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the cultivated personality in the traditional sense represent a value.
Add to this, that the ideological groups in their dissensions are striving
for the greatest possible self-sufficiency, so that it often looks as if a
new Middle Ages would begin. But while in the Middle Ages the
Christian tradition stood as the unique and unshakeable basis of spir–
itual life, the present is characterized by a plurality of authorities,
whose rapid rise and fall stand in striking contrast to their claims to
absoluteness, and are largely decided by forces recognizably different
from "the power of the spirit." The hard fate of intellectuals in our
time has become obvious: to have to talk and to be able to talk only
where no talk decides.
This development, as a brutal fact, presents to the cultural world
a demand, to which a fruitful answer, a "response" in Toynbee's
sense, is not easy to find. Under such apparently overpowering pres–
sure one easily takes flight into a spiritual esotericism, which retreats
from "everyday" life and is thus robbed of the last possibilities of
practical effectiveness. Thus many groups of intellectuals, equally
estranged from the concrete tasks of knowledge and of action, seek
to deceive themselves about their true position by reflections on preser–
vation, resolution, and existential attitudes; or they retreat before
the objective world, which has become meaningless for them, into the
"beyond" of an unobjectifiability, which is then again filled
in
with
the contents, apparently lying "beyond theory and practice," of an
aesthetic-contemplative, occasionally also religiously colored concep–
tion of life.
VI
Thus existential philosophy like cosmic metaphysics is an
interpretation of man and world out of a particular social situation.
In the latter, reality is conceived according to the model of security
found in the rational order of a stable society; in the former, accord–
ing to the experience of insecurity and perplexity of cultural groups
become socially homeless in a time of strong social displacements. In
all scientific criticism of these doctrines, however, it must not be for–
gotten that it is precisely the theoretically untenable element in them
that constitutes their vital power and practical significance.
Man will always strive for a total evaluative orientation in the
