Masaryk and Decadence

Abstract

The critic Arne Novák (1880–1939) called Masaryk ‘the judge sentencing the decadent Austro-Hungarian state at the very hour of the twilight of the idols.’¹ That is a hyperbole or at least a misleading aggrandisement. Masaryk was a man of his age. Czech intellectuals of his time were, most of them, judging and condemning Austrian society as a whole and Czech society in particular. Masaryk was not a man of literary taste; he was not an aesthete; he was a moralist and a student of literary phenomenology. That was unusual in Czech literary studies. First and foremost, however, Masaryk was a criticiser. The period was a criticising period in Czech culture and Masaryk possibly contributed more than any other Czech intellectual of the last years of the nineteenth century to the spirit of criticism. In the first chapter of Naše nynější krise (1895) he speaks of all the main new camps in art and in political thought as growing out of the critical spirit. The new ideas like those of the Realists, Progressivists, Modernists, Socialists, and even Clericals and Aristocratists were produced from mutual criticism and conflict. In Otkzka sociální (1898) he rebukes Marx and Engels for being outmoded, for lacking the spirit of true criticism, the spirit of the 1890s. Masaryk himself is as dogmatic as the other Czech turn-of-the-century polemicists, K. M. Čapek-Chod (1860–1927), Arnošt Procházka (1869–1925) and F. X. Šalda (1867–1937), when he writes that Marx and Engels do indeed constantly criticise their opponents, but that ‘that criticism always relates to given individual problems; they accept their own philosophical bases without any truly philosophical criticism. Marx and Engels are typical representatives of materialist dogmatism.’²