by Peter Watson
Three large panels were asked for: ‘Philosophy’, ‘Medicine’ and ‘Jurisprudence’. All three provoked a furore but the rows over ‘Medicine’ and ‘Jurisprudence’ merely repeated the fuss over ‘Philosophy’. For this first picture the commission stipulated as a theme ‘The triumph of light over darkness’. What Klimt actually produced was an opaque, ‘deliquescent tangle’ of bodies that appear to drift past the onlooker, a kaleidoscopic jumble of forms that run into each other, and all surrounded by a void. The professors of philosophy were outraged. Klimt was vilified as presenting ‘unclear ideas through unclear forms’. Philosophy was supposed to be a rational affair; it ‘sought the truth via the exact sciences’. Klimt’s vision was anything but that, and as a result it wasn’t wanted: eighty professors collaborated in a petition that demanded Klimt’s picture never be shown at the university. The painter responded by returning his fee and never presenting the remaining commissions.48 The significance of the fight is that in these paintings Klimt was attempting a major statement. How can rationalism succeed, he is asking, when the irrational, the instinctive, the unconscious, is such a dominant part of life? Is reason really the way forward? Instinct is an older, more powerful force. It may be more atavistic, more primitive, and a dark force at times, but where is the profit in denying it?49
The concept of Innerlichkeit was one thing in the hands of Freud, say, or Mann, Schnitzler or Klimt–it was original, energising, challenging. But there was another side, typified by the likes of Paul Lagarde and Julius Langbehn. Neither of these is as well-known now as Freud, Klimt, Mann and the others, but at the time they were equally famous. And they were famous for being viciously anti-modern, for seeing all about them, amid the fantastic and brilliant innovations, nothing but decay. Lagarde, a biblical historian (one of the areas where German scholarship led the world), hated modernity as much as he loved the past. He believed in human greatness and in the will: reason, he said, was of secondary importance. He believed that nations have a soul and he believed in Deutschtum, Germanism: he thought the country embodied a unique race of German heroes with a unique will. Lagarde was also one of those calling for a new religion, an idea that, much later, appealed to Alfred Rosenberg, Göring and Hitler himself. Lagarde attacked Protestantism for its lack of ritual and mystery, and for the fact that it was little more than secularism. In advocating a new religion, he said he wanted to see ‘a fusion of the old doctrines of the Gospel with the National Characteristics of the Germans’. Above all, Lagarde sought the resurgence of the German people. To begin with he adopted ‘inner emigration’: people should find salvation within themselves; but then advocated Germany taking over all non-German countries of the Austrian empire. This was because the Germans were superior and all others, especially Jews, were inferior.50
In 1890 Julius Langbehn published Rembrandt als Erzieher (Rembrandt as Teacher). In this book, Langbehn’s aim was to denounce intellectualism and science. Art, not science or religion, was the higher good, he said, the true source of knowledge and virtue. In science, the old German virtues were lost: simplicity, subjectivity, individuality. Rembrandt als Erzieher was a ‘shrill cry against the hothouse intellectualism of modern Germany’ which Langbehn thought would stifle the creative life; it was a cry for the irrational energies of the people or tribe, the Volk-geist, buried for so long under layers of Zivilisation. Rembrandt, the ‘perfect German and incomparable artist’, was pictured as the antithesis of modern culture and as the model for Germany’s ‘third Reformation’, yet another turning-in.51 One theme dominated the entire book: German culture was being destroyed by science and intellectualism and could be regenerated only through the resurgence of art, reflecting the inner qualities of a great people, and the rise to power of heroic, artistic individuals in a new society. After 1871 Germany had lost her artistic style and her great individuals, and for Langbehn Berlin above all symbolised the evil in German culture. The poison of commerce and materialism (‘Manchesterism’ or, sometimes, Amerikanisierung) was corroding the ancient inner spirit of the Prussian garrison town. Art should ennoble, Langbehn said, so that naturalism, realism, anything which exposed the kind of iniquities that a Zola or a Mann drew attention to, was anathema.52
In other words, it can be argued–it has been argued–that nineteenth-century Germany produced a special kind of artist, and a special kind of art, inward-looking and backward-looking, and that the German fascination and obsession with Kultur had let Zivilisation run riot. Among other things, this formed the deep background to the emergence of scientific racism.
Modern (scientific) racism stems from three factors. One, the Enlightenment view that the human condition was essentially a biological state (as opposed to a theological state); two, the wider contact between different races brought about by imperial conquest; and three, the application and misapplication of Darwinian thinking to the various cultures around the world.
