ABSTRACT
This chapter works with the most problematic of the characters the book considers to this point. Compared to the blindness of Aeneas and Othello, Goethe’s character Faust—even in the midst of his cruelly self-centered, even self-obsessed Streben (or striving)—is practically sharp-sighted, though the irony is that he will not be raised to transcendence until he is physically blinded in a way that allows him to achieve psychological insight. Like Gloucester in King Lear, he stumbled when he saw. In Faust, what is doing the raising up—Zieht uns hinan—is the individual (archetypally Masculine) compulsion toward reunion with the source of life: the Eternal-Feminine, the conceptual counterpart of the Greek zoe and the Upanishadic brahman. The title character strives throughout his life to reconcile the opposites within him and causes a great deal of pain and damage along the road of his very long life. Ultimately Faust transcends this opposition through a return to das Ewig-Weibliche—the Eternal-Feminine, in an ending that many have found (and still find) perplexing.
