Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You
Hertz’s Principles of Mechanics
1895 Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest
Durkheim’s Rules of Sociological Method
1896 Becquerel’s discovery of radioactivity in uranium
Jarry’s Ubu Roi
Chekhov’s The Seagull
1897 James’s The Will to Believe
1898 Cezanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings
1900 Death of Nietzsche
Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams
Planck initiates quantum physics
Husserl’s Logical Investigations initiates phenomenology
Rediscovery of Mendelian genetics
1901 Henry James’s The Ambassadors
1902 William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience
1903 Moore’s Refutation of Idealism and Principia Ethica
Shaw’s Man and Superman
Wright brothers make first powered airplane flight
1905 Einstein’s papers on special relativity, photoelectric effect, Brownian motion
Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
1906 Duhem’s La Théorie Physique
Gandhi develops philosophy of nonviolent activism
1907 William James’s Pragmatism
Bergson’s L’Évolution Creatrice
Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
Suzuki’s Outline of Mahayana Buddhism introduces Buddhism to West
1909 Schoenberg’s first atonal work
1910–13 Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica
1912 Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious, break from Freud
Wegener proposes theory of continental drift
1913 Steiner founds anthroposophy
Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring
Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu
Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers
Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life
Royce’s The Problem of Christianity
Ford begins mass production of automobiles
1914 Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka’s The Trial
1914–18 World War I
1915 Saussure’s Cours de Linguistique Générale
1916 Einstein’s general theory of relativity
1917 Otto’s The Idea of the Holy
Russian Revolution
1918 Spengler’s The Decline of the West
1919 General theory of relativity experimentally confirmed
Watson’s Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist
Barth’s Epistle to the Romans
1920 Yeats’s “The Second Coming”
Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle
First public radio broadcast
1921 Russell’s The Analysis of Mind
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
1922 T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land
Joyce’s Ulysses
Weber’s Economy and Society
1923 Rilke’s Duino Elegies
W. Stevens’s Harmonium
Freud’s The Ego and the Id
Buber’s I and Thou
Santayana’s Scepticism and Animal Faith
Pavlov’s Conditioned Reflexes
1924 Piaget’s Judgment and Reasoning in the Child
Rank’s The Trauma of Birth
Mann’s The Magic Mountain
1925 Yeats’s A Vision
Dewey’s Experience and Nature
Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World
1926 Schrödinger develops wave equation underlying quantum mechanics
1927 Heisenberg formulates principle of uncertainty
Bohr formulates principle of complementarity
Lemaître proposes big-bang theory
Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (Being and Time)
Freud’s The Future of an Illusion
Reich’s Der Funktion des Orgasmus
Hesse’s Der Steppenwolf
1928 Yeats’s The Tower
Carnap’s The Logical Structure of the World
Jung’s The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man
1929 Whitehead’s Process and Reality
Vienna Circle manifesto: Scientific Conception of the World
Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury
Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own
1930 Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents
Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses
Bultmann’s The Historicity of Man and Faith
1931 Gödel’s Theorem proves undecidability of propositions in formalized mathematical systems
Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms
1932 Jaspers’s Philosophie
Klein’s Psychoanalysis of Children
1933 Hitler comes to power in Germany
1934 Toynbee’s A Study of History
Popper’s Logic of Scientific Discovery
Jung’s Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious
Mumford’s Technics and Civilization
1936 Lovejoy’s Great Chain of Being
Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic
Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
1937 Anna Freud’s The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense
Turing’s On Computable Numbers
1938 Brecht’s Galileo
Discovery of nuclear fission
Sartre’s Nausea
1939 Death of Freud
1939–45 World War II, Holocaust
1940 Collingwood’s Essay on Metaphysics
1941 Niebuhr’s The Nature and Destiny of Man
Fromm’s Escape from Freedom
Borges’s Ficciones
1942 Camus’s The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus
1943 Sartre’s Being and Nothingness
Eliot’s Four Quartets
1945 Merleau-Ponty’s Phénoménologie de la Perception
Schrödinger’s What Is Life?
Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Founding of United Nations
1946–48 Beginning of Cold War
Rise of public television broadcasting
First electronic digital computers developed
1947 Pollock’s first abstract drip paintings
1948 Wiener’s Cybernetics
Hartshorne’s The Divine Relativity
Graves’s The White Goddess
Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain
1949 Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four
Eliade’s The Myth of the Eternal Return
Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces
De Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sex
1950 Papal declaration of the Assumptio Mariae
1951 Tillich’s Systematic Theology
Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison
Quine’s Two Dogmas of Empiricism
1952 Beckett’s Waiting for Godot
Jung’s Answer to Job, Synchronicity
1953 Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations
Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics
Skinner’s Science and Human Behavior
Watson and Crick discover structure of DNA
1954 Huxley’s Doors of Perception
Rahner’s Theological Investigations
Needham’s Science and Civilization in China
1955 Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man
Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization
Ginsberg’s Howl
1956 Bateson et al. formulate double-bind theory
1957 Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures
Barfield’s Saving the Appearances
Watts’s The Way of Zen Sputnik satellite launched
1958 Lévi-Strauss’s Anthropologie Structurale
Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge
1959 Brown’s Lif
e Against Death
Snow’s Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution
1960 Gadamer’s Truth and Method
Quine’s Word and Object
1960–72 Rise of civil rights movement, student movement, feminism, environmentalism, counterculture
1961 First space flights
Watts’s Psychotherapy East and West
Foucault’s Histoire de la Folie
Fanon’s Les Damnés de la Tene
1962 Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Popper’s Conjectures and Refutations
Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Maslow’s Toward a Psychology of Being
Carson’s Silent Spring
McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy
Hess proposes seafloor-spreading hypothesis
Second Vatican Council begins Founding of Esalen Institute, rise of human potential movement
Psychedelic experiments with Leary and Alpert at Harvard
Rise of Dylan, Beatles, Rolling Stones
Students for a Democratic Society adopts Port Huron statement
1963 Civil rights march on Washington, Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech
Friedan’s Feminine Mystique
E. N. Lorenz publishes first paper on chaos theory
1964 Free speech movement begins in Berkeley
Discovery of background cosmic radiation by Penzias and Wilson supports big-bang theory
Quarks postulated by Gell-Mann and Zweig
Bellah’s Religious Evolution
Barthes’s Essais Critiques
Autobiography of Malcolm X
1965 Escalation of U.S. war in Vietnam
Cox’s The Secular City
Heidegger’s final interview in Der Spiegel
1966 Altizer and Hamilton’s Radical Theology and the Death of God
Commoner’s Science and Survival
Lacan’s Ecrits
Bell’s theorem of nonlocality
1967 Laing’s Politics of Experience
Derrida’s L’Ecriture et la Différence
White’s Historical Roots of Our Ecologie Crisis
1968 Habermas’s Knowledge and Human Interests
Lakatos’s Criticism and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes
Von Bertalanffy’s General Systems Theory
Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan
Brand’s The Whole Earth Catalog
Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb
1968–70 Student rebellions, antiwar movement, counterculture at height
1969 Landing of astronauts on the Moon
Lovelock proposes Gaia hypothesis
Roszak’s The Making of a Counter Culture
Millett’s Sexual Politics
Abbey’s Desert Solitaire
Perls’s Gestalt Therapy Verbatim
Kristeva’s Semiotikè
Ricouer’s The Conflict of Interpretations
1970 First Earth Day
Bellah’s Beyond Belief
1971 Gutierrez’s Theology of Liberation
Boston Women’s Health Book Collective’s Our Bodies, Ourselves
Pribram’s Languages of the Brain
Thompson’s At the Edge of History
1972 Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind
Meadows’s The Limits to Growth
1973 Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful
Geertz’s Interpretation of Cultures
Daly’s Beyond God the Father
Naess’s The Shallow and the Deep Ecology Movements
1974 Ruether’s Religion and Sexism
Gimbutas’s The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe
1975 Grof’s Realms of the Human Unconscious
Hillman’s Re-Visioning Psychology
Capra’s Tao of Physics
Wilson’s Sociobiology
Singer’s Animal Liberation
Feyerabend’s Against Method
1978 Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking
Chodorow’s The Reproduction of Mothering
1979 Rorty’s Philosophy and the Minor of Nature
1980 Emergence of personal computers
Development of biotechnology
Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order
Prigogine’s From Being to Becoming Merchant’s
The Death of Nature
1981 Sheldrake’s A New Science of Life
1982 Gilligan’s In a Different Voice
Aspect experiment confirms Bell’s theorem
Schell’s The Fate of the Earth
1983 Discovery of W and Z subatomic particles
1984 Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition
1985 Keller’s Reflections on Gender and Science
Gorbachev initiates perestroika in Soviet Union
1985–90 Rapid rise of public awareness of planetary ecological crisis
1989–90 End of Cold War, collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe
Notes
Introduction
Because the issue of gender is especially significant today, and because it directly affects the language of the present narrative, an introductory comment is in order. In a historical account such as this, the distinction between the author’s view and the various views he or she is describing can sometimes be obscured, so that a prior note of clarification can be valuable. Like many others, I do not consider it justifiable for a writer today to use the word “man” or “mankind,” or the traditional masculine generic pronouns “he” and “his,” when straightforwardly referring to the human species or the generic human individual (as in “the destiny of man” or “man’s relationship to his environment” or similar expressions). I recognize that many responsible writers and scholars—mainly men, but some women as well—continue to employ such terms in this way, and I appreciate the problem of changing deeply ingrained habits, but in the long run I do not believe that such usage can be successfully defended for what boils down largely to reasons of style (brevity, elegance, rhetorical vigor, tradition). The motive, worthy in itself, is insufficient to justify the implied exclusion of the female half of the human species.
