Goethe’s Faust and the Tragedy of Modernity

Abstract

This article analyzes the complex European social itinerary of the last two centuries through one of the most important literary works of this period: the Faust´s tragedy of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The intellectual journey of its protagonist coincides with that which took place in Europe in the late 19th century at the mercy of the passage from the modern world to the contemporary one. In this sense, the crisis of values and the disproportionate sense of omnipotence that emerges from the nineteenth-century postrevolutionary model, coincides dramatically with the fictional character of the protagonist of this work, that leads him, as well as the current consumer society, to succumb in a kind of descensus ad inferos or nihilistic psychological fall. However, just as Faust is reborn from his ashes and achieves, through social and community longing, the symbolic salvation of his soul, Europe still has the opportunity to reinterpret itself and embark on a new path that allows it to be someday itself, through the recognition of their differences and the reunion with their roots.