2011), pp. ?–??.
© 2011 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved.
1061–1967/2011 $9.50 + 0.00.
DOI 10.2753/RSP1061–1967490404
English translation © 2010 M.E. Sharpe, Inc., from the Russian text © 2011 the author. “‘Faust’ i
‘Fenomenologiia dukha’: po sledam Lukacha i Blokha,” manuscript.
Translated by Stephen D. Shenfield.
Ivan A. Boldyrev
Faust and The Phenomenology of Spirit
In the Footsteps of Lukács and Bloch1
ABSTRACT: The author discusses the views of Lukács and Bloch regarding the
relationship between Hegel’s dialectics of history and the philosophy implicit in Goethe’s
play Faust.
Die Reise geht aus dem Unzulänglichen,
das ewig im Durst liegt, zum Ereignis, das die
Entäusserung endet1
The paths of the outstanding twentieth-century philosophers György Lukács and Ernst Bloch,
who were close friends in their youth, crossed not only in the 1910s but also later, after
World War II—for the most part by correspondence. I will examine here a curious episode
connected with the way in which two important German-language texts—Faust and The
Phenomenology of Spirit—came together in their thinking. Such an exploration is of interest
as well because the path toward totality and the yearning for the authentic fullness and
wholeness of life that were so typical of the works of the young Lukács correspond exactly to
the Faustian type of personality. The interest of Lukács and Bloch in this theme is therefore a
reflection—albeit not fully conscious—of their own youthful predilections.
1
The financial support of the Program “Scientific Endowment of HSE” is gratefully acknowledged
(Research project No 10-01-0011 “Ernst Bloch’s Philosophy of Utopia: Theoretical Foundations,
Intellectual Contexts and Polemics”)
Not coincidentally, Fredric Jameson argues that Bloch’s whole philosophy may be
regarded as an extended commentary on Faust.2 Indeed, the multitude of images in Goethe—
and not only in Faust—seem to illustrate ideas of discovery of the new, the not-yet-existing,
the conquest of unexplored worlds, constant movement: a homunculus striving to overcome
the obstacles that separate him from the real world, Mignon or Euphorion—children as yet
unformed as personalities, images of movement and transition, inhabitants of utopian worlds,
nomads, subjects of utopian languor.3
As for The Phenomenology of Spirit, one of the forms in which this text leaves properly
philosophical, “scientific” (both in Hegel’s sense and in the sense of contemporary historicalphilosophical science) space and enters the integral space of culture must be the exchange of
meanings between philosophy and literature.4 Hegel’s words are fully applicable to his own
work: “Any philosophy is complete in itself and, like an authentic work of art, contains
within itself totality.”5
Parallels between Goethe and Hegel have been drawn more than once. Thus, Hegel’s
biographer Karl Rosenkranz wrote that the right Hegelians perceived their works as a single
whole.6 The similarity of the philosophical and literary strivings of Goethe and Hegel has
been discussed by, among others, Rudolf Honneger, Karl Löwith, Paul Tillich, and Heinrich
Mayer.7 But it was Lukács and Bloch who gave philosophical content to these parallels: their
works deserve the closest attention.8
Before it can be understood in what sense it is possible to compare Faust and The
Phenomenology of Spirit, the relations between their authors must be at least briefly
described.9 Goethe and Hegel made one another’s acquaintance in 1801, when Hegel arrived
in Jena. During the first years of the nineteenth century Goethe was an attentive reader of the
Critical Journal of Philosophy, which was brought out by Hegel and Schelling. From the
letters of those years, it is clear that they attentively read one another’s works10 and were in
quite close communication. These contacts continued until Hegel moved to Bamberg in 1806.
Subsequently they met much less frequently; sometimes they exchanged letters in which they
discussed mainly Goethe’s theory of color (Hegel was one of its few influential supporters);
and they sent one another books.11 The celebrated encounter between Goethe and Hegel and
their conversation about dialectics took place in October 1927. After this they met one more
time (in 1829). It is well known that Goethe sometimes permitted himself to speak frankly
about Hegelian philosophy12; this, however, did not prevent him from respecting Hegel and
preserving a respectful distance from the dialectical contraptions of the Berlin professor.
Did Goethe understand the Hegelian dialectic? It is possible to give a number of easy
answers to this question, but they will not be complete and exhaustive, so without denying
the importance of Goethe’s attitude toward classical German thought and Hegel in particular
I shall approach the matter from a different angle: I shall give the floor not to them but to
their texts.
The problem here is not only that The Phenomenology of Spirit is a work in which the
movement of “patterns” of consciousness (Gestalten des Bewusstseins) correlates with the
dialectic of literary images, while Faust is a tragedy that embodies Goethe’s broad
philosophical conceptions. Our chief task here is not to try to correlate the uncorrelatable, but
to attempt to discern behind essentially diverse texts a single facet of culture, to view both
Faust and Phenomenology as a special model of consciousness that possesses specific
experience. First, to give a full picture, I shall show how Goethe’s tragedy figures openly in
The Phenomenology of Spirit.
A quotation from Faust in The Phenomenology of Spirit
Hegel uses Goethe’s text Faust: A Fragment in his section on “the realization of rational selfconsciousness through itself.” He quotes the words of Mephistopheles in the scene “Faust’s
Workroom,” which then went into the final text of the tragedy—moreover, he quotes from
memory, abridging and changing the text. In Goethe Mephistopheles says the following13:
Verachte nur Vernunft und Wissenschaft,
Des Menschen allerhöchste Kraft,
Laß nur in Blend- und Zauberwerken
Dich von dem Lügengeist bestärken,
So hab’ ich dich schon unbedingt—
...
Und seiner Unersättlichkeit
Soll Speis’ und Trank vor gier’gen Lippen schweben;
Er wird Erquickung sich umsonst erflehn,
Und hätt’ er sich auch nicht dem Teufel übergeben,
Er müßte doch zu Grunde gehn!
(Reason and Knowledge only thou despise,
The highest strength in man that lies!
Let but the Lying Spirit bind thee
With magic works and shows that blind thee,
And I shall have thee fast and sure!
To his hot, insatiate sense,
The dream of drink shall mock, but never lave him:
Refreshment shall his lips in vain implore—
Had he not made himself the Devil’s, naught could save him,
Still were he lost forevermore!)
In Hegel, however, this quotation is given as:
Es verachtet Verstand und Wissenschaft
des Menschen allerhöchste Gaben—
es hat dem Teufel sich ergeben
und muss zu Grunde gehn.
(He despises Reason and Knowledge,
Humanity’s most lofty gifts –
He has surrendered himself to the Devil
And is doomed to perish.14)
It is well known that in Phenomenology Hegel uses literary images to describe the phases
of the historical development of spirit. After the stage of “observing reason,” selfconsciousness wishes “to be an essence for itself as a single spirit” (p. 184); in historical
terms, the epoch of Modernity begins. Hegel writes: “In determining to be for itself an
essence as real-for-itself, it (self-consciousness—I.B.) is the negation of the other.” Selfconsciousness appears here as “directly self-expressing individuality” (p. 184). “Insofar as it
has raised itself from the moral substance and restful being of thinking to its own being-foritself, it leaves behind the law of morals and present being, the knowledge obtained from
observation, and theory as a gray, immediately fading shadow” (p. 185). Here too, in essence,
we encounter a concealed quotation from Faust.
On the whole, Hegel tries to reconstruct the image of early modern man, whose attitude
toward the world leads him along the path of self-destruction (and this is fully in the spirit of
the devil–tempter whose words are used by Hegel). In this regard, he writes: “Its experience
(the experience of self-consciousness—I.B.) enters its consciousness as a contradiction in
which the attained reality of its singularity sees that it is being destroyed by a negative
essence” (p. 186). Hegel has in mind that a purely singular individuality is unable to affirm
itself in the world because it is abstract, and “instead of abandoning dead theory and
immersing itself in life, it has therefore, rather, immersed itself only in the consciousness of
its own lifelessness and realizes itself only as an empty and alien necessity, as dead reality”
(p. 187). Moreover, at this stage of the development of consciousness, the unrestrained lust
and self-affirmation of those who love one another in defiance of social conventions run up
against the might of the law. Hegel writes: “The individual only perishes, and the absolute
fragility of singularity crumbles into dust upon impact with such a hard but unbroken reality.
