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The Master and His Emissary CHAPTER 11 ROMANTICISM AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

Author: Iain McgilChrist Publisher: London, UK: Yale University Press. Publish Date: 2010 Review Date: Status:💥

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WHAT IS ROMANTICISM? JUDGING BY THE ATTEMPTS THAT HAVE BEEN MADE TO define it, it is more than a little enigmatic. In fact Isaiah Berlin devotes the whole of the first chapter of The Roots of Romanticism, one of the best explorations of the topic, to the mutually incompatible propositions that have been advanced as constituting its essential nature. If he reaches a conclusion it is that, though the Enlightenment could be summed up in the cognitive content of a relatively small number of beliefs, Romanticism never could, because its concern is with a whole disposition towards the world, which involves the holder of that disposition, as well as what beliefs might be held. Not in other words, with a what, but with a how.

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Since the foundation of Enlightenment thinking is that all truths cohere, are mutually compatible, non-contradictory, ultimately reconcilable, its weak place is where incompatibilities are found; and indeed in general we are, and always have been, liberated into another way of looking at the world wherever irreconcilables are brought into focus. One such point of weakness occurred with the dawning awareness that, as a generalisation, differences are as important as generalities. Montesquieu was aware that the belief that ‘man is everywhere different’ is as important and as true as the assertion that ‘man is everywhere the same’. This perception leads from the premises of the system itself – that generalisation is the route to truth, and that all generalisations should be compatible – straight to a paradox. The idea of individual difference is central to Romanticism, but it is not merely this which makes Montesquieu’s point tend towards the Romantic: his very acceptance that a thing and its opposite may be true is in itself a Romantic acceptance. The movement from Enlightenment to Romanticism therefore is not from A to not-A, but from a world where ‘A and not-A cannot both be true’ is necessarily true to one where ‘A and not-A can both hold’ holds (in philosophical terms this becomes Hegel’s thesis, antithesis ? synthesis). Thus some elements (a certain kind of idealism, for example) can be found in both Enlightenment and Romanticism, which is how the continuity occurs: to give an example, it is how the French Revolution can be seen itself as a manifestation of the Romantic spirit, while at the same time, as Berlin says, the principles in the name of which it was fought were Enlightenment principles, at odds with the thrust of Romanticism. The progression from Enlightenment to Romanticism can be seen as either seamless (upper arrow) or antithetical (lower arrow), depending on where the emphasis lies:

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In this chapter I will develop the view that Romanticism is a manifestation of right-hemisphere dominance in our way of looking at the world. Here I am reminded of the fact that the right hemisphere is more inclusive, and can equally use what the left hemisphere uses as well as its own preferred approach, whereas the left hemisphere does not have this degree of flexibility or reciprocity.

Whereas for the Enlightenment, and for the workings of the logical left hemisphere, opposites result in a battle which must be won by ‘the Truth’, for the Romantics, and for the right hemisphere, it is the coming together of opposites into a fruitful union that forms the basis not only of everything that we find beautiful, but of truth itself.

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What were the trigger points for needing to move on – the weaknesses in the left-hemisphere system?

It’s true there was this matter of a thing and its opposite both being possible. But there were others, many others. For a start, reason itself proclaimed the fact that reason was insufficient. Montesquieu’s perception anticipates Blake’s saying that ‘to generalise is to be an idiot’, being itself a generalisation. It draws attention, in Gödelian fashion, to the truth that every logical system leads to conclusions that cannot be accommodated within it. An earlier mathematician, Pascal, had reached a similar conclusion, uncongenial as it is to the philosophy of Enlightenment. ‘The ultimate achievement of reason’, he wrote, ‘is to recognize that there are an infinity of things which surpass it. It is indeed feeble if it can’t get as far as understanding that.’2 But this had been common knowledge to what Pascal calls ‘esprits fins’, subtle minds, before the Enlightenment.3 ‘Philosophy never seems to me to have a better hand to play’, as Montaigne wrote, ‘than when she battles against our presumption and our vanity; when in good faith she acknowledges her weakness, her ignorance and her inability to reach conclusions.’4

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4. Montaigne, ‘On presumption’, Essais, Bk. II:17 (1993, p. 721).

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As the Renaissance was reinvigorated by its recurrence to the world of Ancient Greece and Rome, so the post-Enlightenment world was reinvigorated by its recursion to the Renaissance, particularly by the rediscovery of Shakespeare, a vital element in the evolution of Romanticism, not just, or even especially, in England, but in Germany and France. It yielded evidence of something so powerful that it simply swept away Enlightenment principles before it, as inauthentic, untenable in the face of experience. It was not just his grandeur, his unpredictability, his faithfulness to nature that commended him. In Shakespeare, tragedy is no longer the result of a fatal flaw or error: time and again it lies in a clash between two ways of being in the world or looking at the world, neither of which has to be mistaken. In Shakespeare tragedy is in fact the result of the coming together of opposites. And Maurice Morgann’s brilliant essay of 1777 emphasises the importance, in individuality, of the context dependency of personal characteristics, struggling to express the concept of the Gestalt nearly two hundred years before its time.8

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8. Morgann, 1963.

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BODY AND SOUL

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For the Romantic mind, by contrast, theory was not something abstracted from experience and separate from it (based on representation), but present in the act of perception. There was therefore no question of ‘applying’ theory to life, since phenomena themselves were the source of ‘theory’. Fact and theory, like particular and universal, were not opposites. According to Goethe they ‘are not only intimately connected, but … interpenetrate one another … the particular represents the universal, “not as a dream and shadow, but as a momentarily living manifestation of the inscrutable”.’11 The particular metaphorises the universal. Goethe deplored the tendency for us, like children that go round the back of a mirror to see what’s there, to try to find a reality behind the particularity of the archetypal phenomenon.12

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11. See Cassirer, 1950, pp. 145–6, quoting Goethe (trans. Cassirer): ‘Das ist die wahre Symbolik wo das Besondere das Allgemeinere repräsentiert, nicht als Traum und Schatten, sondern als lebendig augenblickliche Offenbarung des Unerforschlichen’ (Goethe, 1991, §314, p. 775).

