The backbone of modern civilization is modern science.
German criticism of modern civilization is therefore primarily
criticism of modern science, either in the form of a limitation
of its bearing or in a still more radical form. That criticism was
expressed by the German philosophic movement of the end
of the 18th and of the beginning of the 19th century, by the
movement culminating in Hegel, in the form of the opposition
of history as the realm of freedom vs. nature as the realm of
(mathematical or mechanical) necessity, or of the opposition of
organic growth or dialectical process vs. rational construction.
This interpretation of the criticism of modern civilization
naturally was an important factor in German postwar philosophy.
But it was not characteristic of the latter. The slogan which
expressed the attitude characteristic of postwar Germany
towards modern civilization, is, not history vs. unhistorical
naturalism, or the grown vs. the made, but life or existence vs.
science, science being any purely theoretical enterprise. The
science criticized in the name of life or existence, comprises
both natural science and history. The German postwar criticism
is directed as much against Hegel and romanticism as
against Descartes. The originator of that criticism was Nietzsche
who had made it its principle to look at science from the
point of view of art, and to look at art from the point of view
of life.
· · · · · · (收起)