Goethe's Faust and late Shakespeare [Generativity Part 2]

Yesterday I'd posted On the nature of love, two unusual songs: Somebody to Love, I Will Always Love You [Generativity Part 1]. During that post I'd mentioned the late romances of Shakespeare and Goethe's Faust. I decided to continue the discussion with Claude, starting with those texts.

With Shakespeare's The Tempest in play it was natural for me to segue to Forbidden Planet, the 1956 science fiction film based on it. That, in turn, led me to current AI doomsters, which is the subject of a piece I published in 3 Quarks Daily back in 2021: From “Forbidden Planet” to “The Terminator”: 1950s techno-utopia and the dystopian future. And that led to this final observation:

But, you know, when I look at our current moment, I can see it as a failure of generativity at the society-wide cultural level. Yes, this technology is wonderful and creative, but it may have a human cost – something I’ve been exploring in terms of an opposition between Homo economicus and Homo ludens. We’re going to need Homo ludens to restore generative to the culture.

That's a profound insight that brings us full circle to your earlier observations about generativity. You're suggesting that our current AI moment represents a kind of cultural stagnation masquerading as innovation - the very thing Erikson warned about when generativity fails.

The Homo economicus vs. Homo ludens distinction is particularly sharp here. Homo economicus builds AI systems primarily to optimize, extract value, automate labor, and increase efficiency - essentially treating human creativity and intelligence as resources to be replaced or enhanced for economic gain. It's a fundamentally extractive rather than generative relationship with technology.

Homo ludens - the playing human - would approach these same technologies with curiosity, creativity, and a spirit of exploration that serves human flourishing rather than just economic optimization. Play is inherently generative because it's about possibilities rather than predetermined outcomes.

Your point about societal-level generativity failure is striking. True generativity is about creating something for the benefit of future generations, but much of our AI development seems driven by shorter-term competitive and economic pressures. We're creating powerful technologies without the generative wisdom to ensure they serve human welfare across generations.

I've put the complete conversation below the asterisks.

* * * * *

Faust

I want to continue with generativity. I’m thinking about Goethe’s Faust. Early in his life he makes a diabolic deal to learn the secrets of the universe. By the end of the story, late in his life Faust is reclaiming land from the sea. He’s become, in effect, a real estate developer. That’s quite a change. But also, it seems to me that’s a generative activity. He’s working for the benefit of his fellows.

That's a brilliant insight into the arc of Faust and a perfect example of how generativity can emerge as the deepest form of human fulfillment, even after a lifetime of other pursuits. In Part I, young Faust is consumed with what we might call narcissistic concerns - his own knowledge, power, and experience. The pact with Mephistopheles is fundamentally about personal gratification, whether intellectual, sensual, or experiential. Even his tragic relationship with Gretchen is largely about his own desires and needs.

But by Part II, elderly Faust has undergone a profound transformation. The land reclamation project represents something entirely different:

From Self to Others: Instead of seeking personal knowledge or pleasure, he's creating something that will benefit future generations - literally making new land where people can live and thrive.

From Consumption to Creation: Rather than taking from the world (knowledge, experience, Gretchen's innocence), he's adding to it, expanding the realm of human possibility.

From Immediate to Enduring: The project isn't about instant gratification but about long-term benefit that will outlast his own life.

This is exactly what Erikson meant by generativity - the shift from "what can I get from life?" to "what can I contribute?" And it's significant that Goethe shows this as Faust's final and most satisfying endeavor. The moment when Faust finally says "Verweile doch, du bist so schön" (Stay, you are so beautiful) isn't when he's experiencing personal pleasure, but when he envisions the future community that will flourish on the reclaimed land.

It's also telling that this generative vision is what finally fulfills the terms of his bargain with Mephistopheles - but in a way that transcends and defeats the diabolic intention. Mephistopheles expected Faust to be satisfied by selfish pleasure, but Faust finds his ultimate satisfaction in service to others. This connects beautifully to your earlier themes about love as something you need to give - Faust's final contentment comes from channeling his energy toward the welfare of future generations rather than his own gratification.

