re: #123 wlewisiii

Ouch. Yeah, a one time thing, I could see, probably defending Marlowe. Did he have a preference?

He was a Goethe fellow - I was more for Marlowe, whose narrative arc had its own ballistics, as it were - it made more sense than did Goethe’s, at least to my mind.

Goethe, I held, was trying to hold out the Enlightenment ideal of the rational-technical conquest of nature for the relief of Man’s estate (which is the entire project of Modernity - there is nothing else from Machiavelli on) as a semi-redemptive act, as it were, the materialist Passion of Faust, simultaneously cleansing the sin (selling the soul, which is what Modernity required as the price of power) and absolving the debtor. Yes, I said it was an inversion of the Christian mythos.