02 -david e. cooper - modern mythology the case of 'reactionary modernism

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History of the Human Sciences

DOI: 10.1177/0952695196009002021996; 9; 25History of the Human Sciences

David E. CooperModern mythology: the case of 'Reactionary Modernism'

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Modern mythology: the case ofReactionary Modernism

DAVID E. COOPER

HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES Vol. 9 No. 2

1996 SAGE (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi)

I

We did not, wrote St Peter, follow cleverly devised myths when we madeknown to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were

eye-witnesses of his majesty (II Peter 1 :16). The implication is clear: if it were

myths that theApostles were broadcasting, no credence could be given them.TheOED agrees with Peter: reference to a story as myth, it tells us, implies that itis false. This raises a problem concerning the devising of myths - mythopoeia.How can anyone openly promulgate a myth, for to do so, it seems, is to offer for

acceptance something which, by calling it a myth, one admits is false? Myths,surely, dare not speak their name.As Roland Barthes put it, the mythologistsrelation to what he recognizes as myth must be one of sarcasm (1973:157).Of course, writersmay use myth in scare-quotes, as it were, to refer to a story

that is generally held to be false, when they themselves want to leave open thequestion of its truth value. But, even then, it seems odd to describe ones ownview as myth, for myth has several connotations, beyond that of falsity, whichmake it a pejorative term. The Greek or Hindu myths may be amusing and

charming, but they are also - so we assume - accounts which have no scientificbasis, are typically anthropomorphic in conception, and so on. These are notfeatures, surely, which people - modern people, at any rate - could want theviews that they promulgate to be accused of having.

Open, self-confessed mythopoeia, then, sounds to be an incoherent enterprise.To proffer ones view as a myth is, at worst, to invite people to accept what isimplied to be false, and at best - only somewhat less paradoxically - to beaccusing ones own view of various epistemic sins. Despite this, there have been

many self-confessed 20th-century mythmongers. The problem posed by this

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myth of blood, the belief in defending the divine nature of man through blood(Glaser, 1964:143).How this motley crew of poets, romantic historians and muddled autodidacts

wouldtry

to

respondto the

problemI raised - of the coherence of self-confessed

mythmaking - I do not know. But they are not my concern, which is, rather,with thinkers of a different hue, the reactionary modernists. These included the

political theorist Carl Schmitt, the economist Werner Sombart and, for a spell,arguably, the philosopher Martin Heidegger. But it is upon two best-sellingserious German authors of the 1920s, Oswald Spengler and Ernst Junger, that Ifocus, but with occasional references, too, to the Italian Futurist and fascist F. T.Marinetti. For in these three cases, we find a self-confessed mythopoeia lacking,or less overt, in their colleagues.

III

It was, perhaps, Thomas Mann who first appreciated the distinctive and

important role played by reactionary modernism in the aetiology of fascism.The really dangerous aspect of National Socialism, he wrote, was its highlytechnological romanticism (quoted in Herf, 1984: 2). For, as Herf explains, themost salient feature of this tendency was the embrace of modern technology by

German thinkers who rejected Enlightenment reason. They succeeded inincorporating technology, he continues, into the symbolism and language ofKultur - community, blood, will, self, form, productivity, and finally race - bytaking it out of the realm of Zivilization (ibid. : 1, 16).Among them, there wasnothing of Stefan Georges horror at a satanic technological ant-world, noranother conservatives sense that mechanization and industrialization was the

most terrible catastrophe to have befallen mankind (H. S. Chamberlain, both

quoted in Zimmermann, 1990: 9-10).They were, nevertheless, reactionaries.At any rate, they were nationalists

implacably opposed to liberalism and democracy. The day when parliamentarydemocracy collapses, proclaimed Junger, will be our greatest day of festivity(Glaser, 1964 : 99). Belief in progress, utilitarian ethics, and more generallyEnlightenment confidence in rationality are rejected. The Futurist, demandsMarinetti, must break apart the old shackles of logic and hate the intelligence(1972:88-9). War is not only inevitable, given that human beings exist in anatural state of struggle, but to be welcomed. For Junger, it provides the theatrein which real men, brought together in masculine camaraderie, may best exercisethe traditional virtues, so alien to the bourgeoisie, of hardness, bravery and

self-sacrifice.In these respects, however, the reactionary modernists were no different

from other currents of right-wing thought. Their main distinguishing mark, asnoted, was their enthusiasm for technology and industrialization. It is this, above