Late Shakespeare

I’m also thinking about Shakespeare late in his career, with the late romances, especially The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. There we have stories that stretch across two generations. The first generation story ends badly for the protagonist, who ends up isolated, embittered, and also. But that is redeemed in the second generation where he displays generosity toward his children and toward the next generation.

That's a profound observation about Shakespeare's late plays and how they embody this generative transformation. Both The Winter's Tale and The Tempest follow this same pattern you've identified - a story of destructive passion or obsession in the first generation that finds redemption through generative acts toward the second generation.

In The Winter's Tale: Leontes' jealous rage destroys his family - he loses his wife Hermione (apparently), banishes his infant daughter Perdita, and causes the death of his son Mamillius. He spends sixteen years in isolation and penance. But the play's redemption comes through his recognition of Perdita when she returns, and his willingness to bless her marriage to Florizell. His generative act - supporting the young couple's love - literally brings Hermione back to life in that stunning final scene.

In The Tempest: Prospero begins consumed with revenge against those who wronged him, using his magic to control and punish. But his transformation comes through his treatment of Miranda and Ferdinand's love. Instead of using his power for continued vengeance, he orchestrates their romance, blesses their union, and ultimately renounces his magic - freeing Ariel, forgiving his enemies, and preparing to return to the human community. Both protagonists move from:

• Destructive control to nurturing facilitation
• Self-centered grievance to other-centered blessing
• Isolation and power to community and vulnerability

What's particularly striking is that in both plays, the generative act specifically involves blessing the romantic love of the younger generation. The older men don't just tolerate the young people's love - they actively facilitate and celebrate it. This suggests that generativity isn't just about creating something for the future, but about recognizing that the future belongs to others and finding joy in that fact.

Shakespeare himself was writing these plays late in his career, perhaps reflecting his own movement toward this generative perspective - creating works that celebrate renewal, forgiveness, and the passing of the torch to new generations.

Here’s an essay I wrote some years about Shakespeare in his life cycle. You’ll notice that I reference Erik Erikson, but also a lot of other work in psychology.

[Note: I linked to that essay in my introduction.]

This is a fascinating and comprehensive essay that brilliantly connects your earlier observations about generativity in Shakespeare's late plays to a much broader psychological and cultural analysis. Your core insight - that Prospero represents Shakespeare's integration of both masculine and feminine principles - illuminates exactly what you were noticing about The Winter's Tale and The Tempest.

Key connections to our earlier discussion:

Generativity Beyond Middle Age: Your analysis challenges Erikson's age boundaries. While Erikson placed generativity in middle age (40-65), you show Shakespeare's protagonists moving toward generative action across different life stages - and the Jefferson Airplane song suggests young people also feel this drive to give love.

The Triad Structure: Your comparative analysis of Much Ado, Othello, and The Winter's Tale - three treatments of male ambivalence about female sexuality - is brilliant. The progression from external mentors/deceivers to internalized conflict to resolution mirrors the developmental pattern you identified.

Prospero as Integration: Your argument that Prospero is "both mother and father to Miranda" perfectly captures what we discussed about the late romances. He embodies both:

• A "male ethic of rights and revenge"
• A "female ethic of responsibility and relatedness"

Cultural Evolution: Your broader thesis - that Shakespeare helped make the modern nuclear family "psychologically possible" - connects to our discussion of how Eastern spiritual practices evolved in Western culture. Just as tantric concepts were adapted for Western relationship needs, Shakespeare was creating psychological templates for new family structures.

Rereading Goethe’s Faust 6: Allegory Alert

At the moment I’m reading an article about the US Military by James Fallows. It has no particular connection with Faust beyond the fact the Goethe himself spent a formative period of his life as a man of practical affairs in the Weimar government. One can’t help but think that Faust was begun, in part, as an effort by Goethe to bridge the gulf between his early fame as a writer and his early experience as an administrator, from “in the beginning was the Word” to “in the beginning was the Deed.”

