Dignity Lost and Regained: Thomas Mann’s Elliptical Path, Part I: Background

Abstract

Abstract This chapter discusses the career of Thomas Mann as an especially relevant illustration of the difficulties that have arisen in the reception of Kant’s doctrine of universal human dignity and pure duty. Mann’s positions vividly illustrate the tendencies of post-Kantian German thought. Mann’s early work exhibits the common and deep misunderstanding of Kantian duty in contingent, achievement-oriented, and chauvinist terms. Mann’s early career took place in an era of German culture that had been struggling to make a decision between religious, ethical, and aesthetic conceptions of humanity’s vocation. At first Mann strongly endorsed an aesthetic orientation. In his later career, however, he began to appreciate what Kant really meant by dignity and duty, and, inspired by Walt Whitman, he turned to advocating democracy. Here it becomes essential to grasp exactly how Mann’s eventual understanding of Kant, the Early Romantics, and Nietzsche, contrasts with common and unappealing stereotypes of their philosophies.