Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (3 page)

A great deal has been written about modernism as a response to the new and alienating late-nineteenth-century world of large cities, fleeting encounters, grim industrialism, and unprecedented squalor. Equally important, and maybe more so, was the modernist response to science per se, rather than to the technology and the social consequences it spawned. Many aspects of twentieth-century science – relativity, quantum theory, atomic theory, symbolic logic, stochastic processes, hormones, accessory food factors (vitamins) – are, or were at the time they were discovered, quite difficult. I believe that the difficulty of much of modern science has been detrimental to the arts. Put simply, artists have avoided engagement with most (I emphasise
most)
sciences. One of the consequences of this, as will become clearer towards the end of the book, is the rise of what John Brockman calls ‘the third culture,’ a reference to C. P. Snow’s idea of the Two Cultures – literary culture and science – at odds with one another.
¹⁰
For Brockman the third culture consists of a new kind of philosophy, a natural philosophy of man’s place in the world, in the universe, written predominantly by physicists and biologists, people best placed now to
make such assessments. This, for me at any rate, is one measure of the evolution in knowledge forms. It is a central message of the book.

I repeat here what I touched on in the preface:
The Modern Mind
is but one person’s version of twentieth-century thought. Even so, the scope of the book is ambitious, and I have had to be extremely selective in my use of material. There are some issues I have had to leave out more or less entirely. I would dearly have loved to have included an entire chapter on the intellectual consequences of the Holocaust. It certainly deserves something like the treatment Paul Fussell and Jay Winter have given to the intellectual consequences of World War I (see chapter 9). It would have fitted in well at the point where Hannah Arendt covered Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem in 1963. A case could be made for including the achievements of Henry Ford, and the moving assembly line, so influential in all our lives, or of Charlie Chaplin, one of the first great stars of the art form born at the turn of the century. But strictly speaking these were cultural advances, rather than intellectual, and so were reluctantly omitted. The subject of statistics has, mainly through the technical design of experiments, led to many conclusions and inferences that would otherwise have been impossible. Daniel Bell kindly alerted me to this fact, and it is not his fault that I didn’t follow it up. At one stage I planned a section on the universities, not just the great institutions like Cambridge, Harvard, Göttingen, or the Imperial Five in Japan, but the great specialist installations like Woods Hole, Scripps, Cern, or Akademgorodok, Russia’s science city. And I initially planned to visit the offices of
Nature, Science,
the
New York Review of Books,
the Nobel Foundation, some of the great university presses, to report on the excitement of such enterprises. Then there are the great mosque-libraries of the Arab world, in Tunisia Egypt, Yemen. All fascinating, but the book would have doubled in length, and weight.

One of the pleasures in writing this book, in addition to having an excuse to read all the works one should have read years ago, and rereading so many others, was the tours I did make of universities, meeting with writers, scientists, philosophers, filmmakers, academics, and others whose works feature in these pages. In all cases my methodology was similar. During the course of conversations that on occasion lasted for three hours or more, I would ask my interlocutor what in his/her opinion were the three most important ideas in his/her field in the twentieth century. Some people provided five ideas, while others plumped for just one. In economics three experts, two of them Nobel Prize winners, overlapped to the point where they suggested just four ideas between them, when they could have given nine.

The book is a narrative. One way of looking at the achievement of twentieth-century thought is to view it as the uncovering of the greatest narrative there is. Accordingly, most of the chapters move forward in time: I think of these as longitudinal or ‘vertical’ chapters. A few, however, are ‘horizontal’ or latitudinal. They are chapter I, on the year 1900; chapter 2, on Vienna at the turn of the century and the ‘halfway house’ character of its thought; chapter 8, on the
miraculous year of 1913; chapter 9, on the intellectual consequences of World War I; chapter 23, on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Paris. Here, the forward march of ideas is slowed down, and simultaneous developments, sometimes in the same place, are considered in detail. This is partly because that is what happened; but I hope readers will also find the change of pace welcome. I hope too that readers will find helpful the printing of key names and concepts in bold type. In a big book like this one, chapter titles may not be enough of a guide.

The four parts into which the text is divided do seem to reflect definite changes in sensibility. In part 1 I have reversed the argument in Frank Kermode’s
The Sense of an Ending
(1967).
¹¹
In fiction particularly, says Kermode, the way plots end – and the concordance they show with the events that precede them – constitutes a fundamental aspect of human nature, a way of making sense of the world. First we had angels – myths – going on forever; then tragedy; most recently perpetual crisis. Part I, on the contrary, reflects my belief that in all areas of life – physics, biology, painting, music, philosophy, film, architecture, transport – the beginning of the century heralded a feeling of new ground being broken, new stories to be told, and therefore new endings to be imagined. Not everyone was optimistic about the changes taking place, but sheer newness is very much a defining idea of this epoch. This belief continued until World War I.