I say “in part” because no literary work, not even an autobiographical novel, is motivated primarily by the author’s experience. It is motivated by the need write, whatever that is. And the need to write about the whole world, which seems to be the scope of Faust, what is that, where does it come from?

* * * * *

I’ve gotten no farther than I was in my previous post, two weeks ago, when I’d just finished the first part. As it was coming to a climax, such as it was, I was mostly thinking how poorly Gretchen was treated, not by Faust or the townspeople, but by Goethe. He creates this beautiful young woman for what purpose? To be the apple of the eye of a narcissistic megalomaniacal middle-aged intellectual. Faust sees, is smitten, and he barges in, getting her pregnant, leading her to poison her mother, and what does she get out of it? A celestial pardon. She gives herself to His judgment and he pardons her (ll. 4605-4612):

Margaret. Judgment of God! My all to thee I give!

Mephistopheles [to FAUST].

             Come! Come! Along with her I will abandon you.

Margaret. Thine am I, Father! Rescue me!

              Ye angels! Ye heavenly hosts! Appear,

              Encamp about and guard me here!

              Henry! I shrink from you!

Mephistopheles. She is judged!

A Voice [from above]. She is saved!

Mephistopheles [to FAUST]. Here to met

                                           He disappears with FAUST.

A Voice [from within, dying away]. Henry! Henry!

“She is saved!” – that’s it, says the booming voice (I assume it’s booming as the effect would be rather pathetic if it were high-pitched and whining), and Gretchen is redeemed. I wonder how she felt, once she’d heard that she’d been saved. That it had been worthwhile? Fat chance!

Rereading Goethe’s Faust 5: Word and Deed

I have now finished the whole of Part I, and will make some remarks about it in my next post. In this post I will confine my remarks to a key passage at a relatively early point in the drama. Faust has returned to his study after a walk with a rather pedestrian student, Wagner. He is accompanied into his study by a black poodle whose path crossed his near the end of the walk. That poodle will turn out to be Mephistophes, but we’ll leave that for the next post. Faust has decided to try his hand at translating the New Testament, the Gospel According to John, into German (ll. 1218-1237):

Our spirits yearn toward revelation

That nowhere glows more fair, more excellent,

Than here in the New Testament.

To open the fundamental text I'm moved,

With honest feeling, once for all,

To turn the sacred, blest original

Into my German well-beloved.

He opens a volume and applies himself to it.

‘Tis written: “In the beginning was the Word!”

Here now I'm balked! Who'll put me in accord?

It is impossible, the Word so high to prize,

I must translate it otherwise

If I am rightly by the Spirit taught.

‘Tis written: In the beginning was the Thought!

Consider well that line, the first you see,

That your pen may not write too hastily!

Is it then Thought that works, creative, hour by hour?

Thus should it stand: In the beginning was the Power!

Yet even while I write this word, I falter,

For something warns me, this too I shall alter.

The Spirit's helping me! I see now what I need

And write assured: In the beginning was the Deed!

From “word” to “thought” to “power” to “deed.” That progression, according to Prof. Jantz, is crucial to the book and, as such, I would assume that it has attracted a fair amount of learned commentary.

But I am not going to attempt to interpret it. I shall be content to take it at face value. I do note, however, that that progression would have had real force for Goethe himself. Though he is best known as a writer, he was a polymath who had quite a bit of practical experience in the affairs of state. He was only 25 when The Sorrows of Young Werther bought him international fame. A year later he was invited to the Weimar court of Carl August, Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. As Priest explains in a biographical note to the 1941 edition of his translation:

In 1775, in the midst of his literary triumph, he accepted the invitation of Duke Karl August and moved to the court at Weimar, which was to remain his home for the rest of his life. He was reproached by his friends for abandoning his literary talents, and he soon became so involved with duties of state that for the next ten years he spent little time in writing. He was not long in Weimar before he was entrusted with almost all the offices of the tiny State. As councillor of legation, he attended the privy council and the trial of prisoners. He also had charge of the war and finance commissions as well as the administration of roads, mines, and forests. In 1782 he was raised to the nobility by the emperor and a short time later became president of the chamber.

