by Peter Watson
For one who lived among enemies so long;
If often he was wrong and at times absurd,
To us he is no more a person
Now but a whole climate of opinion.
Under whom we conduct our differing lives…
Two years later, in 1941, Auden went on to describe Franz Kafka as “the artist who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relationship to our age that Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe bore to theirs.” 1
Despite the horrors of National Socialism, Auden remained involved in German culture and ideas.2 In New York he used to visit a German-language cinema in Yorkville, he collaborated with Brecht, formed a close friendship with Hannah Arendt, and was fascinated by another German psychiatrist in exile in the United States, Bruno Bettelheim, and what he had to say about autism, believing that his own allegedly partly autistic childhood and his calling as a poet were related.
In 1959, after buying a house at Kirchstetten, outside Vienna, Auden became increasingly drawn to Goethe (describing himself as a “minor Atlantic Goethe”). He composed a series of “prose meditations on love,” called “Dichtung und Wahrheit” (Poetry and Truth) after the title of Goethe’s autobiography, a short while later taking on a translation of the German genius’s Italian travel book. He collaborated with Hans Werner Henze on the opera The Bassarids, which many think is Henze’s masterpiece. Auden’s interment took place in the local church at Kirchstetten; the music at the ceremony was Siegfried’s funeral march from Götterdämmerung.
Auden remained close to German culture, and German ideas, despite everything that happened in the first half of the twentieth century, and in this too Auden was, for a well-known Anglo-American, unusual if not unique. But, as should now be clear, he was not wrong in following the path that he did. As he himself might have put it, the climate of opinion under which we live our differing lives is, much more than we like to think, German.
With the exception of market economics and natural selection, the contemporary world of ideas is one that, broadly speaking, was created by, in roughly chronological order, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Rudolf Clausius, Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Planck, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Max Weber, and two world wars. The ideas of another German, Gregor Mendel, are gaining ground fast at the start of the twenty-first century—it has now been shown that genes govern all manner of behaviors, from certain forms of violence to depression and promiscuity—but they do not cohere together into the overall picture as created by these other German geniuses.
Along with his fellow German-speaker, Adolf Hitler, Karl Marx probably had a more direct effect on the recently completed twentieth century, and the shape of the contemporary world, than any other single individual. Without him there would have been no Lenin, no Stalin, no Mao Zedong, and few if any of the other dictators who disfigured those times. Without him there would have been no Russian Revolution, and without World War II (or Max Planck and Albert Einstein), would there—could there—have been a Cold War, a divided Germany? Would decolonization have occurred in the way that it did, would there have been an Israel where it is, the Middle East problem that there is? Would there have been a 9/11? Ideas don’t come any more consequential than Marxism.
In his biography, Das Kapital, the British writer Francis Wheen asserts in his final sentence that Marx “could yet become the most influential thinker of the twenty-first century.” He quotes a series of figures who one would normally take to be right-wing, conservative big-business men—the exact opposite of Marxist—who have come back to Marx and even to Rosa Luxemburg. It is not just that what Marx had to say about monopolization, globalization, inequality, and political corruption sounds so pertinent after 150 years, but that we take so much of Marx for granted now, without most of us even knowing it. We accept, implicitly, that economics is the driving force of human development; we accept, implicitly, that the social being determines consciousness; we accept, implicitly, that nations are interdependent; we accept, implicitly, especially in the realm of the environment, that capitalism destroys as it creates. After the credit crunch and stock market collapse of 2008, the sales of Das Kapital rose markedly, especially in Germany.
Wheen’s point, and the argument of the people he quotes, is that these matters have become ever more visible since the Berlin Wall came down, and the socialist “alternative” to capitalism collapsed. Did the existence of two Germanies, and the rivalry they stimulated, keep capitalism seemingly more healthy than the alternative, than would otherwise have been the case? Either way, Germans and Germany are at the center of the argument.
THE MOST CONSEQUENTIAL CONTEMPORARIES OF THE MODERN WORLD
Sigmund Freud’s influence was less catastrophic than Marx’s, but no less consequential. There are two ways of looking at Freud’s legacy. One is to consider him on his own, to outline the specific ways in which psychoanalysis has affected all our lives; the other is to consider him together with his contemporaries, Nietzsche and Max Weber. Both approaches will be attempted here since this is the only way that the full impact of this cohort of German thinkers can be appreciated.
Alfred Kazin, the American critic, maintained in an essay he published in 1956 to mark the one hundredth anniversary of Freud’s birth that “Freud has influenced even people who have never heard of him.”3 Kazin thought that, at mid-century in America, “to those who have no belief, Freudianism sometimes serves as a philosophy of life.”4 He thought that at “every hour of every day now,” people could not forget a name, feel depressed, or end a marriage without wondering what the “Freudian” reason might be. He thought that the novel and painting (Thomas Mann, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Expressionism, Surrealism, Abstraction) had been reinvigorated by the Freudian knowledge that “personal passion is a stronger force in people’s lives than socially accepted morality” and that the “most beautiful effect” of Freudianism was the increasing awareness of childhood “as the most important single influence on personal development.”5 He thought the insistence on personal happiness—the goal of psychoanalytic therapy—was the most revolutionary force in modern times, a modern form of self-realization.
