Description
With resonance for today, this book explores a significant crisis of German philosophy and national identity in the decades around World War II.
German philosophy, famed for its high-minded Idealism, was plunged into crisis when Germany became an urban and industrial society in the late nineteenth century. The key figure of this shift was Immanuel Kant: seen for a century as the philosophical father of the nation, Kant seemed to lack crucial answers for violent and impersonal modern times. This book shows that the social and intellectual crisis that overturned Germany’s traditions—a sense of profound spiritual confusion over where modern society was headed—was the same crisis that allowed Hitler to come to power. It also describes how German philosophers actively struggled to create a new kind of philosophy in an effort to understand social incoherence and technology’s diminishing of the individual.
A novelist and historian of ideas, Lesley Chamberlain was educated in England in German literature and philosophy. Her books include the acclaimed Nietzsche in Turin, The Secret Artist: A Close Reading of Sigmund Freud, and Arc of Utopia: The Beautiful Story of the Russian Revolution, the last also published by Reaktion Books. She lives in London.
“Chamberlain’s study is a masterly analysis and interpretation of the fate of mainstream Kantian philosophy in Mr. A.H.’s lifetime, as the tradition of individual autonomy and high moral earnest failed to come to terms with the modern challenges of mass culture and technologization. But Chamberlain shows too how, from the rubble, just these elements—from Benjamin and Cassirer, Adorno and Arendt, and, yes, even Heidegger—were used to rebuild the house of German philosophy in today’s form. Her study combines vast scholarship and formal ease with crystal lucidity and a beguiling confessional dimension.”
"This important, lively work tracks the failure of two generations of post-idealist philosophers to reconceive—in light of the social and economic upheaval that emerged during the lifetime of Adolf Hitler—Immanuel Kant’s conception of autonomy and moral personhood. . . . This work is a must read for anyone concerned, as were the philosophers Chamberlain discusses, about the place of meaning, value,and autonomy in a disenchanted world that tends toward biologism and both technological and scientific reductionism. Chamberlain writes from a seat of deep learning, but she has the ability to make the most abstruse ideas clear and relevant to the narrative of her intellectual history of this period. . . . Highly recommended."