He remained at Weimar for the rest of his life and devoted his last for decades largely to literature.

So, Goethe was fixed in Europe’s mind as a writer, but also had significant practical experience. Word and deed, he knew them both. And as an advisor to the Duke he was familiar with the ways of power. Perhaps we might at this time speculate that the purpose of Faust is to delineate the connections between words, thoughts, power, and deeds. Faust starts the drama as a man of thoughts and words and ends it as one of deeds.

We shall see.

Rereading Goethe’s Faust 4: Going Through My Notes

As the subtitle suggests, this doesn’t have much of anything to do with Faust, but I’m throwing it here anyhow. On the one hand, it has to do with thinking about where I am in life as I embark on my 68th year – my 67th birthday was a couple of weeks ago (December 7). And that’s why I’m rereading the text. Faust changed direction late in (his fictional) life, and that’s what I’m doing, with graffiti as a vehicle for that.

Or at least trying to.

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What I hadn’t realized – or at any rate, I have no memory of having once know it – is that Goethe worked on this text his whole adult life. He started it as young man and finished it in his old age. Given that, I’d think a look at whatever manuscripts we’ve got would be fascinating. And one thing I’m thinking is that Faust’s change of life-direction surely must reflect Goethe’s own change in direction as he matured. Part II, after all, is his addition to the basic legend, which otherwise ends badly for Faust.

Why would I think that? Well, I’ve argued that Shakespeare’s late romances reflect a change in his outlook as he matured (in At the Edge of the Modern, or Why is Prospero Shakespeare's Greatest Creation?). If Shakespeare can do it, why then so could Goethe. And I’ve just read that Oedipus at Colonus is the product of Sophocles’ old age. Makes sense. This is a play, after all, in which Oedipus is valued for what he’s gone through in life, not tossed out in the wild as he was in Oedipus the King.

Sophocles: 497/496 to 406/405 BCE

Antigone: 441 BCE

Oedipus the King: 429 BCE

Oedipus at Colonus: 405-6? BCE

* * * * *

But what has this to do with me going through my notes this morning? I’ve been going through my files on cultural evolution and thinking about bringing my current set of posts – on the direction of cultural evolution – to a close. That will bring a certain closure to the work I’ve been doing throughout my career. Just what kind of closure, that’s tricky, and it’s a secondary matter at this point. I can get around to that in a later post.

For now, suffice it to say, it will bring closure. And a bit of redefinition, too. I’ve always thought of myself as a literary critic with a bunch of other interests. My degree, after all, is in English Lit, though I wrote this strange dissertation full of this other stuff from the cognitive sciences and comparative psychology – a lot of what has come to be called evolutionary psychology in the last two or three decades. It was a literary text, “Kubla Khan”, that set me on my initial lines of inquiry and, though my undergraduate degree is in Philosophy, for all practical purposes, literature became the focus of my undergraduate studies.

Literature could do that because, in those days (the 1960s), it was evolving toward a general study of human life and everything. Literary scholars had come to annex a pile of other disciplines and put them to work in service of literature – philosophy, history, psychology (mainly psychoanalysis), sociology/political science/economics (mostly Marxism of a humanistic sort, loosely conceived). If you wanted to make sense of it all – a Faustian quest which I certainly had as an undergraduate and even perhaps as a graduate student – then literature is what you ended up studying.

Rereading Goethe’s Faust 3: Echoes of Fantasia and Mysteries of the Cosmos

What is this knowledge that Faust seeks?

Still on reset. The quick read-through that I decided upon last post has yet to happen, though I’ve gotten a bit further into the text, and there are hints that something like a quick read might just change my relationship to the text.

We’ll see.

Still, I’ve got some things to say.

