Part Two

Part Two

The Industrial Revolution was treated socially, politically and scientifically as unstoppable and as the most glorious manifestation of the West's ability to progress. The linearity of time and history that was willed us by the Greeks, the scientific method of inquiry of Socrates and Descartes, the inexorability of history and the inherent goodness of the technological advances were considered by these decision-makers to be self-evident, but just at this time writers like Thoreau and Dickens were revealing what was being lost and questioning the human and natural cost of what was being gained.

Friedrich Nietzsche was born five years after the invention of the camera, in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, of all these changes in man's relationship to time and nature, of all the questions that were being raised by Dickens ("David Copperfield," 1849-50), by Thoreau ("Walden," 1854) and others.

In 1873, at just the time when the Impressionists were painting in ways that challenged the "truth" of traditional western painting, Nietzsche wrote of the metaphysical nonobjectivity of truth.

Nietzsche not only broke with the method of western philosophical inquiry he also broke with its ethical and moral foundations in "Beyond Good and Evil" (1886) and "On the Genealogy of Morals" (1887). At this same time Cezanne and the post-Impressionists furthered their artistic break with their own traditions.

During the time of the Industrial Revolution political and social revolutions occurred between England and America and in France, more evidence of the break with the past.

America had its Civil War from 1860-65 and out of that and the more general context of the West came the American variety of questioning fundamental truths. The philosophy of Pragmatism was begun by John Dewey, William James and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., the latter a thrice wounded veteran of the war. Not even slavery was beyond the Pragmatists scope of questioning fundamental evil. Holmes came to have deep reservations about his own strident pre-war anti-abolitionist sentiments. The greatest contemporary advocate of pragmatism, Richard Rorty, has had to defend himself against the charge that he too, with his philosophy, implicitly makes slavery a non-moral, strictly pragmatic, issue.

Humankind's dealings with the physical world changed in practical ways with the Industrial Revolution, they changed in aesthetic ways with the Impressionists, literature challenged the results of all these changes, in Europe Nietzsche now challenged the very moral and ethical bases that produced them and in America the Pragmatists did the same in their own way.

Nietzsche died in 1900 and Einstein published his papers on the theory of special relativity in 1905 and general relatively in 1912. The theoretical scientific view of the physical world now changed too, utterly and in the same fundamental ways as the changes in the other areas.

The challenge that relativity posed to western philosophy was that time was neither linear nor progressive nor inexorable. It might be possible to stop or even reverse time. It could certainly be slowed down. A young person who left on a spaceship for a year's journey at near the speed of light would come back to earth aged only that year but with his contemporaries elderly or dead. Were we destined to go back to the cyclical conception of time that we had experienced for all of humankind's history up till the Industrial Revolution? At least we could not view it--or experience it-- in the linear, Cartesian way that characterized it during the preceding two centuries.

Long before Einstein it had been proved that the earth was not the center of the universe, nor even of our galaxy. Late twentieth century discoveries in astronomy demonstrated that we as a species on this one planet were in the "suburbs" of a very ordinary galaxy, of which there were millions and that the age of this thing we have always called the universe made our religious notions of our beginnings folk tales.

The Death of God philosophy of Nietzsche and the "moral relativism" of Pragmatism were good fits for the fin de siecle West. They became better fits with World War I-- the Great War, the war which was to end all wars--with the Russian Revolution and finally, apololyptically with Hitler and World War II.

Art in the first half of the twentieth century seemed to go off in a hundred different directions: cubism, surrealism, dadaism, social realism, ism after ism. There were no standards in art any more, there was no agreement even on what art was. In 1917 Marcel Duchamp displayed a urinal and called it art. Everything was questioned.

The truism was that art and science had broken with one another 500 years ago and were now on different planets entirely. The truism was that everything, from our conceptions of art, to those of time, space, matter, even good and evil had now gone into existential crisis.

The center of Western art moved from Paris in destroyed Europe to New York after World War II.

-Benjamin Harris