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all, which makes them an interesting phenomenon, for we have been conditioned

by generations of thinkers on various points of the leftist spectrum - fromLukics to Dahrendorf - to associate that enthusiasm with progressive modernist

thought.Even skilled commentators have

tended,at least until

very recently,to

lump fascist intellectuals together as people responding to a deep fear of

modernity (Gay,1968: 96) or overwhelming anxiety in the face of industrializ-ation (Fest, 1977:139). Such generalizations are immediately puncturedwhen weencounter Spenglers heroizing of those modern Faustian men, the engineers;or Jungers conviction that the age of... machines represents the gigantic forgeof an approaching empire [for] which ... every decline ... [has been] a

preparation (Junger, 1964: 85); or Marinettis dithyrambs to the vibrant nightlyfervour of arsenals and shipyards ... deep-chested locomotives ... [and] sleek

flightof

planes (1972:42).The modernist tone of such

pronouncementscontrasts vividly with that of other, conservative fascists of the Weimar Years: for

example, with the attitude of the influential Ludwig Klages, for whom modern

technology, the rape of nature by humanity, demonstrates that man... hastorn himself apart along with the planet which gave him birth (quoted inSchnadelbach, 1984:150).There is a further respect in which some, at least, of the reactionary

modernists were modernists. Junger, Marinetti and others were importantfigures in the literary avant-garde, both calling for and, in their own writings,

exhibitingnew

forms of literary expression. Junger, for example, practiseda

magical realism, icily detached descriptions of horrors that transform them intoa peculiarform of beauty for the reader; while Marinetti both advocated and useda bizarre range of syntactic and figurative devices. This compounds, perhaps, the

puzzle over their overall ideological positions, for we tend to assume an intimateconnection between the artistic avant-gardism of the time and predilections forindividualism, freedom, even anarchism. Even the connection between modern-ism and technological enthusiasm is not one which has simply been foisted on us

by unperceptive left-wing commentators. Prima facie, there is indeed something

puzzling about vitriolic critics of Enlightenment embracing that flagship productof Enlightenment reason and science: technology.If there are general puzzles about the coherence of reactionary modernism,

these become more acute in the case of those thinkers belonging to the movementwho unabashedly wrote in the language of myth. I must forgo exploring the

question of how writers attuned to progressive trends in literature could wantto see their own works placed in such an ancient category as that of myth. I focusinstead on the question of how some reactionary modernists, notably Spenglerand Junger, could reconcile their vision of themselves as mythmakers with their

unmitigated enthusiasm for ... steam, chemistry and electricity (Herf,1984: 69).That Spengler and Junger saw themselves as persuading their readers of views

which they want regarded as myths, there is no doubt. In The Decline of the



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West, Spengler refers to his own morphology of world-history as a life-

symbol or universal symbolism, possessing significance, but not eternaltruth (1939:1,41ff.). Symbols, he tells us, should be regarded as myths: not to doso is itself a

symptomof decline.

Mythopoetic power,he

insists,is the

ability... to fill the world with shapes ... symbols (I, 399): precisely what Spenglerhimself is doing in his morphology of world-history. Junger, likewise,describes his stance [as] a symbolic one: he is not reporting on how thingsobjectively are, but comprehend[s] every act in the modern world as a symbolof a unified and unchangeable being (quoted in Zimmermann, 1990: 50). Tounderstand and cope with the age of machine-guns and factories is a matter ofone deciphering [a] secret, [a] now as at all times mythical law and using it as a

weapon (Junger, 1964:145).

