Aspects of the Conservative Intellectual Modernity in the Culture of Central Europe

Abstract

The article traces some of the important and influential ideas inside the intellectual history of modern Central Europe, especially in its German cultural design. Authors like Robert Musil, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hermann Broch, Eric Voegelin, Hans Sedlmayr et al. share a philosophical skepticism towards the revolutionary radicalism of modern thought and art. Their innovative mind and conceptual and theoretical creativity ought not to be conceived along the conventional lines of modernism’s antagonism to tradition, but rather as criticism of both revolutionary modernism and traditionalism as a (modern) ideology. Another defining aspect would be their disposition of thinking through the consequences of secularization and the dilemmas of modernity as a secular age.