The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  Theodor Adorno, as we have seen, was as much concerned with the shortcomings of America as of Germany, though he did become a major force in political thinking in Germany after he returned there. He, and people like Karl Löwith (see Chapter 41), Franz Neumann, and Arnold Bergstraesser were distinguished by the term “rémigré” or “rémigrant.”40 But other major figures from before the war were still alive and still involving themselves in the broader areas of philosophy, the humanities, and social criticism in regard to Germany and the modern condition.

  Having a Jewish wife, Karl Jaspers had not fared well under the Nazis. In September 1937 he was dismissed from his post, his attempts to move to Oxford, Paris, and Basel all fell through, and in 1943 he was banned from publishing anything at all. Matters looked up after the war ended, and he figured prominently on the Allies “White List” of people untainted by links to the Nazis. He was made one of the professors charged with reopening the University of Heidelberg (described by one American observer as “once famous, now notorious,” because it was “still infested” with Nazis) and now began his most creative period of writing, not just in philosophy but also in politics.41 Jaspers laid great store by civic morality, arguing that a liberal humanistic education was the best means of disseminating democratic ideas throughout Germany. He remained firmly against the rehabilitation of professors who had a history of Nazi affiliation, and his writings and radio broadcasts became a major force at the time.42

  To an extent, therefore, Jaspers adopted a classic British or French view of political liberty.43 In theory he wanted to see this model imported into his native Germany but he must have had doubts that this would happen, because in 1948 he accepted a professorship at the University of Basel and became a Swiss national, saying “he felt he was breathing again for the first time in fifteen years.”44 That year too he published Der philosophische Glaube angesichts der Offenbarung (translated as Philosophical Faith), a complicated but influential work in which he claimed that the “evidence” produced by faith (through revelation, say) is always likely to be paradoxical and uncertain. Therefore, dogmatism is unconvincing in religious belief, and a critical form of philosophy can be an important help in adding to what religions have to say; Jaspers saw it as one of philosophy’s main aims to update and relate theology to present circumstances. This led him into confrontation with both Karl Barth and, more especially, Rudolf Bultmann.45 Jaspers also returned to Marx’s point about the role of the educated bourgeois elite. Marx had criticized this elite for making culture its refuge at the expense of politics. Jaspers argued that societies where the educated bourgeois elite see their role undermined will always be “inherently unstable” and that this segment of the body politic has a primary role to play in upholding democratic culture.

  Jaspers’s erstwhile friend Martin Heidegger had been through a much rougher time since the end of the war. In 1946 he had been banned from teaching by the Allies (this lasted until 1949), and his two sons were still in Russian captivity.46 One bright spot for him was Hannah Arendt, who visited Heidegger in 1950 and again two years later. She eventually found it in her heart to forgive him and, from 1967 on, they met every year until his death in 1976.47

  Heidegger’s postwar career in philosophy embraced three subjects—humanism, the nature of thinking, and the issue of technology.48 There was also a very public exchange with Theodor Adorno, who criticized Heidegger in no uncertain terms.

  In a 1946 essay, Über den Humanismus (On Humanism), Heidegger was again the unyielding—and unrepentant—critic of “reason” and “modernity,” still in the name of “Being” and “poesis,” a stance that dovetailed well with the emerging postwar climate of opinion in the West, especially America, where many people were disillusioned with the modern world, “with its attendant horrors and catastrophes.” As often as not, Heidegger’s views were broadcast by French followers, such as Sartre and Jacques Derrida.49 This approach formed a major plank in the postwar development of postmodernism.

