Goethe’s Faust is a mythic projection of a man torn between Western dualisms, arising from the mind/body split, that have both philosophical and psychological dimensions. Mephistopheles, who functions in the text as Faust’s double in many ways, represents the side of these dualisms that is more associated with the body. Just before the poodle that has followed Faust home turns into Mephistopheles, Faust is in his study trying to decide what there was in the beginning – the Word, Mind, Power or the Deed. This hesitation suggests an inability on Faust’s part to unite the mind and the body, the contemplative life and the engaged life, theory and praxis. (The Word is used in the Bible to refer to God’s means of creating the world. The apostles who wrote some of the books in the New Testament were influenced by the neo-Platonism of their time, and this influence informed their use of ‘the Word” as a signifier. Both traditions, Platonism and Christianity, have kept the mind/body split alive in Western culture, although there have been forms of Christianity that encouraged engagement rather than withdrawal. Faust’s hesitation between the Word and the Deed prefigures modern existentialism. One of the most characteristic themes of existentialism was the profound contempt for theory without praxis, or the Word without the Deed.) While Faust is torn between the dichotomies his culture has reproduced in his mind, Mephistopheles looms up. It is significant that Mephistopheles urges worldliness upon Faust. The timing suggests the emergence of Faust’s repressed non-intellectual side.

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