The Modern Mind

by Peter Watson

  Before World War I, Germany had held several concessions in Shandong, China. The Versailles Treaty did not return these to the Beijing government but left them in the hands of the Japanese. When this news was released, on 4 May 1919, some 3,000 students from Beida (Beijing University) and other Beijing institutions besieged the Tiananmen, the gateway to the palace. This led to a battle between students and police, a student strike, demonstrations across the country, a boycott of Japanese goods - and in the end the ‘broadest demonstration of national feeling that China had ever seen.’24 The most extraordinary aspect of this development - what became known as the May 4 movement — was that it was the work of both mature intellectuals and students. Infused by Western notions of democracy, and impressed by the advances of Western science, the leaders of the movement put these new ideas together in an anti-imperialist program. It was the first time the students had asserted their power in the new China, but it would not be the last. Many Chinese intellectuals had been to Japan to study. The main Western ideas they returned with related to personal expression and freedom, including sexual freedom, and this led them to oppose the traditional family organisation of China. Under Western influence they also turned to fiction as the most effective way to attack traditional China, often using first-person narratives written in the vernacular. Normal as this might seem to Westerners, it was very shocking in China.

  The first of these new writers to make a name for himself was Lu Xun. His real name was Zhou Shuren or Chou Shujen, and, coming from a prosperous family (like many in the May 4 movement), he first studied Western medicine and science. One of his brothers translated Havelock Ellis’s theories about sexuality into Chinese, and the other, a biologist and eugenicist, translated Darwin. In 1918, in the magazine New Youth, Lu Xun published a satire entitled ‘The Diary of a Madman.’ The ‘Diary’ was very critical of Chinese society, which he depicted as cannibalistic, devouring its brightest talents, with only the mad glimpsing the truth, and then as often as not in their dreams - a theme that would echo down the years, and not just in China. The problem with Chinese civilisation, Lu Xun wrote, was that it was ‘a culture of serving one’s masters, who are triumphant at the cost of the misery of the multitude.’25

  The Versailles Treaty may have been the immediate stimulus for the May 4 movement, but a more general influence was the ideas that shaped Chinese society after 1911, when the Qing dynasty was replaced with a republic.26 Those ideas — essentially, of a civil society — were not new in the West. But the Confucian heritage posed two difficulties for this transition in China. The first was the concept of individualism, which is of course such a bulwark in Western (and especially American) civil society. Chinese reformers like Yan (or Yen) Fu, who translated so many Western liberal classics (including John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and Herbert Spencer’s Study of Sociology), nonetheless saw individualism only as a trait to be used in support of the state, not against it.27 The second difficulty posed by the Confucian heritage was even more problematic. Though the Chinese developed something called the New Learning, which encompassed ‘foreign matters’ (i.e., modernisation), what in practice was taught may be summarised, in the words of Harvard historian John

  Fairbanks, as ‘Eastern ethics and Western science.’28 The Chinese (and to an extent the Japanese) persisted in the belief that Western ideas – particularly science – were essentially technical or purely functional matters, a set of tools much shallower than, say, Eastern philosophy, which provided the ‘substance’ of education and knowledge. But the Chinese were fooling themselves. Their own brand of education was very thinly spread – male literacy in the late Qing period (i.e., up to 1911) was 30 to 45 percent for men and as low as 2 to 10 percent for women. As a measure of the educational backwardness of China at this time, such universities as existed were required to teach and examine many subjects – engineering, technology, and commerce – using English-language textbooks: Chinese words for specialist terms did not yet exist.29

  In effect, China’s educated elite had to undergo two revolutions. They had first to throw off Confucianism, and the social/educational structure that went with it. Then they had to throw off the awkward amalgam of ‘Eastern ethics, Western science’ that followed. In practice, those who achieved this did so only by going to the United States to study (provided for by a U.S. congressional bill in 1908). To a point this was effective, and in 1914 young Chinese scientists who had studied in America founded the Science Society. For a time, this society offered the only real chance for science in the Chinese/Confucian context.30 Beijing University played its part when a number of scholars who had trained abroad attempted to cleanse China of Confucianism ‘in the name of science and democracy.’31 This process became known as the New Learning – or New Culture – movement.32 Some idea of the magnitude of the task facing the movement can be had from the subject it chose for its first campaign: the Chinese writing system. This had been created around 200 B.C. and had hardly changed in the interim, with characters acquiring more and more meanings, which could only be deciphered according to context and by knowing the classical texts.33 Not surprisingly (to Western minds) the new scholars worked to replace the classical language with everyday speech. (The size of the problem is underlined when one realises this was the step taken in Europe during the Renaissance, four hundred years before, when Latin was replaced by national vernaculars.)34 Writing in the new vernacular, Lu Xun had turned his back on science (many in China, as elsewhere, blamed science for the horrors of World War I), believing he could have more impact as a novelist.35 But science was integral to what was happening. For example, other leaders of the May 4 movement like Fu Sinian and Luo Jialun at Beida advocated in their journal New Tide (Renaissance) — one of eleven such periodicals started in the wake of May 4 – a Chinese ‘enlightenment.’36 By this they meant an individualism beyond family ties and a rational, scientific approach to problems. They put their theories into practice by setting up their own lecture society to reach as many people as possible.37

