The Age of the Crisis of Man

Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973

Mark Greif

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780691173290, 9780691146393
• eBook ISBN: 9781400852109
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Literature

A compelling intellectual and literary history of midcentury America

In a midcentury American cultural episode forgotten today, intellectuals of all schools shared a belief that human nature was under threat. The immediate result was a glut of dense, abstract books on the "nature of man." But the dawning "age of the crisis of man," as Mark Greif calls it, was far more than a historical curiosity. In this ambitious intellectual and literary history, Greif recovers this lost line of thought to show how it influenced society, politics, and culture before, during, and long after World War II.

During the 1930s and 1940s, fears of the barbarization of humanity energized New York intellectuals, Chicago protoconservatives, European Jewish émigrés, and native-born bohemians to seek "re-enlightenment," a new philosophical account of human nature and history. After the war this effort diffused, leading to a rebirth of modern human rights and a new power for the literary arts.

Critics' predictions of a "death of the novel" challenged writers to invest bloodless questions of human nature with flesh and detail. Hemingway, Faulkner, and Richard Wright wrote flawed novels of abstract man. Succeeding them, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Flannery O'Connor, and Thomas Pynchon constituted a new guard who tested philosophical questions against social realities—race, religious faith, and the rise of technology—that kept difference and diversity alive.

By the 1960s, the idea of "universal man" gave way to moral antihumanism, as new sensibilities and social movements transformed what had come before. Greif's reframing of a foundational debate takes us beyond old antagonisms into a new future, and gives a prehistory to the fractures of our own era.

PART I

GENESIS

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

The “Crisis of Man” as Obscurity and Re-enlightenment

In the middle decades of the twentieth century, American intellectuals of manifold types, from disparate and even hostile groups, converged on a perception of danger. The world had entered a new crisis by 1933, the implications of which would echo for nearly three decades to follow: not just the crisis of the liberal state, or capitalist economy generally, and not only the imminent paroxysm of the political world system in world war. The threat was now to “man.” “Man” was in “crisis.” This jeopardy transformed the tone and content of intellectual, political, and literary enterprise, from the late thirties forward, in ways that—because they are so intertwined with panic, piety, and the permanent philosophical questions of human nature—have still not been given an adequate accounting.

To its adherents, the crisis of man specified the danger of the end or barbarization of Western civilization. New conditions seemed destined to snap the long tradition of humanism, the filament of learning, humane confidence, and respect for human capacities that had made intellect modern and progressive since the Renaissance. Thinkers mourned the “end of history” as a forward-moving, progressive stream; it seemed a lonesome terminus in their eyes, and not a fulfillment as in our contemporary “end of history.” Their fear, above all, was that human nature was being changed, either in its permanent essence or in its lineaments for the eyes of other men. The change would have the same result in either form: the demolition of those certainties about human nature, which had been pillars for optimistic thinkers for two centuries.

The Rights of Man had been the foundation upon which modern democracies were built. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men … are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” the Declaration of Independence asserted in 1776. “[T]he only causes of public misfortunes and the corruption of Governments,” allowed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789, are the “ignorance, forgetfulness or contempt of the … natural, unalienable and sacred rights of man.”¹ After 1939, the unalienable rights of man could not be taken for granted in Europe, as “man” was being alienated and eradicated, altered and undone. These erasures largely occurred at gunpoint, of Nazi, Soviet, or fascist arms, though intellectuals took the threat to be much more general. Perhaps men had been better off in ignorance and naive hopefulness, except that, the intellectuals warned, it was this blindness that had prepared the field for the disasters of Nazism and totalitarianism.

Meditations on fundamental anthropology are as continuous a stream of introspection as one can find in the history of philosophy, alongside questions of the substance of the world and the nature of the heavens; you can reach down and pull up a dipperful of speculations on the human in any year. The distinct return of man as a center of intellectual inquiry, apart from his scientific, practical, or religious nature, marks more definite occurrences within the long philosophical trajectory of the history of the West, and the period of the interwar years and World War II constitutes one such landmark. In this moment, the modern progress of expanded rights and protections for oppressed human groups and ignored subjects—the nonwhite, nonmale, and the nonelite—gave way to a renewed inquiry into the majoritarian, unmarked human subject itself, to change and reground the rationale for human moral status and inviolability.

From the 1930s through the 1950s, intellectuals debated a fundamental abstraction. “Whatever be the line of inquiry, the thread leads back to man. Man is the problem,” the Jewish sociologist of religion Will Herberg wrote in 1951, speaking for a perception of the uniqueness of his time.² His mentor, the Protestant neoorthodox theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, had stated the discourse’s difficulty, however, along with its necessity, a decade earlier, near its inception: “Man has always been his own most vexing problem. How shall he think of himself? Every affirmation which he may make about his stature, virtue, or place in the cosmos becomes involved in contradictions when fully analysed.”³ Interminable analysis itself also became the intellectuals’ form of action, a means to pull others into the framework of affirmation and contradiction that their thought created.

