To be sure, Goethe stated repeatedly that what appears in the second part of Faust is ‘a higher, more spacious, brighter, more dispassionate world’, and that one must ‘lead a man like him through more worthy circumstances, in higher regions’. Yet occasionally his intention also admits of more apprehensive tones: ‘There are still a number of magnificent, real and fantastical delusions on earth, in which the poor human, were he to lose himself in them, would experience something nobler, more dignified and higher, than he ever does in the first, common part. Our friend Faust should also have to struggle through these.’ And to this Goethe adds that ‘in the world's daylight, it would look like a pasquinade’.

Those who cling decidedly to the ‘higher regions’, like Max Kommerell, Dorothea Hölscher-Lohmeyer or Wilhelm Emrich, run up against the great entelechy and its spheres of being, the survey, if possible, of cosmic world-regions, primordial ur-phenomena and histories of being – and tend towards a monumental interpretation of Faust, beyond all morality. Those who, on the other hand, keep in mind the ‘real and fantastical delusions on earth’ will retrieve the Faust of the second part, too, from an ontological, ur-phenomenal dimension and expose him to the ‘world's daylight’. The Emperor plot of Acts 1 and 4, as well as the land appropriation venture in the fifth act, are then recognizable as a ‘poetic-symbolic representation of modern existence’, as a more or less systematic sequence of historical-political phenomena, in which ‘symphronistically’ – to use Goethe's expression from the Journeyman Years – the German late Middle Ages are synthesized with the modern present.