IIII

It will help if I briefly sketch the respective and related myths which Spenglerand Junger advance. The central theme of The Decline of the West (1917, revised

1922) was world-history as the marvellous waxing and waning of organic [ormorphological] forms according to an inexorable logic of time (1939:I, 22).These forms arewhole cultures, all aspects of which - from painting to science,

from mathematics to religion - are organically related expression-forms of thewholes which give them their stamp (I, 6, 21).A culture declines when itbecomes a civilization: when its forms become ossified and lose significance,when it looks outward instead of inwards for its resources, and so on. The latest

culture to have waxed is the Faustian one, which began in mediaeval Germany,but which is now, both in Europe and America, waning. Spengler was

interpreted by some as holding technology and industrialization responsible forthe decline. But that was not at all his point: technology is indeed devilish, butthen Faust made a pact with the devil. The Faustian vision of energy, the

will-to-power in Nature (I, 387) is nowhere better manifested than intechnology and industrialization. Decline will be due to their atrophy, a pointmade clearer 12 years later in Man and Technics. There the characterization of

Faustian culture as the victory of ... technical thought, as the attempt toenslave and harness [Natures] very forces in a grim, pitiless no-quarter battleof the will-to-power, is reaffirmed (1932: 77, 84,16). Unfortunately, technologybreeds the elements that will destroy it and with it Faustian culture. The

will-to-power, it seems, began to make its decisive mistakes at the end of the

19th century: democracy and the money-economy, for example, and the

initiation of coloured peoples into a technology which they will use against theFaustians. Worst of all, perhaps, the Faustians themselves turn against tech-

nology : the masses, uncomprehending, begin to care only about material

well-being and resent processes they cannot understand, so that eventually



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even the born leaders, unappreciated, take to flight from the machine

(1932: 97).Despite differences between the two writers, notably over the question of the

impendingdoom of

technological culture, J3ngers myth is,in

large part,a

continuation and radicalization of Spenglers. For him, too, in his maintheoretical work, DerArbeiter (1932), history has the destiny of forms

[Gestalten] for its content (1964: 42). Where a Gestalt obtains, everything andeveryone bears its stamp under the compulsion of iron lawlikeness (159).Corresponding to a Gestalt is the type (Typus) of human being who is thus

stamped. The Gestalt of our age is that of the worker, and the worker, no

longer a person or individual, is its type. By a worker, Junger does not mean theman in a cloth cap, but the person - be he a factory worker, soldier, or engineer-

who bears the stamp. His favourite example, indeed, is that of the anonymoussoldier, a mere cog in a totally mobilized war dominated by machinery. It is inand through technology that the stamp is received, for technology is themobilization of the world through the Gestalt of the worker, the concrete

expression of a metaphysical will-to-power which mobilizes matter (164,126).Machinery is at once the symbol of our time and the image of a power, thenew and unlimited influx of elemental powers which have once more taken

possession (42, 64). Here, in the age of the machine, is the approaching empirefor which earlier declining cultures have been a mere preparation and which,

unlike Spenglers Faustian era, is withus

to stay.

IV

Neither Spengler nor Junger gives prolonged and explicit attention to the

problems I raised in Section I concerning self-confessed mythmaking: hencetheir response to them is an interpretative task. Those problems, recall, were the

following. Myths, as we usually understand the term, are false: hence it seems

self-defeating to promulgate a view as a myth. Second, myths typically havefurther features - an anthropomorphic character, for instance - which are

generally deemed objectionable and which, therefore, seem to preclude anyonefrom wanting their own position to be classified as myth. Our main protagonistsstrategy with these problems is as follows: first, they try to return the charge of

paradox by holding that, in a sense, all theories, not just their own, are myths;second, they deny that the alleged objectionable features of myth are objection-able.

