by Peter Watson
Three large panels had been 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.’50 Philosophy was supposed to be a rational affair; it ‘sought the truth via the exact sciences.’51 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. Unforgivably, they were destroyed in 1945 when the Nazis burned Immendorf Castle, where they were stored during World War II.52 The significance of the fight is that it brings us back to Hofmannsthal and Schnitzler, to Husserl and Brentano. For in the university commission, Klimt was attempting a major statement. How can rationalism succeed, he is asking, when the irrational, the instinctive, is such a dominant part of life? Is reason really the way forward? Instinct is an older, more powerful force. Yes, it may be more atavistic, more primitive, and a dark force at times. But where is the profit in denying it? This remained an important strand in Germanic thought until World War II.
If this was the dominant Zeitgeist in the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the turn of the century, stretching from literature to philosophy to art, at the same time there was in Vienna (and the Teutonic lands) a competing strain of thought that was wholly scientific and frankly reductionist, as we have seen in the work of Planck, de Vries, and Mendel. But the most ardent, the most impressive, and by far the most influential reductionist in Vienna was Ernst Mach (1838— 1916).53 Born near Brünn, where Mendel had outlined his theories, Mach, a precocious and difficult child who questioned everything, was at first tutored at home by his father, then studied mathematics and physics in Vienna. In his own work, he made two major discoveries. Simultaneously with Breuer, but entirely independently, he discovered the importance of the semicircular canals in the inner ear for bodily equilibrium. And second, using a special technique, he made photographs of bullets travelling at more than the speed of sound.54 In the process, he discovered that they create not one but two shock waves, one at the front and another at the rear, as a result of the vacuum their high speed creates. This became particularly significant after World War II with the arrival of jet aircraft that approached the speed of sound, and this is why supersonic speeds (on Concorde, for instance) are given in terms of a ‘Mach number.’55
After these noteworthy empirical achievements, however, Mach became more and more interested in the philosophy and history of science.56 Implacably opposed to metaphysics of any kind, he worshipped the Enlightenment as the most important period in history because it had exposed what he called the ‘misapplication’ of concepts like God, nature, and soul. The ego he regarded as a ‘useless hypothesis.’57 In physics he at first doubted the very existence of atoms and wanted measurement to replace ‘pictorialisation,’ the inner mental images we have of how things are, even dismissing Immanuel Kant’s a priori theory of number (that numbers just are).58 Mach argued instead that ‘our’ system was only one of several possibilities that had arisen merely to fill our economic needs, as an aid in rapid calculation. (This, of course, was an answer of sorts to Husserl.) All knowledge, Mach insisted, could be reduced to sensation, and the task of science was to describe sense data in the simplest and most neutral manner. This meant that for him the primary sciences were physics, ‘which provide the raw material for sensations,’ and psychology, by means of which we are aware of our sensations. For Mach, philosophy had no existence apart from science.59 An examination of the history of scientific ideas showed, he argued, how these ideas evolved. He firmly believed that there is evolution in ideas, with the survival of the fittest, and that we develop ideas, even scientific ideas, in order to survive. For him, theories in physics were no more than descriptions, and mathematics no more than ways of organising these descriptions. For Mach, therefore, it made less sense to talk about the truth or falsity of theories than to talk of their usefulness. Truth, as an eternal, unchanging thing that just is, for him made no sense. He was criticised by Planck among others on the grounds that his evolutionary/biological theory was itself metaphysical speculation, but that didn’t stop him being one of the most influential thinkers of his day. The Russian Marxists, including Anatoli Lunacharsky and Vladimir Lenin, read Mach, and the Vienna Circle was founded in response as much to his ideas as to Wittgenstein’s. Hofmannsthal, Robert Musil, and even Albert Einstein all acknowledged his ‘profound influenee.’60
Mach suffered a stroke in 1898, and thereafter reduced his workload considerably. But he did not die until 1916, by which time physics had made some startling advances. Though he never adjusted entirely to some of the more exotic ideas, such as relativity, his uncompromising reductionism undoubtedly gave a massive boost to the new areas of investigation that were opening up after the discovery of the electron and the quantum. These new entities had dimensions, they could be measured, and so conformed exactly to what Mach thought science should be. Because of his influence, quite a few of the future particle physicists would come from Vienna and the Habsburg hinterland. Owing to the rival arenas of thought, however, which gave free rein to the irrational, very few would actually practise their physics there.
