I have been born and live in West-Berlin, so let me speak from my own on-the-ground experience.
It makes sense to first deconstruct the question. What do you mean by West? It could be that you mean Anglo-American and just label it as West in your mind. Germany has a long intellectual tradition on its own even if the allies suppressed it to the point that we don’t build the old German toilets that Zizek was speaking about anymore.
I don’t feel like there’s anything in our meme space where I could point to it being clearly Eastern while it feels easy to point to Anglo-American influences.
Thirty years ago the musician Blixa Bargeld said in an interview with an American,
“That culture which existed before the war is rightly forbidden to us, because of what it led to—or at best, did not prevent… You had Bugs Bunny before, during and after the war. The war you won. The point I am trying to make is that the German tradition is gone. We hate our culture and our language. All our philosophy and music was appropriated by the Nazis: Dürer, Bach, Friedrich N-Punkt! We cannot redeem that tradition. We can only re-invent.”
My impression of German philosophy after the war is that Heidegger went off to hide in a forest, reemerging only to warn that cybernetics was going to replace metaphysics, and meanwhile Habermas became the new national philosopher, allowing some kind of compatibility with the hegemonic Anglo liberalism.
In fact, one of the slogans of Habermas is “communicative rationality”, so maybe he’s in the cultural background of German rationalism?
I have been born and live in West-Berlin, so let me speak from my own on-the-ground experience.
It makes sense to first deconstruct the question. What do you mean by West? It could be that you mean Anglo-American and just label it as West in your mind. Germany has a long intellectual tradition on its own even if the allies suppressed it to the point that we don’t build the old German toilets that Zizek was speaking about anymore.
Years ago I wrote Beware of identifying with schools of thought to express some memes that feel more German and less Anglo to me.
I don’t feel like there’s anything in our meme space where I could point to it being clearly Eastern while it feels easy to point to Anglo-American influences.
Thirty years ago the musician Blixa Bargeld said in an interview with an American,
“That culture which existed before the war is rightly forbidden to us, because of what it led to—or at best, did not prevent… You had Bugs Bunny before, during and after the war. The war you won. The point I am trying to make is that the German tradition is gone. We hate our culture and our language. All our philosophy and music was appropriated by the Nazis: Dürer, Bach, Friedrich N-Punkt! We cannot redeem that tradition. We can only re-invent.”
My impression of German philosophy after the war is that Heidegger went off to hide in a forest, reemerging only to warn that cybernetics was going to replace metaphysics, and meanwhile Habermas became the new national philosopher, allowing some kind of compatibility with the hegemonic Anglo liberalism.
In fact, one of the slogans of Habermas is “communicative rationality”, so maybe he’s in the cultural background of German rationalism?
I definitely like this.