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NOV 30 INDEX DEC 02
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from First Things
THE FORGOTTEN STORY OF POSTMODERNITY
In February 1943, standing before thousands of loyal Nazis in the Sportpalast in Berlin, Josef Goebbels called for “total war.” Total war it was, and within a few years the Sportpalast was part of the smoldering ruins of the National Socialist movement. Martin Heidegger, one of the movement’s most famous former members, had said that the “inner truth and greatness” of the Nazis’ vision “consisted in modern man’s encounter with global technology.” Surveying the wreckage of that encounter after the war, the German Catholic writer Romano Guardini saw instead the completion and the collapse of the modern project. Guardini was moved to write his classic study The End of the Modern World and its companion volume, Power and Responsibility. The essence of modernity, he argued, lay in the “divorce of power and person.” After centuries of reductionism and debunking, personhood stood reduced to mere subjectivity, the transparent assertion of values without anchorage or horizon. In other words, the crisis of modernity had been grasped well before the academic fad of our own time. The postmodernism that prevails in today’s intellectual climate is a secondary phenomenon, derivative and not truly radical. Guardini saw it and transcended it, calling for a new philosophical anthropology, one that would reappropriate the Christian understanding of the person as the agent of participation in a shared reality and as the locus of responsibility.
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from The Spokesman-Review (Spokane, WA)
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