1749–1832

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The European man of letters as a climate. Faust is his wager that striving itself might be a kind of salvation—and a kind of damnation.

Stretched the Faust legend into a cosmology of desire, science, love, and unfinished becoming.

Primary works

Dramatic poem · 1808 / 1832

Faust

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The scholar’s wager with Mephistopheles becomes a tour of desire: Gretchen’s ruin, classical Helena, land reclaimed from the sea. Striving itself is the poem’s ambiguous good.

Philosophical tragedy