A. Introduction
Our focus in this module is the period between 1650 and 1750, a period of remarkable optimism in the life of the human city. This optimism was based on the belief that human reason, operating inductively and deductively, could solve many of the problems that beset humanity. An optimistic culture that believes in rational progress is a nurturing environment for the concept of reality. If earthly life is considered all gloom and doom, then the principle of reality is going to be less appealing. People will seek to escape earthly reality in a higher truth, whether this truth is defined as heaven or Neo-Platonic forms.
The reality principle became embedded in Western culture when Europe began to regard itself as a progressive society and to reap the benefits from its military might, economic growth and cultural achievements. The concept of reality did not stand on its own, however, but was intimately related to the belief that men and women were rational creatures who could mould reality to their purpose. This perceived potential for progress made Europeans keen to explore nature (i.e. the real world) in order to understand its laws and adapt them to human purposes. Scholars also sought to understand human nature, which they believed was as fundamentally rational and law abiding, as its external counterpart. Reason and reality were linked in a law-abiding universe.
The primary tool for understanding nature and human nature, at least by the seventeenth century, was no longer religion or philosophy; it was science. During the seventeenth-century, science began to demolish the medieval worldview in ways that humanism and other intellectual movements could never hope to do. What science offered was a method or technique for capturing reality and harnessing its power. Prior to seventeenth-century, man’s knowledge of the physical universe was not based on what we today would called scientific inquiry but was an amalgam for concepts and speculations taken from classical antiquity and dovetailed with medieval theology. The mental giant who dominated science-related inquiry prior to the seventeenth century was the Greek philosopher Aristotle, whose towering status needed to be dislodged before any marriage of reason and reality could take place.
B. The Cultural Legacy of Humanism and Protestantism
Although this module implicitly argues that the fundamental breakthrough for the reality principle occurred in science during the seventeenth century, we will take up a little bit of space to discuss some cultural developments between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Science does not, and did not, develop in a cultural vacuum; it was related to the forces of secularization that took place earlier. At the risk of oversimplifying complex cultural and intellectual developments between 1450 and 1650, we can describe the period as the gradual erosion of the medieval worldview and the evolution of a recognizably modern way of looking at the world. The medieval synthesis was assailed on a number of fronts. The growing urban centers gave rise to a well-educated middle class whose connection to commerce and their drive to discover new trading markets and routes gave them a broader perspective on the world and made them increasingly impatient with the medieval church and the feudal, aristocratic society that it legitimized. The increasing power of the monarchy and the concomitant rise of nationalism made the concept of a united Europe, much less a Holy Roman Empire, untenable. Humanist ideals and education promoted a desire for a more practical and distinctly secular learning that, without challenging them directly, eroded medieval ideals. Some modern writers, like Boccaccio, displayed overwhelmingly secular view of the human condition and it became more common for them to write in the vernacular or common language of their country, rather than church Latin. Without its former control over language and literature, the Roman Catholic Church was put on the defensive.
Some of these elements contributed to the Protestant Reformation that tore the unity Europe apart between 1517 and 1560. By the latter date, the Roman Catholic Church had reconstituted itself and had begun to engage in a counter crusade for the souls of European men and women. But in order to do so, the Church was forced to enlist the support of rulers and princes in those Catholic nations and regions where it still dominated. In order to maintain that support, the once mighty Catholic Church had to acquiesce to the separation of Church and State and to relinquish most of its power in the secular domain.
The Protestant Reformation was a historical anomaly because, for a short period of time, its success depended on the labouring poor, who had become dissatisfied with the feudal apparatus as signified by the power of the Church hierarchy. In particular, they objected to the complex array of tithes and indulgences that the Roman Catholic Church instituted in order to maintain its wealth, status, and power vis a vis the rising monarchs and princes. The local nobility, and even national rulers, were able to manipulate this mass opposition to consolidate their power. Once that power was established, whether in Protestant or Catholic form, however, any further rebellion against authority by the labouring poor was crushed without mercy. In Germany, for example, a great peasant rebellion took place in the 1520s that gave birth to numerous Protestant sects – including Baptists, Anabaptists, and Mennonites. Martin Luther was so horrified at the way in which his religious revolution became a social revolution that, by 1525, he was encouraging German princes to slaughter any rebellious peasants. They were only too happy to oblige.
For a short period of history, however, the poor and formerly powerless appeared upon the scene of European culture. They would not do so again with any vitality until the French Revolution and, not with any cultural significance until the European Revolutions of 1848. As much as we might wish to include the lower orders in a discussion of the development of European civilization, even as a blip on the radar screen of European culture, they fall out of the picture. Working class culture did not achieve any general significance until the mid nineteenth century. Only in modern times did historians begin to undertaken the task of reconstituting the popular culture of the people during the early modern period.
The cultural impact of movements like Humanism Protestantism was confined to the upper and middle classes. The long-term influence of these cultural movements is difficult to measure with any certainty. Arguments for cultural influence need to take into account many other complex political and economic developments, including:
- the opening of the Atlantic and the discovery of a much bigger and more diverse world overseas than any medieval man or woman could have ever imagined;
- a century of warfare between the developing nation states, that stimulated the development not only of professional armies but also all kinds of mechanical discoveries and developments that would make technological change a constant in European society;
- the commercial revolution, or the shift to a more recognizably capitalist economy, where the values of the towns slowly began to eclipse the virtues of the country;
- the adoption of mercantilist (commercial trade) ideas by political leaders who began to view colonial trade as a weapon of economic warfare;
- an increasingly global economy that meant that cultural ideas, as well as raw resources and finished materials, now traveled around the world at a much faster speed;
- the new political doctrine of the balance of power that related to a hegemonic shift of dominance from the south to the north and the increasing weakness of those aging empires that attempted to thwart the rise of nationalism.
In terms of humanism, the most visible legacies were in the continuing emphasis on polite manners, elaborate clothing, elegant speech and beautiful public and private architecture that reached its pinnacle in the courts of France and Spain. The humanist attachment to more simple Greek and Roman values, however, was transformed into a highly elaborate form of arts and crafts – the baroque – that soon applied to paintings, tapestries, ornate domed buildings, and, of course, to the music in the form of the opera and the complex and mathematical compositions of Bach. Less obvious, but equally important in the long run, was the development of universities and educational programs that were integrated and could be used to establish an educated, rather than landed, elite with a national, rather than a territorial, perspective.