I approach the first stage of their strategy indirectly. In a much discussed

youthful essay, the philosopher who, by their own admission, most influencedSpengler and Junger - Friedrich Nietzsche - wrote that all so-called truths are

really metaphors, and hence, strictly speaking, falsehoods. No statements reporthow the world objectively is, for they presuppose structures, classifications and



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meanings that we have not found in the world, but have imposed upon it. Withinall these metaphors, of course, important distinctions must be drawn: notably,between those live ones which we all recognize as metaphors and which

therefore retain vibrancy, and those dead, clich6dones

which Nietzschecompares with coins that have lost their faces, illusions which we have forgottenare illusions (1990: 85). Crucial, too, is a distinction between those metaphors ortruths we ought to, or cannot but, accept because they contribute to the increaseof our power, and those we should reject because they do not.

Nietzsches views were exploited, in the following century, by Ernst Cassirerand others in their discussions of myth and science. Myth is not distinguishedfrom science as the true from the false, Cassirer writes, since all schemata [are]arbitrary schemes, none of which expresses the nature of things (1953:7).

Myths and scientific theories alike are symbols... each of which produces andposits a world of its own. They are organs of reality, constructed to achievevarious purposes, like control over nature (8). Just as, for Nietzsche, statementsdo not report objective experience, so, for Cassirer, myth is not superadded to

experience, since the latter is already steeped in the imagery of myth (11). One

way in which myth does differ from science, says Cassirer, is in its holisticcharacter. To the mythical consciousness, items are not separately given, as tothe analytic scientific mind, but have to be ... derived from the whole (13).All the elements of Cassirers Nietzschean treatment of myth, albeit in cruder

and more inflated forms that he would subscribe to, are, I believe, implicit inSpenglers and J3ngers positions, and often rise to the surface. To begin with,there is their insistence that all theories are essentially mythic or symbolic instatus. There are no eternal truths, proclaims Spengler, only life-symbols.Science is a sum of symbols: even mathematics is an early and deep myth(1939: I, 41, 427). Jnger concurs: thinkers are merely the organ through which

[a] language is spoken, so that their products are merely expressive symbols - atone time spiritual ones, and later, as now, technical ones (1964:170). Second,myths are not symbolic simply because they do not, impossibly, report the

objective world. In addition, they confer meanings and hence render the worlditself symbolic. Jungers type recognizes everything about him as a symbol:even he himself is a parable (161, 50). The difference between the mythopoetand others, explains Spengler, is that the former knows he is in the business of

symbolizing, and decline sets in when people forget that this is what they are

doing. Science is, so to speak, ossified mythology, comparable with Nietzschesfaceless coins. (Cassirer, it should be noted, would demur: the philosophicallyalert scientist - the one who has read his Kant - will not mistake his theories for

objective reportage.) Third, we must distinguish between those vibrant myths

which properly serve the will-to-power and the static ones which no longer doso. Truth, ifwe are to retain the concept at all, can only be construed, saysJunger,as the expression of the will-to-power (76). Faustian science, for Spengler, was

distinguished by its masterful questioning of nature (1939 : 382), its conscious



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purpose of harnessing and enslaving nature. If the West is to decline, it will be inno small part because that purpose is forgotten and replaced by ideals ofobjective truth and pure thought. Finally, if there is a genuine difference

between myths and other theories, it is because of the holistic character of theformer. What the person who grasps a Gestalt recognizes, says Junger, is that awhole... encompasses more than the sum of its part, and is subject, not to a lawof cause and effect relating the parts, but to a law of stamp, marking each part asan ingredient in the whole (38). Likewise, for Spengler, Faustian man does not

perceive the world as a collection of independent things, unlike Classical man.God, not gods, and magnetism (a cosmic force), not magnets (individual things),are the currency of Faustian thought.

