Nietzsche and the Melancholy of Modernity

BY ROBERT B. PIPPIN

T HE widespread romantic and late nineteenth century suspi-
cions that the two greatest accomplishments of European mod-
ernization--modern natural science and technology, and a
progressive, liberal democratic culture--were also slowly and
inexorably enervating and spiritually destroying that very culture,
have been with us now for some time and seem to be re-animated
periodically in various twentieth century critical methodologies.
Some aspect of this sort of "mood" (the experience of modern-
ization as a kind of spiritual failure, of modernity as loss) has been
quite prominent in much European high culture of the last hun-
dred years. Faust's failed bargain (or the "failure of science" and
especially scientific power and knowledge, "for life"); Hölderlin's
elegiac sense of modernity's profound loss; Hegel's claim in
Glauben und Wissen that the religion of modern times is: "God is
dead;" Balzac's, Stendahl's, and Flaubert's pictures of our
crummy "new" but not at all better bourgeois world, constant prey
to romantic fantasies of recovery and restoration; Henry James's
international theme and its ever-fading (dying) Europe; Proust
on the passing of the Guermantes' world for the Verdurin's; Dos-
toyevsky's Grand Inquisitor speculations; Joyce's and Eliot's ironic
use of ancient myth; Rilke's elegiac metaphysics of absence;
Husserl on the "crisis" of the European sciences; Heidegger on
the forgetting of Being; the nightmare worlds of Beckett and
Kafka, dominated, if that is the right word, by mere pretensions
to presence and authority; and the new post-war world of absolute
textuality, the end of metaphysics, failed signifiers, the death of

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