Content area
Full text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Focus: Nihilism
Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) related the concepts of nihilism and responsibility to each other. He suggested in 1919 that responsibility is the proper way of relating to nihilism. At the time, he was not very clear about what this meant. By retracing his treatment of nihilism, this article clarifies what he was attempting to say and shows that his way of tying the two concepts together is relevant to contemporary discussions of responsibility. The article strives to identify the underlying historical connection between the two concepts: responsibility is presented as a response to the challenges of the present, although it has been used only infrequently so far.
Context
The concept of nihilism was not unknown to the intellectuals of the Weimar Republic, as it had roots in Germany and had been used to describe Russian revolutionaries. Furthermore, it had been promoted by Nietzsche. For these reasons, the concept was readily available to discourses of culture and society. The topic of contemporary criticism was the depletion of culture through atomization, mechanization and dissolution of values. Nietzsche, who was central to this discussion, referred to cultural degeneration and defined the concept of European nihilism. During the First World War, several leading German intellectuals wrote extensively in this critical tradition. The best known was Thomas Mann, who made a distinction between German culture, which was anchored in values, and French civilization, which had no future. For him, criticism of civilization was criticism of nihilism.1
A widespread theme among German intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s was their critique of civilization. Max Weber's view of rationalization and bureaucracy as forces that restricted human life exerted a strong influence on this group. The Frankfurt School of Marxist thinkers criticized modern technology and analysed the phenomena of mass culture as its logical outcome. Richard Coudenhove-Calergi, the founder and leader of the Pan-European movement, defended technological progress but argued for the need to complement it with a strong ethic.
An important step had been taken once nihilism was seen as the force behind unbridled technology, degeneration and other destructive aspects of modern culture. The next obvious step was to connect this view with Nietzsche and to use the concept of European nihilism. These critiques...