“It is love, not reason, … which is stronger than death, and from that alone can flow the sweetness of civilisation. Reason in itself is too abstract and impersonal a force to face down death. But such love, to be authentic, must live ‘always in silent recognition of the blood-sacrifice.” One must honour beauty, idealism, and the hunger for progress, while confessing in Marxist or Nietzschean style how much blood and wretchedness lie at their root.”
— Terry Eagleton, summarising Thomas Mann’s argument in The Magic Mountain (Reason, Faith and Revolution, pp.163f.)