Although chapter 9 specifically considers the intellectual consequences of World War I, there is a sense in which all of part 2, ‘Spengler to Animal Farm: Civilisations and Their Discontents’, might also be regarded in the same way. One does not have to agree with the arguments of Freud’s 1931 book, which bore the title
Civilisation and Its Discontents,
to accept that his phrase summed up the mood of an entire generation.

Part 3 reflects a quite different sensibility, at once more optimistic than the prewar period, perhaps the most positive moment of the positive hour, when in the West – or rather the non-Communist world – liberal social engineering seemed possible. One of the more curious aspects of twentieth-century history is that World War I sparked so much pessimism, whereas World War II had the opposite effect.

It is too soon to tell whether the sensibility that determines part 4 and is known as post-modernism represents as much of a break as some say. There are those who see it as simply an addendum to modernism, but in the sense in which it promises an era of post-Western thought, and even post-scientific thought (see pages 755–56), it may yet prove to be a far more radical break with the past. This is still to be resolved. If we
are
entering a postscientific age (and I for one am sceptical), then the new millennium will see as radical a break as any that has occurred since Darwin produced ‘the greatest idea, ever.’

The year 1900
A.D.
need not have been remarkable. Centuries are man-made conventions after all, and although people may think in terms of tens and hundreds and thousands, nature doesn’t. She surrenders her secrets piecemeal and, so far as we know, at random. Moreover, for many people around the world, the year 1900
A.D.
meant little. It was a Christian date and therefore not strictly relevant to any of the inhabitants of Africa, the Americas, Asia, or the Middle East. Nevertheless, the year that the West chose to call 1900
was
an unusual year by any standard. So far as intellectual developments – the subject of this book – were concerned, four very different kinds of breakthrough were reported, each one offering a startling reappraisal of the world and man’s place within it. And these new ideas were fundamental, changing the landscape dramatically.

The twentieth century was less than a week old when, on Saturday, 6 January, in Vienna, Austria, there appeared a review of a book that would totally revise the way man thought about himself. Technically, the book had been published the previous November, in Leipzig as well as Vienna, but it bore the date 1900, and the review was the first anyone had heard of it. The book was entitled
The Interpretation of Dreams,
and its author was a forty-four-year-old Jewish doctor from Freiberg in Moravia, called
Sigmund Freud.
¹
Freud, the eldest of eight children, was outwardly a conventional man. He believed passionately in punctuality. He wore suits made of English cloth, cut from material chosen by his wife. Very self-confident as a young man, he once quipped that ‘the good impression of my tailor matters to me as much as that of my professor.’
²
A lover of fresh air and a keen amateur mountaineer, he was nevertheless a ‘relentless’ cigar smoker.
³
Hanns Sachs, one of his disciples and a friend with whom he went mushrooming (a favourite pastime), recalled ‘deep set and piercing eyes and a finely shaped forehead, remarkably high at the temples.’
⁴
However, what drew the attention of friends and critics alike was not the eyes themselves but the look that shone out from them. According to his biographer Giovanni Costigan, ‘There was something baffling in this look – compounded partly of intellectual suffering, partly of distrust, partly of resentment.’
⁵

There was good reason. Though Freud might be a conventional man in his personal habits,
The Interpretation of Dreams
was a deeply controversial and – for
many people in Vienna – an utterly shocking book. To the world outside, the Austro-Hungarian capital in 1900 seemed a gracious if rather antiquated metropolis, dominated by the cathedral, whose Gothic spire soared above the baroque roofs and ornate churches below. The court was stuck in an unwieldy mix of pomposity and gloom. The emperor still dined in the Spanish manner, with all the silverware laid to the right of the plate.
⁶
The ostentation at court was one reason Freud gave for so detesting Vienna. In 1898 he had written, ‘It is a misery to live here and it is no atmosphere in which the hope of completing any difficult thing can survive.’
⁷
In particular, he loathed the ‘eighty families’ of Austria, ‘with their inherited insolence, their rigid etiquette, and their swarm of functionaries.’ The Viennese aristocracy had intermarried so many times that they were in fact one huge family, who addressed each other as
Du,
and by nicknames, and spent their time at each others’ parties.
⁸
This was not all Freud hated. The ‘abominable steeple of St Stefan’ he saw as the symbol of a clericalism he found oppressive. He was no music lover either, and he therefore had a healthy disdain for the ‘frivolous’ waltzes of Johann Strauss. Given all this, it is not hard to see why he should loathe his native city. And yet there are grounds for believing that his often-voiced hatred for the place was only half the picture. On II November 1918, as the guns fell silent after World War I, he made a note to himself in a memorandum, ‘Austria-Hungary is no more. I do not want to live anywhere else. For me emigration is out of the question. I shall live on with the torso and imagine that it is the whole.’
⁹

