In the Air: In the Air-the relationship of ideas and their time.

In the Air: In the Air-the relationship of ideas and their time.

Ideas in the Air-part 3

Ultimately, as Peckham first observed, we see how the tree does in fact become a significant metaphor for the Universe and replaces the clock or clockwork of the Enlightenment.  Wagner’s great ash tree exemplifies this use.  In fact, for many of these artists, Nature becomes the religious center of their universe. Visualize the paintings of Caspar Friedrich or listen to the poem of Wagner’s Hans Sachs sung to him by the people of Nuremburg in the final act of Die Meistersingers.   Emerson was able to discuss an immanent spirit that still transcended everything.  The Oversoul united all living things. The Germans spoke of the noumenal world in which all things were one. As we will see, for most artists in a world that valued change, growth, and development, the images of the journey, the voyage, and the path take on great significance.  While Frodo Baggins, unlike Sydney Carton, could not make the last leap of faith on his own at the end of his journey, the concept of sacrifice and rebirth still fascinates and excites us, and in the midst of the twentieth century Tolkein wrote a novel about a journey on a path that could 

not be forsaken in order to suffer and sacrifice to save the world—the story still holds us in the twenty-first century.

This blog is not an attempt to prove that any artist influenced another.  Rather it is an attempt to show how the ideas identified by Morse Peckham in the 1950s were in the air during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (and perhaps still are).  We will look at common themes that seem closely related which made their ways into the works of many artists and often explain what many anti-Victorian critics of the last century cited as flaws in these works.  We are going to take a journey together.  This will be a quest for understanding.  We will start with the failure of the rules of the Enlightenment, move to the reaction of artists seeking something more (Peckham’s new way of thinking), trace the radical thinking (a loaded term) of the German thinkers, and find resolution by exploring the themes of unselfish love and sacrifice, which free us from the self and the ego to move on to the Everlasting Yea.  

          I do not expect everyone to agree with my conclusions and analyses.  This is a battle I have fought for forty years.  What I hope to do is show that there is a theme that unites the art of the last two centuries, which is very different than that which had gone before.  It is a theme that explains aspects of these works which have seemed to be weaknesses or mysterious inconsistencies.  

          Ten years after his PMLA article, Morse Peckham published Man’s Rage for Chaos.  In this work, Peckham takes to task those critics who speak in broad terms about the common traits of works that make them “Baroque,”  “Classical,” or “Gothic.”  He points out that these traits are imposed on the works by the critics; that these traits are a very small part of each work, and that to concentrate on these traits is to deny the valuable traits of each work which make it unique and valuable.  Thoughout the book, Peckham seems to deny traditional criticism based on chronological periods.  Yet, at the end of the book he identifies and describes the common traits of works in such periods and provides a further refinement of his definition of Romanticism.  In fact, he restates the basis for identifying the ideas in the air at the beginning of the nineteenth century; ideas “so novel and so profoundly revolutionary” they were unlike anything that “had emerged in human culture since the early Neolithic period or perhaps even before” (291). These are the ideas worth pursuing.

In the Air-the relationship of ideas and their time.(continued)

In the middle of the last century, a scholar attempting to reconcile various theories of Romanticism identified the ideas that were in the air at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and, if you accept this scholar’s fourth or fifth revisions of his ideas, are still in the air today.  Morse Peckham, in his series of articles that began with “Toward a Theory of Romanticism,” (PMLA, 1951) and continued through many articles and books, describes how at the beginning of the nineteenth century humankind changed the way it thought and looked at the world and the universe.  Peckham is far more eloquent than I, and to paraphrase severely reduces a great writer’s merit, persuasiveness, and argument, so I apologize for doing so.   His prose is concise and clear, and his logic and argument are always carefully blueprinted and developed.

