GOETHE & THE DEVIL

Presentation 2

Lectures, coordinator: Paul Bijl

Seminar group 4: Flore Janssen
Author: Helena Valanzuela Villena
Utrecht University
Literary History 3
 Who was Goethe?
• Born August 28, 1749, Frankfurt am Main [Germany].
• German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, critic, and
amateur artist.
• He is widely regarded as the greatest and most influential writer in the German
language,
• Literary work: Götz von Berlichingen (1773), The Sorrows of Young Werther
(1774), Faust (1808) etc.
 MEPHISTO'S PRINCIPLES: ON THE
CONSTRUCTION OF EVIL IN GOETHE'S
FAUST I

Author(s): Peter-André Alt

Source: The Modern Language Review , Vol. 106, No. 1 (January 2011),
pp. 149-163
Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association
 KEY WORDS
• Devil
• Evil
• Enlightenment
• Images
• Physique
• Oposites/Contrast/Contradiction
KEY PASSAGES FROM THE ARTICLE THAT MAKE THE
ARGUMENT VISIBLE

•Early modern period→ (Generally) endows the Devil with a visual

representation.
• The eighteenth-century→ Abstains from picturing evil.
• J. C. Gottsched→ Finds fault with Tasso’s, Marino’s, and Milton’s use of the
Devil because in his view they illustrate a principle inaccessible to human
sensibility. must not make itself the servant of superstition by clothing its objects
in images.
•Meier→ Devil has been historically outdated by the Enlightenment, which
returns to the concepts behind the images, and has been reduced, as he puts it, to
material for satire (‘Stof Zur Satyre’, p. 168).
RATIONALISM→ The pact as the element of a contractual form is not only
localized outside all civil conceptions of law but also beyond the morally
thinkable.

For Meier, belief in the Devil has been historically outdated by the
Enlightenment, (…) it has been reduced, as he puts it, to material for
satire.

Increasingly the Devil’s figure is noticed as a product of cultural

imagination by the Age of Reason.
 1750
Zedler’s Universal-Lexikon remarks
distance on the attribution to the Devil of a concrete physique
SO, the issue at stake is no longer the objectifying concretion of the devil in
the body BUT the MOMENT OF CULTURAL REPRESENTATION.

ENLIGHTENMENT→ the Devil’s body is of interest only as an object of aesthetic depiction, eclipsing
the question of his metaphysical evidential. In a virtually programmatic way, Zedler’s encyclopedia
considers the mythical source of the Devil’s imagination from a purely technical perspective. It
constitutes an order of cultural representation which has nothing in common with objective questions
of faith.
 Age of reason→ Devil dies

• The tales, the moral weeklies don’t need him. The physical representation of him only exists in the
novels, the most advanced genre. However, he only exists as a satirical element.
• Jean-Paul→ Attacks the hypotheses of metaphysical reasoning obliges the philosophically trained
Devil to recognize himself as the product of the faculty of imagination. The satire’s apogee consists of
a scene in which the Devil, taking part in a public masque, reveals himself to a surprised audience as a
chimera of metaphysical thought.
• Kant’s Kritik der Reinen Vernunft → Devil is not a figure but a form of the intuition of evil
• Erhard→ the Devil is not a real character but a representation of absolute evil that exists only to
provide absolute good, via the mechanism of diffenksrentiation from logical reality. us the ‘Apology
for the Devil’ fashions itself as the final assault on Satan’s body and his metaphysical grounding.
DEVIL AS A REPRESENTATION OF THE ABSOLUTE EVIL THAT EXISTS ONLY TO
PROVIDE ABSOLUTE GOOD.
 • Enlightenment retains the Devil solely through the
means of thinking the good. Its exorcism is the
intellectual consequence of critically liberating
humanity from the ‘Unmündigkeit’ of superstition.

❑ Devil’s body is shown at all, undergoes a profound

metamorphosis. Jean Paul’s self-doubting messenger of hell knows
his body to be a child of the human soul created by the imagination
(Jean-Paul).
❑ Heine→ Satan as an old acquaintance, courteous and worldly-
wise. Once the Devil has become part of the family he loses his
former frightening appearance; he is menacing because he
resembles man, who invented him to personify evil.
❑ However, such a statement does not mean that the Devil is
removed from literature’s repertoire in the process of
Enlightenment. (Goethe’s Faust, Satan’s old figure loses its aura
and new forms of its literary staging can emerge)
 QUESTIONS

• What would you say is the modern concept of

the devil?
• Could the concept of the devil be related with
the philosophy of Nietzche?
 GOETHE’S MEPHISTO: EVIL’S RHETORICAL SELF-
DEFINITION

• Goethe in Mephisto is available to mix all the different conceptions. By this, I don’t mean that you can
see every conception. By this, I mean that the loopholes of the demon’s conception through time can
be seen.
• Peter Michelsen→ Mephisto as a player, representing not a principle antagonistic to the divine but a
subordinate devil, curiously entangled in the human world and its conceptions. This entanglement
emerges as the texture of different self-fashionings which blur Mephisto’s intellectual profile in a
chameleon-like manner
• Medieval drama: The Devil is a non-tragic character since the rift between God and himself is passed,
and every new disagreement with the creator signifies a repetition of their ancient quarrel.
 An examination of Mephisto’s definitions in the Faust tragedy reveals two formal
classificatory rules:

