Autor: Senior, John

Buch: The Death of Christian Culture

Titel: The Death of Christian Culture

Stichwort: Literatur, Kunst: Modernismus (Angriff auf das Sein); Aristoteles (Satz vom Widerspruch); Huysmans (Anti-Realismus)

Kurzinhalt: Huysmans has suggested that we concentrate by a kind of artistic yoga on a single detail ... in order to annihilate reality.

Textausschnitt: 31a THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT IN LITERATURE, NOW ABOUT one hundred years old, is no longer merely the contemporary or the current. It is rather a definable period in cultural history. Though terms like Neoclassic or Romantic are difficult to define, still, unless we admit that history is the nightmare that Joyce's Stephen Daedalus thought it was, we must work with categories. Romantic and Neoclassic are necessary, though difficult, terms and the same is true of Modern, which describes that period in our cultural history beginning in 1857 and ending ... very shortly, one suspects. The particular choice of year is somewhat arbitrary, of course—Marx published in 1848 and Darwin in 1859—but from the literary point of view the birth of Les fleurs du mal and Madame Bovary takes precedence. (Fs)

31b The consequences of these events reached their majority by the turn of the century, their maturity by World War I, the full expansion of middle-aged ripeness in the 1920s; and we are now into advanced old age where evidences of senility appear in the latest cinematic shocks and the graffiti novel—garrulous recollections of Modernism's childhood in the work of Baudelaire or Isidore Ducasse, the bogus Comte de Laturéamont. (Fs)

The present essay makes no attempt to prove that Modernism exists, but proceeding at once on the obvious fact that it does, analyzes two of its essential characteristics, interlocked and reciprocally causative, not mere aspects of Modernism, but the very valves of its heart—artificiality and sensationalism. Clarification if not definitions of these terms will proceed along with their application. (Fs)

31c With due respect to its failures—for it seems to be failing now—the triumph of three thousand years of Western Civilization has been, from the point of view of ideas, the philosophy vaguely called Realism or the Perennial Philosophy, because it has survived so many seasons. It may be summed up in a sentence: The real is really real; or in a word—is. The terse scholastic formula defines it: Demonstrationis principium 'quod quid est'—the beginning of proof is 'that which is'; or in another: Veritas sequitur esse rerum—truth follows upon the existence of things. According to this view, the principle of all things is "to be." Inprincipio erat Verbum. In the beginning was—not the Word—but the Verb, to which all verbs and nouns as well are ultimately reducible. "I am that I am," said God. (Fs) (notabene)

32a The capital text in philosophy is Aristotle's, which sums up Socrates, Plato, and all the antecedent and subsequent Realists —quite simply the most important chapter in the history of metaphysics:

It is impossible for the same attribute at once to belong and not to belong to the same thing and in the same relation.... This is the most certain of principles.... for it is impossible for anyone to suppose that a thing is and is not.... (Fs)

Hence all men who are demonstrating anything refer back to this as an ultimate belief; for it is by nature the starting point of all other axioms as well. (Fs)

There are some, however... "who both state themselves that the same thing can be, and not be, and say that it is possible to hold this view. Many even of the physicists adopt this theory.... We can demonstrate the impossibility by refutation, if only our opponent makes some statement. If he makes one, it is absurd to seek for an argument against one who has no arguments of his own about anything.... for such a person, in so far as he is such, is really no better than a vegetable.... The starting point for all such discussions is not the claim that he should state that something is or is not so (because that might be supposed to be begging of the question), but that he should say something significant both to himself and to another (this is essential if any argument is to follow; for otherwise such a person cannot reason either with himself or with another).... Thus in the first place it is obvious that this at any rate is true: that the term "to be" or "not to be" has definite meaning; so that not everything can be "so and not so".... For if it is equally possible to assert or deny anything of anything, one thing will not differ from another; for if anything differs, it will be true and unique .... Moreover it follows that all statements would be true and all false; and that our opponent himself admits that what he says is false. Besides it is obvious that discussion with him is pointless, because he makes no real statement.1
33a All of this is simply common sense raised to philosophical perfection. It is the normal mind's first reaction to the world—to know that it exists. Before he reflects, that is, "bends back" his attention to his own mental and sensory processes, a man first simply looks, hears, smells, tastes, touches, and affirms existence. Not Cogito ergo sum; but Aliquid est, intelligo, ergo sum et ergo cogito. Something exists and I know it and therefore I know that I exist and think. Thinking follows from existence; it does not make things so. (Fs)

33b As Aristotle says, anyone denying this, denies his own denial. Make any statement at all and you have affirmed the existence of what it is you have said, either possibly or really. The man who says, "This lie is true," has neither lied nor told the truth. He has said nothing at all. The famous "contradiction card" on one face says, "The statement on the other side of this card is true"; and when you turn it over it says, "The statement on the other side of this card is false."

33c George Orwell, a Modernist himself at the late stage, criticized much more than socialism in 1984 :

It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you —something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you almost to deny the evidence of your senses. In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later; the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience but the very existence of external reality was tacitly demanded by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense .... The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command .... And yet he was right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, the true, had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that!.... Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall toward the earth's center. With the feeling.... that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote: Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. (Fs)

33d The poor lost functionary in the fabricated world of 1984 rediscovers the Perennial Philosophy. Orwell is one of the first popular writers emerging from the heart of Marxism, to see this essential fact about Modernism—that it is an assault on the verb "to be," that its formal cause is "artificiality," the first of the two interlocking principles asserted in this essay. (Fs)

34a Aristotle, master of himself in most cases, almost loses his temper over this. He calls the sophists "vegetables," and finally liars:

It is quite evident that no one, either of those who profess this theory or of any other school, is really in this position. Otherwise, why does a man walk to Megara and not stay at home, when he thinks he ought to make the journey? Why does he not walk early one morning into a well or a ravine, if he comes to it, instead of clearly guarding against doing so, thus showing that he does not think that it is equally good and not good to fall in?

