Andre Malraux And The Crisis Of Western Civilization

Malraux's life and writing were "characterized by a restless, questioning, quasi-apocalyptic intensity that is fully understandable only in terms of the crisis with which Western thought was confronted in the first half of the twentieth century: at grips with a fast-accumulating mass of new knowledge, Western civilization was seeking to adjust to the violent changes that had disrupted its former social, intellectual, and spiritual framework of values."

Moreover, he was "vitally concerned with the problems of the life and death of civilizations; the specificity, irreducibility, and relativity of all cultures; their determining action in shaping the mental structures of individuals; and the bearing on his own cultural world of the observations and conclusions of historians and anthropologists such as Oswald Spengler and Leo Frobenius."

~ Germaine, Bree, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vols. 5-6, pp. 144-145.