One of the early propagators of biological racism was Jules Virey, a French doctor who addressed the Parisian Académie de Médecine in 1841 on ‘the biological causes of civilisation’. Virey divided the world’s peoples into two. There were the whites, ‘who had achieved a more or less perfect stage of civilisation’, and the blacks (the Africans, Asians and American Indians), who were condemned to a ‘constantly imperfect civilisation’. Virey was deeply pessimistic that the ‘blacks’ would ever achieve ‘full civilisation’, pointing out that, like white people, domesticated animals, such as cows, have white flesh, whereas wild animals–deer, say–have dark flesh. This didn’t square with science even then (it had been known since the sixteenth century that, under the skin, all human flesh is the same colour) but for Virey this ‘basic’ difference accounted for all sorts of consequences. For example, he said that ‘just as the wild animal was prey to the human, so the black human was the natural prey of the white human’.53 In other words, slavery–far from being cruel–was consistent with nature.54
One new element in the equation was the development in the nineteenth century of racist thinking within Europe. A familiar name here is Arthur de Gobineau who, in On the Inequality of the Human Races (1853–1855: i.e., before Darwin and natural selection but after the Vestiges of Creation), claimed that the German and French aristocracy (and remember that he was a self-appointed aristocrat) ‘retained the original characteristics of the Aryans’, the original race of mankind. Everyone else, in contrast, was some sort of mongrel.55 This idea never caught on but more successful was the alleged difference between the hard-working, pious–even joyless–northern Protestants, and ‘the languid, potentially passive and potentially despotic Latins’ of the Catholic south. Not surprisingly perhaps, many northerners could be found (Sir Charles Dilke was one) who became convinced that the northern ‘races’, the Anglo-Saxons, Russians and Chinese, would lead the way in the future. The rest would form the ‘dying nations’ of the world.56
This reasoning was taken to its limits by another Frenchman, Georges Vacher de Lapouge (1854–1936). Lapouge, who studied ancient skulls, believed that races were species in the process of formation, that racial differences were ‘innate and ineradicable’ and any idea that they could integrate was contrary to the laws of biology.57 For Lapouge, Europe was populated by three racial groups, Homo Europaeus–tall, pale-skinned and long-skulled (dolichocephalous), Homo Alpinus–smaller and darker with brachycephalous (short) heads, and the Mediterranean type–long-headed again but darker and shorter even than Alpinus.58 Lapouge regarded democracy as a disaster and believed that the brachycephalous types were taking over the world. He thought the proportion of dolichocephalous individuals was declining in Europe, due to emigration to the United States, and suggested that alcohol be provided free of charge in the hope that the worst types might kill off each other in their excesses. He wasn’t joking.59
After publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species it did not take long for his ideas about biology to be extended to the operation of human societies. Darwinism first caught on in
the United States of America. (Darwin was made an honorary member of the American Philosophical Society in 1869, ten years before his own university, Cambridge, conferred on him an honorary degree.60) American social scientists William Graham Sumner and Thorsten Veblen of Yale, Lester Ward of Brown, John Dewey at the University of Chicago, William James, John Fiske and others at Harvard, debated politics, war and the layering of human communities into different classes against the background of a Darwinian ‘struggle for survival’ and the ‘survival of the fittest.’ Sumner believed that Darwin’s new way of looking at mankind had provided the ultimate explanation–and rationalisation–for the world as it was. It explained laissez-faire economics, the free, unfettered competition popular among businessmen. Others believed that it explained the prevailing imperial structure of the world in which the ‘fit’ white races were placed ‘naturally’ above the ‘degenerate’ races of other colours.61*
Fiske and Veblen, whose Theory of the Leisure Class was published in 1899, flatly contradicted Sumner’s belief that the well-to-do could be equated with the biologically fittest. Veblen in fact turned such reasoning on its head, arguing that the type of characters ‘selected for dominance’ in the business world were little more than barbarians, a ‘throwback’ to a more primitive form of society.62
In the German-speaking countries, a veritable galaxy of scientists and pseudo-scientists, philosophers and pseudo-philosophers, intellectuals and would-be intellectuals, competed to outdo each other in the struggle for public attention. Friedrich Ratzel, a zoologist and geographer, argued that all living organisms competed in a Kampf um Raum, a struggle for space, in which the winners expelled the losers. This struggle extended to humans, and the successful races had to extend their living space, Lebensraum, if they were to avoid decline.63 Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), a zoologist from the University of Jena, took to social Darwinism as if it were second nature. He referred to ‘struggle’ as ‘a watchword of the day’.64 However, Haeckel was a passionate advocate of the principle of the inheritance of acquired characteristics and, unlike Spencer, he favoured a strong state. It was this, allied to his bellicose racism and anti-Semitism, that led people to see him as a proto-Nazi.65 For Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927), the renegade son of a British admiral, who went to Germany and married Wagner’s daughter, racial struggle was ‘fundamental to a “scientific” understanding of history and culture’.66 Chamberlain portrayed the history of the West ‘as an incessant conflict between the spiritual and culture-creating Aryans and the mercenary and materialistic Jews’ (his first wife had been half-Jewish).67 For Chamberlain, the Germanic peoples were the last remnants of the Aryans, but they had become enfeebled through interbreeding with other races.