  The May 4 movement was significant because it combined intellectual and political concerns more intimately than at other times. Traditionally China, unlike the West since the Enlightenment, had been divided into two classes only: the ruling elite and the masses. Following May 4, a growing bourgeoisie in China adopted Western attitudes and beliefs, calling for example for birth control and self-government in the regions. Such developments were bound to provoke political awareness.38 Gradually the split between the more academic wing of the May 4 movement and its political phalanx widened. Emboldened by the success of Leninism in Russia, the political wing became a secret, exclusive, centralised party seeking power, modelled on the Bolsheviks. One intellectual of the May 4 movement who began by believing in reform but soon turned to violent revolution was the burly son of a Hunan grain merchant whose fundamental belief was eerily close to that of Spengler, and other Germans.39 His name was Mao Zedong.

  The old Vienna officially came to an end on 3 April 1919, when the Republic of Austria abolished tides of nobility, forbidding the use even of ‘von’ in legal documents. The peace left Austria a nation of only 7 million with a capital that was home to 2 million of them. On top of this overcrowding, the years that followed brought famine, inflation, a chronic lack of fuel, and a catastrophic epidemic of influenza. Housewives were forced to cut trees in the woods, and the university closed because its roof had not been repaired since 1914.40 Coffee, historian William Johnston tells us, was made of barley, bread caused dysentery. Freud’s daughter Sophie was killed by the epidemic, as was the painter Egon Schiele. It was into this world that Alban Berg introduced his opera Wozzeck (1917–21, premiered 1925), about the murderous rage of a soldier degraded by his army experiences. But morals were not eclipsed entirely. At one point an American company offered to provide food for the Austrian people and to take payment in the emperor’s Gobelin tapestries: a public protest stopped the deal.41 Other aspects of Vienna style went out with the ‘von.’ It had
been customary, for example, for the doorman to ring once for a male visitor, twice for a female, three times for an archduke or cardinal. And tipping had been ubiquitous – even elevator operators and the cashiers in restaurants were tipped. After the terrible conditions imposed by the peace, all such behaviour was stopped, never to resume. There was a complete break with the past.42 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Freud, Karl Kraus, and Otto Neurath all stayed on in Vienna, but it wasn’t the same as before. Food was so scarce that a team of British doctors investigating ‘accessory food factors,’ as vitamins were then called, was able to experiment on children, denying some the chance of a healthy life without any moral compunction.43 Now that the apocalypse had come to pass, the gaiety of Vienna was entirely vanished.

  In Budapest, the changes were even more revealing, and more telling. A group of brilliant scientists – physicists and mathematicians – were forced to look elsewhere for work and stimulation. These included Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, and Eugene Wigner, all Jews. Each would eventually go to Britain or the United States and work on the atomic bomb. A second group, of writers and artists, stayed on in Budapest, at least to begin with, having been forced home by the outbreak of war. The significance of this group lay in the fact that its character was shaped by both World War I and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. For what happened in the Sunday Circle, or the Lukács Circle, as it was called, was the eclipse of ethics. This eclipse darkened the world longer than most.

  The Budapest Sunday Circle was not formed until after war broke out, when a group of young intellectuals began to meet on Sunday afternoons to discuss various artistic and philosophical problems mainly to do with modernism. The group included Karl Mannheim, a sociologist, art historian Arnold Hauser, the writers Béla Balázs and Anna Leznai, and the musicians Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, all formed around the critic and philosopher George Lukács. Like Teller and company, most of them had travelled widely and spoke German, French, and English as well as Hungarian. Although Lukács – a friend of Max Weber – was the central figure of the ‘Sundays,’ they met in Balázs’s elegant, ‘notorious,’ hillside apartment.44 For the most part the discussions were highly abstract, though relief was provided by the musicians – it was here, for example, that Bartók tried out his compositions. To begin with, the chief concern of this group was ‘alienation’; like many people, the Sunday Circle members took the view that the war was the logical endpoint of the liberal society that had developed in the nineteenth century, producing industrial capitalism and bourgeois individualism. To Lukács and his friends, there was something sick, unreal, about that state of affairs. The forces of industrial capitalism had created a world where they felt ill at ease, where a shared culture was no longer part of the agenda, where the institutions of religion, art, science, and the state had ceased to have any communal meaning. Many of them were influenced in this by the lectures of George Simmel, ‘the Manet of philosophy’, in Berlin. Simmel made a distinction between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ culture. For him, objective culture was the best that had been thought, written, composed, and painted; a ‘culture’ was defined by how its members related to the canon of these works. In subjective culture, the individual seeks self-fulfilment and self-realisation through his or her own resources. Nothing need be shared. By the end of the nineteenth century, Simmel said, the classic example of this was the business culture; the collective ‘pathology’ arising from a myriad subjective cultures was alienation. For the Sunday Circle in Budapest the stabilising force of objective culture was a sine qua non. It was only through shared culture that the self could become known to others, and thus to itself. It was only by having a standpoint that was to be shared that one could recognise alienation in the first place. This solitude at the heart of modern capitalism came to dominate the discussions of the Sunday Circle as the war progressed and after the Bolshevik revolution they were led into radical politics. An added factor in their alienation was their Jewishness: in an era of growing anti-Semitism, they were bound to feel marginalised. Before the war they had been open to international movements – impressionism and aestheticism and to Paul Gauguin in particular, who, they felt, had found fulfilment away from the anti-Semitic business culture of Europe in far-off Tahiti. ‘Tahiti healed Gauguin,’ as Lukács wrote at one point.45 He himself felt so marginalised in Hungary that he took to writing in German.

