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• W4379617401 abstract "MLRy 97.4, 2002 1027 Thomas Mann: Kunstler und Philosoph. By Reinhard Mehring. Munich: Fink. 2001. 233 pp. ?30.60. In Plato's Republic Socrates proposes the notion of the 'philosopher-king' (473 d) and urges that poets be banished from the city (398 a). Centuries later Nietzsche, the great anti-Platonist thinker, put forward the idea ofthe 'artist-philosopher', and claimed that the world itself should be seen as a work of art (Der Wille zur Macht, ?? 795~96). In Thomas Mann: Kunstler und Philosoph Reinhard Mehring proposes that Germany's most important novelist of the twentieth century was a philosopher in this Nietzschean sense (p. 230); after all, in 1941 Mann himself both accepted the definition of philosophy as 'die Fuhrerin des Lebens' and argued that life was the 'Richtpunkt und Leitstern der Philosophie'. The opposition of life and philosophy (or life and spirit, lifeand art, and so on) is reminiscent of the debates surrounding vitalist philosophy: in Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (1918) Mann quoted Simmel's observation that, ever since Nietzsche, 'life' had become the key concept ofall modern Weltanschauungen. Mehring, however, wishes to see Mann as a philosopher within a far more fundamental, less culturally specific, framework. For Mehring seeks to examine the metaliterary claim to validity ('metaliterarischer Geltungsanspruch') of Mann's political philosophy by a reconstruction of its coherence and rigour (see pp. 12, 15). This ambition amounts to nothing less than the claim that Mann had a clear conception of the good life as, in Mehring's words, 'ein moralisch-politisch verantwortliches Leben, das subjektiv als gliickend erfahren wird' (p. 19). Mehring uncovers this vision ofthe good lifefromthe failure ofthe characters in Mann's early works to achieve happiness and from the foregrounding in the Joseph tetralogy of 'die ganze Relation von gelingendem, gluckendem und gutem Leben' (p. 67). In developing this argument, Mehring advances two furthermajor claims: first,that Mann's novels are concerned with the question 'Wie kann Individuation in Deutschland gelingen?' (p. 122); so while Buddenbrooks deals with the issue of 'individuation' in general, Der Zauberberg investigates whether Bildung can lead to autonomy ('Selbstherrschaft') and Doktor Faustus investigates which kind of Bildung makes individuation possible; and second, that the 'mythopoeic determination of humankind' represents the recurring motif of his entire work (particularly Joseph, Doktor Faustus, and Felix Krull). That Mann is a 'novelist of ideas' or, ifone prefers, a 'philosophical novelist' is not in doubt. Yet the problem with Mehring's argument, aside from its methodological naivety, is that, as he himself sometimes senses, it claims too much. The early Mann, we learn, had 'zunachst noch keine klare moralphilosophische Position' (p. 71); with regard toJoseph, Mehring admits that 'Mann verfugtallerdings [. . .] nicht iiber einen klaren, institutionellen Demokratiebegriff' (p. 146); and in an otherwise perceptive discussion ot Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, we are told: 'Mann unterscheidetdie politische und die juristisch-institutionelle Betrachtung, ohne sie in eine komplexere Begrifflichkeit zusammenzufuhren' (p. 171; cf. p. 176). As Mann himself noted in his diary in 1938: 'Die Gewohnheit, mein Verhalten zur Welt, zum Problem des Seins indirekt, durch das Mittel von Bild und Rhythmus darzustellen, steht der theoretischen Expektoration entgegen.' Perhaps this book's claim that Mann was an 'artist' and a 'philosopher' cannot entirely convince because Mehring inclines to the view, which Mann would undoubtedly have disputed, that philosophy is superior to art. 'Durch das asthetische Spiel', Mann said in an interview in 1926, 'erstrebe ich eine Ethik' (p. 19), and Mann's aesthetics remains the unexamined context of Mehring's argument in this thoroughly researched and well-documentedmonograph. University of Glasgow Paul Bishop ..." @default.
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• W4379617401 date "2002-10-01" @default.
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• W4379617401 title "Thomas Mann: Künstler und Philosoph by Reinhard Mehring (review)" @default.
• W4379617401 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2002.a828223" @default.
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