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Introduction: Interpreters of an Uncertain Age
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15017 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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9 / 1988 |
475 Words |
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All the individuals considered in this month's Currents in Modern Thought section belong to the interwar generation, though some spent part of their lives in pre-1914 Europe and others, ended their lives in the fifties, sixties, or, in the case of Michael Oakeshott, remain alive. What decisively marked their thinking and concerns was their experience of the Western world between the two great wars. Seeing the relatively stable Europe of the nineteenth and early twentieth century crumble soically and morally under the impact of total war, each of these thinkers spoke of a crisis at hand. Not all of them, however, defined the crisis in the same way or looked for similar solutions to what they perceived as the period of dislocation through which they were living. Kolnai, Spengler, Toynbee, Sorokin, and Oaksheott were preoccupied with general historical forces and with their time-boundedness. Simone Weil, by contrast, traced the cultural confusion of the age to man's alienation from divine being. Moreover, while Ortega y Gasset offered a specific prescription for the technicism and populist defiance of authority that he considered to be the causes of western instability, Spengler and Weil judged cultural and social problems ultimately to be beyond human control.
Essential to the views of all these thinkers, however, was the belief that the Western world had experienced an irreversible change in the early twentieth century. Whatever followed, their lives were to be profoundly different from the epoch into which they had been born. In his recollections, Toynbee noted how as a young boy he had seen Queen Victoria's army parading in the streets of London. Neither he nor the other spectators then could have imagined that a day would soon come when England's imperial glory would fade, in all probability, forever.
It may be agreed that all the thinkers here discussed display a certain nostalgia for the generation alive during Europe's high noon. Though they all trace the problems besetting their society back to the prewar period and even to earlier centuries, they each begin their historical, social, or theological speculations by looking at the lost innocence of their age. Ortega may have been the most sensitive in this respect, for he tried to understand history, at least in part, as the work of discrete generations.
In searching for a common thread in the essays that follow, a shared generational experience, broadly understood, may be a suitable point of departure. Even so, the experience of the generation under consideration, as distilled through its ideas, was not unique. It remains relevant for our own generation, as we
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