The quality of modern life seemed ever equivocal. Spectacular empowerment was countered by a widespread sense of anxious helplessness. Profound moral and aesthetic sensitivity confronted horrific cruelty and waste. The price of technology’s accelerating advance grew ever higher. And in the background of every pleasure and every achievement loomed humanity’s unprecedented vulnerability. Under the West’s direction and impetus, modern man had burst forward and outward, with tremendous centrifugal force, complexity, variety, and speed. And yet it appeared he had driven himself into a terrestrial nightmare and a spiritual wasteland, a fierce constriction, a seemingly irresolvable predicament.
Nowhere was the problematic modern condition more precisely embodied than in the phenomenon of existentialism, a mood and philosophy expressed in the writings of Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus, among others, but ultimately reflecting a pervasive spiritual crisis in modern culture. The anguish and alienation of twentieth-century life were brought to full articulation as the existentialist addressed the most fundamental, naked concerns of human existence—suffering and death, loneliness and dread, guilt, conflict, spiritual emptiness and ontological insecurity, the void of absolute values or universal contexts, the sense of cosmic absurdity, the frailty of human reason, the tragic impasse of the human condition. Man was condemned to be free. He faced the necessity of choice and thus knew the continual burden of error. He lived in constant ignorance of his future, thrown into a finite existence bounded at each end by nothingness. The infinity of human aspiration was defeated before the finitude of human possibility. Man possessed no determining essence: only his existence was given, an existence engulfed by mortality, risk, fear, ennui, contradiction, uncertainty. No transcendent Absolute guaranteed the fulfillment of human life or history. There was no eternal design or providential purpose. Things existed simply because they existed, and not for some “higher” or “deeper” reason. God was dead, and the universe was blind to human concerns, devoid of meaning or purpose. Man was abandoned, on his own. All was contingent. To be authentic one had to admit, and choose freely to encounter, the stark reality of life’s meaninglessness. Struggle alone gave meaning.
The Romantic’s quest for spiritual ecstasy, union with nature, and fulfillment of self and society, previously buttressed by the progressive optimism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, had met the dark realities of the twentieth, and the existentialist predicament was felt by many throughout the culture. Even theologians—perhaps especially theologians—were sensitive to the existentialist spirit. In a world shattered by two world wars, totalitarianism, the holocaust, and the atomic bomb, belief in a wise and omnipotent God ruling history for the good of all seemed to have lost any defensible basis. Given the unprecedentedly tragic dimensions of contemporary historical events, given the fall of Scripture as an unshakable foundation for belief, given the lack of any compelling philosophical argument for God’s existence, and given above all the almost universal crisis of religious faith in a secular age, it was becoming impossible for many theologians to speak of God in any way meaningful to the modern sensibility: thus emerged the seemingly self-contradictory but singularly representative theology of the “death of God.”
Contemporary narratives increasingly portrayed individuals caught in a bewilderingly problematic environment, vainly attempting to forge meaning and value in a context devoid of significance. Faced with the relentless impersonality of the modern world—whether mechanized mass society or soulless cosmos—the Romantic’s only remaining response appeared to be despair or self-annihilating defiance. Nihilism in a multitude of inflections now penetrated cultural life with growing insistence. The earlier Romantic passion to merge with the infinite began to be turned against itself, inverted, transformed into a compulsion to negate that passion. Romanticism’s disenchanted spirit increasingly expressed itself in fragmentation, dislocation, and self-parody, its only possible truths those of irony and dark paradox. Some suggested that the entire culture was psychotic in its disorientation, and that those called mad were in fact closer to genuine sanity. The revolt against conventional reality began to take new and more extreme forms. Earlier modern responses of realism and naturalism gave way to the absurd and surreal, the dissolution of all established foundations and solid categories. The quest for freedom became ever more radical, its price the destruction of any standard or stability. As the physical sciences also dismantled long-held certainties and structures, so art met science in the throes of the twentieth century’s epistemological relativism.
