Book Reviews

very high value on tolerance and upon the inevitability of interpreting our ‘thick’ concepts variously. Within limits, ethics will be about making the best out of what we have got. In such a state of mind one might ask a philosopher to help his fellow citizens think matters through clearly and quietly. He should not be treated as a scientist who can speak with the authority and certainty that comes from having a genuine knowledge ofthe natural world. What is being proposed is in fact the democratisation of philosophy and it could not have been done more intelligently or persuasively.

Harvard University

Judith Shklar

The Weimar Dilemma: Intellectuals in the Weimar Republic, Anthony Phelan, ed.

(Manchester University Press, 1985) 224 pp.

The Weimar Dilemma: Intellectuals in the Weimar Republic is a volume of essays complementing the earlier Culture and Society in the Weimar Republic also published by the Manchester University Press (1977) and edited by Keith Bullivant. The Weimar Dilemma is edited by Anthony Phelan who contributes the introduction and two of the seven essays. The volume explores the values and attitudes of intellectuals during the early years of the Weimar Republic. The term ‘intellectual’ is defined by Stephen Lamb as an individual ‘whose primary competence resides in the areas of philosophy, cultural history or literature, and who achieves prominence as a result of activities in and publications on matters of an abstract theoretical nature’ (p. 132).

Why was it so difficult for most intellectuals, in fact, for much of the German middle class to become politically engaged? This and other questions are addressed by the writers in their essays. Traditionally German intellectuals tend to set goals which prove unattainable. The German tradition of philosophical idealism conceives action as the realisation of an absolute value which, of course, cannot be achieved and thus leads the intellectual into isolation from reality. ‘The separation of intellect from mere politics is deeply embedded in modern German cultural history.’

Anthony Phelan explores these issues and their roots in German philosophical thought, in the first essay entitled Some Weimar Theories of the Intellectual. For decades during their history, particularly since the early nineteenth century, German writers were primarily concerned with the cultivation of humane qualities in human beings and with culture as a substitute for politics. During the Weimar Republic, intellectuals both to the right and to the left of the political centre were either critical of political reality or remained uncommitted. When confronted with the actual mechanism of the parliamentary and political party system, they felt uneasy and avoided alignment and political commitment.

The most interesting article is Stephen Lamb’s Intellectuals and the ChaNenge ofPower which focuses on the abortive and brief Munich Soviet Republic (Rlterepublik) of late 1918 and early 1919. Lamb concentrates on the four leading figures in these historic events: Kurt Eisner, Gustav Landauer, Erich Miihsam and Ernst Toller. Using them as examples he examines the relationship between intellectuals and political reality in the early days of the Weimar Republic. Two aspects interest Lamb in particular: the relationship between intellectual theory and practice and ‘the consequences of the failure of this short lived experiment in intellectual politics for the subsequent relationship of intellectuals to the Weimar Republic’. Like most intellectuals, these four men shared the characteristic of intellectualising and idealising politics in their approaches to reality, and thus were unable to accomplish their goals.

Eisner believed in a gradual approach to the building of socialism and in government by

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consensus, essentially in social democracy and not in communism and anarchy. Landauer’s speeches and writings reveal a deep-rooted contempt for absolute monarchy, the aspirations of the social democrats, and the communist dictatorship of the proletariat. He believed his major task to be the complete reorganisation of the intellectual institution of society and made some reforms in the university and the theatre. Miihsam struggled against the manifestations of the state: capitalism, imperialism, militarism, class rule and goal-oriented justice. Toller longed for a new world without poverty. He was opposed to centralised parliamentary democracy since it affords those with the most money the best opportunity to amass political power and influence. His constant theme was the change of man’s heart, and consequently he appealed to the people to cooperate in the process of ‘socialisation of the whole economy’. In the end nothing practical was accomplished by Eisner and his associates nor by other intellectuals like them.

In Left-wing Melancholia Anthony Phelan demonstrates, on the example of Kurt Tucholsky, how impossible it was for many intellectuals to make a commitment to a political cause. He characterises Tucholsky as an example of the non-aligned leftists who basically sympathised with communist causes but who hid behind pseudonyms and satirical humanism in their writings and who guarded their private selves from active involvement. ‘Non-alignment on the left amounts (even constitutionally) to wanting desperately to play the game from a self-imposed position on the side lines.’

In his essay The Golden Age or Nothingness, Godfrey Carr contends that intellectuals like Lukacs, Benjamin, Jtinger and Klaus Mann in their desperate depression regarded suicide as a powerful sign of contempt of existing reality and as a symbolic sacrifice, suggesting both ‘self-obliteration and self-renewal’. Others, for similar reasons, escaped into a world of drugs and thus suppressed both their own self and society with its unsolvable problems. Drugs to them represented an escape into an existence free from limitations and, I might add, from social and political responsibilities.

