Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

Nietzsche thought the scientific cult of objectivity irrelevant, that – as the romantics had said (though for him they were often hypocrites too) – one made one’s life, one created one’s values for oneself – only by acting did one discover one’s self. ‘The self-discipline and constant self-testing which concentrated and intensified life . . . were at the opposite pole from the self-denial and repression which . . . diverting the will to power inwards against the self, breed as in Christianity, self-hatred, guilt, rancour towards the healthy, fulfilled and superior . . . In a world characterised by the flux of consciousness and bare of any metaphysical guarantee of moral meaning, the idea of

vocation offered an obvious way of testing, forging, stabilising the self in a social context, through chosen, regulated, disciplined activity, and self-chosen acceptance of its obligations.’⁷³

Underneath it all, modernism may be seen as the aesthetic equivalent of Freud’s unconscious. It too is concerned with the inner state, and with an attempt to resolve the modern incoherence, to marry romanticism with naturalism, to order science, rationalism and democracy while at the same time highlighting their shortcomings and deficiencies. Modernism was an aesthetic attempt to go beyond the surface of things, its non-representationalism is highly self-conscious and intuitive, its works have a high degree of self-signature, yet another climax of individuality. Its many ‘-isms’ – impressionism, post-impressionism, expressionism, fauvism, cubism, futurism, symbolism, imagism, divisionism, cloisonnism, vorticism, Dadaism, surrealism – are a sequence of avant-gardes, understood as revolutionary experiments into future consciousness.⁷⁴

Modernism was also a celebration that the old regimes of culture were gone and buried, and that art, alongside science, was taking us into new concepts of mental and emotional association, its experimental forms – both absurd and meaningless at the same time – redeeming ‘the formless universe of contingency’.⁷⁵ There was too an impatience for change, amid the belief of the Marxists (still a new ‘faith’ at the time) that revolution was inevitable. Nihilism was never far beneath the surface, as people worried about the impermanent nature of truth, as thrown up by the new sciences, and by the very nature of the human self in the new metropolises – more elusive than ever. The doctrine of ‘therapeutic nihilism’, that nothing could be done, about the ills either of the body, or of society, flowered in metropolises like Vienna. The apposite work here is Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, a fantasy ostensibly about a work of art that functions as a soul, which reveals the ‘real’ self of the main character.

Which is what made The Interpretation of Dreams such an important and timely book and set of theories. Freud (according to non-specialists inhabiting a ‘pre-revisionist world’) had introduced ‘the respectability of clinical proof’ to an area of the mind that was hitherto a morass of jumbled images.

⁷⁶ His wider theories brought a coherence to the apparently irrational recesses of the self and dignified them in the name of science. In 1900 this appeared to be the way forward.

Conclusion

The Electron, the Elements and the Elusive Self

The Cavendish Laboratory, in the University of Cambridge, England, is arguably the most distinguished scientific institution in the world. Since it was established in the late nineteenth century it has produced some of the most consequential and innovative advances of all time. These include the discovery of the electron in 1897, the discovery of the isotopes of the light elements (1919), the splitting of the atom (also in 1919), the discovery of the proton (1920), of the neutron (1932), the unravelling of the structure of DNA (1953), and the discovery of pulsars (1967). Since the Nobel Prize was instituted in 1901, more than twenty Cavendish and Cavendish-trained physicists have won the prize for either physics or chemistry.¹