What does All that is solid melts into air mean to us?
Reading Berman for the first time this week, I was stunned by his opinions and
how counterculture they were. So my question is, "All that is solid melts
into the air," Marx wrote famously in The Communist Manifesto, was his
prophecy as prescient as ever?
One word we can see it this coming from the story of
Goesther’s Faust. If a person who will pay the greatest price in order to
exchange for his greatest wish to come true, then what can this greatest wish
be? For some people that would be to married to their love one, for others may
be the procession of wealth or even the outmost power to some group of people.
But for Faust legend of Christopher Marlowe and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, he
is already a doctor, lawer a highly successful scholar but one dissatisfied
with his life who therefore decided to call on the Devil for further knowledge
and magic powers with which to indulge all the pleasure and knowledge of the
world. For a Christian who sold his soul
to the devil this indeed is the greatest price to pay but for what
greatest wish?
The story concerns the fate of Faust in his quest for the
true essence of life. Frustrated with learning and the limits to his knowledge,
power, and enjoyment of life, he attracts the attention of the Devil
(represented by Mephistopheles), who agrees to serve Faust until the moment he
attains the zenith of human happiness, such that he cries out to that moment to
"stay, thou art so beautiful!" (Faust, I, l.1700) — at which point
Mephistopheles may take his soul. Faust is pleased with the deal, as he
believes this happy zenith will never come. But he did in the later stage
progresses into allegorical poetry. Faust and his Devil pass through and
manipulate the world of politics and the world of the classical gods, and meet
with Helen of Troy(the personification of beauty). Finally, having succeeded in
taming the very forces of war and nature, Faust experiences a singular moment
of happiness.
Mephistopheles tries to seize Faust's soul when he dies
after this moment of happiness, but is frustrated and enraged when angels
intervene due to God's grace. Though this grace is truly 'gratuitous' and does
not condone Faust's frequent errors perpetrated with Mephistopheles, the angels
state that this grace can only occur because of Faust's unending striving and
due to the intercession of the forgiving Gretchen. The final scene has Faust's
soul carried to heaven in the presence of God as the "Holy Virgin, Mother,
Queen, Goddess...The Eternal Feminine." The Goddess is thus victorious
over Mephistopheles, who had insisted at Faust's death that he would be
consigned to "The Eternal Empty."
In the 60s, there was a think tank in America which predicted
people in the future would have lots more of free time to enjoy their life as
most of their work will be done by robots and Artificial intelligence due to
the development of advanced technology. But in fact, people living in todays’
world are working harder, longer and living in a much faster pace. It is widely
acknowledged that our conceptions and experiences of space have changed
considerably in recent times. They have been transformed by the development of
new or more sophisticated technologies, such as the Internet, the jet plane,
and the mobile phone, which bring things and people that were once distant
closer, while simultaneously rendering others further away. An electronic
version of an academic journal article available on the Internet and accessible
on one's computer screen is far closer than the hard copy resting on the
shelves of the university library, even though the source of the former might
be many thousands of miles away.
A whole host of phenomena, ranging from the weakening and
absorbency of territorial boundaries of countries, the actual and potential
"globalization of contingency" in the form of global pandemics and
the spectre of environmental catastrophe, to the backlash of increasing
territorialization as new forms of imperialism, international isolationism,
political fundamentalism, ethnonationalist particularism, or projects for a
"Fortress Europe"--seek to reverse these trends, point to the
increasing salience of changing conceptions of space and time in our
globalizing world.
The Global economy system is by its nature is constantly
expanding and therefore needs to constantly revolutionize itself in order to
create new markets, leaving nothing solid or permanent in its wake, both
destroying and conjuring into existence everything from cities to human
populations along the way. They were also speaking of the way that capitalism
reduces everything to the shadowy abstraction known as money. Both of these
processes have accelerated and transformed themselves in the twentieth century.
New technologies have greatly expanded the human capacity for both creation and
destruction, and the universality of money as a standard of value above all
others has been supplemented by the (much discussed) process through which
everything, if it is to be felt to exist at all.
Faust paid a great price to pursuit the true value and
meaning of life. And we are paying a great price for what? Is it to co-exist in
this system? To stay in a terrain and struggle for control?
The whole discussion questions Global economy system and
power in this era, the manner of how we merge our life with technology and that
we need to understand that we must take responsibility for our choice and
actions.
Faust was persistence in pursuit of the true essence of life
and he was given salvation. So, we must question where our true value of life
lies. As the final stage of Faust story will tell us as he descends into his
inner mind, he is blinded by the witch, Care, who then tells him he has always
been blind. He was blinded by his ambition and failed to see what he was really
doing to the world.
