Modernism Essay | Critical Essay #4

Modernism Critical Essay #4

By the early 1930s, it was a commonplace among artists and intellectuals, especially on the Continent, that European civilization was at a crossroads. C.G. Jung's Seelenprobleme der Gegenwart (Spiritual Problems of the Present Day) (1931), especially the chapter entitled 'Das Seelenproblem des modernen Menschen'; Karl Jaspers's Die geistige Situation der Zeit; Edmund Husserl's lecture of 7 and 10 May 1935 'Die Krisis des europäischen Menschtums und die Philosophie' (translated as 'Philosophy and the Crisis of Modern Man' (1965)); and, of course, Heidegger's Einführung in die Metaphysik all evince a more or less pronounced awareness that Western humanist and/or idealist culture was in a state of crisis. The scientist Max Planck put it thus:

We are living in a very singular moment of history.
It is a moment of crisis, in the literal sense of that
word. . . Many people say that these symptoms mark
the beginnings of...
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