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A. Introduction

In a very deep sense, Cervantes agenda in Don Quixote mirrored the marriage of reason and reality that found its apotheosis in the triumph of the scientific point of view during the nineteenth-century. Cervantes had shown that the irrational – the world of fantasy was unreal. The real world conformed to the laws of reason, not to the subjective ramblings of an insane knight-errant. The distinction between reason and reality, on the one hand, and irrationality and fantasy, on the other could not have been clearer.

Don Quixote, therefore, appropriately symbolizes a three-century march of science to eradicate the irrational and subjective aspects of life that prevented feudal and primitive societies from achieving progress. The scientists did not fight that battle alone. The marriage of reason and rationalism can be seen in philosophy’s dismissal of the metaphysics that was once its womb. Western writers and artists developed more realistic perspectives and techniques, and some even imitated the method of the empirical scientist in classifying and organizing what was once a messy human condition into a nice tidy bourgeois world. In politics, classical liberalism and, particularly, utilitarianism — with its emphasis on the hard facts of economic life – began the painstaking task of reconstructing western society along more rational lines.

While it would be foolish to suggest that these realistic and rational impulses were ever completely stopped in their tracks, after 1870 they began to run into serious opposition from a number of quarters. Western consciousness underwent a transformation in a very short period of time that is as profound as any in the history of culture. Ironically, just at the time when imperialist Europe was forcing its cultural values down the throats of an increasingly global community, it caught a bad case of self-doubt.

Historians can point to all kinds of events in the socio-economic and political environment to explain this loss of confidence. A significant depression in the 1870s made the dominant middle class far less sure of themselves. The increasing tensions between workers and capitalists showed that economic progress in the future was not necessarily going to be smooth sailing. Not all countries, and particularly not Germany, bought into liberal values, and Bismarck’s social reforms struck at the very heart of market philosophy. The advance of nation states, thought by many to be such ideal combinations of reason and realism, gave rise to fears of war between these mighty individuals rather than peace. And nationalist cum regionalist aspirations, particularly in Spain (the Basques) and Great Britain (the Irish) might be espoused by any group within the larger community. The increasingly urban life of the big cities, once thought to be so progressive and exciting, was now condemned by the middle classes as too anonymous, impersonal and an environment where crime flourished. The enthusiastic fight for freedom had settled into a sordid squabble over political spoils that was characterized, not so much by real progress, as by “shuffling and reshuffling political coalitions.”

All of these conditions, and many more, undoubtedly contributed to the general fin de siecle mood of despondency that set in towards the end of the nineteenth-century. But what is most fascinating about the malaise is that it was primarily an intellectual and a cultural belief that Western consciousness was deeply diseased. The starting point for any discussion of this disease was science. Paradoxically, it was the discoveries of highly rationalistic scientists that began to cast a gloomy cloud over the sun of progress. A huge change in the scientific view of the world that began in the 1860s and 1870s, when translated into social thought generally, made Western civilization lose much of its former hubris.

B. Science and Progress

The triumph of Western civilization, along with its ethic of rationalism and its attention to realism, privileged scientific understanding in ways with which we are still familiar. The scientific understanding of the world – sometimes loosely referred to as positivism – dominated social thought and contributed to a new phase of industrialization based on the combination of machinery and scientific systems that were brought together in the new plants. The plant eclipsed the old factory because it totally integrated man and machine in the service of production. The contribution of science and technology to economic progress between 1850 and 1900 further consolidated its hegemony over culture at both the elite and the popular levels. Despite all the attempts of romanticism to overturn the scientific view of the world, the scientist emerged as the leading candidate for hero in the modern world. Most of the intelligenzia and the people bought into this image uncritically.

As the ideal type of the rational and realistic individual of the modern age, scientists now had an unfettered license to search for truth using both deductive and inductive reasoning. Mary Shelly criticized this power, without any accompanying social responsibility, in her novel Frankenstein. Students often confuse Dr. Frankenstein with the monster that he created. But, in a deeper sense, they are right. Dr. Frankenstein, the scientist, was the real monster because he was willing to go to any lengths to prove his Godlike status as a brilliant scientist. Faith in the powers of natural science, and the autonomy of the scientist, reached unprecedented levels in the half-century preceding the First World War. By 1870, science was so popular that new scientific findings were routinely, if sometimes clumsily, incorporated into culture.

Within the scientific community, paradoxically, important discoveries were being made that challenged the optimistic synthesis of reason and reality. For scientists were beginning to discover that nature and human nature were not the rationally ordered entities that everyone seemed to take them to be. Moreover, scientists, sociologists, and political scientists were beginning to question the inevitability of progress in the natural and the human domain. Up until the 1860s and 1870s, the Newtonian view of nature as an orderly, harmonious, and predictable machine held sway. By 1914, most of the best science described the universe as random, chaotic, and relative. Even the most basic principles of rational scientific investigation – cause and effect – had been exploded.

Some of these views of a chaotic universe might have had a hard time penetrating the popular consciousness of science or causing a cultural reaction against positivism. But the discussion of human nature in Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species (1859) represented a totally different view of progress that the one that had dominated ever since the Age of Enlightenment. In one sense, evolutionary thinking was really nothing new. Without the concept of evolution, the scientific notion of progress would never have existed. It was the nature of the evolutionary progress, as described in the new biological sciences that threw a monkey-wrench (if you will pardon the pun) into a formerly optimistic Western culture.

First and foremost, Darwin argued that species were forever changing to adapt to their environment. Change occurred when individuals in a species developed distinctive characteristics (Darwin didn’t say how, but he did suggest why.) that they passed on to their offspring. If these changes were adaptive to the environment – if they helped a species to survive – they were maintained and spread in the population. If the changes were significant enough, they could lead to the development of an entirely new species. Homo Sapiens was just such a species that had evolved distinctively from other primates. Apart from the fact that humans were highly successful in adapting to, and controlling their environment, there was nothing particularly unique about them. Humans were simply a successful species, and even that success was not guaranteed indefinitely. Darwin, therefore, dethroned humanity from its special place in nature.

