Fascination with the relationship between knowledge and power never dies. In just about every intellectual tradition, in essentially every documented

One Must Imagine Faust Happy | The Point Magazine

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2022-09-26 20:00:07

Fascination with the relationship between knowledge and power never dies. In just about every intellectual tradition, in essentially every documented era, the topic bristles through the canon, though the European tradition appears especially fixated upon it. Are the two domains compatible? Are they even distinct? Does the latter corrupt the former? While the philosophical treatments are perhaps the most systematic, it is literary representations that I find most alluring.

Take Victor Frankenstein, the hero (antihero?) of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, who sought to fuse the dreams of mystical alchemist sages with the humdrum empiricism of the lab tech. The result, predictably for a moral fable, was the destruction of the creator, the creation and everything in between. The subtitle of Shelley’s novel was “The Modern Prometheus.” This Greek mythological namesake brought fire down to the humans despite a direct prohibition from Zeus against any such meddling. (It did not end well for Prometheus: eagles, livers.) But of all the cautionary tales about the perils of the human temptation to wisdom there is one I keep coming back to: that of the late medieval scholar Faust, who, upon finding the life of the scholar a little tedious, ends up selling his soul to Mephistopheles for greater knowledge and power. When the story is represented and re-represented by the likes of Christopher Marlowe, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Charles Gounod, Mikhail Bulgakov, Thomas Mann and countless others, it is always a tragedy.

Of course, these are all fictions fixated on the problem of human (or, in the case of Prometheus, Titan) hubris abutting against the godhead. In our secular age—one is repeatedly told that it is indeed a secular age—we are supposedly beyond the superstitious fear of new knowledge and the dangers it might wreak upon the world. There’s a lot to argue against in that nugget of conventional wisdom, but I focus here on a key facet of the Faust story and its literary kin: that corruption in discovery hobbles true wisdom.

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