Intellectualism and the Value of Words Theme Analysis

The play examines intellectual pursuits primarily through the lives of Faust, Wagner, and the student/baccalaureate, all of whom are, at least at some point in their lives, scholars who live for and learn from books alone. Faust comes to reject such a life as unsatisfying, too much of a wild goose chase full of empty words and navel-gazing. Wagner, the more rationalistic and committed scholar of the two, is content to work within the limitations of human knowledge, preferring a life of libraries and laboratories to a life among nature and other people. Eventually, Wagner succeeds in simulating the creation of life with his Homunculus, which represents in the drama the pinnacle of achievement for Enlightment science—but Homunculus then follows Faust in seeking transcendence, which suggests that the drama as a whole privileges the search for the meaning of life over narrow scholarship, however successful it might be. If Wagner exemplifies the best of scholarship, it is the student/baccalaureate who exemplifies the very worst, being as he is easily influenced by authority, superficial in his studies, unoriginal in his insights, and pompous. It may well be as Mephistopheles says: there’s no wise or stupid thought that has not been thought already.

Closely connected to the play’s examination of intellectualism is its evaluation of words, which can so often be empty, disconnected from what they refer to. Faust, for one, comes to reject his scholarly life in large part because he finds that books peddle no more than empty words. Far from finding this state of affairs distressing, Mephistopheles revels in the big, meaningless words of philosophers, and he encourages the student to put all his faith in words, memorizing them and accepting them from authorities without critical thinking. That this is the devil’s advice, of course, should deter us from following it. Faust, for one, comes to have faith only in actual feeling, regardless of how one names one’s feelings. He tells Margarete: “Imbue your heart with this immensity [of the universe], / and when you wholly feel beatitude, / then call it what you will— / Happiness! Heart! Love! God! / I have no name to give it! / Feeling is everything, / name is but sound and smoke…” This is the man, after all, who says that God created the universe not with the Word, as the Biblical Gospel of John states, but with the Act. However, at the end of the drama, a mystical chorus suggests that words can still be meaningful as transitory symbols that do not refer to, but gesture toward the presence of, indescribable eternity. Words cannot reveal the face of the Lord God, the play suggests, but they can reflect His face.