There is, then, no paradox for our protagonists in deeming their own positions

to be myths - no more, at any rate, than for anyone else, for truth in the classicalsense of correspondence with how things are is a chimera. Rather there is anhonest recognition that their own visions do what every theory does: imposeholistic order and meaning on the world in service to the human will-to-powersurge to control and dominate nature. Since this has been the purpose of what we

conventionally recognize as myths, the name of myth is not something to blushat, but to welcome.

V

There were, however, other charges made against myth besides that of falsity,ones which, if conceded, would preclude a thinker from regarding his own

products as myths. How might Spengler and Junger deal with these? We wouldnot, of course, expect them to be embarrassed by the charge that their positions,like myths generally, are supported by little in the way of evidence and

reason-giving. Junger, as one commentator indicates, did not see himself as

constructing an argued philosophical system, for whoever has a vision of what

&dquo;The Worker&dquo; is about does not require to have it demonstrated: and whoeverlacks such a vision (e.g. the bourgeois) will never understand it anyway (Stern,1953:46). He and Spengler, like most reactionary modernists, would haveendorsed Marinettis call to break apart the old shackles of logic and the plumblines of bourgeois thought, so that intuition might be reawakened (1972 : 88-9).

But other charges remain, three of which I shall discuss: those of anthropo-morphism, of treating what are historical human products as if they belonged inthe destined order of nature and, relatedly, of justifying the status quo. Each of

these features, though hardly definitive of myth, can reasonably be regarded astypical.Anthropomorphism is, of course, prevalent among ancient myths. The world

is populated with gods and other beings modelled on people, and the processes of



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nature are typically explained by reference to the machinations of such creatures.Spengler and Junger are by no means unsympathetic to such modes ofexplanation. For the latter, for example, the Nordic sagas rightly register awonder at a

mighty magic operating in the world, andat

elemental dangersunfathomable by ordinary science and reason (1964:53, 56). But their mainresponse to the charge is that anthropomorphism, in some shape, is unavoidable.It is an illusion, says Spengler, to think we can ever set up &dquo;The Truth&dquo; in the

place of &dquo;anthropomorphic&dquo; conceptions, for no other conceptions ... exist atall (1939: I, 381). The concepts of modern physics, for instance, are heirs to themythological concepts of our Germanic ancestors (I, 47), since force, energyand the like are intelligible only on the basis of the will which Faustian men areaware of at work in themselves. The very notion of a Gestalt - the proper

explanatory schema - is derived from those paradigms of wholes which aresomething more than the sum of their parts - the human face and organism.The second charge against myth is one which several notable 20th-century

writers have in mind when criticizing various conceptions and ideologies asmyths.As Barthes puts it, myth operates the inversion of anti-physis intopseudo-physis: it turns reality inside out... empty[ing] it of history and ...fill[ing] it with nature (1973:142). One ofAdornos reasons for labellingEnlightenment thought mythical was its tendency to construe the historical asnatural: a point he applies to Spengler, who is accused of inventing a second

nature by presenting human products as if they were the result of extrahumanforces (Adorno, 1973: 351 ff.). Our protagonists way with this charge is not torebut it, but to disarm it by welcoming it. World-history, says Spengler, is indeedan aimless process over which human beings, whether individually or col-

lectively, have no real control, subject as they are to an organic logic of time that

produces the waxing and waning of cultural forms (1939: I, 22, 26). We are all,he declaims in Heideggerean tones, in the silent service of Being (1939: II, 507).Junger, meanwhile, never tires of telling us about the inner lawfulness of theworld to which we are subject, of the raging process in which we are inscribed

