Ideas
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Of the many writers who struggled to find their way in this bewildering world, Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929) is as reasonable a starting-point as any, for he clarified a good part of the confusion. Von Hofmannsthal was born into an aristocratic family, and blessed with a father who encouraged–even expected–his son to become an aesthete. Despite this, Hofmannsthal noted the encroachment of science on the old aesthetic culture of Vienna. ‘The nature of our epoch,’ he wrote in 1905, ‘is multiplicity and indeterminacy. It can rest only on das Gleitende [the slipping, the sliding].’ He added that ‘what other generations believed to be firm is in fact das Gleitende’.48 Could there be a better description about the way the Newtonian world was slipping after Maxwell’s and Planck’s discoveries? (These are covered in the conclusion.) ‘Everything fell into parts,’ Hofmannsthal wrote, ‘the parts again into more parts, and nothing allowed itself to be embraced by concepts.’49 Hofmannsthal was disturbed by political developments in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in particular the growth of anti-Semitism. For him, this rise in irrationalism owed some of its force to science-induced changes in the understanding of reality; the new ideas were so disturbing as to promote a large-scale reactionary irrationalism.
In addition to Hofmannsthal, Ibsen, Strindberg and Nietzsche together represent the final northwards movement of European thought, after the centre of gravity had shifted, following the Thirty Years War. These latter three owe quite a lot of their prominence to Georg Brandes, a Danish critic who, in 1883, in his book of that title, identified Men of the Modern Breakthrough.50 The ‘modern minds’ that he highlighted included Flaubert, John Stuart Mill, Zola, Tolstoy, Bret Harte and Walt Whitman, but above all Ibsen, Strindberg and Nietzsche. Brandes defined the task of modern literature as the synthesis of naturalism and romanticism–of the outer and inner–and cited these three men as supreme examples.
The Ibsen phenomenon burst in Berlin and then spread to Europe. It began in 1887, with Ghosts, which was banned by the police (a perfect modernist/avant-garde occurrence). Closed performances were given and heavily oversubscribed. (The book, however, sold very well and had to be reprinted.51) An Ibsen banquet was held where the ‘dawn of a new age’ was declared. This was followed by an ‘Ibsen Week’, which saw The Lady from the Sea, The Wild Duck and A Doll’s House playing simultaneously. When Ghosts was finally allowed on to the open stage, later that year, it provoked a sensation and was an important influence on James Joyce, among others. Franz Servaes had this to say: ‘Some people, as though inwardly shattered, did not regain their calm for days. They rushed about the city, about the Tiergarten…’ Ibsen fever raged for two years.52 ‘The most important event in the history of modern drama,’ it has been said, ‘was Ibsen’s abandonment of verse after Peer Gynt in order to write prose plays about contemporary problems.’53 Many other authors–Henry James, Chekhov, Shaw, Joyce, Rilke, Brecht and Pirandello among them–owed a great deal to him. The new territory which he made his own included contemporary politics, the growing role of mass communications, changing morals, the ways of the unconscious, all with a subtlety and intensity unmatched by anyone else. It is a tribute to Ibsen that he made modern theatre so much his own that we have difficulty these days seeing what all the fuss was about, so pertinent were his themes: the role of women (A Doll’s House), the generation gap (The Master Builder), the conflict between individual liberty and institutional authority (Rosmersholm), the threat of pollution brought about by commerce that yet provides jobs (An Enemy of the People54). But it was the subtlety of his language and the sheer intensity of his characters’ inner lives that attracted many people; critics claimed they could detect ‘a second unspoken reality’ below or behind the surface drama or, as Rilke was to put it, Ibsen’s works together comprised ‘an ever more desperate search for visible correlations of the inwardly seen’.55 Ibsen was the first to find a dramatic structure for the ‘second self’ of the modern age, and in doing so illuminated for everyone the central incoherence of man’s predicament ever since Vico. He showed how that predicament could be tragic, comic, or merely banal. Just as Verdi (and Shakespeare of course) had realised that the most profound form of tragedy concerns the non-hero (as Joyce would again show so perfectly in Ulysses, 1922), Ibsen showed that banality, absurdity, meaninglessness–or the threat of them–was the unstable bedrock of modernism. Darwin had done his worst.