The influence of Protestantism on the secular domain is a much more difficult scholarly nettle to grasp. The German sociologist Max Weber made what was perhaps the most profound case for the influence of the Protestant ethos. In a controversial work entitled The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber argued that modern capitalism would have been inconceivable were it not for Protestantism. Protestantism legitimized the work of the capitalist as a calling or vocation like any other. It also provided the emphasis on self-discipline, austerity and thrift that was indispensable for building up a capitalist fund for future investment. Finally, the ambiguity surrounding whether or not one was saved provided an incentive for early capitalists to achieve worldly success – a sign, if not a guarantee, that heaven favoured the godly individual.
Weber’s controversial ideas were, and still are, hotly disputed by scholars, especially Marxist scholars who view the development of capitalism as an economic phenomena and who believe that religious ideals are nothing more than cultural superstructures based on the economic mode of production in a given society. A more promising angle for measuring the cultural influence of Protestantism – and one that relates more directly to the theme of our unit – is its assault on miracles. In order to be able to adopt a realistic and rationalistic perspective on the human condition, it is first necessary to rid the earthly environment of any miraculous or excessively spiritual content. Early Protestants endorsed a direct relationship between God and mankind that problematized the nature of saintly or diabolical forces, not at first as non-existent, but certainly as blasphemous. Since man’s only valid relationship was with his maker, any attempt to manipulate the forces of good and evil to one’s own advantage, was inherently sinful. That is precisely why Protestant sects destroyed statues and pictures of the saints and attempted to eradicate the cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus. That is also why early Protestant communities were so eager to root out and destroy witches.
The protestant ethic emphasized rationality and reality by default, because good Protestants could not stomach any power or credibility given to the concept of the miraculous. By rooting out both good and bad miracles wherever they might appear, Protestants legitimized only one kind of reality – one that conformed to the laws of reason and nature. They thereby eliminated an entire way of knowing – an alternative reality. In this quest, they were more successful than they could have wished. Whereas the belief in witchcraft and magic existed in all social classes in 1600, by 1700 “witches, magicians, and miscellaneous enchantments were disappearing from elite culture.” Gradually, they would also become invisible or go underground in popular culture as well.
Bad magic was used to cause harm, so its disappearance might not be considered as culturally significant as the decline of ‘good magic’, whose purpose was to unlock the secrets of nature. Good magic had a long and powerful tradition, and was a primary technique of the alchemists – medieval proto-scientists who attempted to turn base metals into gold – without which modern chemistry would have been inconceivable. Suddenly, however, ‘good magic’ was classified as a wholly illegitimate method for obtaining information about the natural world. If the Protestant scientist was going to unearth nature’s truths, he or she needed to adopt a very different and highly disciplined approach — one that neither blasphemed God nor used any suspicious methods for penetrating the secrets of the universe. Thus was invented the scientific method of inquiry.
The scientific method not only reoriented attention from the world of miracles to the real world, but eventually it privileged the real world of physical bodies over the ideal world of forms and values. With the dawning of the scientific revolution, the European mind began to explore reality with restlessness, obsession and a deep desire to catalogue the minutiae of existence. Needless to say, such a perspective was entirely foreign to medieval or even the humanist mind. It was like no other perspective on the face of the earth.
C. The Scientific View of the World
In Novum Organum, his magnum opus, Francis Bacon (1561 1626) pointed out that there were illegitimate ways of discovering nature’s secrets; but these were spiritually out of bounds and untrustworthy. A good Protestant sought a more “reliable, truthful, and usable knowledge of the world of nature” than that found in ancient books and magical medieval treatises. Bacon had no doubt that this knowledge was more Godly and reliable than anything previously available. The question was how best to discover this scientific truth. For Bacon, a good Protestant gained knowledge by hard work and discipline; in other words, he or she adopted the scientific method.
Bacon’s chief target was not the miraculous view of the world, which he found generally unreliable, but the scholastic medieval philosophy derived from the teachings of Aristotle. Aristotelian science started with definitions of, or questions about, the meaning of reality, rather than by carefully documenting that reality. The medieval scholastics, who annotated and adapted the science of Aristotle, followed their master by: 1) assuming that all objects, even inert matter, were alive and in the process of becoming; 2) searching for definitions of the essence of objects or what they ideally were striving to be. Once one understood the essence of an object, one could explain why it acted the way it did. While these ideas may seem unscientific, and even strange to us, they conformed to the classical and humanist interest in knowing why objects existed and what their role was in the great Chain of Being that encompassed all of life. In other words, the big questions of philosophy and metaphysics rather than the little questions of science.
Real scientific inquiry only occurred, argued Bacon, when one stopped asking these metaphysical kinds of questions and practiced something that later came to be called empiricism. Empiricism is the close and detailed observation, perhaps with the aid of experiments, in order to slowly and painstakingly discover its properties. “Scientific truths are not something that we postulate at the beginning and then explore in all its ramifications, that that it is something that we find at the end, after a long process of investigation, experiment or intermediate thought.” Only by closely observing and documenting reality can we arrive at a meaningful understanding of things.
One can only get at this limited reality if asks the right questions and if one is systematic in one’s approach to documenting the characteristics of matter. The new kind of scientist that emerged was much more interested in what the properties of matter were and how things worked, rather than why they existed or why they worked the way they did. The most accurate information we can obtain about the physical universe came to involve measuring, describing properties, documenting changes that occurred when different kinds of matter came into contact with other matter. These concrete observations could be painstakingly built up, by the process of induction into more general truths. The study of many individual leaves on many different kinds of trees, of different kinds, for example, can tell us about what exactly characterizes a leaf and what is general to all leaves and specific to an individual leaf. It should not surprise us that this kind of careful observation of objects also corresponds to the technique of a modern novelist, who builds from what is unique and what is more universal in his/her explorations of the human city.
The Baconian emphasis on empiricism and induction from facts could only have gotten science and the representation of reality in the West so far. An enormous amount of painstaking observations leading to carefully constructed truths seems like a lot of effort for a potentially small gain. Scientific progress needed to move much faster than that if it was to understand and control nature, in other words if it were to have a practical purpose. Bacon believed that a scientific community, like the one he described in The New Atlantis, could harness the power of nature by creating machines to put natural forces to work. But his limited version of the scientific method could never lead to a self-sustaining technological revolution because: 1) it discounted deductive reasoning, and, in particular, 2) it ignored the role of mathematics. Enter Rene Descartes.