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12. Eckermann, 1970, conversation of 18 February 1829, p. 296.

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Chamfort’s description of love illustrates another weakness in Enlightenment thinking that paved the way for Romanticism. It was the problem of the explicit, and the things that necessarily fled from it, as if for their lives. Self-knowledge had been the goal of human wisdom since ancient times. Goethe wisely wrote, however, that ‘we are, and ought to be, obscure to ourselves, turned outwards, and working upon the world which surrounds us.’13 We see ourselves, and therefore come to know ourselves, only indirectly, through our engagement with the world at large.14 His observation suggests a consequence of the Enlightenment project which, again in Gödelian fashion, followed from it, but could not be contained within it. The Enlightenment pursuit of certainty and clarity could not be made to stop at the bounds of the self: was not awareness of self the guarantor of rational, intelligent behaviour? As Pope put it, ‘the proper subject of mankind is Man’; and, great poet that he was, he may be said to have succeeded in expressing his personal view on the subject admirably. But the searchlight of objective attention cannot be applied to man himself. It does not result in self-knowledge, because the heightened self-consciousness involved cuts one off from large parts of experience, by crucially altering the nature of what it attends to, and thus subverting its very purpose as an instrument of knowledge. Some things have to remain obscure if they are not to be forced to be untrue to their very nature: they are known, and can be expressed, only indirectly.

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13. Quoted in Amiel, 1898: entry for 3 February 1862, p. 83. I have been unable to trace the source of this quotation in Goethe, and so, it would appear, have the editors of the édition intégrale of Amiel’s Journal Intime (see vol. 4, p. 521).

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14. See p. 272.

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One of these is embodied existence. It was not just Chamfort, of course. Philosophers have, for the most part, had an antagonistic and unsympathetic relationship to the body – it goes with the territory. Kant described marriage as an agreement between two people as to the ‘reciprocal use of each others’ sexual organs’;15 Kant also, it may be noted, remained single, and died probably a virgin.16 Descartes described laughter as that which

results when the blood coming from the right-hand cavity of the heart through the central arterial vein causes the lungs to swell up suddenly and repeatedly, forcing the air they contain to rush out through the windpipe, where it forms an inarticulate, explosive sound. As the air is expelled, the lungs are swollen so much that they push against all the muscles of the diaphragm, chest and throat, thus causing movement in the facial muscles with which these organs are connected. And it is just this facial expression, together with the inarticulate and explosive sound, that we call ‘laughter’.17

Well, that’s not what I call laughter – although it’s hard not to laugh. But what’s striking here is not just the sense of disgust, the deliberately disengaged, mechanical attitude taken by Descartes in this anatomy of hilarity. It’s that his authoritative manner is not in any way inhibited by the fact that actually he had no idea what he was talking about. His anatomy is a complete work of fantasy. But laughter was to be put in its place, because it was spontaneous, intuitive and unwilled, and represented the triumph of the body.

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15. Scruton, 1986, p. 392.

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16. Kuehn, 2001.

17. Descartes, 1984–91e, Part II, §124, p. 371.

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The problem here is not the acknowledgment of the part played in our lives by the flesh – Montaigne and Erasmus had done that with great tact, affection and humour – but the insistence on stopping there, the refusal to see through it. Spinoza’s appreciation that ‘the more capable the body is of being affected in many ways, and affecting external bodies in many ways, the more capable of thinking is the mind’,19 sets the body in its proper relationship with our ‘higher parts’, in the way that Wittgenstein later was to do when he wrote that ‘the human body is the best picture of the human soul’.20 Philosophy itself is rooted in the body, after all: according to the authors of Philosophy in the Flesh, ‘real people have embodied minds whose conceptual systems arise from, are shaped by, and are given meaning through living human bodies. The neural structures of our brains produce conceptual systems and linguistic structures that cannot be adequately accounted for by formal systems that only manipulate symbols.’21 There is nothing reductionist here, any more than it is reductionism when Diderot states with marvellous frankness that ‘il y a un peu de testicule au fond de nos sentiments les plus sublimes et de notre tendresse la plus épurée’.22 On the contrary, it is a warning not to get too carried away with the virtues of abstraction.

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19. Spinoza, 1947, IV, Appendix § 27, p. 249.

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20. Wittgenstein, 1967b, Part II, iv, p. 178.

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21. Lakoff & Johnson, 1999, p.

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22. ‘Underlying our most sublime sentiments and our purest tenderness there is a little of the testicle’: Diderot, lettre à Étienne Noël Damilaville, 3 novembre 1760 (1955–70, vol. III, p. 216; trans. I. McG.).

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SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND REPRESENTATION

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There is a lack of self-consciousness to Wordsworth that is essential to his genius, and which enabled him to write his greatest as well as his worst lines. This is a characteristic he shares with both Blake and Keats (and later with Hopkins and Hardy). These three Romantic geniuses, very different, highly individual poets as they are, share what John Bayley, in describing Keats, refers to as his ‘unmisgiving’ quality, a point later taken up by Christopher Ricks in Keats and Embarrassment.98 The lack of misgiving explains their combination of greatness and at times insouciant foolishness: they make themselves vulnerable in order to become the conduit of something greater than themselves. The explicit, self-conscious workings of the left hemisphere constantly oppose this condition, and therefore need to be stilled.

