Utopian Landscapes and Ecstatic Journeys

Friedrich Nietzsche, Hermann Hesse, and Mircea Eliade on the Terror of Modernity

Bibliographic Data

ID9206101
AuthorsKocku Von Stuckrad (0000-0002-2718-2639, 1University of Groningen, Department of Religious Studies Oude Boteringestraat 38, 9712 GK Groningen, The Netherlands, Email: [email protected], corresponding author)
Year2010
Volume57
Issue1
Pages78-102
Publication date2010-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueNumen (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0029-5973 • E-ISSN: 1568-5276
PublisherWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1163/156852710x12551326520571
OpenAlexW2132062228
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited12

Against the background of fascism and the disasters of two world wars, during the first decades of the twentieth century many European intellectuals were formulating negative responses to “modernity” and to what they regarded as the decline of human civilization. Often, these intellectuals sought for alternatives to the modern conditio humana and looked for solutions in religion, art, or philosophy. Friedrich Nietzsche’s conceptualization of the Dionysian and the Orphic is of particular importance for such a discourse of modernity. After introducing Nietzsche’s contribution as a referential framework, the article compares two representatives of this intellectual discourse: Hermann Hesse and Mircea Eliade. At first glance, Hesse, the writer and poet, does not seem to have much in common with Eliade, the scholar of religion and writer of novels. Upon closer examination, however, there are remarkable similarities in their work and their evaluation of the modern human condition. For Hesse, it was art, music, and literature that provided the antidote against the predicaments of modern culture. Eliade shared Hesse’s search for an alternative to the modern condition and found it in the pure religion outside of time and space, in the illud tempus of the homo religiosus. For him, it was shamanism in particular that provided a model for a contact with the absolute world of truth untouched by the “terror of history.” The article argues that these dialectical responses are part and parcel of the project of European “modernity” itself, rather than representing an “anti-modern” claim

Absolute (philosophy) · Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Civilization · Conceptualization · Dialectic · Epistemology · History of religions · Literature · Modernity · Shamanism · Sociology · Theology · History · Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Religious studies · Violence, Religion, and Philosophy

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