Ominous Parallels (25 page)

The key to the meaning of
The Magic Mountain
is that it has no meaning: it commits itself to nothing, neither idea nor value. Mann’s method is to present his characters, however “scientific” or maniacal or depraved or pedestrian, with a tolerant detachment overlaid with a furtive mockery; the method is not open satire, but a genteel “irony,” a timid, well-mannered sneer directed at man, at aspiration, at ideas, any ideas, including even the idea that ideas are useless. Beneath the surface—beneath the murky half-hints, the numbing details, the indecipherable symbols (which posturing literati have a field day pretending to decode)—the book is a vacuum, which says nothing and stands for nothing.

Except by implication. Implicit in its approach and style—in its well-bred decadence, its sly flirtation with death and disease, its “ironic” cynicism, its logorrheic emptiness, its weary, muted disdain for all viewpoints—is a viewpoint broadcast to the book’s readers: the futility of man, of human effort, of human intelligence. To a country and in a decade swept by hysteria, perishing from uncertainty, torn by political crisis, financial collapse, violence in the streets, and terror of the future—to that country, in that decade, its leading philosophical novelist offered as his contribution to sanity and freedom the smiling assurance that there are no answers, no absolutes, no values, no hope.

The message reached its audience. The book was a literary sensation, selling tens of thousands of copies in its first year alone.

Thomas Mann, says Laqueur, was “one of the main pillars of the Republic.”
⁷
If so, anyone could bring the structure crashing down with a single boot.

There were other modern writers in Weimar Germany, each in his own way indicative of the period’s trend. The works of this group, which generally reflect the influence of Marx or Freud or James Joyce, are characteristically plotless and structureless. The more avant-garde authors (prominent among the Expressionists in the theater) feature grotesque juxtapositions of deliberately unintelligible events; typically, however, the Weimar moderns, like Thomas Mann, simply discard “stories” as such. Serious literature, these writers held, must transcend “materialism”; its proper subject is not man in action, not man using his mind to pursue values in the world, but man’s introspective life, his soul, his feelings (particularly, his fears, his doubts, his alienation, his inner helplessness). “As in the plastic arts,” observes Myers, “German literary naturalism does not hold its form very long but soon pours over into the province of symbolism in which the author stresses mood, states of soul and other kinds of feeling wherein intellect as such plays a relatively minor role.”
⁸

Another example of this development is the leading poet of the period, Rainer Maria Rilke, a Christian mystic widely admired by conservatives and modernists alike. The conservatives, such as the rightist youth groups, praised Rilke as “a unique figure who had conquered and discredited the intellectuality that had dominated the West for a millennium.” The modernists at times went even further; the novelist Stefan Zweig, for instance, extolled Rilke’s later (virtually unintelligible) work as a form of communion not with human beings but “with the other, with the beyond of things and feelings.”
⁹

Still another such communer, a leading writer of the time, was Hermann Hesse (later a favorite of New Left college students in America), whose novels shrug off the external world, burrow into the subconscious as viewed through the lens of such theories as Jungian analysis, and reveal the message of salvation through Indian mysticism.

As to the state of man cut off from the intellect, reduced to mood and Jung and “the beyond,” Franz Kafka (little known in Germany during his lifetime) was presenting it eloquently. He, too, was immortalizing the “spirit of Weimar,” by offering nightmare projections of nameless ciphers paralyzed by a sinister, unknowable reality.

On the whole the academic institutions, strongholds of Prussianism and tradition, were not part of “Weimar culture.” Many influential theorists in the humanities and the sciences, however, were part of it. (Although some of these men taught in German universities, most were associated with private groups or institutes, or worked in nearby Switzerland or Austria.)

In academic philosophy, amid a variety of routine movements unknown to the public, one development stands out as both self-consciously new and fairly popular (especially among college students): the Existentialism of Martin Heidegger. whose major work,
Sein und Zeit,
appeared in 1927. Existence, Heidegger declared to his enthusiastic young following, is unintelligible, reason is invalid, and man is a helpless “Dasein”; he is a creature engulfed by “das Nichts” (nothingness), in terror of the supreme fact of his life: death, and doomed by nature to “angst,” “care,” estrangement, futility.

