World War I 2

1. Before World War I, most people believed in progress, reason, and individual rights. Progress was seen in the rising standard of living, the taming of the city, and the steady in-crease in popular education. This also caused people to believe in the logical universe of Newtonian physics and have faith in the ability of a rational human mind to understand the universe empirically. There were also laws of society that rational human beings could dis-cover and follow. Individual rights were accepted and expanded, with women achieving many rights as men. New social rights also came to be. During the 1880s, these beliefs came under criticism. Critics rejected the general faith in progress and the power of the rational human mind that reached a climax after the Great War. Disorientation and pessimism were strong in the 1930s, when the rise of harsh dictatorships and the Great Depression changed old certainties. The time after World War I to the early 1950s was described as the Age of Anxiety because there was continual crisis and changing ideals about many things, including the sciences of philosophy, physics, psychology, and literature.

2. Modern philosophers attempted to tear down the belief in progress and the general faith in the rational human mind. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche rejected Christianity and wrote as a prophet in a provocative and poetic style. He believed that ever since classical Athens, the West had overemphasized rationality and stifled the passion and animal instinct that drive human activity and creativity. He believed Christianity was a slave morality that glorified weakness, envy, and mediocrity. He viewed reason, democracy, progress, and res-pectability, as outworn social and psychological constructs whose influence was suffocating self-realization and excellence. He believed that the only hope for the individual was to ac-cept the meaninglessness of human existence and use that as a source of self-defined per-sonal integrity and liberation. French philosopher Henri Bergson in the 1890s convinced many young people that immediate experience and intuition were as important as rational and scientific thinking. French socialist Georges Sorel thought of Marxism as an inspiring but unprovable religion rather than a rational scientific truth. He believed socialism would come to power through a great, violent strike; he also rejected democracy and believed in a socialist elite.

3. World War I led to a greater backlash against established certainties in philosophy. This broke out into the English accepted logical empiricism and the continentally accepted exis-tentialism. Logical empiricism was formulated by Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who rejected most of the concerns of traditional philosophy, such as the existence of God and the meaning of happiness. In his 1922 Essay on Logical Philosophy, he saw philosophy as the logical clarification of thoughts and thus involves the study of language. The great philosophical issues of all time were senseless because they could not be tests scientifically or mathematically and so could not be regulated. Existentialists searched for moral values in a dangerous world full of uncertainty.

4. Most existentialists were atheists would did not believe a supreme being had established humanity’s fundamental nature and give life its meaning. French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre believed that human beings simply exist and that only after they turn up do they seek to define themselves. Honest human beings are alone, for there is no God to help them; they are sad and disheartened by the meaninglessness of life. Existentialists believed that human beings must act and that these actions give meaning to life and define oneself. Hu-man beings can overcome life’s absurdity by making courageous and consistent actions. Modern existentialism grew in the 1920s in Germany due to philosophers Martin Heidegger and Karl Jespers and the disillusioned postwar university students. It became very popular in France after World War II when Hitler had conquered France and French citizens had to decide whether to fight against Hitler or accept his rule. Sartre and Albert Camus became France’s leading existentialists.

5. There were many critics of Christianity and religion from the Enlightenment to 1914. In the years before 1914, some theologians began to interpret Christian doctrine and the Bible so that they did not contradict science, evolution, and common sense. Christ was seen primari-ly as the greatest moral teacher, while his supernatural aspects were played down. Some modern theologians were embarrassed by these supernatural aspects. After World War I, Christianity was revived as Christian existentialism, where followers of this stressed human beings’ sinful nature, the need for faith, and the mystery of God’s forgiveness. Danish reli-gious philosopher Søren Kierkegaard became influential after due to his rejected of forma-listic religion in favor of a remote and majestic God. Swiss Protestant theologian Karl Barth believed that human beings are always imperfect, sinful creatures whose reason and will are hopelessly flawed. Religion truth is then made known to human beings only through God’s grace and acceptance of his supernatural powers. French Catholic Gabriel Marcel be-lieved that Catholicism and religious belief provided the hope, humanity, honesty, and piety that he needed. Jacques Maritain denounced anti-Semitism and supported closer ties with non-Catholics.