Second, Darwin suggested that, while evolution could be understood rationally, the natural universe was not a rational or tidy place. Instead, nature was a cruel mistress, where individuals and species struggled with one another for survival or the control of a particular environmental niche. Natural selection translated into the “survival of the fittest.” Those with the most useful characteristics were the ones that survived. Thus, the natural world was not benign and harmonious; it was characterized by competition and fighting to pass on one’s genetic material.

Third, and most troubling for those who had a humanist outlook on life, Darwin’s theory appeared to suggest that all human values had only one fundamental purpose – the survival of the fittest in the species. There was no clear place for morality in Darwin’s scheme. Spiritual and religious values, as well, seemed irrelevant to a very earthly struggle for survival. Biological science appeared to make morality irrelevant.

The perceptions of Darwin’s theory were, in some respects, more important than the reality. The concept of struggle in nature was taken all out of proportion. The disharmony in nature ignored the fact that Darwin viewed the adaptation to environment as taking place over millennia. Species were relatively stable unless there was some kind of environmental catastrophe. Finally, Darwin really did believe that concepts like sympathy and morality made human beings entirely distinct from anything in the natural kingdom. He spent a lot of time talking about the human tear ducts and the capacity to cry, which made humans care for one another and develop codes of ethics. The reason for the remarkable success of the species homo sapiens was directly related to their ability to think and feel humanely. In a very real sense, therefore, human beings escaped from nature and the survival of the fittest.

But these subtleties and refinements were lost on most of the population and did not enter into the culture. The reaction to Darwin was highly polarized. Many scientists defended Darwin’s methodology and argument. Many non-scientists built Darwin’s theory into a vicious argument for the colonization of the world by the superior races and the weeding out of weaker individuals from the species. The negative reaction of many religious thinkers to Darwin’s theory has been well documented. But a host of European thinkers pointed to Darwin as an example of the ultimate sacrifice of humanity on the altar of positivism. The latter argued that Darwin had turned human beings and their culture into simply another species characteristic, that was useful or not only to the extent that it served the purpose of survival. The popularization of Darwin, therefore, contributed to a growing feeling that science had dethroned humanity and left us insignificant and helpless in the face of an impersonal nature.

The perceived onslaught of Darwin on anything that was formerly sacrosanct with respect to humanity was aided and abetted by new discoveries in physics. Whereas Newton presented us with the image of nature as an orderly machine that could be controlled and manipulated for the benefit of man, thinkers like Einstein would soon argue that the world was much more complex than any machine and that its so-called immutable features depended a great deal on the perspective of the observer. Cause and effect, time and space, gravitation, and the speed of light were all relative to one’s perspective inside the universe. They were not immutable principles or laws. In fact, the more closely that you examined it, the more the cosmos became a highly uncertain place. The German scientist Werner Heisenberg advanced the uncertainty principle that suggested that it would never be possible to fully understand physical phenomenon. Moreover, Pierre and Marie Curie, in their discoveries around radiation, showed that the building blocks of matter – atoms – were highly unstable. Everything around us is continually disintegrating, and giving off energy as it does so.

The universe was becoming a very uninhabitable place that did not conform to the wishful thinking of human beings. The new reality was neither orderly, nor did it conform to the laws of reason. Human beings, themselves, were simultaneously a part of nature – which made them less significant. But their much-vaunted reason made them separate and apart from nature – a lonely place to be indeed. Science was beginning to make human life meaningless.

C. Nietzsche’s Condemnation of Science

Given that science was turning man into a collection of atoms and making human values irrelevant, the burning question was: what could be done to reverse the positivist trend. It is difficult to halt, much less reverse, an intellectual development that 300 hundred years in the making. Western culture, in all of its aspects, was now inextricably linked to the concepts of reason and reality. The positivist paradigm permeated all aspects of western society, and had become second nature to the way Westerners organized the most trivial tasks. If the criticism of the romantics had not done much to slow down the progress of science, was there any hope for a cultural affirmation of the human condition.

The short answer certainly seemed to be no, as European culture in particular, went into a period of depression and paralysis. The first major thinker to provide a genuine alternative, albeit not a very practical one, was Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900). The fact that Nietzsche’s theory became more popular after his death suggests that Nietzsche did not have an immediate impact on those thinkers and writers who also opposed the rationalistic and realistic tendency in modern society. But the fact that he was continually cited and identified with by early twentieth-century scholars demonstrates that his diagnosis of the problem, if not his solution, was right on the money.

For our purposes, Nietzsche is important because his argument went to the root cause of the crisis in Western consciousness. He suggested that the rationalistic and realistic tendencies of the West began with the Greeks, who gave western culture its initial shape. Reason and realism allowed the Greek tragedians (playwrights) to give a more orderly shape to the myths and fantasies that guide primitive (Nietzsche’s value judgment) societies. To this extent, reason and realism were positive forces that allowed artists to give an intellectual form to nature. These characteristics were even represented in the personality of the Greek god, Apollo, the god of shape and the artistic god. These benign concepts, however, were prostituted by medieval civilization and its Neo-Platonic development that privileged reason over emotion and realism over a primal, mystical, and mythical identification with the universe. Greek or pagan literature was superior to the Christian outlook, argued Nietzsche, because it always balanced the realistic and rationalist principles with an appreciation of the fundamentally irrational, tragic, but life affirming, qualities of music and chant, dance and trance. These qualities were embodied in the Greek god Dionysus – the god of nature (but a distinctly human and primal nature). Dionysus was a powerful force in Greek drama, where he was embodied by the chanting of the mysterious Greek chorus, who commented on the action and drew a connection between the individual and the universal.

Nietzsche outlined his appreciation for Attic (i.e. Greek empire) values in his important work The Birth of Tragedy (1871), where he argued for a complete turnaround from the overly realistic and rationalistic approaches that had been building in Western culture since the medieval period. What the Greeks had, that modern nihilistic (valueless) society lacked, was the ability to accept the suffering that is part of life, tap into our primal life-affirming nature, and impose human values. What the Greeks realized, that Western society had forgot, was the faith in the freedom of the human will and its power to create its own world. Religion first, but science especially, had systematically taken away the freedom of humans to create their world. They had basically made the artist take a back seat to the scientist. Nothing humanly sustainable, argued Nietzsche, could be created by logic (reason) or cataloguing (realism) working alone. Human values required an additional ingredient – passion and will. Science, systematically and clinically, had cut passion and will out of the human equation.

