Faust: Beyond Light and Darkness—Goethe’s Struggle with Newton’s Shadow
- Dmitri Safronov
- 2 days ago
- 24 min read
She envelops man in darkness, and urges him constantly to the light. She makes him dependent on the earth, heavy and sluggish, and always rouses him up afresh (Goethe, Nature Aphorisms)
Abstract[1]
The extensive and in large parts forensic Newton-Goethe scholarship notwithstanding, one conjecture, teeming with possibilities, appears yet to have been sufficiently explored. It is that of a closer connection between Newton and Goethe, explored through the liminal figure of Dr Faust, who concomitantly symbolises and confounds modernity. This article, by triangulating Newton, Goethe, and Faust, examines the exciting possibility that none other than Isaac Newton may have been cast by Goethe as his tragic hero in what was the continuation—’by other means’—of their intellectual debate over the ‘physics of light’, and, more consequentially, of their cultural feud over the provenance and the rightful domicile of genius, as humankind’s guiding light and guardian.
Introduction
In ‘Goethe’s Faust as a Renaissance Man’, Harold Jantz argued that no ‘actual personalities of the eighteenth century’ could have presented Goethe with a prototype of Faust.[2] Elsewhere, Hans Christoph Binswanger suggested that ‘Goethe’s model for Faust as a creator of quick wealth’ was the infamous Scotsman John Law.[3] Although Law was neither a scientist nor an alchemist (in a non-financial sense) and would, therefore, fall short of being an adequate prototype of Faust, Binswanger’s claim nonetheless hints at something important that Jantz’s misses. Namely, that the character of Faust—inevitably a socio-cultural patchwork woven of multiple and iterative influences, synthesised into a singular haunting expression of the troubled psyche of an epoch en route to modernity—may well have been informed by real-world actors.
Reflecting on this question of historical inspiration makes one wonder whether none other than Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) may have presented Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) with the real-life avatar of the despairing scholar and passionate alchemist driven to the edge of suicide, only to be ‘rescued’ by the seemingly magical powers of Mephistopheles, with the true meaning and consequences of this bailout becoming apparent in Part II of Goethe’s retelling of the tragic tale, where the existential wagers are abruptly called in.[4] Paraphrasing Jantz, could Newton himself perhaps have become the archetypal example of an unfulfilled Renaissance man, caught up in the intricate web of Enlightenment’s predicament, which tested the ‘limits of the Socratic lust for knowledge’?[5]
A curious gap in the Newton-Goethe-Faust scholarship exists, insofar as it is not possible to make a definitive case concerning the extent of Goethe’s knowledge of Newton’s life and activities post-1692.[6] The assumed position, particularly among the Newton scholars, is that it is unlikely (although not impossible) that Goethe would have known enough of Newton’s life after the so-called Cambridge years. This, however, touches on a lesser-explored intersection of Goethe and Newton scholarship, specifically focusing on their ventures into the realms of political economy and finance—an area often overlooked in discussions of their intellectual contributions. In turn, it becomes difficult to dismiss a fascinating—albeit consciously speculative—possibility that none other than Newton could have been cast by Goethe in his retelling of the Faust legend. Using retrospective pattern recognition and circumstantial evidence, this essay pursues the striking conjecture that Goethe knew, or intuited, enough about Newton, more than is generally assumed in the existing scholarship, in order to cast him as his Faust, as well as a reflection of himself.
Goethe, a polymath in his own right, was well-versed in matters of political economy, including finance and tax. He was an avid reader of both James Steuart and Adam Smith (himself a keen follower of the Newtonian method in the broad sense of that word).[7] Furthermore, in his role as finance minister of the duchy of Saxe-Weimar, Goethe was, in effect, dealing with some of the consequences of the economic and financial forces that Newton helped to shape during his extended tenure as Master of the Royal Mint.
By the time Goethe’s literary masterpiece had created a sustained ‘interest in all that pertained to Faust’, most of the original manuscripts that nurtured the Faust narrative across the centuries had been lost.[8] The story of an obscure magician wondering from village to village, and the protagonist himself, needed an overhaul as the ebbing tide of Renaissance reluctantly ushered in the new epoch: the Age of Enlightenment. The two eras, like their changing methods in the pursuit of knowledge, had to remain connected through a liminal figure, who could perhaps act as a conduit for their continuity. John Maynard Keynes concluded his brilliant essay on ‘Newton, The Man’ (1942) by describing him as ‘Copernicus and Faustus in one’.[9] Earlier, Oswald Spengler had insisted that the ‘existence of the Faustian soul’ was the prerequisite for the emergence of ‘that of Newton’s’.[10] But, as Faustus casts a long shadow back in time stretching towards Newton, could the reverse be true: namely, that the great British mathematician and physicist directly informed Goethe’s Faust?
