Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (14 page)

Then there were the influences of science. Outwardly, Kandinsky was an austere man, who wore thick glasses. His manner was authoritative, but his mystical side made him sometimes prone to overinterpret events, as happened with the discovery of the electron. ‘The collapse of the atom was equated, in my soul, with the collapse of the whole world. Suddenly, the stoutest walls crumbled. Everything became uncertain, precarious and insubstantial.’
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Everything?

With so many influences acting on Kandinsky, it is perhaps not surprising he was the one to ‘discover’ abstraction. There was one final precipitating factor, one precise moment when, it could be said, abstract art was born. In 1908 Kandinsky was in Murnau, a country town south of Munich, near the small lake of Staffelsee and the Bavarian Alps, on the way to Garmisch, where Strauss was building his villa on the strength of his success with
Salomé.
One afternoon, after sketching in the foothills of the Alps, Kandinsky returned home, lost in thought. ‘On opening the studio door, I was suddenly confronted by a picture of indescribable and incandescent loveliness. Bewildered, I stopped, staring at it. The painting lacked all subject, depicted no identifiable object and
was entirely composed of bright colour-patches. Finally I approached closer and only then saw it for what it really was – my own painting, standing on its side … One thing became clear to me: that objectiveness, the depiction of objects, needed no place in my paintings, and was indeed harmful to them.’
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Following this incident, Kandinsky produced a series of landscapes, each slightly different from the one before. Shapes became less and less distinct, colours more vivid and more prominent. Trees are just about recognisable as trees, the smoke issuing from a train’s smokestack is just identifiable as smoke. But nothing is certain. His progress to abstraction was unhurried, deliberate. This process continued until, in 1911, Kandinsky painted three series of pictures, called Impressions, Improvisations, and Compositions, each one numbered, each one totally abstract. By the time he had completed the series, his divorce had come through.
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Thus there is a curious personal parallel with Schoenberg and his creation of atonality.

At the turn of the century there were six great philosophers then living, although Nietzsche died before 1900 was out. The other five were Henri Bergson, Benedetto Croce, Edmund Husserl, William James and Bertrand Russell. At this end of the century, Russell is by far the best remembered, in Europe, James in the United States, but Bergson was probably the most accessible thinker of the first decade and, after 1907, certainly the most famous.

Bergson was born in Paris in the rue Lamartine in 1859, the same year as Edmund Husserl.
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This was also the year in which Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species
appeared. Bergson was a singular individual right from childhood. Delicate, with a high forehead, he spoke very slowly, with long breaths between utterances. This was slightly off-putting, and at the Lycée Condorcet, his high school in Paris, he came across as so reserved that his fellow students felt ‘he had no soul,’ a telling irony in view of his later theories.
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For his teachers, however, any idiosyncratic behaviour was more than offset by his mathematical brilliance. He graduated well from Condorcet and, in 1878, secured admission to the Ecole Normale, a year after Emile Durkheim, who would become the most famous sociologist of his day.
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After teaching in several schools, Bergson applied twice for a post at the Sorbonne but failed both times. Durkheim is believed responsible for these rejections, jealousy the motive. Undeterred, Bergson wrote his first book,
Time and Free Will
(1889), and then
Matter and Memory
(1896). Influenced by Franz Brentano and Husserl, Bergson argued forcefully that a sharp distinction should be drawn between physical and psychological processes. The methods evolved to explore the physical world, he said, were inappropriate to the study of mental life. These books were well received, and in 1900 Bergson was appointed to a chair at the Collège de France, overtaking Durkheim.