Much more than Bacon, Descartes (1596-1650) dissolved the increasingly fragile medieval cosmology and ushered in the era modern science by demonstrating the power of deducing arguments rigorously from axiomatic or a priori premises. Descartes was a young French nobleman who received a traditional university education at the Sorbonne in Paris. There he was exposed to Aristotelian philosophy and theology, which he thoroughly detested. Instead of learning anything practical or productive, Descartes said, he learned a lot of nonsense about essences and becoming.
Fortunately for Descartes, he found some relief in mathematics, which could be applied to solve practical problems. Later on, Descartes combined his love of mathematics with his skepticism about Aristotelian science to develop a new scientific method. Descartes began with the question, what can possibly know with certainty. Unlike Bacon, he initially discounted most observations about matter, since these came from the senses, which were inherently misleading. Descartes’ starting point was the rational mind. That the mind existed and was rational was the first axiom that could not be disputed. The rational mind, therefore, was the fundamental reality. The other reality, that of extended reality, was only real to the extent that it conformed to the laws of reason.
The laws of reason, when developed as axioms apart from sensory information, were highly quantitative, measurable, and with rational effort, reducible to formulas or equations. Arguing that it lacked any essence, that we could ever discover and should not waste our time trying to discover, Descartes transformed the world outside the mind into a logical clockwork universe. The motions and forces of this universe operated according to the laws of physics and were machine like. Even humans, when considered only as extended matter rather than as rational beings, who could understand nature’s laws, were pneumatic machines.
By turning all of matter into simple or complex machines, Descartes went far beyond Bacon’s desire to build practical machines that harnessed the forces of nature. Now nature itself was a big machine, and its technological laws were just waiting to be discovered and applied. Descartes’ enormous contribution to modern physics and scientific progress should be obvious. Less obvious perhaps is the way that Descartes finished off the unreal world of miracles and freed science from the control of religion. As a complex machine with axiomatic laws, the Cartesian universe was a miraculous place where no miracles ever happened or ever could happen. God served a useful purpose as the first cause who put his clockwork universe into action. But once the machine was in motion, the rational rules of cause and effect, and axioms like the constancy of matter or the conservation of energy, were what kept the machine ticking. The job of the scientist was to explore God’s creation, not to try to understand the superior reality of God or the spiritual essence of nature. At best, the new scientist could appreciate God in his creation. Theologians who looked for connections between biblical passages and nature’s truth, or philosophers who approached God’s creation metaphysically, were dealing in speculations that were irrelevant to science.
Earthly existence and the universe began to lose its spiritual character after Descartes. Modern science could only approach extended matter through the deductive lens of reason. Human reason was a very precise tool for understanding a universe that was unified, ordered, and interlocked with its operations. A single mind might even be able to work out the entire universe, but only as a rationally (i.e. mathematically) ordered system. Nature and human nature were linked in the mind by reason. Reason operated deductively from first principles, axioms or primary truths that worked downwards to detail all the cogs and wheels in the machine. Machines have no room for spirits. Descartes himself ran into difficulties when it came to talking about the existence of the human soul – the ghost in the machine –, which he thought might be located in the pineal gland located near the brain.
Although Descartes should be credited with the invention of modern science and, especially, the focus on a new and more realistic approach to the study of matter, Baconian science still had an important role to play. Descartes’ emphasis on rational deduction from axioms meant that facts and experiments had a very small role to play in Cartesian science. Descartes might use an experiment to “confirm a hunch or hypothesis” but always closed down the enquiry as quickly as possible. Moreover, he always remained suspicious of facts because, ultimately, these were based on sensory, and therefore, unreliable, information. The famous scientists who followed Descartes and Bacon combined inductive and deductive methods to arrive at scientific truth. While in theory the two approaches were quite distinct and incompatible, in practice they complimented one another very well. The famous scientist Huygens, for example, criticized Bacon for his lack of mathematical knowledge but also complained that Descartes did not back up his theories sufficiently with experiments. After Descartes and Bacon, scientists might lean towards mathematical axioms or observations combined with experiments, but they alternated between the two approaches in order to maximize their understanding and control of the new reality.
Why have we spent so much time talking about scientists like Descartes and Bacon in a module on the representation of reality in Western literature? If you think about it a little, you should be able to understand why. When western writers began to focus on reality in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their perspective mirrored that of the scientists. The reality they saw was simultaneously factual and mechanical; it explored extended matter in detail with the goal of observing universal laws at work. “The idea of a clockwork universe was the great contribution of seventeenth-century science to the eighteenth-century age of reason.” The age of reason, in turn, suggested that, by exploring this new redefined reality, and deriving its laws, we could create a better society. Nature and human nature are systems designed perfectly to serve a function. The better we understand the design, the more we can eliminate anything that gets in the way of serving a purpose. That purpose was to stimulate progresses. The realistic writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with very few exceptions, were optimists with a fundamental in progress.
D. Progress and Enlightenment
The seventeenth-century scientific revolution, which was concerned primarily with the mechanistic laws of motion, reached its high point in the synthesis of astronomy and mechanics in the writings of Sir Isaac Newton. Newton physics captured the imagination of all Europeans. It made it possible for scientists and non-scientists alike to view the entire universe as something governed by a “fundamental system of law” that conformed to human reason. By 1660, these new ideas were spreading well outside the scientific community and beginning to effect a major intellectual transition that contributed to a new view of civilization. The French writer and historian Fontenelle, for example, began to look at history as a particular vision of reality rather than moral lessons or hagiographies. His biographies of great historical characters were organized in terms that are historiographical. In other words, he linked historical facts to epochal and progressive changes in history. In other words he believed in historical laws that were progressive.