CONTRADICTION
• Contradiction’ designates the pleasure of
objection and the joy of negation as well as a
structure that is ambivalent and heterogeneous
in itself.
• Accordingly, in the Prologue in Heaven, he enters
the stage as God’s counterpart, who cynically
characterizes humankind yet is not without
compassion for their earthly troubles.
• Devil divided in himself, his rhetoric oscillating
between rebellion and resignation.
CONSTRAINT
• Refers to the genuinely enlightened restrictions
placed on Mephisto’s actions.
• In the Prologue, he is not only God’s opponent
but also his servant, a subordinate from among
God’s servants. The role of a servant also clearly
determines Mephisto’s part in the betting
arrangement—the game for Faust’s soul—as it is
modeled on the biblical Job narrative. He only
may appear free as God explains, emphasizing
that Goethe’s Prologue in Heaven follows the law
of theodicy.
• Thomas → Stresses that evil complies with the logic of a world architecture whose perfection
has been made possible only by its darker side.

Puntos de
• Leibniz→ Evil is not a rupture of nature’s order, but an element intended by the creator,
generating its rationality using grounding it in a differential logic. He argues that God did not fight
Referencia
evil with miracles because he knew that good could exist only in relation to a counterpart.

• Christian Wolff → God would need evil as a means to establish good and to balance its different
forces. Evil points to the foundational ground of good in a nature that has been ordered.

Buscar en las notas de diapositiva siguientes

Again, through reason, the rationalism of the Enlightenment explains the existence of the devil.
temas a tener en cuenta para hablar
Evil exists because without it good would not do it. Evil is a branch of good, a derivative tainted by
its imperfect grounding, a shadow without identity
Mephisto adopts theodicy’s interpretative pattern as well.

• Faust asks him directly: Who are you?

• Mephisto: Part of that power | Which always wants evil and always creates good.

He is a part because he makes his appearance only as a

subordinate member of the netherworld and not as the
Prince of Darkness.

He is a ‘part’, because to enlightened logic evil’s

representative embodies the deficiency which only
good can remedy.
 GOETHE DEFINING EVIL
1. Quality of denial: 'I am the spirit that always denies.
Mephisto denies God’s command and His law, as the serpent of paradise did.

2. Sin and destruction. Goethe in 1587 Faust Historia prepare a dire death for its hero, who had closed a
deal with the Devil. In the end, he is torn to pieces by the powers of hell. For Goethe, the signifiers of
negation and death are in the end joined by the image of the creation myth. Even Mephisto describes himself
as the origin of the world.

This final attempt at self-definition may still present Mephisto as something particular. However, at the same
time, the synecdoche furnishes him with a cosmological dimension. Here evil claims the right to be at the
origin of all things.

He appears as a Materialist→ Enjoying the temporal loss of self in the intoxication of the Walpurgis Nigh
Buscar en las notas de diapositiva siguientes
AND
temas a tener en cuenta para hablar
Stickler who asks for the contract to be signed, and as casual man of the world, allowed to operate as cynical
maître de plaisir like his model Mephostophiles from the Historia.
epresentaciones hstóricas
THE DEVIL AND THE PERFORMANCE: GOETHE’S CANCELLED
BLACK MASS

The sketch of the black mass which Goethe decided not to publish depicts the powerful
eruption of evil’s subversive, paradoxical, and disordering energies set free by the
blasphemous ritual.

Here, evil does not bind itself to contents but to forms which under the law of the
Blocksberg rite continually repeat themselves. Correspondingly, Mephisto does not
embody attitudes of materialism, cynicism, and blasphemy but Kantian forms of
intuiting evil—a priori principles ready to be filled with different contents.
 CONCLUSION
What is left of evil in Faust once the Devil has lost his body
and the principle of evil has been successively internalized
under the sign of a transformation in meaning?
Evil → Constructions of meaning that are aesthetic in character. Such an evil does not designate good’s
Other. It constitutes no dark counter-world inhabited by the believers’ secret desires.

Mephisto is a Devil that has survived Enlightenment’s exorcism.

- Faust, does not appear as an embodiment of evil that has become obsolete but as its rhetorical
figuration.
- Evil has lost its body. It must be represented in an aesthetically new way.

Goethe’s Mephisto Rhetoricizing evil.

- This is based on a perspective that makes Mephisto’s speech the medium of changing positions,
judgements, and role-fashionings.
- As such, it becomes clear that Mephisto illustrates evil through a language of perspective.
- It is the instrument of dissolution and dispersion, of generating paradox and recombination, of
exploding and recreating all entities of value linked to the concepts of morality and reason.
 Mephisto’s rhetoric reflects an evil that is deconstruction’s
agent.

Goethe contributes to this theory by making the diabolical visible

as an aesthetic moment outside evil’s traditional impersonations.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Colaboradores de los proyectos Wikimedia. "Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Wikipedia, la
enciclopedia libre". Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre, 4 de mayo de
2003, es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Wolfgang_von_Goethe. Accedido el 14 de febrero de 2022.

- On Goethe: Peter-André Alt, “Mephisto’s Principles: On the Construction of Evil in Goethe’s Faust
I.” The Modern Language Review106.1 (2011): 149-163.