Chapter 27: Modern Consciousness: New Views of Nature, Human Nature, and the Arts
Irrationalism
Introduction
Some intellectuals began to stress the irrational side of human nature, seeing blind strivings and animal instincts as the primary fact of human existence
Some intellectuals recognizes the weakness of reason and continued to value it
Some studied manifestations of the irrational in myth, religion, the arts, and politics in order to gain understanding of human nature and behavior.
Others encouraged the creative potential of the irrational
Others celebrated violence as a healthy expression of the irrational
This all had immense implications for political life.
Nietzsche
The principal figure in the dethronement of reason and the glorification of the irrational was the German philosopher %%Friedrich Nietzsche%% (1844-1900)
His works are not systematic treatises but rather collections of aphorisms which often contain internal contradictions.
He denounced social reform, parliamentary government, and universal suffrage; ridiculed the vision of progress through science; condemned Christian morality; and mocked the liberal belief in man’s essential goodness and rationality.
Nietzsche believed that man must understand that life is full of cruelty, injustice, uncertainty, and absurdity. It is not governed by rational principles and there are no absolute standards of good and evil. Nothing is true. There is no higher purpose or sense to the universe or human existence.
If the human will is smothered with excessive intellectualizing, the spontaneity that sparks cultural creativity and ignites a zest for living is destroyed
Christianity also crushes the human impulse for life. Christian morality should be obliterated because it is fit only for the weak and enslaved. Christian virtues debilitate and cripple life and are a facade to hide envy, resentment, hatred, and revenge.
God is dead
:: the belief that moral and social values have no validity
Man can surmount nihilism by adopting a new orientation that gives primacy to the superior man and becoming an or a : by giving order to chaotic passion, making great demands on himself, living life with fierce joy, aspiring to self-perfection, and creating own’s own values.
the most fearful and fundamental desire in man [is] his drive for power
Nietzsche castigated democracy because it “represents the disbelief in great human beings and an elite society,” and Christianity because it imposes and unnatural morality, one that affirms meekness, humility, and compassion.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860):: a philosopher who declared that beneath the conscious intellect is the will, a striving, demanding, and imperious force, which is the real determinant of human behavior. The intellect is merely a tool of an alogical and irrational will.
Nietzsche called for the heroic and joyful assertion of the will and the affirmation of life in order to redeem life from nothingness.
The influence of Nietzsche’s philosophy is still a matter of controversy and conjecture.
His vitriolic attack on European institutions and values help erode the rational foundations of Western Civilization. Many young people welcomed World War I as a way of realizing Nietzsche’s command to live dangerously.
Nazi theorists tried to make Nietzsche a forerunner of their movement and say themselves as Nietzsche’s overmen. Ironically, Nietzsche detested German nationalism and militarism, largely disdained anti-Semitism, and denounced state worship. He would have hated Hitler.
Overall, Nietzsche’s philosophy is conducive to a politics of extremes that knows no moral limits.
Dostoevsky
%%Fyodor Dostoevsky%% (1821-1881)::a russian novelist who also attacked the fundamental outlook of the Enlightenment.
He perceived human beings as inherently depraved, irrational, and rebellious. He maintained that the loss of religious faith would lead to Russia’s ruin.
Human nature is too volatile, too diversified to be schematized by the theoretical mind; it will struggle against reason’s yoke.
There are no absolute and timeless truths that precede the individual and to which the individual should conform. There is merely a terrifying world of naked wills vying with one another. Not all people seek happiness or chooses to eliminate suffering and depravation.
This irrational will defines the individual’s uniqueness and leads him to resist the blueprints drawn up by social theorists.
In rejecting external security and liberal and socialist concepts of progress, Dostoevsky demonstrates that a powerful element of irrationality underlies human nature, an element that reason cannot understand, control, or satisfy.
Bergson
%%Henri Bergson%% (1859-1941)::a French Philosopher of Jewish background.
An emphasis on the intellect sacrifices spiritual impulses, imagination, and intuition, and reduces reality and the soul to mere mechanism.
Science cannot reveal ultimate reality.
Our capacity for intuition tells us more about reality than the method of analysis employed by science.
His philosophy pointed towards religious mysticism.
A protest against modern technology and bureaucracy, Bergson’s philosophy sought to reaffirm the primacy of the individual.
Sorel
%%Georges Sorel%% (1947-1922)::a French Social theorist.
Sorel placed his hopes in the workers and saw them as bearers of higher values: as noble and determined producers struggling against exploiters and parasites.
He applauded violence, for it intensified the revolutionaries’ dedication to the cause and spurred them to acts of heroism.
The overthrow of the decadent bourgeois society would be accomplished through a general strike: a universal work stoppage.
Sorel saw the general strike as having the appeal of a great mobilizing myth. What was important was not that the general strike actually takes place, but that its image stirs all the anticapitalist resentments of the workers and inspires them to carry out their revolutionary responsibilities.
His condemnation of liberal democracy and his conviction that fabricated myths could serve as a powerful political weapon found concrete expression in the Fascist movements after World War I.
Freud: A New View of Human Nature
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)::an Austrian-Jewish physician who spent most of his adult life in Vienna.
Freud focused on the massive power and influence of nonrational drives.
He sought to comprehend the irrational scientifically and wanted to regulate it in the interests of civilization.
Freud held that people are not fundamentally rational and that human behavior is governed primarily by powerful inner forces, which are hidden from consciousness.
He believed that artistic and literary creativity ultimately derives from primal instincts rooted in the unconscious.