Nietzsche and Schopenhauer’s clues
With Newton, the very definition of ‘genius’ underwent a great recoinage, as it transitioned from the creative to the intellectual sphere of human endeavour, and to the secular from the spiritual domain, yet without severing—indeed, reinforcing and amplifying—the religious connotations linking the genius to the supernatural. Nietzsche, who argued that modern science developed directly from the spirit of Christianity, observed that:
Science has been promoted in the last centuries, partly because with it and through it one hoped to best understand God’s goodness and wisdom—the main motive in the souls of the great Englishmen (like Newton) […].[11]
Balancing the scales of inquiry, however, Nietzsche also recognised the dangers of taking Faust as gospel, for this would be an example of a ‘moral prejudice against the value of knowledge’.[12] Earlier, in the second of his Untimely Meditations (1873), commenting on a passage by Goethe concerning Newton’s personality, Nietzsche curiously observed:
Goethe presented to us a comparable enigma in regard to the individual personality in his noteworthy account of Newton: he discovers at the foundation (or, more correctly, at the highest point) of his being ‘a troubled presentiment that he is in error’, the momentary expression, as it were, of a superior consciousness that has attained to a certain ironical overview of his inherent nature.[13]
This comment makes one wonder whether the thread of Nietzsche’s thought may extend further and help to account for the genealogy of Goethe’s Faust, if not of the Faustiad itself? Newton’s long-standing obsession with alchemy—culminating in the trials and tribulations during his tenure as Warden and Master of the Royal Mint (1696-1727), and the resulting curtailment of scientific endeavours in favour of the monetary pursuits en route to considerable personal wealth and status—arguably represented the earthly voyage of a divided soul that, although endowed with an inquisitive mind par excellence, failed to attain satisfaction either in the immediate ‘small world’, or in the macrocosm.[14] This case perhaps adds credibility to Schopenhauer’s observations that:
Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become; and the same is true of fame […].
Money is human happiness in abstracto; and so, the man who is no longer capable of enjoying such happiness in concreto, sets his whole heart on money.[15]
Newton’s pursuit of monetary wealth, particularly in his later years, stands as a stark illustration of how his profound intellectual energies were siphoned off toward unworthy ends. Schopenhauer, a great admirer of both Goethe and Faust, further reflects on the uneasy relationship between money and genius in Parerga and Paralipomena, where Faust emerges as the figure embodying this destructive and insoluble tension.
It is deeply ironic that both Newton and Goethe experienced a decline in their creative endeavours just as their worldly ambitions reached their peak. Goethe’s literary output faltered as his civic responsibilities expanded, while Newton’s scientific achievements diminished after he shifted his focus to state service. In both cases, the worldly demands of civic and public life came into conflict with their higher callings, stifling the very intellectual and artistic pursuits that had defined them.
Newton and Faust
Newton’s own relationship with the story of Faust is as uncertain and inviting of speculation as the ‘obscure origins’ of the Faustian narrative itself,[16] often believed to be a Volksbuch.[17] The original anonymous account, which became the cautionary tale Historia von D. Johann Fausten by Johann Spies (c.1587), appeared at the crossroads of the ‘Renaissance thirst for knowledge of all kinds and the Reformation insistence on the purity of faith’.[18] Was it, perhaps, a reincarnation of the Greek myths of Prometheus and Icarus, restated in the vernacular of the Lutheran tradition, or even of Dionysus, as asserted by Spengler[19] and Jung?[20] It has also been suggested that the historical figure of Simon Magus, a native of Samaria, who lived in the first century AD, may have represented a ‘gnostic’ prototype for the Faust legend, at least in Marlowe’s retelling of it.[21] If that were so, Simon Magus could be an important link by which Faust and Newton were, at least indirectly, connected.
Newton’s notorious lack of interest in art and literature notwithstanding, it would have been remiss of him not to have read at least Marlowe’s version of 1588. Here, Faustus obtains his Doctorate from none other than the University of Wittenberg, which Hamlet is said to have attended as a student, and where Martin Luther—who ‘saw Faustus as a diabolical magician’[22]—taught Theology until 1517, when his famous 95 theses, apocryphally appended to the door of the Castle Church in the same city, launched the tidal wave of Reformation that swept through Europe, imprinting directly on a certain Isaac Newton.[23] Suffice it to say, however, it is highly unlikely that Newton would have in any way fashioned himself on Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, even if he were aware of Simon Magus.[24] Could the reverse, however, be possible in relation to Goethe’s Faust, appearing between 1808 (Part I) and 1832 (Part II)?