The one aspect of Viennese life Freud could feel no ambivalence about, from which there was no escape, was anti-Semitism. This had grown markedly with the rise in the Jewish population of the city, which went from 70,000 in 1873 to 147,000 in 1900, and as a result anti-Semitism had become so prevalent in Vienna that according to one account, a patient might refer to the doctor who was treating him as ‘Jewish swine.’
¹⁰
Karl Lueger, an anti-Semite who had proposed that Jews should be crammed on to ships to be sunk with all on board, had become mayor.
¹¹
Always sensitive to the slightest hint of anti-Semitism, to the end of his life Freud refused to accept royalties from any of his works translated into Hebrew or Yiddish. He once told Carl Jung that he saw himself as Joshua, ‘destined to explore the promised land of psychiatry.’
¹²

A less familiar aspect of Viennese intellectual life that helped shape Freud’s theories was the doctrine of ‘therapeutic nihilism.’ According to this, the diseases of society defied curing. Although adapted widely in relation to philosophy and social theory (Otto Weininger and Ludwig Wittgenstein were both advocates), this concept actually started life as a scientific notion in the medical faculty at Vienna, where from the early nineteenth century on there was a fascination with disease, an acceptance that it be allowed to run its course, a profound compassion for patients, and a corresponding neglect of therapy. This tradition still prevailed when Freud was training, but he reacted against it.
¹³
To us, Freud’s attempt at treatment seems only humane, but at the time it was an added reason why his ideas were regarded as out of the ordinary.

Freud rightly considered
The Interpretation of Dreams
to be his most significant achievement. It is in this book that the four fundamental building blocks of
Freud’s theory about human nature first come together: the
unconscious, repression, infantile sexuality
(leading to the Oedipus complex), and the
tripartite division
of the mind into ego, the sense of self; superego, broadly speaking, the conscience; and id, the primal biological expression of the unconscious. Freud had developed his ideas – and refined his technique – over a decade and a half since the mid–1880s. He saw himself very much in the biological tradition initiated by Darwin. After qualifying as a doctor, Freud obtained a scholarship to study under Jean-Martin Charcot, a Parisian physician who ran an asylum for women afflicted with incurable nervous disorders. In his research Charcot had shown that, under hypnosis, hysterical symptoms could be induced. Freud returned to Vienna from Paris after several months, and following a number of neurological writings (on cerebral palsy, for example, and on aphasia), he began a collaboration with another brilliant Viennese doctor, Josef Breuer (1842—1925). Breuer, also Jewish, was one of the most trusted doctors in Vienna, with many famous patients. Scientifically, he had made two major discoveries: on the role of the vagus nerve in regulating breathing, and on the semicircular canals of the inner ear, which, he found, controlled the body’s equilibrium. But Breuers importance for Freud, and for psychoanalysis, was his discovery in 1881 of the so-called talking cure.
¹⁴
For two years, beginning in December 1880, Breuer had treated for hysteria a Vienna-born Jewish girl, Bertha Pappenheim (1859—1936), whom he described for casebook purposes as ‘Anna O.’ Anna fell ill while looking after her sick father, who died a few months later. Her illness took the form of somnambulism, paralysis, a split personality in which she sometimes behaved as a naughty child, and a phantom pregnancy, though the symptoms varied. When Breuer saw her, he found that if he allowed her to talk at great length about her symptoms, they would disappear. It was, in fact, Bertha Pappenheim who labelled Breuer’s method the ‘talking cure’ (
Redecur
in German) though she also called it
Kaminfegen
– ‘chimney sweeping.’ Breuer noticed that under hypnosis Bertha claimed to remember how she had repressed her feelings while watching her father on his sickbed, and by recalling these ‘lost’ feelings she found she could get rid of them. By June 1882 Miss Pappenheim was able to conclude her treatment, ‘totally cured’ (though it is now known that she was admitted within a month to a sanatorium).
¹⁵