Already at the beginning of the century, the West’s traditional artistic canon, rooted in the forms and ideals of classical Greece and the Renaissance, had begun to be dissolved and atomized. Whereas the nature of human identity reflected in novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries conveyed a sense of human selfhood solidly outlined against large coherent backgrounds of linear narrative logic and historical sequence, the characteristic twentieth-century novel was notable for a constant questioning of its own premises, an incessant disruption of narrative and historical coherence, a confusing of horizons, a sophisticated and convoluted self-doubt that left characters, author, and reader in a state of irreducible suspension. Reality and identity, as Hume had precociously perceived two centuries earlier, were neither humanly ascertainable nor ontologically absolute. They were fictive habits of psychological and pragmatic convenience, and in the acutely introspective, wary, relativist consciousness of the contemporary Western mind, they could no longer be confidently presumed. For many, they were also false prisons, to be seen through and transcended: for where there was uncertainty, there was also freedom.
Half in reflection, half in prophesy, the dissonance and disjunction, radical freedom and radical uncertainty of the twentieth century found full and precise expression in its arts. Palpable life in all its flux and chaos replaced the formal conventions of earlier eras. The marvelous in art was sought through the aleatory, the spontaneous, the happenstance. Whether in painting or poetry, music or theater, an insistent amorphous-ness and indeterminacy governed artistic expression. Incoherence and disturbing juxtaposition constituted the new aesthetic logic The anomalous became normative: the incongruous, the fractured, the stylized, the trivial, the allusively obscure. Concern with the irrational and subjective, compounded by the overriding impulse to break free from conventions and expectations, often rendered an art intelligible to but an esoteric few—or so elliptically inscrutable as to preclude communication altogether. Each artist had become the prophet of his own new order and dispensation, courageously breaking the old law and forging a new testament.
Art’s task was to “make the world strange,” to shock the dulled sensibility, to forge a new reality by fragmenting the old. In art as in social practices, rebellion against a constricting and spiritually destitute society required the earnest, even systematic flouting of traditional values and assumptions. The sacred, made bland and empty by centuries of pious convention, seemed better expressed through the profane and blasphemous. Elemental passion and sensation could best draw forth the aboriginal wellsprings of the creative spirit. In Picasso as in the century he mirrored, there arose a Dionysian compound of unbound eroticism, aggression, dismemberment, death and birth. Alternatively, artistic revolt took the form of simulating the modern world in its metallic aridity, with the minimalists mimicking the scientific positivist in their striving for an expressionless art—an impersonal objectivism stripped of interpretation, flatly depicting gestures, forms, and tones devoid of subjectivity or meaning. In the view of many artists, not just intelligibility and meaning but beauty itself was to be abjured, for beauty, too, could be a tyrant, a convention to be destroyed.
It was not simply that the old formulae had been exhausted, or that artists sought novelty at any cost. Rather, the nature of contemporary human experience demanded the collapse of old structures and themes, the creation of new ones, or the renouncing of any discernible form or content whatever. Artists had become rea
lists of a new reality—of an ever-growing multiplicity of realities—lacking any precedent. Thus their artistic responsibilities sharply diverged from those of their predecessors: radical change, in art as in society, was the century’s overriding theme, its dominant imperative and its inescapable actuality.
Yet a price was paid. “Make it new,” Ezra Pound had decreed, but later he reflected, “I cannot make it cohere.” Radical change and ceaseless innovation lent themselves to unaesthetic chaos, to incomprehensibility and barren alienation. The late modern experiment threatened to fray out into meaningless solipsism. The results of incessant novelty were creative but seldom enduring. Incoherence was authentic but seldom satisfying. Subjectivism was perhaps fascinating but too often irrelevant. The insistent elevation of the abstract over the representational sometimes seemed to reflect little more than the growing incapacity of the modern artist to relate to nature. In the absence of established aesthetic forms or culturally sustained modes of vision, the arts in the twentieth century became notable for a certain quality of graceless transiency, an undisguised self-consciousness regarding their own ephemeral substance and style.
