Chapter 20 reflects on Goethe’s unique way of thinking and his persistent challenges to orthodoxy. It builds on Goethe’s own assertion that he was ‘not naturally equipped to do philosophy in its proper sense’, and argues that his thought engages the figurative power of ‘improper’ (that is, poetic) language to do philosophical work. The chapter notes his criticism of the modes of, among others, Kant and Hegel, and highlights places in Goethe’s oeuvre, including in his literary works, where we can see new and unconventional pathways for thought being built.

JEAN-LUC NANCY's DISCUSSION of the Kantian schema in The Ground of the Image characterizes the European “transformation of thought” between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries as an epochal shift “from painting to the projection screen,” or “from sight (vue) to vision,” by which he means “from representation to presentation …, from the idea to the image, or, more precisely, from the fantasy or fantasm to the imagination.” Nancy's time-span, of course, precisely encompasses the historical arc of Faust. Consequently, his list of the transformative changes that were witnessed between Luther and Goethe could easily serve as an historical and theoretical frame for analyzing the problem of figuration in Faust, which similarly features the work of the imagination and thereby shifts the attention of its protagonist and spectator—in the spirit of Nancy's formulation—from “being to appearing” or from “ontology to phenomenology” (Nancy 80).

Even the casual reader of Faust will notice how the complex of figurative structures at work throughout Goethe's play move with compelling immediacy across the impassioned, personal investments of part one, only to re-emerge as the characteristically rarefied abstractions of part two, with its challenging allegorical and symbolic exhibitions. However, rather than valorize the poetic figure (Bild), in line with Emrich, within an ontological-genetic framework as a referential form that reveals origins in history, or expose it, along with Flax, as a site of deconstructive semiosis, I will take my cue from Nancy in the following remarks and reframe the discussion about figuration (Bildlichkeit) in Faust by exploring the transcendental quality of the play's figurative processes. To initiate this kind of post-Kantian re-evaluation of the Faust-stage, especially in part two, as a site where the poetic figure is analyzed in terms of the inherent (a priori) capacity of the Goethean imagination to animate and sustain thought—despite, or perhaps, because of Faust's cognitive and moral shortfalls—I will consider (more modestly here) just a few familiar passages, largely from the first part of the work—with the exception of Faust's journey to the Mothers.