Why Goethe Can’t Be Faust

Abstract This essay investigates Nietzsche’s puzzling claims (a) that had Goethe been Faust, he would not have created a Faust, and (b) that this fact relates to the artist’s (alleged) susceptibility to the ascetic ideal. The line of reasoning here is opaque, to put it no higher; but it seems to swing on the thought that the artist’s susceptibility to the ascetic ideal is a function of inner emptiness, an emptiness that undercuts his claim to be considered a proper agent, and which leaves him so frustrated that he is prone to other-worldly hopes. Nietzsche arrives at this view, the author argues, by way of a (mis)diagnosis of the later Wagner’s relation to asceticism; and a robust response to it is provided, fittingly enough, by the greatest Wagner conductor of the recorded era, Wilhelm Furtwängler, a response which the author attempts to spell out and elaborate.