By contrast, what was constant and cumulative in twentieth-century art was an increasingly ascetic striving for an uncompromised essence of art that gradually eliminated every artistic element that could be regarded as peripheral or contingent—representation, narrative, character, melody, tonality, structural continuity, thematic relation, form, content, meaning, purpose—moving inevitably toward an end point in which all that remained was a blank canvas, an empty stage, silence. Reversion to distantly past or foreign forms and standards seemed to offer the only way out, but these, too, proved short-lived gambits, incapable of taking deep root in the restless modern psyche. Like philosophers and theologians, artists were finally left with only the self-reflective and fairly paralyzing preoccupation with their own creative processes and formal procedures—and, not infrequently, their destruction of the results. The earlier modernist faith in the great artist who alone was sovereign in an otherwise meaningless world gave way to the postmodernist loss of faith in the artist’s transcendence.
The contemporary writer … is forced to start from scratch: Reality doesn’t exist, time doesn’t exist, personality doesn’t exist. God was the omniscient author, but he died; now no one knows the plot, and since our reality lacks the sanction of a creator, there’s no guarantee as to the authenticity of the received version. Time is reduced to presence, the content of a series of discontinuous moments. Time is no longer purposive, and so there is no density, only chance. Reality is, simply, our experience, and objectivity is, of course, an illusion. Personality, after passing through a stage of awkward self-consciousness, has become … a mere locus for our experience. In view of these annihilations, it should be no surprise that literature, also, does not exist—how could it? There is only reading and writing … ways of maintaining a considered boredom in face of the abyss.6
The underlying powerlessness of the individual in modern life pressed many artists and intellectuals to withdraw from the world, to forsake the public arena. Fewer felt capable of engaging issues beyond those immediately confronting the self and its private struggle for substance, let alone committing to universal moral visions that no longer appeared tenable. Human activity—artistic, intellectual, moral—was forced to find its ground in a standardless vacuum. Meaning seemed to be no more than an arbitrary construct, truth only a convention, reality undiscoverable. Man, it began to be said, was a futile passion.
Underneath the superficial clamor of an often frenetic and hyper-stimulated daily existence, an apocalyptic tone started to pervade many aspects of cultural life, and as the twentieth century advanced there could be heard, with accelerating frequency and intensity, bell-tolling declarations concerning the decline and fall, the deconstruction and collapse, of virtually every one of the West’s great intellectual and cultural projects: the end of theology, the end of philosophy, the end of science, the end of literature, the end of art, the end of culture itself. Just as the Enlightenment-scientific side of the modern mind found itself undermined by its own intellectual advance and radically challenged by its technological and political consequences in the world, so too the Romantic side, reacting to similar circumstances but with a different and often more prophetic sensibility, found itself both disillusioned from within and thwarted from without, apparently destined to hold transcendent aspirations in a cosmic and historical context devoid of transcendent meaning.
Thus Western man enacted an extraordinary dialectic in the course of the modern era—moving from a near boundless confidence in his own powers, his spiritual potential, his capacity for certain knowledge, his mastery over nature, and his progressive destiny, to what often appeared to be a sharply opposite condition: a debilitating sense of metaphysical insignificance and personal futility, spiritual loss of faith, uncertainty in knowledge, a mutually destructive relationship with nature, and an intense insecurity concerning the human future. In the four centuries of modern man’s existence, Bacon and Descartes had become Kafka and Beckett.
Something indeed was ending. And so it was that the Western mind, in response to these many complexly interwoven developments, had followed a trajectory that by the late twentieth century had largely dissolved the foundations of the modern world view, leaving the contemporary mind increasingly bereft of established certainties, yet also fundamentally open in ways it had never been before. And the intellectual sensibility that now reflects and expresses this unprecedented situation, the overdetermined outcome of the modern mind’s extraordinary development of increasing sophistication and self-deconstruction, is the postmodern mind.
