Soren Kierkegaard

The first thing he read was the great bildungsromanWilhelm Meister, which
he called “masterly” because of “the well-rounded Governance that per-
vades the whole work.” Indeed, as he noted in his journal, it was “really
the whole world captured in a mirror, a true microcosm.” Kierkegaard’s
journal reads as though Heiberg’s brain were speaking.
Of all Goethe’s works, however, it wasFaustthat fascinated Kierkegaard
most and for the longest period of time. As early as mid-March 1835, he
had worked out his first sketches for a portrait of the Faust figure, which
he was studying on the basis of Stieglitz’sThe Saga of Dr. Faust. Kierkegaard
also chose the most important works listed in the extensive bibliography in
that book for use in completing what he called his project. Now, a year
later, he turned back to the bibliography and copied down all 107 titles, of
which 14 were concerned with Goethe’s treatment of the Faust theme.
It quickly became clear to Kierkegaard that Faust was an eternal idea,
though it had been interpreted differently in different eras. In earlier days,
amoralpoint of view had been adopted, and consequently it had been neces-
sary to write off the Faust figure as a fundamentally depraved being whose
misery was his own fault. In Kierkegaard’s time the Faust figure had been
examined from an increasinglypsychologicalpoint of view, which led to a
much more complex evaluation. Something similar had taken place with
the figures of Don Juan and the Wandering Jew, whom Kierkegaard
thought of quite early in connection with Faust. All three figures repre-
sented universal human conditions—pleasure (Don Juan), doubt (Faust),
and despair (the Wandering Jew)—and they were thus archetypically pres-
ent in every age, pagan as well as Christian: “The three great ideas...
represent, so to speak, the three forms of life in the absence of religion, and
it is only when these ideas become mediated and enter into the life of the
individual person that morality and religion first appear.” Doubt is therefore
both unavoidable and productive. Thus as Kierkegaard had already written
in his letter to P. W. Lund, “it is this Faustian element that asserts itself to
a greater or lesser extent in every intellectual development....Asouran-
cestors had a goddess of longing, so, I think, Faust stands as the personifica-
tion of doubt.”
To elucidate the Faust figure in its current form Kierkegaard had to de-
fine the present age, which he did by means of a classical, tripartite hierar-
chy. At the bottom he had the dregs, the forms of wretchedness that Aris-
totle calledpraktikoi, manual laborers and peasants who lost themselves in
merely material pursuits—including bringing their children up to be “con-
firmed consumers”—and thus lived out their lives in carefree indifference.
“It is scarcely likely that anything Faustian will develo pamong these peo-
ple,” Kierkegaard concluded, and he was surely right about that. The situa-