Embracing Life: Gustav Landauer’s Anarchism as Rejection of Death

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

i have no specific recommendations or comments

Author Response

Thank you very much for your generous and thoughtful feedback on my essay. I am truly grateful for your kind words and appreciate the time and effort you took to read my paper. 

Reviewer 2 Report

This is one of the best essays on this topic. It is superb, original, imaginative, brilliant, and I am simply running out of superlatives. One possible but by no means not necessary proposal: take a look at Massimilano Tomba and his recent work on the insurgent (alternative) logic of modernity. There are lot of interesting Massimilano. For future research, a great comparative possibility would be between Landauer and Russian mystic Fyodorov.

Author Response

Thank you very much for your generous and thoughtful feedback on my essay. I am truly grateful for your kind words and appreciate the time and effort you took to provide your positive comments. I would also like to thank you for the insightful suggestion about Massimilano Tomba and his recent work on the rebellious logic of modernity. I find the suggestion fascinating and will definitely pursue it in my future research. Your suggestion of comparing Landauer to the Russian mystic Fyodorov is also a valuable idea that I will definitely consider as a possible avenue for further investigation. Thank you again for your encouraging words and constructive suggestions.

Reviewer 3 Report

I am duly impressed by the erudite scope of your most promising essay. I believe your analysis would be greatly enhanced by a nuanced presentation of Maunther's "Sprackritik," particularly his argument that language is a social construction, inflected by folkways, regnant social values, worldviews and ideologies. Without such a presentation of Mauthner's thesis, your invocation of his notions of "idols of langague," "the idea of death," and  "the concept of death" are not only inchoate but misleading. Landauer did not, of course, deny the reality of death. Rather he objected to the understanding of death as sponsored by the bourgeois social constructions of meaning of death (which you state succinctly in lines 42- 43, and 48-53).

Please note: Todesprediger (l. 2) might be best rendered Preacher on Death. l. 27: values of society= values of contemporary society, that is, bourgeois society which gives preeminent axiological attention to the individual in of his /her self. 

l. 34 "ode to existence" = ode to life

See comments in the previous paragraph.

Author Response

I was very pleased to receive these words of appreciation as well as the constructive suggestions and critical comments that helped me to improve and revise the final version of the article. These suggestions were invaluable in enhancing and revising the final version of the article.

I have carefully considered the comments of the reviewers and the editor both in the main text and in the footnotes. Formally, I have incorporated reviewer 3’s and 4’s translation suggestions, along with her/his additional references to Brenner, Eckhart, Hart’s brother, and the significant mention of Simmel’s Religion published in Buber’s Gesellschaft series.

On a more substantive level, I have included a notable paragraph on Mauthner’s language skepticism, focusing in particular on his view of language as a social construction. This addition serves to deepen Landauer’s critique of the individual and enriches his discussion of mysticism. Furthermore, I have set out Landauer’s dual interpretation of death, considering it both as an illusion of language and as a necessary departure from a temporal notion that must be overcome in order to reach the yet-to-come community. Moreover, I elucidated Landauer’s concept of spirit, emphasizing its distinct characteristics as a secularized form of religion.

I would like to thank the reviewers for their meticulous and insightful comments, which played a crucial role in refining and improving my article.

Reviewer 4 Report

The paper offers an interesting angle for approaching Gustav Landauer's Anarch-Mysticism. The author opens with an analysis of Landauer's conception of death in the context of his theory of language and his engagement with Frit Mauthner's Sprachkritik. He\She then moves to a very general analysis of Landauer's political thought, defined as mystical anarchism, which is then interestingly connected to his spatio-temporal conception.

The paper is very short and hence is necessarily limited to a minimal set of quotations and even fewer references to the very rich secondary literature on the subject. In fact, the author limits his bibliography to a few recently published works (almost entirely after 2020!).

As much as such limited reference work might be understandable considering the very limited space, there are still some very essential references to primary and secondary sources that are missing. If just to mention a few:

1. Besides Mauthner it seems essential to mention the brothers Julius and Heinrich Hart during the fin de siecle Berlin (1900-1904), and their New Society (neue Gemeinschaft), where many of the quoted works were first delivered. Landauer's companion there was of course Martin Buber and the two share a lot of ideas regarding anarcho-mysticism (Ernst Bloch and the young Georg Lukacz would be other parallel thinkers emerging from the same socio-cuktural circles, as well as the later well-known episode of the Forte Kreis). A wider context of all those spiritual endeavors relates to the prominent social movement of the Lebensreform, which gave birth to many of the sentiments here described. 

2. An important common figure for all these thinkers, especially for Mauthner and Landauer, is, of course, Meister Eckhart and Landauer's engagement with his work contributes a lot to the development of the relevant ideas as discussed here, including regarding death. Again much has been written on this (Hintz, Willems, Schwartz), and some reference would be certainly in place.

3. Georg Simmel is a major authority on the sociologically oriented thinking on human collectivities and man as a social creature. The quoted work of Landauer on revolution appeared next to Simmel's monograph on religion in Buber's series Die Gesellschaft. I find this very essential for the paragraph on interpersonal human relations.

All those references are well known in the research literature and I do not expect the author to engage with intensive analysis, but as they are extremely relevant a brief reference, even in footnotes will be certainly in place.

And here are a few further concrete remarks:

lines 56-7: "editor of Der Sozialist" - a very short indication of the fact that it was a journal of an anarchistic movement can avoid misunderstandings.

lines 67-72: Landauer was minister of culture in the Räterepublik. Eisner did not "tragically die" but was assassinated. You can quote Michael Brenner, The Long Shadow of the Revolution.

lines 78-9: "which has extremely important – although forgotten – for contemporary philosophical thought." = which was? which has extremely important impact? please correct the syntax.

In general, the text is very fluent. A normal language editing will suffice.

Author Response

I was very pleased to receive these words of appreciation as well as the constructive suggestions and critical comments that helped me to improve and revise the final version of the article. These suggestions were invaluable in enhancing and revising the final version of the article. I have carefully considered the comments of the reviewers and the editor both in the main text and in the footnotes.

Formally, I have incorporated reviewer 3’s and 4’s translation suggestions, along with her/his additional references to Brenner, Eckhart, Hart’s brother, and the significant mention of Simmel’s Religion published in Buber’s Gesellschaft series.

On a more substantive level, I have included a notable paragraph on Mauthner’s language skepticism, focusing in particular on his view of language as a social construction. This addition serves to deepen Landauer’s critique of the individual and enriches his discussion of mysticism. Furthermore, I have set out Landauer’s dual interpretation of death, considering it both as an illusion of language and as a necessary departure from a temporal notion that must be overcome in order to reach the yet-to-come community. Moreover, I elucidated Landauer’s concept of spirit, emphasizing its distinct characteristics as a secularized form of religion.

I would like to thank the reviewers for their meticulous and insightful comments, which played a crucial role in refining and improving my article.

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

Your additions to the original version of your fine essay are judicious and most commenable.

Reviewer 4 Report

The author has done great work in accounting for the different remarks of the reviewers and I find the paper now much better and definitely ready fo publication