Talk delivered to the Creighton Philosophical Club at Syracuse University in April 1940

Introductory remark

Both the intellectual glory and the political misery of the Germans may be traced back to one and the same cause: German civilisation is considerably younger than the civilisation of the West. The Germans are, strictly speaking, less civilized than the English and the French, i.e., they are to a lesser degree citizens, free citizens. This is one aspect of the matter. The other aspect is that German philosophy is more apt to take a critical attitude towards civilisation, towards the tradition of civilisations, than Western philosophy is. We may go so far as to say that, generally speaking, German philosophy implies a more or less radical criticism of the very idea of civilisation and especially of modern civilisation – a criticism disastrous in the political field, but necessary in the philosophical, in the theoretical field. For if civilisation is distinguished from, and even opposed to, what was formerly called the state of nature, the process of civilisation means an increasing going away from the natural condition of man, an increasing forgetting of that situation. And perhaps one must have a living knowledge, an acute recollection of that situation if one wants to know, i.e. to understand in its full meaning, the natural, the basic problems of philosophy.

Criticism of modern civilisation is related to a longing forsome past, for some antiquity. An English acquaintance of mine told me that what struck him most, and what was most incomprehensible to him, when he was talking to Germans, was their longing for their tribal past. Now, longing for the Teutonic past is only the most crude and unintelligent, the most ridiculous form of a deep dissatisfaction with modern civilisation. In its most enlightened form, it is a longing for classical antiquity, especially for Greek antiquity. In a famous aphorism, Nietzsche has described German thought as one great attempt to build a bridge leading back from the modern world to the world of Greece. One has only to recall the names of Leibniz, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Holderlin and Hegel to see that Nietzsche’s remark is based on some evidence. This much is certain: Nietzsche’s own philosophy, the most powerful single factor in German postwar philosophy, is almost identical with his criticism of modern civilisation in the name of classical antiquity….

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The transcript is also available in Heinrich Meier; Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem; 2006