That almost concludes this account of Vienna, but not quite. For there are two important gaps in this description of that teeming world. One is music. The second Viennese school of music comprised Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, Anton von Webern, and Alban Berg, but also included Richard (not Johann) Strauss, who used Hofmannsthal as librettist. They more properly belong in chapter 4, among Les Demoiselles de Modernisme. The second gap in this account concerns a particular mix of science and politics, a deep pessimism about the way the world was developing as the new century was ushered in. This was seen in sharp focus in Austria, but in fact it was a constellation of ideas that extended to many countries, as far afield as the United States of America and even to China. The alleged scientific basis for this pessimism was Darwinism; the sociological process that sounded the alarm was ‘degeneration’; and the political result, as often as not, was some form of racism.
3
DARWIN’S HEART OF DARKNESS
Three significant deaths occurred in 1900. John Ruskin died insane on 20 January, aged eighty-one. The most influential art critic of his day, he had a profound effect on nineteenth-century architecture and, in Modern Painters, on the appreciation of J. M. W. Turner.1 Ruskin hated industrialism and its effect on aesthetics and championed the Pre-Raphaelites – he was splendidly anachronistic. Oscar Wilde died on 30 November, aged forty-four. His art and wit, his campaign against the standardisation of the eccentric, and his efforts ‘to replace a morality of severity by one of sympathy’ have made him seem more modern, and more missed, as the twentieth century has gone by. Far and away the most significant death, however, certainly in regard to the subject of this book, was that of Friedrich Nietzsche, on 25 August. Aged fifty-six, he too died insane.
There is no question that the figure of Nietzsche looms over twentieth-century thought. Inheriting the pessimism of Arthur Schopenhauer, Nietzsche gave it a modern, post-Darwinian twist, stimulating in turn such later figures as Oswald Spengler, T. S. Eliot, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Herbert Marcuse, and even Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Michel Foucault. Yet when he died, Nietzsche was a virtual vegetable and had been so for more than a decade. As he left his boardinghouse in Turin on 3 January 1889 he saw a cabdriver beating a horse in the Palazzo Carlo Alberto. Rushing to the horse’s defence, Nietzsche suddenly collapsed in the street. He was taken
back to his lodgings by onlookers, and began shouting and banging the keys of his piano where a short while before he had been quietly playing Wagner. A doctor was summoned who diagnosed ‘mental degeneration.’ It was an ironic verdict, as we shall see.2
Nietzsche was suffering from the tertiary phase of syphilis. To begin with, he was wildly deluded. He insisted he was the Kaiser and became convinced his incarceration had been ordered by Bismarck. These delusions alternated with uncontrollable rages. Gradually, however, his condition quietened and he was released, to be looked after first by his mother and then by his sister. Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche took an active interest in her brother’s philosophy. A member of Wagner’s circle of intellectuals, she had married another acolyte, Bernard Förster, who in 1887 had conceived a bizarre plan to set up a colony of Aryan German settlers in Paraguay, whose aim was to recolonise the New World with ‘racially pure Nordic pioneers.’ This Utopian scheme failed disastrously, and Elisabeth returned to Germany. (Bernard committed suicide.) Not at all humbled by the experience, she began promoting her brother’s philosophy. She forced her mother to sign over sole legal control in his affairs, and she set up a Nietzsche archive. She then wrote a two-volume adulatory biography of Friedrich and organised his home so that it became a shrine to his work.3 In doing this, she vastly simplified and coarsened her brother’s ideas, leaving out anything that was politically sensitive or too controversial. What remained, however, was controversial enough. Nietzsche’s main idea (not that he was particularly systematic) was that all of history was a metaphysical struggle between two groups, those who express the ‘will to power,’ the vital life force necessary for the creation of values, on which civilisation is based, and those who do not, primarily the masses produced by democracy.4 ‘Those poor in life, the weak,’ he said, ‘impoverish culture,’ whereas ‘those rich in life, the strong, enrich it.’5 All civilisation owes its existence to ‘men of prey who were still in possession of unbroken strength of will and lust for power, [who] hurled themselves on weaker, more civilised, more peaceful races … upon mellow old cultures whose last vitality was even then flaring up in splendid fireworks of spirit and corruption.’6 These men of prey he called ‘Aryans,’ who become the ruling class or caste. Furthermore, this ‘noble caste was always the barbarian caste.’ Simply because they had more life, more energy, they were, he said, ‘more complete human beings’ than the ‘jaded sophisticates’ they put down.7 These energetic nobles, he said, ‘spontaneously create values’ for themselves and the society around them. This strong ‘aristocratic class’ creates its own definitions of right and wrong, honour and duty, truth and falsity, beauty and ugliness, and the conquerors impose their views on the conquered – this is only natural, says Nietzsche. Morality, on the other hand, ‘is the creation of the underclass.’8 It springs from resentment and nourishes the virtues of the herd animal. For Nietzsche, ‘morality negates life.’9 Conventional, sophisticated civilisation – ‘Western man’ – he thought, would inevitably result in the end of humanity. This was his famous description of ‘the last man.’10
The acceptance of Nietzsche’s views was hardly helped by the fact that many of them were written when he was already ill with the early stages of syphilis. But there is no denying that his philosophy – mad or not – has been extremely influential, not least for the way in which, for many people, it accords neatly with what Charles Darwin had said in his theory of evolution, published in 1859. Nietzsche’s concept of the ‘superman,’ the Übermensch, lording it over the underclass certainly sounds like evolution, the law of the jungle, with natural selection in operation as ‘the survival of the fittest’ for the overall good of humanity, whatever its effects on certain individuals. But of course the ability to lead, to create values, to impose one’s will on others, is not in and of itself what evolutionary theory meant by ‘the fittest.’ The fittest were those who reproduced most, propagating their own kind. Social Darwinists, into which class Nietzsche essentially fell, have often made this mistake.