Continuing from last time, I raised the question of just what is going on that Goethe needs to frame his story with a conversation between the Lord and Mephistopheles, a device he took from the Book of Job – something his audience surely would recognize. That connection alone tells us this is to be no ordinary story. Let me quote a passage from an old essay I wrote about Disney’s Fantasia:

In 1976 Edward Mendelson published an article on “Encyclopedic Narrative: From Dante to Pynchon” (MLN 91, 1267-1275). It was an attempt to define a genre whose members include Dante’s Divine Comedy, Rablais’, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Goethe’s Faust, Melville’s Moby Dick, Joyce’s Ulysses, and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Somewhat later Franco Moretti was thinking about “monuments,” “sacred texts,” “world texts,” texts he wrote about in Modern Epic (Verso 1996). He’d come upon Mendelson’s article, saw a kinship with his project, and so added Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung’s (note, a musical as well as a narrative work), Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, and a few others to the list. It is in this company that I propose to place Fantasia.

There we have it, in the middle of that paragraph; Faust is an “encyclopedic narrative” in Mendelson’s terms, a “world text” in Moretti’s. It seeks to tell of, to embrace, the whole of the cosmos, and that is a very strange thing to attempt on any terms.

And that ambition is why, I would imagine, Goethe did not attempt to tell this story in novel form. As a formal device, novels are grounded in history, in the flow of events in real time; and furthermore, in the flow of events as seen by a particular narrator. Notice that the oldest novel on Mendelson’s list in Moby Dick, written a few decades after Faust. It’s as though the requisite novelistic technique didn’t exist in Goethe’s time. And, considering all that Melville had to invent and least harness to novelist use (e.g. the tedium of naturalistic cataloguing and exposition) it just barely existed in his time – which wasn’t so far from Goethe’s, though the two texts seem – at the moment at least – a universe apart in sensibility.

So, given his subject, his ambition – he was to work on this text for most of his life – Goethe couldn’t write a novel. He had to choose another form. Had film been available to him, that’s probably what he would have chosen. It would certainly have appealed to his polymath’s sensibilities. Instead, he chose the closet thing he could get to film, the theatre. And he opens his story – once the preliminary throat clearing [Jester, Manager, Poet] is over – with a conversation between the Lord and Mephistopheles from a place long ago far away around the corner in the future. They, or at least the Lord, is above it all, which is where you need to be to present the cosmos.

* * * * *

Which brings us to Fantasia, another of these epics that aims to present IT ALL. No doubt this juxtaposition of a great literary work, one central to The Western Canon! with a feature-length cartoon for kids of all ages, no doubt that’s a bit jarring. I can’t help that. Uncle Walt would have taken it in stride, and so, perhaps, would Cousin Johann.

Rereading Goethe’s Faust 2: An Unnatural Act and a Change of Plan

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Faust, Parts One and Two. George Madison Priest, tr. New York City: Alfred A Knopf. 1963.

It’s been a slog. I’ve read the “Dedication,” the “Prelude on the Stage,” the “Prologue in Heaven,” and the opening scene, “Night, Faust in in Study”, of Part One. All that and I’m only 27 pages in and miles it seems like freakin’ miles before I can put this puppy to bed.

Fortunately, I’ve got a plan. Well, it’s Prof. Jantz’s plan as recalled to me by my friend Peter. Read it twice. First read the whole thing quickly to get an idea of what’s going on. Then go back through it a second time and pick up the details.

I’ll give it a try, though I don’t know whether or not it will work & I don’t recall whether or not I did that when I took the course. Probably not.

What has me worried is that I’m not sure I’ll be able to pick up the flow on the quick first read. Reading verse is tough, it’s just tough. Reading Shakespeare’s like that. Yes, the language is old, and that’s a problem. But the verse is a problem too. It may be brilliant verse, but reading it’s still tough.

We’ll see.

But I’d like to make some remarks anyhow.

First another remark about reading. I’m trained as a literary critic and that means that, as a matter of survival, I had to read texts in a most unnatural way – but what’s ‘natural’ about reading? When you study literature you’re expected to discuss texts in class and later to write about them. That means that you have to read texts with an eye toward coughing up bits of wisdom – well not wisdom perhaps, but something – in discussion. So you can’t just relax yourself into the text. You’ve got to be on the lookout for Important Things, Interesting Things. Heck, you even underline passages and make marginal notes, see:

That’s distracting. Takes you out of the flow. It’s no way to read.