“CRISIS” AND “MAN”

“Crisis,” in the context of 1939, had been a thundercloud continually forming new shapes since World War I. Eric Hobsbawm has stressed the thirty-one years of continuous war that define the early twentieth century, one year more than the Reformation’s bloody thirty-year realignment of Europe from 1618–48.⁴ It was a single movement, in a way, of changed political, technological, and philosophical norms for Europe. Hobsbawm observes that those shielded from intervening events, as in England and America, could see it as two discrete wars separated by a bad but recognizable peace; this is how Americans do tend to see it today. In fact, at the time, intellectuals attuned to Continental events could also see it as continuous, from whichever country they looked. From the vantage of England, E. H. Carr, the Cambridge historian, had it as the “Twenty Years’ Crisis” in 1939, a continuity of instability from Versailles to the invasion of Poland.⁵ Safely in America, the German émigré Hannah Arendt in 1951 described it in this way: “Two World Wars in one generation, separated by an uninterrupted chain of local wars and revolutions, followed by no peace treaty for the vanquished and no respite for the victor,” ending “in the anticipation of a third World War between the two remaining world powers.”⁶ In any country, those with eyes open to the affairs of the world, or ready to listen to such authorities, could sense they were living in a unique and uniquely bad time.

American intellectuals who identified themselves with world politics could recite a continuous list of crises leading up to World War II. They had learned the litany from their newspapers or from networks of political comradeship: 1928, Stalin’s expulsion of Trotsky and the old revolutionaries to concentrate his power; 1929, the stock market crash and global depression; 1931, the Japanese militarists’ occupation of Manchuria; 1933, Hitler’s electoral takeover; 1935, Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia, raining bombs and poison gas on lightly armed Ethiopian soldiers; 1936, Franco’s revolt against the Spanish Republic and the rumbling bloodshed of the first fully ideologized, internationalist war in the midst of Europe; 1939, Hitler’s capture of Czechoslovakia, secret nonaggression pact with Stalin, and invasion of Poland to launch World War II. By 1940, France had capitulated, and that signified, in essence, the end of Europe. It was done. From Portugal to Spain to Russia at the furthest meridian of the Continent, democratic forms had expired, either by murder or acquiescent suicide. England stood alone against the ruined Continent, its shapeless island not more than twenty miles separated at Dover from the Normandy coast through which Hitler seemed likely to invade. This meant that those in the United States, who suffered none of these disasters, still knew that the political philosophy of fascism, and its means of controlling populations through terror, complicity, and mobilization (the potent trinity that was very early on called “totalitarianism”), spelled something terrible for the liberal-democratic West and the European tradition with which Americans identified.⁷ Serious arguments were proffered that the world was becoming totalitarian because the totalitarian model of the rule of men was more efficient and effective than the liberal state’s manner of leaving men on their own, proposals that reinforced the 1930s intellectuals’ habitual mistrust of liberalism or fears on its behalf. In the press, too, the world conflict reflected rival models of man. Time, in its year in review for 1941, pronounced in its books section, a few years late for the intellectuals, that “The greatest challenge of all” that year “was the triumphant emergence of a new human type, totalitarian man—superbly armed, deliberately destructive and dominant—at the very heart of what had been Europe’s cultural sanctuaries.”⁸

Visions of the “new man” preceded National Socialism in avant-garde artistic and political utopias of the early century.⁹ Yet Hitler’s revolution made the rhetoric distinctively its own. Contemporaries could cite Hitler’s boast to Hermann Rauschning: “Those who see in National Socialism nothing more than a political movement know scarcely anything of it. It is more even than a religion: it is the will to create mankind anew.”¹⁰ Historians of fascism validate the seriousness with which observers in the thirties viewed promises that today seem outlandish, as research has confirmed the centrality of new man theory to propaganda and practice.¹¹ Joachim Fest has emphasized how “[i]n countless speeches and proclamations Hitler again and again conjured up the image of the ‘new man,’ and the many people who acclaimed the regime, who applauded every step it made and every point in its programme, celebrated the development of this man as the dawn of ‘the truly golden age.’ ”¹² The cynicism and idealism of the people-shaping program of the Nazi leadership was familiar to Americans who had read the regime’s chief scriptures.¹³ In Mein Kampf, Hitler warned “that by the clever and continuous use of propaganda a people can even be made to mistake heaven for hell, and vice versa, the most miserable life for Paradise.”¹⁴ In the other official best seller of Nazi Germany, the Aryan race theory diatribe titled The Myth of the 20th Century, Alfred Rosenberg specified that the “measures taken on all social planes to mould a new human type” would define a complementary “task of the twentieth century.”¹⁵

