After reading Faust Part One and The Sorrows of Young Werther
Besides the desolate but beautiful love story of Werther and the struggling battle of Faust’s innerself, I find another aspect of these two books intriguing: do Werther and Faust fit into the enlightenment movement?
By the definition of enlightenment provided by Kant, enlightenment is “Have courage to use your own reason” (Kant). Werther and Faust definitely dare to think and dare to challenge. Werther follows his own tutelage and goes to small town to pursue his artistic expression and his diary is always filled with questions challenging common beliefs. For example, Werther said, “I honour religion...But --- can it, must it, be that for everyone?” (Goethe,77). Werther challenges the fananticality of religion by saying that “if the chalice was too bitter for the human lips of the God of heaven why should I play a bragging part and pretend I find it sweet?” (Goethe, 77). Another aspect of showing his enlightenment is Werther measures things by its consequences. For example, when Werther talks about the power, he said, “who is the top man? The one who oversees all others and is powerful or cunning enough to harness their energies and passions for the execution of his own”(Goethe,56). Faust is a man of extreme knowledge and reasons. One example is when Margareta asks him about god, he responds: “Call it joy, or your heart, or love, or God! I have no name for it, the feeling’s all there is”(Goethe). This is consistent of what enlightened Nathan said in the three rings parable in Nathan the Wise. Werther and Faust indeed are enlightened men. However, they also challenge the concepts of enlightenment: the extreme rationalism.
Enlightenment thinkers don’t allow emotions. They believe that love is unreasonable. However, after reading Werther and Faust, I believe it depends. If emotions and love become fanatical and become the tutelage that drives every decision, then this kind of emotion should be avoided. But if emotions and love do not control you, if they separate from everyday reasoning, but serve as a way to elevate spiritual world, then I believe it is reasonable. I think Werther’s deep emotions to life, to art are reasonable. They enrich Werther’s mind and offer him independent decision so that Werther can enjoy himself. However, Werther’s love to Lotte is unreasonable. His love is so fanatical that creates illusions. This love manipulates Werther’s decisions and he sees everything with his love life. He blindly connected the story of farmhand killing the boyfriend of his love one with himself and then assumes that someone must die among himself, Albert and Lotte, which incurs his final suicide. In the contrast, I believe Faust’s love is reasonable. He constantly questions himself if he is carried away by Mephistopheles and his loved ones and he remains his reasonability. For example, when Margreta asks him if he can be Christian, he sticks to his own belief. This love gives Faust a taste of love that he, as a man of absolute rationalism, has never tatsted and it enriches himself with more spiritual satisfaction while he did not lose himself. I think Faust is a demonstration of the new kind of enlightenment that is rational but also reasonably emotional.
Since Werther and Faust are epitome of Goethe himself, I believe that Goethe agrees with the general statement of enlightenment that is bringing rationality. But he also refines it by proposing the importance of emotions and love.
Works Cited:
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang., and David Luke. Faust: Part One. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang., and David Constantine. The Sorrows of Young Werther. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. Print.
Kant, Immanuel. "What Is Enlightenment." N.p., n.d. Web. 02 July 2017.