Faust and Newton
The ‘strivings and strayings’[25] of Goethe’s Faust and Newton exhibit a number of uncanny resemblances. Both were very complex and contradictory characters. A certain notion of otherworldliness is imputed to both men, who tried in earnest to create, rather than to simply find, the Philosopher’s Stone. Jung tells us that Faust, both the work and the character, ‘is not of this world’,[26] just as the fanatical Newtonians, with some assistance from Newton, who considered himself the ‘last of the prophets’,[27] aimed to elevate his genius to a supernatural height.[28]
Goethe’s tale begins on Holy Saturday, at the end of Lent, and Part II of Faust opens with the Mardi Gras Carnival, a day preceding the start of Lent. The significance of Easter and Lent for Newton’s lengthy efforts to re-trace the life cycle of Jesus in an attempt to unlock the secrets of the divine prophecies—with an emphasis on the date of the crucifixion—can hardly be understated.
If it could be supposed that Goethe engaged with the depressed Newton at the time of his ‘derangement of the intellect’ in mid-1693, this would bear resemblance to the depressed Faust who, having worked his way right through philosophy, medicine, and jurisprudence, was driven by despair to the edge of suicide.[29] Newton, not unlike Faust, eventually emerged from his ailment, albeit having seemingly lost interest in science and with his mind firmly focused on the more esoteric matters, which included the interpretation of prophecy and scripture, admixed with continued alchemic inquiries.
The thin red line between Newton’s physics and Dr. Faust’s chemistry melts in the nature-defying flames of alchemy (or, chymistry), which burnt bright in the hearts and minds of both men as testament to their ‘desire to fathom and control the secrets of nature’,[30] even if Newton, unlike many of his contemporaries, pursued alchemy as a science rather than magic. A propensity for mental and emotional frailty, possibly a consequence of the inability to find binding love, perhaps along with perhaps excessive exposure to mercury,[31] plagued the lives of both Newton and Dr. Faust.[32] Faust’s abandonment of Gretchen, ‘because his goal is self-fulfilment without consideration of society’, could also be relevant in relation to the understanding of Newton, who never married and was known to shun society at large for extended periods of time.[33]
In Part II of Goethe’s Faust, we are introduced to an ‘emperor, whose realm is in total disarray’.[34] This is not entirely unlike the circumstances which led to Newton’s appointment as Warden of the Royal Mint in 1696 during the reign of William III, when English currency was in disarray and counterfeiting was rife. This transition from personal despair, suffered by both Newton (prior to 1696) and Faust (in Part I), to facing a ‘similar condition on a collective and a transpersonal level’, which offers a glimpse of redemption for a corrupted ego if the latter’s fraudulent motivations can be overcome, is as important to understanding Newton’s post-Cambridge life as it is to following the mysterious twists and turns of Goethe’s Faustian plot.[35] Furthermore, Faust’s subsequent travails in and out of the underworld and the world of myth bear considerable resemblance to Newton’s own attempts at deciphering divine prophecies whilst contending in person with the gory realities of London’s counterfeiting underworld. Following the taxing encounter with the underworld (‘Nekyia’), Mephistopheles brought the exhausted and unconscious Faust back to his study to convalesce.[36] Newton, enervated by his exploits at the Royal Mint, often sought refuge in his London flat, where he could lock the world out and be left alone with alchemy.
Both men waged open wars of sorts, Newton against the counterfeiters and alleged plagiarists, aka Leibniz, whereas Faust was compelled by Mephistopheles to come to the aid of his beleaguered Emperor, forced to defend his throne in the aftermath of Faust’s paper-money scheme fiasco. (Goethe too was summoned to accompany Duke Karl August in the invasion of France in 1792.) The victorious and grateful Emperor granted Faust the shoreline for the latter to reclaim it from the sea. Newton’s not inconsiderable personal fortune, earned with some controversy at the Royal Mint, provided an irresistible temptation to augment it by investing in stocks, into which Newton had an insider’s track.
Having accomplished his speculative scheme by ignominious means—following the death of Philemon and Baucis at the hands of Mephistopheles’ ‘three Mighty Men’—Faust was accosted by four shadowy figures named Lack (Mangel), Debt-Guilt (Schuld), Need (Not), and Care (Sorge).[37] Where the first three failed to gain access to the wealthy Faust’s house (signifying his conscience), Care succeeded, having slipped through a keyhole, and in so doing blinded Faust, tormented but unrepentant and refusing to suffer. Standing on the edge of the grave being dug out for him by Mephistopheles’ unscrupulous aides, oblivious to what was to come, Faust delivered his final speech on ‘progress’, which both signalled the end his earthly passage and issued the most prescient warning to modernity, an important door to which had been opened by the equally unrepentant Newton—Master of the Mint to his final day—who died in his sleep, having lost consciousness a day or so prior, due to the severe bouts of indigestion from which he suffered during his final years.[38] Faust’s concluding earthly deed, his liminal epiphany, may hold the key to his subsequent redemption, which is also of significance for considering Newton’s enduring legacy.
