The treatise is divided into three parts: the first one (From History to Story) follows the mythological beginnings of the Faustian motif as depicted in the Promethean rebel and moves through its Medieval and Renaissance variants to the development of this character in literature, starting with the chapbook Historia von dr. Johann Fausten, Marlowe’s tragedy and famous Goethe’s poem. It is precisely Goethe’s Faust as the paradigmatic Faust, whose titanic hero embodies – in his insatiable striving for the ultimate knowledge – the fundamental contradictions, which even nowadays remain unresolved and keep intriguing the modern man, that is its first and primary interest. Following his path from the »small« to the »broad« world, it particularly focuses on the topics of magic, love, economy, politics, utopia, science and technology; it thereby registers the change of the mental paradigm which turns Faust from the warning example of Lutheranism, condemned to eternal damnation, to the positive hero of Romanticism and the secularized »myth of modern intellectualism«.
In the second part (From Story to History), the treatise moves from the literary character of Faust to the thematization of Faustianism as the fundamental trait of the Western (European) man, as it was conceived – directly referring to Goethe and Nietzsche – by Oswald Spengler in his philosophy of culture. In concentrates mostly on the question of nihilism and on the ethical implications of the Faustian man, his orientation towards the eternal »forwards« and »upwards«, taking into account the historical experiences of the 20th century, which render the unshakable faith in progress – and thereby also in the legitimacy of the Faustian striving – impossible. Within the framework of the »dialectics of enlightenment«, as conceived by Adorno in Horkheimer, it touches upon the question of modernity with its overhasty activism and the projects of kinetic utopia (Sloterdijk), as well as the question of tragedy and the tragic, which can be anticipated already in the expression »velociferity«, with which Goethe denoted the accelerated tempo of the modern world. It thus puts into question the interpretations which read Faust in the way of »perfectibility«, turning him from the affirmative hero into an ambiguous witness – as well as co-initiator – of the disasters which mark the 20th century.
In the third part (After Story), it discusses the question what happens to Faustianism as the mental framework of the Western man nowadays, after the end of the grand narratives and after the failure of the Enlightenment faith in reason, which was supposed to gradually unveil all the secrets of the world. In answering this question, the treatise refers to the Fausts of the 20th century, especially Thomas Mann’s German fresco Doctor Faustus, the novel Master and Marguerite by Mikhail Bulgakov and Valéry’s fragmentary poem Mon Faust; works of art which – each in their own way – bear witness to the fact that the Faustian titanic striving to master the world and dominate the nature was finally forced to face the limits of its own power and became the parable for the »tragedy of the modern overhastiness«. In the end, the treatise discusses several Slovenian treatments of this motif – above all in Janez Mencinger (Abadon), Ivan Cankar (Pohujšanje v dolini šentflorjanski) and Joža Lovrenčič (Sholar iz Trente) – and touches the question of the special manner in which the Slovenian literary space took over and reshaped this European literary myth, also taking into account the Slovenian reception and translation of the Goethe’s poem.
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