Judge Holden — Faustian Man's Shadow

Introduction 🔗

Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.

Thus declares judge Holden his metaphysical authority over existence itself.¹ He is the darkest potential of (European) man, and while fascinating to some, is a stark reminder of the brutal nature of reality.

Context for Writing 🔗

This essay responds to a video by Morgoth’s Review² and our subsequent exchange, exploring Holden’s resonances with Faustian impulses, Evola’s observations on the will to power turned toward domination, and the Hobbesian undertones of unchecked violence in McCarthy’s worlds. He mentioned how he would explore the latter in a future essay, which he has since released.³

Scope 🔗

Since the current essay discusses major plot points for Blood Meridian, Goethe’s Faust, Moby-Dick, No Country for Old Men, and The Road, consider this a spoiler alert.

It helps to be familiar with the works, but it is not a necessity.

General Thesis 🔗

My argument is that Holden resembles the shadow archetype of the driving force that shaped Western civilization: the relentless Faustian striving for mastery, knowledge and conquest. His fusion of polymathic intellect, philosophical certainty, and unrestraint offers the darkest possible mirror to the European spirit’s quest to conquer nature, impose order, and dictate fate.

Background 🔗

Blood Meridian and the Judge 🔗

Blood Meridian (1985) is a historical Western with deep philosophical themes, set in the last vestige of American frontier.

The story follows “the kid,” an illiterate runaway teenager, who, despite a taste for mindless violence, retains a rudimentary sense of morality. He joins a gang of scalp hunters, witnessing and participating in acts of extreme brutality.

Within this gang, we meet judge Holden. To say the least, Holden is otherworldly. McCarthy is very clear about this,⁴ and it best shown in his abilities, which are plausible in isolation but supernatural in their totality:

• Physically: albino, completely hairless, nearly seven feet tall, ambidextrous, and able to crush a man’s head with his bare hands. The closest he comes to physical vulnerability is bartering for a hat to escape the desert sun.
• Intellectually: a polyglot and polymath, both philosopher and tactician.
• Technologically: capable of to manufacturing gunpowder from natural resources while on the run.
• Morally: capable and predatory, reveling in corruption of the innocent—children especially.

All of this gives weight to the brutal philosophy preaches. When Holden says “war is god,” he embodies it. This sets him apart from the Raskolnikovs of the world.

The Faustian Spirit 🔗

The Faustian spirit is a term coined by Oswald Spengler to denote the animating force which he claimed awakened in European man around the early Renaissance (~1000–1200). It is characterized by a restless pursuit to explore and conquer the frontiers of nature, from the planetary level to the atomic level, “without any practical object, merely for the Symbol’s own sake—to reach North Pole and South Pole.” It disregards costs, consequences, or limits in its quest for extension and infinity.⁵

This spirit is inherently individualistic, with Spengler pointing to “Kant’s will to subject the ‘phenomenal’ world to the asserted domination of the cognizing ego” as an expression thereof. A result is that it creates a morality around personal will and achievement over harmony or stasis.⁶

He writes that it awakens earlier and more intensely in the Nordic people, as evidenced by the extraordinary Viking voyages that reach from Vinland to Serkland (Asia Minor). We glimpse its value system in Norse mythology where deeds are stated to be what ultimately matters.⁷ It also reshaped European Chrisitianity, most visibly in the Crusades. He later texts he writes about the dream of the Faustian inventor is “[t]o build a world oneself, to be oneself God.”⁸

Spengler tells us to imagine it as the manifested spirit of the Western culture. A stark contrast appears when Amazonian tribesmen watch footage of the moon landing and instinctively ask why?⁹ The Faustian spirit demanded it.

Goethe and Faust 🔗

Spengler names Goethe’s Doctor Faust as the literary embodiment of this drive, citing:

A longing pure and not to be described
drove me to wander over woods and fields,
and in a mist of hot abundant tears
I felt a world arise and live for me.¹⁰

Faust spends his entire life mastering conventional knowledge. Still unfulfilled, he turns to magic. He enlists Mephistopheles as a servant who will provide him with what all the material world can offer. Not believing that anything can give him meaning, Faust does this on a wager (not a sale of his soul¹¹): only if he experiences a moment so fulfilling that he wishes it to last forever will he forfeit himself.

