EDGAR LANDGRAF

THE DISINTEGRATION OF MODERN CULTURE: NIETZSCHE AND THE INFORMATION AGE

THAT NIETZSCHE’S PHILOSOPHY has contributed significantly to the widespread use and abuse of the term culture throughout the last century is everywhere apparent. His critique of modernity helped ring in the “golden twenties” of cultural philosophy and the not-so-golden thirties and forties of mono-cultural politics and propaganda. In the decades following the Second World War, Nietzsche’s critique of modernity was reassessed from two competing positions: one argued that Nietzsche’s critique of Enlightenment values had played into the hands of totalitarian ideology and its desire to create its own “culture”; the other saw in Nietzsche a prophet of sorts whose philosophy had predicted the failure of the Enlightenment ideology to provide the West with a sustainable, unified, and unifying culture. Although this particular debate is still played out today as part of the modernity/post-modernity discussion, the concept of culture took a seemingly different turn in the 1980s and 1990s, when an increased interest in multiculturalism initially shifted attention away from a critical examination of Western culture to a focus on foreign, “primitive,” suppressed, or otherwise marginalized cultures. Proponents of multiculturalism turned to Western culture primarily to investigate its colonialist tendencies, the political and cultural mechanisms that allow it to suppress different cultures and cultural differences. Cultural studies eventually provoked a return to a more comprehensive interrogation of Western culture, however, as multiculturalism itself gradually came to be considered a cultural phenomenon of the West. Indeed, thinkers as diverse as Richard Rorty and Terry Eagleton—who rarely see eye to eye—seem to agree that Western society’s interest in different cultures is unique, a mark of difference, of an “otherness” and self-alienation which signals at the very least a “loss of innocence” regarding Western society’s own cultural identity.

This brief history of the concept of culture is intended to provide a context—if only an oversimplified one—for a detailed investigation of the connections between Nietzsche’s critique of modern culture and our contemporary multi-media culture with its declared interest in multiculturalism. Such an endeavor admittedly risks ignoring the conflicting meanings that today are encompassed by the single term culture, as well as the historical distance and national distinctiveness that separate the Anglo-American concept of culture from the German meaning of Kultur, a concept that, unlike its English counterpart, for centuries supported the German quest for a national identity. This problem is further compounded by the fact that the current pan-national use of the Anglo-American concept also informs the German debates on Multikulturalität. Despite these complications, however, Nietzsche’s critique of modern culture can nevertheless be related to our contemporary concerns. But to do so we need to follow Rorty’s and Eagleton’s lead and understand the modern interest in culture—and subsequently the multiplicity of congruent and incongruent meanings of culture —as a cultural phenomenon, as a defining aspect of modernity’s own culture, just as Nietzsche understood his own time’s interest in (historical) culture(s) as itself a cultural phenomenon. This approach also assumes that the modern concept of “culture” designates an observational mode, a perspective rather than a set of particular physical differences. As a result, any event, artifact, or concept—including the concept of culture—can be understood as a cultural phenomenon.

I

 Nietzsche’s critique of modernity can be summarized in the following terms: because modern culture has become a matter of perspective, a way of knowing rather than a way of practicing culture, it has lost its force. Subsequently, he interprets the modern interest in culture not as indicative of a new cultural paradigm, but rather as a sign of the absence of culture in modern society. Nietzsche unfolds this critique most forcefully in the second Untimely Meditation, “On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life.” The treatise was written in 1873, less than two years after Germany became a modern unified nation-state and at a time when the Western imperial powers were subjecting the rest of the world to their political will (with Germany soon asking for its “Platz an der Sonne”). In this time of national pride and expansionist ambition—when history was used, to speak in Nietzsche’s terms, “monumentally” (to inspire hopes of new grandeur), in an “antiquarian” fashion (to instill a sense of identity and belonging), and “critically” (to reject old paradigms and make room for the new)—Nietzsche takes a deliberately “untimely” stance. He sets out to understand “as a defect, infirmity and shortcoming of the age something of which our age is justifiably proud, its historical education.” Historical education (“historische Bildung”), he argues, prevents rather than accomplishes Bildung, understood in the tradition of Alexander von Humboldt as the endeavor to fashion (literarily, to form after an image) a cultured (kultiviert)—that is, a mature, autonomous, responsible, civilized, and “whole”—human being. Nietzsche argues that not only does historical education fail to achieve Bildung in this comprehensive sense, but it also is the primary reason that modern society lacks culture altogether.

Nietzsche’s use of the term culture—which, as Robert McGinn has shown, is itself by no means consistent—must of course be distinguished from some of the common uses of the term today. I take Nietzsche’s famous definition of culture from the first Untimely Meditation (a definition which reappears in the second) as my starting point. Following Jakob Burckhardt’s understanding of culture as an “organic, collective work of art,” Nietzsche defines culture as the unified artistic style in all of the life expressions of a people: “Kultur ist vor allem Einheit des künstlerischen Stiles in allen Lebensäusserungen eines Volkes.” This definition differs from three notions of culture that are commonly held today. First, culture according to Nietzsche’s definition is not simply a set of shared habits and customs—the sort of limited sense that today allows us, for example, to speak of the corporate culture of McDonald’s or of a Japanese Tea Ceremony as expressions of a particular national culture. Second, Nietzsche does not restrict his concept of culture to the idea of “high culture,” that is, to the valuation of existing artistic achievements. To the contrary, Nietzsche demands that all of the vital expressions of a people be artistic, that is, creative, self-motivating, and able to overcome the horror vacui of a life without art: “for it is only as an “aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.” Third, his concept of culture is more narrowly defined than the eighteenth-century idea of culture as a universal human trait that separates man from nature. By restricting culture to the expression of “a people,” Nietzsche defines culture as pluralistic and historical—that is, as a collection of traits that allows a comparison between cultures both in time and space.