Where Ibsen’s strength was his intensity, Strindberg’s was his versatility. He had, in the words of one observer, a ‘mind on horseback’, a multi-faceted genius that, for some people, put him on a par with Leonardo and Goethe.56 A novelist, a painter, but above all a playwright like Ibsen, he himself lived the great convulsions of the modern world. In an early book, such as By the Open Sea, completed in June 1890, his theme was, as he put it, ‘the ruin of the individual when he isolates himself’.57 Borg, the central character, ‘has been forced to live too rapidly in this era of steam and electricity’, and is turning into a modern human being, deranged and full of ‘bad nerves’. These were the symptoms, Strindberg said, of an increased ‘vitality’ (stress) in life, which was making people increasingly ‘sensitive’ (psychologically ill). It resulted in ‘the creation of a new race, or at least of a new type of human being’.58 Later, in the plays that he wrote after his own breakdown in his forties (what he called his ‘Inferno crisis’), he became more and more interested in dreams (To Damascus, A Dream Play), by what one critic called ‘an assertive inner reality, the sense of the illogical’s inner logic and the recognition of the supremacy of those forces (both within and without the individual) which are not wholly under conscious control’. He took a great interest in the new stage technology, to create ‘expressionist’ theatre.59 In To Damascus, it is not even clear whether the unnamed characters are characters or else psychological archetypes representing mental or emotional states, including the Unknown, like one of Ellenberger’s Ur-phenomena. As Strindberg himself said, ‘The characters split, double, multiply; they evaporate, crystallise, scatter and converge. But a single consciousness holds dominion over them all; that of the dreamer.’60 (This could be Hofmannsthal talking of Das Gleitende.) The play is quite different from By the Open Sea: here Strindberg is saying that science can tell us nothing about faith, that sheer rationality is helpless in the face of the most fundamental mysteries of life. ‘Dreams offered a means for giving form to apparent randomness–mixing, transforming, dissolving.’ And again: ‘Sometimes I think of myself as a medium: everything comes so easily, half unconsciously, with just a little bit of planning and calculation…But it doesn’t come to order, and it doesn’t come to please me.’61 Rilke said much the same about the ‘arrival’ of the Duino Elegies and Picasso spoke of African masks acting as ‘intercessors’ in his art.62
The fact that Strindberg was so many things, and not one thing, his experimentalism (in other words his dissatisfaction with tradition), his turning away from science after his breakdown, his fascination with the irrational–with dreams, the unconscious, the stubbornness of faith in a post-Darwinian world–all this marked him as quintessentially modern, a focus of the many forces pressing in on individuals from all sides. Eugene O’Neill said Strindberg was ‘the precursor of all modernity in our present theater…’ He was, as James Fletcher and James McFarlane have said, the unique sensor of the age.63
He and Ibsen were joined in this concern with the intensity of the inner life by the Russians, by Tolstoy, Turgenev, Pushkin, Lermontov and above all Dostoevsky. Some of the most original investigations of what J. W. Burrow has called ‘the elusive self’ were Russian, possibly because Russia was so backward in comparison with other European nations, and writers there had less standing and were more rootless.64 Turgenev went so far as to use the term, ‘superfluous man’ (Diary of a Superfluous Man, 1850), superfluous because the protagonists were so tormented by their self-consciousness that they achieved little, ‘dissipating their lives in words and self examination’.65 Rudin, in Turgenev’s 1856 novel of that nam
e, Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), Stavrogin in The Devils (1872), Pierre in Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869) and Levin in Anna Karenina (1877) all attempt to break out of their debilitating self-consciousness via crime, romantic love, religion or revolutionary activity.66 But Dostoevsky arguably went furthest, in ‘Notes from Underground’ (1864), where he explores the life–if that is what it is–of a petty official who has come into a small inheritance and is now retired and lives as a recluse. The story is really a discussion of consciousness, of character, selfhood. Although at one stage, the official is described as spiteful, vengeful and malicious, at other times he confesses to the opposite qualities. This inconsistency in personality, in character, is Dostoevsky’s main point. The petty official ends up confessing: ‘The fact is that I have never succeeded in being anything at all.’ He doesn’t have a personality; he has a mask and behind the mask there are only other masks.67
