CULTURAL ANXIETY
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of pain and pleasure." But it does not occur to Wordsworth that the
Poet will pay homage to the pain (Ur-Schmerz) but rather "to the
native naked dignity of man, to the grand elementary principle of
pleasure, by which he knows, and feels, and lives, and moves." The
action of this poetry, shared more or less by the whole of nineteenth–
century Romanticism, near the head of which Wordsworth stands, is
to turn the imagination away from the city in an effort to regain the
human community, its "still, sad music" at least, through .a contempla–
tion of Nature.
Valery, who is according to T. S. Eliot the most representative
of twentieth-century poets, does not seek to escape the anxiety of social
disintegration, but, on the contrary, to make poetry precisely out of
this anxiety itself; he, too, hears in Nature something like Words–
worth's "still, sad music of humanity" but now it is the music of a
humanity already dead:
L es morts caches sont bien dans cette terre.
The live man is a flaw in the "great diamond" of Nature; the real,
the "irrefutable worm" is not for the dead but for the living:
((il vit
de vie) it ne me quitte pas!JJ
Valery identifies the sense of life with
anxiety and with fear of death almost as plainly as does Heidegger,
and provides about the same chance for serenity in despair; David
Baumgardt, in his "Rationalism and the Philosophy of Despair: Pre–
Nazi German Ethics, 1913-1933,"* summarizes the position of Heideg–
ger: "The horror of death is not an accidental sentiment of certain
individuals; it is an essential feature of all possible existence. And so
Heidegger characterizes
((die Grundbefindlichheit des Daseins/)
the
main trait of existence as anxiety, as sorrow. This anxiety manifests
itself, first, in the sorrow over, the care for, the daily needs of life....
The second type of anxiety is the anxiety about men, for our fellow–
beings round us
((die Fursorge JJ ;
and the highest type of anxiety is
anxiety about our own existence, about the chances of shaping our
being, our own inner destiny in the face of death."
Whether the basic sense of life is pleasure, as with Wordsworth,
or pain, as with Heidegger (and I think also, Valery), there has been
from the beginnings of Romanticism a strong movement in the
Heidegger-direction; in reviewing the development of German philo–
sophy, Dr. Baumgardt discovers two parallel waves of increasing
*
The Sewanee Review,
April-June, 1947.