Human reality was only partly the reality of nature and the scientist, argued Nietzsche. It had its fundamental being in the identification between the individual and the universal that the Greek god Dionysus symbolized. Without Dionysus, Apollo was rootless instead of grounded, clever instead of wise, critic rather than creator. Of course, we cannot simply deny the cultural developments of many centuries in the West. Nietzsche was not suggesting that we all convert to paganism, even though he might have preferred that to the sterile and enervated society that he saw strangling our basic humanity. In the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche suggested that music, especially music based on primal folk rhythms, could provide the starting point for a re-engagement of the artist (simultaneously Dionysian and Apollonian) with life. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1884), his solution was the development of a group of wise men – supermen – who not only understood the dilemma of Western culture but also begin creating a new set of values that would transcend those of science.

Nietzsche, like so many of the critics of the scientific point of view, was an intellectual snob. He was totally incapable of seeing any salvation in the common sense of people. In the modern age, we are accustomed to seeing the most effective movements to limit the power of scientists and technologists come from the grass roots, particularly in the form of the environmental movement that can now be labeled a popular movement, in the sense that it has a broad base of public support. Most of the critics of science and western rationalism between 1870 and 1914 viewed an increasingly democratic civil society as part of the rationalization of modern life and not as part of a possible solution.

D. Karl Marx as Scientist and Metaphysician

The obvious exception was Karl Marx, whose theory of dialectical materialism led to the victory of a working class society. In that utopian society, real human values could finally be affirmed free from the ideology of the elite. Marx was not opposed to rationalism or realism – anything but. He inherited his rationalism honestly from the European Enlightenment; his realism was part and parcel of the materialist philosophy and economics that he gleaned from Bacon, Locke, David Hume and Adam Smith. The question he raised, however, was to problematize reason and reality right up to the present.

When we talk about reason and reality, says Marx, we have to understand whose reason and whose reality is on the table. Thought processes and descriptions of the world can never be neutral in a world where some groups dominate others and use these processes and descriptions to impose their own values in society. Thus, the reason and reality of the feudal aristocracy was different from that of the industrial bourgeoisie. The reason and reality of the working class were the only ones with any legitimate claim to truth because they reflected the understanding of the majority of the population and were not tools designed to exploit others.

All consciousness, Marx argued, was a superstructure based upon a more fundamental economic reality. That truer materialist reality exposed many of the cherished values of social groups as inherently ideological – designed to reinforce and perpetuate their economic position. This was particularly true of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century concept of progress. When looked at closely, the doctrine of progress was really an ideological weapon whereby the industrial bourgeoisie could criticize the backwardness, vested interests, and intransigence of landed society. Marx taught us all to look behind logical statements and realistic descriptions in order to discover the motive of those where were deploying reason and reconstituting reality in their own interest.

In an important sense, therefore, Marx demonstrated that reason and reality, at least in the past, were not absolute but relative concepts. Adapting Hegelian metaphysics, and echoing Darwin’s theory of evolution, Marx suggested that the evolution of human society was neither uniform nor peaceful. Human history, like nature, was characterized by conflict – a struggle for the control over material life – not the orderly and mechanical reason of a Newton. The struggle was progressive, but not in any liberal sense; it was a revolutionary battle. Moreover, the struggle in human history was between economic classes not abstract liberal values like freedom, representation, or equality.

Despite its success as a political movement, Marxism had a difficult time getting absorbed in the European cultural mainstream. One reason for this was the distaste for anything too revolutionary or democratic among the intelligenzia. Liberalism had been about as far as they were ready to go in terms of reform; when they rejected liberalism, they were not prepared to make the jump into a revolutionary consciousness. A more important reason, ironically, was the pseudo-scientific character of Marxist thought – its emphasis on reason and material reality. As Marx and Engels refined dialectical materialism, they increasingly emphasized the belief that this was a science and simultaneously distanced themselves from other socialists who were adopting a more recognizably humanist perspective. By the 1870s, Marx didn’t want to be known as the defender of the oppressed multitude, but as someone who had created a new science that brought together history, economics and society.

By doing so, orthodox Marxism ran smack into the cultural reaction against science and its positivist ethos. While a number of brilliant European thinkers cut their intellectual teeth on Marx, including Croce, Pareto and Sorel, most of these thinkers dismissed the scientific character of Marxism. What they took from his corpus of was the metaphysics that Marx had almost completely discarded by the time that he died. The Frenchman, Georges Sorel, for example, was impressed by the recognition of passion and conflict in Marx’s theory. As Sorel aged and reverted back to liberal type, he emphasized a particular, and non-revolutionary, form of passion – the ethical criticism of capitalism. This “moral passion rather than any scientific rigour”, he argued, was what gave Marxism its “perennial appeal.”

After 1900, especially, Marxism led a “double life” that separated politics from culture. Politically, it acted as a guide to political Communists and many Socialists in their attempt to transform society. Culturally, it contributed to the condemnation of the capitalist marketplace. The positivist character of Marxism, its claim to be a deductive science with a basis in empirical reality was put in the shade by Marx’s supposed humanism. The great Marxist interpreter and activist, Antonio Gramsci, focused on the early writings of Marx (i.e. The Philosophical and Economic Manuscripts of 1848) because his approach was moralistic.

E. The Science of the Unconscious

While Marxism did not cut it in the fin de siecle consciousness, at least not as a science, another pseudo-science certainly did. Psychoanalysis was the one positivistic activity that was absorbed almost completely into European culture. The reason for the receptivity of artists and writers to this exploration of the unconscious was its bottom line – the fundamental irrationality of human beings. By affirming that human beings were basically irrational creatures whose psychic life was played out in an unreal, even surreal, subconscious, psychoanalysis not only problematized reason and reality, but also created an entirely new and fascinating playground for the exploration of humanity.