There is no desire for pleasure, only the experience that will complete him.

We witness his attempt at fulfillment through material and sensual immersion fail—Goethe’s point being that spiritual questions are not fulfilled with material answers. He hammers this point home in the closing acts of Part II: where Faust only finds fulfillment (and dies) after working toward something greater than himself.¹²

Captain Ahab 🔗

Another Faustian archetype is Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab.¹³ Having lost his leg to the white whale, Moby-Dick, Ahab becomes consumed with a legendary obsession to pursue the beast to the end of the world.

Moby-Dick represent the unconquered, mythic nature, whereas Ahab posses the restless, Faustian will to overcome it at all cost. That the object of his quest is a whale whale is; there is no ordinary hunt; for Ahab this is metaphysical war. We read:

Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.¹⁴

Where the Fausts wants to master knowledge and experience, the Ahabs wants to conquer nature through feats of will.

It is also worth noting that McCarthy was intimately familiar and deeply influenced by Melville’s work.

Nietzschean Man 🔗

I assert that the Nietzschean Übermensch is a philosophical archetype of the Faustian spirit. In Nietzschean terms, the Faustian spirit can be described as the will to overcome, which aligns closely with the Übermensch ideal: continuously willing to overcome oneself.

Will to Power 🔗

Nietzsche’s will to power is the fundamental driving force of all life. As I’ve explored, the inorganic may living as it is driven by the same principles that drives human life,¹⁵ but atoms, cells, animals, and human systems appear inert compared to a human and his active mind.¹⁶ Even in an awakened human, the mind has strict limitations.¹⁷

To Nietzsche, understanding the universe from the perspective of the self and the mind is bound to reflect as truths what was projected:

The error of confusing the mind as cause with reality! And made the measure of reality! And called God!¹⁸

In a materialist sense, will can be seen as an illusion of the mind. The underlying force of the will to power, physically, would be entropy or evolutionary computation,¹⁵ which is experienced as a will on the mental level.

Übermensch 🔗

The “superman” is related to the will to power but distinct. Whereas the will to power is the fundamental drive in all life, the Übermensch is Nietzsche’s idealized human manifestation of what this drive becomes when continuously directed to overcoming the current state of man.¹⁹

The Übermensch is therefore not merely strong, but transformative. Nietzsche stresses transvaluation in the existential sense: the power to create new values, to overturn inherited moral systems, and to affirm one’s own standards.²⁰

Additionally, the concept of the Eternal Return²¹ can be understood as the mind-state that will guide man towards the Übermensch: by willing one’s life so completely that it is affirmed through endless repetition.

Master and Slave Morality 🔗

Nietzsche distinguishes between master and slave morality.²²

Master morality is the morality of strength (not necessarily physical, but of will, although the two are correlated). It is not a stretch to call it the morality of the Übermensch and anti-egalitarian what Nietzsche expresses with Zarathustra as his mouthpiece.²³ Positivity for the master morality is then associated identified with strength, vitality, nobility, and self-affirmation.

In contrast, slave morality arose, according to Nietzsche, with the early Christians in response to Roman dominance. Lacking power in this world, they reinterpreted weakness as a virtue and strength as a sin.²⁴ The psychology of slave morality is an inferiority complex: envy of the ones perceived as better.

The Christians succeeded in convincing the Romans that earthly power was inferior to the power of the next world. To be meek and resent those greater ones becomes a moral stance, thus it requires a subject to pull down to its level. By contrast, a (true) master is secure in his own strength, without needing to impose his morality on others.

Spengler-Nietzsche 🔗

As Spengler’s philosophy is heavily influenced by Nietzsche, his critique of becomes relevant to understanding the world in which judge Holden operates.

Spengler’s ultimate critique is that Nietzsche’s philosophy is aimless. He views the Eternal Return a necessary invention to preserve a sense of mission, since the Übermensch remains an abstract symbol, lacking practical guidance.

Finally, Spengler remarks that master morality is nothing other than the Faustian morality that had existed in the West for centuries. View like this, Nietzsche does not creating anything new, but expressed the existing spirit of the age. And how could he have made truth out of nothing?