Both men lived the real tension between ambition and satisfaction. Both were introverted yet excessively vain and actively sought public recognition. Both were obsessive when it came to their work. Both underwent a remarkable metamorphosis from fairly obscure academic loners, who hastily moved on ‘through little clouds of local scandal’, into figures of prominence and significant influence.[39] Both tested their prolific gifts in the field of civic activities and in politics; for a brief time in 1689-90 and 1701-02, Newton was a member of parliament for Cambridge. In their time, both men were responsible for causing a death or two.[40] Both presided over the grandest alchemic ‘successes’ of their times: Faust whilst an advisor to the Emperor and Newton in his tenure at the Royal Mint. Faust (Part II) provides a prescient account of the genesis of the modern economic order with its newly discovered powers to create fiat money, while Newton’s arrival at the Royal Mint coincided with the climax of the debate on the future of the English currency between the ‘restorers’ (aka John Locke) and the ‘devaluers’ (aka William Lowndes, Secretary of the Treasury), with Newton throwing his support behind the latter.[41] In an important sense, Faust II deals with the consequences of the financial trends which Newton helped inaugurate.[42]
Both Newton and Faust were investors in the major financial bubbles of their times. Newton, notably, was involved in the South Sea Bubble of 1720, ‘after the South Sea Company promised massive returns from its slave-trading enterprise’.[43] Faust, infamously, invested his proceeds from the paper money scheme in land reclaimed from the sea, a venture doomed to failure for denying the laws of nature and ignoring the basic tenets of economics. Both men considerably exceeded the average life expectancy of their respective times.
Goethe and Newton
What of Newton and Goethe, though? Separated by almost a century, both lived well into their eighties. Both were prodigious talents, geniuses, ennobled by their respective monarchs, staunch Puritans in the matters of faith, devout naturalists, and experimentalists, where their science was concerned. Both men experienced the ‘unsparing censure’ of ‘judging, unfeeling mankind’ in relation to their scientific discoveries.[44] Both harboured a certain disdain for the frivolity involved in hypothesising, which arguably haunted them equally.[45] The above notwithstanding, both shared a passion for symbolism and the occult, repeatedly traversing ‘from mystics to physics’ and ‘from physics to magic’.[46] Both men knew how to bear a grudge.[47] Both held important offices of the State. Neither proved entirely immune to the temptations of fame and fortune. Both appear to have harboured unresolved psychological childhood trauma. It has been suggested that both great men may have been gay.[48]
Was it all about light?
Newton and Goethe’s career paths diverge in at least one important respect. Goethe’s prescient insight anticipated the coming era of fiat (ie paper) money, as a continuation of alchemists’ quest for the elusive Philosopher’s Stone: the singularity that would enable turning lead into gold and the meeting point of the physical and the metaphysical. To borrow from Nietzsche, it was as though Goethe was able to see the consequences of ‘the track along which this wheel had yet to roll’.[49] Where Goethe once fought hard against the Scotsman-inspired idea—originally implemented by the French[50]—of erasing his Duke Karl August’s substantial debts by embracing the new trend of printing paper money, Newton’s endeavours at the Royal Mint laid the groundwork for turning money into a commodity of commerce. This development proceeded via a curious case of the first great ‘gold-silver’ carry trade, which saw England briefly establish a de-facto gold standard in 1717, and all but precipitated Britain’s full move to the Gold Standard by 1816. This was an early harbinger of the ‘consumer revolution’ which would sweep through the eighteenth century, paving the way to the kind of modernity Goethe had staunchly resisted.[51] In a certain sense, Newton became an exponent of financial alchemy (which Goethe opposed) and may be said to have partly and perhaps unwittingly realised his alchemic ambition in his role at the Royal Mint. This divergence between the two great men, however, was neither superficial nor accidental.
Although Goethe considered Newton a redoubtable genius, he had little patience for the cults of self-appointed Newtonians—English as well as German—who busied themselves by fashioning Newton into a Christ-like figure, a quasi-catholic saint, something he started out by opposing yet may have inadvertently contributed to. More of an artist himself, Goethe was a proponent of the higher synthesis of the rational (science) and the irrational (art, religion). His Theory of Colours (1810) openly challenged Newton’s Opticks (1704) as a shallow theoretical falsification of nature and of the history of colour—to the point where the difference between the two geniuses developed into a protracted acrimony which straddled the empirical and the metaphysical.