The road interior returned the artist to the messy world predating Cervantes and the Scientific Revolution, where fact and fiction were blurred and intuition and myth took precedence over reason. Henri Bergson, a French philosopher who was impressed by the explanatory power of psychoanalysis, began to argue that the quintessentially human way of organizing the world was not to collect and logically organize facts but to practice “that intellectual sympathy which we call intuition.” Intuition was primary. Scientists and thinkers operated through intuition in a natural desire to discover absolute knowledge. Only later did they reconstruct their intellectual inspiration to try to make it look like it conformed precisely to reason and reality.

The writer who defined psychoanalysis and, along with someone by the name of Max Weber, who we will describe shortly, established the framework for modern consciousness, was Sigmund Freud. Ostensibly, there was no one less predisposed to engineer the destruction of reality and reason. Freud had neither truck nor trade with the artists and writers who hated science and reason. To his death, Freud defended the need for reality (the Ego) and reason (the Super Ego) to control the subconscious (the Id). His avowed methodology was scientific to the extent that it was based on close examination of the behaviour of patients. But Freud could build mammoth interpretations (like the Oedipal complex) and slender threads of evidence. To his intelligent readers, Freud was less like a scientist that an imaginative writer of fiction or an intuitive historian of reality. Like one of the people he wrote about, Leonardo Da Vinci, Freud appears to have been “torn by two impulses: the passion for scientific knowledge and the passion for creating works of art.” The sources of his inspiration were as much symbolic, especially poetic, as rational. And, like all artistic creators, he sought to create a “metaphysic and a cosmology that would bring into one coherent explanation the last riddles of human existence.”

But it was Freud’s characterization of the Id, especially its passionate and aggressive sexual character, which made him a dangerous and significant contemporary writer. In his classic The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) Freud argued: 1) that the nature of mind, while it could never be fully known, was fundamentally irrational; 2) that human reason was a fragile shell covering powerful instinctual passions; 3) that men and women were both brutal and sexual in nature; 4) that the irrationality of mankind would continually evidence itself in aggression and conflict. In Civilization and its Discontents (1930), Freud went much further by suggesting that civilization was inherently repressive and maintained itself through the continual inculcation of guilt. While some of this repression was necessary to make human animals act like civilized human beings, some of it was not. Freud was the first to draw the connection between a civilized and scientific society, and the sharp increase in pathological illnesses. In matters of sexual education, in particular, Freud argued that Victorian society needed to loosen its ethical grip on the individual and get rid of any unnecessary sexual restraints. You can only control human beings effectively if you avoid turning them into lunatics.

Ultimately, Freud was balanced precariously between humanism and positivism. He was concerned to provide men and women with a modicum of freedom in an unfree society. He wanted to understand the fundamental pathologies of modern life, not because he thought he could create a utopia, but to relieve unnecessary pain. On balance, however, his assessment of modern civilization was mildly pessimistic with the injunction that we needed to learn to endure it like men (Freud’s negative views of women are well known. They did not provide his standard for mature conduct). In the words of a very bad song, when the going gets tough, the tough get going.

Freud’s student, Carl Gustav Jung, was much closer to the fin de siecle (end of the century) cultural mainstream. Jung disappointed his master by denying the sexual character of the unconscious and affirming its mythical structure. Jung argued that the human subconscious mind was not only instinctual but a collective mind. In that collective mind, one could find archetypal truths that were fundamentally human ways of perceiving and symbolizing. Less interesting than whether or not one believes that Jung’s mythical archetypes are true, is the way that these symbolic concepts make myth a superior form of reality. Empirical and logical reality, the kind of positivistic ideals that propelled Western culture into its hegemonic role, were not the mind’s natural ways of knowing. The later were more intuitive and mystical. They were much more evident in the myths and legends of small-scale and supposedly backward societies than in the artificial, bureaucratic and advanced societies of the west.

In Jung’s exploration of the subconscious, we come full circle. Whereas in Don Quixote, Cervantes wanted to explode mythical and romantic interpretations of the world as fantasies, Jung has made myths and legends (the original fantasies) the primary and archetypical way of knowing. Moreover, Jung has achieved this in a way that is spiritually uplifting (in a way that resembles New Age thinking today), since he connects all humanity to its primal existence minus the problematic sexually aggressive side of our natures. In a sense, he has created a new kind of spirituality, religion without the dogmatism, as the answer to human problems. To his patients, Jung explicitly advocated the adoption of spiritual belief as a form of “psychic hygiene.”

While this may be a pleasing antidote to the otherwise problematic nature of modern life, most fin de siecle writers and thinkers were inclined to adopt a tougher attitude. The younger of them referred positively to Nietzsche and his doctrine of the superman who could shoulder the pain of life in a world where human nature and the natural environment were distinct solitudes. This hard, some would say excessively masculine, contributed to the existentialist literature and philosophy that we will look at in the next module.

F. Idealism versus Reality

One of the most sophisticated challenges to the hegemony of positivism and realism came from a new historical tradition that had its roots in the philosophy of Hegel and the German tradition of intellectual thought. The positivist approach never really caught on in Germany where writers were much more fascinated by the cultural spirit of a people, rather than the data of sense perception. Understanding the spirit of a people meant looking at their ideas and attitudes over time. This approach privileged history, but not the history of memorizing and adding up facts. In order to appreciate the essence or spirit of a people or nation, you had to be practiced in the art of sympathetic imagination. The scientific approach that dominated in England, France and Italy, at least up until 1870, was not suited to understanding culture at a deep level. It was forced to focus on hard data, individual achievements, and advances in material life. It could not, for example, explain why a people who were progressing economically could feel alienated intellectually.

The neo-idealist tradition (Hegel was associated with the former idealism) was established between 1770 and 1840. It enriched historical studies immensely, but had few if any practical applications. It had precedents in Hegelian philosophy and in Romanticism, but its major contribution to historical understanding was the importance of subjectivity or intuition. The central idea was that empirical fact gathering or deductive logic could never construct a deep level understanding of a people or a culture. The historian had to approach his subject as a cultural totality and bridge any gaps in understanding by absorbing and relating to another culture in the sympathetic or empathic way that people related to one another. Understanding the spirit of a people or nation – what their ideals were; what made them tick – was the deepest understanding of human reality that one could ever have. But it was inherently subjective.

