Compare and contrast Goethe s Faust I with the Faust tradition Faust tradition Faust is the protagonist of a classic German legend He is a scholar who is highly successful yet dissatisfied with his life so he makes a pact with the Devil exchanging his soul for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures The Faust legend has been the basis for many literary artistic cinematic and musical works that have reinterpreted it through the ages Faust and the adjective Faustian imply a situation in which an ambitious person surrenders moral in tegrity in order to achieve power and success for a delimited term 1 Today the name Faust has become attached to tales about a person of power whose pride and arrogance lead to his doom The term faustian has come to mean a tarnished deal for worldly power or knowledge at the expense of a higher spiritual value or reward or simply posses sion with a thirst for skill or knowledge Faustus is a scholar who sells his soul to the Devil Although fictional in literature the legend is based on an actual magician who lived in the area of northern Germany in the fifteenth century Once idealistic he is now disillusioned and bitter with despair He foresakes God and makes a perilous deal with the Devil in which he commits his soul to eternal damnation in return for power and knowledge in this life God s argument with Mephistopheles comes from his divine belief that in the end humanity will transcend the evil of the world and be faithful to their creator God brings Faust into the conver sation as an example of such goodness Mephistopheles is skeptical that Faust is that good of a servant to God and the two make a wager for Faust s soul Describe the paradigm of the Apollonian Dionysian as presented in Friedrich Nietzsche s The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music Select two additional works by Nietzsche that we discussed in class Give their exact titles and discuss one major idea from each of those two readings Artistic creation depends on a tension between two opposing forces which Nietzsche terms the Apollonian and the Dionysian Apollo is the Greek god of light and reason and Nietzsche identifies the Apollonian as a life and form giving force characterized by measured restraint and detachment which reinforces a strong sense of self Dionysus is the Greek god of wine and music and Nietzsche identifies the Dionysian as a frenzy of self forgetting in which the self gives way to a primal unity where individuals are at one with others and with nature Both the Apollonian and the Dionysian are necessary in the creation of art Without the Apollonian the Dionysian lacks the form and structure to make a coherent piece of art and without the Dionysian the Apollonian lacks the necessary vitality and passion Although they are diametri cally opposed they are also intimately intertwined zarathrustra and the will to power zarathrustra The novel opens with Zarathustra descending from his cave in the mountains after ten years of solitude He is brimming with wisdom and love and wants to teach humanity about the overman He arrives in the town of the Motley Cow and announces that the overman must be the meaning of the earth Mankind is just a bridge between animal and overman and as such must be overcome The overman is someone who is free from all the prejudices and moralities of human society and who creates his own values and purpose The overman bermensch a self mastered individual who has achieved his full power is an al most omnipresent idea in Thus Spoke Zarathustra Man as a race is merely a bridge between ani mals and the overman Nietzsche also makes a point that the overman is not an end result for a person but more the journey toward self mastery The will to power is the fundamental component of human nature Everything we do is an ex pression of the will to power The will to power is a psychological analysis of all human action and is accentuated by self overcoming and self enhancement Contrasted with living for procre ation pleasure or happiness the will to power is the summary of all man s struggle against his surrounding environment as well as his reason for living in it The will to power describes what Nietzsche may have believed to be the main driving force in humans achievement ambition the striving to reach the highest possible position in life these are all manifestations of the will to power