Session 6

This next reading is the section on Goethe's Faust from this book. It enables us to get a handle on one of our most troublesome problems, that of development. As we have already established, man produces, we do not just flower, we take actions with consequences, we develop. Goethe wrote the story of Faust over the whole of his life, and whilst we may not know it in the original, his message is as profound as when it was written and presented well for us here by Berman. Faust's story essentially takes us from the certainties and superstitions of the medieval world, via science, in to the tumult of the modern, where all that was stable now 'melts in to air'. Faust's story is of course tragic, just as when you first leave home for the big city and leave your first lover behind, people get hurt as you progress. Faust's end is also tragic, but we learn much along the way, enough to make us most circumspect over our definition of technological progress, whilst at the same time understanding it's necessity. There is much subtlety in Goethe, but if you want it tweet sized, it must go something like 'you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs'.