The link to William James’ and Oliver Wendell Holmes’ pragmatism is clear. There is no such thing as personality, in the sense of a consistent entity, coming from within. People behave pragmatically in a variety of situations and there is no guarantee of coherence: in fact, if the laws of chance are any guide, behaviour will vary along a standard distribution. Out of that, we draw what lessons about ourselves that we can, but the Russian writers were apt to say that we often make these choices arbitrarily, ‘just in order to have an identity of some kind’.68 Even Proust was influenced by this thinking, exploring in his massive masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past, the instability of character over time. People in Proust are not only unpredictable, they assume incompatible characteristics in a disconcerting manner, while others are the complete opposite.69
Finally, there was Nietzsche (1844–1900). He is generally thought of as a philosopher, though he himself claimed that psychology occupied pole position among the sciences. ‘All psychology has so far got stuck in moral prejudices and fears; it has not dared to descend into the depths…the psychologist who thus “makes a sacrifice” [to explore such depths]…will at least be entitled to demand in return that psychology shall be recognised as the queen of the sciences, for whose service and preparation the other sciences exist.’70 Walter Kaufmann called Nietzsche ‘the first great (depth) psychologist’ and what he was referring to was Nietzsche’s ability to go beyond a person’s self-description ‘to see hidden motives, to hear what is not said’.71 Freud also acknowledged a debt to Nietzsche but that debt was far from straightforward. In showing that our feelings and desires are not what we say they are, Freud arrived at the unconscious, whereas for Nietzsche it was instead the ‘will to power’. For Nietzsche, the elusive or second self wasn’t so much hidden as insufficiently recognised. The way to self-fulfilment, self-realisation, was through the will, a process of ‘self-overcoming’ or breaking the limits of the self. For Nietzsche, one didn’t find one’s inner self by looking in; rather one discovered it by giving an outward expression to the inner, by striving, by acknowledging that such motives as pride existed and were nothing to be ashamed of but entirely natural; one discovered oneself when one ‘overcame’ one’s limits.72
Nietzsche thought the scientific cult of objectivity irrelevant, that–as the romantics had said (though for him they were often hypocrites too)–one made one’s life, one created one’s values for oneself–only by acting did one discover one’s self. ‘The self-discipline and constant self-testing which concentrated and intensified life…were at the opposite pole from the self-denial and repression which…diverting the will to power inwards against the self, breed as in Christianity, self-hatred, guilt, rancour towards the healthy, fulfilled and superior…In a world characterised by the flux of consciousness and bare of any metaphysical guarantee of moral meaning, the idea of vocation offered an obvious way of testing, forging, stabilising the self in a social context, through chosen, regulated, disciplined activity, and self-chosen acceptance of its obligations.’73
Underneath it all, modernism may be seen as the aesthetic equivalent of Freud’s unconscious. It too is concerned with the inner state, and with an attempt to resolve the modern incoherence, to marry romanticism with naturalism, to order science, rationalism and democracy while at the same time highlighting their shortcomings and deficiencies. Modernism was an aesthetic attempt to go beyond the surface of things, its non-representationalism is highly self-conscious and intuitive, its works have a high degree of self-signature, yet another climax of individuality. Its many ‘-isms’–impressionism, post-impressionism, expressionism, fauvism, cubism, futurism, symbolism, imagism, divisionism, cloisonnism, vorticism, Dadaism, surrealism–are a sequence of avant-gardes, understood as revolutionary experiments into future consciousness.74 Modernism was also a celebration that the old regimes of culture were gone and buried, and that art, alongside science, was taking us into new concepts of mental and emotional association, its experimental forms–both absurd and meaningless at the same time–redeeming ‘the formless universe of contingency’.75 There was too an impatience for change, amid the belief of the Marxists (still a new ‘faith’ at the time) that revolution was inevitable. Nihilism was never far beneath the surface, as people worried about the impermanent nature of truth, as thrown up by the new sciences, and by the very nature of the human self in the new metropolises–more elusive than ever. The doctrine of ‘therapeutic nihilism’, that nothing could be done, about the ills either of the body, or of society, flowered in metropolises like Vienna. The apposite work here is Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, a fantasy ostensibly about a work of art that functions as a soul, which reveals the ‘real’ self of the main character.
