March 26, 2020 | By Su Karagoz (A20)

Jack Condie is from Australia. He spent his high school years in Melbourne, but his family currently resides in Adelaide. His senior essay is entitled “Time, Nature, & Empathy: A Portrait of Humanity in Goethe’s Faust.”​

What was at the heart of your argument?

I was really interested in the different depictions of the human being Goethe gives us. Not only in the titular character, but in the other human characters across the two plays. It felt like Goethe gives us so many depictions of human life that Faust does not seem to understand, or thinks that he is above. Ultimately, I felt like Goethe was saying to be human is to struggle with three interconnected problems, and Faust errs in thinking that he is alone in that struggle.

First, you have the problem of time. This is probably the most explicit because Goethe frames the famous Faustian pact in terms of time. We have a moment-to-moment existence. As each moment unfolds, we are in the process of becoming. We are never in complete possession of ourselves or where we are going. It’s a version of what Solon says: that to judge the happiness of a man’s life, one must look to the end, because only then is it whole.

Then, you have nature. Nature in a teleological sense is a lot like time. Things in nature move in time towards ends, much like we do. A big part of being temporal is that we are connected to nature, and yet through reason (which might be seen as something like divine right) we have custodianship over it. Custodianship doesn’t mean we can do anything we want to nature; it’s a responsibility. We have to be good custodians, lest we think ourselves as too much like gods and lose sight of our humanity.

Finally, there is empathy and community. Dealing with our temporal existence and exercising correctly our responsibilities to nature is really tough, and oftentimes the more aware we are of these problems the more they drive us to a kind of despair. In those moments, a kind of empathy is needed. You are human, and someone else is human, and you are both dealing with the burden of this kind of existence, whether you deal with it in the same way or not. I focused a lot in my essay on Mephistopheles taking Faust to Auerbach’s Cellar. It seemed to me odd that Faust positioned himself as unlike the patrons of the pub—who were college students drunkenly singing about love and politics—yet Faust himself is an academic. He once was exactly in the same position as the students in the pub and in many ways still is. In short, sometimes our desire to climb the ladder of knowledge makes us forget the foundations of why we took on a humanistic study to begin with.

How did your essay connect to different aspects of the Program from throughout your four years?

I have been deeply troubled by time, in one way or another, throughout the entire St. John’s Program. I think one place I first really articulated it was in my sophomore essay on Augustine. Temporality there seems to be really dangerous. On the one hand, the word of God spoke all into existence in time, which means it should be a good thing. Yet so often it’s our existence in the moment that triggers our desire to sin, in the sense that Augustine thinks of sin as a grotesque imitation of God. We hold our existence in a moment as a kind of false whole—a false eternity in that desire to be in complete possession of ourselves. It gives rise to our darker impulses and convinces us that we can do anything. Even without God and Christianity as a framework, this did seem a real problem to me. What was really surprising to me was time’s real connection to nature. I had forgotten over the years about Goethe’s Metamorphosis of Plants, which we read in freshman lab. When I was struggling to think of a way to connect time and nature as they appeared thematically in Faust, I suddenly remembered it. In the dedication poem at the beginning, Goethe speaks of the “chain” of “eternal forces” that is nature. In addition, metamorphosis itself is fairly teleological. You can tell Goethe was very interested in the nature of things becoming towards an end, and that is a temporal process, at least in the natural world. Goethe’s Faust really does connect to a lot of the ideas we cover here at St. John’s, and it’s kind of shocking it isn’t on the Program—nearly every senior seminar reading makes mention of it. So psst…Instruction Committee…get on that…

What was the writing process like for you?

It was a lot of fun. One of my best friends was in the Faust preceptorial with me in junior year and also wrote his senior essay on Faust, so it was good to have someone to talk to and sound off ideas with. Another friend wrote her essay on Gounod’s opera [that is] loosely based on Faust, so it was really nice to talk to her also and see how different people have taken this story (particularly Goethe’s version) and used it as a framework to tell what I think is, at its heart, an extremely human story. I really enjoyed the freedom (and free coffee) that the writing period and the senior writing lounge gave us. I was worried I wasn’t going to have enough to say, but after every meeting with my advisor I left excited about a new scene I had never really given much thought to before. It was good to spend a month with just a book, a tutor that I trusted, and myself to ultimately create something that I am really proud of.

What is the most important lesson you learned during your time at St. John’s?

That it is very easy to become like Faust. I think his first lines in the play really speak to pretty much every Johnnie senior year: “Alas! I have alone studied Philosophy, Law, and Medicine, and unfortunately also Theology with heated fervour. Yet here I stand still, a poor fool!” It is really easy to be embittered by the seemingly endless weight of what we study, not to mention what lies after graduation. However, I think the best advice I was ever given by my advisor about being a temporal being, particularly a St. John’s one, was: “Don’t ever let yourself become bitter.” It’s a lesson I am still trying to live by.