Speaker
Description
Crisis: there is perhaps no word we can hear more often today, in the age of the omniscient media and economic and political turmoil. One speaks of financial and political, social or environmental crisis, medical or psychological crisis, the crisis of globalism and liberalism, crisis of democracy and welfare society, of church and state, crisis of values and faith, and so on. The inflationary use of the term itself makes the world appear so full of crises that any kind of optimism turns out to be unreasonable. Nevertheless, crisis is not a recent invention; the western (cultural) history shows a series of crises from the antiquity to modern times. The term itself received an expressed negative connotation in the modern era, although its etymology did not necessarily predestined it to such an interpretation, as Hippocrates’ κρίσις rather meant distinction or differentiation than decline, or, as the German philosopher and poet Rudolf Pannwitz (1881-1969) put it, “decision, but not desperation”.
In his Crisis of European Culture (Die Krisis der europäischen Kultur, first edition 1917) Pannwitz not only revealed the forms and roots of the European crisis of that time but also pointed out its possible remedies. In the paper I will examine: 1. Pannwitz’s philosophy of crisis, including his suggestions how crisis can be overcome; 2. His poetics of crisis and ways of its overcoming in some of his (mytho)poetic works like the epic Undine; 3. His ideas that allow an interpretation from today's perspective, including an ecological view of the world.
| Keywords | German literature and philosophy, Intercultural Studies, cultural studies, crisis |
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| vszabol@gmail.com |