Closing of the American Mind (23 page)

I got my first look at this scene at the midpoint of its development, when American university life was being revolutionized by German thought, which was still the preserve of earnest intellectuals. When I came to the University of Chicago in the mid-forties, just after the war, terms like “value judgment” were fresh, confined to an elite and promising special insight. There were great expectations in the social sciences that a new era was beginning in which man and society would be understood better than they had ever been understood before. The academic character of the philosophy departments, with their tired and tiresome methodology and positivism, had caused people interested in the perennial and live questions about man to migrate to the social sciences. There were two writers who dominated and generated real enthusiasm—Freud and Weber. Marx was revered but, as had been true for a long time, was little read and did not provide inspiration for dealing with the problems really facing us. Although it is even now still insufficiently appreciated, Freud and Weber were both thinkers who were profoundly influenced by Nietzsche, as is obvious to anyone who knows Nietzsche and knows what was going on in the German-speaking world in the late nineteenth century. In a strange way they divided up Nietzsche's psychological and social concerns between them. Freud concentrated on the id, or unconscious, the sexual as the motor of the most interesting spiritual phenomena, and the related ideas of sublimation and neurosis. Weber was most concerned with the problem of values, the role of religion in their formation, and community. Together Freud and Weber are the immediate source of most of the language with which we are so familiar.

Everyone knew that they were German thinkers, and that the professors teaching them were a mix of German refugees from Hitler and of Americans who had either studied in Germany prior to Hitler or who had learned from these emigrés. It was not problematic to any of them that these ideas were German. Freud and Weber were part of that great
pre-Hitlerian German classical tradition, which everyone respected. Nietzsche himself was not at that time very respectable because his thought seemed to have some discomfiting relation to fascism, and many of those who had favored Nietzsche in the Anglo-Saxon world (where he had had his greatest direct influence on artists, most notably, of course, Ezra Pound) had not been sufficiently alert to the dangers of fascism and anti-Semitism (although Nietzsche himself was the very opposite of an anti-Semite). The fact that German thought had taken an antirational and antiliberal turn with Nietzsche, and even more so with Heidegger, was evident. But this was simply repressed, and a blind eye was turned to their influence on their contemporaries. There were some superficial attempts to blame Hegel, Fichte and Nietzsche for what happened in Germany, but the German classical tradition in general, as well as German historicism, remained in favor, and the special stars in our firmament were either treated as spinoffs from them or as having been generated spontaneously. The trouble with Weimar was simply that the bad guys won.

My professors, many of whom were to become very famous, did not tend to be philosophic and did not dig back into the sources of the new language and categories they were using. They thought that these were scientific discoveries like any others, which were to be used in order to make further discoveries. They were very much addicted to abstractions and generalizations, as Tocqueville predicted they would be. They believed in scientific progress and appeared (there may have been an element of boasting and self-irony in this) to be convinced that they were on the verge of a historic breakthrough in the social sciences, equivalent to that scored in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the natural sciences by Galileo, Kepler, Descartes and Newton, which would make earlier social science as irrelevant as was Ptolemy after Copernicus. These teachers were literally inebriated by the unconscious and values. And they were also sure that scientific progress would be related to social and political progress. All were either Marxists or New Deal liberals. The war against the Right had been won domestically at the polls, and in foreign affairs on the battlefield. The decisive question of principle had been resolved. Equality and the welfare state were now a part of the order of things, and what remained was to complete the democratic project. Psychotherapy would make individuals happy, as sociology would improve societies.

