Faustian Ascent from the Faustian Abyss

There is really nothing to add to the Goetheanum Stage’s production of Faust. As a work of art, it speaks for itself. So, instead, I’d like to suggest a change of perspective: Let’s turn our gaze from the Faust 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.

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Each of us, as individuals, has signed this pact, but we’ve also signed it collectively, as humanity. It’s 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 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.

On the way to this sovereign personality, we’ve 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. René Descartes’ statement a few years later (1637), “I think, therefore I am,” is the philosophical conclusion of this path of self-empowerment: thinking establishes existence! Similarly, Kant (1784) explains what defines this era: “The Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.” 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’s Faust 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: “The foundation of the world has poured itself out entirely into the world . . . . The highest form in which it appears within the reality of ordinary life is thinking and, with it, the human personality.”1

The Enlightenment Is Now Completed

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. This is how the Enlightenment, a path that led us to a turning point in modernity, is now being completed. As examples, I’ll cite here three contemporary authors from the fields of sociology, political science, and philosophy:

• Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (2017/18).2 At the beginning of the book, he writes, “The feeling of vertigo, almost panic, that pervades all current politics stems from the fact that the ground beneath our feet is shaking. It’s as if we feel attacked in all our habits and possessions. Do you know that feeling?” At the end, he humorously illustrates how questionable quick answers to this problem can be: “Should I throw myself into permaculture, stand at the front of the demonstration, storm the Winter Palace, follow the teachings of St. Francis, become a hacker, organize neighborhood parties, reintroduce witchcraft rituals, invest in artificial photosynthesis, or do you want me to track wolves?”
• Ingolflur Blühdorn, Unhaltbarkeit [Unsustainability] (2024).3 Blühdorn also describes the situation of modernity’s Faustian project as a dilemma. Since the 1970s and ‘80s, we have been committed to an ecological and just world, only to find that late modernity has “emancipated” itself from this narrative and that the socio-political situation is now presenting us with something completely different. Movements such as Occupy Wall Street or Fridays for Future are bringing about a brief renaissance but no breakthrough. Rather, late modern societies are facing a vacuum in terms of political action. What is the political situation in France, Austria, or the Netherlands at the moment? Our societies, with pandemics, overuse of resources, social inequality, a crisis in care and nursing, global warming, digitalization, migration, etc., are becoming ungovernable—according to Blühdorn’s analysis.
• Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity (2025).4 This New York Times bestseller describes how we, as a Faustian society, are surrendering ourselves to Mephisto to such an extent that our entire social life is becoming a machine, and everything human is being called into question. In doing so, he refers to Oswald Spengler’s book, The Decline of the West (1918/22),5 which Steiner read in 1920. What the three authors now observe was already described by Spengler at that time: this Faustian age in which we live is probably heading for decline. Steiner largely agreed with Spengler’s analysis but vehemently rejected his defeatist conclusions.

This text is an excerpt from an article published in the (online exclusive) Goetheanum Weekly. You can read the full article on the website. If you are not yet a subscriber, you can get to know the Goetheanum Weekly for 1 CHF./€.

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