Max Nordau (1849–1923), born in Budapest, was like Durkheim the son of a rabbi. His best-known book was the two-volume Entartung (Degeneration) which, despite being six hundred pages long, became an international best-seller. Nordau became convinced there was ‘a severe mental epidemic; a sort of black death of degeneracy and hysteria’, which was affecting Europe, sapping its vitality, and was manifest in a whole range of symptoms, ‘squint eyes, imperfect ears, stunted growth…pessimism, apathy, impulsiveness, emotionalism, mysticism, and a complete absence of any sense of right and wrong’.68 Everywhere he looked there was decline.69 The impressionist painters were the result, he said, of a degenerate physiology, nystagmus, a trembling of the eyeball, causing them to paint in the fuzzy, indistinct way that they did. In the writings of Baudelaire, Wilde and Nietzsche, Nordau found ‘overwheening egomania’, while Zola had ‘an obsession with filth’. Nordau believed that degeneracy was caused by industrialised society–literally the wear-and-tear exerted on leaders by railways, steamships, telephones and factories. When Freud visited Nordau he found him ‘unbearably vain’ with a complete lack of a sense of humour.70 In Austria, more than anywhere else in Europe, social Darwinism did not stop at theory. Two political leaders, Georg von Schönerer and Karl Lueger, fashioned political platforms that stressed the twin aims of, first, power to the peasants (because they had remained ‘uncontaminated’ by contact with the corrupt cities) and, second, a virulent anti-Semitism, in which Jews were characterised as the very embodiment of degeneracy. It was this miasma of ideas that greeted the young Adolf Hitler when he first arrived in Vienna in 1907 to attend art school.
France, in contrast, was relatively slow to catch on to Darwinism, but when she did she had her own passionate social Darwinist. In her Origines de l’homme et des sociétés, Clémence Auguste Royer took a strong social Darwinist line, regarding ‘Aryans’ as superior to other races and warfare between them as inevitable in the interests of progress.71 In Russia, the anarchist Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) released Mutual Aid in 1902, where he took a different line, arguing that although competition was undoubtedly a fact of life, so too was co-operation, which was so prevalent in the animal kingdom as to constitute a natural law. Like Veblen, he presented an alternative model to the Spencerians in which violence was condemned as abnormal. Social Darwinism was, not unnaturally, compared with Marxism and not only in the minds of Russian intellectuals.72
Not dissimilar arguments were heard across the Atlantic in the southern states of the USA. Darwinism prescribed a common origin for all races and therefore could have been used as an argument against slavery, as it was by Chester Loring Brace.73 But others argued the opposite. Joseph le Conte (1823–1901), like Lapouge or Ratzel, was an educated man, not a red neck but a trained geologist. When his book The Race Problem in the South appeared in 1892, he was the highly-esteemed president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His argument was brutally Darwinian.74 He said that when two races came into contact one was bound to dominate the other.
The most immediate political impact of social Darwinism was the Eugenics movement, which became established with the new century. All of the above writers played a role in this, but the most direct progenitor, the real father, was Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton (1822–1911). In an article published in 1904 (in the American Journal of Sociology), he argued that the essence of eugenics was that ‘inferiority’ and ‘superiority’ could be objectively described and measured.75
Racism, or at the very least uncompromising ethnocentrism, shaped everything. Richard King, an authority on ancient Indian philosophy, says it was Orientalists who, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ‘effectively created’ the religions of Hinduism and Buddhism.76 What he means is that though complex systems of belief had evolved in the East over many centuries, the peoples who lived there did not have the concept of religion ‘as a monolithic entity which involved a set of coherent beliefs, doctrines and liturgical practices’. He says that the very idea of religion, as an organised belief system, using sacred texts, and with a dedicated clerisy, was a European notion, stemming from the Christians of the third century after they had redefined the Latin word religio. To begin with, that had meant a ‘re-reading’ of the traditional practices of their ancestors, but the early Christians–then under threat from the Romans–had redefined the word so that for them it meant ‘a banding together, in which a “bond of piety” would unite all true believers’.77 It was in this way, says King, that religion came to mean a system that emphasised ‘theistic belief, exclusivity and a fundamental dualism between the human world and the transcendental world of the divine…By the time of the Enlightenment, it was taken for granted that all cultures were understandable in this way.’78
In fact, says King, the term ‘Hindoo’ was originally Persian, a version of the Sanskrit sindhu, meaning the Indus river. In other words, the Persians employed the word to single out the tribes inhabiting that region–it did not then have a religious meaning.79 When the British arrived in India, he says, they first described the local inhabitants ‘as either heathens, the children of the devil, Gentoos (from the Portuguese gentio = gentile) or Banians (after the merchant population of Northern India)’. But the early colonialists could just not c
onceive of a people without a religion as they understood the term, and it was they who attached to this complex system of beliefs the phrase ‘the religion of the Gentoos’.80 Towards the end of the eighteenth century, ‘Gentoo’ was changed to ‘Hindoo’ and then, in 1816, according to King, Rammohan Roy, an Indian intellectual, employed the word ‘Hinduism’ for the first time.81
And it was much the same with Buddhism. ‘It was by no means certain,’ says King, ‘that the Tibetans, Sinhalese and the Chinese conceived of themselves as Buddhists before they were so labelled by Europeans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.’82 In this case, the crucial figure was Eugène Burnouf, whose Introduction à l’histoire de Bouddhisme indien effectively created the religion as we recognise it today. Published in 1844, Burnouf’s book was based on 147 Sanskrit manuscripts brought back from Nepal in 1824 by Brian Hodgson (see above, page 600).