Writing in the age of the sun king, Louis XIV, Fontenelle not only demonstrated an ability to discern rational patterns in history, but he adopted the close and detailed lens of the scientist to describe historical periods with “peculiar vividness” and almost like an “eyewitness.” Ironically, he also documented a gathering of scientists in Paris in 1680 in such rich detail and with such precise attention to the relationships between these learned men and their particular circles, that he performs the role of a scientific observer of science himself. Fontenelle was only one of many writers who absorbed and translated the scientific perspective into the literary domain. The results of the new scientific revolution were “precipitately and hastily translated into a new world-view” and, we might say, a new literary view of reality. Many thinkers and writers in France, Scotland, Germany and the other countries where the Enlightenment took place, saw themselves as scientists exploring the world as it really was to discern its laws. These philosophes also viewed themselves as walking in the steps of Galileo and other scientific rebels against the medieval mindset of their time.
Writers like Adam Smith, Voltaire, Diderot, Saint-Simon – while not strictly or exclusively literary writers – begin to document a new kind of reality. The real historical world that they described was one where feudal values and privileges were declining and a new and more progressive civilization seemed to be emerging. The new and more realistic world that they described was more bourgeois, commercial and civil than the increasingly unreal world of medieval and feudal society. It had new laws like supply and demand in the marketplace; the rule of reason; and a belief in equal citizenship within rationally created laws. It was not insular or dogmatic, like the closed world of medieval society, but delighted in the exploration of new worlds and societies where regional distinctiveness where regional distinctions could be absorbed within the doctrine of a universal and benign human reason. It was an entirely new perspective that often ridiculed the ideals, ceremonies and hierarchical relationships of medieval society as outmoded, irrelevant and even perverted. The more scientific and realistic these writers were, even when they detested the new bourgeois society that was emerging, the more they depicted the old aristocracy and its values as unrealistic. They began to discover the progressive and realistic class of the future – the bourgeoisie – who had more realistic values that were in tune with a more rationally ordered modern world.
The eighteenth-century philosophes stereotyped the medieval world as the dark ages. In many respects, they are to blame for the inability of many modern scholars to appreciate the progress made towards the development of the reality principle and the realistic individual from within the medieval synthesis. But contemporaries, if not modern scholars, can be forgiven for believing that their view of the world was much more realistic and scientific than anything the medieval world had to offer. Adam Smith, for example, surveyed the still distinctly feudal blend of commerce and agriculture and showed: 1) how the evolutionary forces of commerce and capitalism were already transforming feudal relations and making the medieval world unworkable; and 2) how the freeing up of the market and the recognition of its laws of supply and demand could usher in an entirely unprecedented era of economic progress. A century later, these discussions of the new realities were still so fresh, precise and penetrating that they were picked up by Karl Marx among others and rolled into a new materialistic approach to the human condition, one that highlighted socio-economic classes that had been invisible before, and that saw the linkages and tensions between these classes that was establishing a pattern that Marx himself would try to turn into the evolutionary science of dialectical materialism. Marx always acknowledged his debt to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and its progressive philosophes.
What was a Philosophe?
This was the term that Enlightened writers during the eighteenth-century used to distinguish their rationalist and practical approach from the philosophers or scholastics in the universities. To be a philosophe meant to be on the side of progress and reform and to use the new scientific techniques to build a more rational human city. This also meant that the philosophes were self-conscious propagandists for a more orderly, humane and civilized world. As such, they routinely mocked and stereotyped the feudal world and its values. In particular, they condemned: 1) the vested interests and privileges of the church and aristocracy, and 2) the superstition and traditionalism of the peasantry or labouring classes.
The writings of the philosophes created a broad based political and cultural movement known as the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was a movement designed expressly to reform feudal society and to make it conform to the laws of nature and reason. The Enlightenment had its own artists and musicians, such as Mozart, whose optimistic and orderly melodies still appeal to us today. It had its one cultural heroes and propagandists — the philosophes – were only to willing to give opinion leaders and politicians advice on how to get real, to get rational, to get modern. They were merciless in their attack on tradition, superstition, and the supernatural. And they put in the place of all of these values reason, the goddess of Reason, or a Rational deity. Reason, based on realism, was the vehicle for establishing a heaven on earth.
Alongside reason, enlightened men and women worshiped nature. For them, nature was the supreme reality. But this was the scientist’s view of nature as something that conformed to rational laws. It was not the meaningless, chaotic or romantic nature of later writers. Its laws were the ideal type of an orderly mechanical universe. The problem with the human city, or the social universe inherited from medieval times, was that it was irrational, messy, particular, intolerant, and, increasingly, unworkable. By imitating nature, the philosophes believed that we could create a perfect society.
The humanist, Thomas More, in his Utopia described a perfect society, but like most fifteenth-century men and women, More never thought that an ideal society was realistically possible in this imperfect world. The enlightened philosophes, however, were often carried away with the power of reason to reform an imperfect reality. They often spoke as if a real utopia could be created on this earth. And they even developed a new theory of history that you are all familiar with. This was the theory of evolutionary progress. As commercial society cast off its medieval blinders, society could gradually but irrevocably move towards greater improvement. Enlightened men and women (and there were many important women writers and facilitators in the Enlightenment) were intrigued by the notion that the modern world could become more civilized, peaceful and pleasurable than anything that had ever existed at any time or in any place.
Of course, Enlightened theorists were concerned to be realistic, and were not always blind to the problems in trying to achieve the perfect society. In Candide, for example, Voltaire admitted that the world was a far more messy and imperfect place than existed in Enlightened propaganda. Some of Mozart’s later music evidenced doubt and pain. Rousseau’s essays warned that modernity had serious drawbacks and that a capitalist world might not constitute real grounds for a real community. In a brilliant work entitled Rameau’s Nephew, the philosophe and author of the first encyclopedia, Denis Diderot, illuminated the negative effects that economic and cultural improvement might have upon individuals, especially those in the lower orders. Adam Smith was the first to point to the alienation of the worker as the mechanistic principles of the universe were applied to the workplace and the new factories. But only the Scotsman David Hume had the effrontery to argue that rational systems, or even the Cartesian laws of cause and effect, could not capture reality and were dangerous whenever they attempted to do so. That is precisely why Hume’s philosophy appeals more to our skeptical and pessimistic age than do the more optimistic treaties of the philosophes.
In his own words, however, Hume’s philosophical concerns about the nature of reality and human understanding fell “still born from the press.” By and large, most enlightened thinkers believed that improvement was real and would be continuous if reality was informed by reason. When French writers became troubled by the complexity of changing the real world, they only had to look over the English Channel to make themselves feel better. Voltaire looked at English society and thought: “Here is a society that exhibits unequivocal progress. Here is a society where individuals can rationally pursue their real interests without the interference of governments or vested interests. Here is a society where superstition is on the decline. Here is a society that has given us the new psychology of a Locke, the scientific method of Bacon, and a new perspective on the laws of the universe in Newton.
