2. C
—
box 38/3
1
it „IDES
60
HERMANN BROCH
strives towards deeper insight and knowledge is thereby brutally relegated
to the domain of T’art pour T’art, such an attitude towards philsephy proves
ignorance of its latest development. For philosophy itself has come to
realise that logic, its special field, cannot well comprehend the whole of
life, and knows where its limits lie.“ Thus philosophy has, in many
cases, withdrawn to the field of pure logic, and though it still maintains
as heretofore its general philosophical principles and outlook, it has found
itself obliged to exclude large regions from the domain of its activities
in particular, ethics and metaphysics. Philosophy has itself made an
end to its age of universality, to the age of large compendia, and has found
it necessary to remove its most burning questions from its logical abode to
the field of mysticism. That is the point where the mission of the poet
begins.?
One may add: the point at which the mission not only of Joyce, and
more recently of Broch, endeavoured to begin, but also where that of Goethe,
the great child of the world, had to begin. The“ dilettantism of this
great master was that of a man“ who cannot find full satisfaction in any
individual science and strives to attain the universality of all knowledge,
and it was the consciousness of the great and grave responsibility which
such knowledge imposes on its possessor that urged him to burst asunder
and fly beyond the confines of rational knowledge in search of something
which neither the speculative theories of theology or philosophy, nor the
knowledge ofthe exact sciences, could give.?1 nis Goethe-like dilettantism,
in which the theorist and writer Broch clearly sees the ideal to be aimedat,
and which he, like the poet he honours in his work, himself endeavours
to attain, this Goethe-like dilettantism seeks to discover the mystic
residue contained in all earthly experience; it seeks, as it were, the higher
reality that overshadows all outward positivistic reality, that true meta¬
physical knowledge the advancement of which has become his chief aim.
Broch also gives us a psychological explanation of this poetic will to
a higher knowledge, which enables the poet more than any other to
comprehend the totality of world events. He calls it an impatience for
knowledge, a hastening in front of rational knowledge, which only
approaches step by step and never attains such totality. And his contri¬
bution towards this great effort for deeper knowledge and perception of
the true realities of lite lies not only in his discovery from foreign examples,
from the works of Goethe and Joyce, what these men may mean to this
age, and why their influence must continue beyond their time: the insight
he gained is expressed in his work.
Thus the Austrian Broch only appears to describe the lives and dates
of individual men and women in the Rhine district, Pomerania or Berlin;
in reality he writes of the life of all people of our time, of all us poor devils,
caught as we are in the hell of a changing world. And having a clear
perception of reality, he also sees that the forces now battling against one
—
box 38/3
1
it „IDES
60
HERMANN BROCH
strives towards deeper insight and knowledge is thereby brutally relegated
to the domain of T’art pour T’art, such an attitude towards philsephy proves
ignorance of its latest development. For philosophy itself has come to
realise that logic, its special field, cannot well comprehend the whole of
life, and knows where its limits lie.“ Thus philosophy has, in many
cases, withdrawn to the field of pure logic, and though it still maintains
as heretofore its general philosophical principles and outlook, it has found
itself obliged to exclude large regions from the domain of its activities
in particular, ethics and metaphysics. Philosophy has itself made an
end to its age of universality, to the age of large compendia, and has found
it necessary to remove its most burning questions from its logical abode to
the field of mysticism. That is the point where the mission of the poet
begins.?
One may add: the point at which the mission not only of Joyce, and
more recently of Broch, endeavoured to begin, but also where that of Goethe,
the great child of the world, had to begin. The“ dilettantism of this
great master was that of a man“ who cannot find full satisfaction in any
individual science and strives to attain the universality of all knowledge,
and it was the consciousness of the great and grave responsibility which
such knowledge imposes on its possessor that urged him to burst asunder
and fly beyond the confines of rational knowledge in search of something
which neither the speculative theories of theology or philosophy, nor the
knowledge ofthe exact sciences, could give.?1 nis Goethe-like dilettantism,
in which the theorist and writer Broch clearly sees the ideal to be aimedat,
and which he, like the poet he honours in his work, himself endeavours
to attain, this Goethe-like dilettantism seeks to discover the mystic
residue contained in all earthly experience; it seeks, as it were, the higher
reality that overshadows all outward positivistic reality, that true meta¬
physical knowledge the advancement of which has become his chief aim.
Broch also gives us a psychological explanation of this poetic will to
a higher knowledge, which enables the poet more than any other to
comprehend the totality of world events. He calls it an impatience for
knowledge, a hastening in front of rational knowledge, which only
approaches step by step and never attains such totality. And his contri¬
bution towards this great effort for deeper knowledge and perception of
the true realities of lite lies not only in his discovery from foreign examples,
from the works of Goethe and Joyce, what these men may mean to this
age, and why their influence must continue beyond their time: the insight
he gained is expressed in his work.
Thus the Austrian Broch only appears to describe the lives and dates
of individual men and women in the Rhine district, Pomerania or Berlin;
in reality he writes of the life of all people of our time, of all us poor devils,
caught as we are in the hell of a changing world. And having a clear
perception of reality, he also sees that the forces now battling against one