I do not believe any of these professors noticed the darker side of Freud and Weber, let alone the Nietzsche-Heidegger extremism lying somewhere beneath the surface. Or rather, if they did notice, they found it of autobiographical rather than scientific interest. It is amazing to me that the irrational source of all conscious life in Freud, and the relativity of all values in Weber, did not pose a problem for them and their optimism about science. Freud was very dubious about the future of civilization and the role of reason in the life of man. He certainly was not a convinced advocate of democracy or equality. And Weber, much more thoughtful than Freud about science, morals and politics, lived in an atmosphere of permanent tragedy. His science was formulated as a doubtful dare against the chaos of things, and values certainly lay beyond its limits. This is what the very precarious, not to say imaginary, distinction between facts and values meant. Reason in politics leads to the inhumanity of bureaucracy. Weber found it impossible to prefer rational politics to the politics of irrational commitment; he believed that reason and science themselves were value commitments like any other commitments, incapable of asserting their own goodness, thus having lost what had always been most distinctive in them. Politics required dangerous and uncontrollable semireligious value positing, and Weber was witnessing a struggle of the gods for possession of man and society, the results of which were unpredictable. Calculating reason would end up in dried-up, heartless and soulless administration of things without community-forming and sustaining values; feeling would lead to selfish indulgence in superficial pleasures; political commitment would likely foster fanaticism, and it was questionable whether there was enough value-positing energy left in man. Everything was up in the air, and there was no theodicy to sustain him in his travail. Weber, along with many others in Germany under Nietzsche's influence, saw that all that we care for was threatened by his insight and that we were without intellectual or moral resources to govern the outcome. We require values, which in turn require a peculiar human creativity that is drying up and in any event has no cosmic support. Scientific analysis itself concludes that reason is powerless, while dissolving the protective horizon within which men can value. None of this is peculiar to Weber or comes simply from his distressed personality, which he had at least partly because of the bleak perspective that lay before him. There is no doubt that value relativism, if it is true and it is believed in,
takes one into very dark regions of the soul and very dangerous political experiments. But on enchanted American ground the tragic sense has little place, and the early proponents of the new social science gaily accepted the value insight, sure that their values were just fine, and went ahead with science. Compare the character and concerns of Talcott Parsons with those of Max Weber and you have the measure of the distance between the Continent and us. In Parsons you see the routinization of Weber. It was not until the sixties that the value insight began to have its true effects in the United States, as it had had in Germany thirty or forty years earlier. Suddenly a new generation that had not lived off inherited value fat, that had been educated in philosophic and scientific indifference to good and evil, came on the scene representing value commitment and taught their elders a most unpleasant lesson.

The image of this astonishing Americanization of the German pathos can be seen in the smiling face of Louis Armstrong as he belts out the words of his great hit “Mack the Knife.” As most American intellectuals know, it is a translation of the song “Mackie Messer” from
The Threepenny Opera
, a monument of Weimar Republic popular culture, written by two heroes of the artistic Left, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. There is a strange nostalgia among many of the American intelligentsia for this moment just prior to Hitler's coming to power, and Lotte Lenya's rendition of this song has long stood with Marlene Dietrich's singing “
Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe eingestellt
” in the
Blue Angel
as the symbol of a charming, neurotic, sexy, decadent longing for some hazy fulfillment not quite present to the consciousness. Less known to our intelligentsia is an aphorism in Nietzsche's
Thus Spake Zarathustra
, a book well known to Brecht, entitled “On the Pale Criminal,” which tells the story of a neurotic murderer, eerily resembling Raskolnikov in
Crime and Punishment
, who does not know, cannot know, that he committed murder out of a motive as legitimate as any other and useful in many important situations, but delegitimized in our pacific times: he lusted after “the joy of the knife.” This scenario for “Mack the Knife” is the beginning of the supra-moral attitude of expectancy, waiting to see what the volcano of the id will spew forth, which appealed to Weimar and its American admirers. Everything is all right as long as it is not fascism! With Armstrong taking Lenya's place, as Mai Britt took Dietrich's, it is all mass-marketed and the message becomes less dangerous, although no
less corrupt. All awareness of foreignness disappears. It is thought to be folk culture, all-American, part of the American century, just as “stay loose” (as opposed to uptight) is supposed to have been an insight of rock music and not a translation of Heidegger's
Gelassenheit
. The historical sense and the distance on our times, the only advantages of Weimar nostalgia, are gone, and American self-satisfaction—the sense that the scene is ours, that we have nothing important to learn about life from the past—is served.