The Germans liked to use the word verstehen with a capital V to describe this method of “inner understanding.” Despite the fact that the concept could be murky at the best of times, it reinvigorated historical studies by getting historians away from the brain numbing and, ultimately, fruitless process of fact gathering. Understanding human nature, as exhibited in the spirit of a culture, was far more complex than empiricism. The pile of facts in human life must have seemed insurmountable; it must have been liberating to discover that these were meaningless without interpretation. It must have been even more liberating to suggest that subjective values like ethics and aesthetics were more critical to Verstehen than empiricism.

The elevation of subjectivity to a historiographical principle liberated cultural observers in yet another way. From here on in, historical studies would be more relativistic, based as they were on the values and choices of the observer. There was no longer any question of verifying a historical argument, at least not a sophisticated historical interpretation. The key was whether on not one shared, or was convinced by, the intuitions of the historical researcher. Historical arguments were based on faith rather than reason.

It is interesting to note that the Scottish philosopher had made this argument with respect to science in his classic work A Treatise on Human Understanding as early as the 1730s. In the 1730s, when science was still developing as a discipline and a paradigm, it was still possible to shatter scientific illusions. Between the 1730s and 1870s, however, science had become the dominant way of looking at the world, and all other disciplines were pressured to demonstrate their scientific character. By suggesting that history could never be, and should never be, a positivist science, the new breed of German idealistic historians (i.e. Wilhelm Dilthey and Wilhelm Windelbrand) were genuinely radical in the context of the culture of their time.

Wilhelm Dilthey was the first to confront positivism and natural science with the new historical consciousness. He rightly pointed out that positivism in the form of scientific inquiry and progress was not a neutral activity. It was a highly dogmatic and limiting interpretation of life. While the scientific method had its utility as a way of interpreting nature, it was next to useless when it came to explaining human nature and activity. The differences between nature and human nature were monumental. Human culture could only be explored internally, whereas science was focused on externalities. Human culture changed dramatically, whereas physical and biological nature changed gradually. One’s perspective on culture was subjective rather than objective. In the case of a historian, for example, it depended on the culture of the historian himself and the “active decisions” he made about his subject matter.

If you are beginning to spot an emphasis on human creativity and free will, as distinct from the increasingly deterministic interpretations of nature and human nature, in neo-idealism, you are exactly right. The anti-positivist writers could take that creativity to extreme lengths. Dilthey, for example, argued that interpretations of culture were paradigms or ways of looking at human activity. It wasn’t the data of a subject that mattered, so much as the paradigm used to examine it. Thus, Dilthey and the neo-idealists implicitly made the case for new disciplines like psychology, sociology and anthropology, which looked at the same data in different ways. Ultimately all of these methodologies and approaches were subjective.

Not merely subjective but also sympathetic. In all of these studies – history, anthropology, psychology, and sociology – we are presented with the intriguing phenomenon of humans studying other humans. At least to some extent, this must always mean “re-living” or “re-experiencing” the lived lives of others. History, in particular, was the art of understanding the people of the past, not a science.

The Italian thinker Benedetto Croce consolidated these insights and methodological suggestions into a metaphysical position. Natural and social science, he argued, dealt primarily with data that was externally perceived, whereas the art of history “strove for internal comprehension. He took it one step further, however, by suggesting that the historian was an intuitive bridge between his/her own era and the culture of the past. Thus, he took idealism to a new level by saying that “every true history is contemporary history.” It was an imaginative recreation or interpretation of the past. Anything else was dead history and meaningless. The best thing that can be said about empirical or dead history was that it provided factual material for the interpretations of a true historian.

The neo-idealist view of history put forward by Croce and others was very exciting in terms of liberating historians from fact gathering. It was brilliant in contextualizing the historical factors that contributed to present problems. The new history conclusively demonstrated the freedom of choice that individuals and societies had to chart their own destiny. Where the new history was at its weakest, however, was in providing a clear guide to actions. Without the positivist attitude that was firmly anchored in a theory of progress, every course of action was a matter of judgment and belief. History was liberated from positivism at the cost of potency.

The political career of Croce is a good example of the dilemma of the fin de siecle consciousness when faced with the necessity for action. Croce began his historical career by being disgusted at the cold and clinical view of history as the progression towards a rational and freer society. He and other historians wanted to highlight the passion and spirit that was embodied by peoples and states in contrast to such “pale and bloodless” fare. This attitude caused the young Croce to flirt with political alternatives to bourgeois liberalism such as fascism. But, when confronted with fascism’s anti-intellectualism and complete disrespect for freedom of thought (and creativity), the older Croce claimed that he was once again proud to call himself a liberal and engaged in a constant attack on Mussolini’s government. His resulting liberalism was not as much of a philosophy of action, however, as a critique of stupidity and intolerance. The most revered intellectual in all of Italy after Mussolini’s fall from power could only “offer his distressed countrymen” a loosely assorted package of “paternal counsels of expediency, vague hopes for the future, and eloquent appeals to the individual consciences” of politicians. Croce became a guru to the younger generation but “in terms of a specific program he could offer no guidance.”

Fin de siecle writers and thinkers may have moulded our modern consciousness, but they were not very comfortable with the modern world. This was especially true in the case of German neo-idealists who belonged to a fundamentally conservative class of university educators and state bureaucrats that found it difficult to adapt to the modernization in their country. Whereas industrialization took place gradually in Great Britain and fairly evenly in France, the major period of industrialization in Germany took place after 1860 and marked a dramatic change in the way that German society viewed itself. German writers and thinkers were never very comfortable, for example, with democracy. They might accept modernization and democracy as inevitable; but that didn’t mean that they had to like it.

