ABSTRACT
The textual evidence for supporting an interpretation of Reflections as a rearguard defense of the authoritarian state is abundant and conspicuous. Therein Thomas Mann for the first time uses the phrase, "political irony," which critics have generally passed over but which Mann highlights too dramatically to be of little import. The declaration requires that he situate the nineteenth century between the eighteenth and the twentieth. Mann sees "political irony" in Kant's charitable self-reversal, for after Kant's "terrible and only too successful epistemological campaign, reintroduced everything again under the name of 'Postulates of Practical Reason,' and made possible again what he had just critically crushed.”. In Reflections Thomas Mann states that there are "two brotherly possibilities" for appropriating Nietzsche's aesthetics, different ways of interpreting the significance of "life" in the aesthetic act of a "selfdenial of intellect in favor of life."
