Abstract
We are always in the circle of the present and everything depends on where we are in it, and if we wish to move around, or even impossibly, exit from it. In terms of our topic, we are in a history of bad mistakes and misjudgements. But we can make the past speak, ask questions of it that are self-consciously raised by the present. In this sense the past is turned into an interlocutor rather than either an object that can be dissected or re-assembled in the scientific manner of a forensic anthropologist or a corpse that can be picked over by crows. (Rundell 2014: 235.) These mistakes and misjudgements involve the problem of ‘leaping in’ prematurely where there may be nowhere to leap to, of holding back too long where and when it was more prudent to act than not to. These are the questions of and for our present, as it was for the present of World War I. But questions always require creativity, interpretation and thinking in Arendt’s use of the term. They require circumspection (Arendt 1978: 166–193).
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Notes
- 1.
Salomon points to a continuing tension in German intellectual life between Zivilization and Kultur (and between Enlightenment and Romanticism), which was played out in a number of currents. The first current consisted of revolts against the determinism of Hegel’s work, typified by Burckhardt and Dilthey, and against the determinism of Marx’s typified by Tönnies and Max Weber. The second current was the revolt against the bureaucratization characteristic of Wilhelmine Germany, which produced not only a culture of mediocrity (as Nietzsche contended) but also an adaptation of the personality to a regime of impersonal rules and structures. This current is best typified by the work of Max Weber on the pervasive growth of purposive rationality and by Simmel’s sociological impressionism. See Rundell and Mennell (1998: 16–18).
- 2.
Compare Brown’s ‘The Sons destined to Murder their Father: Crisis in Interwar Germany’, Chap. 4 above.
- 3.
See Altman’s “Singin’ in the Shade”, Chap. 2 above.
- 4.
Context in full from Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’:’If in some smothering dreams you too could pace /Behind the wagon that we flung him in,/And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,/His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;/ If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood/Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,/Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud/Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—My friend, you would not tell with such high zest/To children ardent for some desperate glory,/The old lie: Dulce et decorum est./ Pro patria mori. (Owen 1974: 79) See Chap. 6 above.
- 5.
Kate Kennedy, ‘World War One and Classical Music’, 2016: 1. Vaughan Williams was in the Medical Corp and experienced first-hand the death and carnage. Holst also composed ‘Ode to Death’ in 1916/17 which was presaged in the ‘Mars’ suite in the Planets. One can also listen to John Foulds’ ‘A World Requiem, Opus 60 (1921), and Arthur Bliss’ later ‘Morning Heroes’ (1930). See also Freud, ‘Thoughts for the times on war and death’ and ‘Introduction to Psychoanalysis and War Neuroses’ (Freud 1991: 61–89; Freud 2001: 210). Again Wilfred Owen gives a compelling portrait of the maddening trauma of the war in ‘Mental Cases’ (Owen 1974: 98–99). See also Remarque (1987).
- 6.
- 7.
A more nuanced historiography emerges when one considers the Weimar period. As recent studies have indicated— as well as the aesthetics of the period—this was not a period of only hyperinflation, dysfunction and social crisis. The language of crisis purported that there was a society in its totality that needed to be saved. See Makropolous (2012: 9–18); Graf and Föllmer (2012: 36: 47); Harrington (2012: 66–80).
- 8.
Whilst the modern state did not invent terrorism and should not be equated with it, it is certainly the case that it became the social site for the institutionalization of modern identity cruelty and its terroristic practices. Historically, the modern state is the site for the creation and management of the apparatuses of control–for example, the bureaucracies of territoriality, armies, and police.
- 9.
More recently the redemptive paradigm has been reinvented in unexpected places, for example, in Islamist fundamentalism where forms of terrorism can emerge from a negative, one-dimensionalizing critique of modernity coupled with, in this case, an imputed collective representation or social imaginary that needs to be saved. However, the form of terror is similar to previous ones—it is a war against civil society that homogenizes and disregards both the complexity of the target group that has been constructed as the enemy, and the host civilization from which it originated.
- 10.
See Chap. 8 by Geoffrey Boucher above.
- 11.
Whilst Castoriadis is important here his attitude is shared by Kantian-inspired critical theorists, for example, Claude Lefort, Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, and Agnes Heller, all of whose works can be put into productive dialogue. Agnes Heller’s work is alert to the nuanced separateness between politics qua autonomy and the vicissitudes of the human condition. It is out of this recognition that she constructs the distinction between the good citizen and the good person. See for example Heller (1987, 2002, 2005).
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Rundell, J. (2017). Modernity, Civilisation, Culture and ‘The War to End All Wars’: Or We Begin and End in the Mess. In: Sharpe, M., Jeffs, R., Reynolds, J. (eds) 100 years of European Philosophy Since the Great War. Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture, vol 25. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50361-5_13
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