Modernism’s Contempt for the Human Intellect

The skeptical mode is the source of modernism’s contempt for the human intellect. Or maybe it’s better to say modernism’s contempt for the human’s ability to know anything. Harold Kaplan¹ says we have come to believe this mode is the strongest trait of an enlightened modern consciousness. Metaphysics might seem to be the focus of this skepticism, but its focus is primarily the ordinary human consciousness.

Contemporary academic philosophers wrestled with this problem. Kaplan calls the whole process the end of the road in the progress of Western thought. The main function left to thought was to define its own limitations. As stated previously, the key to this development was the death of the anthropomorphic spirit.

By the late nineteenth century science and positivism were in charge. Philosophy had replaced the anthropomorphic spirit in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The philosophy of Kant (1724-1804) was the pinnacle of this principle of criticism.

This was highly disorienting for people whose job it was to define and describe reality, or to define truth, including the writers of novels. It seemed that science, which was now the valid instrument of knowledge, had outpaced the human sensibility.

This intellectual suspicion of the human intellect challenged philosophy, especially after it became the focus of modern fiction. It was not the ideas that were at stake. It was the problem of knowledge.

Literature and the Problem of Knowledge: Note to my readers

This article is too long in my opinion. And it might seem at first that I just repeat the dry history of western thought which all of us may have read or tried to read but didn’t retain. But I’ve noticed that when it’s approached from a literary point of view, everything is more immediate and relevant. One begins to hope that we can discover how we got this way, and learn the wisdom and understanding we need to chose a different direction. One can also hope that the writers of the future will be inspired to reinvent literature.

This article is a fresh attempt to orient our thinking in this confusing time and also to prepare for the essays. If you have the patience to read it, I think the rest of the series will feel like a reward. As I have already said, I’m not a literary critic. In this article, I’ve tried to categorize the various literary styles described by Kaplan, but there may be small lapses. My hope is that it will help readers and writers to see the struggle of the last 200 years through the eyes of literature.

If you have been wondering what you should study but have found that there are a million suggestions and each one requires a lifetime of work, Kaplan’s reading list taken from the pages of this book suggests a beginning. I will post the list after we look at Kaplan’s analysis of Madame Bovary. However, I suggest that you read Madame Bovary before reading my summary of Kaplan’s essay.

Now back to Kaplan’s description of the issues that literature has tried to address.

Realism and Naturalism

Kaplan defines the characteristic extremes in modern fiction as objective naturalism and subjective impressionism. (However, he acknowledges that modern fiction as a whole can’t be neatly placed into these two categories). The focus of early realism and naturalism was to reveal the human capacity for self-deception. But it became difficult to tell the difference between illusion and reality. This was due to the complexity and speed of changes in knowledge. The style of the imagination seemed to be the style of illusion, and this posed new problems for literature. (Please see this link for a clarification of the difference between naturalism and realism.)

Kaplan argues it is literature that is most committed to the anthropomorphic sensibility. He means a sensibility in which ‘a perception seeks harmony with the life sentience and thought of the perceiver’. So, writers were especially challenged when scientific thought replaced the anthropomorphic spirit. Literature treated the problem of knowledge as the condition of an alienation from reality and a sense of broken communication with existence. The themes of writing became the search for an identity against the threat of dispersion. The goal of literature became a sense of authentic reality. (Kaplan P. 7)

Unfortunately, writers now had to worry about falling into solipsism. (Solipsism is the philosophical premise that the self is all that can be known to exist. The solipsistic character was first introduced by Nietzsche.)They tried to avoid this charge by using styles and techniques of narration. Subjectivity was the most extreme example of a defensive maneuver, according to Kaplan.

The Solipsism of Subjective Impressionism (Philosophical Naturalism)

Subjectivity is a form of narrative in which authenticity can be measured by its faithfulness to a character’s actual subjectivity. What does this mean? The belief was that if the human sensibility was incapable of knowing the world as it is, at least it could give an account of itself. The problem for modern literature was how to keep this limited sensibility alive and also how to ensure that it is heard with respect. The solution was to allow it to speak only for itself. In this mode, writers portrayed the human sensibility on a perilous ledge. On one side was irrelevant solipsism, and on the other side was the rival sentience of other listening minds.

Objectivism

Objectivism was a direct literary response to philosophic naturalism. The writer of a factual documentary of the naturalistic novel assumed the costume and tone of the scientist. He observed and reported what he saw without judgement. However, he may frame it with a theory of social and biological behavior. Kaplan gives the examples of Dreiser, Dos Passos, and Farrell as American writers who used this method. And he notes the corresponding personalities of their characters:

“We are impressed by the fumbling irrelevance in the subjective consciousness of their characters. They are portrayed in terms of rather simplistic laws of psychological and social behavior, while their own consciousness is groping, penetrated by only brief glimpses of light.” (Kaplan p. 9)

These Two Opposing Sides Had Similar Fears and Drives

Both of these extremes share a fear of solipsism and are driven to establish a sense of reality. Their most extreme examples are the result of the perspective nature of truth–a modern doctrine. Naturalistic fiction tends to drown the subject in context when it imitates science. Context is important to naturalistic fiction because it provides credibility. The subjective method on the other hand, isolates the subject in a private consciousness. This method calls reality itself into question.

