We Moderns: Enigmas and Guesses — Reading Companion

Mencken's Framing of a Scottish Nietzschean

Mencken's introduction is as much a performance as a preface. He paints Muir as a 'cold, reserved northern' figure who emerged from 'massacre and blue paint' to produce a 'strange flouting of all things traditionally Scotch.' The editor emphasizes that Muir's ideas are 'outlandish contraband' in Scotland—a celebration of life as 'a grand and glittering adventure.' Mencken explicitly links Muir to Nietzsche, calling the Naumburg Antichrist 'the red hand' behind the book. Yet Mencken also distances himself: he notes that Muir's 'concept of life' is 'almost an orgy,' a phrase that hints at the editor's own ironic distance. The introduction thus sets up a tension between the editor's worldly skepticism and Muir's earnest, aphoristic fervor.

Emancipation as a Spiritual Task

Aphorism 92, titled 'Emancipation,' argues that the great writers of the last century—Goethe, Heine, Ibsen, Nietzsche—meant something 'profound' and 'spiritual' by freedom, not mere negation. Muir claims that later moderns have 'belittled this freedom,' reducing Ibsen's battle for inward liberation to 'a battle to deliver the women of the middle classes from their husbands.' Heine's 'healthy and noble sensuousness' has been perverted into 'worship of the senses for their own sake.' Muir's target is the 'cult of modernity' that seizes on the latest theory and discards the past without understanding it. The aphorism ends by calling for a return to the 'task of emancipation' as a way to restore dignity to literature.

The Genealogy of the Moderns

Aphorism 93, 'Genealogy of the Moderns,' sharpens Muir's critique. He argues that 'conventional moderns' are not descendants of Heine and Ibsen but of the very forces those poets fought. The great danger is no longer 'slavery to the past' but 'slavery to the present.' Muir insists that the great fighters of the last century were not iconoclasts by choice; they destroyed the past only because it lay between them and their future ideal. If they were alive today, they would be fighting against those who 'live so complacently in your provincial present, making of it almost a cult.' The aphorism thus redefines modernity not as a temporal category but as a spiritual orientation toward the future.

Readers should approach We Moderns as a series of provocations rather than a systematic treatise. Muir's aphorisms reward slow reading: each numbered entry is dense with allusion and argument. Mencken's introduction, while entertaining, is not a neutral guide—it frames Muir's project in terms that may exaggerate its Nietzschean debts. The book's catalog subjects—Ethics, Human beings, Life—are accurate but generic; the actual text is a specific, early-20th-century polemic about the misuse of intellectual traditions.

Mencken's companion volume reminds us that Muir's quarrel with the present was never about destruction, but about a quieter, inward turning. It sits beside me now, much like Democritus Platonissans — Inside the Classic, where old atoms stir into a patient soul. Both books seem to whisper that our restless rushing is a kind of forgetting—the one clearing a path, the other brightening a lantern for it.