The image of humanities in Doktor Faustus by Thomas Mann

Abstract

We start from the consideration of the knowledge of the humanities, and of the consequent humanistic formation, to observe its interference and justification in the cultural results, according to the narrative of Thomas Mann. With the framework of the historical situation of the author and within the confrontation between the bourgeois and the artist, we analyze the author’s diagnosis of the capitalist epoch and its exhaustion; we stop at the idea of evolution-transition operated by art, in particular by music, as a language to renew tradition. The description of the fictional forms is made through the apparent contrast of Doktor Faustus between the witness narrator, Serenus Zeitblom, and the protagonist, Adrián Leverkuhn, who reveals the unity of vision. The conclusions refer to the dubious energy of the knowledge of the humanities, and to the complicity of their mutations, under the paradigm of instrumental rationality, to favor the crisis of the Western individual.