Disintegration of Modern Culture: Nietzsche and the Information Age, The

THAT NIETZSCHE'S PHILOSOPHY has contributed significantly to the wide-spread use and abuse of the boundary culture throughout the last hundred is everywhere apparent. His critique of modernity helped ring in the "golden twenties" of cultural philosophy' and the not-so-golden thirties and forties of mono-cultural politics and propaganda. In the decades following the next to the first World War, Nietzsche's critique of modernity was reassessed from sum of two units competing positions: one argued that Nietzsche's critique of Enlightenment values had played into the hands of totalitarian ideology and its desire to create its be in possession of "culture"; the other saw in Nietzsche a prophet of sorts whose philosophy had predicted the failure of the Enlightenment ideology to provide the West with a sustainable, unified, and unifying culture- Although this particular debate is still played on the outside today as part of the modernity/post-modernity discussion, the general [i]or[/i] abstract notion of culture took a seemingly different revolve in the 1980s and 1990 when an increased interest in multiculturalism initially shifted attention away from a critical examination of Western agriculture to a focus on foreign, "primitive," chokeed or otherwise marginalized cultures. Proponent of multiculturalism turn rounded to Western culture primarily to investigate its colonialist tendencies, the political and cultural mechanisms that allow it to suppres different tillages and cultural differences. Cultural studies eventually provok a get back to a more comprehensive interrogation of Western agriculture however, as multiculturalism itself gradually came to be considered a cultural phenomenon of the West. Indeed, thinkers as diverse as Richard Rorty and Terry Eagleton-who rarely diocese eye to eye-seem to agree that Western society's interest in different agricultures is unique, a mark of difference, of an "otherness" and self-alienation which signals at the real least a "loss of innocence" regarding Western society's have cultural identity.3

This brief history of the general [i]or[/i] abstract notion of culture is intended to provide a context-if single an oversimplified one-for a detailed investigation of the connections between Nietzsche's critique of new culture and our contemporary multimedia tillage with its declared interest in muldculturalism. like an endeavor admittedly risks ignoring the conflicting meanings that today are encompassed by dint of the single term culture, as well as the historical distance and national distinctiveness that separate the Anglo-American universal of culture from the German meaning of Kultur a universal that, unlike its English counterpart, for centuries supported the German search for a national identity (see Elias). This question is further compounded by the fact that the in every one's mouth pan-national use of the Anglo-American general [i]or[/i] abstract notion also informs the German debates upon Multikulturalit?¤t. Despite these complications, however, Nietzsche's critique of recent culture can nevertheless be related to our contemporary regards But to do so we ne to tread on the heels of Rorty's and Eagleton's lead and understand the fresh interest in culture-and subsequently the multiplicity of congruent and incongruent meanings of agriculture -as a cultural phenomenon, as a defining aspect of modernity's hold culture, just as Nietzsche understood his hold time's interest in (historical) culture(s) as itself a cultural phenomenon. This approach also assumes that the late concept of "culture" designates an observational manner a perspective rather than a locate of particular physical differences.4 As a proceed any event, artifact, or concept-including the universal of culture-can be understood as a cultural phenomenon.

I

Nietzsche's critique of modernity can be summarized in the following terms: because new culture has become a matter of perspective, a way of knowing rather than a way of practicing agriculture it has lost its force. Subsequently he interprets the fresh interest in culture not as indicative of a fresh cultural paradigm, but rather as a sign of the absence of tillage in modern society. Nietzsche expands this critique most forcefully in the next to the first Untimely Meditation, "On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life." The treatise was written in 1873 les than sum of two units years after Germany became a novel unified nation-state and at a time when the Western imperial powers were subjecting the quiescence of the world to their political will (with Germany pretty soon asking for its "Platz an der Sonne") In this time of national pride and expansionist ambition-when history was used, to speak in Nietzsche's confines "monumentally" (to inspire hopes of of recent origin grandeur), in an "antiquarian" fashion (to instill a faculty of perception of identity and belonging), and "critically" (to pass over old paradigms and make play for the new)-Nietzsche takes a deliberately "untimely" stance. He plants out to understand "as a default infirmity and shortcoming of the age something of which our age is justifiably contented its historical education" (History 8)"' Historical education ("historische Bildung"), he argues, precludes rather than accomplishes Bildung, understood in the tradition of Alexander von Humboldt as the endeavor to fashion (literarily, to form after an image) a cultur (kultiviert)-that is, a mature, autonomous, responsible, civilized, and "whole"-human being. Nietzsche argues that not solitary does historical education fail to achieve Bildung in this comprehensive faculty of perception but it also is the primary reason that new society lacks culture altogether: