A selection from Keyserling's America Set Free.
Keyserling originally wrote America Set Free in English for an English speaking audience, and subsequently had it translated into his native German, with his oversight, for a German audience in 1930 as Amerika, der Aufgang einer neuen Welt.
From the German Preface:
'[T]oday we are living in a North American epoch of world history, in the same sense that there were once Egyptian, Hellenic, Roman, Germanic, French and English epochs.
This means that today it is not a question of whether to accept or reject the United States; quite the contrary: only insofar as the other cultural spirits can hold their own against the United States can they continue to be bearers of historical significance.'
'The age of German idealism has passed just as irretrievably as that of classical Greece.
'Being less burdened by tradition, they [Americans] are able to perceive what is needed today more freely and directly.'
'[W]e all live, whether we know it or not, in the age of that new kind of spirituality... . Thus there is no American problem that is not also, at the deepest level, our own problem. This is the underlying reason for that Americanisation which, despite all the denunciations, is spreading irresistibly everywhere.
Yet Europe, with Germany in the lead, is today Americanising itself above all in the wrong sense. Thus the attempt made in this book to set the American problems in their proper perspective becomes directly a German concern.
Of course Germany will never become a province of America. Why this is out of the question, and in what sense Europe—and within Europe, Germany above all—now has before it the greatest opportunity for historical significance in its entire history, I have shown in The Spectrum of Europe. But Europe will be able to advance confidently along its new path only after it has undergone a rebirth through its confrontation with the United States.'
And since this confrontation is necessary in absolutely every sphere, every American problem — once again — directly concerns Europe.'
From the English edition:
Chapter 1: The American Scene.
'It was not so difficult to discover America for the first time. [...] It should have been comparatively easy for Columbus to discover America... because he had few prejudices which could obscure his vision;... he started with only one single prejudice of any moment-- that America would prove to be India. [...] For everyone who subsequently started out to discover America the task became more difficult... for there were always thicker and thicker strata of prejudices... which had to be pierced through, as it were, in order to get the real truth. [...]
It follows that it was obviously easier to discover America for the first time than it has ever been since. The strata of prejudices grow thicker and thicker with every generation. With every generation, more of them sink down into the unconscious, where they are beyond reach of possible correction.
[...]
...I kept in contact almost exclusively with the subconscious side of American life. ...I used exclusively the faculty of intuition-- the one faculty which establishes an immediate contact with the wholeness of life.
[...]
The average American thinks... in headlines... .
[...]
First of all-- what is the American scene? [...] The scene presented by any inhabited continent is the result of the interaction between nature and man.
[...]
The... equilibrium between man and nature depends in principle on the balance of the forces in play. If nature is all-too-powerful, then man can play no conspicuous part in it. On the other hand, the more man is... developed, the more he must predominate. Hence it should follow that all countries long enough inhabited by modern technical man should be essentially man's domain; the more nature is conquered, the more the atmosphere should breathe man's spirit; and this implies, that of all continents the North American should appear as the most humanized. But this is not the case. [...] America does not impress one as humanized, not only because the primeval forces of nature are overpowering-- were it only for them, America might be a second Africa. America really impresses one as the greatest possible contrast to Africa. And this is so, because it has as yet no soul, which the latter possesses to so high a degree. No gods have as yet been born out of its marriage with man. There was, of course, Manitou, and his ghost still hovers, here and there, over the prairie... . Externally, man does predominate in America, which he does not in Africa. But he predominates only as a physical being. He has not conquered nature psychically... . [...]