Being as consciousness the union of himself and his opposite, the individual still sees this
perishing; he sees his goal and his realization, just as he sees the contradiction between what
was the essence for him and what is the essence in itself; he recognizes from experience the
dual meaning inherent in what he has done—namely, in the fact that he has taken to himself
his own life; he has taken life, but thereby he has, on the contrary, seized death” (p. 187).15
Hegel clearly hints at the murder of Valentin and the tragedy of Gretchen. And although the
law here appears as something alien to the lovers (Gretchen and Faust), they themselves feel
quite alien to themselves. (Compare: “The last moment of the existence of this form is the
thought of its loss in necessity, or the thought of itself as some essence absolutely alien to
itself”—p. 188.) In the final reckoning, it becomes clear that the truth of self-consciousness is
this alien necessity—that is, social conventions. However, consciousness still has to traverse
a long road to absolute knowledge—a road full of setbacks and spiritual searchings.16
We find references to Goethe also in other works of Hegel—in particular, in his Esthetics,
where he calls Faust an “absolute philosophical tragedy” that presents “on the one hand, the
impossibility of finding satisfaction in science, and, on the other hand, the animation of
mundane life and earthly delights, in general, the tragic experience of the mediation of
subjective knowledge and striving—and of the absolute in its essence and manifestation.”17
Here, evidently, Hegel already has in mind the first part of the tragedy, which came out as a
separate publication in 1808. (I might note that the theme of Faust as a philosophical work
was not an original one: Hegel follows here in the footsteps of Schelling, who in his
Philosophy of Art—that is, in lectures delivered even before the first part of Faust was
published—wrote that if any poetical work deserved to be called philosophical then that work
was Faust.)
And so we see that Hegel uses material from Faust only in order to illustrate one of the
gestalts of the Phenomenology. But let us not forget that the second part of Faust was not
known to him. Although he did not therefore succeed in appraising the whole scope of
Goethe’s literary task, this task was related very closely to his philosophical strivings and,
above all, to the design that Hegel tried to realize in The Phenomenology of Spirit. It was to
this circumstance that Lukács and Bloch turned their attention.
How Lukács poses the problem
Lukács already mentions the kinship between Phenomenology and Faust in his book The
Young Hegel; however, a much more detailed analysis is provided in his work Faust
Studies,18 where he interprets Goethe’s work as “the drama of the human race.” Lukács
argues that Goethe’s creative evolution proceeded from a recognition of the insoluble
conflicts and contradictions of human life to their (dialectical!) resolution at the level of the
race, whose representative turns out to be Faust.19 In his Fragment of 1790 (well known to
Hegel and very cordially received—above all, in German philosophical and not literary
circles), Goethe already places in Faust’s mouth words that Lukács and Bloch adopt as
programmatic:
Und was der ganzen Menschheit zugeteilt ist,
Will ich in meinem innern Selbst geniessen . . .
Und so mein eigen Selbst zu ihrem Selbst erweitern,
Und, wie sie selbst, am End auch ich zerscheitern.
The meaning of the verse is understandable from a literal translation: “All that has fallen to
the lot of mankind, // I wish to take into my inner self . . . // And so expand my own self to its
self, // And together with it rush down into the abyss.” Hegel, for his part, writes in The
Phenomenology of Spirit: “Thus, if this spirit starts afresh upon its formation, as though
proceeding only from itself, it nonetheless starts at a higher level. The kingdom of spirits
thereby formed in present being constitutes a sequence in which one spirit gives way to
another and each takes over the kingdom of the world from its predecessor” (p. 410). The
individual here, according to Hegel, carries the baton of the race, renouncing himself.
Lukács is interested primarily in the literary problems of identifying the individual with the
human race. Above all, he is concerned with the creation of literary types and with the
problem of the “lifelikeness” of the literary type in an artistic universe in which the attempt
has been undertaken to portray the process of world history as a whole. And while
comprehension of the fate of mankind is the key to success for a literary work, simply
copying the universe is, according to Lukács, a dead end for literature (he considers that
Milton and Klopstock chose this dead end). Although the fate of Faust in Goethe is a vast
panhuman tragedy, his image and his historical and personal individuality do not suffer from
the vast scale of Goethe’s conception—Goethe does not hypostasize the racial principle and
does not suppress the individual principle.
It is appropriate to recall here another philosophical theme, connected with Friedrich
Engels, who called Hegel’s work an embryology and paleontology of spirit that shows the
ascent of the individual and all mankind to philosophical knowledge. Fully in the spirit of
traditional Marxism, Lukács asserts that the historical development of man through labor lies
at the foundation both of Faust and of The Phenomenology of Spirit. The latter, according to
Lukács, is a truly “democratic” educational project—any mind is capable of pursuing the
path to the supreme.20
As regards the intellectual and literary collisions in Faust, for Lukács they are connected,
above all, with how the powers of the race arise and develop within the individual and what
kinds of obstacles they encounter. If the fate of the race must become manifest in the
individual, in “abridged” form, then the mental series of categories and stages of personality
development must not be subordinated to objective dialectical logic. The sequence of stages
must be dictated by the specific characteristics of the individual consciousness. It is a matter
not of an arbitrary ordering of events, but of a special logic of individual development. In
Faust, the individual and the race are organically connected: when stagnation is observed in
the development of the race, the action of Faust hardly moves; when the race takes a sharp
progressive “leap,” the action immediately quickens. For this reason, Lukács writes about a
spasmodic, sharp, uneven, subjective-objective time or succession of times (let us recall that
in his famous letter to Humboldt Goethe wrote of the “fullness of times” in Faust, the action
of which encompasses several historical epochs), like that which (as is well known) is also
present in The Phenomenology of Spirit—a work that clearly violates the “even-measured”
character of conceptual movement—above all, at the level of composition (attention has
often been drawn to the unevenness of the presentation, the lack of proportion among key
sections of the book, and so on). Hegel understands dialectics as “the immanent rhythm of
concepts,”21 but how random and unpredictable this rhythm sometimes is!
In Faust this “unevenness” also finds expression in the presence of an element of fantasy,
which however—according to Lukács—is closely connected with Goethe’s realism. This
special “concrete-historical” fantasizing serves to create “a real environment—but one free of
any naturalistic triviality—such that from the fantasy situation and from the individual
characters ennobled thanks to this situation problems raise themselves to the height and
typicality of the racial.”22 The fantastic is the most adequate literary means for expressing the
contradictory unity of the individual and the race. In the constructions of Lukács, who at that
time was at great pains to uphold the principles of realistic literature, this unity occupies a
very important place. This does not mean that he sees the true meaning of literary realism in
the dialectic of the sociohistorical and the fantasy principles, but in the case of Faust it is
precisely this idea that guides his reasoning.
Of course, Lukács’ position here is that of an orthodox communist—very dogmatic and
not always well-grounded. The dialectic of the individual and the race is a good explanatory
device, but it is not clear why, for example, this particular intellectual strategy has to be used
to interpret one of the initial scenes—when the memory of childhood and the mystical
reliving of past religious experience return Faust to life and save him from suicide.
Lukács writes that in The Phenomenology of Spirit there is some single ordering principle
at each stage in the development of consciousness and considers that the same can be
observed in Goethe. The poetical idea in Faust is some sort of invisible focus at which is
concentrated the central problem of Goethe’s worldview; from this vantage point, the
interconnection of all parts of the tragedy becomes clear and intelligible.23
In Goethe’s tragedy, according to Lukács, it is possible to observe both the emergence and
the overcoming of the tragic principle. All the personal dramas of Faust (the scenes with the
spirit of the earth, Gretchen, and Helena, the finale of the tragedy) become intermediate
stages in the development of the race. At the end of his life, Goethe wrote to Zelter that for
him irresolvable tragedy was an absurdity, pure tragedy did not interest him. In Lukács’s
opinion, Goethe and Hegel share the view that the path of the race is not tragic but consists of
innumerable objectively necessary individual tragedies. Goethe’s descriptions of the reversals
of man’s personal fate are quite devoid of sentimentality, and when an individual has
performed his historical role he must leave the scene. In Hegel, the same idea is expressed in
terms of the limited and finite nature of the individual human being in comparison with the
Absolute. So Lukács finds the common philosophical ground between The Phenomenology of
Spirit and Faust in the idea that tragedies in the microcosmos of the individual are a
manifestation of ceaseless progress in the macrocosmos of the race. For example, the tragedy
of Gretchen is merely a necessary stage in Faust’s life—a stage that must be overcome. It is
in the same spirit that Lukács interprets Goethe’s statement to Ekkerman that the first part of
the tragedy is subjective and the second part objective. The naive historicism of the first part
of the “literary Phenomenology of Spirit” passes into the reflective historicism of the second
part, direct history into experienced philosophy of history. (In his work The Young Hegel,
Lukács analyzes the relationship between the second and third parts of Phenomenology in
exactly the same way.) While the first part of Faust is a drama in terms of style, the second
part is not an epic but a description of the past from the perspective of the present. (Thus, the
“Classical Walpurgis Night” expresses the “phenomenological” history of the development
of the race. Subjectively this is Faust’s path to Helena, but objectively it is the development
of Greek beauty, starting from its primitive natural sources.) As is well known, in Hegel
ancient beauty also plays an important role—and precisely in the objective-historical sense of
the development of spirit.
And so Lukács and Bloch see in Faust the same structure as in Phenomenology—the
single path of the individual and the race. But in Hegel this path is traversed by
consciousness with the aid of numerous dialectical transitions. How about in Goethe? Here
there arises a new theme—Faust and dialectics.24
Dialectical motifs manifest themselves in Faust in various ways. First, there is the motif of
the “dialectical journey”; second, the concept of negativity; and third, the critique of inert and
frozen forms of thought. All these motifs are also present in The Phenomenology of Spirit.