E. The Discovery of Material Life and Laws
Nowhere was the exploration of the new reality more extensive, profound, and influential than in the discovery of economic life and work. While the realistic individual emerges as a figura from the background in medieval literature, the individual is only recognized as a spiritual actor. This is true, even when the individual is a member of the labouring poor, i.e. the fishermen apostles who followed Jesus. The individual is more sharply drawn and connected to his/her environment in the writings of the humanists. But economic life is only a background and economic classes, and the tensions between them, are barely mentioned. Of the merchants and moneylenders in The Decameron, we only know that their profession usually means that they can’t be trusted. While those of noble birth or breeding are more sharply drawn as characters, we are hard pressed to discover anything about the source of their wealth or the way they managed their estates. We have to read between the lines in Boccaccio’s description of gardens, fountains, mills, the appointment of apartments in buildings, etc. to discover the underlying economic reality.
The eighteenth-century Enlightenment changed all that by bringing the economy into the forefront of discussion. Nineteenth-century economic and social analysts, particularly Karl Marx, peopled this economic domain with distinctive classes. Both of these developed contributed immensely to the representation of reality in western literature by illuminating the attributes of material life that seemed beneath the attention of writers in other cultures. Material reality, and social relations based on the conditions of material life, gradually became the subject matter of historians, sociologists, political scientists, and writers of fiction. Many so-called works of fiction now came to be judged by how well they mirrored reality.
The initial forays into economic life and laws were stimulated by the very real cash-flow problems of the French government during the eighteenth-century. In a nutshell, the richest country in Europe was in a free fall to bankruptcy. The French government was engaged in wars of territorial (colonial) expansion with England. As warfare got more global, it also got a lot more expensive. The French government had a hard time taxing its people, who were not yet citizens, because of all the feudal privileges and vested interests of the people with money – the church, the aristocrats and the merchants. The taxes basically fell upon the peasantry because there was no way to get it out of people and corporations who had privileges, exemptions and many other ways of hiding their wealth.
In an attempt to get a handle on this chaotic feudal economy, the French philosophes began to develop a working model of a more rational economic system. Under the leadership of Francois Quesnay, a group that called themselves the Physiocrats – which means the rule of nature – began to describe the natural and realistic production and distribution of wealth. The Physiocrats began by defining land or nature as the primary source of value. From this principle, they developed the first circulating model of the economy. It was a rational model, based or a realistic analysis of the productive forces in French society, and it blew away people’s minds in its explanatory power.
Don’t question the model from a modern capitalist perspective or you will fail to appreciate its contemporary impact. The Physiocrats argued that agriculture (and also mining and fishing) was the primary sector in the economy. It produced a surplus product known as the net product. This net product was used up by society in the following ways. Roughly a quarter of it went back into agricultural renewal; it was used to pay wages and to cover the costs of growing another crop. The second quarter went to purchase manufactured good, luxury goods, servants and any other items of secondary consumption. Yet another quarter was consumed by labourers who worked in the towns as craftsmen and workshop labourers and their families. Those who owned the land consumed the final quarter.
Grain and agricultural produce, the life-blood of this society, could only circulate effectively if it flowed freely, in other words if there was a free market in grain. A society characterized by privilege, government intervention, and taxation that inevitably fell on those who produced the grain, was filled with bottlenecks that prevented the most effective circulation of goods and services. These and other discoveries of the Physiocrats turned the rationalistic and realistic energies of writers to the economic or material foundation of life. After reading the theories of the Physiocrats, for example, the Scotsman Adam Smith came up with his own circulating model of the economy, one that included all the basic concepts developed by the Physiocrats but went beyond them by: 1) emphasizing the mechanistic principle of the division of labour; and 2) including commerce and manufacturing as primary economic sectors in addition to land.
The impact of the Physiocrats and Adam Smith in turning western minds to the basic, and formerly ignored, features of material life cannot be exaggerated. In France, nobles began to become interested in the principles of estate management. The formerly ignored countryside became the ideal and the idyll of Europeans because it represented nature and, in its cultivation, exhibited nature’s laws. Hobby farms became all the rage. Noble kooks like Marie Antoinette even took to playing at being farmers or, in her case, little bo peep, with a flock of sheep that was kept at Versailles Palace for whenever the mood struck her to be a shepherdess. The influence of The Wealth of Nations was even more profound. English politicians debated the merits of this economic treatise in Parliament; British aristocrats and gentry now wanted to be known as improvers; and Smith’s work was considered a fundamental blueprint for economic reform in all the backward countries of Europe.
Even in Smith’s great treatise, we are still a long way from the economic dominance of the urban environment. Factories had only begun to dot the British landscape in 1776 when he published The Wealth of Nations. The grim and gritty nature of manufacturing in an industrial society had not yet stimulated another and more negative kind of reality. The class tensions that accompanied economic growth could still be ignored. Smith was intelligent enough to note the possible alienation of the worker as the principle of the division of labour transformed agricultural labourers into appendages of the machine. But such comments were submerged in a generally progressive vision of a rational society distributing more wealth more evenly. Smith also warned that merchants and industrialists were dangerous to the extent that they put their own self-interest ahead of society. Merchants and industrialists, he suggested, were natural monopolists. But these tendencies, he thought, could be offset in a free market that forced these individuals too compete. Smith even pointed to the conflict of interest between workers and the owners of the means of production. But he hoped that a progressive economy with a constant demand for labour would ensure that workers were able either to get a fair wage from their employer (Smith was a man of his time, however, in thinking that the price of labour would always be fairly close to subsistence) or to find work elsewhere.
Thus, the Enlightenment was an optimistic movement that encouraged the investigation of nature on the grounds that nature’s laws would provide the blueprint for a better society. By focusing on, and privileging, the hitherto neglected workings of the economy, the Enlightened philosophes drew the attention of cultured men and women to descriptions of material reality. Both nature and human nature were characterized by reason and linked together in progressive evolution. It could seem, in the words of Voltaire’s character, Dr. Pangloss, “the best of all possible worlds.”
