Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

by Peter Watson

But it was L’Evolution créatrice (Creative Evolution), which appeared in 1907, that established Bergson’s world reputation, extending it far beyond academic life. The book was quickly published in English, German, and Russian, and Bergson’s weekly lectures at the Collège de France turned into crowded and fashionable social events, attracting not only the Parisian but the international elite. In 1914, the Holy Office, the Vatican office that decided Catholic doctrine, decided to put Bergson’s works on its index of prohibited books.75 This was a precaution very rarely imposed on non-Catholic writers, so what was the fuss about? Bergson once wrote that ‘each great philosopher has only one thing to say, and more often than not gets no further than an attempt to express it.’ Bergson’s own central insight was that time is real. Hardly original or provocative, but the excitement lay in the details. What drew people’s attention was his claim that the future does not in any sense exist. This was especially contentious because in 1907 the scientific determinists, bolstered by recent discoveries, were claiming that life was merely the unfolding of an already existing sequence of events, as if time were no more than a gigantic film reel, where the future is only that part which has yet to be played. In France this owed a lot to the cult of scientism popularised by Hippolyte Taine, who claimed that if everything could be broken down to atoms, the future was by definition utterly predictable.76

  Bergson thought this was nonsense. For him there were two types of time, physics-time and real time. By definition, he said, time, as we normally understand it, involves memory; physics-time, on the other hand, consists of ‘one long strip of nearly identical segments,’ where segments of the past perish almost instantaneously. ‘Real’ time, however, is not reversible – on the contrary, each new segment takes its colour from the past. His final point, the one people found most difficult to accept, was that since memory is necessary for time, then time itself must to some extent be psychological. (This is what the Holy Office most objected to, since it was an interference in God’s domain.) From this it followed for Bergson that the evolution of the universe, insofar as it can be known, is itself a psychological process also. Echoing Brentano and Husserl, Bergson was saying that evolution, far from being a truth ‘out there’ in the world, is itself a product, an ‘intention’ of mind.77

  What really appealed to the French at first, and then to increasing numbers around the world, was Bergson’s unshakeable belief in human freedom of choice and the unscientific effects of an entity he called the élan vital, the vital impulse, or life force. For Bergson, well read as he was in the sciences, rationalism was never enough. There had to be something else on top, ‘vital phenomena’ that were ‘inaccessible to reason,’ that could only be apprehended by intuition. The vital force further explained why humans are qualitatively different from other forms of life. For Bergson, an animal, almost by definition, was a specialist – in other words, very good at one thing (not unlike philosophers). Humans, on the other hand, were nonspecialists, the result of reason but also of intuition.78 Herein lay Bergson’s attraction to the younger generation of intellectuals in France, who crowded to his lectures. Known as the ‘liberator,’ he became the figure ‘who had redeemed Western thought from the nineteenth-century “religion of science.”’ T. E. Hulme, a British acolyte, confessed that Bergson had brought ‘relief to an ‘entire generation’ by dispelling ‘the nightmare of determinism.’79

  An entire generation is an exaggeration, for there was no shortage of critics. Julien Benda, a fervent rationahst, said he would ‘cheerfully have killed Bergson’ if his views could have been stifled with him.80 For the rationalists, Bergson’s philosophy was a sign of degeneration, an atavistic congeries of opinions in which the rigours of science were replaced by quasi-mystical ramblings. Paradoxically, he came under fire from the church on the grounds that he paid too much attention to science. For a time, little of this criticism stuck. Creative Evolution was a runaway success (T. S. Eliot went so far as to call Bergsonism ‘an epidemic’).81 America was just as excited, and William James confessed that ‘Bergson’s originality is so profuse that many of his ideas baffle me entirely.’82 Elan vital, the ‘life force,’ turned into a widely used cliché, but ‘life’ meant not only life but intuition, instinct, the very opposite of reason. As a result, religious and metaphysical mysteries, which science had seemingly killed off, reappeared in ‘respectable’ guise. William James, who had himself written a book on religion, thought that Bergson had ‘killed intellectualism definitively and without hope of recovery. I don’t see how it can ever revive again in its ancient platonizing role of claiming to be the most authentic, intimate, and exhaustive definer of the nature of reality.’83 Bergson’s followers believed Creative Evolution had shown that reason itself is just one aspect of life, rather than the all-important judge of what mattered. This overlapped with Freud, but it also found an echo, much later in the century, in the philosophers of postmodernism.