  The Sunday Circle’s fascination with the redemptive powers of art had some predictable consequences. For a time they flirted with mysticism and, as Mary Gluck describes it, in her history of the Sunday circle, turned against science. (This was a problem for Mannheim; sociology was especially strong in Hungary and regarded itself as a science that would, eventually, explain the evolution of society.) The Sundays also embraced the erotic.46 In Bluebeard’s Castle, Béla Balázs described an erotic encounter between a man and a woman, his focus being what he saw as the inevitable sexual struggle between them. In Bartók’s musical version of the story, Judith enters Prince Bluebeard’s Castle as his bride. With increasing confidence, she explores the hidden layers – or chambers – of man’s consciousness. To begin with she brings joy into the gloom. In the deeper recesses, however, there is a growing resistance. She is forced to become increasingly reckless and will not be dissuaded from opening the seventh, forbidden door. Total intimacy, implies Balázs, leads only to a ‘final struggle’ for power. And power is a chimera, bringing only ‘renewed solitude.’47

  Step by step, therefore, Lukács and the others came to the view that art could only ever have a limited role in human affairs, ‘islands in a sea of fragmentation.’48 This was – so far as art was concerned – the eclipse of meaning. And this cold comfort became the main message of the Free School for Humanistic Studies, which the Sunday Circle set up during the war years. The very existence of the Free School was itself instructive. It was no longer Sunday-afternoon discussions – but action.

  Then came the Bolshevik revolution. Hitherto, Marxism had sounded too materialistic and scientistic for the Sunday Circle. But after so much darkness, and after Lukács’s own journey through art, to the point where he had much reduced expectations and hopes of redemption in that direction, socialism began to seem to him and others in the group like the only option that offered a way forward: ‘Like Kant, Lukács endorsed the primacy of ethics in politics.’49 A sense of urgency was added by the emergence of an intransigent left wing throughout Europe, committed to ending the war without delay. In 1917 Lukács had written, ‘Bolshevism is based on the metaphysical premise that out of evil, good can come, that it is possible to lie our way to the truth. [I am] incapable of sharing this faith.’50 A few weeks later Lukács joined the Communist Party of Hungary. He gave his reasons in an article entitled ‘Tactics and Ethics.’ The central question hadn’t changed: ‘Was it justifiable to bring about socialism through terror, through the violation of individual rights,’ in the interests of the majority? Could one lie one’s way to power? Or were such tactics irredeemably opposed to the principles of socialism? Once incapable of sharing the faith, Lukács now concluded that terror was legitimate in the socialist context, ‘and that therefore Bolshevism was a true embodiment of socialism.’ Moreover, ‘the class struggle – the basis of socialism – was a transcendental experience and the old rules no longer applied.’51

  In short, this was the eclipse of ethics, the replacement of one set of principles by another. Lukács is important here because he openly admitted the change in himself, the justification of terror. Conrad had already foreseen such a change, Kafka was about to record its deep psychological effects on all concerned, and a whole generation of intellectuals, maybe two generations, would be compromised as Lukács was. At least he had the courage to entitle his paper ‘Tactics and Ethics.’ With him, the issue was out in the open, which it wouldn’t always be.

  By the end of 1919 the Sunday Circle was itself on the verge of eclipse. The police had it under surveillance and once went so far as to confiscate Balász’s d
iaries, which were scrutinised for damaging admissions. The police had no luck, but the attention was too much for some of the Sundays. The Circle was reconvened in Vienna (on Mondays), but not for long, because the Hungarians were charged with using fake identities.52 By then Lukács, its centre of gravity, had other things on his mind: he had become part of the Communist underground. In December 1919 Balázs gave this description: ‘He presents the most heart-rending sight imaginable, deathly pale, hollow cheeked, impatient and sad. He is watched and followed, he goes around with a gun in his pocket…. There is a warrant out for his arrest in Budapest which would condemn him to death nine times over…. And here [in Vienna] he is active in hopeless conspiratorial party work, tracking down people who have absconded with party funds … in the meantime his philosophic genius remains repressed, like a stream forced underground which loosens and destroys the ground above.’53 Vivid, but not wholly true. At the back of Lukács’s mind, while he was otherwise engaged on futile conspiratorial work, he was conceiving what would become his most well known book, History and Class Consciousness.