  The Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts invited Heidegger to give lectures there from the early 1950s and the lecture of 1953 became famous. His subject was “Die Frage nach der Technik” (The Question of Technology), and the hall was packed with Munich’s intelligentsia—Werner Heisenberg, Ernst Jünger, and José Ortega y Gasset. Rüdiger Safranski says it was probably Heidegger’s greatest success in postwar Germany, and he was given a standing ovation. By the time of this lecture, as again Safranski points out, there was widespread anxiety about the threat of a technological society, not only in Germany but especially so there.50 Alfred Weber’s Der dritte oder der vierte Mensch (The Third or Fourth Man) came out in the same year with a horrific vision of a future robotic world, and Friedrich Georg Jünger (Ernst’s brother) had released Die Perfektion der Technik (Perfection of Technology), in which he argued that technology had already changed mankind, that technological man was locked in an irreversible exploitation of the earth that would eventually destroy us. Shortly afterward, Günther Anders published Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (The Obsoleteness of Man), in which he too argued that technology had to be deliberately curbed or it would destroy us.

  Heidegger saw technology as a vicious circle: technology breeds more technology, it “challenges” nature, and people live in a Gestell, or “frame,” of technology. In doing so, we lose elements of freedom. With technology so rampant and so ever-present, the original experience of Being, says Heidegger, is lost. We cannot let nature “be,” we are less able to submit, to surrender to that experience of being; the “releasement towards things” is simply unavailable in a technological society: the poetic experience of the world is sidelined and overwhelmed by technology.

  This was reinforced by Heidegger’s views on America. The United States had often been the object of German thought. For Heine, America was the symbol of all that Romanticism detested. After a visit across the Atlantic, Nikolaus Lenau, sometimes called the German Byron, described the country as disfigured by its politics, with its culture imposed from outside. Nietzsche expected America to spread a spiritual emptiness (Geistlosigkeit) over Europe and neither Moeller van den Bruck nor Spengler cared much for it, though Ernst Jünger admired America’s ability to involve all the country in World War I.51 As we have seen, Freud thought America “a mistake” (whatever that might mean). For Heidegger, America was the symbol of the crisis of our age, “which is also the deepest crisis of all time.” It represents the greatest alienation of man, his profoundest loss of “authenticity,” and it was the supreme impediment to spiritual reawakening. America reduced everything to its lowest common denominator, all experience to routine—all was trivialized and rendered bland. Americans, said Heidegger, were “totally oblivious” to “man’s encounter with Being.”52 After the first space probes, Heidegger wrote that “there is no longer either ‘earth’ or ‘heaven,’ in the sense of poetic dwelling of man on this earth.” The age of technology is our fate and America the home of this “catastrophe.” 53

  Heidegger had written about America before the war, and essentially his arguments hadn’t changed, only been updated. And this was partly Theodor Adorno’s point in his celebrated attack on Heidegger, published as a pamphlet in the mid-1960s and titled Jargon der Eigentlichkeit (The Jargon of Authenticity). There was, it has to be said, a wider context to Adorno’s uncompromising stance. The developing Cold War in the 1950s had undoubtedly played into the hands of former Nazis. Chancellor Adenauer was keen to have the distinction between “politically impeccable” and the “not-so-impeccable” abolished, and in 1951 a law was passed that allowed “compromised” people to again hold public office, while the Loyalty Law of 1952 helped ensure that some people persecuted under the Nazi regime were now removed from public posts on suspicion of being Communists. Adorno and Horkheimer again became the subject of anti-Semitism.

  The Jargon of Authenticity was important because Adorno felt that the whole idea of the authentic in Heidegger—the rural allusions, the emphasis on the Volk, the hat
red of modernity as artificial—was phony, a form of “sacred gibberish…devoid of content…except self-idolisation.”54 When people use words like “authentic,” Adorno said, they make them sound as if they meant something “higher” than what they had actually said, and Heidegger was especially guilty of this.55

  Heidegger never replied to Adorno. The latter had scored some telling points, but they hardly affected his target’s long-term reputation. That had more to do with what Richard Wolin has called Heidegger’s Children. Of these, we have already met Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, Herbert Marcuse, and Leo Strauss, all of whom stayed in the United States after their emigration. The other two were Karl Löwith, who returned to Germany in 1952, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, who never left it.