But not for long. Whereas the optimism of the Enlightenment and its faith in progress continued to hold their own in the scientific domain, cultural investigations took a very different turn. The backlash to Enlightened theories of nature and progress can be spotted within enlightened circles themselves. The Marquis de Sade, for example, pointed out that nature was neither benign, nor were its laws rational. When de Sade looked at nature or human nature, he was violence, conflict, territoriality, aggression, bestiality and an entire host of perverse emotions that Enlightened writers wanted to suppress under their banner of reason. De Sade described nature in terms that more closely resembled the seventeenth-century thinker and would-be scientist, Thomas Hobbes, who claimed that “man is to man like the wolf.” De Sade’s famous phrase was “nature is red in tooth and claw.”
While society and economic life appeared to be progressing, it was easy to treat De Sade as something of an extremist or even a madman. But historical events appeared to confirm many of De Sade’s pessimistic views of nature and human nature. Between 1756 and 1763, the European powers were locked within the Seven Year’s War that took violent conflict to new levels of destruction and impeded internal national progress. The American Revolution of 1776 showed that the drive to colonial expansion and the natural striving for freedom could result in conflicts. Natural rights and equalities seemed to signify something different to the colonial Americans and the constitutional British. To these, we can add the slave revolt in Haiti, the separation of Brazil from Portugal, and various revolts in the Spanish-American republics. Nature bared its fangs in the Lisbon Earthquake, which took hundreds of thousands of lives and stunned Europe. The French economy continued to break down and tensions were building that led to the French Revolution of 1789. The latter event, and particularly the Terror (1792 – 1795) that followed it, shook up those who believed in rational systems, peaceful progress, or even the inherent goodness of human nature. Reality was decidedly messier than the rationalists wanted to believe.
F. The Aftermath of the Industrial Revolution
None of the preceding, however, had the impact on cultural life and literature as the Industrial Revolution that began in Britain around 1760. The story of the industrial revolution that: 1) had cotton as its catalyst; 2) led to the formation of crowed industrial towns, characterized by squalor and disease; and 3) established the factory system and new machines as the engines of growth, has been told many times. It need not detain us here. What is more interesting than the mechanization of the factory, and the rise to greater power prominence of the industrial bourgeoisie, was the devastating impact that the mechanization of life had upon culture. Whereas the elite culture of the past, whether ideal (medieval) or real (post-medieval) represented a fairly unified world view, culture bifurcated as a result of the Industrial Revolution into two very different types.
The primary cultural reaction to the Industrial Revolution and the increasing mechanization/bureaucratization of society along mechanical lines was overwhelmingly negative. This negativity could take the form of: 1) the defensive retreat from industrialization characteristic of the Romantics; or 2) the development of a new and grittier representation of reality characteristic of many continental writers. In the romantic category, we discover writers such as Keats and Shelly. In the realistic continental tradition, we discover writers such as Balzac, Gogol, and Tolstoy. In neither camp all traces of optimism stamped out. Romantics such as Carlyle still longed for heroes to lead a mechanical society into a more cultivated oasis. Balzac and Standhal seek to document the poverty of bourgeois society in order to stimulate a new leadership. Tolstoy, the sweeping Russian novelist, has a deep and abiding faith in the Russian people to endure and eventually change society.
The overwhelming conclusion that we must face, even with respect to the most realistic writers, is their remarkably unrealistic perspective. The solutions to the problems of industrial (and technological society) are left in the hands of the scientists and politicians. Only with Marx’s dialectical materialism do we get anything that can be called a realistic approach to solving the tensions of bourgeois society. But Marxism did not, and could not foster, a serious literature that was simultaneously realistic and progressive, despite the many attempts of Marxist writers to pursue that agenda. The great realistic authors have only been able to achieve is the documentation of the tensions, conflicts and alienation of modern life.
The reasons for the separation of literature and culture from an active engagement with life are complex. Although we cannot go into the various arguments that have been put forward here, one or two are well worth exploring because they relate directly to the representation of reality in Western literature. In The Birth of Tragedy, the philosopher Nietzsche suggested that the spread of rationalistic and individualistic principles in western culture was a product of the medieval rather than the Greek mind. This development occurred precisely because Christian writers began the process of removing the individual from the group mind and submitting the heroic ideals of Greek and Roman civilization to the continual assaults of a highly rationalistic critique that was completely out of touch with a dynamic human reality. What exactly does that mean? It means that, despite the secularization of society and its culture, medieval values still remain. Those values continue to privilege the solitary and usually meek individual as a kind of everyman. They also limit our creative options by rationally criticizing anyone who attempts to mould this earthly existence into a meaningful civilization. The so-called dissolving of the medieval synthesis merely accentuated the Christian tendency to elevate the individual at the expense of real-life engagement in the world.
Nietzsche condemned the romantics not only because they divorced art from life as it is lived, and thereby deprived the creative artist of active engagement with his or her society, but also because they privileged the individual over society. In his attempt to reconnect art and life, the individual and the community, Nietzsche explored Attic (i.e. Greece during the height of its civilization) culture in the form of the drama. In classic Greek drama, the individual is always connected to society, and the hero is able to endure his suffering, because the mystical union of community is ever present. The form of this presence is the Greek chorus, those shadowy masked and chanting figures, who comment on the action of the drama and draw the audience into the a musical world of oneness with nature and human nature. That oneness, or sense of connection, was destroyed by the rationalistic tendencies in the medieval mind, Nietzsche argues. In order to restore that balance between the individual and his/her mystical origins we have to get away from the overly rationalistic impulse in Western civilization.
The romantics may say that he hate mechanical civilization and science, but they continue a pernicious medieval agenda by artificially separating earthly life from an ideal perspective that effectively denies the possibility of influencing life as it is really lived.
The true lineage of the Romantics is visible in their addiction to medieval notions of community and to the language and literature of romance, says Nietzsche. Whereas medieval romance might have once had a social purpose, now it is simply an escape from an engagement with life, with reality. Now what Nietzsche is saying here is very interesting. Effectively, he is arguing that the Romantics are creating an ideal world that exists primarily, if not exclusively, in the imagination. This is the world of fantasy. The Romantics basically invented fantasy. The only reality for the Romantics is the imagination and creativity of the individual. This is an escape from lived life that continues the medieval separation of heaven and earth.