(1993:134,128).A ruling Gestalt is indeed something that has destiny and is inthe deepest sense independent of ... circumstances over which individuals orcollectives have control (1964: 40, 89). The human being is not the goal of our

present technology, but the means employed by the Gestalt of the worker: heor she is subject to the new order as the will to total mobilization (1964 : 50).History, then, no less than nature, is physis if this means that its processes, likethose of the latter, are in the final analysis destined to roll on irrespective of

peoples best-laid plans.An important reason forAdornos and Barthess complaint against myth for

rendering the historical natural is that, by doing so, it serves to justify the statusquo. We reach the third of the charges I mentioned, then. The mythic process,Adorno and Horkheimer complain, tends to legitimate factuality (1979: 27): a

point echoed by Barthes, when he accuses myths of providing a natural



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justification for what are in reality historical intentions3 (1973 : 142). It is afamiliar, if bland, observation about ancient myths that they do typically serve toreconcile people to their condition, construing it as the requirement of fate, the

will of the gods, the demand of cosmic justice,or

whatever. But it mayseem a

strange charge to level against Spengler and Junger, both of them enthusiasts for

processes of technological modernization which will surely transform theconditions of human existence that have hitherto obtained. Indeed, Spenglerrefers to a quite new phase of human existence (1939: I, 34) andJnger to a new

life ( 1993:138). Neither thinks it either desirableor possible to keep things static,let alone to turn back the clock in the manner of reactionary conservatives.

Nevertheless, it is the intention of the two writers to vindicate the fundamentalhuman condition as it stands, if only by dismissing religious, Enlightenment and

other dreams of transforming or transcending that condition. Ernst Noltefamously defined fascism as resistance to transcendence, to attempts to correctnature in the name of transforming ideals. The pursuit of such ideals not onlyfails ultimately, but threatens to destroy the familiar and the beloved (1969: 529,538). For Hitler, the worlds woes are due to attempts to transgress the laws ofnature for the sake of illusory ideals, like universal justice (quoted in Nolte,1969 : 529). Noltes definition has, to be sure, been challenged, most recently byRoger Griffin: but what Griffin has in mind by a fascistic urge to transcendence,a desire for self-transcendence through, say, identification with [a] supra-

personal entity like the Volk (1991:188), is perfectly compatible with whatNolte had in mind when speaking of resistance to transcendence, namelyresistance to endeavours to transcend the confines of Nature and of ones

Culture.

Noltes characterization applies to our reactionary modernists as well. Notall of them would subscribe to Marinettis bleak statement that, as the life ofinsects demonstrates, everything, including human life, comes down toreproduction at any cost and to purposeless destruction (1972:150): but theyshare the view that our lot can only be to conform to the reigning Gestalt that fateor nature has dispensed. Nothing, says Spengler, allows us to becomedissociated from the conditions imposed by blood and history (1939: xiii), andwhen we try to dissociate ourselves, we produce civilization and so go intodecline, ripe for replacement by a new culture. Or, as Junger put it in one of hisnovels, when the pattern fades to which our innermost life must conform, we

sway and lose our balance and enter upon periods of decline (1970 : 33). Theworker can only express the Gestalt in which he is inscribed, not attempt toreform or replace it. It is true, of course, that at a certain level human life alters

radically, and that succeeding cultures may be incommensurable with one

another. But, at another level, it is all just more of the same - differentexpressionsof a will-to-power that human beings in essence are. Man is a beast of prey,declares Spengler, and life is a no-quarter battle of the will-to-power, and whenpeople endeavour, pathetically, to deny this, to live in a completely anti-natural



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way, the writing is on the wall. Their culture is in decline and will soon lie in

fragments, forgotten (1932: 19, 16, 76, 103). There is, then, a status quo, that ofthe fundamental human condition, which our writers wish to vindicate: but then,

from their perspective, those who complain of this, likeAdorno and Barthes, aremerely in the grip of other and less realistic, less life-enhancing myths.

