Faust, Der Übermensch, & Leslie Nielsen's Close Encounter

In last week’s class, we briefly talked about Nietzsche’s understanding of the pursuit of knowledge as an attempt to flee the tragedies of existence. With Nietzsche in mind, could we see Faust as a sort of Übermensch? Indeed, Nietzsche’s “Übermensch” ideal states that the self should naturally be held as one’s highest priority, and certainly Faust’s egocentricism led him to sell Mephisto his soul from the get-go. But Faust never really wished to escape the Lord's authority, much less ever actually did.

I would say that, although he would appear to have achieved the status of “Übermensch” during his rule of Holland, what truly definitively separates Faust from Nietzsche’s concept of the ideal/authentic human is the fact that Faust never really recognized his ontological potential: unlike the Übermensch proper, Faust sold his soul because he was at no point in his diegetic lifetime forced to confront his existential angst directly and therefore never articulated his transcendental purpose as a human being. Faust was fed up with his worldly status, but instead of trying to realize his place in the realm of existents, he instead repressed his admission of ontological submission to God and sold his soul to Mephisto, the embodiment of negation and non-existence, the representative of the realm of the imaginary.

In this sense, the story of Faust (especially of Goethe’s portrayal) is much like the 1956 science fiction masterpiece Forbidden Planet. For those who have never watched this monument to Classical Hollywood cinema, this film tells the story of a star ship crew (commanded by no other than Leslie Nielsen) and its encounter with a planet that was once inhabited with a race of super intelligent aliens. The planet’s only current residents, a wise old scientist, his flirtatious twenty-something daughter, and Robbie The Robot, reveal the greatest creation and ultimate cause of extinction for the LONG gone former inhabitants. As it so happened, the aliens built a massive, city sized underground machine that could turn pure thought into physical reality. Obviously this didn’t fare well for the aliens, and neither did it for Leslie Nielsen and his men, who suffered the same wrath that the alien civilization had hundreds of thousands of years prior.

Ok, so what does a ‘50s sci-fi blockbuster have to do with classical Faust? Just as Faust’s ambition for omnipotence equated to mass suffering, so to did the extinct alien race of Forbidden Planet amass the power of the imaginary and mythical into reality in a similar vein. Both instances involved successful attempts to harness the powers of that which does not exist and somehow rendered such hyper-realistic power physically with tragic results: Faust did so with the help of the Devil, while the extinct race of Forbidden Planet achieved similar ends with science, knowledge, and technology, the “postmodern Lord” in a sense.

Returning to my initial point, an Übermensch, though ultimately embodying the potential for such power as described above, would never actually suffer the same existential fate as Faust did, or literally fall prey to his/her own abilities par the thematic discourse of Forbidden Planet. I would say, then, that Faust is not an Übermensch: though he flirts with the (metaphorical) rendering of the Übermensch’s boundless abilities, insofar as such ability is only obtainable (much less conceivable) upon authentic ontological articulation before Heaven and nothingness, Faust proves himself unable (or subconsciously unwilling) to recognize his place/purpose as a physical inhabitant of Earth, and therefore succumbs to the transcendental abilities that he cannot actually control.