ABSTRACT
When we look back today on the time between the two world wars, we can see that this pause within the turbulent events of our century represents a period of extraordinary creativity. Omens of what was to come could be seen even before the catastrophe of World War I, particularly in painting and architecture. But for the most part, the general awareness of the time was transformed only by the terrible shock that the slaughters of World War I brought to the cultural consciousness and to the faith in progress of the liberal era. In the philosophy of the day, this transformation of general sensibilities was marked by the fact that with one blow the dominant philosophy that had grown up in the second half of the nineteenth century in renewal of Kant's critical idealism was rendered untenable. "The collapse of German idealism," as Paul Ernst called it in a popular book of the time,* was placed in a world-historical context by Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West. The forces that carried out the critique of this dominant Neo-Kantian philosophy had two powerful precursors: Friedrich Nietzsche's critique of Platonism and Christendom, and Sϕren Kierkegaard's brilliant attack on the Reflexionsphilosophie of spec 336ulative idealism. Two new philosophical catchwords confronted the Neo-Kantian preoccupation with methodology. One was the irrationality of life, and of historical life in particular. In connection with this notion, one could refer to Nietzsche and Bergson, but also to the great historian of philosophy Wilhelm Dilthey. The other catchword was Existenz, a term that rang forth from the works of Sϕren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher of the first part of the nineteenth century, whose influence was only beginning to be felt in Germany as a result of the Diedrichs translation. Just as Kierkegaard had criticized Hegel as the philosopher of reflection who had forgotten existence, so now the complacent system-building of Neo-Kantian methodologism, which had placed philosophy entirely in the service of establishing scientific cognition, came under critical attack. And just as Kierkegaard — a Christian thinker — had stepped forward to oppose the philosophy of idealism, so now the radical self-criticism of the so-called dialectical theology opened the new epoch.