  One of the central tenets of Bergsonism was that the future is unpredictable. Yet in his will, dated 8 February 1937, he said, ‘I would have become a convert [to Catholicism], had I not seen in preparation for years the formidable wave of anti-Semitism which is to break upon the world. I wanted to remain among those who tomorrow will be persecuted.’84 Bergson died in 1941 of pneumonia contracted from having stood for hours in line with other Jews, forced to register with the authorities, then under Nazi military occupation.

  Throughout the nineteenth century organised religion, and Christianity in particular, came under sustained assault from many of the sciences, the discoveries of which contradicted the biblical account of the universe. Many younger members of the clergy urged the Vatican to respond to these findings, while traditionalists wanted the church to explain them away and allow a return to familiar verities. In this debate, which threatened a deep divide, the young radicals were known as modernists.

  In September 1907 the traditionalists finally got what they had been praying for when, from Rome, Pope Pius X published his encyclical, Pascendi Dominici Gregis. This unequivocally condemned modernism in all its forms. Papal encyclicals (letters to all bishops of the church) rarely make headlines now, but they were once very reassuring for the faithful, and Pascendi was the first of the century.85 The ideas that Pius was responding to may be grouped under four headings. There was first the general attitude of science, developed since the Enlightenment, which brought about a change in the way that man looked at the world around him and, in the appeal to reason and experience that science typified, constituted a challenge to established authority. Then there was the specific science of Darwin and his concept of evolution. This had two effects. First, evolution carried the Copernican and Galilean revolutions still further toward the displacement of man from a specially appointed position in a limited universe. It showed that man had arisen from the animals, and was essentially no different from them and certainly not set apart in any way. The second effect of evolution was as metaphor: that ideas, like animals, evolve, change, develop. The theological modernists believed that the church – and belief – should evolve too, that in the modern world dogma as such was out of place. Third, there was the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724—1804), who argued that there were limits to reason, that human observations of the world were ‘never neutral, never free of priorly imposed conceptual judgements’, and because of that one could never know that God exists. And finally there were the theories of Henri Bergson. As we have seen, he actually supported spiritual notions, but these were very different from the traditional teachings of the church and closely interwoven with science and reason.86

  The theological modernists believed that the church should address its own ‘self-serving’ forms of reason, such as the Immaculate Conception and the infallibility of the pope. They also wanted a reexamination of church teaching in the light of Kant, pragmatism, and recent scientific developments. In archaeology there were the discoveries and researches of the German school, who had made so much of the quest for the historical Je
sus, the evidence for his actual, temporal existence rather than his meaning for the faithful. In anthropology, Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough had shown the ubiquity of magical and religious rites, and their similarities in various cultures. This great diversity of religions had therefore undermined Christian claims to unique possession of truth – people found it hard to believe, as one writer said, ‘that the greater part of humanity is plunged in error.’87 With the benefit of hindsight, it is tempting to see Pascendi as yet another stage in ‘the death of God.’ However, most of the young clergy who took part in the debate over theological modernism did not wish to leave the church; instead they hoped it would ‘evolve’ to a higher plane.