Essentially Peckham examines a world, the world of the Enlightenment, disillusioned by the failure of the French Revolution; a world that begins to observe that all of the wonderful discoveries and rules of the Age of Reason seem to fall short.  (The Chaos Theorists of our day would provide evidence as to why this happened.)  Peckham does not mention them, but Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology and Robert Chamber’s Vestiges of Creation undermined age-old teachings that even Sir Isaac Newton thought he was verifying.  Darwin was waiting in the wings. 

Peckham notes that the old values of an unchanging universe, uniform and perfect, no longer matched observations.  The metaphor of the Universe as a clock set in motion by the perfect clock maker and allowed to run by universal rules, suddenly seemed sterile and, quite frankly, wrong.  We must acknowledge that he also points out that the desire for finding perfection coming out of change kept many Romantic artists from ultimately understanding what they were doing, exploring, and producing, and probably led to the Social Darwinism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.  

           Ultimately, the line of German philosophers from Kant, Richter, Hegel, Shelling, Fichte to Schopenhauer provided a more appropriate world view. Wordsworth and Coleridge and those who followed them provided works that expressed the ideas these Germans explicated.  Peckham says the Romantics saw an organic world, diverse and changing.  Imperfection was a value because it allowed for change (even though, as we noted, many found that the ideal of reaching perfection was hard to let go).  Imagination, which lives in the unconscious, the seat of creativity, replaced reason as the most valued faculty; and the artist, the poet-philosopher revealed more of the Universe than the scientist.  Consider how Wordsworth’s inner eye allows the artist to create the world anew, to give it existence through experience and reflection.  Existentialism (the world exists because we define it in our experience) thus becomes a Romantic concept and as we will see, so do Impressionism and Surrealism, at least that is Peckham’s contention.  In his first essay, Peckham defines “Dynamic and diverse organicism.”  He later backed away from this concept, but as we will see, it was in the air and influences us today.

          Thinking humankind, Peckham points out, finds itself disillusioned by the collapse of the old.  The individual feels lost, swallowed up.  To escape this despondency, he enters a phase of supreme egotism.  But this too is empty, and the feelings of oppression are replaced by feelings of loneliness and emptiness or corruption and dissipation.  Each then faces a “leap of faith,” in which the ego is sacrificed through unselfish love and service.  We must recall Carlyle’s dictum, “Find the duty nearest to you and do it.”  Only then has the individual found his/her place in the universe.  Peckham describes this journey as one from the “not me” to the “me” to the “not me,” and freely identifies it with the journey of Carlyle’s Teufelsdrock from the Everlasting No to the Center of Indifference to the Everlasting Yea.

          During the rest of the twentieth century, Peckham refined, moderated, and adulterated these ideas, but when pushed, he always sought to defend them.  While he was trying to define historical Romanticism, he fairly depicted ideas that were in the air to be breathed in by any writer, composer, or artist of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  However, whether he viewed himself as a mainstream scholar or simply as a reasonable person, he never identified the shadowy reflection between the qualities he was defining and the esoteric movements beginning in the heart of the Enlightenment and continuing well into the twentieth century nor with the Gnostic tradition in which the individual looks within himself for an understanding of the universe.  When Peckham identifies the tree as the metaphor of the Romantics’ universe, did he even think of the Cabala’s Tree of Life, the parts of which closely resemble the Romantic Journey described by Peckham.  It seems every road has two sides.  Even when we examine the breakdown of reasonable systems, we may not be willing to totally depart from the logical and rational.