This image can be seen in our intellectual history, if only one substitutes Mary McCarthy for Louis Armstrong and Hannah Arendt for Lotte Lenya, or David Riesman for Armstrong and Erich Fromm for Lenya, and so on through the honor roll of American intellectuals. Our stars are singing a song they do not understand, translated from a German original and having a huge popular success with unknown but wide-ranging consequences, as something of the original message touches something in American souls. But behind it all, the master lyricists are Nietzsche and Heidegger.

In short, after the war, while America was sending out its blue jeans to unite the young of all nations, a concrete form of democratic universalism that has had liberalizing effects on many enslaved nations, it was importing a clothing of German fabrication for its souls, which clashed with all that and cast doubt on the Americanization of the world on which we had embarked, thinking it was good and in conformity with the rights of man. Our intellectual skyline has been altered by German thinkers even more radically than has our physical skyline by German architects.
³

My insistence on the Germanness of all this is intended not as a know-nothing response to foreign influence, the search for a German intellectual under every bed, but to heighten awareness of where we must look if we are to understand what we are saying and thinking, for we are in danger of forgetting. The great influence of a nation with a powerful intellectual life over less well endowed nations, even if the armies of the latter are very powerful, is not rare in human experience. The most obvious cases are the influence of Greece on Rome and of France on Germany and Russia. But it is precisely the differences between these two cases and the example of Germany and the United States that makes the
latter so problematic for us. Greek and French philosophy were universalistic in intention and fact. They appealed to the use of a faculty potentially possessed by all men everywhere and at all times. The proper noun in Greek philosophy is only an inessential tag, as it is in
French
Enlightenment. (The same is true of
Italian
Renaissance, a rebirth that is proof of the accidental character of nations and of the universality of Greek thinkers.) The good life and the just regime they taught knew no limits of race, nation, religion or climate. This relation to man as man was the very definition of philosophy. We are aware of this when we speak of science, and no one seriously talks of German, Italian or English physics. And when we Americans speak seriously about politics, we mean that our principles of freedom and equality and the rights based on them are rational and everywhere applicable. World War II was really an educational project undertaken to force those who did not accept these principles to do so.

But German philosophy after Hegel cast doubt on them, and there was some relationship between German politics and German thought Historicism has taught that the mind is essentially related to history or culture. Germanness is, according to later German philosophers, an essential part of them. For Nietzsche and those influenced by him, values are the products of folk minds and have relevance only to those minds. The possibility of translation itself, as I have mentioned, is doubted by Heidegger. For him the Latin translations of the Greek philosophical terms are superficial and do not convey the essence of the translated text. German thought tended not toward liberation from one's own culture, as did earlier thought, but toward reconstituting the rootedness in one's own, which has been shattered by cosmopolitanism, philosophical and political. We are like the millionaire in
The Ghost (Geist) Goes West
who brings a castle from brooding Scotland to sunny Florida and adds canals and gondolas for “local color.” We chose a system of thought that, like some wines, does not travel; we chose a way of looking at things that could never be ours and had as its starting point dislike of us and our goals. The United States was held to be a nonculture, a collection of castoffs from real cultures, seeking only comfortable self-preservation in a regime dedicated to superficial cosmopolitanism in thought and deed. Our desire for the German things was proof we could not understand them. The decisive character of peoples and their values that was decreed by historicism of all kinds, but particularly by Nietzsche's radical historicism, makes the
German case the opposite of the Greek one. The difference can be seen in the way Cicero treats Socrates as opposed to the way Nietzsche does. For Cicero, Socrates is a friend and contemporary; for Nietzsche he is an enemy and an ancient. Given our country's extreme Enlightenment universalism, nothing could be more unwelcome to Nietzsche and Heidegger than our embrace.