The dialectical journey
The motif of the journey, which links Faust and The Phenomenology of Spirit, was very
important for Bloch. Faust’s journey is a model of the utopian attitude toward the world—of
the dynamic, future-oriented, restless, and dissatisfied principle in man, striving to realize the
possibilities hidden in the world. The Faustian motif is the active need to go beyond the
bounds of the known and established, to venture upon experiment.25 Nor did Bloch ignore the
theme of education [in the sense of “formation” of the whole person—Trans.] (Bildung) in
Faust and in Phenomenology. Education is a key concept in German culture, and the
correlation between Faust’s dramatic path and the reverses of the subject–object mediations
of consciousness in Hegel’s Phenomenology, conducted through the prism of this concept,
takes us back to the very essence of the German spirit.
According to Bloch, the self-improvement of Faust is not naked subjectivism or futile selfadmiration but “a gaze over a world traveled far and wide”26—a gaze, by the way, fully
consistent with the ideology of the Enlightenment, with which Hegel too settled accounts in
The Phenomenology of Spirit. Faust is the moving principle of the whole world (that is why
he seeks intimacy with the spirit of the earth). For both the Hegelian subject and Faust, the
outward gaze, into the world, turns inward, into their inner being. Bloch calls Faust’s journey
dialectical because he rejects each level that he has reached out of newly awakened curiosity
and yearning for the new and unexplored.27 In general, Hegel and Goethe share the striving to
grasp the essence of the inner becoming and constant changeability of the world, to feel the
rhythm of this becoming.
Until the splendid instant is achieved, Faust will find no peace of mind. 28 Nor will it be
found by the Hegelian consciousness, which “violently compels itself to spoil for itself any
limited satisfaction. Feeling this violence, fear of the truth may, of course, both retreat and
strive to preserve that which is threatened by the danger of being lost. But this fear cannot
find rest: if it wishes to remain thoughtlessly inert, then its thoughtlessness will be poisoned
by thought and its inertness violated by its disquiet; if it affirms itself as a feeling of
assurance that everything has excellence of its own kind, then this assurance, in exactly the
same way, will suffer violence at the hands of reason, which will find nothing excellent that
is ‘of its own kind’.”29 Bloch conceives of this becoming in a special fashion: consciousness
(Faust) uncovers within itself (himself) new possibilities and feels its (his) otherness as its
(his) own not-yet-being, which it (he) might become, and this compels it (him) to wander
eternally. Faust and the world over which he travels—the social “topos”—undergo change
that depends on their mutual changes within one another. Bloch calls the self (the subject) the
question and the world the answer, and vice versa.30
Historical becoming appears in The Phenomenology of Spirit as the development of forms
of consciousness. Consciousness, as it were, puts on a succession of historical masks, one
after the other. In Faust, by contrast, we see, for instance, the repetition of the tragedies of
Gretchen and Helena, but now at another, higher level. (Incidentally, it is precisely Helena
who embodied Goethe’s striving to understand possible forms of coexistence between the
ancient spirit and the spirit of modernity—a theme that always agitated Hegel. In The
Phenomenology of Spirit, traces of these interests are found in the section “Artistic Religion,”
which discusses the rise and fall of ancient art.)
Hegel, abstractly describing the concept of experience that he uses in Phenomenology,
writes: “We see that consciousness now has two objects: one is the first ‘in itself’; the other is
the being of this ‘in itself’ for consciousness. The second object seems at first only the
reflection of consciousness in itself, the process of representing not some object but only the
knowledge of consciousness concerning that first object. However, . . . for consciousness
here the first object changes: it ceases to be in-itself[-being] and becomes such as constitutes
in-itself[-being] only for consciousness; but thereby this is now the being of this ‘in itself’ for
consciousness, true being, and this means that it is the essence or object of consciousness.
This new object contains within itself the insignificance of the first object; it is acquired
experience regarding the latter” (p. 52).31 It is precisely here that pedagogy is identified with
processual metaphysics.32
Bloch also writes about another literary precursor of Goethe and Hegel: “The topographic
prototype of the this-worldly journey of Goethe’s Faust is given by the heavenly journey of
Dante.”33 Instead of a divine comedy, Hegel and Goethe play out before us a bourgeoisProtestant human comedy. While in Dante we see static constructions by which the heroes
descend into hell and ascend to the heavens, in Hegel and in Goethe being is plastic: subject
and object are interwoven in dialectical unity.
The time has come to clarify the essence of Bloch’s very ambivalent and contradictory
attitude toward the Hegelian dialectic. For Bloch, “the truly dialectical motif is need: only
need, as an insatiable feeling not realized through the world, which each time becomes need,
is a constantly arising, slipping, and explosive contradiction.”34 Bloch’s chief complaint
against Hegel is the figure of Er-innerung or remembrance—the dialectical “ingathering” by
consciousness of its preceding forms and their sublation in absolute knowledge. 35 To this
exertion of remembrance and subordination of the individual to the entirety of spirit, in which
each form of consciousness “determines itself as a moment and establishes a place for itself
within the whole,”36 Bloch, summoning Goethe too as an ally, counterposes the subjective,
emotional, utopian principle and an open, incomplete system. He finds Hegel’s philosophy
lacking in fundamental novelty and uncertainty.37
The “openness” of dialectics, according to the late Bloch, is achieved through a special
understanding of its materialist version—the essence of phenomena lies in their materiality;
some sort of immanent logic should not be ascribed to them. It is precisely this circumstance
that makes materialist dialectics more realistic and connects it with the multiplicity, 38
discontinuity, and incompleteness that are so important for Bloch’s philosophy.39 For a
utopian philosophy, the uniformity and logical transparency of the Absolute are
unacceptable, just as attempts to subordinate material being to logic are inadequate (and on
this point Schelling becomes Bloch’s ally). Bloch, for example, writes: “Reality is
nominalism and not conceptual realism—nominalism, however, of such a kind that all its
moments and details are gathered together by the unity of objectively-real intention and its
foundation is the utopian unity of a goal.”40 Bloch’s deliberations concerning logic are
anthropological and psychological in nature. Logic without instinct, without inclinations or a
special affective tension remains for Bloch a herbarium of dessicated words or tautologies;
Bloch, for his part, tries to enter into proto-logical thinking.
Considering speculative dialectics, he emphasizes that only the volitional intervention of
the subject is capable of giving objective contradictions a historically progressive character,
that orientation toward the future which may be considered the true power of dialectics—the
power to overcome simple negativity and subordinate it to progressive negativity. Here
subjective contradictions make it possible to grasp objective ones.41
Bloch, unlike Marx, was never consciously guided by dialectical methodology in the strict
sense of the word: in Bloch we shall find no methodologically well-thought-out system of
dialectical construction, no description of one or another stage of dialectical development
and/or intellectual movement with a substantiation of its lawfulness and attainability. What is
more, many of his statements prompt the thought that the idea of dialectical mediation was
alien to him, that despite constant references to dialectics and rationality he was inclined,
rather, toward a mystical solution to the problem of final identity as the end of the historical
process.42 And here he remained true to the general orientation of Hegelian Marxism as
formulated by Lukács in History and Class Consciousness.
By calling for the static metaphysical constructions of the Absolute to be replaced by the
dynamic conception of hope (inter alia, as special affect), Bloch in fact reproduces the
anthropological character of his own philosophical thinking. This occurs in a clear form in
his interpretation of dialectics. I do not call the late Bloch a subjectivist, inasmuch as he
himself, as we have seen above, did not recognize subjectivist (“idealist,” “irrationalistic”)
theories, insisting that the model of consciousness and image of man that he tried to describe
and justify are connected with objective reality, with its tendencies, with a historical and
natural dynamic—which, however, without a subject would be deprived of its positive,
creative orientation. His own philosophical position, however, is anthropological in character.
This is precisely why Bloch so emphasizes the importance of the Hegelian absolute spirit
overcoming its alienated forms as the meaning of historical development. The individual
(social subject) must be freed from inert reified formations, unfreedom, the pressure of
outdated social institutions, and so on. Bloch thought by analogy with the movement of the
Hegelian absolute spirit, which at the end of history acquires true selfhood. The methodically
constructed acquisition of totality in Hegelian philosophy is replaced by anthropology, whose
chief feature is a yearning for this totality. Bloch denounces any philosophical system for
having some kind of static, pre-established foundation—something that should not exist in
the world of philosophy, which is fundamentally uncertain and unstable. This dynamism,
which Hegelian dialectics and Bloch’s philosophy share, was unconsciously sensed even by
Heidegger, who never referred to Bloch, when he described the movement of Hegel’s
Phenomenology as the movement of knowledge that was not yet true and of a subject that had
not yet found itself.43
And so the rejection of positivism and mechanistic materialism as well as of extreme
subjectivism and irrationalism, and the counterposition to them of dialectical philosophy, are
characteristic features of Bloch’s philosophical worldview—features that would be
impossible without the Hegelian legacy. For Bloch, the statics of mythological thinking,
which tries to “return to the sources,” is not a whit better than the statics of vulgar
materialism. The processual ontology that Bloch upheld undoubtedly goes back, inter alia, to
Hegel. Thus, we see that Bloch cannot be considered a Hegelian, but nor is it possible to
conceive of his ideas outside the context of Hegelian philosophy.