This seems to me the primary outstanding fact of the American scene. [...] Man is, in the first place, a psychic being; his direct experiences are of a psychic, not of a physical nature. Moreover, the subconscious of all men is interconnected, independently of all conscious realization of the fact, so that the background of the thoughts and feelings of each individual is simultaneously the background of those living around him; this accounts for... all national like-mindedness or of the similarity of contemporaries belonging to the same sphere of civilization... . Under these circumstances, this background belonging to the collective unconscious must grow in importance, as a force among other forces, in proportion to the quantity and quality of the psychic forces in play on the one hand, and, on the other, the length of time these forces act. This explains why the atmosphere of Europe is essentially intellectual and stimulating to thought, whereas that of Northern Africa is spiritual in spite of nature's predominance. As opposed to this, the psychic atmosphere of America bears a likeness to that of Russia and Northern Asia. The reason is that in all three cases the background of thoughts and feelings which stands out behind the individual native of the country is a very small item as compared with the physical forces in play. This explains why both in Russia and in America, as opposed to cultured Europe, alcohol is used not to stimulate, but to numb:... to become unconscious seems indeed the simplest device to overcome a feeling of inward emptiness. This also explains why both in Russia and in America... psychic activity produces the impression of not only reckless but inordinate energy: it is working in a vacuum, as it were, which must needs create the feeling of horror vacui [fear of empty spaces]. [...] ...the same considerations also go far to explain that "soullessness" of which practically all foreigners complain as being characteristic of the American. [...] ... what one may call American "soullessness" is due, in the first instance, to the fact that America is as yet a colony, and that a really native civilization has up to now not been developed.
[...] What may be said of present-day Americans might no doubt have been said of all colonials of all times and all places, as long as they remained colonials in their psychological adjustment. [...] ...sentimentalism always denotes a crude and undeveloped state of the emotion sphere. The explanation is to be found in what follows. ...when a people changes its abode, it takes along with it... its body, but not its soul... . ...tradition, in the sense of a vital background represented by a continuous collective Unconscious, falls away after a few generations; it may continue in the Conscious or in some secluded layer of the Unconscious in the form of what psycho-analysts call complexes and repressions-- but if it lives only there and thus, it has no creative power in the constructive sense; all really vital psychic forces emanate from an unbroken and well-organized Unconscious. ...whenever a new vital tradition sprang up, it was a local tradition. ...the sphere of the sensations and feelings... is closely bound with the earth. From this recognition it follows a priori, that whoever emigrates for good from his native country, by that very fact renounces racially, not individually speaking, his soul. And this can only lead, as time goes on, to complete soullessness, just as long as a new soul has not been born from a new communion with Mother Earth. This is what we witness today in the United States; but it could no doubt be observed everywhere a colonial soul has long survived as such. The Teutonic invaders of Italy and Gaul certainly were soulless for a long period during the interval between the time of the dwindling of their original tribal memories and the time when the real spirits of Italy and Gaul pervaded them... . And here I may enter at once upon one aspect of the negro Problem. Why is it that the coloured man seems to wield such a disproportionately enormous influence in the United States in the field of emotional life? It is due to the fact that the coloured man alone of all settlers surrendered himself immediately to the spirit of the New Earth. He was not in the material position merely to exploit it, as the white settlers were; nor could he live an intellectual life independent of the earth... ; thus he came to be the one peasant-type among the settlers. Owing to this fact, the negro was able to develop an authentic soul... . In the similar region of the white American's subconscious there was and still is a comparative void. The black soul accordingly invaded and continues to invade it, as a gas pours into a vacuum with tremendous force.
The aforesaid should suffice to account for the comparative lack of a psychic atmosphere in the American Scene. And the same should explain why the North American continent — of all continents the one most subdued by man — does not appear humanized in spite of this fact; its atmosphere is still very much the same in kind as that of Siberia. The fact is that humanization depends entirely on the force of the psychic atmosphere and this, again, depends not on intellect but on the undifferentiated basic subconscious, which is linked to the earth by the emotions. Now this leads us to the paradoxical result that, in spite of the fact that American Man has conquered the earth in the material sense more than any other representative of the human race, the American Scene is to a greater extent determined by the Earth as such, than by man. This, then, accounts for its primeval quality. In spite of all external civilization, America impresses the sensitive observer as an extremely young country from the point of view of human evolution, but at the same time as an extremely old country from the point of view of nature. Here I refer my readers to what I have