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The very titles of Blake’s major works, Songs of Innocence and Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, allude to the reality that, in the lived world of the right hemisphere, opposites are not ‘in opposition’. Blake’s visionary poetry nonetheless dramatises in various forms a battle between two powerful forces that adopt different guises: the single-minded, limiting, measuring, mechanical power of what Blake called Ratio, the God of Newton, and the myriad-minded, liberating power of creative imagination, the God of Milton. This opposition persists despite the right hemisphere’s unification of opposites, for the same reason that a tolerant society cannot necessarily secure the co-operation of the intolerant who would undermine it, and may ultimately find itself in the paradoxical situation of having to be intolerant of them. I commented earlier that Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, ‘doing right without knowing it’, displays the mind unwittingly cognizing itself. Unconsciously it gives voice to the right hemisphere’s prophecy of where the revolt of the left hemisphere would lead. Blake too voices, without being aware of it, the brain’s struggle to ward off domination by the left hemisphere. For instance, in ‘There is No Natural Religion’ he writes:

Conclusion. If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic Character the Philosophic & Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things, and stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again [to reach outside the known one needs the right hemisphere: the left hemisphere can only repeat the known].

Application. He who sees the Infinite [looks outward to the ever-becoming with the right hemisphere] in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only [looks at the self-defined world brought into being by the left hemisphere] sees himself only [the left hemisphere is self-reflexive].

Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is [through the right hemisphere gives us access to imagination/metaphor, the bridge whereby the divine reaches us, and liberates us from ourselves].

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The fusion of body with mind, or more properly with spirit or soul, was never more keenly felt than by the Romantics. ‘O Human Imagination, O Divine Body’, wrote Blake.23

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23. Blake, Jerusalem, ch. I, plate 24, line 23.

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A longing for the innocent unself-consciousness of both the historical and personal past is a central theme of Romanticism, which again points away from the world of the left hemisphere to that of the right. It does so not just because of the association of the left hemisphere with excessive self-consciousness. Personal and emotive memory are preferentially stored in the right hemisphere, and childhood, too, is associated with a greater reliance on the right hemisphere. The right hemisphere is particularly important in childhood experience and is preponderant even in language development in early childhood;30 many hand gestures are produced in speech areas of the right hemisphere, which are abandoned in early childhood, as language shifts to the left hemisphere. It is with the right hemisphere that we recall childhood memories,31 and autobiographical memories of all kinds.32 As mentioned in Chapter 2, the right hemisphere is more advanced until the second year of life.33 Given the relatively ‘split brain’ nature of the child, this is also a peculiarly unalloyed right hemisphere, one that is sheltered from being overwhelmed, as it later will be, by the left. The right hemisphere is more active in children up to the age of four years,34 and intelligence across the spectrum of cognitive faculties in children (and probably in adults) is related principally to right-hemisphere function.35 In childhood, experience is relatively unalloyed by re-presentation: experience has ‘the glory and the freshness of a dream’, as Wordsworth expressed it.36 This was not just a Romantic insight, but lay behind the evocations of their own childhood by, for example, Vaughan in The Retreat and Traherne in his Centuries.37 Childhood represents innocence, not in some moral sense, but in the sense of offering what the phenomenologists thought of as the pre-conceptual immediacy of experience (the world before the left hemisphere has deadened it to familiarity). It was this authentic ‘presencing’ of the world that Romantic poetry aimed to recapture.

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30. Luria, 1980. Until the age of four or five, dendritic systems of the language areas of the right hemisphere are more exuberant than those on the left: see Simonds & Scheibel, 1989.

31. Horowitz, 1983; Ardila, 1984.

32. Cimino, Verfaellie, Bowers et al., 1991; Markowitsch, Calabrese, Neufeld et al., 1999; Markowitsch, Calabrese, Haupts et al., 1993; Markowitsch, Calabrese, Fink et al., 1997; Markowitsch, 1995; Phelps & Gazzaniga, 1992; Metcalfe, Funnell & Gazzaniga, 1995; Tulving, Kapur, Craik et al., 1994.

33. Trevarthen, 1996.

34. Chiron, Jambaque, Nabbout et al., 1997.

35. O’Boyle & Benbow, 1990; and see Gorynia & Müller, 2006.

36. Wordsworth, ‘Ode on Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood’.

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But this marriage was not to last. A sort of second Reformation was on the way. The Reformation of the sixteenth century could be seen as having involved a shift away from the capacity to understand metaphor, incarnation, the realm that bridges this world and the next, matter and spirit, towards a literalistic way of thinking – a move away from imagination, now seen as treacherous, and towards rationalism. In the middle of the nineteenth century in Germany, there arose a new intellectual movement, which, as one of its protagonists Ludwig Feuerbach indeed acknowledged, had its roots in the Reformation. It too had difficulty with the idea that the realms of matter and spirit interpenetrated one another: if a thing was not to be wholly disembodied, just an idea, it had to be wholly material. Gone was the understanding of the complex, often apparently paradoxical nature of reality, an acceptance of the coniunctio oppositorum: we were back to the realm of ‘either/or’. It too embraced a sort of literalism, and mistrusted imagination. This philosophy, known as materialism, was explicitly based on a view that science is the only foundation for knowing and understanding the world.

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The origins of this scientific materialism, or ‘positivism’, lay in the French Enlightenment. Auguste Comte had asserted that science was not only our sole source of genuine knowledge about the world, but that it was the only way to understand humanity’s place in the world, and the only credible view of the world as a whole. He saw societies and cultures passing through three stages: a theological phase, where religious perspectives dominate, ceding to a stage of philosophical analysis, inevitably shaped by metaphysical assumptions, which in turn gives way to the ‘positive’, scientific stage, in which these are jettisoned, and we achieve ‘objective’ knowledge.

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According to Richard Olson, throughout the early years of the nineteenth century, every major tradition of natural science strove to extend its ideas, methods, practices, and attitudes to social and political issues of contemporary concern.114

Note: yeah like eugenics

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114. Olson, 2008.

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As Aristotle had warned, each kind of knowledge has its proper context: it cannot be assumed that what is rational for the geometer is rational for the physician, or for the politician. But the left hemisphere does not respect context. Comte’s wishes came to be realised, and the analytic strategies associated with mechanics generally led to a presumption that society could be treated as an aggregate of individual units – not a society in fact, but the prototype of the ‘masses’ – with the society’s well-being reduced to a sum of individual pleasures and pains.

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Reality was what science could deal with, and only that was real. Karl Vogt proclaimed that thought, the secretion of the brain, could be changed, like other bodily secretions, by diet: ‘since belief is only a property of the body’s atoms, a change in beliefs depends only on the way in which the atoms of the body are substituted’.115 He seems not to have noticed that this applies to the belief in materialism, too. How were we to decide which placement of atoms was the one to embrace, assuming that is something one could do to a placement of atoms? But these questions were not answered.

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115. ‘da der Glaube nur eine Eigenschaft der Körperatome ist, so hängt eine Veränderung des Glaubens nur von der Art und Weise der Ersetzung der Körperatome ab’: Vogt, 1851, p.

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By driving a wedge between the realm of sensory experience and the realm of ideas, the whole realm of ideas became suspect. Ideas were what led us to believe that things we could not see with our eyes and touch with our hands – like God – were real, whereas they must, so went the logic, be our own inventions. Worse, endowed with such independent existence, they kept us in a state of indignity and humility.

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The denial of the divine was as important to them as the elevation of matter. This was itself, of course, an idea; and, if it could be said to be true, so was the idea of its truth. But there is more than a little of the Promethean about the materialists. When one of their number, Ludwig Büchner, emerged from a period of personal crisis it was with the proclamation: ‘No longer do I acknowledge any human authority over me.’116 No human authority, notice. The unwillingness to acknowledge any authority was, in another parallel with the Reformation, at the very core of materialism: but these reformers, like those before them, had to acknowledge some sort of authority, even if it were the authority of reason (which is something in itself we can only intuit). So the materialists, too, had to have a superhuman authority: and this new divinity was science. Both scientific materialism and the dialectical materialism of Engels and Marx emerged from the view that science was the only authority.

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In 1848, revolution spread across Europe, and its reverberations were felt most strongly in France and Germany. ‘For the scientific materialists, and to some extent for Marx as well, opposition to groundless authority was the task and natural science was its justification.’117 Speaking in 1853, Lyon Playfair, one of the keenest evangelists for scientific materialism in nineteenth-century Britain, declared that ‘science is a religion and its philosophers are the priests of nature’: T. H. Huxley, Darwin’s ‘bulldog’, described his talks as lay sermons.118 This was part of a broad shift whereby, according to Gaukroger, the West’s sense of its own superiority shifted seamlessly in the early nineteenth century from its religion to its science.119 In doing so it swapped one religion for another; but these ‘priests of nature’ did not honour nature herself so much as the human capacity to control nature, and to make it apparently graspable by rationalism alone: the left hemisphere reflecting on itself. It is interesting that Marx called Prometheus, opposed as he was to ‘all divine and earthly Gods who do not acknowledge human self-consciousness as the highest divinity … the most eminent saint and martyr in the philosophic calendar’.120 It is an uncomfortable fact that Hitler, too, was later to write that the Aryan is ‘the Prometheus of mankind from whose bright forehead the divine spark of genius has sprung at all times, forever kindling anew that fire of knowledge which illumined the night of silent mysteries and thus caused man to climb the path to mastery over the other beings of this earth.’121 In sweeping away the past, it seems that the concept of hubris, which the Greeks had understood as lying at the heart of all tragedy, was lost.

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117. Gregory, 1977, p. 9.

118. Hedley Brooke, 1991, p. 31.

119. Gaukroger, 2006, p. 11.

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The left hemisphere’s lack of concern for context leads to two important consequences, each of which makes its version of reality more dangerous and simultaneously more difficult to resist. The appropriateness or otherwise of applying scientism to one field of human experience rather than another – Aristotle’s perception – is disregarded, since to understand that would require a sense of context, and of what is reasonable, both of which, from the left-hemisphere point of view, are unnecessary intrusions by the right hemisphere on its absolute, non-contingent nature, the source of its absolute power.

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At the same time, science preached that it was exempt from the historicisation or contextualisation that was being used to undermine Christianity in the nineteenth century,124 a way of enabling science to criticise all other accounts of the world and of human experience while rendering itself immune to criticism. This doctrine of the infallibility of science is also a result of the Enlightenment failure to understand the contextual nature of all thought, what Dewey called ‘the dogma of immaculate conception of philosophical systems’.125 None of this would have been possible without its development of its own mythos, which in the twentieth century was to become the dominating mythos of our culture. The key features of it are all in place, however, by the mid-nineteenth century.

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124. Gaukroger, 2006, pp. 11–12.

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First there was the myth of the unity of science – the left hemisphere’s view that there is one logical path to knowledge, irrespective of context; whereas in reality science is, to quote Gaukroger again, ‘a loose grouping of disciplines with different subject matters and different methods, tied in various ways each of which work for some purposes but not for others’.126 Then there was the myth of the sovereignty of the scientific method – of the left hemisphere’s planned, relentless progress following a sequential path to knowledge. In fact we know that, though scientific method plays its part, the greatest advances of science are often the result of chance observations, the obsessions of particular personalities, and intuitions that can be positively inhibited by too rigid a structure, method or world view.127

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126. Gaukroger, 2006, p. 16.

127. See p. 472, n. 182.

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Technological advances, too, have been less often the foreseen consequences of systematic method than the results of local enthusiasts or skilled artisans attempting empirically to solve a local problem, and many have been frankly serendipitous by-products of an attempt to achieve something quite different. And there are things that are simply beyond scientific knowledge, where it is a category error to suppose that they can be understood in this fashion. The left hemisphere’s hubris is affronted by this idea, and when the great German physiologist Emil DuBois-Reymond, the discoverer of the neuronal action potential, drew attention to the proper limits of scientific understanding with his declaration: ignorabimus (‘[there are things which] we shall never know’), its reaction was – and remains – one of indignation.

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Then there was the myth of science as above morality, oddly coupled with an uncritical acceptance of the idea that science is the only sure foundation for decency and morality – the left hemisphere in characteristic denial, since we know that despite its many successes in alleviating human suffering, it has a far from unblemished record in this respect, with its methods of research, as well as the perhaps unintended, but nonetheless foreseeable, consequences of its actions, and sometimes its very aims (in collaboration with corrupt regimes) being at times manifestly harmful. And, in further denial, there is the myth of its brave stand against the forces of dogma, usually in the form of the Church, encapsulated in grossly simplified tales, designed to convey the message that science alone is without preconception.128

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In essence this was the achievement of the Industrial Revolution. It is not just that this movement was obviously, colossally, man’s most brazen bid for power over the natural world, the grasping left hemisphere’s long-term agenda. It was also the creating of a world in the left hemisphere’s own likeness. The mechanical production of goods ensured a world in which the members of a class were not just approximate fits, because of their tiresome authenticity as individuals, but truly identical: equal, interchangeable members of their category. They would be free from the ‘imperfections’ that come from being made by living hands. The subtle variations of form that result from natural processes would be replaced by invariant forms, as well as by largely ‘typical’ forms, in other words the shapes which the left hemisphere recognises: perfect circles, rectilinear forms such as the straight line, the rectangle, the cube, the cylinder. (Delacroix wrote that ‘it would be worthy to investigate whether straight lines exist only in our brains’; as Leonard Shlain has pointed out, straight lines exist nowhere in the natural world, except perhaps at the horizon, where the natural world ends.)129 Such regular shapes are not produced by natural processes and are inimical to the body, which is after all a source of constant variation, change, and evolution of form, both in itself, and in everything it goes to create. Thus as far as possible evidence of the body would be eliminated from what is made. It would above all make tools, mechanisms, the sort of inanimate objects preferentially dealt with by the left hemisphere, and it would make machines that make machines, self-propagating parodies of life that lack all the qualities of the living. Its products would be certain, perfect in their way, familiar in the ‘iconic’ sense (preferred by the left hemisphere), not in the sense of ‘special things that have value for me’ (preferred by the right): identical entities, rectilinear in shape, endlessly reproducible, mechanistic in nature, certain, fixed, man-made.

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Is it over-stated to say that this would lead to a position where the pre-reflectively experienced world, the world that the right hemisphere was to deliver, became simply ‘the world as processed by the left hemisphere’? I do not think so. I would contend that a combination of urban environments which are increasingly rectilinear grids of machine-made surfaces and shapes, in which little speaks of the natural world; a worldwide increase in the proportion of the population who live in such environments, and live in them in greater degrees of isolation; an unprecedented assault on the natural world, not just through exploitation, despoliation and pollution, but also more subtly, through excessive ‘management’ of one kind or another, coupled with an increase in the virtuality of life, both in the nature of work undertaken, and in the omnipresence in leisure time of television and the internet, which between them have created a largely insubstantial replica of ‘life’ as processed by the left hemisphere – all these have to a remarkable extent realised this aim, if I am right that it is an aim, in an almost unbelievably short period of time. Heisenberg, in the 1950s, wrote that technology no longer appears

as the product of a conscious human effort to enlarge material power, but rather like a biological development of mankind in which the innate structures of the human organism are transplanted in an ever-increasing measure into the environment of man.130

I could hardly believe my eyes when I came across this passage, because it expresses precisely my contention that the innate structures of the left hemisphere are, through technology, being incarnated in the world it has come to dominate.

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But the left hemisphere would appear to be unsatisfied with this, because it still leaves possible exits from the maze, from the hall of mirrors, unbarred. Through the fact of our embodied nature, through art and through religion, the right hemisphere might still be able to make a comeback. And so we now need to take a look not just at the evolution of the world of things, but of the world of ideas in the twentieth century, to see how the left hemisphere has effectively closed off the escape routes. This is where the ‘asymmetry of interaction’ that I alluded to at the end of Part I comes into play, where the situation, until now evidencing a series of ever more violent swings between the hemispheres, goes out of kilter, and results in a possibly final triumph of the left-hemisphere world.

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In the Enlightenment, the living was thought to be the sum of its parts: and, if so, its parts could be put together to make the living again. For Romanticism, not only was the living not reducible to the mechanical – the world of the right hemisphere irreducible to that of the left – but even the inanimate world came to be seen as alive, the reintegration of the left hemisphere’s realm into that of the right.

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Simplicity is a laudable aim, but one must not make things any simpler than they are. As always, it was the clashes of theory with experience that showed up the cracks in the edifice of rationalism.

Note: psychiatry

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If I am correct in my supposition that the right hemisphere is grappling with experience, which is multiple in nature, in principle unknowable in its totality, changing, infinite, full of individual differences, while the left hemisphere sees only a version or representation of that experience, in which, by contrast, the world is single, knowable, consistent, certain, fixed, therefore ultimately finite, generalised across experience, a world that we can master – the Enlightenment world, in other words – it follows that the left hemisphere is a closed system, ‘bootstrapping’ itself. It cannot, however, shield itself from experience completely – or has not been able to until recently (the subject of the last chapter of this book). Its weakness, therefore, will be exposed when attention is turned to those elements within the system that point to something beyond it.

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Then there was the fact that theory was just not compatible with experience. In figures such as Rousseau and the painter David I believe one can trace a smooth evolution from the ideals of the Enlightenment to those of Romanticism (the upper arrow in the diagram above). But in many other figures of the transitional era there is simply a disjunction between what they explicitly held to be true and what implicitly they must, from their actions and judgments, have believed. Just as Reynolds, when faced with the unruly genius of Michelangelo, was magnanimous enough to sweep away the precepts he had outlined for years in his lectures, Johnson jettisoned Enlightenment preconceptions, which he referred to as ‘the petty cavils of petty minds’, when faced with the reality of Shakespeare’s greatness.

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The Romantic acceptance that there is no simple ‘fact of the matter’ – a reality that exists independently of ourselves and our attitude towards it – brought to the fore the absolutely crucial question of one’s disposition towards it, the relationship in which one stands to it. This emphasis on disposition towards whatever it might be, rather than the primacy of the thing itself in isolation or abstraction, explains the otherwise baffling plethora of often contradictory accounts of what Romanticism ‘stood for’ – Berlin’s point, the move from what is said or done to the spirit in which it is said or done. How was it that the French Revolution, executed in the name of reason, order, justice, fraternity and liberty, was so unreasonable, disorderly, unjust, unfraternal and illiberal? For the same reason that other grandiose projects originating in the rationalising of the left hemisphere have ended up betraying their ideals. In accordance with the left-hemisphere preoccupation with what a thing is, rather than what manner of thing it is (‘what’ rather than ‘how’), ideas, concepts, acts become neatly reified (the familiar statuesque figures of Reason, Justice, Liberty and so on), and the way in which they are actualised in the messy human context of the lived world gets to be neglected. Ends come to justify means.

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‘My thinking is not separate from objects’, wrote Goethe:

the elements of the object, the perception of the object, flow into my thinking and are fully permeated by it … My perception itself is a thinking, and my thinking a perception. Man knows himself only to the extent that he knows the world; he becomes aware of himself only within the world, and aware of the world only within himself. Every new object, clearly seen, opens up a new organ of perception in us.38

This last, perhaps somewhat cryptic, sentence suggests that for us truly to experience something it has to enter into and alter us, and there must be something in us which specifically responds to it as unique.39 A consequence of this, as Thomas Kuhn recognised, will be that those phenomena with which we have no affinity, and which we are not in some sense ready to see, are often not seen at all.40 Theory, in the conventional sense of the term, can restrict one’s capacity to see things, and the only remedy is to be aware of it.

Understanding, then, is not a discursive explanatory process, but a moment of connection, in which we see through our experience – an aperçu or insight.41 All seeing is ‘seeing as’; not that a cognition is added to perception, but that each act of seeing, in the sense of allowing something to ‘presence’ for us, is in itself necessarily an act of understanding.42

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38. Goethe, 1988, ‘Significant help given by an ingenious turn of phrase’, p. 39. In relation to ‘Man knows himself only to the extent that he knows the world; he becomes aware of himself only within the world, and aware of the world only within himself’, cf. Snell: ‘Man must listen to an echo of himself before he may hear or know himself’ (p. 272 above); and Matthews: ‘my awareness of myself as a subject necessarily presupposes awareness of other things as objects … awareness of our own subjectivity is possible only if we are also aware of a world that transcends it. Subject and object of experience are inseparably bound up together; our being is “being-in-the-world” ‘(2002, pp. 89–90).

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39. There is a similarity here with Plotinus: ‘For one must come to the sight with a seeing power made akin and like to what is seen. No eye ever saw the sun without becoming sun-like …’ (1966, Sixth Tractate, §9).

40. Kuhn, 1970, p. 24.

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41. A. Zajonc, 1998, p. 26.

42. Brady, 1998, p. 88.

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An extremely odd demand is often set forth but never met, even by those who make it: i.e., that empirical data should be presented without any theoretical context, leaving the reader, the student, to his own devices in judging it [the classic demand of Enlightenment science]. This demand seems odd because it is useless simply to look at something. Every act of looking turns into observation, every act of observation into reflection, every act of reflection into the making of associations; thus it is evident that we theorise every time we look carefully at the world.43

Theory, in this sense, according to Goethe, is not systematised abstraction after the fact, and separate from experience, but vision that sees something in its context (the ‘making of associations’) and sees through it.

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Reality was not, as Goethe and the Romantics came to see, the fixed and unchanging state of affairs that the left hemisphere assumes. ‘The phenomenon must never be thought of as finished or complete’, Goethe wrote, ‘but rather as evolving, growing, and in many ways as something yet to be determined.’44 Interestingly, in the light of the last chapter, he noted that ‘Vernunft [reason] is concerned with what is becoming, Verstand [rationality] with what has already become … [Reason] rejoices in whatever evolves; [rationality] wants to hold everything still, so that it can utilise it’.45 That we take part in a changing world, and that the world evokes faculties, dimensions, and characteristics in us, just as we bring aspects of the world into existence, is perhaps the most profound perception of Romanticism.

This was not an idea or theory, but, for the Romantics, an incarnate reality. One can see it in the paintings and feel it in the poetry of the period. It is related to the sense of depth which is everywhere conveyed in its art.

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43. Goethe, 1988, p. 159.

44. Goethe, 1989, ‘Bedingungen unter welchen die Farbenerscheinung zunimmt’, §217, p. 85: ‘Bei allem diesen lassen wir niemals aus dem Sinne, daß diese Erscheinung nie als eine fertige, vollendete, sondern immer als eine werdende, zunehmende, und in manchem Sinn bestimmbare Erscheinung anzusehen sei’ (trans. I. McG.).

45. Goethe, 1991, §555, p. 821: ‘Die Vernunft ist auf das Werdende, der Verstand auf das Gewordene angewiesen … Sie erfreut sich am Entwickeln; er wünscht alles festzuhalten, damit er es nutzen könne’ (trans. I. McG.).

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THE PROBLEM OF CLARITY AND EXPLICITNESS

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The problem with sight, as Herder notes, is its tendency to meet our approach with the cool rebuff of a planar surface, an image, a representation, rather than with the palpable immediacy of the thing itself as it ‘presences’ to us – the ‘physically present, tangible truth’. Because of this tendency to sap the life from the embodied original and substitute a product of the mind, Wordsworth spoke of what he called ‘the tyranny of the eye’,

When that which is in every stage of life

The most despotic of our senses gain’d

Such strength in me as often held my mind

In absolute dominion …78

He is here speaking of the loss of what Heidegger calls authenticity: what had once been a source of wonder became part of the everyday. This is also what I believe Blake had in mind when he wrote:

This Life’s dim Windows of the Soul

Distorts the Heavens from Pole to Pole

And leads you to Believe a Lie

When you see with, not thro’, the Eye.79

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78. Wordsworth, 1933, Bk. XI, lines 173–6.

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79. Blake, ‘The Everlasting Gospel’, d, lines 103–6. He almost repeats the phrase in one of his most famous passages of prose: ‘ “What”, it will be Question’d, “When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?” O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying “Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord God Almighty”. I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight. I look thro’ it & not with it’ (1972, p. 617).

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In art there needs to be a certain balance between the facticity of the medium and the something that is seen through the medium, what I have referred to in shorthand as semi-transparency. A too great emphasis on the sound and feel of words as ‘things’ separate from their meaning, or alternatively on the meaning as something separate from the sound and feel of the words in which it exists, destroys poetry. Similarly with painting: but there the tendency for ‘re-presentation’, being dependent on the eye, is greatest. We rush to the ‘meaning’ too quickly in its subject matter (this is not a reason for rejecting representation in art, a quite different issue – just for being on one’s guard for the substitution of representation for the whole, form and matter together). Here again distance results in seeing indistinctly, which allows other aspects of the painting – its ‘music’ – to come forward. ‘There is an impression’, wrote Delacroix, ‘which results from a certain arrangement of colours, light effects, shadows, etc. It is what one might call the music of the painting. Before you even know what the picture represents, you enter a cathedral, and you find yourself at too great a distance to know what it represents, and often you are rapt by this magical harmony …’80

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The Romantics were constantly aware of the difficulty inherent in remaining with the presence rather than substituting the representation. The truth of this perception, obvious in art, must apply to our apprehension of reality at large, and therefore just as much to the realm of science. Goethe, whose scientific writings are fascinating and too little known today, warned against the tendency immediately to reduce observation to conception, thus losing the power of the object in all its newness to help us break out of the otherwise unbreachable defences of our conceptual systems. He wrote that the student of nature ‘should form to himself a method in accordance with observation, but he should be careful not to reduce observation to a mere concept, to substitute words for this concept, and to proceed to treat these words as if they were objects’.81 In general language is the route by which this conceptualisation occurs: ‘how difficult it is to refrain from replacing the thing with its sign; to keep the object (Wesen) alive before us instead of killing it with the word.’82

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81. Goethe, 1989, ‘Verhältnis zur Philosophie’, §716, p. 215: ‘[Der Physiker] soll sich eine Methode bilden, die dem Anschauen gemäß ist; er soll sich hüten, das Anschauen in Begriffe, den Begriff in Worte zu verwandeln, und mit diesen Worten, als wären’s Gegenstände, umzugehen und zu verfahren’ (trans. I. McG.).

82. Goethe, 1988, p. 311.

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Language, a principally left-hemisphere function, tends, as Nietzsche said, to ‘make the uncommon common’: the general currency of vocabulary returns the vibrant multiplicity of experience to the same few, worn coins.83 Poetry, however, by its exploitation of non-literal language and connotation, makes use of the right hemisphere’s faculty for metaphor, nuance and a broad, complex field of association to reverse this tendency. ‘Poetry’, in Shelley’s famous formulation, ‘lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar … It creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration.’84

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83. See p. 74 above.

84. Shelley, 1972, pp. 33 & 56.

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However, poetry, like other manifestations of the imagination, has the typical right hemisphere resistance to explicit approach. Wordsworth speaks movingly, in recollecting the moments of inspiration in his childhood: ‘the hiding-places of my power / Seem open; I approach, and then they close’.85 The right hemisphere has to use subterfuge and indirection to achieve its aims. Berlin’s account of why Romanticism relies on what he calls symbols, but I would call metaphors, conveys perfectly the stranglehold that the left hemisphere has on the means of communication of the right:

I wish to convey something immaterial and I have to use material means for it. I have to convey something which is inexpressible and I have to use expression. I have to convey, perhaps, something unconscious and I have to use conscious means. I know in advance that I shall not succeed, and therefore all I can do is to get nearer and nearer in some asymptotic approach; I do my best, but it is an agonising struggle in which, if I am an artist, or indeed for the German romantics any kind of self-conscious thinker, I am engaged for the whole of my life.86

In doing so, they were redeeming the inauthenticity of the familiar.

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85. Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), Bk. XI, lines 336–7.

86. I. Berlin, 1999, p. 102.

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The deadening effect of the familiar – the inauthentic, in phenomenological terms – is the trap of the left hemisphere. Breaking out of it requires the work of the imagination – not fantasy which makes things novel, but imagination that actually makes them new, alive once more. A defining quality of the artistic process, perhaps its raison d’être, is its implacable opposition to the inauthentic. However, there is an absolute distinction, even an antithesis, here being made between two ways of responding to the experience of the inauthentic. In one, the inauthentic is seen as that which is too familiar, in the left-hemisphere sense, which is to say too often presented, therefore in fact never more than re-presented (in other words, a worn-out resource). In the other, inauthenticity is seen as resulting precisely from a loss of familiarity, in the right-hemisphere sense, which is to say never being present at all – we are no longer ‘at home’ with it, have become in fact alienated from it. In one, the thing itself is perceived as exhausted, and needs to be replaced; in the other, the problem lies not in the thing itself, which we have barely begun to explore, but in our selves and our ability to see it for what it really is. As a result, the responses are different at all levels. In the first case, the solution is seen as lying in a conscious attempt to produce novelty, something never seen before, to invent, to ‘be original’. In the second, the solution, by contrast, is to make the everyday appear to us anew, to be seen again as it is in itself, therefore to discover rather than to invent, to see what was there all along, rather than put something new in its place, original in the sense that it takes us back to the origin, the ground of being. This is the distinction between fantasy, which presents something novel in the place of the too familiar thing, and imagination, which clears away everything between us and the not familiar enough thing so that we see it itself, new, as it is. Wordsworth, the most original of poets, was mocked for the insistent return of his gaze to what had been seen a thousand times before in an attempt to see it for the first time. It is in this context that one can appreciate Steiner’s aphorism that ‘originality is antithetical to novelty’.87

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87. Steiner, 1989, p. 27.

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Hopkins

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He realized the importance of the leap of intuition, as opposed to the unbroken line of rationality: ‘it is a happy thing that there is no royal road to poetry’, he wrote, ‘one cannot reach Parnassus except by flying thither’.108

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108. Hopkins, 1963, p. 91.

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Inspiration is something we cannot control, towards which we have to exhibit what Wordsworth called a ‘wise passiveness’.111 As the nineteenth century wore on, this lack of control fitted ill with the confident spirit engendered by the Industrial Revolution, and this lack of predictability with the need, in accord with the Protestant ethic, for ‘results’ as the reward for effort. Imagination was something that could not be relied on: it was transitory, fading from the moment it revealed itself to consciousness (in Shelley’s famous phrase, ‘the mind in creation is a fading coal’), recalcitrant to the will. In response to this, ‘the Imaginative’, a product of active fantasy, rather than of the receptive imagination, began to encroach on the realm of imagination itself: it’s there, for example, in the self-conscious mediaevalising of the Victorians. This ‘re-presentation’ of something which had once been ‘present’ suggests that once more the territory of the right hemisphere is being colonised by the left.

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THE SECOND REFORMATION

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the German so-called ‘idealist’ philosophers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and therefore of the Romantic age, and their view that one had to combine reason with imagination, system-building with perception of individuality, consistency with contradiction, analysis with a sense of the whole.

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Though they were primarily philosophers and poets, they saw the world as a living unity, in which the metaphysical and the material were not to be separated, but where, nonetheless, different contexts demanded appropriately different approaches. In an exploration of the spirit of Goethe’s age, one historian writes, in words that echo Nietzsche on Apollo and Dionysus:

For even rationality cannot get by without imagination, but neither can imagination without rationality. The marriage of the two is, however, of such a peculiar kind, that they carry on a life and death struggle, and yet it is only together that they are able to accomplish their greatest feats, such as the higher form of conceptualising that we are accustomed to call reason.113

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Feuerbach was the foremost of the apostate group known as the young Hegelians. Where Hegel had been at pains to preserve the (right hemisphere’s) ultimate unity of spirit and matter, without either simply collapsing into the other, Feuerbach and his fellow materialists saw only the (left hemisphere) alternatives: matter or ideal. In rejecting the ideal as an empty representation, they were compelled to accept only matter. In a striking parallel with the Reformation, however, the first impulse was towards authenticity. The young Hegelians wished to rescue the realm of sensory experience, what can be seen and touched, from what they saw as subjection to the realm of concepts and ideas, and more generally experience from a representation of experience, and religion from mere theology. Experience was not the same as ideas about experience, true enough. But as with the ideologues of the Reformation, they ended by destroying the bridge between the two realms, and reducing the complexity of existence to something simple and clear. Whereas at the Reformation it had been the Word, in this case it was Matter.

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120. ‘… gegen alle himmlischen und irdischen Götter, die das menschliche Selbstbewußtsein nicht als die oberste Gottheit anerkennen … der vornehmste Heilige und Märtyrer im philosophischen Kalender’: Marx, 1968, p. 262 (trans. K. Merz).

121. Hitler, 1943, p. 290.

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By contrast, in the ancient world, according to Kerényi, ‘vulnerability was an attribute of the gods, just as it is characteristic of human existence’.122 (The core mythos of Christianity, for that matter, is the vulnerability of the divine, God suffering alongside his creation.) But this admission is not possible to the Promethean left hemisphere. ‘Prometheus, founder of the sacrifice, was a cheat and a thief’, he writes, ‘these traits were at the bottom of all the stories that deal with him.’ Under his tutelage, men became stealers of the divinity that lies round about them, ‘whose temerity brings immeasurable and unforeseen misfortune upon them’.123

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122. Kerényi, 1991, p. 31.

123. ibid., p. xxii.

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THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

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Notes