Negativity
Faust’s journey has an important feature that brings Goethe close to Hegel: Faust constantly
subjects the world around him to dialectical negation. Bloch writes: “Presence under various
circumstances shows that they are full of contradictions and sudden changes; everywhere
present in them is a sort of objective Mephistopheles, an objective Negation.” 44 Both Lukács
and Bloch emphasize the positive character of the negative nature of Mephistopheles, his
creative role. Mephistopheles is compared with evil as the motor of history in the Hegelian
conception of the “cunning of reason.” Here it is worth recalling his celebrated selfdescription: “Part of that Power, not underestood, / Which always wills the Bad, and always
works the Good” (p. 50).
Bloch is right: Mephistopheles is indeed immanent to the world; he is not only a moment
in Faust’s emotional-historical development,45 as Lukács supposes, but also a moment in
historical development, a part of the divine order of the world. He calmly comes to be
received by the Lord and asks permission to seduce Faust from the true path. Were
Mephistopheles not involved in the world, God would not say to him: “Of the spirits of
negation, you least of all / Have been onerous to me, a rogue and merry fellow” (p. 18).
Mephistopheles’ thoughts are seditious; they do not fit into the harmony of the spheres—but
this does not prevent him from remaining a part of this harmony.46
The positive meaning of Mephistopheles’s image has long been recognized by literary
critics. Often he is “cleverer” and more cunning than Faust; he utters generally known truths,
does not lose his sobriety of outlook, and so on. In the words of God Himself,
Mephistopheles even becomes a creator.47 He often proves right in arguments with Faust, as
was already acknowledged by Schiller.48
On the other hand, Mephistopheles is a spirit who “has always been accustomed to
negate”; this is fully in the spirit of Hegelian thought. But this negation has special features.
Mephistopheles says:
Part of the Part am I, once All, in primal Night,—
Part of the Darkness which brought forth the Light,
The haughty Light, which now disputes the space,
And claims of Mother Night her ancient place (p. 51).
Here we no longer have a dialectical interpretation of the devil, but rather a deliberation in
the spirit of German mysticism (a tradition continued in Goethe’s time by Baader and
Schelling) and the Manichean dualism of good and evil. Bloch too points to the Schellingian
roots of some of Goethe’s conceptions. He writes that under Schelling’s influence Goethe
calls polarity and ascent (Steigerung) the main natural forces, adhering to “old” pantheistic
views associated with the coincidence of opposites in the universal harmony. Thus, Bloch
acknowledges that it is difficult to combine Faust’s insatiable passion (interpreting him in the
Hegelian spirit) with such a Spinozan ideology of harmony. Let us note that Goethe’s
philosophical views (like Schelling’s) cannot, of course, be reduced to Spinozism or
naturalistic pantheism. Bloch is describing merely one important tendency in their thought.
Here is a characteristic example from Goethe’s “Tame Xenia” (Bloch does not mention
this poem, but it is clearly among those which he has in mind):
Wenn im Unendlichen dasselbe
Sich wiederholend ewig fließt,
Das tausendfältige Gewölbe
Sich kräftig in einander schließt;
Strömt Lebenslust aus allen Dingen,
Dem kleinsten wie dem größten Stern,
Und alles Drängen, alles Ringen
Ist ewige Ruh' in Gott dem Herrn.49
Here is another statement of the same kind: “In the human spirit, just as in the universe,
there is no top and bottom; all have equal rights before a common focus, which manifests its
mysterious being precisely through the harmonious relationship to it of all parts.”50
As for Lukács, he considers that the inner dialectic of Faust is focused on balancing on a
knife’s edge between good and evil. The problem to which the ideas of Lukács and Bloch
lead us concerns the moral implications of Goethe’s literary thought. Did Goethe in his
“dialecticality” reach a recognition of the positive role of evil in history and, in general, a
conception of dialectical, “constructive” negativity?
Goethe was hardly interested in the subtleties of speculative thought; this is also shown by
his famous conversation with Hegel as recorded by Ekkerman, in which Goethe sarcastically
referred to dialectical art.51 Bloch, unlike Lukács, thinks that if there was a “dialectics” in
Goethe at all then it was a dialectics in the spirit of Spinoza and the early Schelling—the
“old” dialectics with which Hegel polemicized both in the Logic and in the Phenomenology.
It was precisely against this old dialectics that he directed his celebrated words: “It is
possible, of course, to proclaim divine life and divine knowledge some sort of game of love
with itself; however, this idea descends to edification and even to banality if not accompanied
by sufficient seriousness, suffering, patience, and work of the negative” (p. 56). 52 Such a
revolutionary (recall Herzen—dialectics is the algebra of revolution) mood was in many
respects alien to the “Olympian” Goethe with his often contemplative political position and
his striving to stand “above the fray.”53 Let us note in passing that the direct contemplation of
a protophenomenon, the intuitive grasping or glimpsing of essence as some sort of common
basis of natural phenomena that cannot be captured in scientific abstractions 54—the crucial
idea of Goethe’s Naturphilosophie—is altogether unacceptable to Hegel.
As regards the image of Mephistopheles, here too various points of view are possible. It
might be considered, for example, that Goethe’s God is the wholly positive God of Spinoza,
Who tolerates no negativity of any kind within Himself and for Whom Mephistopheles is
merely a misunderstanding. However, there is not much basis for such a view: in
conversation with Ekkerman on 2 March 1831 Goethe remarked that Mephistopheles should
not be regarded as a demonic image because he is too negative for this, while the demonic
often appears attractive.55 From this point of view, Goethe’s Mephistopheles has nothing to
do with the “cunning of reason” or the “invisible hand” 56; he is, rather, something barren and
empty, like the devil in Spinoza, who consists of undiluted negativity. (Spinoza is even
surprised how such a repulsive creature can exist even for an instant.57)
In Hegelian dialectics, by contrast, the negative is a means for the self-revelation of the
Absolute; it is sublated in the course of development while remaining an inseparable part of
the Absolute. Hegel introduced the concept of negativity into philosophy in order to sublate
the contradictions and one-sided rational views of the epoch of the Enlightenment (in
particular, in the sphere of social life) and transform them into higher forms of reason.
Precisely here lies the constructive meaning of evil as a progressive motor of history: it is
inseparable from the concept of spirit—the key concept for Hegel’s Phenomenology. In § 199
of The Philosophy of Right, Hegel writes: “In this interdependence of labor and the
satisfaction of needs, subjective egoism is transformed into assistance in satisfying the needs
of all others, into mediation as the dialectical movement of the particular by the universal, so
that when each acquires, produces, and consumes for himself he thereby acquires and
produces for others to consume.”58
But on the other hand, according to one well-known interpretation of Faust, it may be said
that the chief hero is spared punishment and sent to heaven not because he is a sinner, not
because the negative principle within him is a moving force of world history, but because he
has good will (a Kantian59 concept!) and this is the fundamental feature of his personality. 60
This circumstance prevents us from interpreting Faust’s very path in an exclusively Hegelian
key.
There also arises a more general question. Is the composition of Faust really arranged in
accordance with Hegelian laws? Is it possible to subordinate it unquestioningly to dialectical
teleology, following Hegel in saying that Faust’s unexpected insights are merely a necessary
stage in the world-historical development of mankind? The well-known German literary
critic W. Vosskamp recalls in this connection an episode in Goethe’s conversations with
Ekkerman when the latter starts to describe the structure of Faust. Ekkerman speaks of some
sort of layers of the world that influence one another but are not very closely
interconnected.61 The poet (that is, Goethe himself) must express this multiplicity of
meanings that find reflection in one another, this diverse and multivalent world, and he uses
the legend of a famous hero as a connecting thread in order to string together whatever he
thinks fit. Goethe confirms Ekkerman’s words and says that in a composition of this kind the
individual sections must remain clearly distinct and significant: the whole cannot be reduced
to any one of them. Vosskamp asserts that the realization of the subject in the world,
according to Goethe, never ends with reconciliation and dialectical identity and is not
directed toward any sort of consciously set goal, that as soon as Faust’s titanic and
unrestrained passion comes into contact with rational-teleological calculation this leads to
tragedy (he is referring to the episode with Philemon and Baucis). The position of Faust as a
person who has acquired power is ethically indifferent; his life force borders on the evil
principle. Vosskamp, like Lukács, writes of the absence of all sentimentality in Goethe: the
old world must be destroyed. But his conclusion is directly opposed to that of Lukács: there
is no reason to speak of dialectics in Faust.
