PHIL304: Existentialism

Although World War II resulted in mass atrocities and a scale of death unmatched in human history, from a cultural point of view World War I had implications that were equally far-reaching. Modernism was a multi-faceted phenomenon arising in the aftermath of World War I, which denied the adequacy of longstanding presuppositions of European culture. In fact, Heidegger's philosophy has been read by some scholars as reflecting a search for solid ground in a European world that lost its footing in the chaos following World War I, and perhaps never regained it.

Modernism rejected a number of optimistic Enlightenment assumptions regarding the rationality of the universe and human nature; modernist artists and thinkers thus began to represent the world and human nature as fragmented and chaotic, characterized not by order and reason, but by darker, more irrational forces. This sense of spiritual dislocation found expression all across the artistic and cultural spectrum. Freud's new science of psychoanalysis, with its theories concerning the unconscious mind, emphasized the irrational side of human nature, while Kafka's twisted tales of alienation represented a world turned upside-down. In music, Alban Berg's Wozzeck exhibited an atonality that was at once brilliant and disturbing as it radically called into question basic presuppositions about the nature of melody, harmony and scale. In modern art, the breakdown of the representative image was reflected in movements such as Cubism and Dada, with an increased tendency towards abstraction, fragmentation and distortion. Perhaps the most famous expression of this theme is to be found in Yeats' famous poem "Second Coming":

    Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold,
    Mere anarchy is unleashed upon the world
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere,
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned…
 
The aftermath of World War I has been described by many critics and historians as a loss of innocence. As The Great War unfolded over time, it became increasingly clear to thoughtful people on all sides of the conflict that this was a war unprecedented both in its brutality and its futility. This realization reflected a stark truth- that the European world prior to The Great War simply no longer existed, and one could never go back. Hence Paul Fussell, in his classic study The Great War and Modern Memory, writes in connection with the British war poets, that "for the modern imagination, that last summer ("our summer of 1914") has assumed the status of a permanent symbol for anything innocently but irrevocably lost".

The anti-modernist strain in Heidegger's thought can similarly be read as a form of "homesickness". Heidegger discussed this concept himself, writing approvingly of the romantic poet Novalis' interpretation of the philosophical impulse as homesickness (Heidegger Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics 5). In his later work, he also discussed the concept of "homelessness" especially in connection with the proliferation of technology as a fundamental characteristic of modernity. But what exactly does the discussion about "home" signify? When one is homesick, one yearns for a place to which one cannot return. But how can we clarify the feeling of loss experienced when one returns "home" when "home" no longer exists? (See Read) Consider the loss experienced by a tsunami survivor returning to a now leveled house and only the memory of dead or missing relatives. The survivor can only mourn a lost family, a lost world, and a lost innocence. In what follows, I will discuss the concept of "homesickness" on a larger cultural level. I will specifically analyze anti-modernist discourses of melancholy as reactions to the perceived disintegration of values in the aftermath of World War I. In Heidegger's case, fundamental themes in his philosophy (and his life) partly reflect an attempted retreat into a world before the dislocations of modernity. Heidegger rejected modernity as nihilistic and was critical of what he took to be a rootless, technology-obsessed, conformist society, out of touch with the fundamental rhythms of Being.

Source: David J. Rosner, https://journals.openedition.org/erea/596
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