Abstract

Today, happily, we have much less confidence than a Montesquieu or a Hegel in depicting the “spirits” of nations, times, and generations. The more intelligible such depictions are, and the more suitable for their role in world–historical drama, the less plausible they seem to those whose spirits they are supposed to be. For no matter how subtly drawn and with no matter how many reservations, they remain in the end categories. The application of categories to any living subject matter itself generates a categorial malaise: the category is clear, but life while it illustrates that category, also illustrates its opposite, as well as an indefinite number of other categories not encompassed in either the one or the other.