Chapter 23: Realism and Social Criticism
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Realism and Naturalism
Realism
::the dominant movement in art and literature in the mid-1800s
opposed the veneration of the inner life and sentimentality
%%Gustave Courbet%% (1819-1877)::an artist who exemplified in painting
%%Gustave Flaubert%% (1821-1880)::an author who wrote @@Madame Bovary,@@ a masterpiece of literature.
Art ought…to rise above personal feelings and nervous susceptibilities! It is time to give it the precision of the physical sciences by means of a pitiless method.”
%%Honoré de Balza%% (1799-1850)::an author who used his works to describe how social and economic forces affected people’s behavior.
%%Eugéne Sue%%::a french author who gave harrowing accounts of slum life and crime in his serialized novel, @@Les Mystères de Paris @@(1842-1843)
%%George Sand%%::a woman writing under a male pen name who portrayed the married woman as a victim in @@Indiana @@(1832)
Russian writers were among the leading realists.
%%Ivan Turgenev%% (1818-1883):: wrote @@A Sportman’s Sketches @@(1852), which focused on Russian rural conditions, particularly the brutal life of serfs.
@@War and Peace@@ (1868-1869)::a book by %%Leo Tolstoy%% that described the manners and outlook of the Russian nobility and the tragedies that attended %%Napoleon’s%% invasion of Europe.
@@Anna Karenina@@ (1873-1877)::a book by %%Leo Tolstoy%% that probed class divisions and the complexities of marital relationships.
%%Anton Chekhov%% (1860-1904)::a physician turned writer who focused on the realities of provincial life among ineffectual upper-class landowners, perennially short of money, who writter away their lives and do nothing productive to better society.
%%Fyodor Dostoyevsky%% (1821-1881)::a Russian author who wrote @@Crime and Punishment @@(1866), @@The Idiot @@(1868), @@The Possessed @@(1871), and @@The Brothers Karamazov @@(1880) and showed a superb ability to create memorable characters, to probe minds, and to describe vividly and perceptively.
%%Elizabeth Gaskell%%::the wife of a Unitarian minister in Manchester who dealt compassionately with the plight of industrial workers in @@Mary Barton @@(1848) and @@North and South @@(1855)
Charles Dickens (1812-1870)::the author of Bleak House (1853), Hard Times (1854), Oliver Twist, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1839), who explored the squalor of life, the hypocrisy of society, and the drudgery of labor in British industrial cities.
Naturalism
::an attempt to demonstrate a causal relationship between human character and the social environment: that certain conditions of life produced predictable character traits in human beings.
The belief that the law of cause and effect governed human behavior reflected the immense prestige attached to science in the closing decades of the ^^nineteenth century^^.
%%Emile Zola%% (1840-1902)::the leading novelist who probed the slums, brothels, mining villages, and cabarets of France.
[the experimental novel] is a consequence of the scientific evolution of the century: it continues and completes physiology, which itself leans for support on chemistry and medicine; it substitutes for the study of the abstract and the metaphysical man the study of the natural man, governed by physical and chemical laws, and modified by the influences of his surroundings; it is in one word the literature of our scientific age, as the classical and romantic literature corresponded to a scholastic and theological age.
@@Germinal @@(1885):: %%Emile Zola’s%% greatest novel that graphically renders the terrible toil and drudgery endured by coal miners.
%%Henrik Ibsen%% (1828-1906)::the leading playwright. A Norwegian who examined with clinical precision and uncompromising truth the commercial and professional classes, their personal ambitions, business practices, and family relationships.
@@Pillars of Society@@ (1877)::a work by Ibsen which portrayed entrepreneurs who, aspiring for wealth and status, not only betray loved ones but also engage in unscrupulous business practices at the expense of their fellow citizens.
@@A Doll’s House@@ (1879)::a work by Ibsen about a woman who leaves her husband and children in search of self-realization.
Positivism
::those who viewed science as the highest achievement of the mind and sought to apply a strict empirical approach to the study of society.
Positivists rejected metaphysics and therefore the tradition of Plato. Any effort to go beyond the realm of experience to a deeper reality would be a mistaken and fruitless endeavor.
%%Auguste Comte%% (1798-1857)::the father of positivism. He called for a purely scientific approach to history and society. Only through a proper understanding of the laws governing human affairs could society, which was in a state of intellectual anarchy, be rationally reorganized.
I shall bring factual proof that there are just as definite laws for the development of teh human race as there are for the fall of a stone.”
Law of the three stages:: the theological, the metaphysical, and the scientific (pg 562)
Darwinism
Intro
^^1808^^::John Dalton formulates the modern atomic theory.
^^1831^^::Michael Faraday discovers the principle of electromagnetic induction, on which the electric generator and electric motor are based.
^^1847^^::Hermann von Helmholtz formulates the law of conservation of energy
^^1861^^::Louis Pasteur devises vaccines to prevent diseases he proved were caused by microbes.
^^1869^^::Dmitri Mendeleev constructs a periodic table for the elements.
^^1887^^::Heinrich Hertz discovers electromagnetic wave which allows for the invention of radio, television and radar.