          Examining the changes in thought of the early 1800s, we begin to understand what Peckham saw.  From the Deism of the eighteenth century, many artists seemed to move to a dislike and distrust of organized religion in the nineteenth century.  It is not the slate-cleaning dislike exhibited by Rousseau; rather it is a dislike bred from organized religion falling short of its promise or being usurped by selfish individuals who use it as a source of power.  Consider the disillusionment of Matthew Arnold with his father’s muscular Christianity or Emerson’s withdrawal from his Unitarian ministry, the belief which itself withdrew from fundamental Protestantism.  Only Dostoevsky of the great nineteenth-century writers is comfortable with organized religion (this is not to say that there are not others, only that Dostoevsky is the first to come to mind). Dostoevsky’s great contemporary, Tolstoy, is an interesting mirror image seeking a more personal, fundamental source of faith. Yet, because the audience of the writers, composers, and artists shared a religious background, many of the ideas in the air during the nineteenth century are encapsulated in a Christian setting, but not the Christianity of the Medieval morality plays or that flaunted by the Chansons de geste, or Courtly Romances, although if we follow the other Gnostic and esoteric track, we will find the heretical ideas of the Grail Romances returning.  For many artists the ethics of Christianity are fine; they have trouble with the metaphysics and the ontology.  David Strauss, Emmanual Feuerbach and Friedrich Nietzsche provided the escape from the quandary.   Strauss’ Life of Christ examined the history of Jesus and the essential mythological nature of the story.  Feuerbach pointed out that man created God rather than the other way about.  Nietzsche told the world that “God was dead, because we no longer needed him to understand things.”

To be continued

In the Air-the relationship of ideas and their time.

Ideas in the Air

Two scholarly approaches, one totally unfair and one totally overwhelming, present difficulties for modern researchers.  One approach is to judge a work or an artist on the basis of contemporary prejudice, that is to say, on the prejudices of the present.  The other is to try to establish influence by one artist over another. 

       The first of these judges a creator and his works through the lens of contemporary prejudices.  To further complicate this issue, some critics use events in history that took place after the death of the artist as interpretive tools for speaking about his creations; this seems to me unjust, unfair, and unconscionable.  Ultimately we have critics who go so far as to accept unpopular interpretations of a work or an artist based on those feelings (however scandalous) or on the ideas or ideologies of people who later admired the work or the artist. This is simply ridiculous.Just because Dickens was admired by the Communist critics of the Soviet Union for his cries for social justice, must we assume that Dickens was a closet communist?  Just because Nietzche spoke of men and supermen and was admired by the Nazis as the definer of the “Master Race,” should we make Nietzche the true founder of the Nazi party.  The events, the ideas, the culture of an artist’s own time and that which came before him/her are what the critic and scholar need to use as tools for understanding, not the events of more recent time. This is not to deny that some artists are so influential that their works impact events which follow—this is clearly a different position and the works then become helpful in understanding the later events, but to work in the other direction is a serious mistake, since it clearly violates the concept that Hegel identified as zeitgeist, the spirit of the time. Bryan Magee in his The Story of Philosophy explains it this way:  “If a great genius in the year 2000 tried to write plays like Shakespeare’s, or compose symphonies like Beethoven’s, his work would be inauthentic, imitation, pastiche, no matter how brilliantly gifted he was.  You cannot jump out of history; that is to say, you cannot make yourself independent of the dialectical process” (161).  Even though we search for timeless, eternal, and universal ideas in a work, that work is a product of its time and cannot be held accountable to the prejudices or sensibilities of the present,.  Yet we constantly do this with many of the creative geniuses of the last two centuries and before.  While we must never be apologists for works that display behavior we find deplorable, we must also understand that different times had different viewpoints.Kipling, though he may not have liked it, took Colonialism for granted, as did Dickens. Remember that Pip in Great Expectations goes to Egypt after his “rebirth” to repair his fortunes and expectations.  Should we despise Kipling and Dickens and their works because we now find Colonialism to be an abomination? We need to be looking at the work to see if there is something there beyond the disgusting behavior.  As we will see, the ideas in the air at the time of conception and creation are what count, not later events.  To allow Hitler’s enthusiasm, however shallow or misguided, to prejudice us against Wagner’s artistic works is a terrible mistake and leads us to another error.