Such usage, however, is appropriate—and, indeed, necessary for semantic precision and historical accuracy—when the task is specifically that of articulating the mode of thinking, the world view, and the image of the human expressed by most of the principal figures of Western thought from the time of the Greeks until very recently. For most of its existence, the Western intellectual tradition was an unequivocally patrilineal tradition. With a uniform consistency that we today can scarcely appreciate, that tradition was formed and canonized almost exclusively by men writing for other men, with the result that an androcentric perspective was implicitly assumed to be the “natural” one. Perhaps not coincidentally, it has been characteristic of all the major languages within which the Western intellectual tradition developed, both ancient and modern, to denote the human species and the generic human being with words that are masculine in gender and, to varying degrees, in implication (e.g., Greek anthrōpos, Latin homo, Italian l’uomo, French l’homme, Spanish el hombre, Russian chelovek, German der Mensch, English man). In addition, generalizations about human experience were regularly made using words that in other contexts explicitly denoted members of the male sex alone (e.g., Greek anēr, andres; English man, men). Many complexities are involved in analyzing these tendencies: each language has its own grammatical conventions for gender, and its own semantic peculiarities, nuances, and overtones; different words in different contexts suggest different degrees and forms of inclusiveness or bias; and all of these variables can differ from one writer to another and from one era to another. But running through all these complexities is evident a fundamental masculine linguistic bias that has been embedded in and intrinsic to virtually the entire progression of world views discussed in this book. That bias cannot be excised without distorting the essential meaning and structure of those cultural perspectives. The bias does
not represent merely an isolated linguistic peculiarity; rather, it is the linguistic manifestation of a deep-seated and systemic, if generally unconscious, masculine predisposition in the character of the Western mind.
When major thinkers and writers of the past used the word “man” or other masculine generics to indicate the human species—as, for example, in The Descent of Man (Darwin, 1871), or De hominis dignitate oratio (“Oration on the Dignity of Man,” Pico della Mirandola, 1486), or Das Seelenproblem des modernen Menschen (“The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man,” Jung, 1928)—the meaning of the term was pervaded by a fundamental ambiguity. It is usually clear that a writer who employed such an expression in this kind of context intended to personify the entire human species, not only members of the male sex. Yet it is also evident from the larger framework of understanding within which the word appears that such a term was generally intended to denote and connote a decisively masculine contour in what the writer understood to be the essential nature of the human being and the human enterprise. This shifting but persistent ambiguity of diction—both gender-inclusive and masculine-oriented—must be accurately conveyed if one is to understand the distinctive character of Western cultural and intellectual history. The implicit masculine meaning of such terms was not accidental, even if it was largely unconscious. If the present narrative were to attempt to convey the mainstream traditional Western image of the human enterprise by systematically and unvaryingly using gender-neutral expressions such as “humankind,” “humanity,” “people,” “persons,” “women and men,” and “the human being” (along with “she or he” and “his or her”), instead of what would actually have been used—man, anthröpos, andres, homines, der Mensch, etc.—the result would be roughly comparable to the work of a medieval historian who, when writing about the ancient Greek view of the divine, conscientiously substituted the word “God” every time the Greeks would have said “the gods,” thereby correcting a usage that to medieval ears would have seemed both wrong and offensive.
My aim in this historical narrative has been to recount the evolution of the Western world view as it was articulated within the mainstream Western intellectual tradition, and I have attempted to do so as far as possible from the unfolding point of view of the tradition itself. By the careful choice and variation of specific words and expressions within the continuum of the narrative, using the idioms of only one language, modern English, I have tried to capture the spirit of each major perspective that emerged from this tradition. For the sake of historical fidelity, therefore, this narrative employs where appropriate certain English terms and expressions, such as “man,” “mankind,” “modern man,” “man and God,” “man’s place in the cosmos,” “man’s emergence from nature,” and the like, when these would reflect the spirit and characteristic style of discourse of the individual or era under discussion. To avoid such locutions in this context would bowdlerize the history of the Western mind and misrepresent its fundamental character, making much of that history unintelligible.
Passion of the Western Mind Page 60