But it was
L’Evolution créatrice
(Creative Evolution), which appeared in 1907, that established Bergson’s world reputation, extending it far beyond academic life. The book was quickly published in English, German, and Russian, and Bergson’s weekly lectures at the Collège de France turned into crowded and fashionable social events, attracting not only the Parisian but the international
elite. In 1914, the Holy Office, the Vatican office that decided Catholic doctrine, decided to put Bergson’s works on its index of prohibited books.
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This was a precaution very rarely imposed on non-Catholic writers, so what was the fuss about? Bergson once wrote that ‘each great philosopher has only one thing to say, and more often than not gets no further than an attempt to express it.’ Bergson’s own central insight was that time is real. Hardly original or provocative, but the excitement lay in the details. What drew people’s attention was his claim that the future does not in any sense exist. This was especially contentious because in 1907 the scientific determinists, bolstered by recent discoveries, were claiming that life was merely the unfolding of an already existing sequence of events, as if time were no more than a gigantic film reel, where the future is only that part which has yet to be played. In France this owed a lot to the cult of scientism popularised by Hippolyte Taine, who claimed that if everything could be broken down to atoms, the future was by definition utterly predictable.
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Bergson thought this was nonsense. For him there were two types of time, physics-time and real time. By definition, he said, time, as we normally understand it, involves memory; physics-time, on the other hand, consists of ‘one long strip of nearly identical segments,’ where segments of the past perish almost instantaneously. ‘Real’ time, however, is not reversible – on the contrary, each new segment takes its colour from the past. His final point, the one people found most difficult to accept, was that since memory is necessary for time, then time itself must to some extent be psychological. (This is what the Holy Office most objected to, since it was an interference in God’s domain.) From this it followed for Bergson that the evolution of the universe, insofar as it can be known, is itself a psychological process also. Echoing Brentano and Husserl, Bergson was saying that evolution, far from being a truth ‘out there’ in the world, is itself a product, an ‘intention’ of mind.
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What really appealed to the French at first, and then to increasing numbers around the world, was Bergson’s unshakeable belief in human freedom of choice and the unscientific effects of an entity he called the
élan vital,
the vital impulse, or life force. For Bergson, well read as he was in the sciences, rationalism was never enough. There had to be something else on top, ‘vital phenomena’ that were ‘inaccessible to reason,’ that could only be apprehended by intuition. The vital force further explained why humans are qualitatively different from other forms of life. For Bergson, an animal, almost by definition, was a specialist – in other words, very good at one thing (not unlike philosophers). Humans, on the other hand, were nonspecialists, the result of reason but also of intuition.
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Herein lay Bergson’s attraction to the younger generation of intellectuals in France, who crowded to his lectures. Known as the ‘liberator,’ he became the figure ‘who had redeemed Western thought from the nineteenth-century “religion of science.”’ T. E. Hulme, a British acolyte, confessed that Bergson had brought ‘relief to an ‘entire generation’ by dispelling ‘the nightmare of determinism.’
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An entire generation is an exaggeration, for there was no shortage of critics. Julien Benda, a fervent rationahst, said he would ‘cheerfully have killed Bergson’
if his views could have been stifled with him.
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For the rationalists, Bergson’s philosophy was a sign of degeneration, an atavistic congeries of opinions in which the rigours of science were replaced by quasi-mystical ramblings. Paradoxically, he came under fire from the church on the grounds that he paid too much attention to science. For a time, little of this criticism stuck.
Creative Evolution
was a runaway success (T. S. Eliot went so far as to call Bergsonism ‘an epidemic’).
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America was just as excited, and William James confessed that ‘Bergson’s originality is so profuse that many of his ideas baffle me entirely.’
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Elan vital,
the ‘life force,’ turned into a widely used cliché, but ‘life’ meant not only life but intuition, instinct, the very opposite of reason. As a result, religious and metaphysical mysteries, which science had seemingly killed off, reappeared in ‘respectable’ guise. William James, who had himself written a book on religion, thought that Bergson had ‘killed intellectualism definitively and without hope of recovery. I don’t see how it can ever revive again in its ancient platonizing role of claiming to be the most authentic, intimate, and exhaustive definer of the nature of reality.’
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Bergson’s followers believed
Creative Evolution
had shown that reason itself is just one aspect of life, rather than the all-important judge of what mattered. This overlapped with Freud, but it also found an echo, much later in the century, in the philosophers of postmodernism.

One of the central tenets of Bergsonism was that the future is unpredictable. Yet in his will, dated 8 February 1937, he said, ‘I would have become a convert [to Catholicism], had I not seen in preparation for years the formidable wave of anti-Semitism which is to break upon the world. I wanted to remain among those who tomorrow will be persecuted.’
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Bergson died in 1941 of pneumonia contracted from having stood for hours in line with other Jews, forced to register with the authorities, then under Nazi military occupation.

