Diagnosing the Crisis

In the decades that witnessed the dysfunction and demise of the Weimar Republic, an acute sense of crisis fell upon German intellectual life. The crisis received numerous diagnoses. In The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (1923), Karl Schmitt argues that the democratic persuasion of the masses inevitably degenerates into the sophisticated manipulation of public sentiment and the end of “real discussion.” With prescient but fatalistic pessimism, Schmitt thus acknowledges the ascendance of political myth and the elite manipulation of the masses, regardless of whether it takes a Fascistic or Bolshevistic form. In “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity,” the lecture Edmund Husserl delivered in Vienna in 1935, the aging philosopher likewise turned to “the frequently treated theme of the European crisis,” the growing sense that rational inquiry and deliberation have no bearing upon the pressing concerns of human existence. With strained optimism, Husserl insists that a phenomenologically informed recommitment to pure theoria might yet renew the political, spiritual, and world-historical vocation of reason. Husserl pleads for the possibility of a disinterested but ultimately action-guiding form of rational inquiry.