Open Access

Ján Čakanek

• Im Buch "Arthur Schopenhauer als Interpret des Götheʼschen Faust" (Leipzig 1859) erhebt David Asher den ersten Teil des Dramas zum Prüfstein der Schopenhauer’schen Philosophie. Zugleich aber sieht er den "überwiegenden philosophischen Charakter" der Dichtung nicht der idealen Dialektik Hegels, sondern dem voluntativen Irrationalismus dessen Antipoden Schopenhauer entwachsen. Diese Einsicht kam einem Paradigmenwechsel gleich, bedenkt man, dass der Gedankenaustausch zwischen Schopenhauer und Goethe mit einem pseudoödipalen Fiasko endete.
• Previous attempts to explain Goethe's Faust on the basis of Schopenhauer's philosophy were basically confined to connections with voluntarism, respectively to Schopenhauer's exemplifications of his views by Goethe's metaphors. However, the connection of the qualities of the will of some literary characters with the transcendental ideality, as understood by Plato, escaped attention. The present study aims to remedy this situation at least in part. The author starts from the problematisation of the concepts "idea" in Platonic, "will" in Schopenhauer's and "Urphänomen" in Goethe's sense. His aim is to show by what internal processes Faust reaches the knowledge of eternal ideas and what role negation of will plays in this. The study extends interdisciplinarily from literature to natural philosophy and natural science and touches on a number of ontological problems such as time, space, matter, but also light or colour. This broad scope is also reflected in a methodology of interpretation that is more coordinating than subordinating and more open than closed with a desire to stimulate further research.