  The pope in Rome, Pius X (later Saint Pius), was a working-class man from Riese in the northern Italian province of the Veneto. Unsophisticated, having begun his career as a country priest, he was not surprisingly an uncompromising conservative and not at all afraid to get into politics. He therefore responded to the young clergy not by appeasing their demands but by carrying the fight to them. Modernism was condemned outright, without any prevarication, as ‘nothing but the union of the faith with false philosophy.’88 Modernism, for the pope and traditional Catholics, was defined as ‘an exaggerated love of what is modern, an infatuation for modern ideas.’ One Catholic writer even went so far as to say it was ‘an abuse of what is modern.’89 Pascendi, however, was only the most prominent part of a Vatican-led campaign against modernism. The Holy Office, the Cardinal Secretary of State, decrees of the Consistorial Congregation, and a second encyclical, Editae, published in 1910, all condemned the trend, and Pius repeated the argument in several papal letters to cardinals and the Catholic Institute in Paris. In his decree, Lamentabili, he singled out for condemnation no fewer than sixty-five specific propositions of modernism. Moreover, candidates for higher orders, newly appointed confessors, preachers, parish priests, canons, and bishops’ staff were all obliged to swear allegiance to the pope, according to a formula ‘which reprobates the principal modernist tenets.’ And the primary role of dogma was reasserted: ‘Faith is an act of the intellect made under the sway of the will.’90

  Faithful Catholics across the world were grateful for the Vatican’s closely reasoned arguments and its firm stance. Discoveries in the sciences were coming thick and fast in the early years of the century, changes in the arts were more bewildering and challenging than ever. It was good to have a rock in this turbulent world. Beyond the Catholic Church, however, few people were listening.

  One place they weren’t listening was China. There, in 1900, the number of Christian converts, after several centuries of missionary work, was barely a million. The fact is that the intellectual changes taking place in China were very different from anywhere else. This immense country was finally coming to terms with the modern world, and that involved abandoning, above all, Confucianism, the religion that had once led China to the forefront of mankind (helping to produce a society that first discovered paper, gunpowder, and much else) but had by then long ceased to be an innovative force, had indeed become a liability. This was far more daunting than the West’s piecemeal attempts to move beyond Christianity.

  Confucianism began by taking its fundamental strength, its basic analogy, from the cosmic order. Put simply, there is in Confucianism an hierarchy of superior-inferior relationships that form the governing principle of life. ‘Parents are superior to children, men to women, rulers to subjects.’ From this, it follows that each person has a role to fulfil; there is a ‘conventionally fixed set of social expectations to which individual behaviour should conform.’ Confucius himself described the hierarchy this way: ‘Jun jun chen chen fu fu zi zi,’ which meant, in effect, ‘Let the ruler rule as he should and the minister be a minister as he should. Let the father act as a father should and the son act as a son should.’ So long as everyone performs his role, social stability is maintained.91 In laying stress on ‘proper behaviour according to status,’ the Confucian gentleman was guided by li, a moral code that stressed the quiet virtues of patience, pacifism, and compromise, respect for ancestors, the old, and the educated, and above all a gentle humanism, taking man as the measure of all things. Confucianism also stressed that men were naturally equal at birth but perfectible, and that an individual, by his own efforts, could do ‘the right thing’ and be a model for others. The successful sages were those who put ‘right conduct’ above everything else.92

  And yet, for all its undoubted successes, the Confucian view of life was a form of conservatism. Given the tumultuous changes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that the system was failing could not be disguised for long. As the rest of the world coped with scientific advances, the concepts of modernism and the advent of socialism, China needed changes that were more profound, the mental and moral road more tortuous. The ancient virtues of patience and compromise no longer offered real hope, and the old and the traditionally educated no longer had the answers. Nowhere was the demoralisation more evident than in the educated class, the scholars, the very guardians of the neo-Confucian faith.