The case of Anna O. deeply impressed Freud. For a time he himself tried hypnosis with hysterical patients but abandoned this approach, replacing it with ‘free association’ – a technique whereby he allowed his patients to talk about whatever came into their minds. It was this technique that led to his discovery that, given the right circumstances, many people could recall events that had occurred in their early lives and which they had completely forgotten. Freud came to the conclusion that though forgotten, these early events could still shape the way people behaved. Thus was born the concept of the unconscious, and with it the notion of repression. Freud also realised that many of the early memories revealed – with difficulty – under free association were sexual in nature. When he further found that many of the ‘recalled’ events had in fact never taken place, he developed his notion of the Oedipus complex. In other
words the sexual traumas and aberrations falsely reported by patients were for Freud a form of code, showing what people secretly
wanted
to happen, and confirming that human infants went through a very early period of sexual awareness. During this period, he said, a son was drawn to the mother and saw himself as a rival to the father (the Oedipus complex) and vice versa with a daughter (the Electra complex). By extension, Freud said, this broad motivation lasted throughout a person’s life, helping to determine character.

These early theories of Freud were met with outraged incredulity and unremitting hostility. Baron Richard von Krafft-Ebing, the author of a famous book,
Psychopathia Sexualis,
quipped that Freud’s account of hysteria ‘sounds like a scientific fairy tale.’ The neurological institute of Vienna University refused to have anything to do with him. As Freud later said, ‘An empty space soon formed itself about my person.’
¹⁶

His response was to throw himself deeper into his researches and to put himself under analysis – with himself. The spur to this occurred after the death of his father, Jakob, in October 1896. Although father and son had not been very intimate for a number of years, Freud found to his surprise that he was unaccountably moved by his father’s death, and that many long-buried recollections spontaneously resurfaced. His dreams also changed. He recognised in them an unconscious hostility directed toward his father that hitherto he had repressed. This led him to conceive of dreams as ‘the royal road to the unconscious.’
¹⁷
Freud’s central idea in
The Interpretation of Dreams
was that in sleep the ego is like ‘a sentry asleep at its post.’
¹⁸
The normal vigilance by which the urges of the id are repressed is less efficient, and dreams are therefore a disguised way for the id to show itself. Freud was well aware that in devoting a book to dreams he was risking a lot. The tradition of interpreting dreams dated back to the Old Testament, but the German title of the book,
Die Traumdeutung,
didn’t exactly help. ‘Traumdeutung’ was the word used at the time to describe the popular practice of fairground fortune-tellers.
¹⁹

The early sales for
The Interpretation of Dreams
indicate its poor reception. Of the original 600 copies printed, only 228 were sold during the first two years, and the book apparently sold only 351 copies during its first six years in print.
²⁰
More disturbing to Freud was the complete lack of attention paid to the book by the Viennese medical profession.
²¹
The picture was much the same in Berlin. Freud had agreed to give a lecture on dreams at the university, but only three people turned up to hear him. In 1901, shortly before he was to address the Philosophical Society, he was handed a note that begged him to indicate ‘when he was coming to objectionable matter and make a pause, during which the ladies could leave the hall.’ Many colleagues felt for his wife, ‘the poor woman whose husband, formerly a clever scientist, had turned out to be a rather disgusting freak.’
²²

But if Freud felt that at times all Vienna was against him, support of sorts gradually emerged. In 1902, a decade and a half after Freud had begun his researches, Dr Wilhelm Stekel, a brilliant Viennese physician, after finding a review of
The Interpretation of Dreams
unsatisfactory, called on its author to discuss the book with him. He subsequently asked to be analysed by Freud and
a year later began to practise psychoanalysis himself. These two founded the ‘Psychological Wednesday Society,’ which met every Wednesday evening in Freud’s waiting room under the silent stare of his ‘grubby old gods,’ a reference to the archaeological objects he collected.
²³
They were joined in 1902 by Alfred Adler, by Paul Federn in 1904, by Eduard Hirschmann in 1905, by Otto Rank in 1906, and in 1907 by Carl Gustav Jung from Zurich. In that year the name of the group was changed to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and thereafter its sessions were held in the College of Physicians. Psychoanalysis had a good way to go before it would be fully accepted, and many people never regarded it as a proper science. But by 1908, for Freud at least, the years of isolation were over.