Street Life and Morals: German Philosophy in Hitler’s Lifetime

Description

With resonance for today, this book explores a significant crisis of German philosophy and national identity in the decades around World War II.   German philosophy, famed for its high-minded Idealism, was plunged into crisis when Germany became an urban and industrial society in the late nineteenth century. The key figure of this shift was Immanuel Kant: seen for a century as the philosophical father of the nation, Kant seemed to lack crucial answers for violent and impersonal modern times. This book shows that the social and intellectual crisis that overturned Germany’s traditions—a sense of profound spiritual confusion over where modern society was headed—was the same crisis that allowed Hitler to come to power. It also describes how German philosophers actively struggled to create a new kind of philosophy in an effort to understand social incoherence and technology’s diminishing of the individual. Cover Title Page Copyright Contents 1. The Life of the Mind Undone 2. The Challenge from the Streets 3. The Collapsed House of Bourgeois Ideas 4. New Philosophy out of the Rubble 5. The Possibility of Life Together Appendix 1: The National Socialist Kant Appendix 2: The Philosophers and the National Socialist Terror References Further Reading Acknowledgements Author’s Note