Throughout the nineteenth century organised religion, and Christianity in particular, came under sustained assault from many of the sciences, the discoveries of which contradicted the biblical account of the universe. Many younger members of the clergy urged the Vatican to respond to these findings, while traditionalists wanted the church to explain them away and allow a return to familiar verities. In this debate, which threatened a deep divide, the young radicals were known as modernists.

In September 1907 the traditionalists finally got what they had been praying for when, from Rome,
Pope Pius X
published his encyclical,
Pascendi Dominici Gregis.
This unequivocally condemned modernism in all its forms. Papal encyclicals (letters to all bishops of the church) rarely make headlines now, but they were once very reassuring for the faithful, and
Pascendi
was the first of the century.
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The ideas that Pius was responding to may be grouped under four headings. There was first the general attitude of science, developed since the Enlightenment, which brought about a change in the way that man looked at the world around him and, in the appeal to reason and experience that science typified, constituted a challenge to established authority. Then there was the specific science of Darwin and his concept of evolution. This had two effects. First, evolution carried the Copernican and Galilean revolutions
still further toward the displacement of man from a specially appointed position in a limited universe. It showed that man had arisen from the animals, and was essentially no different from them and certainly not set apart in any way. The second effect of evolution was as metaphor: that ideas, like animals, evolve, change, develop. The theological modernists believed that the church – and belief – should evolve too, that in the modern world dogma as such was out of place. Third, there was the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724—1804), who argued that there were limits to reason, that human observations of the world were ‘never neutral, never free of priorly imposed conceptual judgements’, and because of that one could never
know
that God exists. And finally there were the theories of Henri Bergson. As we have seen, he actually supported spiritual notions, but these were very different from the traditional teachings of the church and closely interwoven with science and reason.
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The theological modernists believed that the church should address its own ‘self-serving’ forms of reason, such as the Immaculate Conception and the infallibility of the pope. They also wanted a reexamination of church teaching in the light of Kant, pragmatism, and recent scientific developments. In archaeology there were the discoveries and researches of the German school, who had made so much of the quest for the historical Jesus, the evidence for his actual, temporal existence rather than his
meaning
for the faithful. In anthropology, Sir James Frazer’s
The Golden Bough
had shown the ubiquity of magical and religious rites, and their similarities in various cultures. This great diversity of religions had therefore undermined Christian claims to unique possession of truth – people found it hard to believe, as one writer said, ‘that the greater part of humanity is plunged in error.’
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With the benefit of hindsight, it is tempting to see
Pascendi
as yet another stage in ‘the death of God.’ However, most of the young clergy who took part in the debate over theological modernism did not wish to leave the church; instead they hoped it would ‘evolve’ to a higher plane.

The pope in Rome, Pius X (later Saint Pius), was a working-class man from Riese in the northern Italian province of the Veneto. Unsophisticated, having begun his career as a country priest, he was not surprisingly an uncompromising conservative and not at all afraid to get into politics. He therefore responded to the young clergy not by appeasing their demands but by carrying the fight to them. Modernism was condemned outright, without any prevarication, as ‘nothing but the union of the faith with false philosophy.’
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Modernism, for the pope and traditional Catholics, was defined as ‘an exaggerated love of what is modern, an infatuation for modern ideas.’ One Catholic writer even went so far as to say it was ‘an abuse of what is modern.’
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Pascendi,
however, was only the most prominent part of a Vatican-led campaign against modernism. The Holy Office, the Cardinal Secretary of State, decrees of the Consistorial Congregation, and a second encyclical,
Editae,
published in 1910, all condemned the trend, and Pius repeated the argument in several papal letters to cardinals and the Catholic Institute in Paris. In his decree,
Lamentabili,
he singled out for condemnation no fewer than sixty-five specific propositions of modernism. Moreover, candidates for higher orders, newly appointed confessors, preachers,
parish priests, canons, and bishops’ staff were all obliged to swear allegiance to the pope, according to a formula ‘which reprobates the principal modernist tenets.’ And the primary role of dogma was reasserted: ‘Faith is an act of the intellect made under the sway of the will.’
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