German Turn -- Script

Hello, I'm Chris Chantrill. Let's talk about what I call The German Turn.

Ok, you ask, why? Because I think that the way to understand the modern world is through the arc of German thinking, from Kant to Jung.

Some of these Germans were good Germans, some of them were bad. And one or two were just naughty.

Most Anglo-Saxons are proud to believe logic and reason -- and sneer at people led by their feelings. 

But the Germans, prompted by the British David Hume, realized that this was not so. We are all governed by our feelings, including the unconscious feelings that we don't even feel.

With Immanuel Kant, the Germans believed that we cannot know things-in-themselves, but only appearances, appearances that get processed by our brains into a picture of reality.

I maintain that Kant leads directly, do not pass Go, to the modern physics of relativity and quantum mechanics -- developed mainly by Germans and a Dane or two.

I believe that Kant leads directly to German psychology, with Schopenhauer, Freud, and Jung and the theory of the unconscious. 

Guess what? It was Schopenhauer that invented "repression," not Freud.

Then there is Richard Wagner. His operas were all about characters in medieval romances, Tannhauser, Lohengrin, Tristan und Isolde, Parsifal, and a rehash of the Nordic myths in The Ring of the Nibelung. You could say he was digging into the past in order to understand the future. Wagner was a bit of an anti-Semite.

But then there were the bad Germans. I mean guys like rich kid Karl Marx that created an economics of worker "immiseration" on classical economics the day before it was superceded by the marginal revolution of 1870. But enough of them.

Let's talk about Nietzsche: he is my naughty German. Lefties dismiss him as "the Nazis' favorite intellectual." Maybe so, but Nietzsche argued that for guys like him the old God had Died, and this meant a brutal process of decadence -- the dying off of the old order -- followed by nihilism, then the terror of the eternal recurrence -- think Bill Murray and Groundhog Day -- and finally the birth of a new god with the revaluation of all values. 

Nietzsche's man of the future was his egoistic Übermensch, but I think that the new man will be a Sacrificial Hero rather than a Warrior Hero.

Why is that? Because the Good German that came after Nietzsche was Carl Jung. OK, so he was Swiss. And Jung, following Wagner, reckoned that if we wanted to understand human nature it would help to look at the ancient myths in a new light: not as superstitions but as universal human experiences. 

Jung talked about archetypes and the collective unconscious. And one ancient archetype is the Sacrificial Hero, as in Jesus Christ.

After Jung? The Frankfurt School, in particular Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in their Dialectic of Enlightenment. They took the Marxian narrative of bourgeois vs. proletarian and made it bigger: mankind vs. the world. "Enlightenment behaves towards things as a dictator towards men."

Finally, there is Jürgen Habermas. He was a leftist, but he climbed out of the Marxian hell-hole.

For him, humans are not merely rational actors dominating the world with instrumental reason. They also live in a community in the world -- he called it the life-world. Humans live with other humans with whom they communicate and develop moral agreement.

Oh, and don't forget the German Wernher von Braun. He helped America win the race to the moon.

What does it mean that humans live in a life-world animated by a shared experience of archetypes ancient and modern and the mystery of the collective unconscious?

That's what my reductive Three Peoples theory is all about, up next.

I'm Chris Chantrill, and thanks for watching.