Title: Conservatism and Crisis, the Anti-Modernist Perspective in Twentieth-Century German Philosophy
Abstract: David J. Rosner, Conservatism and Crisis, The Anti-Modernist Perspective in Twentieth-Century German Philosophy. Lexington Books, 2012.Reviewed by Laina Farhat-HolzmanIt is fascinating that a book so specifically devoted to looking back to how the antimodernist fever in the first half of the 20th century led to something as nightmarish as World War II, the Holocaust, and the deaths of millions of people around the world. But what made this book even more interesting to me was its relevance to our own time, and our own fever of anti-modernism that is causing war, deaths, and enormous human misery.While we are all aware of the negative consequences of such anti-modernism, Rosner notes that these movements are a response to a natural and understandable human emotion: the longing for certainty in the face of what many see as loss of everything familiar and sacred. Such longing takes form in nostalgia, romanticizing the past, and some kind of wish to reconnect with the natural world.David Rosner is a philosopher, a specialist in German philosophy, a discipline that has given much serious scholarship to the world. But it has also given something else: philosophy that gave heft to the formless fear of modernity that gave rise to Nazism.In his preface, Rosner asks:When longstanding ways of life are extinguished and new paradigms have not yet been offered to replace them, how is the world now experienced and constituted by the individual subject? What happens when the only explanatory framework a culture has ever known is slowly eroded? Interwar Germany's cultural collapse involved a number of serious concrete problems specific to Germany at this time, such as a devastating financial crisis and a sense of national humiliation in the aftermath of World War I associated with the treaty of Versailles. Yet often accompanying such external factors in a cultural collapse are the signs of the loss of an entire value system. Thus, the crisis of Weimar signified the deeper loss of a spiritual center, a sense of wide-spread pessimism and confusion, felt not only in Germany but throughout the West after the fin de siecle.Rosner talks about the aporia of modernity, a term that he defines as alienation, a sense of loss, of homelessness. For many, modernity brought with it great gains: the discoveries of the scientific revolution, industrialization, the lessening of the hold of traditional religion as a force for explaining the world, the emancipation of women, and the opening of political participation to those who were never included before. But these optimistic values were dashed by World War I, when civilized Europeans descended into mindless horror. Empires collapsed, a whole generation of young men died or were horrifically maimed, and everything familiar had changed.From 1500 to 1950, the traditional world changed with ever-increasing speed, at a rate too fast for ordinary people to understand and accept. There have been many times in human history that such changes took place (the collapse of Rome, barbarian invasions, the sudden rise of Islam, the discovery of the New World, the religious wars); however, the changes in the 19th and early 20th century were the most rapid of all, and the outcome of World War I threw millions of people into a world with no rational explanation for why things happen.Although Rosner focuses on Germany, this book can be read as an explanation for the current aporia of so many people: conservative and sometimes neo-fascist movements in Europe and the US, as well as the most obvious of all, the crisis within Islam, the struggle between the modernizers and those who violently reject modernity.The German philosopher Heidegger, who struggled with the loss of all that was familiar in traditional rural Germany, is the key philosopher whose trajectory from despair to his shameful romance with the Nazis makes him the central figure in this book. Rosner not only reviews the work of Spengler, Schmitt, Junger, and others who were influenced by earlier Romantic movements, but in his scholarship he also cites numerous important modem philosophers and analysts of the interwar period. …
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-10-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 4
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