The novelty of this viewpoint lies, primarily, not in its content—Heidegger traces his root premises back to Kant—but in its blatancy and form (or rather formlessness). Contrary to the major line of nineteenth-century German philosophers, Heidegger does not attempt to offer an objective defense of his ideas; he rejects the traditional demand for logical argument, definition, integration, system-building. As a result, his works, brimming with disdain for the external world (and with unintelligible passages), have been praised by admirers as the intellectual counterpart of modern painting. Heidegger, it is sometimes said, exemplifies “non-representational thinking.”

As to human action, according to Heidegger, it must be unreasoned, feeling-dictated, willful. On May 27, 1933, he practiced this idea on a grand scale: in a formal, voluntary proclamation, he declared to the country that the age of science and of academic freedom was over, and that hereafter it was the duty of intellectuals to think in the service of the Nazi state.

Heidegger’s philosophy dispensed with God and religion. Many Weimar modernists, however, sought to preserve religious feeling by reconceiving it in appropriately contemporary terms. To define the latter was the special task of the period’s avant-garde theologians (among them, Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, Paul Tillich, Martin Buber).

God, these men declared, cannot be reached by the outdated, nineteenth-century method, i.e., by the attempt at a “natural” or “scientific” theology. God, said Barth, is “wholly other”; He is discontinuous with nature, unknowable to the human intellect, alien to human morality. To know God (or acquire true virtue), therefore, man must abandon thought and humbly await the ineffable. On his own, without the benefit of mystical grace, these innovators stressed, man is lost, helpless, wretched; he is tormented by guilt and disfigured by sin—above all, by the sin of pride. “
The
theological problem,” writes Brunner, is “to deliver modern man ... from the illegitimate self-sufficiency of reason and the spirit of autonomy.”
¹⁰

Avant-garde religion, in short, consists in ditching one’s mind, prostrating oneself in the muck, and screaming for mercy.

This synthesis of Existentialism and the Dark Ages, which soon ruled “progressive theology” everywhere, did not reach the German public at the time. Its less academic equivalents, however, reflecting the same basic cause and the same spirit, did reach the public.

Weimar Germany was awash with mystic and occult crazes of every kind, including medieval revivals, Orientalist sects, anthroposophy, theosophy, etc. It was also awash with the social concomitants of such crazes. “Certain cultural parallels [between Weimar Germany and America in 1970] are almost uncanny . . . .” observes Laqueur.

The phenomenal revival of astrology and various quasi-religious cults, the great acclaim given to prophets of doom, the success of highly marketable
Weltschmerz
in literature and philosophy, the spread of pornography and the use of drugs, the appearance of charlatans of every possible description and the enthusiastic audiences welcoming them—all these are common to both periods.
¹¹

There were also movements which purported to speak to the Germans (and later to the Americans) in the name of
science
. The most widely known, fiercely denounced both by traditionalists and by Communists, was a movement whose world capital in the twenties was Berlin: the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud. (Freud’s students or admirers in Germany at the time included, among many others of similar prominence today, Karen Homey, Otto Fenichel, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Erik Erikson, and Wilhelm Reich.)

In 1922, before a rapt Berlin audience, Freud introduced the theory which many of his followers regarded as
the
intellectual discovery of their era: his tripartite analysis of the human personality.

According to this theory, the prime mover in human nature is an unperceivable entity with a will and purpose of its own, the unconscious—which is basically an “id,” i.e., a contradictory, amoral “it” seething with innate, bestial, primevally inherited, imperiously insistent cravings or “instincts.” In deadly combat with this element is man’s conscience or “superego,” which consists essentially, not of reasoned moral convictions, but of primitive, illogical, largely unconscious taboos or categorical imperatives, representing the mores of the child’s parents (and ultimately of society), whose random injunctions every individual unquestioningly “introjects” and cowers before. Caught in the middle between these forces—between a psychopathic hippie screaming: satisfaction now! and a jungle chieftain intoning: tribal obedience! —sentenced by nature to ineradicable conflict, guilt, anxiety, and neurosis is man, i.e., man’s mind, his reason or “ego,” the faculty which is able to grasp reality, and which exists primarily to mediate between the clashing demands of the psyche’s two irrational masters.