said in my Travel Diary on the primordial forces still alive on the American continent... [See Appendix below]. These primordial forces are extraordinarily powerful. [...] The same accounts to a considerable extent for that rejuvenation the European stocks experience in the New World. ...its primordial forces... create a new human species. As we are witnessing only the first beginnings of a process requiring a very long time for its accomplishment, there can obviously in this case be no question of a mature type. But if one remembers that the earliest settlers... came across the ocean only little more than three hundred years ago, and that the process of immigration is still continuing, allowing only slight opportunity for national consolidation, then one simply stands amazed at the formative powers of Mother Earth. There can indeed be no doubting the fact that the so-called melting-pot, if it is given a chance, does produce a unified type. Even today everybody... can distinguish at first sight the typical North American from every other human type... . When I said above: "If Earth is given the chance," I meant to imply that the forces of the earth must not find too great a resistance... . The closer to nature a generation of man has been living, the less question there can have been of such resistance. Accordingly, the authentic American type is most frequent among descendants of the old farmer-- or cowboy-- stocks... ; it is least pronounced in the wealthy families of city-dwellers. Attention has often been drawn to the alleged fact that there is a convergence between the physiques of the white and the red American, which grows more marked the longer the former has resided int he country. However, to my mind, one ought not to stress this point too strongly; if it were as important as many pretend, the physique of the American negro, the American closest to the earth, should also converge with that of the red Indian-- a thing of which, as far as I know, we find no trace. On the other hand, the researches of Hermann Wirth (see his epochal book Der Aufgang der Menschheit) have made it almost certain that the purest types of red Indians are the closest kinsmen of the European Nordics. It appears that the forebears of both originated in what is today the Arctic zone, when America was settled before Europe; accordingly, the convergence of the white American with the Indian may easily be due to that "decivilization of the European" many writers have claimed to be the essence of americanization; that is, to the reversion of the European to a more ancient type. But three really is no need, for our purposes, to insist on the Aryan-Indian convergence: the fact is that the new continent does irresistibly develop a new type of man-- I say "irresistibly," because that type develops in spite of the fact that the immigration from without into the American continent has continued for centuries. [...] What one may fairly call soullessness can continue as a national characteristic only for as long as men remain nomads; nomadism implies a minimum of earth-influence. And a large proportion of the present-day Americans are still nomads. [...] ...the soullessness of the American type is not the fated characteristic so many European writers take if or.
...I have found that there is a striking parallelism between pathological cases and some of the most marked national types; a parallelism in the sense that the former present caricatures of the latter. ...we have a caricature of the Anglo-Saxon type with his lean, lithe body, his narrow head and prominent chin;... we have a caricature of the Russian, with the seal-like distribution of fat over his whole body. [...] ...there is a real physiology of nations underlying all psychology; that the type of [is] conditioned to a very high degree by the material surroundings-- indeed, to a higher degree than by heredity.
...this is, indeed, one of the most important intuitions which have come to me with the force of a revelation of obvious truth as a result of the opening of my soul to the influences of the American atmosphere. The truly native-born American is not— what everybody believes him to be—the man least dependent on Mother Earth; on the contrary, he belongs
to a type of man which owes its main characteristics to the latter. [...] We said that there is no doubt that the so-called melting-pot does produce, if given the chance, a unified type; and we added that by "given the chance" we meant that the forces of the earth must not encounter too much resistance... . This resistance, again, decreases in proportion to the closeness to nature in which a stock has been living for generations. How about this closeness to nature? It can hardly be a question of physical nearness or distance; in this sense there is no escaping her. It is a question of psychological closeness.
The town-dweller is psychologically distant from nature... ; the same applies to the "intellectual,"... . [...] Urban and intellectual civilizations... have always depended for their continuance on a constant influx of country-dwellers; in all great civilizations the towns have been the brains of the national body and no more; and the more vital the brain in question was, the more this was due to... a rich and developed provincial life close to nature. [...] The races of unadulterated town-dwellers and intellectuals have invariably degenerated or died out in the course of three or four generations. [...] It is nothing short of ridiculous to expect that the type of the American which has lived for many generations in Boston or New York, or even Chicago, will provide the exemplar for future American civilization. An urban tradition can indeed provide the frame for a national tradition, but it must derive its life-blood from without, by a constant process of metabolism... . Without contact with the vitalizing powers of the earth, man must lose his vitality. [...]