  The modernisation of China had in theory been going on since the seventeenth century, but by the beginning of the twentieth it had in practice become a kind of game played by a few high officials who realised it was needed but did not have the political wherewithal to carry these changes through. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Jesuit missionaries had produced Chinese translations of over four hundred Western works, more than half on Christianity and about a third in science. But Chinese scholars still remained conservative, as was highlighted by the case of Yung Wing, a student who was invited to the United States by missionaries in 1847 and graduated from Yale in 1854. He returned to China after eight years’ study but was forced to wait another eight years before his skills as an interpreter and translator were made use of.93 There was some change. The original concentration of Confucian scholarship on philosophy had given way by the nineteenth century to ‘evidential research,’ the concrete analysis of ancient texts.94 This had two consequences of significance. One was the discovery that many of the so-called classic texts were fake, thus throwing the very tenets of Confucianism itself into doubt. No less importantly, the ‘evidential research’ was extended to mathematics, astronomy, fiscal and administrative matters, and archaeology. This could not yet be described as a scientific revolution, but it was a start, however late.

  The final thrust in the move away from Confucianism arrived in the form of the Boxer Rising, which began in 1898 and ended two years later with the beginnings of China’s republican revolution. The reason for this was once again the Confucian attitude to life, which meant that although there had been some change in Chinese scholarly activity, the compartmentalisation recommended by classical Confucianism was still paramount, its most important consequence being that many of the die-hard and powerful Manchu princes had had palace upbringings that had left them ‘ignorant of the world and proud of it.’95 This profound ignorance was one of the reasons so many of them became patrons of a peasant secret society known as the Boxers, merely the most obvious and tragic sign of China’s intellectual bankruptcy. The Boxers, who began in the Shandong area and were rabidly xenophobic, featured two peasant traditions – the technique of martial arts (‘boxing’) and spirit possession or shamanism. Nothing could have been more inappropriate, and this fatal combination made for a vicious set of episodes. The Chinese were defeated at the hands of eleven (despised) foreign countries, and were thus forced to pay $333 million in indemnities over forty years (which would be at least $20 billion now), and suffer the most severe loss of face the nation had ever seen. The year the Boxer Uprising was put down was therefore the low point by a long way for Confucianism, and everyone, inside and outside China, knew that radical, fundamental, philosophical change had to come.96

  Such change began with a set of New Policies (with initial capitals). Of these, the most portentous – and most revealing – was educational reform. Under this sch
eme, a raft of modern schools was to be set up across the country, teaching a new Japanese-style mix of old and new subjects (Japan was the culture to be emulated because that country had defeated China in the war of 1895 and, under Confucianism, the victor was superior to the vanquished: at the turn of the century Chinese students crowded into Tokyo).97 It was intended that many of China’s academies would be converted into these new schools. Traditionally, China had hundreds if not thousands of academies, each consisting of a few dozen local scholars thinking high thoughts but not in any way coordinated with one another or the needs of the country. In time they had become a small elite who ran things locally, from burials to water distribution, but had no overall, systematic influence. The idea was that these academies would be modernised.98

  It didn’t work out like that. The new – modern, Japanese, and Western science-oriented – curriculum proved so strange and so difficult for the Chinese that most students stuck to the easier, more familiar Confucianism, despite the evidence everywhere that it wasn’t working or didn’t meet China’s needs. It soon became apparent that the only way to deal with the classical system was to abolish it entirely, and that in fact is what happened just four years later, in 1905. A great turning point for China, this stopped in its tracks the production of the degree-holding elite, the gentry class. As a result, the old order lost its intellectual foundation and with it its intellectual cohesion. So far so good, one might think. However, the student class that replaced the old scholar gentry was presented, in John Fairbanks’s words, with a ‘grab-bag’ of Chinese and Western thought, which pulled students into technical specialities that however modern still left them without a moral order: ‘The Neo-Confucian synthesis was no longer valid or useful, yet nothing to replace it was in sight.’99 The important intellectual point to grasp about China is that that is how it has since remained. The country might take on over the years many semblances of Western thinking and behaviour, but the moral void at the centre of the society, vacated by Confucianism, has never been filled.