Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

There was thus in Germany what C. P. Snow would have called a ‘two cultures’ mentality, and with a vengeance. One of the effects of this was to highlight and deepen the divide between the natural sciences, on the one hand, and the arts and humanities on the other. Several of the sciences, by their very nature, formed a natural alliance with engineering, commerce and industry. But, at the same time, and despite their enormous successes, the sciences were looked down upon by artists. Whereas in a country like England, or America, the sciences and the arts were, to a much greater extent, seen as two sides of the same coin, jointly forming the intellectual elite, this was much less true in nineteenth-century Germany. A good example of this is Max Planck, the physicist who (in 1900) discovered the quantum, the idea that all energy comes in very small packets, or quanta. Planck came from a very religious, somewhat academic family, and was himself an excellent pianist. Despite the fact that his discovery of the quantum rates as one of the most important scientific discoveries of all time, in Planck’s own family the humanities were considered a superior form of knowledge to science.³⁷ His cousin, the historian Max Lenz, would jokingly pun that scientists (Naturforscher

) were in reality foresters (Naturförster) – or, as we would say, hicks.¹⁹

The work of Ernst Mach reinforces this point. Mach (1838–1916) was one of the most impressive and ardent reductionists, with many discoveries to his credit, including the importance of the semicircular canals in the inner ear for bodily equilibrium, and that bodies travelling at more than the speed of sound create two shock waves, one at the front and the other at the rear, as a result of the vacuum their high speed creates (this is why we speak of a ‘Mach number’ on Concorde, or used to). But Mach was implacably opposed to metaphysics of any kind and denounced what he called ‘misapplied concepts’, like God, nature and soul. He regarded Freud’s concept of the ‘ego’ as a ‘useless hypothesis’. He felt that even the concept of the ‘self’ was ‘irretrievable’, that all knowledge could be reduced to sensation and that the task of science was to describe sense data in the simplest and most neutral manner possible. Mach was widely read in his day: both Lenin and his disciples, and the Vienna Circle, were adherents. Mach firmly believed that science had the answers, and that such subjects as philosophy and psychoanalysis were largely useless.³⁸

This profound division – between the sciences on the one hand, and the arts and humanities on the other – had serious consequences. One that is particularly relevant here was that the intuition of artists was given more respect, accorded a far higher status, in Germany than anywhere else at the time. This was reflected in a second division, over and above that between the arts and the sciences, between Kultur

and Zivilisation. This was the opposition between Geist

and Macht, the realm of intellectual or spiritual endeavour and the realm of power and political control. It is important to say that the relationship between Geist and Macht, whether culture or the state should take precedence, was never satisfactorily resolved in Germany. The consequences were momentous, as a brief excursion into political/social history will show.