Vosskamp, however, adheres to a very simplistic conception of dialectics as some goalrational panlogism, as a striving to crush the fragile individuality of the personality and the
ecumenical spontaneity of the literary universe under the iron heel of the concept. This is, to
say the least, a one-sided interpretation, even leaving aside the French neo-Hegelians, who
read Phenomenology in a quite special way—precisely, moreover, in light of that fragile and
concealed identity which Kierkegaard already found so lacking in Hegel and which,
incidentally, Bloch (and, following in his footsteps, Vosskamp too) championed in
philosophy. Even without this, authentic Hegelian dialectics is full of drama, and it is
precisely in Phenomenology that historical collisions acquire special tension. 62 There
dialectics is free of repressive political correctness and least of all connected with the
totalitarian thinking of which it was suspected both by Popper and by the postmodernists. 63
Indeed, Goethe did not subordinate the movement of Faust to laws of any kind; much in
the action of the tragedy is spontaneous and unpredictable and cannot be evaluated solely on
the basis of some literary or other logic. Nor does Faust himself act in accordance with any
plan given to him in advance. The living and deeply individual experience that Goethe
propagates in Faust really is at times hard to reconcile with Hegelian constructions. It is
important to us that on the whole these constructions were also unacceptable to Bloch. “The
truly moving and radically substantive essence of the world is something intensive and not
logical.”64
But here too we shall have to make an exception for Phenomenology, because the
individual principle appears there in all its fullness and is raised to the level of existential
drama. As regards the “play of reflections,” from the deliberations of Bloch it becomes clear
that we have before us the movement of some integral consciousness (or of its image, model,
“gestalt”), and this consciousness is constantly changing. So heroes in Goethe, like meanings
(according to Ekkerman), are reflected in one another, and it is this play of reflections that
constitutes the movement of the tragedy—that is, Faust’s path. It must be acknowledged that
the reflection of consciousness in itself or in another consciousness is a key theme of The
Phenomenology of Spirit. And Marx’s famous statement that man becomes man only by
recognizing the other as man is merely a late reflex of Hegel’s thought.
And so man (be it Goethe’s Faust or “consciousness” in Hegel) may be regarded as a
union of the positive and negative principles (that is, of Faust and Mephistopheles), which
cannot exist without one another and are consequently in dialectical connection. By
concluding his agreement with Mephistopheles, Faust (as I have already said) posits “his
other”; for him Mephistopheles embodies the will and potentiality for him to change.65
It must be said that the Faustian principle is far from being as “harmonious” as it might
seem on the basis of the philosophical conceptions of Goethe himself, and therefore we move
along the laborious path of Hegelian consciousness. Indeed, let us recall Faust’s celebrated
summons:
Into the crucible of boiling passions,
Into their abyss, into their depths,
With all the impetuosity of ardor (pyl)!66
Headlong into the fever of time!
Plunge into the maelstrom of chance,
Into living pain, into living bliss,
Into the vortex of griefs and amusements! (p. 63).
Let us recall Hegel: “Not that life which fears death and only guards itself from
destruction, but that which endures and is preserved in death is the life of the spirit. It attains
its truth only by acquiring itself in absolute disintegration. Spirit . . . is this power only when
it looks the negative in the face and sojourns therein. It is this sojourning that constitutes that
magical power which turns the negative into being” (p. 23).67
There is another point of contact between Faust and the Phenomenology: criticism of
abstractions and stagnant rational thinking. Naïve mathematicized rationalism comes under
criticism in the Preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit and in the first part of Faust. Goethe
shows the torments of Faust, who feels cramped within the confines of rigid dogmatic
knowledge. This criticism, to which Goethe gave ironic expression in several scenes (recall
Wagner), is presented in Phenomenology in an equally ironic but more fully argued manner.
Hegel does not simply show us the realm of reason, but also proposes an alternative to
knowledge that is lost in particulars and abstract schemas; he proposes the concept of spirit as
knowledge “of itself in its renunciation of itself,” of an essence “that is movement aimed at
preserving equality to itself in its other-being.”68 Neither Hegel nor Goethe accept an
understanding of truth as an end result separated from its genesis; “tabular” reason, the idea
that the true can be expressed in a single clear proposition (Satz) is alien to them. Criticism of
abstractions is one of the main features of that very experience of consciousness sought after
by us—an experience advocated both by Hegel and by Goethe.
The lived instant
There is one more theme that Bloch touches on—one of the main themes in his interpretation
of Faust. This is the motif of the “lived instant.” When Bloch writes that Phenomenology
shares with Faust the movement “of restless consciousness through a gallery of
transformations in pursuit of an infinite goal,”69 he also has in mind the basic raison d’être of
this movement—the same lived instant that Bloch interprets in the spirit of his philosophy as
close and intimate, as a gloom opaque to the subject. Not an image, not a concept, but an
event (embodied, however, in literary form)—such is the level at which subject and object
are united for Goethe.70
At the end of the second part, the blind Faust “sees” the image of a free nation in a free
land. Bloch interprets this unalienated existence also as a brightening of the gloom of the
instant, and in the spirit of a social utopia.71 Here, moreover, Goethe’s Naturphilosophie is of
significance: the future realm is based on harmony between man and nature. The goal of
Faust’s journey is an event that puts an end to alienation,72 an event of liberation and at the
same time redemption.73 The idea of the lived instant is not abstract (let me repeat that
Goethe did not like abstractions and waxed ironic over then, in Faust as well as elsewhere). It
is an idea of such concreteness that there no longer remains any idea, 74 but only an
experiment. The features of this experiment are described in Goethe. At the beginning of the
second part, Faust addresses the Earth as follows:
Your breath is quickening all the things about me,
Already, with that joy you give, beginning
To stir the strengthening resolution in me,
That strives, forever, towards highest Being (zum höchsten Dasein) (p. 185).
We have before us, on the one hand, an absolutely full present being (Dasein), and, on the
other hand, a special visionary, messianic75 “here and now.” As is well known, Goethe
himself looked upon this “here and now” with tragic irony: while Faust abandons himself to
dreams of a future world, lemurs dig up his grave. As a matter of fact, Faust’s grandiose
“revolutionary” design turns out to be an abstract utopia, remaining merely the vision of a
ruler who has not failed to shed blood for the sake of realizing his idea. The conquest of the
future, which the Marxist Bloch so wants to justify, is for Goethe ruinous, and the hope that
Bloch wants to save, at least in a single instant, is debunked in the words of Mephistopheles,
who calls this instant the last, bad and empty. 76 But is it debunked completely? “The night
seems deeper all around me, / Only within me is there gleaming light” 77—says the blind
Faust, who has not ceased to hope and continues to envision with his inner eye a utopian
dream that is unattainable from the point of view of current developments and inexplicable in
terms of historical logic. The instant is the triumph of individuality as unique living
concreteness (connected with the natural principle by the most intimate ties). In the words of
Manto from the second act of the second part, Faust “wants impossible things.”78
Apparently, it is precisely this circumstance that did not suit Bloch in Hegel’s conceptual
schematism, although he does not give it sufficiently clear expression. Bloch is too inclined
to shun Hegelian self-consciousness from The Phenomenology of Spirit, for which “the
negative of an object or its self-sublation has positive significance, or it knows this
insignificance of the object, because, on the one hand, it renounces itself; for in this
renunciation it affirms itself as an object, or the object—by virtue of the indivisible unity of
its for-self-being—as itself. On the other hand, here we have at the same time a second
moment—that it has equally sublated this renunciation and objecthood and taken it back into
itself, and therefore in its own other-being as such it finds itself at home.”79 This knowledge
has little in common with the affective instant, with astonishment at the new. Renate Wieland
adds here another meaning, concretizing this logic of individuality: the final instant is a
moment of love and perfect openness to the other, a moment at which independent people
address one another, and not the dissolution of objecthood in an absolute subject.80
Eternal, fire of bliss,
Glow of love’s bond this is,
Pain in the heart, seething,
Rapture divine, foaming.
Arrows, come, piercing me,
Spears, compelling me,
Clubs, you may shatter me,
Lightning may flash through me!
So passes the nullity
Of all unreality,
And from the lasting star
Shines Love’s eternal core.81
Thus speaks the Ecstatic Father at the end of the tragedy. The “pain of love” (Liebesqual)82
of which Goethe writes, the scenes from nature (mountain gorges, forests, cliffs, and deserts
“animated by the love / That created them”83) where he depicts in dazzling, living images the
world’s mystical bounty, unpredictability, and at the same time—paradoxically!—its
mysterious proportionality, constant changeability and incompleteness—all this is indeed
consistent neither with general conceptions of Bildung nor with popular dialectical
constructions (this concerns especially the schematism of Lukács). In addition, it is hardly
worth comparing (as Wieland also often does) the ending of Faust with that of The
Phenomenology of Spirit, if only because in the first case, however “objective” the whole
second part of the tragedy may be and however epic its scale, it takes us back to
individuality—something quite uncharacteristic of Hegel, for whom at the higher levels of
development consciousness is spirit, “this absolute substance that in its perfect freedom and
independence from its opposite—that is, from the various self-consciousnesses that are real
for themselves—is the union of them: an ‘I’ that is ‘we’ and a ‘we’ that is ‘I’.”84
It must be said that Faust is not the sole figure whom Bloch proposes as an indicative
image of the “overstepping of boundaries.” Another character who appears in his work is
Don Juan, who abandons himself to his altogether this-worldly passion and fights against
outmoded, ossified vestiges of the past.85 The Promethean nature of Don Juan (first analyzed
by Bloch in a 1928 article on the staging of a Mozart opera86) finds expression in (among
other things) devotion to the immediate moment and a cult of momentary passion and natural
power. Curiously enough, in a letter about his article to Siegfried Krakauer, Bloch writes that
although Don Juan is a revolutionary this does not mean that any passionate enthusiasm is
revolutionary. “What is a matter of indifference from the point of view of tragic drama is not
a matter of indifference from the point of view of the revolution.” 87 Thus, Bloch repudiates
the cult of blind and self-sufficient revolutionariness,88 at the same time showing that the
tragic principle possesses the most diverse ethical and esthetic potentialities. In addition, for
Bloch what is important is collective experience, experience within a community, 89 and so
everywhere—both in his interpretation of Faust and in his own original philosophical texts—
he remains despite everything loyal to the Hegelian idea of the primacy of the “we” or social
whole (albeit in the form of a problem) over isolated human existence.