The Postmodern Mind
Each great epochal transformation in the history of the Western mind appears to have been initiated by a kind of archetypal sacrifice. As if to consecrate the birth of a fundamental new cultural vision, in each case a symbolically resonant trial and martyrdom of some sort was suffered by its central prophet: thus the trial and execution of Socrates at the birth of the classical Greek mind, the trial and crucifixion of Jesus at the birth of Christianity, and the trial and condemnation of Galileo at the birth of modern science. By all accounts the central prophet of the postmodern mind was Friedrich Nietzsche, with his radical perspectivism, his sovereign critical sensibility, and his powerful, poignantly ambivalent anticipation of the emerging nihilism in Western culture. And we see a curious, perhaps aptly postmodern analogy of this theme of archetypal sacrifice and martyrdom with the extraordinary inner trial and imprisonment—the intense intellectual ordeal, the extreme psychological isolation, and the eventually paralyzing madness—suffered at the birth of the postmodern by Nietzsche, who signed his last letters “The Crucified,” and who died at the dawn of the twentieth century.
Like Nietzsche, the postmodern intellectual situation is profoundly complex and ambiguous—perhaps this is its very essence. What is called postmodern varies considerably according to context, but in its most general and widespread form, the postmodern mind may be viewed as an open-ended, indeterminate set of attitudes that has been shaped by a great diversity of intellectual and cultural currents; these range from pragmatism, existentialism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis to feminism, hermeneutics, deconstruction, and postempiricist philosophy of science, to cite only a few of the more prominent. Out of this maelstrom of highly developed and often divergent impulses and tendencies, a few widely shared working principles have emerged. There is an appreciation of the plasticity and constant change of reality and knowledge, a stress on the priority of concrete experience over fixed abstract principles, and a conviction that no single a priori thought system should govern belief or investigation. It is recognized that human knowledge is subjectively determined by a multitude of factors; that objective essences, or things in-themselves, are neither accessible nor positable; and that the value of all truths and assumptions must be continually subjected to direct testing. The critical search for truth is
constrained to be tolerant of ambiguity and pluralism, and its outcome will necessarily be knowledge that is relative and fallible rather than absolute or certain.
Hence the quest for knowledge must be endlessly self-revising. One must try the new, experiment and explore, test against subjective and objective consequences, learn from one’s mistakes, take nothing for granted, treat all as provisional, assume no absolutes. Reality is not a solid, self-contained given but a fluid, unfolding process, an “open universe,” continually affected and molded by one’s actions and beliefs. It is possibility rather than fact. One cannot regard reality as a removed spectator against a fixed object; rather, one is always and necessarily engaged in reality, thereby at once transforming it while being transformed oneself. Although intransigent or provoking in many respects, reality must in some sense be hewed out by means of the human mind and will, which themselves are already enmeshed in that which they seek to understand and affect. The human subject is an embodied agent, acting and judging in a context that can never be wholly objectified, with orientations and motivations that can never be fully grasped or controlled. The knowing subject is never disengaged from the body or from the world, which form the background and condition of every cognitive act.
The inherent human capacity for concept and symbol formation is recognized as a fundamental and necessary element in the human understanding, anticipation, and creation of reality. The mind is not the passive reflector of an external world and its intrinsic order, but is active and creative in the process of perception and cognition. Reality is in some sense constructed by the mind, not simply perceived by it, and many such constructions are possible, none necessarily sovereign. Although human knowledge may be bound to conform to certain innate subjective structures, there is a degree of indeterminacy in these that, combined with the human will and imagination, permit an element of freedom in cognition. Implicit here is a relativized critical empiricism and a relativized critical rationalism—recognizing the indispensability both of concrete investigation and of rigorous argument, criticism, and theoretical formulation, yet also recognizing that neither procedure can claim any absolute foundation: There is no empirical “fact” that is not already theory-laden, and there is no logical argument or formal principle that is a priori certain. All human understanding is interpretation, and no interpretation is final.
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