Faust Series, Essay 2 of 5
Most people assume they know what Faust is after. He makes a deal with the devil, so the assumption is that he wants something big. Power. Fame. Pleasure. The original 1587 legend — the one that started all of this — gives him worldly delights for twenty-four years and then damns him. That’s the version most people carry around in their heads without having read it.
Goethe’s Faust is something else.
He doesn’t want power. He already told you he has no lands, no gold, no honor. He doesn’t want pleasure — he explicitly says he’s foregoing all pleasure. And as we established in Essay 1, he doesn’t want knowledge. He tried that for ten years and concluded that nothing can be known.
So what does he want?
He tells you directly. Stay inside the text and you’ll find it. In Act One, turning from his useless books to magic, Faust says he wants to detect “the inmost force which binds the world and guides its course.”
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Not knowledge of facts. Not dominion over people. The inmost force. The thing underneath everything. What makes the world hold together. What living actually is.
That is a staggering thing to want. And it changes everything about how you read this play.
Most of us don’t get up in the morning thinking about the inmost force that binds the world. Be honest about that. We think about what’s in front of us. The day’s work. The problem that needs solving. The people we’re responsible for. That’s not a criticism — it’s just how most human life operates.
Faust can’t do that. He never could. Ten years at his desk, philosophy to theology, and he couldn’t stop pushing past the surface of things. The question wasn’t what do I need to know today. The question was what is the force that holds all of this together. And no discipline he studied gave him an answer.
So he turns to magic. And eventually — through the Earth Spirit, through Mephistopheles appearing as a black poodle, through the pact — he arrives at a plan. If study won’t get him there, experience will. Drown him in experiences. Every kind. Every level. Let him participate in the world so fully that eventually he hits the moment where he understands it from the inside.
That’s the deal. Not power. Not pleasure. Experiences, plural, until the one arrives that makes him say — stay, thou art so fair. That’s the condition Mephistopheles names. The moment Faust is fully satisfied, the moment he wants a single experience to last forever, his soul is forfeit. Mephistopheles gets him.
And Faust agrees because he’s certain he’ll never say it.
Think about that. He agrees but feels he will never, ever be satisfied completely.
The difference Faust draws — between studying the world and being in it — is not a simple one.
He’s been a participant his whole life. He was in the world during those ten years of study. Breathing, teaching, talking to students, walking outside under the moon he calls his mournful friend. He wasn’t absent from life. He was inside it. So why wasn’t that enough?
Because he was observing, not participating. Or so he thought.
But here’s the thing Einstein understood that Faust didn’t — and I’m stepping outside the story for a moment, the way I do when a concept needs grounding, not because I’m abandoning the text but because the text earns it: through the very act of observation, you change what you’re observing. And it changes you. You cannot be a pure observer. The moment you’re present, you’re participating. The moment you’re participating, you’re changing the event. The event is changing you. There’s no clean line between watching and being.
I’m colorblind. Red-green. Didn’t find out until college, when they showed me those circles with numbers in them and I couldn’t see the nine that everyone else saw. My wife points out red in a flower and I take her word for it, because what I see when I look at red is not what you see. I trained myself in the advertising world to identify red by context, by what people around me were reacting to. But I cannot tell you what you see when you see red, because I don’t have the same reference point.
That’s not a limitation unique to me. That’s the human condition. We get our information about reality through five senses, and those senses filter and distort and miss things constantly. What I see is not what you see. What either of us sees is not the thing itself.
Knowledge, then, is comparison. It’s not absolute. It’s relational. You know things by comparing them to other things, by finding the shared reference points that let you say — we’re talking about the same bird on the same branch.
Classical literature does this. It gives you a basis of comparison to your own experience. Have you ever felt what Faust feels? That’s the question that makes Faust worth reading. Not what the devil is up to.
Faust understands this eventually. The experiences he collects through Mephistopheles are comparisons. Each one a data point. Each one a reference. He’s building toward the one that finally answers the question — until he finds the inmost force, or until he can’t anymore.
But here’s where his plan breaks down, and where narrator is being ruthlessly honest.
Faust is looking outside himself.
The inmost force. He says it himself — inmost. The word means inside. The deepest interior. And he goes hunting for it in taverns, in witch’s kitchens, on Walpurgis Night with fifteen characters talking in verse, in his pursuit of Margaret. He keeps reaching outward. Each experience is something exterior. Something happening to him or around him. He collects them like specimens.
He’s looking in the wrong direction. The inmost force isn’t out there. It was never going to be out there. And Goethe is smart enough not to tell you that in a tidy lesson. He just shows you Faust running, experience after experience, never satisfied, always certain the next one will be it.
Thus in desire I hasten to enjoyment, and in enjoyment I pine and feel desire.
That’s the logic loop. That’s what Faust actually is — a man in a logic loop he can’t see from the inside, because seeing it from the inside would require the one thing he refuses to do: look there.
The pact with Mephistopheles is not a story about temptation in the way most people read it. The devil doesn’t seduce Faust. Faust recruits the devil. He needs a vehicle for experience, and Mephistopheles is the most efficient one available. The devil, in Goethe’s version, is not primarily evil. He’s an enabler. He makes things easier. He removes the friction between Faust and the next experience.
And that’s precisely the problem. Because friction — resistance, difficulty, the slow accumulation of consequences — is exactly how a person learns what they’re actually doing. Remove it, and you get experience without understanding. Sensation without meaning.
Which is what Faust has, for the entire play.
What do you want? It’s worth asking. Not as a rhetorical question — as an honest one. Not the next thing on the list. The inmost force. What are you actually after? And where are you looking for it?
Read Essay 3: The Story That Started in Heaven — and What That Means for Everything Below