  After his return, Löwith was made a professor at Heidelberg and became chiefly known for three highly original works, From Hegel to Nietzsche, an account of the fragmentation of German philosophy, Meaning in History, about the relationship between modern philosophy and its theological predecessors, and Max Weber and Karl Marx, describing the emergence of sociology. Throughout his works, Löwith argued that the twentieth-century disasters were originally shaped in the middle of the nineteenth century “as the educated elite decisively turned their backs on the classicism of Goethe and Hegel. Increasingly, they grew impatient with values that were ‘timeless’ or that transcended the finitude of human temporal existence. Nature and the heavens ceased to be the touchstone for value and meaning, instead, ‘man’ became the measure.” In Löwith’s view, Europe’s descent into nihilism culminated in there being “no constraints” upon the “sovereignty of the human will.” Nietzsche’s “will to power” was for Löwith “an amoral excess.” Instead of Marx or Nietzsche, he preferred Heidegger and his advocacy of Stoicism, “acquiescence to fate.”56

  Löwith studied with Husserl before Heidegger, under whom he examined the role of intersubjectivity in the formation of the self. In his dissertation he argued that the “I” is primarily formed and shaped by a world of human intimacy, what he called “the co-world.” According to Löwith, interpreting Heidegger, “Human beings are not ‘rational animals’ but instead ecstatic ‘shepherds of being.’” Scientific thinking, seeking to control the world, is a decline from this original feeling of ecstasy.57

  The career—and thought—of Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) was very different from that of the rest of Heidegger’s children. Born in Marburg and the son of a pharmacology professor, Gadamer studied at Breslau before returning to Marburg after World War I. There his early teachers were Paul Natorp and Nicolai Hartmann, but it was Heidegger who exerted the most influence and, for a time, Gadamer worked as Heidegger’s assistant.58 “I always had the damned feeling that Heidegger was looking over my shoulder,” he said later.59

  During the 1930s and 1940s, Gadamer accommodated himself, first to National Socialism and then, briefly, to Communism. He was never a member of the NSDAP, and he seems to have kept his head down, though he was later criticized for being “too acquiescent.” At the end of the war he received an appointment at Leipzig and, having been found untainted by Nazism by the American occupation forces, was made rector of the university. But Communist East Germany was not to his liking and he left, eventually succeeding Karl Jaspers in Heidelberg in 1949. To an extent, while there he tried to aid the rehabilitation of Heidegger. In 1953, with Helmut Kuhn, he founded Philosophische Rundschau, a highly influential journal, though Gadamer did not become known outside his own professional circle until the publication in 1960 of Wahrheit und Methode (Truth and Method). This established him in the eyes of many as one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century.60

  One of his starting points in Truth and Method was a series of lectures Heidegger gave in 1936 (not published until 1950), titled “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks” (The Origin of the Work of Art). Here Heidegger introduced his concept of the “event” of truth, the “unconcealment” of truth, an idea that contrasts with the notion of truth as “correctness,” usually taken to mean some sort of correspondence between a statement and the world. Works of art have a coherence and within that coherence “a” truth is revealed, stemming from disclosure, but it is disclosure that is an interpretation, which can never be total or truly objective. We play a part in whatever we choose to understand as a truth. The influence of Kant is clear.

