Our Cultural Agony

Book excerpt: Cultural twilight means cultural disintegration or death. It means cul tural agony. Such agony gradually fades into the dawn of tomorrow's culture, just as the twilight of a summer's evening proceeds into the daylight of the forthcoming day. Consequently cultural twilight or agony simul taneously is the dawn - the milieu of birth - of future gods. With these words a close interbelonging of the recently published SEARCH FOR GoDS with the present study, OUR CULTURAL AGONY, is stressed. Both of these books belong together and constitute one and the same "story". While SEARCH FOR GODS deals with man of tomorrow in his venture to find the way which would lead him to his dawning gods, OUR CULTURAL AGONY attempts to disclose contemporary man's ways of erring - his stray ing ways. Moreover, just as the way towards man's future gods is simul taneously his way to his true cultural self, so are his straying ways his ways of a lack of self. Man's way to his true self is his authentic, innermost, "bloody" or "ex-istential" way, while the way of his lack of self is his inauthentic way. The inauthentic ways, generally speaking, are "democratic" ways: they are the public and common ways of modem society, most typical or characteristic of it. Accordingly, while SEARCH FOR GODS has an indi vidualistic character, OUR CULTURAL AGONY has a social character.