34b But ding dong bell, pussy's in the well! Though you cannot refute Aristotle, you can deliberately choose to drown. J.K.Huysmans, the paradigm of literary anti-Realism, in his novel A Rebours—"Against" — describes the dining room of his hero Des Esseintes, the perfect modernist, which

resembled a ship's cabin, with its ceiling of arched beams, its bulkheads and floor-boards of pitch-pine, and the little window-opening, let into the wainscoting like a porthole . . . [behind which] was a large aquarium .... Thus what daylight penetrated into the cabin had at first to pass through .... the waters.... He could then imagine himself between decks in a brig, and gaze inquisitively at some ingenious mechanical fishes driven by clockwork, which moved backwards and forwards behind the porthole window and got entangled in the artificial seaweed. At other times, while he was inhaling the smell of tar which had been introduced into the room before he entered it, he would examine a series of colour prints on the walls, such as you see in packet-boat offices and Lloyd's agencies, representing steamers bound for Valparaiso and the River Plate .... By these means he was able to enjoy quickly, almost simultaneously, all the sensations of a long sea voyage, without ever leaving home .... The imagination could provide a more than adequate substitute for the vulgar reality of actual experience. (Fs)

34c Aristotle flings his challenge to the physicists: If you deny the law of contradiction, why walk to Megara when you want to go there? Huysmans replies: "I don't." And he proceeds one step further in describing the particular techniques for the surpassing of reality in imagination:

The main thing is to know how to set about it, to be able to concentrate your attention on a single detail, to forget yourself sufficiently to bring about the desired hallucination and substitute the vision of a reality for the reality itself.... There can be no shadow of doubt that with her never-ending platitudes the Old Crone [Nature!] has by now exhausted the good-humored admiration of all true artists, and the time has come for artifice to take her place wherever possible. (Fs)

35a Aristotle said art is the imitation of nature; Huysman's art surpasses her. (Fs)

After all, to take what among her works is considered to be the most exquisite, what among her creatures is deemed to possess the most perfect and original beauty—to wit, woman —has not man, for his part, by his own efforts, produced an animate, yet artificial creature that is every bit as good from the point of view of plastic beauty? Does there exist anywhere on this earth a being born in the throes of motherhood, who is more dazzlingly, more outstandingly beautiful than the two locomotives recently put into service on the Northern Railway?

35b The whole of modernist aesthetic is in the obviously ridiculous but most serious—not at all satiric—passage. Huysmans has suggested that we concentrate by a kind of artistic yoga on a single detail—what is usually called the symbol—in order to annihilate reality. And then he goes one crucial stage further: after the achievement of unconsciousness, he reconstructs his own false consciousness, a deliberate, self-induced hallucination. (Fs) (notabene)

Kommentar (12/08/11): cf. Voegelin über zweite Realität.

To the Party, Orwell said, "Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." Huysmans goes on beyond unconsciousness. He saw that the opposite of Being is not just nothing—the mere absence of Being, like empty space, which has a kind of ablative reality, a potential for being filled. Pure non-Being, anti-Being, is the faking of reality. (Fs) (notabene)

35c Ortega y Gasset formulated the modern crisis in precisely these terms in The Dehumanization of Art:

The progressive dis-realization of the world, which began in the philosophy of the Renaissance, reaches its extreme consequence in the radical sensationalism of Avenarius and Mach. How can this continue? A return to primitive realism is unthinkable; four centuries of criticism, of doubt, of suspicion, have made this attitude forever untenable. To remain in our subjectivism is equally impossible. Where shall we find the material to reconstruct the world?

35d Note that in rejecting criticism and doubt, he nonetheless accepts the consequences. That is, he does not attempt to refute an error but, conceding a change in fashion, rather like Monsieur Ennui in Baudelaire, "stifles" the philosophy of Realism in a four-hundred-year-old yawn. Nowhere does he or anyone else in this position ever find an answer to Aristotle within the terms of reason. It is not that they have committed an error; they have abandoned intelligence. (Fs)

The philosopher retracts his attention even more and, instead of directing it to the subject as such, fixes on what up to now has been called "the content of consciousness," that is, the intra-subjective. There may be no corresponding reality to what our ideas project and what our thoughts think, but this does not make them purely subjective. A world of hallucination would not be real, but neither would it fail to be a world, an objective universe, full of sense and perfection. Although the imaginary centaur does not really gallop, tail and mane in the wind, across real prairies, he has a peculiar independence with regard to the subject that imagines him. He is a virtual object, or, as the most recent philosophy expresses it, an ideal object. This is the type of phenomenon which the thinker of our time considers most adequate as a basis for his universal system. Can we fail to be surprised at the coincidence between such a philosophy and its synchronous art, known as expressionism or cubism?

36a Ortega for fifty years was what a good cultural journalist should be, a weathervane for doctrines; and in this particular passage he has pointed out the direction of the prevailing winds. He has seen that culture is integral. As an organic growth, all its parts—music, painting, literature, science, politics, philosophy, religion—move and work as one. The purpose of this present essay is to get behind appearances to the source. Knowledge, Aristotle says, is necessarily of causes. Ortega's very brilliance is the shining of a flaw because like all Modernists he is convinced there are no causes, only winds. (Fs) (notabene)