Should I not be proud, when for twenty years I have had to admit to myself that the great Newton and all the mathematicians and noble calculators along with him were involved in a decisive error with respect to the doctrine of colour, and that I among millions was the only one who knew what was right in this great subject of nature?[52]
Goethe’s criticism was aimed squarely at Newton’s most sacred, albeit consciously anti-metaphysical claim, made in his General Scholium, appended to the second edition of the Principia in 1713: ‘hypotheses non fingo’. In other circumstances, it should have been possible for Goethe to rise above the desire to critique Newton’s theory. He had earlier noted that ‘if two masters of the same art differ in their statement of it, in all likelihood the insoluble problem lies midway between them’.[53] However, having waged an almost forty-year campaign to ‘establish a non-Newtonian theory of colour’, Goethe appeared to ascribe an almost existential significance to it, as though the higher Light itself were ‘suffering at the hands of Newton’.[54] In so doing, as John Tyndall noted, Goethe ventured to undertake the task, the magnitude of which would be comparable to Newton attempting ‘to produce a “Faust”’: something which Newton would never tackle in view of the ‘poverty of his intellect on the poetic and dramatic side’.[55] Ultimately, Wittgenstein might have been right to note in relation to Goethe’s alleged ‘great error’[56] that ‘what Goethe was really seeking was not a physiological but a psychological theory of colours’.[57]
The aphotic depths of the Newton-Goethe divide
There was, however, something else at play that made the Goethe-Newton polemics atypical.[58] As the battle over the rightful domicile of ‘genius’ (artistic or scientific) raged on between the two of its brightest manifestations, it also exemplified the clash of the worldviews that would forge the advent of modernity. Seen in this light, it appears that the texture of Goethe’s polemic vis-à-vis Newton and the difference in their respective frames of reference was projected onto and reflected in Faust’s own skirmishes at the furthest boundaries of contemporary science. If Goethe can be said to have attempted a ‘physics of colour’ based on experience, as a way of achieving an elusive authentic wholeness of reflection by dwelling in the phenomenon instead of representing it with abstract mathematical formulae,[59] then the warning of the ‘artist’s conscience’[60] concerning the perilous consequences of pursuing any ‘one-sided preference, whether it be science […] or art’ to its extreme resonates throughout his Faust.[61]
The lesson from Faust is not unlike the images that cry out to us from Joseph Wright of Derby’s famous paintings An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768) and The Alchemist Discovering Phosphorus (1771), which have been associated with Newton,[62] or the image of Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). These and notable other examples problematised the unbridled pursuit of scientific discovery as resulting in chaos, tragedy, and despair for all involved in earnestly trying to deliver on science’s emancipatory promise. A deeper cultural change underwrote the Newton-Goethe intellectual divide, which the liminal figure of Faust inadvertently straddled: an age-old premonition that science, unless it be tempered by art and the mythical, would lead to a dehumanisation of society.
Could Faust have been Goethe’s veiled apology to Newton?
Unsurprisingly, further signs of antipathy towards Newton and his disciples—his ‘furor anti-Newtonianus’[63]—emerge from Goethe’s writings, in particular the Maxims and Reflections. This antipathy appears to run deeper than simply intellectual differences over the physics of colour. Goethe’s Maxims #1242-1248, in which he accuses Newton of embedding ‘a hidden anthropomorphism’ into his scientific theories, vividly reflects Goethe’s intellectual opposition to the mechanistic and reductive nature of Newton’s laws of motion and astronomy.[64] This critique is not merely scientific but philosophical, representing Goethe’s broader resistance to the dehumanizing implications of Newtonian mechanics. It reveals Goethe’s preference for a more organic, holistic understanding of nature, one that transcends the rigid framework of mechanical causality. Beneath this intellectual resistance, however, there lurks a subtle undercurrent of personal rivalry—perhaps tinged with Goethe’s resentment over Newton’s audacious claims to the invention of calculus, a matter of great contention with Leibniz, whom Goethe greatly admired. This philosophical feud underscores not only the clash of their worldviews but also the personal stakes embedded within the scientific and intellectual ambitions of their age. At times, Goethe almost appears to bear a misguidedly patriotic, cultural, and spiritual grudge towards the great Englishman:
The battle against Newton is really being carried on in a very low region. One is contesting a badly envisaged, badly developed, badly applied, badly theorized phenomenon. He is being accused of a lack of caution in his early experiments, of intentionality in those that followed, of precipitation in his theorizing, of obstinacy in his defence, and overall of a half-unconscious, half-conscious lack of straightforwardness. A hundred grey horses don’t make up one single white horse.[65]
Could, however, Goethe’s lack of recognition as a scientist by scientists compared to that enjoyed by Newton during his lifetime have played a role here?[66] Could this have been a problem Goethe recognised and confronted artistically?