His great achievement was to explore the consciousness methodically and systematically with the tools and temperament of a scientist.
His investigations led him to conclude that childhood fears and experiences, often sexual in nature, accounted for neuroses: disorders in thinking, feeling, and behavior that interfere with everyday acts of personal and social life.
:: the subconscious seat of the instincts
::the conscious and reasonable part of the mind.
Human beings derive their highest pleasure from sexual fulfillment
He saw evil as rooted in human nature rather than as a product of a faulty environment.
He had no vision of utopia
Social Thought: Confronting the Irrational and the Complexities of Modern Society
Durkheim
%%Émile Durkheim%% (1858-1917)::a French scholar of Jewish background and heir to Comte’s positivism as well as an important founder of modern sociology
He tried to show that the essential ingredients of modern times -- secularism, rationalism, and individualism -- threaten society with disintegration into a disconnected mass of self-seeking, antagonistic individuals.
:: a collapse of values
The weakening of traditional ties that bind the individual to society constitute the crisis of modern industrial society.
Durkheim called for a rational and secular system of morals to replace Christian dogma, which had lost its power to attract and bind.
Pareto
%%Vilfredo Pareto%% (1848-1923)::an Italian economist and sociologist who aimed to construct a system of sociology on the model of the physical sciences.
Social behavior rests primarily not on reason but rather on non-rational instincts and sentiments. These deeply rooted and essentially changeless feelings are the fundamental elements of human behavior.
People do not act according to carefully thought-out theories. They act first from non-logical motivations and then construct a rationalization to justify their behavior.
He divided society into two strata: the elite and the masses.
A successful ruling elite must exploit the feelings and impulses of the masses to win its own advantage with cunning and occasionally with violence.
The masses aren’t really influenced by rational argument
He opposed parliamentary democracy and predicted that new political leaders would emerge who would master the people through propaganda and force and would always appeal to sentiment.
Mussolini praised Pareto.
Le Bon
%%Gustave Le Bon%% (1841-1931)::A french social psychologist who concentrated on mass psychology
The substitution of the unconscious action of crowds for the conscious activity of individuals is one of the principal characteristics of the present age.
He applied the term “crowd” to a large group of people in which individuality is submerged in the mass and the individual loses control over his or her ideas and emotions.
A psychological crowd could be a street mob, a political party, or a labor union.
In a contest with aroused emotions, human reason is utterly powerless.
Weber
%%Max Weber%% (1864-1920)::arguably the most prominent social thinker of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and a leader in shaping modern sociology.
Western science is an attempt to understand and master nature through reason
Western capitalism is an attempt to organize work and production in a rational manner that achieved maximum efficiency.
Reason accounts for brilliant achievements in science and economic life but it also spiritualized life by ruthlessly eliminating centuries old traditions.
Secular rationality is shaping a world in which standards cannot claim ultimate saction.
With no God, we are no confronted with the burden of how to create for ourselves values that give meaning to life in a world deprived of certainty.
Secular rationality has also fostered self-liberation, and also self-enslavement.
The Modernist Movement
Breaking with Conventional Modes of Esthetics
Artists and writers began to seek to liberate the imagination from traditional forms of artistic and literary expression that had shaped European cultural life since the revolution.
These avant=garde writers and artists found new and creative ways to express the human psyche, producing a great cultural revolution called .
Examples of modernist authors::Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, August Strindberg, D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, and Franz Kafka
Several modernist writers explored the dark side of human nature.
Modernist culture acknowledged no objective reality of space, motion, and time that has the same meaning for all observers.
Modernists probed subjective views and visions and the inner world of the unconscious, searching within its primitive layer for an authentic inner self.
:: a flor of feelings and thoughts in which the boundary between consciousness and unconsciousness is blurred
::a tool in which a character’s meandering and disconnected comments progressively penetrate deep into the unconscious, disclosing buried fears and torments.
Modernist writers also made use of symbols that convey larger implications about the human condition
Arnold Schönberg (1874-1951)::an Austrian composer who purposefully abandoned traditional scale and harmonic chords to produce atonal music that “seeks to express all that swells in us subconsciously like a dream.”
Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971):: A Russian composer who experimented with both atonality and primitive rhythms, notably in his ballet The Rite of Spring
Modern Art
%%Paul Klee%% (1879-1940)::a prominent twentieth-century artist.
::a new art style developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque between 1909 and 1914.
explored the interplay between the flat world of the canvas and the three-dimensional world of visual perception.
The Cubists tried to depict things from multiple perspectives and in doing so deliberately deformed objects in order to achieve this effect.
Throughout the period ^^1890-1914^^, avant-garde artists were deemphasizing subject matter.
abstract art:: created by artists such as %%Piet Mondrian%% (1872-1944) and %%Wassily Kandinsky%% (1866-1944), and art form which was devoid of reference to the visible world.
By breaking with the Renaissance view of the world as inherently orderly and rational and by stressing the power of the imagination, modern artists opened up new possibilities for artistic expression and exemplified the growing power and appeal of the non-rational.
Modern Physics
Until the closing years of the nineteenth century, the view of the universe held by the Western mind was based mainly on the classical physics of Isaac Newton.
1895 → the discovery of X-rays by Wilhelm Konrad Roentgen
1896 → the discovery of radioactivity by Henri Bequerel
1897 → the discovery of the electron by J.J. Thomson
1900 → Max Planck, a German physicist, proposed the quantum theory, which holds that a heated body radiates energy not in a continuous unbroken stream, as had been believed, but in intermittent spurts, or jumps, called quanta.