Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Muenzer, Clark S

Titel

Forms of Figuration in Goethe's Faust

Ist Teil von

• Goethe yearbook, 2010, Vol.17 (1), p.133-152

Ort / Verlag

Rochester: North American Goethe Society

Erscheinungsjahr

2010

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Literature Online (LION)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• [...]while this kind of figure, as a representation ("Vorstellung"), exhibits an initial cognitive interest in the synthesis of concepts and intuitions as regulated by the determinant judgment, when the imagination stages aesthetic ideas- which by definition deny conceptual adequacy- it must redirect that interest.To do this, the imagination becomes reflexive and productive. (6275-80) By fleeing empirical reality ("dem Entstandnen ") and thereby positioning himself, both transcendentally and aesthetically, to take pleasure ("Ergetze dich ") in what is no longer present to the senses ("am längst nicht mehr Vorhandnen"), Faust discovers that his driving desire for a secure and comprehensive cognitive grasp of macrocosmic design has been re-staged as an autonomous ("schlingt sich") machine. [...]re-situated within the gears ("Getreibe") of the productive imagination ("in der Gebilde losgebundne Räume"), his erotic striving will no longer find redemption, or "Heil" (6271), in the kind of misguided idolization of semiotic materiality that was enacted in the macrocosm-scene during his short-lived attempt to reduce the informing law of the universe to the rigid outline of an empirically given geometric figure.22 To avoid the "Erstarren" (6271) of the phantasmic display, the mind must instead glance downward and into itself, where the capacity of spontaneous figuration resides. [...]as stagings of space and time, the two pure forms constitutive of Kantian intuition, they facilitate the appearance of the unified manifolds of sensibility, which are synthesized by the imagination and then applied to the understanding as schematized categories. [...]both of the stagings move Faust to believe momentarily that he has direct cognitive access to their regimes. [...]in the failed encounter with the macrocosm, "die wirkende Natur" deceptively promises to reveal the conceptual ground of macrocosmic connectivity in the pure outlines of the geometric figure- "in diesen reinen Zügen" (440)which would then mediate between heaven and earth in a spatial representation of universal harmony34 Likewise, with Faust's subsequent turn to the "Erdgeist," we see the creative-destructive process of life coalesce in its temporal entirety as a "[schreckliches Gesicht" (482): an overwhelming human figure or vision that the scholar would grasp, schematically again, as a determination of time.