G. Fact and Fiction in the Sociology of Max Weber

One of the German writers who believed that modern life was something to be endured was Max Weber. A typical student in the idealist tradition, Weber was the kind of person who preferred spiritual values to anything that smacked of the inferior materialist world. What makes Weber such a modern thinker, however, it that he found himself working very hard to come to some accommodation with modernity. Weber set himself the task of bringing together the subjective/relativistic perspective of the idealists with the rationalistic/scientific world of the positivists. In the process, he ended up inventing a discipline that would become more important as decades went on – sociology.

It would be difficult to summarize the many different kinds of writings of this brilliant intellectual in a few short pages. What we can do here is highlight some of his insights that relate most closely to our theme of the representation of reality in Western civilization. Chief among these was the proposition that no account of human life or action could be meaningful unless it took into account the inherent subjectivity of human beings. A scientist or a social scientist might want to view human behaviour biologically or statistically – in terms of cause and effect relations and mathematical patterns – but the result would not be particularly interesting or useful unless one understood the importance of culture. Human beings are not biological machines, like Pavlov’s dog, but people who act on their beliefs. Moreover, deeply held beliefs can have extraordinary power in real life.

Subjective ideas could be creative and autonomous forces. The fascinating example of a powerful subjective idea that Weber provided was that of religion, specifically Protestantism. In his analysis of the Protestant ethic, Weber turned both materialistic and positivistic analysis on their head by suggesting that Protestant values were instrumental in advancing capitalism and science – two examples of realistic and rationalistic practices in Western culture. Protestantism emerged within a medieval society that thought more highly of the world to come than this earthly existence. While Protestants did not reject the spiritual focus altogether, they dramatically altered the relationship between heaven and earth by privileging the relationship between God and those individuals to whom he gave the gift of grace.

In the Protestant paradigm, the world consisted of those who were damned to eternal punishment and those who God, in his infinite mercy had decided to save. No longer could individuals earn a place in heaven by going good works or obtaining indulgences from the church. But this earthly existence was a training ground for the elect, who had to practice a tight discipline, not only to demonstrate their respect for God, but also to separate themselves from the ungodly. This emphasis on self and social discipline made Protestant communities models of rational order and decorum.

Discipline was centred on one’s calling or vocation. The latter terms used to apply to a spiritual calling to serve God by taking on holy orders. In the Protestant world of the priesthood of all believers, the term calling applied to whatever work one did in the real world. This emphasis, not only on the real world of work, but also on the rational disciplining of work, marked a major paradigm shift in western consciousness towards material life, even if it was only a testing ground for the life hereafter.

The Protestant ethic or mentality further dissolved the medieval synthesis by getting rid of miracles, angels, demons, saints or anything that might conceivably get in the way of the relationship between the individual and his or her God. At first, Protestantism defined the myriad of intermediate relationships between heaven and earth as evil. But gradually, the Protestant ethic made them irrational, thereby privileging reason as the tool for organizing human life. The disciplined rationality of the Protestant took a characteristic direction that was pregnant with possibilities for western civilization. It emphasized organizing one’s life minutely, usually with the aid of clock that could ensure that not a minute was wasted. The discipline of time was matched by a new propensity for routinizing every aspect of one’s life, because idle hands are the devil’s workshop.

Long before the Enlightenment advanced its theory of material progress, Protestants began to illuminate the nature and function of capitalist accumulation. Here, the relationship between ideas and reality was subtle, so we need to examine it step by step. First, the early capitalists came from the urban commercial centers where Protestantism was most attractive. Second, Protestantism made all activities, including trade and commerce, respectable, just as long as they exemplified the disciplined behaviour required by the godly. Third, the Protestant ethic demanded the kind of disciplined and rational behaviour that we have come to associate with capitalism. Fourth, the application of rational principles to business typically generates a greater profit than was possible in the past. Fifth, a good Protestant should not spend any of these profits on worldly comforts or in the way of ostentation. Therefore, profits are reinvested into the enterprise, the fundamental principle of capitalism and an excellent way for a pre-industrial society to generate a sufficient capital pool to propel commerce and industrialization along.

What is Weber saying here? He’s saying that highly subjective, idealist, spiritual values made modern capitalism, and to a certain extent modern science, possible. Without those subjective values, the principles of materialism (reality) and positivism (reason linked to progress) would have had a much more difficult time emerging. Reason and reality, therefore, were not absolute truths that have been obscured by misguided cultural values. They are themselves cultural values and reflections of human values. For the first time in several centuries, therefore, Weber re-established the bridge between the subjective mind and objective reality, between spiritual values and rationalistic analysis. Moreover, he did so in a way that affirmed the pre-eminence of human subjectivity.

Rationalism and realism were cultural values that arose from within an overwhelmingly spiritual context. The process by which the West became the foremost proponent of a rationalism based upon material reality could be understood historically. Weber’s historical world was not an empirical place; he followed the German neo-idealist approach to history by emphasizing the need to imaginatively and sympathetically connect with the Protestant value system that informed the development of western civilization. So clear was Weber that history had to be at least as much a subjective reconstruction as an objective analysis that he developed the concept of ideal types as historical and sociological tools. Ideal types were conceptual grouping of common characteristics, heuristic devices to help understand complex human phenomena.

By definition, an ideal type is something different from a real individual. It is a fiction. Weber’s discussion of the Protestant ethic suggests that there are a certain set of values that many Protestants shared that will help us to appreciate the cultural worldview to which they contributed. As individuals with unique backgrounds, religious doctrines, socio-political agendas, Protestants differed from one another just as much as we do. No one individual might actually fit all the characteristics of an ideal type. But, unless we use such a useful fiction, we will never be able to understand (Verstehen) or appreciate their contribution to our culture.

The concept of the ideal type allowed Weber to escape from the pitfalls of extreme subjectivity – i.e. total relativism – in order to be able to study socio-cultural phenomena. In other words, Weber transcended the debate between idealism and positivism by establishing a “middle level of empirically derived conceptualization” that got the serious observer away from either a preoccupation with individual facts or a retreat from reality. This middle-approach allowed historians and sociologists to explore the human world with a much higher degree of rigour and even to develop laws or causal explanations of human behaviour. These laws were not the axioms of science; at best they were partial explanations. But they did allow cultural observers to aim for something resembling the objectivity and neutrality of the scientist.