A true idea cannot be ‘new’, for truth is not a product of the human mind; it exists independently of us.

—René Guénon²⁵

Of course this is an interpretive engagement with Nietzsche’s philosophy, and one could argue that it misappropriates his thought. That may be, but it goes beyond the scope of this essay, which is to better understand man and the forces of the universe. In that respect, we can certainly learn from study Nietzsche’s astute observations.

McCarthy’s Metaphysics 🔗

Now that we have established the background on the Faustian spirit, and familiarized ourselves with the Nietzschean terms, we shall see how they fit neatly with Cormac McCarthy’s broader philosophy. To understand the context of judge Holden and his enigmatic statements, we will consider McCarthy’s understanding of human nature, will, destiny, authority, and morality. It is worth acknowledging the Gnostic undertones of his works, but that is not central to the discussion.

Human Nature and Civilization 🔗

A Hobbesian state of nature is the idea that man left unchecked by civilization results in savagery and barbarism.²⁶ This view was opposed by Enlightenment thinkers who propagated the myth of the noble savage, but has since been heavily refuted.²⁷

McCarthy certainly agreed with Hobbes that there is a taste for violence at the human core. We see this in the anarchy and cannibalism that erupts in the apocalyptic climate of The Road (2006), and it is one of Blood Meridian’s central themes. Early in the work he sets the stage:

You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the Devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything.

Man is of course set apart by his intelligence, for there can be no cruelty without malicious intent; knowledge of how the pain will affect the afflicted.

Another theme of the work is the shrinking frontiers. The epilogue is set as the prairies become fenced in and the buffalo close to extinct. Holden sees this approaching, and knows that the Hobbesian state will endure because it is the default state. Those that engage in battles of will (war), he calls dancers, yet only those who embrace the Hobbesian state of man can be true dancers. He explains it to the Kid thus:

As war becomes dishonored and its nobility called into question those honorable men who recognize the sanctity of blood will become excluded from the dance, which is the warrior’s right, and thereby will the dance become a false dance and the dancers false dancers. And yet there will be one there always who is a true dancer and can you guess who that might be?

[The Kid responds:] You aint nothin.

You speak truer than you know. But I will tell you. Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance.

Holden is quite symbolic for the dance itself, and he claims towards the end that “he will never die.” The Kid is capable of being a dancer, but ultimately rejects the dance, and thereby the broader teachings of the judge. However, in resisting the corruption, he pays with his life.

In one of McCarthy’s later works, No Country for Old Men (2005), we can observe the hierarchy of dancers. The protagonist, Llewelyn Moss is a Vietnam war veteran who falls into a thrilling adventure when he seizes a case of money from the remains of a Mexican drug deal gone wrong. As he becomes pursued, he rediscovers a sense of animating thrill, for he is very competent and cunning. We can say that he is a dancer and that he expresses his dormant Faustian urge. But there is always a bigger fish, and in No Country for Old Men, this is Anton Chigurh, who functions like judge Holden, but stripped of the supernatural myth. Llewelyn is capable enough to take on a true dancer like Anton, but he eventually recognizes that he is in over his head, and his steps have become irreversible, and succumbs to the brutal nature of the dance.

The broader theme of the novel is that the Hobbesian shackles of modernity cannot hold back the brutal reality of chaos and violence, which modernity refuses to acknowledge, due to its ideological presumptions about human nature. In part, this refers to the mindless violence of the drug smugglers and delinquent youth, but particular emphasis is placed on the series of coordinated acts committed by Anton. An old sheriff narrates how the world isn’t what it used to be.

Will and Destiny: The Metaphysics of Conflict 🔗

To Cormac McCarthy, destiny is very fatalistic, but to an extent determined by will. All possibility exists within one’s destiny. Will gives the potential in which man can operate to dictate outcome.

“The arc of circling bodies is determined by the length of their tether,” says the judge. The metaphor is that he length represents the potential of one’s will, extending from the center, which is one’s place in space and time. Destiny is the position of the circling body at any given moment in time. Holden tells it more clearly:

Any man who could discover his own fate and elect therefore some opposite course could only come at last to that selfsame reckoning at the same appointed time, for each man’s destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well.

