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Leo Strauss: The Living Issues of German Postwar Philosophy [1940]

The Creighton Philosophical Club held its thirty-ninth meeting at Syracuse University, on April 27 and 28. Leo Strauss read a paper on The Living Issues of German Postwar Philosophy with special reference to Husserl's phenomenology

Both the intellectual glory and the political misery of the

Germans may be traced back to one and the same cause:

German civilization is considerably younger than the civilization

of the West. The Germans are, strictly speaking, less civilized

than the English and the French, i.e., they are to a lesser

degree citizens, free citizens. This is one aspect of the matter.

The other aspect is that German philosophy is more apt to take

a critical attitude towards civilization, towards the tradition of

civilizations, than Western philosophy is. We may go so far as

to say that, generally speaking, German philosophy implies.

more or less radical criticism of the very idea of civilization

and especially of modern civilization - a criticism disastrous

in the political field, but necessary in the philosophical, in the

theoretical field. For if civilization is distinguished from, and

even opposed to, what was formerly called the state of nature,

the process of civilization means an increasing going away

from the natured condition of man, an increasing forgetting of

that situation. And perhaps one must have a living knowledge,

an acute recollection of that situation if one wants to know,

i.e. to understand in its full meaning, the natural, the basic

problems of philosophy.

Criticism of modern civilization is related to a longing for

some past, for some antiquity. An English acquaintance of

mine told me that what struck him most, and what was most

incomprehensible to him, when he was talking to Germans,

was their longing for their tribal past. Now, longing for the

Teutonic past is only the most crude and unintelligent, the

most ridiculous form of a deep dissatisfaction with modern

civilization. In its most enlightened form, it is a longing for

classical antiquity, especially for Greek antiquity. In a famous

aphorism, Nietzsche has described German thought as one

great attempt to build a bridge leading back from the modern

world to the world of Greece. One has only to recall the

names of Leibniz, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Holderlin and

Hegel to see that Nietzsche's remark is based on some evidence.

This much is certain: Nietzsche's own philosophy, the

most powerful single factor in German postwar philosophy,

is almost identical with his criticism of modern civilization in

the name of classical antiquity.

The backbone of modern civilization is modern science.
German criticism of modern civilization is therefore primarily
criticism of modern science, either in the form of a limitation
of its bearing or in a still more radical form. That criticism was
expressed by the German philosophic movement of the end
of the 18th and of the beginning of the 19th century, by the
movement culminating in Hegel, in the form of the opposition
of history as the realm of freedom vs. nature as the realm of
(mathematical or mechanical) necessity, or of the opposition of
organic growth or dialectical process vs. rational construction.
This interpretation of the criticism of modern civilization
naturally was an important factor in German postwar philosophy.
But it was not characteristic of the latter. The slogan which
expressed the attitude characteristic of postwar Germany
towards modern civilization, is, not history vs. unhistorical
naturalism, or the grown vs. the made, but life or existence vs.
science, science being any purely theoretical enterprise. The
science criticized in the name of life or existence, comprises
both natural science and history. The German postwar criticism
is directed as much against Hegel and romanticism as
against Descartes. The originator of that criticism was Nietzsche
who had made it its principle to look at science from the
point of view of art, and to look at art from the point of view
of life.
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