There can be no doubt that Faust is sublime and extraordinarily complex in its influences, but was it also a result of Goethe’s creative sublimation, transfiguring what he lacked and possibly coveted in terms of critical acclaim for his scientific endeavours into an enduring artistic masterpiece? Could the Faust of the dawn of the nineteenth century, therefore, have been a discarnate child of Goethe’s creative sublimation of the envy for Newton the man and, more so, Newton the scientist? Furthermore, could this self-inflicted ‘trauma’—experienced through the tragic eyes of Faust and with the added humility of an artist—have inadvertently heightened Goethe’s creativity, thus enabling him to see farther than Newton?[67] And, finally, could Part II of Goethe’s Faust, which appeared in print almost a quarter of a century after Part I—near to Goethe’s own passing and containing a radical departure from Marlowe’s version in respect of Faust’s fate—have become the means by which Goethe sought to settle his differences and make peace with Newton?[68]
Conclusion
Faust’s provenance as a Volksbuch will always favour a ‘collective portrait, which is bound to neither time, place, or person’.[69] As Palmer and More noted, the Faust tradition is the ‘vehicle of certain fundamental religious and philosophical problems which have ever fascinated and tormented mankind’.[70] However, to capture the Geist of a particular epoch—in order to speak to it in the vernacular it would understand, as well as to see the unfolding of its implications beyond the inevitable short-sightedness of any present moment—is the generic need also embody specific attributes.[71] Isaac Newton, sourced from the archives of real life, provides a plausible match for Goethe’s Faust. If this resemblance should be a mere coincidence, then—at least—we have learned that seemingly credible matches can sometimes be purely the play of chance and imagination which, akin to Penelope, tirelessly weave their web of human existence afresh.
I am not convinced this connection is entirely random. I am of the view that we do not yet (or no longer) possess the sensibility to grasp the quantum transformations of energy, including information and thinking more generally, which underwrites human relations and crafts narratives. When it comes to Goethe’s retelling of the tragic tale, even though Faust remained an allegorical collage, there is to my mind sufficient evidence to support further exploring the hypothesis that Newton played anything but a peripheral role in firing up the creative genius of Goethe, who conjured up his Faust in Newton’s likeness. His failure to reference this connection explicitly might be explained as the result of a desire not to embolden and inadvertently contribute to the cultic efforts of Newtonians either side of the English Channel, whom Goethe opposed as staunchly as Newton once opposed the Catholicization of Cambridge. In the end, Goethe provided his own—ambiguous and unexpected—version of redemption for the tormented genius and the divided soul of Faust, perhaps one he would have wished for Newton, who, in some important respects, may have been a doppelgänger of Goethe himself. This kind of redemption requires reconciling with oneself. It echoes in Nietzsche’s equally perplexing amor fati, which he quite possibly arrived at having contemplated Goethe’s Faust: ‘“Love that which is necessary”—amor fati—this would be my morality, to do the best to raise mankind above its terrible origins and up to your level’.[72]
Dmitri Safronov
Dmitri Safronov holds a PhD in Political Economy from the University of Cambridge for research on ‘Nietzsche’s Political Economy’ (2020). Dmitri received an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics, and Honors BA in Philosophy and Politics from Trent University. Prior to matriculating at Cambridge, he spent over 20 years in the City of London, working for the leading global investment banking franchises. Dmitri’s profile and list of recent publications can be found on <https://philpeople.org/profiles/dmitri-safronov>.
[1] I am incredibly grateful to Dr Patricia Fara, Professor Simon Schaffer, Professor Robert Iliffe, and Professor Myles Jackson for their valuable and educational comments on the early drafts of this paper, particularly in relation to Newton, as well as for the suggestions for further research.
[2] Harold Jantz, ‘Goethe’s Faust as a Renaissance Man: Sources and Prototypes’ (1949) 1(4) Comparative Literature 348. See also Harry Levin, ‘A Faustian Typology’ in Peter Boerner and Sidney Johnson (eds), Faust through Four Centuries—Vierhundert Jahre Faust (Max Niemeyer 1989) 1-13.
[3] Hans Christoph Binswanger, Money and Magic: A Critique of the Modern Economy in the Light of Goethe’s Faust (University of Chicago Press 1994) 30.
[4] Fara alludes to this possibility when referring to Carlyle’s inclusion of both Newton and Faust in his ‘catalogue of innate geniuses’. Patricia Fara, Newton: The Making of Genius (Columbia University Press 2002) 227.
[5] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings (Cambridge University Press 1999) §18.
[6] In 1692-3, Newton suffered a serious nervous breakdown followed by a prolonged depression. These events have been linked to a possible mercury poisoning. Newton’s career pursuits thereafter gravitated away from science and, through a brief flirtation with politics, towards a 30-year stint as a distinguished civil servant.
[7] See William H Carter, ‘Faust’s Begehren: Revisiting the History of Political Economy in Faust II’ (2014) 21 Goethe Yearbook 104. Smith expressed reservations about some of Newton’s financial ideas—see RC Fay, ‘Newton and the Gold Standard’ (1935) 5(1) The Cambridge Historical Journal 115.