Weber, therefore, laid the groundwork for a new and influential approach to the study of human behaviour that could take the best values of the scientist and apply them to situations where no absolute objectivity was possible or desirable. Subjects like sociology, history and political science could now stop trying to justify themselves as being like their cousins in pure science. Put on firmer and less relativistic grounds, humanist and artistic values could be revitalized in the study of culture. The key to the future success of the non-scientific disciplines was the application of an appropriate methodology, that was grounded in a valid theory of knowledge and that was appropriate to both the observer and the data being observed. The particular method that was most appropriate for the different disciplines, or fields within disciplines, could be approached pragmatically, in terms of the best practices of those at the forefront of their disciplines.

The price of greater objectivity and methodology, of course, was that it would no longer be possible to conceive of ever achieving a comprehensive and fixed reality with respect to the complexity of human culture and affairs. Both between and within the humanistic disciplines, it was likely that a plurality of interpretations would always coexist. The new emphasis, therefore, was on comprehensibility rather than complete understanding. To the extent that disciplines and fields added different dimensions to this comprehensibility, there was also the possibility for complementarity. The study of human nature, at least at its most sophisticated levels, now withdrew from the domain of the pure sciences.

In many respects, Weber himself represents an ideal type of the modern humanist scholar who looks to make empirically grounded generalizations. The modern historian or sociologist typically attempts to create a bridge between useful fictions (theoretical models) and reality (facts). While neither Weber nor many of his successors were particularly spiritual, at least not in the sense of those godly Protestants that Weber described, there is a sense in which we share a belief in the spiritual nature of human beings and a spiritual commitment to our human subject matter. Moreover, professors in humanities and the liberal arts today recognize that, ultimately, our most fiercely held beliefs are based on faith; we tend to adopt a tolerant but undogmatic attitude towards religion. Whereas scientists who still continue to espouse a positivist approach to their discipline tend to be very opinionated on the topic of religion, most of us adopt the approach of “suspended judgment in spiritual matters. Weber himself was typical of this attitude and, for his time, he was one of the few who adopted a balanced approach to the issue of religion. Unlike the militantly anti-religious Freud, or skeptics like Emile Durkheim, who both started out as scientists and positivists, Weber was neither “anti-religious nor irreligious”. At the same time, he did not retreat into the mysticism of thinkers like Jung or Bergson. This capacity for neutrality show how much Weber was a precursor and an influence on our modern academic community.

This attempt at balance cost Weber dearly. He was always intensely poised between an objective and a subjective reality without a place to rest. These two spheres are ultimately irreconcilable, even if one can work between them. For Weber, there was no possibility of escape into an optimistic science or the world of fantasy or mysticism. The tension became all the more unbearable as Weber’s exploration of realism and rationalism in the Western world illuminated several very disturbing tendencies. The first of these was a realization that rationalism was so deeply imbedded in Western consciousness that it now operated as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Rationalism already had moved past the phases of capitalism and positivism, which were only manifestations of a more fundamental process, and was now becoming an all-embracing rationalization of human life along bureaucratic lines. Reason had once been a tool for creating an improved human city. Now human beings were becoming the tools whereby rationalization continually reproduced itself.

In the bureaucratic universe – that would soon witness the convergence of societies as different as capitalist and communist nations within a global system — it doesn’t make a great deal of sense to talk about free will or human creativity. The new reality is that people are made to fit into processes and systems that they only dimly understand, if at all. The highly rationalized world that once was a product of spiritual values was now systematically eliminating the vitality of the spirit. The human world was increasingly becoming cold, clinical and soulless, contributing to an increase in alienation and sadness. The word that Weber liked to use to describe contemporary life was disenchanted.

Enchantment and Disenchantment

You will remember from the first module that Cervantes’ self-proclaimed agenda was to rid the world of enchantment in the form of medieval chivalric romances. Three centuries later, Max Weber was arguing that the progress of rationalism and realism had gone way too far. The world was becoming so rationalized that human creativity, imagination and spirit – all things that Cervantes believed in – were now on the defensive.

The desire for spiritual enrichment may reassert itself under certain conditions, argued Weber. For two centuries, romantics and idealists had harboured the hope that an exceptional leader would emerge, who would replace rationalist with more deeply human values. Weber held no such false illusions. From time to time, a charismatic individual would be able to harness all the pent up resentment of a bureaucratic civilization. Such individuals would owe their authority and any legitimacy to “the belief in magical powers, revelations and hero worship.” The danger of allowing the release of these “irrational” and “revolutionary” powers is that they would pose a threat to all the values of a rationalistic society – freedom, constitutionalism, citizenship, humane laws and institutions. Weber warned that the support for a charismatic hero could open the floodgates of the primitive and demonic. It was safer to endure the difficulties of modern life and “to bear without flinching “the antimonies of existence – to live without illusions…”

H. Russian Realism

Weber’s discussion of charismatic and rational authority has striking parallels with Freud’s argument in Civilization and its Discontents. Both authors were concerned to emphasize the need for balance and responsibility in an imperfect, and often oppressive, world. This image of humanity suffering in an inhospitable world has distinctly tragic qualities. What prevents us from experiencing the true tragic vision is partly the recognition that the works of Weber and Freud are academic rather than literary, but also the fact that these writings have a very defined and limiting setting. The geographical setting is fin de siecle mainstream Europe, and the social context is a well-developed bourgeois society with an established, if problematic, culture of progress and positivism. The mood is one of relative discomfort and self-indulgent ennui of a civilization poised for, but not yet entered into, a decline. In this sharply etched, insular and somnambulant world, it was difficult to evoke the kind of passion or universality that makes for great literature, realistic or otherwise. For that to happen, you would need a society where: 1) science did not play such a hegemonic role; 2) the bourgeoisie had not established its values; and 3) socio-economic change was much more tumultuous. The right environment for experimenting with realistic literature was Russia, a society moving from feudal tradition to a modern western civilization without any mediating bourgeois class.

