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Jurisprudence and medicine, too,
And, worst of all, theology:
With keen endeavor, through and through—
And here I am, for all my lore,
The wretched fool I was before.
Called Master of Arts, and Doctor to boot,
For ten years almost I confute
And up and down, wherever it goes,
I drag my students by the nose—
And see that for all our science and art
We can know nothing…
Where, boundless Nature can I hold you fast?
And where your breasts? Wells that sustain all
Life—the heaven and the earth are nursed.
Where withered hearts crave you in thirst—
You well, you nourish, and I languish in vain.3
—Goethe
Faust’s dilemma is famous—and not only because the greatest poet of the German language decided to set the story and ended up making it his life’s work. Faust stands at the apex of human knowledge. He is a polymath, at home in many fields. He is a philosopher, learned in law and religion, a teacher, and so forth.
It is the teaching that got him: listening to himself saying those things; looking at trusting, bored, adoring, deadened, passionate eyes; explaining, expostulating, exhorting students ever onward—to what?
Faust knows the secret virtually everyone who possesses an advanced degree knows. On the walk across the stage to receive the fruits of years of labor, many of us experience a revelation. We become intensely aware that we know, that we possess, only one truth: we have learned much, but in that very process we have come face to face with the infinity we do not know. We know, in that moment, that we know virtually nothing.
But that is the easy part.
We, like Faust, want to “grasp” nature—to harness it, to transform its enigmatic inarticulateness into concepts, and to find and to master the spring of life itself in order that we may renew our “withered hearts”; in order that we may wrest ourselves, however temporarily, out of the burden of mortality.