Kierkegaard and the philosophy of Existenz

In 1934 the young German philosopher Werner Brock held a series of lectures at the University of London that were published the following year under the title Contemporary German Philosophy. The date was significant. Brock, a Jew, had been stripped of his right to function as a university teacher when the National Socialists had come to power in Germany in 1933 and he was now laying the foundations for a new life and career in Britain. No less significant was the fact that, only shortly before the National Socialist revolution, Brock had been given the much-coveted post of teaching assistant to Martin Heidegger, then at the height of his university career and subsequently much criticized for his own involvement with Nazism. Brock was therefore well placed to comment on “contemporary German philosophy”, coming from within the inner circle of one of its most eminent, if controversial, representatives. What, then, was the story he had to tell?

Essentially, Brock saw the issue of German twentieth-century philosophy as the struggle between, on the one hand, a positivistic view, in which philosophy served to regulate the manifold practices of the natural, social and human sciences, and, on the other hand, a return to “interpret[ing] existence in a more universal sense and so once more giv[ing] strength and significance to human life, as it did in Greece and in earlier modern times”.