Which is what made The Interpretation of Dreams such an important and timely book and set of theories. Freud (according to non-specialists inhabiting a ‘pre-revisionist world’) had introduced ‘the respectability of clinical proof’ to an area of the mind that was hitherto a morass of jumbled images.76 His wider theories brought a coherence to the apparently irrational recesses of the self and dignified them in the name of science. In 1900 this appeared to be the way forward.
Conclusion
The Electron, the Elements and the Elusive Self
To Conclusion Notes and References
The Cavendish Laboratory, in the University of Cambridge, England, is arguably the most distinguished scientific institution in the world. Since it was established in the late nineteenth century it has produced some of the most consequential and innovative advances of all time. These include the discovery of the electron in 1897, the discovery of the isotopes of the light elements (1919), the splitting of the atom (also in 1919), the discovery of the proton (1920), of the neutron (1932), the unravelling of the structure of DNA (1953), and the discovery of pulsars (1967). Since the Nobel Prize was instituted in 1901, more than twenty Cavendish and Cavendish-trained physicists have won the prize for either physics or chemistry.1
Established in 1871, the laboratory opened its doors three years later. It was housed in a mock-Gothic building in Free School Lane, boasting a façade of six stone gables and a warren of small rooms connected, in Steven Weinberg’s words, ‘by an incomprehensible network of staircases and corridors’.2 In the late nineteenth century, few people knew, exactly, what ‘physicists’ did. The term itself was relatively new. There was no such thing as a publicly-funded physics laboratory–indeed, the idea of a physics laboratory at all was unheard-of. What is more, the state of physics was primitive by today’s standards. The discipline was taught at Cambridge as part of the mathematical tripos, which was intended to equip young men for high office in Britain and the British empire. In this system there was no place for research: physics was in effect a branch of mathematics and students were taught to learn how to solve problems, so as to equip them to become clergymen, lawyers, schoolteachers or civil servants (i.e., not physicists).3 During the 1870s, however, as the four-way economic competition between Germany, France, the United States and Britain turned fiercer–mainly as a res
ult of the unification of Germany, and the advances of the United States in the wake of the Civil War–the universities expanded and, with a new experimental physics laboratory being built in Berlin, Cambridge was reorganised. William Cavendish, the seventh duke of Devonshire, a landowner and an industrialist, whose ancestor Henry Cavendish had been an early authority on gravity, agreed to fund a laboratory provided the university promised to found a chair in experimental physics. When it was opened, the Duke was presented with a letter, informing him (in elegant Latin), that the laboratory was to be named in his honour.4
The new laboratory became a success only after a few false starts. Having tried–and failed–to attract first William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, from Glasgow (he was the man who, among other things, conceived the idea of absolute zero and contributed to the second law of thermodynamics), and second Hermann von Helmholtz, from Germany (who had scores of discoveries and insights to his credit, including an early notion of the quantum), Cambridge finally offered the directorship to James Clerk Maxwell, a Scot and a Cambridge graduate. This was fortuitous. Maxwell turned into what is generally regarded as ‘the greatest physicist between Newton and Einstein’.5 Above all, Maxwell finalised the mathematical equations which provided a fundamental understanding of both electricity and magnetism. These explained the nature of light but also led the German physicist Heinrich Hertz at Karlsruhe in 1887 to identify electromagnetic waves, now known as radio.