%%Charles Darwin%% (1809-1882)
Natural Selection
^^1794^^::%%Erasmus Darwin%%, the grandfather of %%Charles Darwin%%, published @@Zoonomia, or The Laws of Organic Life.@@
@@Zoonomia@@::a book by %%Erasmus Darwin%% that offered evidence that the earth had existed for millions of years before the appearance of people and that animals experienced modifications, which they passed on to their offspring.
@@Principles of Geology@@ (1830-1833)::three volumes by %%Sir Charles Lyell%% that posits the planet has evolved slowly over many ages.
^^December 1831^^::Charles Darwin sails as a naturalist on the HMS Beagle, which surveyed the shores of South America and some Pacific islands.
@@Origin of Species@@ (1859)
@@Descent of Man@@ (1871)
Population reproduces faster than the food supply, causing a struggle for existence. Thus enters the principle of , or survival of the fittest.
Darwinism and Christianity
Darwin’s theory of evolution undermined the conviction that the Bible was indeed the Word of God
Natural selection eliminated the need for the world’s creation through divine arrangement or divine purpose.
Darwinism ultimately helped end the practice of relying on the Bible as an authority in questions of science, completing a trend initiated by Galileo.
Social Darwinism
Social thinkers applied Darwin’s theories to the social order.
and were used to justify economic individualism and political conservatism
%%Andrew Carnegie%% (1835-1919)::an American author who wrote @@The Gospel of Wealth @@(1800)
We accept and welcome…the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few and the law of competition…as being, not only beneficial, but essential to the future progress of the race…We start, then, with a condition of affairs under which the best interests of the race are promoted, but which inevitably gives wealth to the few.
Instant reforms conflicted with nature’s laws and wisdom and resulted in a deterioration of the social body.
When applied to the social world, Darwin’s biological theories buttressed imperialism, racism, nationalism, and militarism.
The domination of other peoples by the Anglo-Saxons and Teutonics was seen as the natural right of the superior race.
The Social Darwinist notions of the struggle of races for survival and of preserving racial purity became core doctrines of the Nazi Party after World War I and provided the “scientific” and “ethical” justification for genocide.
Religion in a Secular Age
Fortified by the discoveries of anthropologists and psychologists, “higher critics” examined the rise of Christianity in a historical and critical way.
@@Life of Jesus@@ (1835)::a book by %%David Friedrich Strauss%% (1808-1874) which argued that the NT was replete with inherited legends and with myths and contained little history.
@@The Essence of Christianity@@ (1841):: a book by %%Ludwig Feuerbach%% (1804-1872) which argued that the starting point of philosophy should be the human being and the material world, not God.
^ God is an unconscious projection of human hopes, fears, and self-doubts
^ Christianity diminishes human beings in order to affirm God
^ Christians deny their own worth and goodness that they might ascribe all value to God.
^ God represents the externalization of an idealized human being.
^ Humanity liberates itself when it rejects God’s existence and religion’s claim to truth.
%%Soren Kierkegaard%% (1813-1855) argued that truth is subjective and personal, reached through passion and commitment.
==“The Syllabus of Errors”== ::an encyclical by Pope Pius IX in 1864 to condemn features of the modern world such as religious freedom, Protestantism, civil marriage, and divorce.
*::a movement of Catholic intellectuals that sought to liberalize the church and make it more accepting of modern, liberal, political ideals and modern science and to reexamine the Gospels and Catholic teaching in the light of modern biblical scholarship.
%%Pope Pius X%% (1903-1914)::a pope who strongly condemned Catholic modernists for undermining revelation and fostering agnosticism.
Marxism
Introduction
the failure of the revolutions of 1848 and growing fear of working-class violence led liberals to abandon revolution and to press for reforms throughout the political process.
In the last parts of the nineteenth century, Marxists and anarchists became the chief proponents of revolution.
Both liberalism and Marxism shared these things in common::belief in the essential goodness and perfectibility of human nature; the claim that their doctrines rested on rational foundations; the desire to free individuals from the accumulated superstition, ignorance, and prejudices of the past and to fashion a more harmonious and rational society; the belief in social progress; and the value of the full realization of human talents
Liberals, however, placed the highest value on the individual and the power of education and self-discipline
A Biography of Karl Marx
%%Karl Marx%% (1818-1883)
1818 → born of German-Jewish parents (both descendants of prominent Rabbis.
His father converted to Protestantism to save his job as a lawyer.
Marx switched to philosophy from his original study of law.
1842 → editing a newspaper that was soon suppressed by the Prussian authorities for outspoken ideas.
Left the RHineland to go to paris where he met Friedrich Engels
1848 → Marx and Engels published the @@Communist Manifesto@@ in which they called for a working-class revolution to overthrow the capitalist system.
1849 → Forced to leave France because of his political views and fled to London.
He was continually short of funds though he was supported by Engels
In London, he spent years writing @@Capital@@
A Science of History
Marx believed history was governed by scientific law.
The philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways; the point is to change it.
The historical process was governed by objective and rational principles. Marx also adopted Hegel’s view that history advanced dialectically: that the clash of opposing forces propelled history into higher stages.
According to Hegel, history was the unfolding of the Absolute Spirit, and a higher stage of development was produced by the synthesis of opposing ideas.
According to Marx, material technology determined society’s social and political arrangements and intellectual outlooks.
Class Conflict
Throughout history there has been a class struggle between those who own the means of production and those whose labor has been exploited to provide wealth for this upper class.