In this connexion, therefore, we need give no heed to the town-dwellers... . ...without close inner contact with the earth there is no question of man's prospering on its surface for any length of time. [...] Man is not only a son of nature, but also of the spirit. ...spirit, too can vitalize. Only it must be a question of vital spirit, not of mere intellect, the most superficial expression of the former; it must be the spirit of which the best-known expression is great religious faith. [...] ...we can witness it... in the... preservation of the original character of a race which emigrated into a foreign land. The greatest example of this is provided by the Jews. They have had no really native country for thousands of years; they have spread all over the earth, settling down in almost all countries; having become a fundamentally parasitic nation... . [...] And yet they have always remained, even as a physical type, what they originally were. This is dues to two causes. Firstly, to the unequaled understanding the Jews possess of the laws of blood [i.e., Ezra]. But if were a case of this only, a change of type would certainly have taken place in every country in which they settle. The preservation of the original Jewish type is due to the second of the causes in question: to its spirituality. For the Jew the law of his religion always represents his closest "environment." Owing to this, he has proved stronger than nature; he has continued his original type in spite of her varying influences. [...] ...so consolidated a type as the Jew cannot easily become part of a new nation. [...] ...the same also applies to American Puritanism.
[...] ...the extraordinary power of Puritanism is the result of the fact that this spiritual force alone was strong enough to counter-act the influence of the American soil and thus to make for the preservation of the ancestral type. Puritanism alone could achieve this because no other spiritual force at hand was equally deeply rooted, well defined, and strong. [...] ...one should always remember that Puritanism means a reincarnation of the spirit of the Old, as opposed to the New Testament, and that the spirit of the former, as the spirit of the most one-sided Ethos the world has ever seen, has from the very first proved to be the most potent influence on earth; the entire conquest of the material world is, in the last analysis, an effect of the spirit of the Old Testament. Here I may quote what Harvey O'Higgins and Edward H. Reed have to say on the subject in their book The American Mind in Action [1924]... :
Puritan ideals of godly toil and blessed prosperity became the dominant ideals of the land. And no life has ever lent itself to the formation of a national ideal with greater facility. [...] Such an ideal, once formed, could be held up to all children by all parents, taught to youth by educators, fed to the people in the popular reading, and diligently realized by energetic young ambition with sufficient success to establish it in the habits and customs and traditions of the nation.
Thus the spirit of America is essentially Puritan... .
[...]
...the Puritan spirit soon became the very backbone of the American business man. ...the necessity of work in pioneer days developed into the present-day religion of work and enterprise. [...] What America unconsciously aims at is the spiritual americanization of the whole world. [...] ...the Puritan spirit alone... is strong enough to counteract the influences of the New Continent. [...]
All this is true. But on the other hand... today America is traversing the first great crisis in her history and... the chief characteristic of this crisis is that it saps the foundations of Puritanism. Unquestionably the latter is today fighting for its life as a ruling power... . [...] ...in America the spirit of the earth, as opposed to the spirit of man, seems to predominate. [...] ...in order to make my readers realize at once, and with a shock as it were, what a tremendous change is going on under their eyes, I shall quote here a passage of the lecture which the great Swiss psychologist Dr. C. G. Jung gave [in] 1927.... ; in the general context of the problem of the extent to which man's soul is conditioned by the earth, this lecture dealt with the problem of the transformation the American type is undergoing just now... .
That peculiar walk, loose-limbed, those swaying hips, observed so frequently among American women, are of negro origin. American music draws its chief inspiration from the negro; the dance is the negro dance. [...] In the hero fantasies of the American the Indian character plays a leading role. [...] In everything that involves the American will, the Indian comes to the fore; in his extraordinary concentration on a given goal, in the obstinacy of his persistence, in his unfaltering endurance of the severest difficulties, all the legendary virtues of the Indian come into play. [...] Thus the American presents a curious picture: a European with the manners of a negro and the soul of an Indian. He is sharing the destiny of all usurpers of an alien soil; certain Australian aborigines assert that it is impossible to conquer an alien soil, for alien ancestral spirits live in that alien soil, and thus the new-born children of the conqueror will incarnate alien ancestral spirits. This contains a great psychological truth. The conquered alien country assimilates the conqueror. Unlike the Latin conquerors of Central and South America, the North Americans have maintained the European level with the sternest Puritanism; but this could not prevent the soul of their Indian foes from becoming their own. It is everywhere within the power of virgin earth to bring down at least the unconscious of the conqueror to the level of the autochthonous inhabitants.