We hear Anton echo the same words:

If the rule you followed led you to this of what use was the rule? […] Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. […] You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way.

To McCarthy, the present moment is all that exists and that ultimately matters. While you may only do one thing in every instance, the illusory possibility that you could act some other way creates from the present a divergence that you and others will and must consider. Yet all is contained within destiny.

Holden and Anton know this and operate according to their own rules which they reckon to reflect their nature. Llewelyn comes to understand that this is true for him, but since his true nature differs, he has less will with which to affirm his destiny. His words show uncertainty:

It’s not about knowin where you are. It’s about thinkin you got there without takin anything with you. Your notions about startin over. Or anybody’s. You dont start over. That’s what it’s about. Ever step you take is forever. You cant make it go away. None of it. […] You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday dont count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else. You might think you could run away and change your name and I dont know what all. Start over. And then one mornin you wake up and look at the ceilin and guess who’s layin there?

War: Survival of the Fittest Will 🔗

Holden asserts that there is no life in the universe except on the Earth. This needs to be true for him as then there can be none in the universe who is higher than him, someone greater who can judge him. It is he who wills it upon himself to take on both nature and man, going to metaphysical war.

Instincts to hate, to attack, to annihilate. The frontier, of whatever kind it may be, even the intellectual frontier, is the mortal foe of the will to power.

—Oswald Spengler²⁸

To the judge, war is a metaphor for conflict between wills of people. A person’s will is only validated by its dominance over other wills:

It makes no difference what men think of war. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.

War as the Ultimate Game 🔗

To Holden, games are metaphors for testing the will against the outcome—destiny. Game’s worth are proportional to what is put at stake. War (a battle of wills) is the ultimate game because it puts life at stake. Since will shapes destiny to Holden, this is the ultimate mode of being. This is divinity; war is God.

It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.

Holden doesn’t claim that might makes right, for he doesn’t believe in value systems altogether, he is concerned with truth, and believes that will to power shapes outcome. This is one and the same with Anton’s case that what could’ve been is rendered irrelevant before what is. When he has time, Anton offers his victims a coin toss with their life on the line; the same game with ultimate stake. But since Anton dominates the situation, it is not a battle of wills, only him making a point about the nature of destiny. For this reason, those who forfeit willpower (e.g. the gas station clerk) are pathetic to these characters.

“War” to Holden is a clash of wills, between each and all, among creatures and nature broadly. He is the judge because his will and power have solidified his values to a standard from which none can judge him. He is the judge because he is the truest of dancers.

Ultimate Authority / Morality is Only as Strong as the Power of Those Who Impose It 🔗

Action, not abstract law determines what will be. The grievance an action perceived as immoral causes might shape future retaliatory usurpation of the order, but only to prove McCarthy’s broader point.

He believes there there exists both a deeper, intrinsic sense of morality as well as the individual authority the actualizes it, similar to the reality in which the Übermensch operates. From his Hobbesian view of man, he sees morality as an attempt to hold the brutal nature state at bay, and has Holden explicitly point out the foundations of slave morality:

Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak.

Of course you can use your will to maintain your own values, as the Kid pursues his own instincts, and while violent, tries to help wounded members of the gang, and is not fascinated by the judge whatsoever.

We see something similar in The Road, where the father and son describe themselves as the good guys that are carrying the fire. The son makes his survival-focused father reluctantly offer food to a blind old man, and spare the life of a robber who stole all of their possessions.

One could argue that moral law expresses a higher truth, yet since it is channeled through individuals, their actions and power ultimately determine how morality and truth manifest in the world.

Discussion 🔗

Judge Holden is a character beyond the page. Whether supernatural or not is secondary for what I will consider. Even if he exceeds human normality, I will refer to him like a person for the sake of comparison. He is not reducible to psychology; instead, he operates as an archetypal force that can manifest psychologically. If he ever was human, then he has already “overcome” man to achieve his mastery. If he is not, then he is the demonic principle embodied. As an archetype he is symbolic of the dark potential of Faustian man, similar to what Jung would call the “shadow” self.²⁹ Because he is supernatural and doesn’t develop as a character, shadow or dark side becomes more apt than fallen or corrupted, since those imply a prior state of purity.

