Thomas Mann: The Devil’s Advocate PDF
Preview Thomas Mann: The Devil’s Advocate
THOMAS MANN Novels by T. E. Apter SILKEN LINES AND SILVER HOOKS ADONIS' GARDEN THOMAS MANN THE DEVIL'S ADVOCATE T. E. APTER © T. E. Apter 1978 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1978 978-o-333-23298-9 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission First published 1978 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD London and Basingstoke Associated companies in Delhi Dublin Hong Kong Johannesburg Lagos Melbourne New York Singapore Tokyo British Library Cataloguing 1n Publication Data Apter, T E Thomas Mann 1. Mann, Thomas- Criticism and interpretation 833 .9 12 PT2625.A44Z/ ISBN 978-1-349-03596-0 ISBN 978-1-349-03594-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-03594-6 This book is sold subject to the standard conditions of the Net Book Agreement For David Acknowledgements The author and publishers are grateful to Martin Seeker & W arburg Ltd and Alfred A. Knopf Inc for permission to reproduce extracts from the English editions of Mann's works. We are also grateful to Lawrence Pollinger Ltd, the estate of the late Mrs Frieda Lawrence and the Viking Press for permission to quote the extracts from Women in Love and Phoenix by D. H. Lawrence. Contents Acknowledgements Vl 1 Introduction 1 2 The Romantic Dilemma 13 3 The Death Enchantment 38 4 The Fascination of Disgust 58 5 Mann and Lawrence 78 6 Myth and Resolution 92 7 Mann and Goethe 112 8 The Nihilistic Face of Aestheticism 121 9 D<rmonic Redemption 135 References 158 Bibliography 161 Index 163 Introduction 1 Thomas Mann tried to state every claim in the devil's favour. He hoped, with a would-be humanism, that an investigation of evil's force and fascination would result in refreshing disgust with evil, that evil, once exposed, would shrivel in sunlight and crumble in the hands of the clear-eyed. This hope, however, is the point against which his novels, stories and essays move. As he boldly underlines the sometimes grotesque, sometimes elegant course the d~monic and decadent take, the dark river of corruption fails to reveal an unqualified ugliness; unflaggingly it glows with an hypnotic iri descence and flows with a silky vitality that promises rich and good things. Mann had to face the crisis of morality, the transformation of values he found in the works ofSchopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud. A person could no longer be seen as governed primarily by consciousness, nor could human impulses be supposed to be educable and enlightened. The will to live was not simply a prudent desire to survive; it was a will to power, constantly in conflict with other wills which in turn seek power. A living thing seeks above all else to discharge its strength, Nietzsche said; life itself is will to power; self preservation is simply one of the indirect and most frequent results. 1 Life could be best understood as a battlefield of wills, and will as an irrational force, inexorably egoistic and morally blind. From this basic force both good and evil arose. Its strength emerged as destructiveness as easily as creativeness; in fact, according to Nietz sche, the higher the type of energy a person possessed, the greater the improbability that it would turn out well. Artistic impulses, keen sensitivity, extended vision, religious temperament could not be seen as straightforward goods, for as manifestations of vitality they were tied not only in genesis but in character to madness, cruelty, criminality. A division between good and evil could not be drawn; the notion of a purely spiritual side of nature and mankind no longer had any application. Genius and creativeness, even in their brightest, most liberating forms, were not simple children of light, but were 2 Thomas Mann: The Devil' s Advocate born of energies that are themselves amoral and which, m their unusually excessive strength, are akin to the da:monic. This is the basic world picture Mann inherited from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and his own moral development can be seen as a result of the tension between these philosophers' opposing recommen dations of which value-systems should function within this world. Mann's admiration for Nietzsche was boundless. He called him the greatest psychologist and moral critic of the age and noted the number of 'Freudian' perceptions scattered throughout his works. Nietzsche's psychology and moral criticism, however, did not provide Mann with what he sought, that is, a foundation and justification for an ethical culture based upon sympathy, reason and reverence for life. In fact, in the books Mann considered to be Nietzsche's best-Beyond Good and Evil and Genealogy of Morals-the philosopher's task was to argue against humanism and to expose the desire for such an ethical culture as cowardly and, according to his own value-system, immoral. Nietzsche begins his criticism of conventional moral thought by saying he is not going to concern himself with truth, for he wishes to investigate the possibility that a higher and more fundamental value be ascribed to deception, selfishness and lust. The falsity of a moral judgement does not interest him; he cares only for what is life enhancing, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species creating. Initially this defiance of truth on behalf oflife might appear as a humanist utilitarianism, but Nietzsche has nothing of the kind in mind. First, his arguments are not actually directed against true moral judgements but against the conventional moral axioms, taken as truths. The strength of a person, he suggests, should be measured according to how much truth he can endure; and in claiming to disregard truth himself, he underlines the way others disregard it, for Nietzsche is determined to pursue a line of moral argument even when it goes against ethical intuition. That a certain precept promotes happiness or what is ordinarily considered to be virtue is not, he points out, an argument for its truth. Truth might destroy; truth might favour conditions which promote pain; truth might be on the side of those who are, in conventional terms, considered evil. In short, he applies criteria which anyone would accept for the truth of empirical statements to common moral statements, and then asserts that the possible alternative-a true morality is in opposition to harmony and happiness-is fact. His presentation of this new
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