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.)11 American social scientists William Graham Sumner and Thorsten Veblen of Yale, Lester Ward of Brown, John Dewey at the University of Chicago, and 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. On a slightly different note, the slow pace of change implied by evolution, occurring across geological aeons, also offered to people like Sumner a natural metaphor for political advancement: rapid, revolutionary change was ‘unnatural’; the world was essentially the way it was as a result of natural laws that brought about change only gradually.12
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 ‘throw-back’ to a more primitive form of society.13
Britain had probably the most influential social Darwinist in Herbert Spencer. Born in 1820 into a lower-middle-class Nonconformist English family in Derby, Spencer had a lifelong hatred of state power. In his early years he was on the staff of the Economist, a weekly periodical that was fanatically pro-laissez-faire. He was also influenced by the positivist scientists, in particular Sir Charles Lyell, whose Principles of Geology, published in the 1830s, went into great detail about fossils that were millions of years old. Spencer was thus primed for Darwin’s theory, which at a stroke appeared to connect earlier forms of life to later forms in one continuous thread. It was Spencer, and not Darwin, who actually coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest,’ and Spencer quickly saw how Darwinism might be applied to human societies. His views on this were uncompromising. Regarding the poor, for example, he was against all state aid. They were unfit, he said, and should be eliminated: ‘The whole effort of nature is to get rid of such, to clear the world of them, and make room for better.’14 He explained his theories in his seminal work The Study of Sociology (1872–3), which had a notable impact on the rise of sociology as a discipline (a biological base made it seem so much more like science). Spencer was almost certainly the most widely read social Darwinist, as famous in the United States as in Britain.
Germany had its own Spencer-type figure in Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919). A zoologist from the University of Jena, Haeckel took to social Darwinism as if it were second nature. He referred to ‘struggle’ as ‘a watchword of the day.’15 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.16 France, in contrast, was relatively slow to catch on to Darwinism, but when she did, she had her own passionate advocate. In her Origines de l’homme et des sociétés, Clemence August 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.’17 In Russia, the anarchist Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) released Mutual Aid in 1902, in which he took a different line, arguing that althou
gh competition was undoubtedly a fact of life, so too was cooperation, 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.18 Neither Karl Marx nor Friedrich Engels saw any conflict between the two systems. At Marx’s graveside, Engels said, ‘Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history.’19 But others did see a conflict. Darwinism was based on perpetual struggle; Marxism looked forward to a time when a new harmony would be established.
If one had to draw up a balance sheet of the social Darwinist arguments at the turn of the century, one would have to say that the ardent Spencerians (who included several members of Darwin’s family, though never the great man himself) had the better of it. This helps explain the openly racist views that were widespread then. For example, in the theories of the French aristocratic poet Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882), racial interbreeding was ‘dysgenic’ and led to the collapse of civilisation. 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 that any idea that races could integrate was contrary to the laws of biology.20 For Lapouge, Europe was populated by three racial groups: Homo europaeus, tall, pale-skinned, and long-skulled (dolichocephalic); Homo alpinus, smaller and darker with brachycephalic (short) heads; and the Mediterranean type, long-headed again but darker and shorter even than alpinus. Such attempts to calibrate racial differences would recur time and again in the twentieth century.21 Lapouge regarded democracy as a disaster and believed that the brachycephalic types were taking over the world. He thought the proportion of dolichocephalic 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 each other off in their excesses. He wasn’t joking.22
