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The German Genius

The German Genius

Titel: The German Genius Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Peter Watson
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imagination. The first, Eros and Civilization , was published in 1955 and was intended as a liberating text in which Marcuse used Freud to modify Marx for the modern world. It became popular especially among the hippies of the counterculture. 32 His argument was that modern men and women need to educate their desire , that Marx says nothing about this, that modern conformist society kills the aesthetic and sensual side to life, that this is a form of repression, and that society needed to be based as much on the pleasure principle as on economic principles. 33
    Marcuse made this more explicit in One-Dimensional Man (1964), with its famous concept of “repressive tolerance” where, he said, in modern society, even the language of tolerance and liberation is used to keep people from being liberated. The world, the American world in particular, was one-dimensional in that there was only one way of thinking that was now regarded as legitimate—technological rationality, which perpetuated itself in science, in the universities, in industry and commerce. His remedy was “the great refusal,” the “negation” of the reality that technological rationality has foisted on us. This stifling world, he said, needed to be replaced by imagination, art, and “negative thought.”
    Compared to these, the influence of yet another student of Heidegger, Leo Strauss, was less diffuse, more immediate, and by no means to everyone’s taste. In 2004 Anne Norton wrote an impassioned attack on the charismatic Strauss and the many Straussians whose particular cult of militant conservatism she held responsible for taking over George W. Bush’s White House and oversimplifying the world of politics into a crass battle between righteous Americans and a series of “convenient enemies.” 34
    Born in Kirchhain in Germany in 1899, Strauss arrived in the United States in 1938, where he joined the University in Exile at the New School. His interests, to that point, were Spinoza, Maimonides, and Carl Schmitt, the National Socialist scholar, in particular his book The Concept of the Political (see Chapter 35). 35 Strauss studied at the universities of Frankfurt, Marburg, Berlin, and Hamburg and his PhD dissertation was sponsored by Ernst Cassirer. After that he spent a year at Freiburg under Husserl and Heidegger. A formal and timid man, Strauss’s thought “was marked by his revulsion from the preponderant tendencies of the modern age…His conservatism rested on his conviction that modern trends of thought, be they positivistic or historicist, were inimical to—nay, destructive of—what he cherished as being the perennial values.” 36 He thought that these perennial values were the qualities that had distinguished the educated middle class in Nazi Germany and that modern “fads” had undermined the timeless qualities of the Greeks and “opened the floodgates to a nihilism of values of which the Nazi movement was the most extreme outcome.” Science, neo-Kantianism, and the modern behavioral sciences all contribute to a contemporary nihilism and this, Strauss was convinced, was the modern predicament, out of which a way must be found. He doubted the redemptive power of politics and never once wrote about American thought, 37 becoming known for his doubts about technological supremacy and for his dogmatic stance on these issues. 38 He lamented the decline of religion “as the only means of keeping the mob in check” and, according to Arendt (when they were both students of Heidegger), he “concurred with fascism in every respect except its anti-Semitism.” * His many students became very influential. 39
    Among political practitioners , as opposed to theoreticians, the most colorful is without question Arnold Schwarzenegger. Born in Thal bei Graz in Austria in 1947, he arrived in the United States in 1968, already famous for being voted the best-built man in Europe (and going AWOL during basic training in the Austrian army in order to enter competitions). In Los Angeles he trained to be an actor, at the same time continuing to work on bodybuilding, but his acting career blossomed after Conan the Barbarian was a hit, most notably with the three science-fiction Terminator films. He was elected governor of California in October 2003, though for the time being at least his political achievements have been overshadowed by those of Henry Kissinger, conceivably the most conventionally successful of all German émigrés to the United

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