The negro influence cannot, of course, be accounted for by the spirit of the American continent. We have already found one other reason for this: it is a matter of the emotional vacuum within the soul of the colonial which must inevitably be filled from without. Another reason lies in the rejuvenation of America, its relapse, or rather lapse, into primitivity... ; as a primitive, the coloured man is naturally superior to his white brother... . [...] ...the chief reason is the fact that hitherto the black native of America has been, from the point of view of Mother Earth, a more authentic American than the white native... . [...] The American negro is a purely American type... .
[...]
...almost all expressions of American emotionalism seem to be of negro origin. They really are of American origin. But since the white man's soul has not yet grown in this respect... , it must needs express itself in the black man's way, in order to live out its own life.
[...]
If a race becomes almost entirely a race of town-dwellers, to whom nature means nothing but raw material, its prospects cannot possibly be hopeful.
[...]
...if the white American continues on his present line of development, then America may end by becoming the black continent of post-modern times.
[...]
...the true earth-rooted American type is developing in spite of all that has been said above. [...] [The] Puritan spirit... preserve the original racial characteristics against the impact of the influence of the New World.
The man of predominating spirit is Yang, whose life is ruled by spiritual ideals; the man of the earth is Yin, who is characterised by a primary adjustment to the earth.
[...]
...the Middle-Westerner is the prototype of the hundred-percent-American... . Every autochthonous culture in the world began as a local culture. Culture is always... married to earth. [...] ...a really native American life can develop only out of small and narrow beginnings. [...] Puritanism made for soullessness... , and on the other hand, the soulless felt a natural bent for Puritanism; for... the colonial felt the impoverishment of his nature which inevitably followed his transplantation in foreign soil less the more of a genuine Puritan he was. Now in America this soulless kind of man found a tremendously wide field of activity. All the more did he crave for compensatory narrowness... .
[...]
...the Americanization of the American has only just begun; it must be a very slow process because, on the one hand, of the continual influx of alien blood, and on the other, because of the still widespread ideal conception of America as a refuge for all, as a land of complete freedom, unfettered by prejudice of any kind. These ruling ideals of liberty make the resulting narrow type of man cling all the more vehemently to his narrowness. [...] But then, again, America's history is really only beginning. No race which emigrated from other countries has ever become truly native in its new home within the short space of a few hundred years. [...] ...there is hope that a true culture will grow out of the soil of the United States in days to come.
Appendix:
From Travel Diary (19--)
A wave of the deepest happiness wells up within me. The earth is not yet decrepit after all! It can still sustain mighty things, still create mighty things! For the first time I look up at greatness without sadness. Never have I contemplated the remains of antediluvian splendour in palaeontological collections without bitterness, never without pain thought of the giants that our age still produces here and there through atavism or chance: for it seemed all too certain to me that our planet’s creative power was dying away, that soon only dwarfs and stunted creatures would be able to endure upon it. Now I see that the youngest of the continents still possesses the primordial power of primeval times. Gratefully I welcome it as the stronghold of our future.
To obtain bodies such as we need today, endowed with limitless resilience and unfailing plasticity, we would require an infinitely vitalising environment—a world as young as it was on the fifth day of Creation. Such a world seems to exist here; American nature still possesses, undiminished, the creative power of primeval times. Just as it has already succeeded in melting down even the most resistant races and, within a short time, making Americans out of almost any human types—not a human variety, but a distinct human species—so we may also expect it to create the body capable of meeting the continually increasing demands of the spirit and of continuing to transform itself for ever.
In America, if anywhere, we shall bring our development to fulfilment. Soon Europe will have spoken its last historically significant word. Tradition in itself is a fetter that binds more tightly from generation to generation and ultimately suffocates; and Europe’s history is already so long that a radical liberation and renewal upon its soil will scarcely succeed any longer, however much its inhabitants may rejuvenate themselves, however violently they may attempt through upheavals to avert their fate.
This time too, the old truth will prove itself: new cultures grow only on new soil; at this latest historical turning point too, the problem of the new form will be solved not by what is most mature, but by what is rawest.
And why this must happen is immediately evident in this case: when we Westerners undertook not merely to orient our lives towards the realm of ideas, as all cultures had done hitherto, but to incorporate that realm into the earthly world, we began, in the fullest sense, a new epoch of creation; as beings of spirit and soul, we are beginning at precisely the point where physical nature began in the Triassic. That is why the human being of the New World fits better into the sequoia grove, this oasis of the primeval world, than among the ruins of Rome.