Humanity was divided, said new man theory. The divisions must be accelerated and completed. National Socialists must be taught to identify declining specimens, a subhuman within humanity. This was Der Untermensch, eponymous subject of an SS tract from 1935. “For all is not equal which bears a human face! Woe to him who forget[s] this!”¹⁶ Against an Aryan ideal stood the degenerate image specified in the Nazi book The Counter-Type (Der Gegentyp, 1938), which “stated clearly what was involved in the sharp distinction.”¹⁷ Italian fascism advertised comparable ambitions to divide and transform man. Mussolini’s famous 1932 article in Enciclopedia Italiana, ghostwritten by Giovanni Gentile, extolled a new “fascist man,” while at the “totalitarian leap” (svolta totalitarian) later in the decade, “[a]nother activist party secretary, Achille Starace … led a campaign to shape the Fascist ‘new man’ by instituting ‘Fascist customs,’ ‘Fascist language,’ and racial legislation.”¹⁸

But Hitler excelled all other totalitarian visionaries in his institutions for reshaping the clay of human life and firing it through violence and crime. “In my great educative work,” Hitler said, “I am beginning with the young. … In my Ordensburgen [the Nazi academies] a youth will grow up before which the world will shrink back. A violently active, dominating, intrepid, brutal youth—that is what I am after. … In this way I will eradicate the thousands of years of human domestication. Then I shall have in front of me the pure and noble natural material. With that I can create the new order.”¹⁹

With the US entry into the war after Pearl Harbor, government and mass-market magazines began to take up the language of the new crisis, adding the values of man to those fundamentals that democratic armies defended. Fortune magazine produced a major unsigned statement by the editors: “The Heart of the Problem: Without Vision of Deep Purpose We Shall Perish,” and turned to professors of philosophy and theologians for “a general meaning.”²⁰ Professor William Ernest Hocking of Harvard, in an article on “What Man Can Make of Man,” warned that “In all our doings, and by way of these doings, something is happening to human nature.”²¹ The French neo-Thomist theologian Jacques Maritain proposed that “the only way of regeneration for the human community is a rediscovery of the true image of man”—in his case, a Catholic image.²² As a new School of the Humanities was launched at Stanford in 1942, its dean posed, against the outer crisis of the Axis onslaught, the “internal crisis” of the new sense of man, both for evil and good: “Today we see [man] turning the weapons of his brain against himself—groping, amid the noise of a tottering civilization, for some faith in man to which he can cling.”²³

One can detect much in the early discourse of the crisis of man that is desperate and hortatory. But philosophical intellectuals and practical commentators of the true crisis of man discourse alike tried to understand why Europe had gone under and how England and America might not. They asked what man was, in what part of himself he should have a steady faith, and how he had come to this pass. A confusion and difficulty of the philosophical intellectuals’ enterprise is that they were claiming to ask anew a question that we know they had always asked. Philosophers had contemplated man’s nature for three thousand years. “What is man?” as a discrete phrase is a cliché twice over, and belongs to two different points of origin. One is the Bible: “What is man?” is heard in both Job and Psalms.²⁴ But “What is man?” held a hallowed place, too, in the philosophy of the Enlightenment. It is remembered from the handbook to Kant’s Logic, where he says that there are only four true questions of philosophy in its universal sense: “What can I know?,” “What ought I to do?,” “What may I hope?,” and “What is man?”²⁵

When the intellectuals took up man in the recognizable language and concepts of midcentury, they created a historically specific configuration. These intellectuals attempted to wrench the question free of the context of homiletics, invest it with the utmost urgency, and answer it inductively in a single book, sometimes of 300, 600, or 700 pages. Their seriousness was not a hoax. The inquiry was taken up by major thinkers not dealing in clichés or trafficking in old religion. Yet there is always something odd, unnerving, in this tenacious grasping of a question that really might have deserved its neglect as a sermon title or a lecture-room chalkboard scribble. And one is struck by how many significant secular books in the period begin, in their first line, with the cliché, making no attempt to evade the echo. “What is man?” the German émigré philosopher Ernst Cassirer labels his first section of a short summary book of 1944 written for Americans to cover the body of his own thought and the fundamental questions of philosophical anthropology.²⁶ “What is man?” the native-born historian and urban theorist Lewis Mumford begins another major book of 1944 within his series of researches on civilization and technology.²⁷ It is in the dissident theologians’ work as well, renewed: Martin Buber, for example, used the phrase in a mixed philosophical-theological register (as “Was ist der mensch?”) in his inaugural 1938 course of lectures as an émigré to Jerusalem, after years of being monitored and harassed by the Gestapo.²⁸

Man became at midcentury the figure everyone insisted must be addressed, recognized, helped, rescued, made the center, the measure, the “root,” and released for “what was in” him. But the thinkers who encouraged this were not, themselves, naive. Paragons of erudition, most knew the shape of other answers, the profusion of historical shrubs and undergrowth on this plot of ground that might tempt one to call the query an unanswerable. The more skeptical among them acknowledged that every effort to specify what the quiddity was that defined man seemed doomed. They had to admit to many previous definitions, as the Oxford philosopher R. G. Collingwood noted:

We know, or at least we have been ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I: Genesis
• Part II: Transmission
• Part III: Studies in Fiction
• Part IV: Transmutation
• Conclusion: Moral History and the Twentieth Century
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index