If we Agree that Passivity is a Feature of Modern Knowledge, What is Action?

Science now provides the credibility for our knowledge of character. The dependence on science leads to analysis rather than action. Analysis leads to passivity. Thus, Kaplan argues that passivity is a feature of modern knowledge. But what does Kaplan mean by action?

“Action in the essential dramatic sense summons a full role for consciousness, or else it has the effect of mere movement. Action can be distinguished from movement only when choice, responsibility, or causation is clearly featured, and the further these are placed from the protagonist himself on the scene of action, the less he has to offer as a dramatic agent.”

The effective curiosity of science is psychological. Psychological and historical information is data. Morality on the other hand, is a value and action dominated conception of character. When value judgements lose their active nature as values and become psychological or historical information, passivity is the result. Kaplan argues that the values of dramatic choice must transcend the nature of data to function within the scene of action.

Kaplan cites literary characters Stephen Dedalus and Proust’s Marcel as examples. He believes this tendency is more extreme when brought to action. The intelligence descends to a lesser order, like the minds of Emma Bovary and Leopold Bloom.

Optimistic Evolutionary Creeds Such as Marxism

Kaplan places Marxism in the context of the naturalistic novel. This is a better perspective in my opinion than that of Loren Goldner. Goldner limits his analysis to the late twentieth century, which I believe makes Marxism seem uniquely messianic. It wasn’t. Marx was working within the same philosophical and psychological parameters as everyone else in this era.

The naturalistic novel puts action first. Its vision may be pessimistic and necessitarian, or it may follow the more or less optimistic evolutionary creeds. Marxism was an optimistic creed. But its view of individual action results in a sense of victimization and passivity. The contribution of each individual diminishes the sense of action, except for the possibility of historical eruptions. In this context, the revolution and the strike offers cathartic release from passivity. Kaplan argues that this is the outburst of a repressed force that may be in search of a personality. His example here is Joe Christmas in Faulkner’s Light in August. But at that point, action has only its disintegrated fragments to exhibit.

Romanticism

Romanticism accomplished what Kaplan calls the business of being at home in the universe. However, its philosophic base was naturalism. Romanticism is probably disappointing to a traditional moralist. It was calculated to challenge the cold, anti-anthropomorphic naturalism of science, but it rejected the claims of supernatural metaphysics. Romantic art considered nature to be an extension of the person, and the dream of the world to be an extension of the dreamer. The romantic considered himself an anthropocentric prophet listening to harmonious revelations within himself and from nature.

It seems to critics now as if all of the nineteenth century was listening to nature and announcing its messages. Kaplan cites Dostoevsky’s underground man as one answer to that effort. This character declared that nature has nothing to say to him, and went on to a life of impotent self-destruction. Kaplan also cites Melville’s Bartleby, who faced a similar crisis.

Romantic or Redemptive Naturalism, Biological or Social Determinism, and Metaphysical Nihilism

The interchange of these ideas shapes the characteristics of American writers. The tradition of sentimental naturalism is strong among Americans, as in the fiction of Hemingway and Faulkner. Also, much of modern fiction is ambivalent about nature. Rival viewpoints include the doctrine of sympathy as opposed to the rival doctrines of mechanism and alienation.

The traditions behind the modern novel are naturalistic in a broad sense. That is, according to Kaplan, if we regard naturalism as a life philosophy which bases its view of the human order on the natural order. The traditions divide in a variety of ways. They divide first in the reading of affirmative or negative response in nature, and second in their tendency to subjectify or objectify nature.

“Romanticism preached a subjective power, expressed in freedom, founded on sympathy, which organized the large harmonies of experience. Objective naturalism stressed the external order of necessity, and understood human behavior largely in terms of self-wounding anthropomorphic illusions (the largest perhaps was the sense of freedom) which break down in conflict with the natural order. When literary naturalism as such, in its narrow definition, arose, it did so in protest against romantic subjectivity. Even more basically it arose against the conventional anthropomorphism of social moralities and mythologies, which spread a screen over natural truth and seemed mass self-deceptions.” (Kaplan p. 14)

Here Kaplan highlights Gustave Flaubert in particular. He refers to Émile Zola, who said Flaubert is the true father of the modern novel. But he differentiates Zola from Flaubert.

Zola and Flaubert: The Issue of a Redemptive Doctrine of Nature

There is an important distinction between the naturalism of Zola and the work of Flaubert, and it has major importance for understanding twentieth century fiction. The issue of the redemptive doctrine of nature separates the modern consciousness from the affirmative forms of naturalism. This is true regardless of whether they are romantic or scientistic. Flaubert dominates twentieth century fiction in Kaplan’s view.

Zola accepted scientific knowledge as the instrument of understanding, and implicitly or directly, as the instrument of redemptive human goals. To represent reality in this mode, one must obey the rules and seem to follow the methods of official knowledge.