Obviously these intellectuals refused to believe that reforms were possible, and the prospect for progress based on ever-increasing material prosperity filled them with despair. ‘Only a radical break with the existing world could end the chaos, confusion and frustration’ which they perceived, and such a radical action was suicide, ‘a pure, selfless act involving the whole being of the individual’. After the horrors of the Second World War, Klaus Mann, in total desperation and obvious derangement, proposed to save Europe through a bizarre gesture: the mass suicide of thousands of intellectuals. One questions both the sanity and the effectiveness of such a gesture. Suicide certainly neither deterred the National Socialists nor the Communists from their self-appointed paths.

In The ConservativeRevolution Keith Bullivant reviews the various conservative groups which existed during the Weimar Republic and concludes that they differed in organisation, to be sure, but that they shared basic convictions and attitudes. They questioned the supremacy of rationality, rejected party-political activities, preferred an ‘authoritarian, hierarchical “Volksstaat” to democracy, and emphasized the positive aspects of the war experience’. Most regarded the Weimar Republic as a ‘dead time’ or as a time of painful birth that had to be endured until ‘creative forces’ would awaken a completely new state rising from a special ‘German politics’ distinct from traditional Western forms. The conservatives were waiting for some ‘other force’ which rema.ined essentially unidentified in their writings, but which probably meant a government of national unity based on the unity of what they termed ‘Volk’, not on parliamentary practice of compromise and coalition. Some conservative intellectuals, as, for example, Thomas Mann (whom Bullivant includes among the conservative revolutionaries), viewed the political world as irrelevant and profane, and when they entered the political arena, ‘the categories they used were essentially aesthetic or spiritual in nature, rather than unambiguously political’. Needless to say, the conservatives were not able and, in some cases, not willing to stem the tide of National Socialism.

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A major source for ideas and terminology used by conservative writers was, of course, Friedrich Nietzsche. Richard Hinton Thomas in Nietzsche in Weimar Society points out how conservative intellectuals took concepts and values from the philosopher’s system for the construction of the ‘other’, the ‘German’ alternative.

In the final essay, Wilfried van der Will and Rob Burns briefly review the history of socialism and its uneasy relationship with intellectuals, some of whom finally became integrated in the organisations of the SPD and the KPD during the Weimar Republic. They had recognised the choice of either becoming a ‘political being’ or remain a private individual. They opted for the former, especially when the working class movement provided a unique opportunity for them to become involved in educating the workers.

Most of the essays are interesting and informative, not to the lay reader, to be sure, but to the student of the Weimar Republic. One is constantly reminded of the fateful consequences of both the political impotence and nai’vetk of German intellectuals as well as their substantial diversity of ideas and even disunity. This disunity together with the tradition of idealism had so totally formed them that they were no match for the brutal onslaught of the national socialist brownshirts, and therein lies in part the tragedy of the Republic which was abandoned all too quickly to divisive and destructive forces.

Brigham Young University Hans-Wilhelm Kelling

Die Uerberwindung des Zufalls, Kritische Betrachtungen zu Leonard Nelsons Begruendung der Ethik als Wissenshaft, Grete Henry-Hermann (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1985), 232 pp.

This book is a brief discussion of the ethical philosophy of the remarkable and original philosopher and pedagogue Leonard Nelson (1882-1927), written by one of the leading scholars on Nelson, Grete Henry-Hermann (190 l-84). Nelson’s philosophy is generally unknown to the intellectual public outside of Germany and his significance is almost entirely unrecognised. He was the main figure in the foundation of the ‘Neu-Fries’schen

Schule’, a philosophical stream of thought based on the work of J.F. Fries (1773-1843), a forgotten philosopher who took an outstanding revolutionary stance against the sociopolitical thought and praxis of the main streams of post-Kantian philosophers.

The philosophy of Leonard Nelson, as well as that of J.F. Fries, belongs to the Kantian tradition, although he was also influenced by his formal teacher, the mathematician David Hilbert. The tendency to find a similar axiomatic base for geometry, mathematics, physics and ethics was known as the Nelson Programme, an expansion of the well-known ‘Hilbert Programme’. Nelson’s philosophical roots were based in his original concept of the ‘Socratic Method’, which basically means a conception of philosophy as self- examination together with a special technique for clarifying principles and ideas through synthetic a priori insight. In his restructuring of Fries’ epistemological method, Nelson sought to form a new foundation of rational metaphysics. Synthesising critical philosophy and mathematical axiomatics should be the new basis for science, psychology and ethics.

Grete Henry-Hermann as a scholar of Leonard Nelson and Werner Heisenberg gives us a reasonable interpretation of the interaction between modern physics, the quantum theory and Nelson’s methodological approach to ethics. The debate lies in the fact that, while Nelson’s Programme tries to establish an axiomatic base for ‘scientific ethics’, there is an opposing tendency to fight any form of absolute thinking, which has been rejected by modern physics. Nelson’s system of philosophical ethics and pedagogy was not only a pure philosophical system, but was highly influential as a system of the philosophy of law, politics and social reform. Besides being a professor at the University of Goettingen, he