Let us note, however, that there are other interpretations of the instant besides that of
Bloch. It suffices to recall how important a role was assigned to the metaphysics of the
instant or event and in what diverse contexts this theme was discussed in the religious
philosophy of Kierkegaard or in the esthetics of Baudelaire (“the poet of contemporary life”).
Indeed, Hegel himself gave due recognition to the portrayal of instants in art—instants that
appear to be fortuitous but in which eternal meaning flickers.90
Despite all the logical difficulties that this analysis encounters and may continue to
encounter, I nonetheless consider it productive. The interpretation of literature enables us,
albeit with reservations, to substantiate a special philosophical-anthropological project.91 And
although, as we have seen, Goethe and Hegel substantiate this project in fundamentally
different ways, such substantiation enables us not only to find keys to the German culture of
that epoch but also, at a more general level, to pose the problem of the relationship between
philosophical and literary experience as experience of correlating and connecting the sensual
with the spiritual, experience of alignment with absolute values.
The solution that Bloch proposes to this problem seems to me inadequate. He argues that
the utopian ending to Faust is a more humanistic and less abstract mental construction than
the absolute knowledge portrayed at the end of The Phenomenology of Spirit—that is,
literature is more “alive,” more real, artistically more “authentic” than philosophy. Literature
has room for the unexpected, for sensual experience, for experience of the fragmented and
fortuitous, for astonishment, for the mystical, spontaneous, and graphic. Finally, it has room
for nature, which is irreducible to the conceptual schemas of the subject. But thus to
counterpose literature to philosophy is not altogether correct either for Hegel, in whom the
abstract concepts of the Phenomenology acquire living, graphic, almost fleshly existence, for
whom absolute knowledge itself was the highest point of bifurcation, at which the ability of
consciousness to appropriate its other attains its limit,92 or for Goethe, who in Faust
(especially in its second part) clearly saw the drama of ideas. Both Goethe and Hegel
fearlessly speak of the absolute; both trace the development of spirit in language; both recreate this development in images.93 Indeed, is the esthetic act itself not a visible embodiment
of the absolute idea?
The way in which Bloch correlates Faust with the Phenomenology gives us one possible
approach to interpreting the grounds and premises of Hegel’s work—the presence of the
manifest spirit itself, the spirit that is the final and historic human essence. (This is precisely
the premise of the whole of Hegel’s philosophy, inasmuch as without The Phenomenology of
Spirit the entire construction of the Logic appears groundless.94) The life of man, the reverses
of his personal and social being, the tragic nature of existence, the religious and social fabric
of history—all this is the material not only of The Phenomenology of Spirit but also of Faust.
And it is in essence upon this material that the majestic structure of Hegel’s system, to which
Phenomenology serves as an introduction, is erected. As it turns out, a knowledge of
dialectics can be acquired only by passing through the storms of human life, by experiencing
and overcoming doubts, despair, disintegration, conflicts with the community, and much else.
This difficult path can obtain either philosophical or literary expression; it can be
estheticized, portrayed as a religious feat, and so on—the important point is that it was
precisely this path that shaped Hegelian philosophy.
Literature and philosophy are connected through anthropology. Having witnessed in Faust
the historical-dialectical drama of emerging consciousness and in The Phenomenology of
Spirit the upbringing of the personality toward the lived instant, we end up with a quite real
sense of how the visions dreamt long ago by one of Goethe’s contemporaries and admirers—
Friedrich Schlegel—are embodied in a unified philosophical-literary experience. The
romantic utopia of universal poetry, albeit bereft of explicit religious foundations, by the
exertions of Goethe and Hegel acquires flesh and blood.
Notes
1. E. Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1959), p. 1196.
2. See F. Jameson, Marxism and Form: 20th-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 140.
3. Compare: R. Wieland, Schein—Kritik—Utopie. Zu Goethe und Hegel (Munich: Edition
Text+Kritik, 1992), pp. 158–59.
4. As is well known, Hegel’s own work contains quite a few literary allusions: Sophocles,
Diderot, Goethe, Schiller, Lichtenberg, Jacobi—this is far from a complete list of the authors
who constituted the literary background to The Phenomenology of Spirit.
5. G.W.F. Hegel, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4 (Hamburg: Meiner, 1968), p. 12. [All
quotations are translated from Russian.—Trans.]
6. K. Rosenkranz, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegels Leben (Berlin, 1844), p. 340. Compare
K.F. Göschel, Hegel und seine Zeit, mit Rücksicht auf Goethe (Berlin, 1832).
7. See R. Honneger, “Goethe und Hegel,” in Jahrbuch der Goethe-Gesellschaft, vol. 11
(Weimar, 1925), pp. 38–111; K. Löwith, Von Hegel zu Nietzsche: Der revolutionäre Bruch
im Denken des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (Zürich/New York, 1941) (in Russian translation:
K. Levit, Ot Gegelia k Nitsshe, St. Petersburg 2002); P. Tillich, Hegel und Goethe. Zwei
Gedenkreden (Tübingen, 1932); H. Mayer, Von Lessing bis Thomas Mann (Pfullingen,
1959).
8. In their youth, they had found inspiration in the subject–object dialectic in The
Phenomenology of Spirit—the idea of the mediation of thinking by being. Bloch writes:
“We—Lukács and I—were ourselves both still young, and this work excited us to the verge
of insanity” (quoted from D. Horster, Ernst Bloch. Eine Einführung, Wiesbaden: Panorama,
1987, p. 13). Lukács himself, according to Bloch, called the latter’s thinking “a mixture of
Goebbels’ jewel casket with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit” (see Gespräche mit Ernst
Bloch, ed. R. Traub and H. Wieser, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975, p. 34). D. Horster observes
that by connecting the philosophical goal of The Phenomenology of Spirit with the discovery
and investigation of future-oriented tendencies, Bloch became a “phenomenologist of the
socialist future” (Horster, Ernst Bloch, p. 14).
9. Alas, almost nothing is said about this in the work of K.A. Svas_’ian (Filosofskoe
mirovozzrenie Gëte, 2d ed., Moscow 2001)—one of the few recent books (in Russian) on
Goethe’s philosophy.
10. Goethe’s library contained Hegel’s work The Difference Between the Philosophical
Systems of Fichte and Schelling; for his part, Hegel, in addition to the majority of the books
of Goethe that came out at this time, read Faust: A Fragment, and possibly heard the author
recite an extract from the first part of Faust.
11. In Goethe’s eyes, Hegel’s positive attitude toward Goethe’s theory of color more than
compensated for and “outweighed” his views regarding Naturphilosophie, which in other
contexts Goethe found quite unacceptable.
12. See: B. Sandkaulen, “Hegel G.W.F.,” in Goethe-Handbuch, ed. Bernd Witte, Theo
Buck, Hans-Dietrich Dahnke, and Otto Regine, vol. 4/1 (Stuttgart/Weimar, 2004), pp. 468–
71.
13. Faust I, 1851–1867, “Rabochaia komnata Fausta.” (Quotations from Faust are given in
the translation by B.L. Pasternak.) <<I have looked for but not always found quoted passages
in
the
English
translations
of
Faust
by
A.S.
Kline
at
http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/German/Fausthome.htm and by
Bayard Taylor at http://www.scribd.com/doc/7145872/Goethe-Faust. Various
translations in English and Russian differ so much from one another that they can be hard to
recognize. In some cases it seemed best just to translate from the Russian text>>
14. G.V.F. Gegel_’ [G.W.F. Hegel], Fenomenologiia dukha (Moscow, 2000), p. 185.
Further quotations from this work are taken from this edition; page numbers are shown in the
text.
15. Here there is a play on words, based on the idiom “sich das Leben nehmen”—literally,
“take to oneself life” or “deprive oneself of life.”
16. Self-consciousness passes into a new stage—“the Law of the Heart”—and here, as
several commentators on Phenomenology have observed, the focus shifts to other literary
characters—the Savoy priest in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile, Woldemar in F.H. Jacobi’s
novel of the same name, Schiller’s Don Carlos, or the characters of F. Hölderlin. See, in
particular, Ludwig Siep, Der Weg der “Phänomenologie des Geistes.” Ein einführender
Kommentar (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2000).
17. See: G.V.F. Gegel_’, Estetika (v 4-kh tt.), vol. 3 (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1971), p. 602.
