16.4 - Toward a Twentieth-Century Frame of Mind

  • Last quarter of 19th + first decade of 20th were crucible of modern Western thought

  • New concepts challenged major presuppositions of mid 19th science, rationalism, liberalism, and bourgeois morality

Science: The Revolution in Physics

  • Changes in scientific worldview came from scientific community itself

  • 1883, Ernst Mach urges science to consider their concepts descriptive of not the physical world but of the sensations the observer experiences

  • Poincare urges the theories of scientists be considered as hypothetical constructs of the mind than as real descriptions of nature

  • X-Rays and Radiation

    • Discoveries in labs paralleled philosophical challenge to science

    • 1895, Wilhelm Roentgen publishes paper on discover of X-rays

    • 1896, other scientist finds uranium emitted similar energy to X-rays

    • 1897, Thomson formulates theory of the electron

  • Theories of Quantum Energy, Relativity, and Uncertainty

    • 1900, Max Planck pioneers articulation of quantum theory of energy

    • Einstein in 1905

  • Science is popularized from the complexity of 20th century physics

  • Scientists grow successful in gaining $$$ support from governments and priv. institutions

Literature: Realism and Naturalism

  • realist - the style of art and literature that depicts the physical world and human life with scientific objectivity and detached observation

  • Major realist figures examined the dreary and unseemly side of life

  • Flaubert and Zola

    • Emile Zola turns realism into movement

      • Wrote 20 novels exploring the dreary in life

  • Ibsen and Shaw

    • Ibsen carried realism into dramatic presentation of domestic life - controversial

    • George Bernard Shaw - attack on romanticism and false respectability

  • Realist writers believed it was their duty to portray reality and the commonplace

    • Hoped to compel public to face reality - remove hypocrisy that forbade unmentionable subjects

Modernism in Literature

  • modernism - movement in the arts and literature in late 19th + early 20th to create new aesthetic experience of a work of art above the attempt to portray reality as accurately as possible

  • Modernism also critical of middle class society and morality

    • Less concerned with social issues

  • Virginia Woolf - novels portrayed individuals trying to find way in a world where most 19th cent. social + moral certainties removed

  • Modernism in literature began pre-WWI, flourished after the war bc/ turmoil and social dislocation caused by war

The Coming of Modern Art

  • Last quarter of 19th witnessed many departures in Western art

  • Impressionism

    • Painters depict modern life rather than religious, mythological, historical

      • Focusing on social life and leisure activities of urban middle and lower middle classes

    • Fascination of light, color, visual experience

    • Monet

  • Postimpressionism

    • Ideas derived from impressionism applied to several styles of art

    • van gogh

  • Cubism

    • Picasso

    • Rejected idea of painting as a window into real world

    • Redirected artistic portrayal of reality like literary modernists reshaped the portrayal of social and moral experience

Friedrich Nietzsche and the Revolt Against Reason

  • Rational thinking began to be questioned

  • Nietzsche attacked Christianity, democracy, rationality, nationalism, science, and progress

    • Claimed democracy and Christianity would lead to sheepish masses

  • “There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena”

The Birth of Psychoanalysis

  • Major figures sought to discern undercurrents that lay between rationality, social relationships, and respectable families

  • Development of Sigmund Freud’s Early Theories

    • Found patients associated neurotic symptoms with symptoms relating to earlier experiences, specifically sexual ones

    • Later abandoned this in place of theory of “infantile sexuality

  • Freud’s Concern with Dreams

    • Concluded dreams allow unconscious wishes, desires, and drives to play free in the mind

  • Freud’s Later Thought

    • Developed model of the mind’s internal organization:

    • The id - amoral, irrational driving instincts for sexual gratification, aggression, general pleasure

    • The superego - Embodies the external moral imperatives and expectations imposed on the personality by society and culture

    • The ego mediates between the id and superego and allows the personality to cope with the inner and outer demands of its existence

  • Divisions in the Psychoanalytic Movement

    • Some followers of Freud dissented and questioned various ideas

      • Lead to fragmentation of psychoanalytic movement

  • Psychoanalytic movement influenced psychology, sociology, anthropology, religious studies, literary theory

Retreat from Rationalism in Politics

  • Some began to question the view that politics was rational

  • Max Weber

    • Saw bureaucratization as the basic feature of modern social life (opposes marx)

  • Theorists of Collective Behavior

    • Some explored activity of crowds and mobs

    • Theorists emphasized role of collective groups in politics

Racism

  • Long existed in europe

  • Since late 18th, biologists + anthropologists classified humans according to skin color, language, stage of civilization

  • Racial thinking was transformed b/c of its association with the biological sciences

  • Gobineau

    • Claimed that original white Aryan race unwisely intermarried with inferior yellows and blacks and diluted greatness

  • Chamberlain

    • Championed concept of biological determinism through race

    • Believed through genetics, human race could be improved and superior race could be developed

  • Late-Century Nationalism

    • Nationalism became mass supported movement from 1870s onward

Anti-Semitism and the Birth of Zionism

  • Developed in part from racial thought and retreat from rationality

  • Dreyfus Affair

    • Dreyfus found guilty of treason off basis of flimsy and forged evidence

    • Used to spread anti-Semitic dogma

      • Jewish response to rapid outbreak of anti-Semitism was launching of Zionist movement to found a separate jewish state