[8] Philip M Palmer and Robert P More, The Sources of the Faust Tradition from Simon Magus to Lessing (Routledge 1936) 242.
[9] John Maynard Keynes, ‘Newton, The Man’ in Elizabeth Johnson and Donald Moggridge (eds), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol 10: Essays in Biography (Cambridge University Press 1978) 374.
[10] Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (Oxford University Press 1919) 119.
[11] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (Vintage 1974) §105.
[12] ibid §203.
[13] Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (Cambridge University Press 1997) II §8.
[14] See Thomas Levenson, Newton and the Counterfeiter (Faber & Faber 2009) 241.
[15] Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena (Oxford University Press 1974) vol 1 §360 (‘What One Has’); vol 2 §320.
[16] Palmer and More (n 8) 3.
[17] See ibid 15; Frank Baron, ‘Georg Lukács on the Origins of the Faust Legend’ in Boerner and Johnson (n 2) 13; Gerald Strauss, ‘How to Read a Volksbuch’ in Boerner and Johnson (n 2) 27.
[18] Jane K Brown, ‘Faust’ in Lesley Sharpe (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Goethe (Cambridge University Press 2002) 88.
[19] Spengler (n 10) 99-100.
[20] Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (Princeton University Press 1968) 168.
[21] Beatrice Daw Brown, ‘Marlowe, Faustus, and Simon Magus’ (1939) 54(1) PMLA 83-6; Stephen Haar, Simon Magus: The First Gnostic? (De Gruyter 2003); Karl P Wentersdorf, ‘Some Observations on the Historical Faust’ (1978) 89(2) Folklore 213.
[22] Baron (n 17) 18.
[23] See Jantz (n 2) 340-1; GB Deason, ‘The Protestant Reformation and the Rise of Modern Science’ (1985) 38(2) Scottish Journal of Theology 238.
[24] See The Death of Simon Magus, a drawing in the Nuremberg Chronicle by an unknown artist, of 1493.
[25] Levin (n 2) 4.
[26] Carl Jung, Letters of C. G. Jung: Volume I, 1906-1950 (Routledge 1973) 89.
[27] Frank E Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton (Frederick Muller Limited 1980) 391.
[28] Compare Alexander Pope’s 1730 ‘Epitaph: Intended for Sir Isaac Newton’: ‘Nature, and Nature’s laws lay hid in night. God said, Let Newton be! and all was light’.
[29] William R Newman, Newton the Alchemist (Princeton University Press 2019) 393.
[30] Levin (n 2) 5.
[31] See Robert Iliffe and George E Smith (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Newton (Cambridge University Press 2016) 128; LW Johnson and ML Wolbarsht, ‘Mercury Poisoning: A Probable Cause of Isaac Newton’s Physical and Mental Ills’ (1979) 34(1) Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 1-9; Newman (n 29) 477.
[32] See also Goethe’s tale of unrequited love in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774).
[33] Edward F Edinger, Goethe’s Faust: Notes for a Jungian Commentary (Inner City Books 1990) 44.
[34] ibid 46.
[35] ibid.
[36] The name ‘Mephistopheles’ is of unknown origins. KJ Schröer, a prominent Goethe scholar, suggested that it is a compound of Hebrew mephitz ‘destroyer’ (or ‘spoiler’) + tophel ‘liar’ (short for tophel sheqer, literally ‘falsehood plasterer’; see also Job xiii:4).
[37] Fittingly, the brother of the four grey women was called ‘Death’.
[38] Manuel (n 27) 388-91.
[39] Levin (n 2) 1.
[40] In Newton’s case, William Chaloner (hanged 1699) and around 28 others for counterfeiting (see Manuel (n 27) 244); in Faust’s, Gretchen’s mother, brother, and daughter, as well as Philemon and Baucis.
[41] Already in the early scenes, Mephistopheles persuades the heavily indebted Holy Roman Emperor to print paper money—only notionally backed by gold that had not yet been mined—to solve an economic crisis, with initially happy results until more and more money is printed and rampant inflation ensues. Regarding Newton, see Glyn Davies, A History of Money (University of Wales Press 2002) 245-8.
[42] For an insightful discussion connecting Newton, Goethe, their respective theories of light, and the ‘Gold Standard’, see Christopher Houghton Budd, Finance at the Threshold: Rethinking the Real and Financial Economies (Routledge 2017) 14-21.
[43] Patricia Fara, ‘When Isaac Newton was Master of the Royal Mint’ (Prospect Magazine, 21 April 2021)
<https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/economics-and-finance/isaac-newton-royal-mint-physics-gravity-currency> accessed 29 January 2025. Founded in 1711, the South Sea Company was largely a scheme for managing British government debt. Newton was an early investor and profited handsomely as the price of South Sea stock rose over the course of the 1710s. In 1720, however, the company’s stock experienced one of the most spectacular rises and falls in financial history.
