{"id":68652,"date":"2025-11-05T22:01:04","date_gmt":"2025-11-05T21:01:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/?p=68652"},"modified":"2025-11-05T22:01:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-05T21:01:08","slug":"faustian-ascent-from-the-faustian-abyss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/faustian-ascent-from-the-faustian-abyss\/","title":{"rendered":"Faustian Ascent from the Faustian Abyss"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

There is really nothing to add to the Goetheanum Stage\u2019s production of Faust<\/em>. As a work of art, it speaks for itself. So, instead, I\u2019d like to suggest a change of perspective: Let\u2019s turn our gaze from the Faust<\/em> on the stage to the Faust in us, to ourselves as one who has signed the Faustian pact. Like Faust, we can no longer escape this contract. But I believe there are three important perspectives in the drama that point the way forward and up.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Each of us, as individuals, has signed this pact, but we\u2019ve also signed it collectively, as humanity. It\u2019s worth trying to remember the time in your life when you gave your Faustian signature, when you signed the pact with Mephisto. Individually and as a social body, we stand with Faust at the current turning point of modernity. I approach modernity as the<\/em> Faustian project, as the moment when every human being stands at the apex of their personality and acts in the world from this vantage point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the way to this sovereign personality, we\u2019ve crossed many milestones: the Copernican revolution, for instance. Galileo Galilei observed through his telescope (1633) that Venus, like the moon, can have a crescent shape and concluded that Venus must revolve around the sun as does the Earth. This is one of the starting points of modernity: the divinely sublime, self-contained worldview, where we humans have a clearly assigned place, transforms into a dynamic worldview. Ren\u00e9 Descartes\u2019 statement a few years later (1637), \u201cI think, therefore I am,\u201d is the philosophical conclusion of this path of self-empowerment: thinking establishes existence! Similarly, Kant (1784) explains what defines this era: \u201cThe Enlightenment is man\u2019s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.\u201d Thinking now becomes the guide for our actions and forms the basis of ethical universalism, leading on to the formulation of human rights. This is also where Goethe\u2019s Faust <\/em>ends up when the hundred-year-old Faust wrestles fertile land from the swamp on the coast and dreams of a free land for a free people. The 25-year-old Rudolf Steiner put it similarly: \u201cThe foundation of the world has poured itself out entirely into the world\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. The highest form in which it appears within the reality of ordinary life is thinking and, with it, the human personality.\u201d<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Enlightenment Is Now Completed<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

We are at a point in human development where the fate of the world must now be born out of us human beings. The anthroposophical view is that this is a co-creative endeavor, a creation born of humanity, of the Anthropos<\/em>. This is how the Enlightenment, a path that led us to a turning point in modernity, is now being completed. As examples, I\u2019ll cite here three contemporary authors from the fields of sociology, political science, and philosophy:<\/p>\n\n\n\n