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Courage of the Spirit-On the Cult of Naturalism
In the follow up to the
first essay to appear in the Zurich newspaper, my father took up the cudgel
against the neo-Romantic spirit of thought, the rebellion against the “reine Vernunft”,
the Pure Reason of the 18th and early 19th century. The
new Zeitgeist emphasized emotion ,
experience, or will against straight logic as opposed to the ideal or the
intellectual, the realm of the mind ( as expressed by the term “ Geist”,
translated here as “ Spirit”). While acknowledging
the excesses of absolute rationality, he warns of the destructiveness inherent
in the unrestrained adoration of the instinctual forces deep inside the human
soul. The line led from Nietzsche’s
“Beyond Good and Evil” to the
horror of Riefenstahl’s paean to the
embodiment of power in “Triumph of the Will”.
Not only six million Jews but tens of millions around the world would
fall as victims to the unbridled power of human savagery let loose.
The
solution is in the application of “Chochmah”, the wisdom approach of classic
Jewish thought which seeks a fusion of these two dichotomies in human
existence.
Jüdische Presszentralle Zürich
( Jewish Central Press of Zurich)
15 Oktober 1937 No. 962 of 15th October 1937, page 1-2 Mut
zum Geist- Courage of the Spirit
By Dr. Wilhelm Weinberg,
Vienna
2nd Essay
The Cult of Naturalism