Science was enjoying a large degree of self-confidence at this time, and the physical and biological sciences were striving toward a science of society and history. For the novel, this meant that man could only be understood in terms of the large processes which formed him. Any teleological hope for human destiny had to be placed in society and history. Kaplan associates this belief with the tendency for writers like Zola to become social revolutionaries and reformists. He cites America’s first generation of naturalists: Dreiser, Norris, and London.

This was a prophetic and moral strain searching for a means of moral redemption. It needed only the example provided by Marx. (Kaplan calls Marx’s moral imagination ingenious and covert.) He served to reverse the gloom of nineteenth century economics. In the process, he transformed something that posed as a scientific report of history into history’s process of self-redemption.

The irony of Neo-scientism

Kaplan calls it ironic that neo-scientism should pursue the same ultimate goals as romantic naturalism. They both worked from difficult premises. But they turned the abstract notion of home values into a concrete cosmic system. The common need was to find human values supported in nature and the large design of history. This was the age of hopeful ideologies. (I believe he is referring to the work of Rousseau and Marx.) Kaplan believes these two traditions were the last appeals for the survival of the anthropomorphic principle. He argues that they were redemptive and that they found their force for redemption in natural causes.

However, the distinctive moods of the most important fiction of the twentieth century were not found in Rousseau or Marx. The philosophic spokesmen are Nietzsche and Kierkegaard; the literary ancestors are Dostoevsky and Flaubert. Kaplan also includes Melville. However, he argues against calling Dostoevsky and Melville spokesmen for modern literature. He doesn’t think they are representative of the twentieth century in the way that Flaubert is.

Flaubert Signals the Shattering of the Anthropomorphic Consciousness

In Kaplan’s words, Flaubert signals the shattering of the anthropomorphic consciousness. His temper is hard and ordealistic in a modern sense. But what distinguished him from other naturalists was that he could not release the unique personal being as the important subject for his fiction. We will see what Kaplan means when we study his analysis of Madame Bovary. I can’t bear to talk about it now without Kaplan’s encouraging ending.

Kaplan’s name for Flaubert’s style is stoic naturalism. He sees similar qualities in Joyce, Conrad, Faulkner and Camus. He has something to say about Hemingway as well.

Hemingway’s initial romanticism cannot be mistaken; it is not a cold dissection of Bovaryism which we find in Hemingway; rather it is Bovaryism itself and the pathos of its destiny. (Kaplan p. 17)

Conclusion of Part 2

All of the novels Kaplan deals with in this series of essays find justification in the lucidity of consciousness, which becomes a virtue. It is the virtue of honesty. That’s because honesty is often the only virtue that can support the moral regime which defines and judges the characters. This moral regime harbors modernism’s contempt for the human intellect.

“Under such a regime, the villain of the piece is illusion in all its forms, whether conventional anthropomorphic belief or individual self-deception. thereby the redemptive act in the moral drama is disillusionment, the quality of revelation which more than any other describes the modern temper…We thus pursue virtues which are the virtues of the heroic consciousness. In literature at least intelligence is the god we serve, but a particularly passive and unpragmatic intelligence.” (Kaplan p. 19)

The Examples of Camus and Nietzsche

Kaplan ends this chapter with quotes from Camus, page 19, and Nietzsche, page 20. Both quotes are quite dramatic. Camus’s quote speaks of the absurd man and his lucid indifference. Kaplan observes that it demonstrates the resilient toughness of Camus’ own temperament but it is also pathetic. It is a climax of pathos.

Kaplan notes the ‘anarchical self-confidence’, of Nietzsche’s quote, but he says it may just as well be an hysterical appeal from the void.

“The falseness of a given judgment does not consitute an objection against it, so far as we are concerned. It is perhaps in this respect that our new language sounds strangest. The real question is how far a juddgment furthers and maintains life, preserves a given type, possibly cultivates and trains a given type. We are, in fact, fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest judgments (to which belong the synthetic a priori judgements) are the most indispensable to us, that man cannot live without accepting the logical fictions as valid, without measuring reality against the purley invented world of the absolute, the immutable, without constantly falsifying the world by means of numeration. That getting along without false judments would amount to getting along without life, negating life. To admit untruth as a necessary condition of life: this implies, to be sure, a perilous resistance against customary value-feelings. A philosophy that risks it nonetheless, if it did nothing else, would by this alone have taken its stand beyond good and evil.”

New Questions

The conclusion of this article suggests questions that I’ve never heard anyone ask. Or rather, it calls forth hints of questions. We know that writers and other artists take on the fears and ‘hysterical appeals’ of their time. They base their own works on the ferment of ideas that surrounds them. And, admittedly, if anything demanded a dramatic response, it was the death of the anthropomorphic spirit. But each contribution to this drama seems to have been accepted as authoritative by subsequent artists. For example, Kaplan says Nietzsche introduced the solipsistic hero of modern fiction. He identifies positive elements in Nietzsche’s quote but notes a constant and dispiriting ambivalence in ‘Nietzschean egocentricity’.

“To extend the circle of one’s own being was to fill an empty space, to go beyond good and evil was to stress that good and evil, truth and value were non-existent.” (Kaplan p. 20)

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