This equally misguided approach is a variation of the Intentional Fallacy (the work can only be evaluated on the basis of the author’s intent).  This approach tries to interpret the work on the basis of the character of the artist.  Several years ago a much respected scholar made a presentation in which he noted that Thackeray should be placed above Dickens in the writers’ pantheon, because the former had never had an extramarital affair.  Such Ad Hominem criticism adds nothing to scholarship and clouds an understanding of the artist’s work.  What ideas was the artist inhaling as a part of the thinking society in which he or she lived, in his or her milieu; these are the ideas of which we need to be aware.  Should I despise the work of Hieronymus Bosch because a Pope found his work objectionable, or should I despise the work of Tolstoy because Stalin enjoyed his work?  Those of us with axes to grind make just such decisions.  Furthermore, while Wagner was certainly never bashful about expressing his dislike for Jews in his essays, he never drew a Fagin or Shylock in any of his creative works despite efforts by critics to make Klingsor and Beckmesser into Jewish stereotypes.

The second bothersome approach is often almost impossible.  One of the great philological themes for scholars in the last three centuries has been to trace influence among writers, artists, and musicians. Many hours have been spent searching libraries, journals, diaries, and other writings to see if one artist had access to the writings of another, or better yet, wrote something describing actually reading, seeing, or hearing another work of art, or best of all, describing the effect that other work had on him/her.  This has always been the philosopher’s stone of influence.  

Many of my students will gladly debate chaos theory with me, even though they have not read any of the mathematical philosophers who build the fractals or work with non-linear equations.  Some of my students have read or seen versions of Jurassic Park and the Lost World.  Others have just been at parties where the topic came up and they absorbed as much from the discussion as possible, making the information their own. Some have even been curious enough to search out “Ian Malcolm’s Homepage” on the Internet and get a superficial introduction to a complicated philosophy.  They have, in fact, breathed the air of the milieu. Having done so, they feel sufficiently informed to discuss the ideas and employ them in their own arguments and writings. We have seen, however, that even without this direct evidence of actual exposure to a specific work, artists breath the air of their milieu sometimes to the level of intoxication.

 Perhaps a more contemporary example is the recent popular discussion surrounding the marital status of Jesus.  Individuals who have not read the DaVinci Code will argue and discuss the true nature of the Sacred Blood because, thanks to Dan Brown, the ideas are in the air.  As this debate plays out in Western Society, more and more is published, videoed, and broadcast exposing even more people to the discussion.  While it may seem to many of us that almost everyone has now read the Da Vinci Code, few people have read the library of books that ignited Brown’s imagination or those that are the result of Brown’s imagination and success. After its initial success,  Holy Blood, Holy Grail languished on bookstore shelves for over a decade.  However, Ladies Church Circles across this country in their Bible studies debate the importance and status of Mary Magdalene with rancor and intensity.  The ideas are in the air.

Granted these are not weighty examples, but they are contemporary.  We could discuss how in the first half of the twentieth century, artists who hadn’t read a word of Freud used psychoanalytical ideas in their works—the ideas were in the air.  Consider also that the air can be filled with all kinds of ideas.  Sartre inhaled Communism and Existentialism, and exhaled the combination to infect other artists like Camus, if I may continue the metaphor.  During the Viet Nam War, Thoreau’s “Essay on Civil Disobedience” was repopularized and cited as justification for almost every act of antiwar protest.  Many of us suspect this essay helped link the antiwar movement with the civil rights movement—ideas dating back a full century were still in the air.

Ideas once let loose seem to live in the air like bacteria or a virus.  Two millennia ago, when the Greeks threw off their superstitious chains and invented all of the ologies we still study, something was in the air that kept these new ideas spreading and growing.  When the pent-up genius of humanity broke free after a 1000 years’ sleep in the Tuscan city of Florence, something was in the air.  We know that there was a conscious effort to return to the Classical past, but this Rebirth opened the door to the future and Mankind became the measure of all things.  Ideas seem to live in the very air of certain times like viruses waiting to infect the deep breathers and thinkers of those ages.

More to come