Another aspect of Freud’s legacy is that we are now, to use Frank Furedi’s phrase, taken from Philip Rieff’s book The Triumph of the Therapeutic, living in a “therapeutic society.” In the therapeutic society, as Furedi puts it, “there is an inward turn…The quest for personal self-understanding through the act of self-reflection is one of the legacies of modernity…the self acquires meaning through the experience of the inner, emotional life…”6 Especially among those who are no longer religious, there is a widespread belief in an alternative self, somewhere within, and with it goes the essentially therapeutic belief that, if we can only “get in touch” with this inner, alternative (better and “higher”) self, we can find happiness, contentment, fulfillment. The “soul” has been secularized.
Not everyone has been so sanguine about Freud. Richard Lapierre thought that “the Freudian ethic,” as he called it, was responsible for many of the discontents and false pathways of modern society. “In the Freudian concept, man is not born free with the right to pursue life, liberty and happiness; he is shackled by biological urges that can never be freely expressed and that set him in constant and grievous conflict with his society.”7 Lapierre thought Freudianism had been responsible for “the permissive home,” “the progressive school,” “the condoning of crime,” and “the maternalization of politics” (now called single-issue or identity politics), none of which he cared for.
Christopher Lasch, himself a psychoanalyst, was still more caustic. He said frankly that we now have what he called a culture of narcissism, economic man (Marxist man) having given way to psychological man. He too said we have entered a period of “therapeutic sensibility”: therapy, he argued, had established itself “as the successor to rugged individualism and to religion.” This new narcissism means that people are more intereste
d in personal change than in political change, that encounter groups and other forms of awareness training have helped to abolish a meaningful inner private life—the private has become public in “an ideology of intimacy.” This makes people less individualistic, less genuinely creative, and far more fad- and fashion-conscious. It follows, says Lasch, that lasting friendships, love affairs, and successful marriages are much harder to achieve, in turn thrusting people back on themselves, when the whole cycle recommences. Modern man, Lasch concluded, was actually imprisoned in his self-awareness. He longs for “the lost innocence of spontaneous feeling. Unable to express emotion without calculating its effects on others, he doubts the authenticity of its expression in others and therefore derives little comfort from audience reactions to his own performance.”8
There is no shortage of evidence for the startling penetration of the “therapeutic sensibility” in our society. A troop of Brownies in California has its own stress clinic for eight-year-olds; a primary school in Liverpool, England, gives its stressed children aromatherapy. In 1993 British newspapers used the word “counseling” 400 times in a year; by 2000 it had risen to 7,250; some 1.2 million counseling sessions take place each month in Britain. Recently, the Archbishop of Canterbury himself claimed that therapy was “replacing Christianity” in Western countries, that “Christ the Saviour” is becoming “Christ the counsellor.”9
If that all seems rather a lot to lay at Freud’s door—well, we are not done yet. Freud must also be understood in the context of his German-speaking contemporaries Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Weber.
THE “ENTRANCE DOOR” TO MODERN THOUGHT
Nietzsche’s most well-known—some might say notorious—aphorism is “God is dead.” One of his most important achievements, along with Max Weber, was to think through and confront the implications of that sentiment, to work out in what he saw as terrifying detail the consequences of modernity, a world of vast populous cities, mass transport, and mass communications, in which the old certainties had been dissolved, where the comforts and consolations of religion had disappeared for many people, and in which science had acquired an authority that was, in his view, as arid and empty as it was impersonal and impressive. It is in this sense that Martin Heidegger called Nietzsche the “culmination” of modernity—i.e., Nietzsche felt the loss of whatever had gone before more keenly than anyone else, and he described that loss in more vivid hues.
