NICHOLAS RENNIE

            BETWEEN PASCAL AND MALLARME:  FAUST'S SPECULATIVE MOMENT

THERE IS A TRADITION of Enlightenment discourse that rejects the idea of chance as a crude superstition. In line with this tradition, Goethe frequently expresses his own distaste for what appears random, chaotic, unstructured. The dream-vision with which Goethe’s Faust opens--after a brief dedication and prelude--is perhaps Goethe’s most vigorous argument against chance and disorder. Here, the harmony of the universe reveals itself in the Pythagorean movement of the spheres, where if all is in motion, the sun nonetheless follows a "predetermined course." Its revolutions--and those of the planets--only confirm that the universe is a perpetuum mobile, a system in which no fundamental change can occur. It is from this perspective that the Lord agrees to a wager with the devil; and from this same perspective, strictly speaking, the agreement can hardly be called a "wager" since its results, like the sun’s path through the heavens, are preordained. To quote the motto of a more recent (Einsteinian) form of determinism, "God does not play dice with the universe": in a deterministic system there can be no pure chance.

This promise of total order was already embedded in the aesthetic and philosophical harmony of the universe as described by Leibniz, and later by Goethe’s contemporary Pierre Simon LaPlace. Indeed, the vision of unvarying universal harmony with which the play opens repeats an aesthetic and semiotic ideal that both German Romanticism and German Classicism may be said to inherit from the Enlightenment. Nonetheless, I suggest that Goethe’s play remains consistently preoccupied with the problem of chance. Furthermore, I wish to argue that the concept of chance developed within this work directly problematizes Goethe’s semiotic ideal of the symbol. To make this point, I propose to examine Goethe’s play through the eyes of two poet-theorists of chance, Pascal and Mallarmé.