However, researchers have long doubted—and not without grounds—the authenticity of this
part of the Lectures on Esthetics. See A. Gethmann-Siefert and B. Stemmrich-Köhler, “Faust:
die ‘absolute philosophische Tragödie’—und die ‘gesellschaftliche Andersartigkeit’ des
West-östlichen Divan. Zu Editionsproblemen der Ästhetikvorlesungen,” Hegel-Studien,
1983, vol. 18.
18. G. Lukács, “Faust-Studien,” in Faust und Faustus. Vom Drama der Menschengattung
zur Tragödie der modernen Kunst (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1968).
19. Lukács refers to a letter that Goethe sent to Schiller at the time when he was working
on Faust, in which he writes: “Nature is unknowable for the reason that one person cannot
comprehend it, although perhaps the whole of mankind might comprehend it” (letter of
February 25, 1798). See I.-V. Gete, Shiller F. Perepiska: V 2-kh t. (Moscow: Iskusstvo,
1988), vol. 2, p. 58. Compare also the characteristic (almost Hegelian) statement from Poetry
and Truth: “If . . . in the course of our life we see that others have done something to which
we once felt a calling but that we—like many others—failed to do, then we are gripped by
the splendid feeling that only mankind as a whole is a true human being and that each
individual should be glad and happy if he has the courage to feel himself part of this whole”
(I.-V. Gete, “Iz moei zhizni. Poeziia i pravda,” in Sobranie sochinenii v 10-ti tt., vol. 3,
Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1976, p. 326).
20. Let us recall the words of Hegel: “Science, for its part, demands that selfconsciousness raise itself into this ether—so that it might live and live with science and in
science. Conversely, the individual has the right to demand that science place under him the
ladder by which he might reach at least this point of view, that science show him this point of
view within himself” (Fenomenologiia, p. 19).
21. Fenomenologiia, p. 36.
22. Lukács, “Faust-Studien,” p. 147.
23. Compare what Goethe said about Faust to Heinrich Luden: “There is in Faust a
supreme interest—this is the idea that inspired the poet, the idea that connects all the separate
parts of the poem together into a whole, being the law for all the separate parts, the idea that
gives significance to all the separate parts” (Goethes Gespräche, ed. F. von Biedermann, vol.
1, Leipzig 1909, p. 427; quoted from A.V. Mikhailov, “Stilisticheskaia garmoniia i
klassicheskii stil_’ v nemetskoi literature,” in Iazyki kul_’tury, Moscow 1997, pp. 301–2).
24. Here the following comparative works are worthy of note: W. Marotzki, “Der
Bildungsprozess des Menschen in Hegels ‘Phänomenologie des Geistes’ und Goethes
‘Faust’,” Goethe Jahrbuch, no. 104 (1987), pp. 128–56; R. Wieland, Zur Dialektik des
ästhetischen Scheins (Königstein/Ts., 1981); 2d ed.: Wieland, Schei—Kritik—Utopie.
25. See: E. Bloch, “Das Faustmotiv der ‘Phänomenologie des Geistes’,” Hegel-Studien,
vol. 1 (Bonn, 1961), pp. 155–71.
26. Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, p. 1191. According to Bloch and Lukács, both Hegel
and Goethe share the faith of the Enlightenment in man’s capacity for endless selfimprovement. As regards Bloch’s historical-literary position, it is as follows: Goethe went
from the early images of Faust as rebel, Werter, and Gotz to the “grownup” Wilhelm Meister,
but in mediated fashion—via The Phenomenology of Spirit (which, however, the Weimar
classic probably did not read). Bloch also stresses here the philosophical meaning of the idea
of the upbringing of all mankind. It is precisely this idea that Hegel too has in mind when he
writes in the preface to Phenomenology: “The substance of the individual [and] the world
spirit had the patience to pass through these forms over a long period of time and take upon
their shoulders the enormous work of world history” (p. 21).
27. Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, p. 1192.
28. “To enjoy, to vegetate / Will take me down to the lowest level”—he says, refusing to
stop at what he has achieved (p. 376).
29. Fenomenologiia, p. 49.
30. See E. Blokh [Bloch], Tiubingenskoe vvedenie v filosofiiu (Ekaterinburg, 1997), p. 90.
31. Compare ibid., p. 90.
32. Ibid., p. 96.
33. Ibid., p. 105. Let us note that subsequently the theme of the interconnection between
The Phenomenology of Spirit and The Divine Comedy was picked up by American
researchers (see J. Dobbins and P. Fuss, “The Silhouette of Dante in Hegel’s Phenomenology
of Spirit,” Clio, vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 387–413).
34. E. Bloch, Subjekt-Objekt: Erläuterungen zu Hegel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1962), pp.
137–38.
35. Bloch, of course, also devotes much time to criticizing the Platonic anamnesis in the
same spirit—not forgetting, however, to make clear that Plato himself was the creator of a
utopia who strove to realize his ideas in Syracuse (see, for example, J. Habermas, p. 148
<<“Op. cit.”—but no reference to any work by Habermas anywhere!>>; Experimentum
mundi, p. 163 <<incomplete reference>>).
36. Fenomenologiia, p. 33.
37. Bloch, Subjekt-Objekt, p. 125.
38. Here it is impossible to miss the common ground between certain of Bloch’s
philosophical constructions and contemporary French philosophy.
39. “Reality as grasped from a Marxist point of view, . . . though something
interconnected, is so only as a mediated break, and the process of reality as such, when
investigated from a Marxist point of view, is still open and therefore objectively
fragmentary” (E. Blokh, “Marksizm i poeziia,” Kosmopolis, no. 4(10), 2004–5, p. 140).
40. Bloch, Subjekt-Objekt, p. 508. Compare also p. 398.
41. All this may also find expression in Bloch in sociophilosophical terms: “The factor of
subjective contradiction, though only together with the contradiction that has arisen
objectively within the history of the class struggle, supplements the material dialectic. This
subjectively negative violence leads by a revolutionary path away from simple catastrophe,
which would be an ordinary negation: as a strengthening of the productive, explosive
character of objective contradictions” (Bloch, Subjekt-Objekt, p. 150).
42. “So-That reaches its What and the last What reaches the first So-That (and this is
identity, the goal of the utopian process—I.B.) not as the closing of a circle, but rather as a
sheer bolt of lightning that at some time will transfix its surroundings” (E. Bloch, Tübinger
Einleitung in die Philosophie, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1963–64, p. 277).
43. M. Heidegger, Hegels Begriff der Erfahrung (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1977), pp. 150,
154.
44. Bloch, Tübinger Einleitung, p. 75.
45. Compare the interpretation of “devilish” literary characters as the alter egos of heroes
(for example, the image of the devil in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov or Kafka’s
fragment The Truth About Sancho Panza, where Don Quixote is depicted as a devil that has
taken possession of Sancho).
46. “The world,” Goethe once observed in conversation with Sulpiz Boisserée, “is an
organ whose pedals are pressed by the devil” (E. Schmidt, “Einleitung,” in Aufsätze zu
Goethes “Faust I”, ed. W. Keller [Darmstadt, 1974], p. 17).
47. This active diabolic character is reflected more precisely in the translation by N.
Kholodkovskii: “Man is weak; submitting to destiny, / He is glad to seek rest, so / I shall give
him a restless traveling companion: / Like a devil, needling him, let him arouse man to
action!”
48. In a letter to Goethe dated June 26, 1797. See I.-V. Gete and F. Shiller, Perepiska, vol.
1, p. 366.
49. The following translation by A. Revich is not bad but somewhat approximate: “When
in the boundlessness of nature, / Where all endlessly flows, / Rise up innumerable domes /
And each dome grows into a dome, / Then the star and the miserable worm / Are equal
before the might of being, / And the world’s whole crush / Seems to us rest in God” (I.-V.
Gete, Sobr. soch. v 10-ti tt., vol. 1 [Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1975], p. 463). In
Goethe, of course, the “crush” does not seem but simply is eternal rest in God. <<I can’t find
an existing English translation of this poem>>
50. J.W. Goethe, Ernst Stiedenroth: Psychologie zur Erklärung der Seelenerscheinungen
(1824), in Weimarer Ausgave. II. Abt., vol. 11, p. 74.
51. An attentive reading of the dialogue written by Ekkerman makes it clear that Goethe
adhered there rather to a Kantian interpretation of dialectics as the “logic of appearances.”
However, this does not mean that the text of Ekkerman’s book should be compared directly
with the philosophical ideas in Faust; it is important only to show the multifaceted nature of
Goethe’s views.
52. While Bloch asserts that Goethe simply failed fully to comprehend Hegel, for Lukács
Goethe’s philosophical thought embodies the evolution of Enlightenment rationalism into
dialectics.
53. Let us note that it is possible to speak of two types of dialectics only on the basis of a
certain conventional schema, which is used by Bloch but does not have to be applied to the
analysis of Goethe’s work.
54. “It is not easy to express in words that which should be presented to the gaze”—
Goethe writes to Hegel on October 7, 1820, sending him the fruits of his natural-scientific
searchings (G.V.F. Gegel_’, Raboty raznykh let. V 2-kh tt., vol. 2 [Moscow: Mysl_’, 1973], p.
384).
