Modern European Intellectual History

1. Modern EuropeanIntellectual History Lecture 1 Introduction January 23, 2008

2. Edward Savage, “Reason” (ca. 1930) left, bottom: workers (agricultural and industrial) left, top: law, religion, science, and art right, bottom: ignorance and greed

3. Gustav Klimt, “Philosophie” (1900) “On the left a group of figures, the beginning of life, fruition, decay. On the right, the globe as mystery. Emerging below, a figure of light: knowledge.”

4. Klimt, study for “Philosophie”

5. the “crisis of reason”? • commissioned theme: “the triumph of light over darkness” • “Klimt’s vision of the universe is … blind energy in an endless round of meaningless parturience, love and death. … [He] provides access to that intellectual generation’s painful, psychologized world-view -- a view that at once affirms desire and suffers the deathly dissolution of the boundaries of the ego and world which desire decrees” (Carl Schorske) • is this the “crisis” or the reinvention of reason? or both?

6. intellectual history • seeking “the spirit of the times” • high culture • short time span • multidisciplinary: literature, philosophy, social theory, painting, sculpture, music, dance

7. a revolution and its sequels • “one of those periods in history in which a number of advanced thinkers, usually working independently of one another, have proposed views on human conduct so different from those commonly accepted at the time — and yet so manifestly interrelated — that together they seem to constitute an intellectual revolution” (H. Stuart Hughes)

8. modernism • a revolution against bourgeois society • at first, a literary revolt • revolutionaries who know their cause is dangerous or ambiguous • Sigmund Freud: “No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.”

9. structure of course • evolution of modernist revolt over time • political affiliations and implications • WW I as watershed • ultimate question: what can and should be saved from this moment in recent history?

10. risks • incompetence • selectivity • dangers of synopsis: content versus form • Clement Greenberg: modernism as the “self-purification of form” • reply: “the content of the form” • historical interrelations of different formal campaigns

11. why bother? • the value of elite ideas • one feature of modernism is skepticism about the autonomy and power of the intellectual realm • the causal role of elite ideas: “ideas … are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. … [S]oon or late, it is ideas … which are dangerous for good or evil” (J.M. Keynes). • alternative answer: currency of modernist revolution and search for self-understanding