Zeitschrift für Kulturphilosophie 2020/2: LOGOS

This essay shows the difficulties inherent in the very term of ›culture‹ itself, spe- cifically in political and philosophical contexts between 1910 and 1933. Despite the eagerness and the striking idealism of its founders, Logos never offered an under- standing of culture that was able to resist the totalitarian tendencies of its own time. The term ›culture‹ thus continues to contaminate every attempt to formulate the legacy of the Logos project. From today’s perspective, that means recognizing the need to come to terms with the connotations and the implications of such a project as Logos rather than rushing into a naive and simplistic affirmation. Al- though not the first, Klaus Christian Köhnke and Rüdiger Kramme were the most insistent researchers who brought up this painful subject of the modern history of philosophy.

This article analyzes the thematic and conceptual importance of aesthetics and
›Kunstwissenschaft‹ within the journal Logos, where ›style‹ is a conceptual tool for analyzing the crisis of modernity, both a diagnosis and a symptom of an era that questions the form and equally the absence of form in culture. If Logos is indeed a philosophy of culture in action, both Wölfflin’s categorical research and Simmel’s emphasis on the importance of tragedy manifest the tensions that characterize it.

Why does a journal that intends to »bring out reason into culture« give so much space to the question of mysticism? The contemporary rise of extra-ecclesial reli- giosity is well known. A critique of culture that questions the significance of its given forms must problematize the enthusiasm for mysticism. But in its claim for immediacy, mystical experience constitutes a kind of impossible object for the phi- losophy of culture. I interpret the reflection on mysticism as a test for the capacity of the philosophy of culture to account for cultural life and not only its objectified forms. This reflection reveals a structural tension of the Logos program as an effort to recover the link between life and its objectivations.

This article focusses on the function of poetry in Logos. Four positions can be ob- served: 1) a rationalistic integration of poetry in the realm of culture, as Cassirer shows it in the case of Hölderlin, which is connected to his intellectual and philosophical environment; 2) an esthetician view of poetry as an absolute world per se, in the continuation of the ideas of the George’s circle, a position that cannot avoid an ambiguous politization; 3) an attempt to read poetry as a way of »seeing the world« (Weltanschauung) in the tradition of Dilthey, integrating it into a complex ideal of culture, as Anna Tumarkin did in a most interesting way, who was one of the first women to become a professor of philosophy (in Bern); 4) the time-condi- tioned attempt to link poetry and mysticism in order to challenge a rationalistic view of culture, reading for instance Rilke as a »Mystiker« like August Faust did, searching a solution to the crisis of civilization beyond the realm of reason. In all these features, it appears that poetry—though not a central topic of the journal Lo- gos—built a very controversial place, a modern »Kampfplatz« where central phil- osophical—and political!—questions were at stake. Therefore, it reveals the inner tensions of the Logos.

Simmel was (at least quantitatively) the main contributor to Logos. His engagement for the journal coincides with the philosophical turn in his oeuvre that culminates in his late work The View of Life (Lebensanschauung); earlier versions for three of its four main chapters had been previously published in Logos. The essay follows the hypothesis of an intrinsic relation between the content of a philosophy of culture the way Simmel developed it in the last decade of his life, and the essentially essay- istic form of this philosophy that found its primary medium of articulation in the journal of Logos. The essay thus contributes to a clarification of the motives that motivated Simmel to participate in this new international format of publication and it offers insights into the hopes he pinned on the development of the journal.

The Internationale Zeitschrift für Kulturphilosophie was quite a different journal be- fore 1933 than after. The Germanized version of the new title demonstrated this change offensively and shamelessly. A detailed analysis of some selected essays written by a representative group of authors who published in the journal in both periods – partly already from the very beginning, such as Heinrich Rickert, partly later on, such as Ernst Forsthoff – might continue to scandalize today’s reader: Af- ter 1933 these authors lost all their inhibitions like former partisans who now could reveal their very identity. They prepared the journal for the political break by cre- ating a fatal continuity.

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