55. Indeed, the demonic was attractive in Goethe’s time (for Hoffman, Kleist, Jean Paul)
and then, after Nerval (the translator of Faust into French) would become a formative motif
of French literature (Baudelaire, Lautréamont).
56. The principle of the “invisible hand” of Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith, which
describes the counterintuitive logic of the market (where social well-being is achieved only
when people forget about it and look after only their own interests), in a certain sense
resembles Mephistophelian dialectics. In Faust, of course, this theme bears no direct relation
to “economic” motifs.
57. B. Spinoza, Kratkii traktat o Boge, cheloveke i ego schast_’e, Ch. XXV (On Devils), in
Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Moscow, 1957).
58. G.V.F. Gegel_’, Filosofiia prava (Moscow, 1990), p. 240.
59. Let us note that Theodor Adorno, for example, refused to understand Faust in a neoKantian spirit; he considered, however, that the moving force in Faust is not the laws of
dialectics but the power of oblivion, which enables the chief hero to live and act (T.W.
Adorno, “Zur Schlußszene des Faust,” in Noten zur Literatur II [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1961],
pp. 7–18).
60. See V. Oittinen, “Die ‘ontologische Wende’ von Lukács und seine FaustInterpretation,” in Frank Benseler and Werner Jung, ed., Lukács 2001. Jahrbuch der
Internationalen Georg-Lukács-Gesellschaft (Bielefeld, 2001), pp. 67–99. Oittinen shows, in
particular, to what extent the Hegelian concept of the “cunning of reason” is inapplicable to
the justification of Stalinist and fascist terror and how inconsistent Lukács was in this case in
refusing to apply the principles of the Hegelian philosophy of history to the analysis of
fascism. Bloch, for his part, distinguishes between barren and empty negativity
(“Mephistopheles without Faust”) and creative negativity, referring in particular (see Blokh,
Tiubingenskoe, p. 112) to a fragment from the Esthetics in which Hegel writes of the low
esthetic value of the depiction of absolute evil, difference, or negativity—in the final
analysis, of the devil. This distinction enables us to take a more subtle approach in appraising
the evil principle in Goethe and Hegel: evil can be either productive or destructive. It is
precisely hypertrophied, “abstract,” barren negativity that Bloch associates with fascist (but
not with communist!) terror.
61. W. Vosskamp, “‘Hochstes Exemplar des utopischen Menschen’: Ernst Bloch und
Goethes Faust,”
Deutsche
Vierteljahrsschrift
für Literaturwissenschaft
und
Geistesgeschichte, 1985, vol. 59, no. 4, pp. 676–87.
62. There is another standard Hegelian objection: a concrete gestalt of consciousness
(however unique it may be), while a self-sufficient and integral form, nonetheless contains
within itself “the rudiment of its own death” (Entsiklopediia, § 92)—that is, of transition to a
new and higher level.
63. See K. Popper, Otkrytoe obshchestvo i ego vragi. V 2-kh tt. (Moscow, 1992); Zh. [J.]
Derrida, Pozitsii (Moscow, 2007). (Of course, Derrida’s attitude toward Hegel is much more
complex, but the commonplaces of his philosophy are associated today with the rejection of
dialectical teleology and of the “economy” of Hegelian sublation.) Hegel is defended against
accusations of totalitarianism and conservatism by, in particular, Marcuse (G. Markuze,
Razum i revoliutsiia, St. Petersburg 2002).
64. Bloch, Subjekt-Objekt, p. 172.
65. Let us listen to Hegel’s description of philosophical cognition: “This is a process that
creates its moments for itself and passes through them, and all this movement as a whole
constitutes the positive and its truth. This truth, consequently, also contains in equal measure
the negative—that which should be called false if it could be regarded as something that must
be abstracted from” (p. 29). Here Hegel indicates both that the stages of the path of
consciousness are created and that the negative is a necessary element of philosophical
movement.
66. Let us note that Goethe uses the word Taumel (intoxication, ecstasy), and it is precisely
this word that Hegel uses in the preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit when in describing
cognition in concepts he speaks of the true (that is, dialectical movement) as a Bacchic
ecstasy whose participants are all intoxicated (p. 30).
67. Compare Entsiklopediia filosofskikh nauk, §§ 382–3.
68. Fenomenologiia, p. 383.
69. Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, p. 1195. (Compare the ending of Faust: Das
Unzulängliche, / Hier wird’s Ereignis (in Bloch: “das Unzulängliche als werden zum
Ereignis”).
70. Wieland, Schein—Kritik—Utopie, p. 91.
71. He also makes the important remark that literary depiction of the instant is
fundamentally constrained—it is only a presentiment of the utopian but not its content.
Jameson also writes that according to Bloch Faust never experiences the decisive instant in
reality, but merely imagines it, and the conditional mood in which he clothes his words is
akin to myth or fiction. In this sense, the utopian impulse resembles allegory: it always refers
to something else; it can never be found directly; it “speaks” only through images,
summoning us to supplement, improve, and interpret them.
72. Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, p. 1196.
73. Wieland, Schein—Kritik—Utopie, p. 65. On the whole, Wieland interprets the sphere
of artistic manifestation (Schein) in the spirit of Adorno, as an “irremovable” residue that
resists dialectical totalization.
74. Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, pp. 1190–91.
75. The words of the Apostle Paul were very important for the metaphysics of Bloch’s
instant: “I tell you a mystery: we shall not all die, but we shall all be changed suddenly, in the
twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be
raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed” (1 Corinthians 15:51–52).
76. Den letzten, schlechten, leeren Augenblick, / Der Arme wünscht ihn festzuhalten. / Der
mir so kräftig widerstand, / Die Zeit wird Herr, der Greis hier liegt im Sand. / Die Uhr steht
still-77. Faust, p. 420.
78. Ibid., p. 282.
79. Fenomenologiia, p. 399.
80. Wieland, Schein—Kritik—Utopie, p. 51.
81. Faust, p. 432.
82. Ibid., p. 435.
83. Ibid., p. 432.
84. Fenomenologiia, p. 97.
85. Compare also the mention of Don Juan and Faust in Rosenzweig in connection with
the “absolute hero” of modern tragedy: F. Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlösung, p. 235.
<<Full reference missing>>
86. E. Bloch, “Don Giovanni,” Das Unterhaltungsblatt der Vossischen Zeitung, no. 12, 14
January 1928. Partly reprinted as: “Don Giovanni, alle Frauen und die Hochzeit,” in Bloch,
Das Prinzip Hoffnung, pp. 1180–88.
87. Briefe, vol. 1, p. 287.
88. It was precisely for this that Bloch and his supporters were subsequently unjustly
rebuked by the well-known German sociologist Helmut Schelsky (H. Schelsky, Die Hoffnung
Blochs. Kritik der marxistischen Existenzphilosophie eines Jugendbewegten [Stuttgart: KlettCotta, 1979]). Schelsky asserts that intoxicated passion for revolution and millennarian
anticipation of a new order disorient a person and undermine his ability to deal appropriately
with illusions, irrespective of the nature of the latter—be they fascist illusions (to which
Schelsky himself fell prey in his youth) or communist ones.
89. Compare also the deliberations with which Walter Benjamin concludes his essay on
surrealism: V. Ben_’iamin, “Siurrealizm,” NLO, 2004, no. 68, p. 16.
90. Compare the characterization of Dutch painting in the Lectures on Esthetics: Gegel_’,
Estetika, vol. 2 (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1969), pp. 309–12.
91. Very provisionally, we may designate this project “European man in the modern age”
or “utopian consciousness”; it is not a matter of designations.
92. Compare, for example, the passage from The Phenomenology of Spirit (pp. 380–81)
where revealed religion is described as the birthplace of the highest form of spirit, which
incorporated into itself all the torments and longings of the preceding stages.
93. Problems specific to literary studies merit separate treatment. It may be said that in The
Phenomenology of Spirit the old theoretical problem of the essential properties of literary
types finds a very original solution in the framework of the development and mutual
transition of forms of consciousness. The technology for the construction of “gestalts” at the
abstract-philosophical level often makes contact with the technology of literary typization.
(This is especially noticeable where Hegel interprets literary images—in particular,
Sophocles’ Antigone and Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew.) I have already discussed above how
the interesting question of the temporal structure and scenic action of Faust can also be posed
in light of The Phenomenology of Spirit. In the context of Hegelian constructions these
exclusively literary aspects obtain a special, unexpected meaning, whose explication,
however, is wholly beyond the bounds of my investigation.
94. “In the phenomenology of spirit, direct consciousness is also first and direct in science,
and therefore serves as a premise; in logic, by contrast, the premise is that which was the
result of the aforementioned investigation—the idea as pure knowledge” (G.V.F. Gegel_’,
Nauka logiki. V 3-kh tt., vol. 1 [Moscow: Mysl_’, 1970], p. 125). See also I.A. Boldyrev,
“Dialektika bytiia i nichto v ‘Nauke logiki’ Gegelia: osnovnye cherty i problemy
spekuliativnogo metoda,” Vestnik MGU, Ser. 7. Filosofiia, 2006, no. 3, pp. 3–10.