As this theory makes eloquently clear, Freud’s view of reason is fundamentally Kantian. Both men hold that human thought is ultimately governed, not by a man’s awareness of external fact, but by inner mental elements independent of such fact. Both see the basic task of the mind not as perception, but as creation, the creation of a subjective world in compliance with the requirements of innate (or “introjected”) mental structures. Whereas Kant, however, draws on the concepts of eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophy to define his “categories” (and strives to defend them as inherent in “pure reason”), Freud derives his key structures from nineteenth-century romanticist philosophy (and flaunts their antirational character). The theory of the “id” is the voluntarist insistence on the primacy of “will.” The theory of the “superego” is the Hegelian insistence that the individual, including his moral ideas, is a mere fragment of the group.

In regard to method, the basic novelty of this psychological variant of the Kantian viewpoint lies in the Freudians’ claim that their theories are a product, not of a priori philosophizing, but of scientific investigation based on clinical data. Judging by their methodological practice, scientific investigation for the Freudians consists in leaping from random observations to sweeping constructs devoid of evidential justification, rational or empirical; and then in declaring that these constructs are compatible with any factual data of any kind, and are therefore irrefutable. (For example, if one finds no sign of an Oedipus complex, it has, one is told, been “repressed”; if one finds evidence contradicting it, there has been a “reaction formation”; etc.)

This unprecedented approach to scientific inquiry is a corollary of the basic Freudian theory: if man’s mind, as Freud says, is ruled by forces indifferent to facts, forces which are “unmoved by logical rebuttal, and unaffected though reality refutes them,”
¹²
then science in the nineteenth-century sense—science as the rigorous, logical pursuit of objective knowledge—is impossible. The “new science”—like the new philosophy, the new theology, the new art—becomes instead a vehicle of the willful, the arbitrary, the subjective.

Kant had made the attack on the self the essence of virtue. Here, too, Freud is a follower.

The real root of the outrage his own doctrines provoked, Freud says with a certain pride, is their assault on “the self-love of humanity.” Whatever the “wounds” that men have suffered from earlier scientific theories, he explains, the “blow” of psychoanalysis “is probably the most wounding.” The blow, he states, is the idea that man is not “supreme in his own soul,” “that
the ego is not master in its own house.
”
¹³

These formulations, while eloquent, are too generalized to capture fully the essence of Freud’s “wound”: Freud did not originate determinism—or irrationalism, or collectivism, or the theory of Original Sin, or cynicism, or pessimism (or even the idea of the unconscious). What he did originate, relying on all these theories, is a specific, and in its details unprecedented, view of man.

Freud offers to the world not man the dutiful, decorous nonperceiver (as in Kant); not man the defeated plaything of grand-scale forces, such as a malevolent reality or God or society or a “tragic flaw” (as in the works of countless traditional cynics and pessimists); but man the defeated plaything of the gutter; man the smutty pawn shaped by sexual aberrations and toilet training, itching to rape his mother, castrate his father, hoard his excrement; man the sordid cheat who pursues science because he is a frustrated voyeur, practices surgery because he is a sublimating sadist, and creates the David because he craves, secretly, to mold his own feces.

Man as a loathsomely small, ordure-strewn pervert: such is the sort of “wound” that Freud infficted on the being who had once been defined, in a radiantly different age, as the “rational animal.”

The expression “beyond freedom and dignity,” it has been said, names a distinctively modem view of man. By this standard, Freud is the preeminent modern. In relation to him, B.F. Skinner and the behaviorists, and Heidegger and Barth, and even Thomas Mann, are pikers.