Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal (review)

This is a small book, but it deals with the very large subject designated by its title: Nobility of Spirit. These are hardly words that anybody uses today without a considerable twinge of self-doubt; but Riemen undertakes the task not so much of defining as illustrating the existence of the human quality that such words are intended to designate. Indeed, the point of his book is the importance of not allowing this quality to slip from sight completely in the midst of the deconstructive animus of the present.

Riemen is the head of the Nexus Institute, an organization in the Netherlands that describes itself as a “cultural think tank” and is devoted particularly to discussing the problems of European civilization. During the Dutch presidency of the European Union, Nexus organized a series of conferences in both Europe and the United States on the particular values defining this civilization, now more than ever under siege with the rise of cultural relativism. The institute also publishes a journal in Dutch called Nexus, with a dazzling array of international contributors. Many of these recently appeared in an anthology of impressive new essays, entitled Europees humanisme in fragmenten, marking the fiftieth number of the journal.

Riemen has directed this enterprise ever since its beginning, and he outlines its history in the first essay of this volume, “Nexus’ genesis,” whose Dutch is unfortunately much beyond my extremely limited capacity to decipher through English and German. But in flipping through its pages, I came across names that were familiar—Socrates, Nietzsche, Thomas Mann—and these can lead me into the book under discussion. For with these names we come to some of the heroes of the spirit whose example Riemen wishes to celebrate and who are joined by a number of others in this powerful little work.

The book is not a dispassionate scholarly exposition but rather a series of personal encounters, both with individuals and with texts. Riemen, for example, describes an actual lunch in New York with Elizabeth Mann Borgese, the daughter of Thomas Mann and widow of Giuseppe Borgese, an important Italian man of letters and opponent of Mussolini. But Riemen also writes in the same intimate tone and style of a conversation on the Piraeus between Socrates and his friends, and of one, taken from Mann’s The Magic Mountain, between the Italian humanist Settembrini and “the small Jewish Communist intellectual” Naptha, who is also a member of the Jesuit order. Another such conversation, whose participants step from the pages of Mann’s Dr. Faustus, is handled in exactly the same semireportorial, eyewitness-account tone and style. Sometimes these are not conversations but eloquent monologues of a figure like Nietzsche, reflecting on himself and his world. The book begins with Socrates and Spinoza and runs up to reflections either taken from, or drawing on, Whitman, Koestler, Malraux, Camus, Sartre, and Leone Ginzburg. Riemen’s text is always a lively dramatization of such literary-philosophical exchanges or meditations, as if, rather than reading about documents shelved in libraries, we are present while human personalities attempt coming to grips with eternal problems posed by the moral, social, and political conflicts of their time (and of ours—complete with references to 9/11 and Indiana Jones).

It is the effort never to lose sight of these endless eternal questions, never to think they could finally be answered by one or another religious dogma or political creed, or that they are worth surrendering for some worldly honor, renown, or privilege—or in the case of Socrates, even to save one’s life—that constitutes what Riemen considers “nobility of spirit.” Such nobility is what once made up the inner fiber of those whom Riemen designates as the pillars of Western civilization, and whose example, he argues, we are now in danger of losing. His own point of view, if it can be defined at all, is perhaps that of “a pessimistic humanism . . . familiar with tragedy and the...