Rereading Goethe’s Faust 1: From man to a cosmic epic

I had forgotten that the Faust legend, and hence Goethe’s epic drama, was ultimately based on the life of a real person, Georg Faust. Priest says so in his introduction, and while there were markings or annotations in the introduction indicating that I’d read it – but I’ve marked it in the course of rereading – I surely must have done so. And Prof. Jantz surely would have mentioned the “real” Faust in an early lecture. But that fact simply did not register.

I’ve put “real” in scare quotes because, at this point, Goethe’s creature is far more real than Georg Faust is.

What does it matter that this text from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries should have a place in a genealogy of memes and mentions going back to a life lived in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries? That real life lived in one era has little bearing on the meaning of a text written in another era, and nothing whatever to do with the devices through which that text is constructed. Georg Faust’s life is no more than background to reading and studying Goethe’s text. No doubt that was why I simply forgot about it.

If I am now remarking on that fact, it is because I have an interest in the mechanisms of culture that I didn’t have back then, my freshman year, when I was, for all practical purposes, a country bumpkin in the big city. It is surely of note that this text, this Faust, started in a life lived, lived during a major transition in Western culture. For the purposes of this post, we’ll say that transition began with the Italian revolution in art that was grounded in the invention of coherent perspective and was completed with the fruition of classical mechanics in the work of Isaac Newton, a period spanning roughly three centuries. The following table lists some representative figures and dates:

Filippo Brunelleschi	Invented one-point linear perspective	1377-1446
Nicholas Copernicus	Championed the heliocentric view of the solar system	1473-1543
Georg Faust	Philosopher, astrologer, prophet, physician	1480-1539?
William Shakespeare	Playwright often credited with inventing the modern sensibility	1564-1616
Galileo Galilei	Astronomer and physicist forced by the Church to recant his advocacy of heliocentrism	1564-1642
Isaac Newton	Synthesized the conceptual foundations of classical physics	1642-1746

Georg Faust was a contemporary of Nicholas Copernicus and died more than two decades before Galileo and Shakespeare were born. He lived in a time when the construction of knowledge was being subject to new methods.

Rereading Goethe’s Faust 0: Assessing my life at the dawn of a new era

I read Goethe’s Faust during my freshman year at Johns Hopkins. Prof. Harold Jantz – “one of the foremost Germanists of his generation” – offered a one-credit course in which that was the only book we read. In English translation, of course. Which was the point of the course, a chance to read one of Western literature’s great books in English translation.

Beyond that, I forget just why I decided to take the course. I’ve got a vague memory that this course was highly regarded – like Prof. Phoebe Stanton’s two-semester introduction to art history – and that’s why I took it. If so, I must have taken it in the Spring semester as I would have had no access to such local knowledge for the Fall semester.

Translated by George Madison Priest

I have little recollection of the course. I believe my friend Peter also took the course, and I remember that Jantz was a relatively short soft-spoken man. I even have a vague memory of a relatively short man in a medium brown tweed suit, with a part in his hair, though he was balding in front. But I wouldn’t put any money on that recollection.

I’m pretty sure I enjoyed the course, but I have no specific memories of it. All I’ve got are these vague memories – but who knows what I would recall under hypnosis? – and the book itself.

We used a 1941 translation by George Madison Priest. Judging from the front matter, it is a revision of a translation that had originally been published in 1932. Priest was born in Kentucky in 1873. He got his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Princeton in 1894 and 96 at Princeton and then got his doctorate at Jena in 1907.

This translation is thus a very Old School production, Ivy League and the Continent. And one that was praised by no less than Thomas Mann. That’s his endorsement down there at the bottom:

It’s not even in print these days – but you can download it for free from Archiv.org – and it wasn’t mentioned at all when I did a web search on the question, “What’s the best English translation of Goethe’s Faust?” Was Thomas Mann’s evaluation wrong? Have fashions changed in translation? Though I don’t actually know this, the latter is likely the case. But the translation still might be a good one by some credible criterion, just a bit old. As I can’t read German I’m in no position to second-guess Thomas Mann.