[44] Walter Kaufmann, Goethe’s Faust (Anchor Books 1961) 401.
[45] Consider Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections (Penguin 1998) maxims #520, 560, 1221-1222 and Newton’s famous ‘hypotheses non fingo’ from his General Scholium.
[46] Victor Barsan and Andrei Merticariu, ‘Goethe’s theory of colors between the ancient philosophy, middle ages occultism and modern science’ (2016) 3 Cogent Arts & Humanities 12.
[47] Newton against Hooke, Huygens, Leibniz, and the English Jesuits in Liège (regarding the criticism of gravity, invention of calculus, and theory of colours); and Goethe against Newton himself.
[48] Regarding Goethe, see Karl Hugo Pruys, Die Liebkosungen des Tigers. Eine erotische Goethe-Biographie (Edition q 1995). Regarding Newton, see Manuel (n 27); Richard S Westfall, Never at Rest (Cambridge University Press 1980); Natalie M Rosinky, Sir Isaac Newton: Brilliant Mathematician and Scientist (Compass Point Books 2007). These claims remain a much disputed conjecture; in particular, Scott Mandelbrote and Robert Iliffe argue to the contrary.
[49] Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All-Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (Cambridge University Press 1996) II Assorted Opinions and Maxims §106.
[50] Specifically, Louis XV of France and John Law (1671-1729), the mastermind behind the Mississippi Bubble (1720). Goethe followed closely the exploits of Law, a Scottish financier and monetary theorist, in his role as chief financial adviser to King Louis XV of France. Law’s ideas to revive the war-ravaged French economy, by printing paper money (ie, debt) and replacing the existing national debt with equity investments in dubious economic ventures, ended in economic disaster.
[51] For Goethe’s views on the principles of economic management, see the excellent discussion in Myles W Jackson, ‘Goethe’s Economy of Nature and the Nature of His Economy’ (1992) 17(5) Accounting, Organizations and Society 459-69; Binswanger (n 3).
[52] Goethe, Letter to Eckermann, 30 December, 1823, quoted in Dennis L Sepper, Goethe Contra Newton: Polemics and the Project for a New Science of Color (Cambridge University Press 2003) 1. See also Goethe (n 45) maxim #1285.
[53] Goethe (n 45) maxim #527.
[54] Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age: Volume I: The Poetry of Desire (1749-1790) (Oxford University Press 1991) 645-7.
[55] John Tyndall, Goethe’s Farbenlehre: Theory of Colors (independently published 2019, originally published 1880) 78.
[56] Dennis L Sepper, ‘Goethe Against Newton: Towards Saving the Phenomenon’ in Frederick Amrine, Francis J Zucker, and Harvey Wheeler (eds), Goethe and the Sciences: A Reappraisal (Springer 1987) 175.
[57] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Blackwell 1978) 26e.
[58] See also Barsan and Merticariu (n 46); Spengler (n 10) 384-90; Sepper (n 56) 181; Michael Duck and Michael Petry (trans), Goethe’s “Exposure of Newton’s Theory” (Imperial College Press 2016) for further exploration of the intellectual and aesthetic tensions underwriting the Goethe-Newton disagreements.
[59] See discussion in Henry Bortoft, The Wholeness of Nature (Lindisfarne Books 1996) 18-20, 31.
[60] Ronald Douglas Gray, Goethe the Alchemist (Cambridge University Press 2010) 260.
[61] Nietzsche (n 49) II Assorted Opinions and Maxims §186
[62] See Fara (n 4) 21-2.
[63] Friedrich Nietzsche, Letter to Carl von Gersdorff, 12 December 1870 (Nietzsche Source) <http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/BVN-1870,111> accessed 30 January 2025.
[65] ibid maxims #1294-95; my emphasis.
[66] Schelling and Hegel, as well as a handful of naturalists, asserted Goethe’s ‘victory’ over Newton, but not the physicists.
[67] See Gray (n 60) 262.
[68] Barsan and Merticariu aptly conclude their thought-provoking study of the Goethe-Newton feud with the comment that ‘Goethe is defeated by Newton, just like the Greek Gods were defeated by monotheism. He is defeated, but not crushed; what is left is rich enough to reveal a fascinating facet of his genius’. See Barsan and Merticariu (n 46) 27.
[69] Edinger (n 33) 52.
[70] Palmer and More (n 8) 3.
[71] Such attributes as are on display between Parts I and II of Goethe’s Faust, where the latter explores the socio-political problems of Goethe’s age, in a diversion from but also establishing inedible links with the metaphysical themes problematised in Part I.
[72] Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Nachgelassene Fragmente 1881 15[20]’ (Nietzsche Source) <http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/NF-1881,15> accessed 30 January 2025.