VII

Although most ofmy discussion has focused on certain reactionary modernists,they have been serving as a test case, an illustration of a general problem, that ofhow modern thinkers can engage in open, self-confessed mythopoeia. Indeed,

they thereby serve as a test case, as noted in Section I, for the still widerproblems raised by relativism and perspectivism. What are the lessons for

addressing the problem of mythopoeia which can be learned from myillustration? I suggest that anyone intelligibly engaged in open mythopoeia mustmake at least the same broad moves as Spengler and Junger. If the name myth isto be at all appropriate to ones position, and if it is not to be paradoxical orotherwise bizarre to want that label attached to it, then something like the

following must be advanced.First, the mythical perspective is no worse off than any other. Indeed, these

other perspectives are themselves myths in the sense that they too fail to depictreality as it objectively is. Second, within the class of myths in this wide sense,distinctions need to be made; some, including ones own, are to be preferred,since they are, for example, life-enhancing or effective devices in the pursuit of

power. Third, ones own position is holistic, and hence cleaves closer to ourfundamental experience than the artificial abstractions of analytical science andreason. Fourth, reason and logic are not to be privileged over other epistemicstrategies, such as the cultivation of intuition. Fifth, ones position must, like

typical myths,render as natural or destined what many

peoplewould regard as

the intended and controlled products of human historical purposes. Finally, and

relatedly, the human condition so subject to nature or destiny is not one thatwe can or should try to transcend.

Whether or not a position possessing these features can be intelligiblyadvanced, I do not here judge. But such a position is not obviously absurd, or, if itis, then it is absurd in a sense thatwould be welcomed by those who advance it. If

so, open, self-confessed mythopoeia may not be the suicidal enterprise it at firstseemed.

Do the six broad moves

just cataloguedwhich our

reactionarymodernists

make in order to draw the sting of accusations of paradox have wider

application?Are they, that is, of a kind which relativists or perspectivists at

large must also make if their advancing positions of their own is not to beincoherent? I suggest that moves closely akin to the first four listed certainly need



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to be made by all such thinkers. They must, that is, show that their positions areno worse off than any other; that by some criterion such as life-enhancement,these positions are preferable to rival ones; that they remain closer to our basic

experience of the world than rival ones, especially the esoteric constructions ofthe sciences; and that the elevation of certain perspectives to the status of

objective truth is due to an invidious preference for certain epistemic methods.The two remaining moves, however, seem on the surface only to be required

by people anxious to have their own positions regarded as myths in some serioussense of that term. Why else should it be important to show that ones positiondeflates the role of intentionand control in history and that it preaches resistanceto transcendence? Nevertheless, several philosophers who have not used the

vocabulary of myth, but who have - whatever their intentions - spawned

relativist or perspectivist viewpoints, have made moves of this kind, and itseems to me unsurprising that they should have done. Thus the Heideggereantone of Spenglers pronouncements is no accident: for it is important to

Heideggers critique of scientific reason, and of its claims to issue in a privilegedaccount of reality, to show that it belongs to a destined history of Being. For toshow that science developed as the result of certain much earlier, unreflectingturns in human beings vision of the world is to puncture the image of science asthe product of peoples belated recognition and controlled application of rationalcriteria of knowledge (see for example, Heidegger, 1977).

Again, it should occasion no surprise that many relativists seek inspirationfrom the works of someone whose resistance to transcendence is total - LudwigWittgenstein. There can, for him, be no appeal to justificatory criteria thattranscend our actual, basic practices, themselves rooted in our natural history.The language in which we think is not based on grounds. It is not reasonable (orunreasonable). It is there - like our life (1969: 559). Such resistance to atranscendence which, if feasible, would hold out the promise of achieving a

standpoint from which all but one perspective could be ruled out is, surely, anatural strategy for any perspectivist to adopt.Arguably, then, even thosemoves of our reactionary modernists specifically designed to warrant theirboast of promulgating myths are of a kind which others must also make if theyare to reconcile a perspectivist outlook with advancing positions of their own.

University of Durham, UK

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

An earlier version of this paper was presented at a conference, Modernism andMythopoeia, organized by the Centre for Research in Philosophy andLiterature at the University of Warwick. The author is grateful to the editors of



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the proceedings of the conference, in which this paper will also appear, forpermission to publish it in this journal.

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