It is typical for modern literary commentators to sympathize with Romanticism as a fundamental break with an overly rationalistic and mechanical society, and the starting point for an exploration of the human emotions. While the Romantics beat a retreat from the social domain, they began the process of realistically exploring the inner domain of individual consciousness, which is fundamentally irrational. While that may be the case, Nietzsche’s point is equally valid. The Romantics were unwittingly completing a fundamentally rationalist medieval agenda that made the individual the supreme reality and that established a dualistic relationship between culture and life. In other words, the Romantics allowed scientists and technicians complete rule in the world of extended matter and made culture largely irrelevant to life. Reality is impoverished and human values become powerless when the links between the creative imagination and social life are severed.
By establishing a separate domain for fantasy or the life of the imagination, therefore, the Romantics contributed to a new definition of reality. No longer was reality infused with magic or spiritual forces; the Protestant ethic and scientific imperatives had seen to that. Much more serious was Nietzsche’s claim that the representation of reality no longer had any clear links to human values. It had become very cold, clinical and scientific. Human values retreated into the world of the individual mind, where they could no longer influence social life or contribute to an integrated civilization.
This fact helps to explain the nostalgia of the Romantics for the past, basically for any society other than the one in which they lived. When the Romantics looked at past societies, particularly medieval society, they were able to discover an inner genius or group spirit that infused the age. When they tried to discover an underlying spirit in their own times, they invariably cowered within the mind of the individual that was totally unclassifiable – a series of “moods, impressions, scenes, episodes and idiosyncrasies” – that could not easily give rise to any universal generalizations.
G. The Break With Romanticism
The influence of Romanticism has been extensive, and the genre contributed a great deal to our understanding of individual consciousness and, particularly, the inner life of the subconscious. As a movement, however, it was too amorphous and too defensive to last for very long. The men and women of the nineteenth century were immersed in a materialist society that romanticism either condemned or ignored. Writers and thinkers naturally began to embrace a new kind of realism; one that Nietzsche had tried his best to prevent. The terms materialism, realism, positivism, and Realpolitik defined a new attitude of toughness and acceptance of modern life.
Materialist philosophy, suggested that “everything mental, spiritual, or ideal” was an “outgrowth of physical or physiological forces”. As adapted by Marx and his followers, materialism came to mean that the mode of production and exchange of goods in material life was the engine that created values. It was not only impossible to redirect economic forces by imposing human values, but also it demonstrated false consciousness and a naivety about the relationship between the real and the ideal. While there are bleak aspects to materialistic philosophy, Marx was optimistic that economic development was leading in a progressive direction that would increase the freedom, not of a few individuals, but of an entire class of individuals. The working class would inherit the society of tomorrow. The intelligencia could only participate in their ultimate victory to the extent that they understood and supported it.
Positivism viewed society as proceeding through three basic evolutionary stages: theological, metaphysical and scientific. According to the founder of positivism, Auguste Comte, the only rational way to approach the modern world was to facilitate the scientific perspective and to extend it to all parts of society. Thus, Comte invented social science and even coined the term sociology to represent the scientific study of social life. In its early manifestations, sociology eschewed cultural issues and ideals as unrealistic and wishful thinking. The emphasis was on facts, statistics, verifiable relationships, and the testing of hypotheses. The uncritical adoption of the values of science was, and still is, the hallmark of positivism. Its fundamental assumption is that scientific progress is beneficial and unavoidable and that the methods of science need to be
Realpolitik was coined by the Germans to describe a new and hard political attitude towards living in the world. Now that the Enlightened ideas of peace, brotherhood and mutual benefit had been exploded, the practitioners of politics needed to face the facts of coexistence. This meant that ends needed to be placed above means, and that one should not have any false scruples about the difficulties involved in maintaining a state in a competitive environment, where one nation’s success was another nation’s loss. The master of Realpolitik was Otto Von Bismarck, who moulded Germany under the leadership of Prussia, into a military and diplomatic force.
Realism was the term used by artists to describe their acceptance of the real world and their rejection of romanticism. The primary characteristic of realistic art and literature was the complete elimination of any values whatsoever apart from the faithful representation of reality. Unlike materialists or positivists, these writers and artists did not have an evolutionary perspective that would lead to a better world. The purpose of the artist and the writer was simply to record the facts as they were without any cultural gloss whatsoever.
Neither Realism nor Romanticism posed any serious threat to the hegemony of the scientific interpretation of the world; Positivism and Materialism, in fact, supported the scientific view of reality. The culture of scientific optimism survived industrialization, and despite the abdication of many artists and writers, prospered in the period between 1850 and 1914. There were important dissenting voices, of course, among whom Nietzsche and Dostoyevky were the most important. When the crisis in European consciousness finally hit after 1914, many writers would return to the questions raised by these two literary giants. While Nietzsche was technically a philosopher rather than a literary writer, his poetic style and his cultural criticism made him a much more important influence in the literary than the philosophical realm. In fact, the existentialist philosophy that originates with Nietzsche was one that was grounded in literature and which transposed literary ideals and issues into the philosophical domain. Dostoyevky, who we will be looking at closely in the next module, is important to us in two ways. First, like Nietzsche, he criticized the scientific and realistic view of the world. Second, and ironically, he pioneered a new form of psychological realism that took the Western preoccupation with the individual consciousness to an entirely new and unprecedented level.
H. Fact and Fantasy in Don Quixote
After that whirlwind, and hopefully not too confusing, tour of the rise of science and the marginalization of culture in European history, I hope you will forgive me for taking you back to the year 1614 when Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra, better known as Cervantes, published the novel Don Quixote. The novel, originally a skit or a satire on popular chivalric ballads, is important because it marked a fundamental break with the idealism of medieval life and a new concern with demarking the reality of everyday life. Feudal ideals are mocked contrasted with the superior reality of everyday life in Cervantes’ novel in ways that begin a separation of fact from fantasy, realty from myth, the real from the ideal, in ways that are entirely modern. There is no doubt, in the battle between an ideal will and a concrete reality that the reality of everyday life will win. The highly amusing plot is based entirely on the fact that Don Quixote substitutes an ideal, and entirely dated mental vision, for flesh and blood reality. And while his noble intentions allow us to sympathize with this tragic-comic figure, there can be no doubt that the former are “absurd, fantastic, grotesque.” The hero, or anti-hero, is never anything other than ridiculous. The whole purpose of the novel is to explode the heroic, and by definition, unreal values of the medieval romance.