Where Holden Fits the Faustian Archetype 🔗

What emerges from Spengler, Goethe, Melville, and Nietzsche is not a moral doctrine, but a structure of drive. The Faustian spirit is characterized by the restless will of the individual to expand, master and conquer, and to refuse boundaries, whether physical or metaphysical. In Faust, the drive seeks fulfillment and ultimately finds transcendence. In Ahab, it streams into obsession and ends in destruction. In Nietzschean man, it becomes a project of self-overcoming and creation of new values. Shared by the above is the dynamism and direction, always upward or outward.

The closest sign of obsession that Holden shows is with the Kid who resits him. To someone who can be considered as Faustian, this is of course unacceptable, although he shows no signs of restlessness. Holden lives the master morality absolutely, even if he uses it for no other reason than to harm. True dancers like Holden and Anton cannot accept external laws, following the Übermensch ideal. Where they would have fit society perfectly as war chiefs or assassins 1000 years earlier, they are now outcast. In a world of peace and slave morality, their immense capacity for violence and their skill makes them uncontrollable and uncontested. Their aimless leisure becomes domination. Holden does this intellectually, physically and spiritually (denying knowledge and corrupting), whereas Anton murders and outwits.

Holden as the Faustian Shadow 🔗

But what happens when the force is stripped of direction, longing and dissatisfaction? Worse yet, what happens when will to power turns downward and inward—against nature, against man, against God—becoming an end in itself? For all that the characters are morally questionable according to modern values, a Faustian man will understand or even empathize with Ahab’s destruction. The same cannot be said for Holden, who might fascinate, but even for the one who strives beyond good and evil, will stand out as a devil in disguise. The demonic in nature and the demonic in our nature.

Where Holden assumes the shadow of Faustian man is the will to power turned on nature, the reinvention of values to reduce the truth down to the individual, and domination without a clear obstacle to will toward. The Faustian will is a drive to overcome, without direction it stands ready. When war becomes a goal in itself it is the trial through which we test our will and character against the fabric of reality. Ahab goes to war against Moby-Dick (nature) and becomes villainous only because he disregards anything else. Holden, moved from nihilistic foundations, has made getting what he wants the goal. Pleasure in domination and cruelty as principle. Corruptor. No inspiration of others (Ahab), only corruption. In our exchange, Morgoth referred to this as “shades of Mephistopheles” like with Ahab. Ahab is not a deal-making devil, and while Holden resembles it, we must consider what it means for a Faustian man to fall under the influence of Mephistopheles (symbolically).

Frontiers and the Eternal Dancer 🔗

Faustian man has certainly lost the environment in which he thrives. Not only have most areas of the map been explored (space is inaccessible, scientific fringes shrinking), but he has also been instrumental in developing a high technological society which is a setting far detached from what he is adapted to. Technology may be a part of nature, but it creates an environment in which Faustian man (or man generally) is unable to express himself.³⁰ Exploring frontiers is what keeps Faustian man driven. When they are abolished, he easily becomes restless or aimless. Yet he cannot help it.

Instincts to hate, to attack, to annihilate. The frontier, of whatever kind it may be, even the intellectual frontier, is the mortal foe of the will to power.

—Oswald Spengler³¹

The only time both Holden and Anton seem human-like is in their encounters with the respective protagonists, who challenge their positions. Both find some abstract form of pleasure in the mental torment of their victims, whether that is Anton taunting the life choices of people he later kills. We can also see the need for a challenger in how Anton respects Llewelyn as a contender. There is something of this kind that Holden sees in the Kid, which might be what attracts him. In some sense he knows that this is not right.

Scientific Domination 🔗

This phenomenon is inherent in the inventive nature of Faustian man. Though some would argue that technology is good (“progress!”), it is precisely what accelerates that rate at which frontiers shrink.