From the 1880s on, Russian literature invaded the European consciousness. Turgenev and Gogol were important, but it was Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky whose names were on the lips of most cultured Europeans by 1890. Several characteristics differentiate Russian literature from its central European counterpart:

1. It is very serious and very elevated in the classical sense. Whereas comic characters could be described realistically in central European literature, there is no literary category of the “low” in Russian literature.
2. Russian literature has a medieval concern to present an “everyman” – a representative of humanity, whose class and background, rank and position, cannot obscure his/her essential humanity.
3. Thus, there are no distinct classes in Russian literature. To be sure, there are landowners, bureaucrats, merchants, peasants, preachers – but these are all Russian in character rather than belonging to identifiable groups.
4. Russian literature has little interest in presenting the particular – the background. Cities, hamlets, provinces are rarely identified. This is also true with respect to some important aspects of the foreground description. We don’t get the accents, idiosyncrasies, or peculiar mannerisms of minorities, although there are characters who were Jews, Poles, German Russians, Little Russians, Orthodox Russians, and cosmopolitan Russians.
5. Russian literature is so universal in scope that you don’t need to be a Russian to appreciate it.
6. Russian literature is clearly the battleground for the acceptance or rejection of aspects of European culture. When a Russian writer rejects central European culture, you can expect a powerful reaction and the development of “immense theoretical counter systems.”
7. In Russian literature, we find the deepest and most intense appreciation that a moral crisis is occurring in European literature and there is often also “a premonition of impending catastrophe.”
8. Its most “essential characteristic” is the “unqualified, unlimited, and passionate intensity of experience in the characters portrayed.” This is particularly true of the novels of Dostoyevsky.

Another way of saying most of the above is that the recognition of the individual character and his/her ethical/spiritual development, a characteristic of medieval literature, is still very present in Russian literature. When these dynamic characters confront aspects of more modern western culture, a conflict is bound to result.

In the next module, we will discuss Dostoyevsky’s most recognizably modern work Notes from the Underground. In this module, however, we want to concentrate on the work that Dostoyevsky worked on for the three years prior to his death in 1881. This work had been in his mind much longer than that and he clearly considered it to be his magnum opus. Ostensibly, the novel revolves around a highly dramatic classical them – parricide, or the killing of ones father. In this case, it turns out that the crime is in the mind rather than in real life because the real murderer is Smerdyakov, who makes himself the instrument of desires of three brothers. The real theme of the novel is much more spiritually profound – the battle between good and evil for the control of the human soul. These themes received their dramatic development in the life of the characters and reflected the tensions felt by a spiritually minded Russian confronted with a materialist and positivist western culture that has not only dethroned God and the Devil, but also made them irrelevant to individual and national life. The setting of course, is the disintegration of a Russian family and the Russian state, but these can easily be read as a metaphor for a decaying European civilization. “The whole idea of the story is to show that universal disorder now reigns everywhere in society.”

The reason for this disorder is the erosion of “passionate convictions” or their perversion into materialist or political forms (i.e. socialism and anarchism). Dostoyevsky always wants to elevate the human, and by definition, spiritual conscience over political ideas that he believes reduces “mankind to the level of cattle.” His insight is that social technocrats – those attempting to create the perfect socialist society – really detest all that is human. For Dostoyevsky, these would be politicians are all part of the realistic and rationalizing tendencies in European life that began with the Enlightenment. For Dostoyevsky, anything that smacked of positivism was anathema and, by definition, a denial of mankind.

Despite his disgust with rationalism, Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov evidences an enormous attention to realistic description. The author sought “to deepen and widen the realistic features of his novel”. Dostoyevsky’s realism was foreground realism – the realism of his characters, not as classes or people from a particular geographical location – but as characters. He wanted his characters to be authentic in terms of their psychological character. Dostoyevsky variously described this as finding the man in man or depicting the depths of the human soul. What makes The Brothers Karamazov something special is the way that Dostoyevsky brings together the anti-positivist critique of Western civilization with some of the most richly developed characters in the history of the novel.

Although Dostoyevsky’s characters are realistic, don’t make the mistake of missing their allegorical significance. The three sons of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov represent different types of humanity. Dmitry is a sensual lover of love, encased in a military man with a deep sense of honour that is often betrayed by his appetites. Ivan is an intellectual, someone who emphasizes the rational/logical side of human nature. Alyosha is a spiritual person, highly aesthetic and moralistic. But they are all Karamazovs who share parts of one another’s personalities. Dostoyevsky, therefore, wants us to look at them as different aspects of the human psyche that must be integrated properly in order for full humanity to reveal itself. “The main hero of Karamazov is the three brothers in their spiritual unity.”

The women in the novel are realistically drawn, but they are not really independent beings like the men. The three main female characters in the novel have personalities that compliment those of the men. Grushenka is connected to Dmitry; Liza is linked to Alyosha; Katerina is the alter ego of Ivan. These connections unfold gradually as Dostoyevsky allows us to discover the soul within the external personality. All of the characters are linked in an obvious tragedy that sometimes resembles a soap opera. But the deep structure of the novel is the battled between God and the devil for the human heart. The central character through whom this battle is played out is Dmitry (sometimes called Mitya), whose heartaches are described in detail.

In Dmitry, and in the combined Karamazov psyche, Dostoyevsky anticipates Freud and Psychoanalysis by confronting us the drama and tragedy that is the divided self. For Dostoyevsky, however, the divided self is not a state that is natural to man. It is the product of a Humanist and Enlightened agenda that wanted to put man at the centre of the universe and that eventually degraded man. The scientific search for truth, in particular, had made man nothing more than a part of nature and a product of his/her environment. Man’s spiritual centre was lost in the process; as man abandoned spirituality, it could appear that God had abandoned man. Ivan, the intellectual brother, rejects religion for just this reason. He feels that God, if He exists, has allowed too much suffering in the world. Ivan prefers human reason and human judgment to God.

Dostoyevsky’s message to his fellow Russians in this great novel was to recognize the decay happening all around them as a call back home to the Greek Orthodox Church. The novel, however, is a “universal human drama” that simultaneously discovers the tragedy and suffering of life and calls us all to remember our spiritual natures.