Formally, Nietzsche’s influence is second only to that of the Greeks and Kant, and maybe even that doesn’t do him justice. Until, roughly speaking, the Second World War, his influence was primarily literary and artistic. Robert Musil regarded Nietzsche’s thought “as one of the great events of the twentieth century.”10
Beyond art, Anatoly Lunasharski and Maxim Gorky tried to construct a “Nietzschean Marxism” in Russia but that did not outlast the rise of National Socialism and their appropriation (and inversion) of some of his themes (the last thing Nietzsche was, was an anti-Semite). But as the twentieth century lengthened, Nietzsche’s relevance became clearer. Stephen Aschheim, in his study of the Nietzsche legacy in Germany, lists books detailing the philosopher’s influence in Italy, “Anglo-Saxony” (Britain, the United States), Spain, Austro-Hungary, and Japan, and on the Catholic Church and Judaism. Karl Jaspers saw Nietzsche as “perhaps the last of the great philosophers of the past” and, as Ernst Behler has noted, divided the intellectual history of the West into two periods: “one marked by the domination of the logos and the admonition ‘Know Thyself,’ culminating in Hegel; the other characterized by a radical disillusionment with the self-confidence of reason, the dissolution of all boundaries, and the collapse of all authority, a period that began with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.” Together with Marx, Behler said, “They stand at the entrance door to modern thought.”11
For Heidegger, Nietzsche’s philosophy “is the completion of Western metaphysics” with the interpretation of Being as the will to power, he “realised the most extreme possibility of philosophy.”12 Among modern philosophers, Nietzsche’s influence has been reflected most keenly in the work of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Richard Rorty (who characterizes the entire present age as “post-Nietzschean”), Alexander Nehamas, Eugene Fink, and Jacques Derrida. As Bernd Magnus and Kathleen Higgins put it, “Nietzsche’s influence has become unavoidable in our culture.”13
That culture is “modernity” and in his quest to understand and explain modernity, Nietzsche in effect tells us that the search for “absolute truth, universal values and complete liberation” is impossible.14 Our profound psychological/philosophical condition in the modern world, says Nietzsche, is that we long to believe the old, the traditional certainties, but we cannot, we are trapped on the far side of scientific discoveries that destroy the old beliefs while replacing them with—nothing. Progress, philosophical progress, has reached an impasse: “…it is the disorganising principles that give our age its character.”15
Nietzsche called this condition, the absence of any moral purpose to the world, any direction, “nihilism,” and it had three—at least three—important consequences: there is no meaning to events, we lose faith that anything is to be achieved, or can be achieved; there is no coherent pattern in history; and there is nothing universal that we can all agree upon or aspire to. Our world is motivated mainly by our own inner psychological needs, rather than by any “truth” (a meaningless and malleable commodity, the only purpose of which is to enhance our feeling of power). He thought that our main psychological need was just that—the celebrated “will to power” and, for himself, felt that the only basis for any judgment, now that all other bases had disappeared, was the aesthetic one.
Even in making aesthetic judgments, since we have no grounds for agreement in any “deep” or universal sense, because there is no longer any basis for meaning, the only criterion by which originality or creativity or beauty may be judged is by their “newness.” Even here, however, newness will be obsolete more or less immediately because it can have no meaning over and above the fact that it is new. This applies to changes in ourselves as much as in conventional works of art or developments in history or fashion. There can be no direction in our personal development, only meaningless change, change for the sake of it.
This is, needless to say, arguably the bleakest analysis of the human condition there has ever been, and Nietzsche intended it as such. (“I am by far the most terrible human being that has existed so far,” he said in a famous passage. “This does not preclude the possibility that I shall be the most beneficial.”) He thought there was no escape, that he was—we are—living at a unique time in history, when a sea change in philosophy and psychology was taking place, a “new man” was being born. It was this chilling message that echoed down the twentieth century and was only slightly alleviated by what Max Weber observed.
Just as Nietzsche’s most famous aphorism was that “God is dead,” so Weber’s was that we now live in a world that is in a state of Entzauberung, that is “disenchanted.” Weber made two main claims about modern life. One, its discontents were brought about, as Lawrence Scaff glosses it, by capitalism, technology, economic rationalism, and the institutionalization of instrumentalism—in other words, the main aim now is to control the world in an abstract, intellectual manner rather than to enjoy it in an aesthetic or sensual way. The modern condition is that we have to choose between knowledge that in Weber’s words is “untimely and troubling” or undergo a “sacrifice of the intellect” as when we embrace a religious faith or a closed philosophical system like Christianity, Marxism, or Hegelianism.16 We believe we can master all things by calculation—there is now a “romanticism in numbers”—and that science can preserve life. At the same time science cannot “answer whether the quality of the life preserved is worth having.”17 The idea of a “unified self” simply lies beyond our grasp in the modern world.18
Weber’s other argument was that modernity involved a heightened preoccupation with the “inner self” that leave
s us having to create our own ideals and values “from within our chests…We cannot read the meaning of the world in the results of its investigation, no matter how perfect, but must instead be in a position to create that meaning ourselves…therefore the highest ideals, which move us most powerfully, are worked out for all time only in struggle with other ideals, which are just as sacred as ours are to us.”19 Only in the West, he said, has mankind developed the idea of understanding himself in a universal way, in other words on principles that apply to all human beings at all times—this is essentially what science aims at. In other cultures, people do not have this aim, they are content to explain themselves to themselves as they are, at their particular point in history and location in the world. Why should the West be so concerned about it, and doesn’t it condemn us to an empty, cold existence? The result, he said, for many—for most—people was that the only meaning in life was the pursuit of pleasure, entertainment, self-gratification, or money. In America, he said, capitalism, devoid of any religious or ethical meaning, had acquired the character of sport, and this had replaced the search for salvation. We are burdened by a surfeit of knowledge that doesn’t tell us how to live or what living is for.
