Who in their right mind would reject an offer of unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures?
Presumably if Faust refuses Mephistopheles’ bargain, he must resign himself to a life haunted by unfulfilled longing, existential frustration, and the bitter realization that some mysteries will forever remain beyond his grasp. Or worse, his life could descend into base forms of evil and criminality, which seems likely given what he did to Gretchen.
Christ Himself rejected various temptations by Satan when he was in the wilderness.
The bargain had a quid pro quo...you get knowledge and pleasure in exchange for perpetual servitude to a bad guy. I wouldn't make that trade
So Faust enjoyed his life of pleasure and knowledge and got away with making his Mephistophelean deal.
In Marlowe's version Faust goes to hell.
I always found Goethe's ending to be unsatisfying, and prefer Marlowe's where Faust not only accepts, but embraces his fate to be a far better resolution.
I've never heard of queen Victoria having Habsburg ancestry and I can't find any details on this other than AI hallucinations.
I believe many are not even aware of the amount of proverbs coming from that classic:
Des Pudels Kern - the poodles core/crux of the matter
Gretchenfrage - the essential question
... And many more that I won't bother trying to translate.
SSJPython•9h ago
Man has a natural inclination to worship something. For most of human history, that has been the divine/supernatural/metaphysical. Nowadays, rationalism and materialism have become the main objects of worship. But rationalism and materialism do not have answers to the existential questions and crises that humans face.
Similar to Christ saying that "man cannot live on bread alone", man cannot live on materialism alone - spiritual nourishment is a very real and necessary thing.
croes•9h ago
They just stop asking questions at a certain point.
geodel•8h ago
IAmBroom•5h ago
The sentence is otherwise correct.
williamdclt•8h ago
What definition of the word do you use?
That man has a natural inclination to it is another pretty big assumption, whether "natural inclinations" are even a thing at all has been debated for centuries
SSJPython•8h ago
CamperBob2•8h ago
quotz•7h ago
CamperBob2•7h ago
lo_zamoyski•7h ago
But this fails to distinguish between a being and Being. You and I are beings, beings among many. The pagan gods, personifications of various natural phenomena, were like us, in this sense: they were beings among, only more powerful. Being, on the other hand, is the verb to be. You exist, I exist, all the beings of the world exist. The pagan gods, I submit, do not exist, save as fictions.
So how do you relate to your existence? We all exist, so it isn't particular to you. And you are not the cause of your own existence, here and now. Rather existence is something prior to any particular existing things in the order of causes. This cause, this existence, this Being itself, is God, and you can know quite a bit about it, analogously, through unaided reason and without appealing to authority.
> What has the spiritual ever done for us?
That question is premature for you.
williamdclt•2h ago
libraryofbabel•8h ago
lo_zamoyski•8h ago
There appear to be a few dubious presuppositions at play here.
The first is religious indifferentism. That is, that is makes no difference which you pick, or that what you pick is simply a matter of "what's 'right' for you". The question of truth never enters the picture. This makes religious belief a matter of utility: I believe X because I derive some kind of perceived or real benefit from believing X.
The first problem with religious indifferentism is exactly that it is indifferent to the truth. If you believe something because of the utility it provides, it means you don't really believe in that thing. You believe in the utility of the thing. So while a Christian will believe that Christ is God Incarnate because he believes this to be true, an indifferentist wouldn't really believe Christ in God, but he might "use" that belief. There is a lack of integrity, a kind of bad faith, at work here. The pretense of this lack of integrity never produces any peace or alleviates the misery of nihilism plaguing the indifferentist. He's still where he started.
While Nietzsche and others had valuable insights (and misconceptions), he and most others did not themselves find a solution to the basic problem of nihilism.
barbazoo•8h ago
That's the crux of it. Nothing and no one has those answers. Some isms acknowledge that, most don't.
superb-owl•8h ago
The best spiritual disciplines provide a _framework_ for exploring existential questions.
lo_zamoyski•7h ago
mistrial9•4h ago
uh really? Barbarism and brute force have succeeded many times.