THE CULTURAL CRITICISM of CLASSICISM Classicist Thinkers Considered the Problems with Contemporary Culture to Be First of All Of

CHAPTER SIX

THE CULTURAL CRITICISM OF CLASSICISM

Classicist thinkers considered the problems with contemporary culture to be ﬁrst of all of an intellectual nature, related to developments that originated in the 19th century. As a consequence, they interpreted the

First World War as a result rather than as a cause of the problems of

Western culture. They were also convinced that the problems that existed before the war did not disappear with it. Paul Valéry wrote in La

Crise de l’Esprit (1919), an essay that was published in the Nouvelle Re- vue Française and translated as The Crisis of the Mind for the British The

Athenaeum:

The military crisis may be over. The economic crisis is still with us in all

its force. But the intellectual crisis, being more subtle and, by its nature,

assuming the most deceptive appearances (..) this crisis will hardly allow 1 us to grasp its true extent, its phase.

In his essay Achtung, Europa! (Europe Beware, 1935), Thomas Mann also stressed that the origins of the cultural decline were to be found before 2 the war:

(..) the war did not make our world, but merely clariﬁed, strengthened,

and brought to a head tendencies which already existed before it. (..) I

repeat that the decline of culture in Europe was not caused but merely ac-

celerated and steepened by the war. The war did not start that giant wave

of eccentric barbarism, the vulgar crudity of primitive mass-democracy

that is sweeping the world, but merely added to it and increased its brutal

impetus. Modern man is the victim of the wild, bewildering, yet nervously

stimulating impressions that beat upon him and make up the picture

of our time; these, together with the collapse and extinction of concep-

tions such as culture, spirit, art, philosophy, the civilizing and disciplining 3 forces.

1 P.Valéry, ‘The Crisis of the Mind’ in: The Athenaeum (April 11, 1919) Included in:

P.Valéry, History and Politics (New York 1962) p. 25 2 The essay originates in an address for the Comité Permanent des Lettres et des Arts of the

League of Nations. 3 T. Mann, Order of the Day. Political Essays and Speeches of Two Decades (New York 1942) pp. 73, 74 206 CHAPTER SIX

In this chapter we investigate the criticism of contemporary culture that was expressed in classicist thinking. Particular aspects of this criticism are dealt with in other chapters: Chapter 4 discusses the classicist rejec- tion of philosophical currents like life-philosophy and Nietzscheanism;

Chapter 5 covers the classicist aversion to nationalism; and Chapter 7 treats the classicist opinions about contemporary literature and art. In the current chapter, we will deal with various aspects of the classicist cultural criticism that do not ﬁt into these larger categories, although, as we will see, they are interlinked with themes from the other chapters.

The ‘building blocks’ of the classicist cultural criticism are directly related to the classicist values we discussed in §3.3. As we have seen, the main classicist values were its belief in reason as opposed to emotion; in standards of excellence; in the signiﬁcance of historical sense and cultural continuity; and in the importance of a broad liberal education.

From this it follows what classicism objected to: the dethronement of reason (§6.1); relativism and the lack of standards (§6.2); lack of historical sense (§6.3); the declining importance of the tradition of high culture

(§6.4) and ﬁnally the utilitarian character of modern education (§6.6).

Moreover, we have seen that the classicist idea of man rejects the deter- minism and reductionism of naturalistic and materialistic perceptions of man. Classicism was critical of scientism and technicism, the over- valuing of science and technology (§6.5) and the related view that only scientiﬁc rationality can lead to truth.

6.1 Reason dethroned

In §3.3.2 we saw that classicism held a ﬁrm belief in human reason, interpreted as the combination of rationality and practical wisdom (phrone- sis). It attacked intellectual currents that tried to dethrone reason and criticized what was considered to be a decline of intelligence. And there was a lot to criticize. “What is to become of Me, the European intel- 4 lect?”, Valéry lets his Hamlet of Europe ask. In Chapter 4 we already discussed classicism’s opposition to Freudianism, Nietzscheanism and life-philosophy, defending reason against the forces of life, emotion and intuition. Here we will discuss the general criticism of the anti- intellectual tendencies and the shallowness of the times.

4 P.Valéry, ‘The Crisis of the Mind’ (op. cit.) p. 29