As I have attempted to argue, however, the medieval perspective never really went away, and found its apotheosis in the development of the individual. Both the idealistic Don Quixote and the realistic Sancho are clearly drawn and complex characters. Don Quixote’s feelings are real and often profound. Sancho is more than a poor everyman; he is a real character, capable of achieving strokes of genius in the predicament of accompanying someone who is, for all intents and purposes, a madman on a mission. Don Quixote has a rich interior life, based entirely on his idée fixe that he is a nobleman on a quest. The interactions between these two characters are entirely believable. Despite being natural opposites, they learn from one another and even learn to love one another. Entirely in keeping with the medieval tradition, however, and distinct from more modern realism, these characters are not expressly linked to events or problems occurring in the society of the time. The plot is contrived and these otherwise distinctive characters propel it along like automata.
Of course, none of this should prevent us from pointing out some of the interesting features of Cervantes’ times that play themselves out in the narrative. The Spain of Cervantes’ time was one of social change and mobility. Rich nobles contrast with younger sons that are forced to go off on military and commercial adventures to earn a living. In a fundamentally agrarian community, some farmers are becoming prosperous by breeding stock and practicing other forms of mixed farming. The Spanish colonies, while becoming less relevant as a source of revenue, are still places for people without a fortune to try to make one. With the exception of the shepherds and goatherds, who form an entirely unreal pastoral community, this is a world experiencing dramatic change.
One of the historical ironies of Spanish society at this time is that clung all the more tenaciously to its feudal values, and ideals of honour and nobility, as its empire and political significance were entering into a decline. England, France, and Holland were beginning to espouse more explicitly commercial values at the same time that Spain was dramatically, and unsuccessfully, trying to bully its way into the new world on military strength alone. The Scottish economist Adam Smith suggested that the Spanish were still adventurers looking for buried treasure in a world where the real treasure lay in the optimization of the division of labour and the deployment of any surplus in commerce. If ever there was a society that needed a new and more realistic (i.e. commercial) value system, therefore, it was seventeenth-century Spain.
There is real irony, therefore, that despite all the shocks that Don Quixote receives to his worldview – shocks that make the reader think that the errant knight will either come to his senses or completely lose his touch with reality – he always manages to recover his bearings. Although he does not prosper, he does manage to survive and to maintain the support of those most closely associated with him. Moreover, although Don Quixote is a farce, its central character is not entirely ridiculous. He is not simply a comic device like the fool in a Shakespeare play. There is real beauty, passion and sublimity in the speeches of Don Quixote, and sometimes even a trace of self-irony, but never to the extent that it challenges the delusion. These feelings are not only genuine and profound, but also complex and self-referential. Don Quixote’s elevated and artificial language does not obscure one of the first fully realized individuals in western literature.
Whenever his idée fixe is not involved, Don Quixote is as sane as you or I, and probably a damn sight more intelligent. His idée fixe does not appear to relate to a psychological disorder. His only problem is that he has read too many chivalric romances and these have unhinged his mind. Otherwise he would simply be a cultivated and intelligent country gentleman. He has all the civility, dignity, and good manners of a well-bred individual. Moreover, his madness never obscures his individuality.
It is too easy for we modern lovers of what is truly individual to become captivated by these elements, as in the theatrical adaptation of The Man from La Mancha. Cervantes never allows his character to be redeemed from a fool into an everyman. There are tragic elements in his tale, but he never takes on the mantle of a tragic figure, which would allow us to identify with him. Even at his most sublime, Don Quixote is still grotesque, a culturally deformed creature. He “pours out” chivalric love, for example, to “three ugly and vulgar peasant women.” There are insufficient tragic complications on serious consequences to allow our sympathies to merge into an identification with the character. The knight’s adventures include nothing in the way of a serious critique of Spanish institutions or laws. He has no symbolic importance apart from displaying the conflict between chivalric values and reality.
Cervantes presents two realms of life and style that are mutually incompatible at a particular historical point in time. Readers are made aware that the chivalric ideal is a role. If one attempts to play that role in real life, one needs others to play complementary roles or the entire enterprise will end up as a highly dramatic farce. This is exactly what happens in Don Quixote.
The limitations of this representation of reality are legion, and I have already mentioned a few. The book is rich in terms of characterization, and the interplay between the two central characters, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza is wonderfully complex. There are lots of examples of an attention to detail in the setting or background. But background and foreground are not linked in a very sophisticated way. We never get to see Don Quixote as a representative of the troubles of his class or the way that fairly oppressive Spanish institutions, such as the law, impact on individuals’ lives. Later satires, such as Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels make these connections, Don Quixote doesn’t.
Another problem concerns the form of the novel. If this is a farce, and we have suggested that it is, then there are strict boundaries on the author’s ability to, or interest in, creating a more universal type. The blending of the particular with the universal, a sign of a more sophisticated approach to character, is missing here. Also, a farce, by definition is a lower form of literature that allows the development of realism but prevents it from going further. To be sure, Don Quixote takes the form of a novel, but it is also a series of semi-autonomous vignettes that began their life as farces. And, while Don Quixote is a complex character, his character never really develops as a result of his strange experiences. The knight remains a combination of the fool and an intelligent person from the beginning to the end of his adventures.
When we focus on other parts of the plot that don’t involve the “knight errant” (the Don) or the “knight ill-errant” (Sancho), we begin to discover some very interesting tales and discussions that illuminate Cervantes’ goal. In particular, his analysis of love is pregnant with ideas that would be incorporated into a new kind of romantic literature that Cervantes hinted at in his short stories. Moreover, the digressions on chivalric literate show that Cervantes was clearly making a literary distinction between romantic fiction, which was a good form of literature, and the chivalric romance, which was not.
For many reasons, therefore, Don Quixote remains an important starting point for the modern departure of realism in the west. Just how important it was can be determined by the fact that the novelists of the eighteenth century, when they began to define the form of the genre, spent a long time discussing the techniques of their two favourite writers. Being British, it may not be surprising that they singled out their countryman, William Shakespeare, as the most influential writer in terms of the sophistication and individualization of his characters. Less obvious, but equally interesting, was their fascination with an author by the name of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra.