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(Accepted for publication 5 March 2014)
In Goethe's epic masterpiece of modernity, Faust, the protagonist, a seeker after knowledge, laments his frustrations with the fruits of his labour, rails against their limited nature, the obstructions that stand in his way. He says:
No new strength wells up within meI am not a hairsbreadth tallerI am still no nearer the infinite
Faust craves the infinite and so the meagre gains of his endless toiling for knowledge pale into insignificance when compared to the new object of his longing - omniscience. Faust is hidebound by ‘considerations of reality’ and this state of mind provides fertile soil for the devil's work; Mephistopheles offers a world of no obstruction, where all desire can be realized.
Mephistopheles introduces himself as the spirit “that negates all”, he continues:
all that is deserves to perishbetter if nothing had ever been born
He personifies the negative principle, the antithesis of thought and creativity. We learn that Faust has no independent existence of his own but is called into being by the presence of good. Some regard evil/human hatred only as the absence of but Freud, like Goethe, did not see human destructiveness in such passive terms; it is not only the negative of good, it is the negation of good.