A Life Beyond Go(O)D: A Criticism of Wisdom and the Foundation of a Poetic Conception of Life Based on Goethe’s Faust

Abstract

Proem. There are two and just two ways of reflecting upon an intellectual or artistic work: the first one is to figure out its inner structure, the second, to bring to light the theoretical or practical problems that it entails. The first reflection is the reader’s, the second is the thinker’s, and it seeks to explain an idea more than a dramatic framework or a previous content, which is why it deserves to be considered philosophic stricto sensu. Such a reading will be developed thereinafter through the opposition between wisdom and sensibleness, which are the respective grounds of what will be called the metaphysical and the poetical conceptions of man’s nature and life. Briefly, a metaphysical conception of man claims that the end of life is the fusion of him with the transcendent ground of reality, which has been traditionally identified with God (reason whereby that conception is finally akin to religiosity); instead, the poetical conception states that whichever end in life is determined by the immanent condition of man’s being, that is to say, finitude. According to the general orientation of these lines, the originality of Goethe’s Faust lies in its having fathomed the implications of the poetical conception in order to assume a new attitude towards finitude, which is why the work is a milliary stone both for the history of Western literature and for the philosophical conceptions of man.