  Gadamer took these ideas much further in Truth and Method. He said that our involvement in the event of truth is always based on our prejudices, “anticipatory structures” that we have within us and that allow, or determine, that our understanding of any truth event will be grasped in a certain way, together with “the anticipation of completeness,” another neo-Kantian notion that involves the presupposition “that what is to be understood constitutes something that is understandable, that is, something that is constituted as a coherent, and therefore meaningful, whole.”61 At the same time, history also plays a part in our understanding, says Gadamer. We are “embedded” in our particular history and cannot escape its effects. Understanding also needs another to be certain it is not mere subjectivism; new meaning emerges not by access to some “inner realm” but by the “fusion of horizons” (Horizontverschmelzung).62

  Gadamer therefore concluded that the humanities, the Geisteswissenschaften, could never achieve the methodological footing of the “sciences of nature,” that such an attempt was misguided. He even thought that the natural sciences claimed too much for their method, that understanding was an ongoing process with no final completion, a stance that marked Gadamer as in the same mold as the later Wittgenstein and Thomas Kuhn. Eventually, he arrived at a model for understanding that said it was like a “conversation”: it takes place in language and each brings his or her understanding to the conversation or negotiation.

  A final aspect was his exploration of culture, in particular “the relevance of the beautiful,” in which he considered “art as play, symbol and festival.”63 He thought that the meaning, or role, or function of art often got lost in the modern world, and that play—the activity of disinterested pleasure—was also overlooked.64 The symbolic role of art was to open up for us “a space in which both the world, and our own place in the world, is brought to light as a single but inexhaustibly rich totality,” where we can “dwell” out of ordinary time. The disinterested pleasure we take in art is an aid to escaping ordinary time and moving into “autonomous time.” The final quality of the successful artwork, as festival, also takes us out of ordinary time and opens us up “to the true possibility of community.”65

  Gadamer engaged in two famous debates, with Jacques Derrida and with Jürgen Habermas, on whether we can ever transcend history and how this affects criticism of contemporary society, whether such criticism can ever be truly objective (and therefore what validity it can have). The debate with Derrida was inconclusive, but as a result of the other debate, Gadamer and Habermas became good friends, and the former helped secure the latter’s appointment to a professorship at Heidelberg.

  THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF REFLECTION

  Habermas, however, was much more interested in politics than Gadamer, and more critical of his own country. Born in 1929 in Gummersbach, Habermas was the son of the chairman of the Cologne Chamber of Industry and the grandson of a pastor.66 The Nuremberg trials had a big effect on the teenage Habermas, and he became especially critical of his own country, in particular its scholars. He studied philosophy at Göttingen from 1949 to 1954 and was alarmed to observe that most of the professors made no allowance in their teaching for the events of 1933–45. Accordingly, he first put pen to paper in a critique of Heidegger and his failure to repudiate the ideas of Hitler. An interest in Marxism led Habermas to both Lukács’s Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (History and Class Consciousness) and Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialektik der Aufklärung (Dialectic of Enlightenment), his first encounter with the critical school with which he was himself to be so much identified. He taught at Heidelberg before taking a chair in philosophy and sociology at
Frankfurt in 1964; in 1971 he took up a position at the Max Planck Institute in Starnberg, near Munich. During those years he became well known internationally as a theorist of the student protest movement.

  Habermas’s written output has been prodigious—politics, philosophy, the evolution of society, the role of religion and the social sciences in modern life, Freud, even the role of child psychology in civic life. But his most innovative and enduring contributions have been in the realm of critical theory and “communicative action.”

  The aim of critical theory, for Habermas, is to facilitate the understanding of communicative action—the way different aspects of society link with each other, often in unconscious and unintended ways, so as to enable cultural evolution, a key idea.67 He began, in Theorie und Praxis (Theory and Practice), with the observation of four historical developments that rendered Marxism obsolete. The most important of these is that the state is no longer separated from the economy as it was in the days of laissez-faire capitalism, but plays a crucial role in regulation and enablement, meaning that the functioning of the state now requires careful critical attention. A second crucial observation is that rising standards of living in advanced societies have changed modes of oppression in ways not foreseen by Marx but still not appreciated by those undergoing that oppression. The new constraints are psychological and ethical rather than economic and it is in this realm that his theory of communicative action in particular applies.68 More especially, Habermas thinks that the advent of the welfare state in capitalist societies renders true human emancipation far more difficult, that science and technology condition the way we think without our—for the most part—knowing it.