Title: "Mephiltopheles and the Pupil" (1828) by Eugene Delacroix, a depiction of Faust and Mephistopheles.A 1918 poster for Goethe's Faust by Richard Roland Holst, the story of a main who strives to learn everything that can be known so to gain power over the physical world. |
“Doctor Faust the polymath is — as was Goethe the polymath — a man of "a hundred scholarly disciplines" [and] also a natural scientist.”
Hamlet (by Shakespeare)
3,641 editions published between 1603 and 2009 in 72 languages and held by 6,941 libraries worldwide
Faust (by Goethe)
4,422 editions published between 1787 and 2008 in 55 languages and held by 5,204 libraries worldwide
Wagner, a famed sorcerer's former student, creating Homunculus (life) in the chemical laboratory.A statue of Faust and Mephistopheles. |
See main: Thermodynamics of Goethe's FaustIn an 1892 lecture, titled "Goethe's Presentiments of Coming Scientific Ideas", held in the General Assembly of the Goethe Society in Weimar, German physician and physicist Hermann Helmholtz attempted to explain Goethe's Faust through the lens of thermodynamics. [1] In this speech, Helmholtz postulates that Goethe was aware of the basics of the conservation of energy and argues that the ebb and flow of life, and its relation to death, has an explanation in the total constancy of energy or active force, for both animate and inanimate life.
A scene of Faust from the 1865 edition. [6](link) |
“To grant me a vision of nature's forces that bind the world, all its seeds and sources and innermost life... all this I shall see... and stop peddling in words that mean nothing to me.”
(Daß ich erkenne was die Welt im Innersten zusammenhält... Schau alle Wirkenskraft und Samen... und tu nicht mehr in Worten kramen.)— Faust, lines 382-5 (link)
“Until one is committed there is always hesitancy, a chance to draw back. Always ineffectiveness concerning all acts of initiative and creation. There is one elementary truth—the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans—that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one, that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come this way. Whatever you can do or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it, begin it now.”
— Faust
“I regard my work on alchemy as a sign of my inner relationship to Goethe. Goethe’s secret was that he was in the grip of that process of archetypal transformation that has gone on through the centuries. He regarded his Faust as an opus magnum or divinum. He called it his ‘main business’, and his whole life was enacted with the framework of this drama.”— Carl Jung (c.1940), Swiss psychologist
“For myself, the pleasure of the work had always provided justification enough for doing it. Sitting at my desk or at some café table, I manipulate mathematical expressions and feel like Faust playing with his pentagrams before Mephistopheles arrives.”— Steven Weinberg (1992), Dreams of a Final Theory[9]