In terms of general and specialized skill, Holden knows no equal. Total knowledge and mastery for the sake of dominion in all domains is Faustian. He collects the essence/form of the objects he studies while erasing the matter/substance: when he studies archeology, he sketches the items in a notebook before purging them in fire; when he botanizes leaves, it is to prove his power over nature and to erase their memories. With no evidence of the form of an object, we will overlook the existence of the corresponding essence. This absorption of knowledge has rightly been compared to a Gnostic Archon, or to the Demiurge himself—beings that suppress the true knowledge of the world for the sake of tormenting their subjects. Knowledge is power in Gnosticism and for Holden. It maintains his worldview’s validity. For so long as no external authority or higher truth exists in the universe, Holden can be the judge of any and all.

This is integral to his philosophy: one will should be manifest to take total dominion over everything in the world, giving no room for autonomy. Instead of showing humility before the glory of nature, before higher order, it must be conquered:

These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men’s knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth. […] The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I’d have them all in zoos.

This is the implicit Faustian nature of modern science. French metaphysician René Guénon considered this to be the fatal error of science; inverting the hierarchy of truth:

Modern man, instead of seeking to raise himself to truth, seeks to drag truth down to his own level.³²

Even if this is the impulse of Faustian man, he does this not to subvert the truth because he hates it. Instead it occurs when the truth is secondary to the object of his quest: instead of using his drive to ascend to the truth, the drive is pointed downward and inward. Meaning is destroyed.

The impulse to know is transformed into an impulse to dominate. Science morphs from being a means to know the world, into a means to change the world. The will to power turned on nature.

—paraphrasing Julius Evola³³

Seen in the examples above, what truly makes Holden the shadow of Faustian man is the orientation of the will.

Orientation 🔗

Holden demonstrates the extreme, corrupt endpoint of the Faustian drive untethered from ethics or higher purpose. Inherent in the nature of the Faustian spirit is going beyond bonds, be that moral law or judicial law. Like the Übermensch, Holden and Anton have transcended moral bonds and made their own laws. Where they become detestable is in their orientation.

The Kid resists the judge and the dark impulse of the Faustian shadow, but does not integrate it, and is destroyed physically. We see something similar with Llewelyn. Holden shows what the will-to-overcome becomes when untethered from transcendental and transformative direction. The closest we get to mission in Holden is his corruption: he preaches it and he preys to enact it. There is no glory in this Archon-like orientation to subdue, and anyone can recognize this. He might be fascinating, yet even the Nietzscheans, nihilists, and/or anarchists that think that he is correct in his observations recognize within them that this mode of being is improper. And though Holden stirs in the unknown regions of the mind, he is not inevitable.

Conclusion 🔗

Judge Holden stands as the shadow archetype of the Faustian spirit—the demonic form that driven characters like Faust and Ahab resemble at their worst. He possesses the abilities that characterize Faustian man: total knowledge and dominion for the sake of power, and he pursues his grand design of corruption in every action. If he is to be understood as a human, then he has overcome man to the point where he toys with others—verbally, intellectually, or physically. Using will to power, he has gained mastery over the system that is nature.

Holden will never die as he is exists in the heart of man, and to this analysis as part of the Faustian soul as something to never succumb to. Instead we must, as Jung stressed, confront and integrate this shadow; we must make understand the impulses that lead to dark destruction and to the light of the truth; we must grasp its functions and drive it in a proper direction. Instead of outright rejecting Holden, we must transcend him.

What makes him the shadow is his erroneous orientation. As Goethe clearly demonstrated in Faust, obtaining otherworldly might and knowledge is ultimately not what matters to humans. What matters is meaning, and that is a spiritual question. Holden is to some extent rooted in all humans, but the substance of his character is shaped around Faustian man. Therefore, to one who does not contain this dark potential, it may not apply in the same way.

Holden should be resisted in others and in ourselves (depending on the degree of the Faustian spirit). One who possesses a true Faustian nature must accept this shadow like Ahab did, and try to use this knowledge to direct it toward creation rather than destruction. If you are more of an Apollonian nature,⁶ then you should transcend it through static means, through knowledge, with faith or without it.³⁴

Faust found transcendence by creating something greater than himself, Ahab accepted that his path would lead to destruction, Nietzschean Man still bravely walks his tightrope into uncertainty, and the judge is dancing, dancing, and he says that he will never die.