THE CONCEPT OF CULTURAL CRISIS IN THE INTER-WAR EUROPEAN THOUGHT  Cover Image
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CONCEPTUL DE CRIZĂ A CULTURII ÎN GÂNDIREA EUROPEANĂ INTERBELICĂ
THE CONCEPT OF CULTURAL CRISIS IN THE INTER-WAR EUROPEAN THOUGHT

Author(s): Cristiana Bulgaru
Subject(s): Cultural Essay, Political Essay, Societal Essay
Published by: Editura U. T. Press
Keywords: cultural crisis; ethnicity; archaism; Romanian culture; universal culture

Summary/Abstract: The aim of the paper is to explore the concept of cultural crisis rooted in Nietzsche’s immoralist conception and invoked as an obsession of the European space by the thinkers and artists of the inter-war period. The first part of the paper shall discuss the three theories that have tried not only to explain this phenomenon but also to find its solutions: G. Simmel’s immoralist theory, the absolutist theory supported by A. Liebert and H. Massis and the organic and skeptical theory promoted by O. Spengler. Moreover, we shall try to demonstrate the way in which modern art has assumed the generalized spiritual deadlock and the ways to re-launch the direction of progress that several artistic groups of the age have suggested, i.e. the protest against the official art, the detachment from the values of former generations, the support of a new vision uncorrupted by civilization, adopted from peasant art, African art or the art of the peoples of Oceania. The second part of the paper aims to follow two local perspectives on the same matter, pertaining to L. Blaga and M. Eliade. The two Romanian thinkers pleaded everything for the rediscovery of the ethnicity and archaism as sources for the revitalization of the aged Western culture. In the case of a culture that had not had the possibility of considerable expressions that far, as was the case of Romanian culture, the rediscovery mainly of the ethnic fund could have become the spring of access into the universal circuit, which mostly interested the Romanian intellectuals of those times.

  • Issue Year: 11/2011
  • Issue No: 3
  • Page Range: 53-61
  • Page Count: 9
  • Language: Romanian