A Book Review . . . Cultural Identity Is National
By JUDE DOUGHERTY
Redner, Harry. The Tragedy of European Civilization: Towards an Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2015. xxiii + 257 pp.
This is a collection of essays each of which could have been turned into a book. Harry Redner, retired reader at Monash University in Melbourne, has served as a visiting professor at distinguished universities in Europe and the United States as well as in Israel. He is the author of Totalitarianism, Globalization, Colonialism, and other major studies.
At the outset of this book, Redner identifies ten leading thinkers who he believes comprise much of the intellectual history of the 20th century. They are Marx, Weber, Freud, Spengler, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Arendt, Nietzsche, Foucault, and Elias.
Each, he says, was responding to what was going on at the time in the history of Europe.
In Redner’s judgment, although the tragedy of European civilization has still some ways to go, its denouement is already apparent. German intellectuals, more than any other group, he believes, are responsible for the tragedy.
Redner’s narrative is complex but could be summarized: Europe in pursuing technological advancement on an international scale has left behind its distinctive national traits. It is evident, he believes, that technological advance does not generate cultural development but, on the contrary, works against it. All human accomplishments are specific to the nations in which they are generated.
Redner divides the book into three parts: Part I, “Masters of Social Science,” features discussions of the work of Weber, Elias, and Freud; Part II, “Untergangsters of History and Philosophy,” focuses on the thought of Spengler, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein; and Part III examines the “Critics of Culture, Society and Science,” represented by Nietzsche and Foucault. Redner’s ability to identify connections and to trace intellectual lineage rivals that of any epidemiologist on the trail of a viral or bacterial strain.
Redner holds that the tragedy of Europe is for the first time clearly expressed in the work of Oswald Spengler. His chapter on Spengler sets the stage for much that follows. Spengler looked upon himself as a philosopher of history and Redner does not dispute that.
The first volume of his Decline of the West, sometimes translated also as Downfall of the Orient, dates to 1918. Spengler’s target is those intellectuals who turn against the culture that nourished them. Julien Benda, echoing Spengler in his La Trahison des Clercs, later called them simply “traitors.” Spengler’s hatred of intellectuals whom he associates with cosmopolitans, pacifists, Jews, and “other thinking people,” was to have significant influence on the thought of Heidegger and Wittgenstein, and on the Jewish followers of Heidegger in France, notably Levinas and Derrida.
In the judgment of Redner, “[t]heir influence has been well-nigh disastrous for philosophy in the twentieth century. The present state of philosophy in America is evident proof of this.”
When it comes to his treatment of Nietzsche, Redner claims that he was the great precursor to almost every form of literature in the 20th century. He was the original expositor of a cultural revolution that proceeded to overturn European culture in a more radical way than Marx or any other revolutionary.
In Redner’s judgment, Nietzsche not only predicted Europe’s decline but also helped to bring it about. In the post-World War II decades “there was hardly a novelist, poet, or dramatist in any European language who remained untouched by Nietzsche.” His work coincided with the advance of modernism in art that many considered it to be its cultural expression. “Mythopoetic” rather than rational, says Radner, Nietzsche’s thought stood at the opposite extreme of the prevailing logical positivism.
Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein Redner takes to be the most celebrated philosophers of the second half of the 20th century. Both were followers of Spengler, sharing his cultural pessimism and his antisemitism. Both Heidegger and Wittgenstein are described as “philosophically anti-Semitic,” as distinct from an ethnic prejudice. Heidegger had many disciples who were Jewish, notably Hannah Arendt and Karl Lowith, and Wittgenstein himself was a Jew. Both saw Jews as a foreign and dangerous presence in Western civilization. Heidegger regarded Jews as “rootless cosmopolitans.” This comes out in his strong critique of international or global capitalism.
Wittgenstein’s self-deprecatory antisemitism in evident in his scathing assessment of “Freud’s scientific pretentions,” which he treats as “a kind of Talmudic hermeneutics, a clever way of finding analogies, formulating metaphors, and inventing similes.” He similarly denigrates the work of Gustav Mahler, certainly one of the 20th century’s greatest, a Jewish composer par excellence.
The Germanic world is not the whole intellectual world of the 20th century. There is much in the English speaking world and in Italy that was taking place in the period covered in this volume. One can admire Harry Redner’s erudition and appreciate his many insights without subscribing to all of his judgments.
Clearly the embrace of what has come to be called “cosmopolitanism” or “internationalism” by Europe’s intellectual elites has left Europe without much to defend as its own. Cultural identity is national; one cannot be a citizen of the world.