6. Before World War I, science was one of many things that supported Western society’s op-timistic and rationalistic view of the world. Science was believed to be unchanging, leading people to accept Darwinism and other theories. Unchanging laws determined physical processes and permit useful solutions to problems. Science became a new religion that seemed to be unchangeable. However, the new physics came to challenge these ideas. New physics started off by discovering that atoms were composed of many smaller, fast-moving particles, such as Marie Curie’s discovery of radioactive radium. German physicist Max Planck found in 1900 that subatomic energy is emitted in uneven little spurts, or quanta, and not in a steady stream. He was challenging the difference between matter and energy, something that Albert Einstein would completely debunk in 1905. His theory of special rela-tivity postulated that time and space are relative to the viewpoint of the observer and that only the speed of light is constant for all frames of reference in the universe. Einstein was able to unite the universe with the subatomic world, unlike Newtonian physics, which was limited. Ernest Rutherford showed in 1919 that the atom could be split, and by 1944, seven subatomic particles had been identified, with the neutron being the most important. It could pass through other atoms and eventually be used in the atomic bomb.

7. News of scientific discoveries reached millions of people, causing people to question reality. Everything was relative and dependent on the observer’s frame of reference. Werner Hei-senberg formulated in 1927 the principle of uncertainty, stating that it is impossible to pre-dict an electron’s behavior because you don’t know the position and speed of one. There were no longer dependable, rational laws; instead, there were only tendencies and proba-bilities. Physics became more abstract and thus harder to relate to human experience and values. In fact, physics could no longer provide answers, let alone easy ones, for society’s problems.

8. Before Sigmund Freud, poets and mystics had talked about the unconscious and irrational aspects of human behavior. Professional, scientific psychologists assumed that a single, uni-fied conscious mind processed sense experiences in a rational and logical way. Human be-havior was the result of rational calculation by the conscious mind. However, Freud devel-oped a very different view of the mid by using his insights on the analysis of dreams ad hys-teria. He believed that human behavior is basically irrational and that the key to under-standing the mind is the primitive, irrational unconscious, the id. It is driven by sexual, ag-gressive, and pleasure-seeking desire and is locked in a constant battle with the rationaliz-ing conscious, the ego, and ingrained moral values, the superego. He saw instinctual drives as extremely powerful and possibly violent. Freudian psychology and psychiatry was ac-cepted by 1910, but gained a strong following after 1918. Many people saw his first re-quirement for mental health to be an uninhibited sex life, leading to a growing sexual expe-rimentation.

1. In twentieth century literature, pessimism, relativism, and alienation were major themes. Many narrators wrote from the solitary and confused viewpoint of a single individual. No-velists focused on the complexity and irrationality of the human mind. Marcel Proust wrote Remembrance of Things Past, recalling bittersweet memories of childhood and youthful love and tried to discover their innermost meaning. Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room used a series of internal monologues in a stream-of-consciousness technique. William Faulkner and his The Sound and the Fury had this same technique. James Joyce’s Ulysses tells of how his hero wanders aimlessly through the streets and pubs of Dublin just like how Ulysses finds his way home from Troy. He used realistic words and used them creatively. Creative writers turned their attention from society to the individual and from realism to psychological rela-tivity an also rejected the idea of progress. Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West ex-plained how every culture experiences a life cycle of growth and decline. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land depicts a world of growing desolation. Franz Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle portray helpless individuals crushed by hostile force.

2. George Orwell was an Englishman born in 1903. He wrote the greatest anti-utopian novel, 1984, that contrasted reality and its Stalinist counterpart. In the novel, Big Brother and his totalitarian state use a new kind of language, sophisticated technology, and psychological terror to strip a weak individual of human dignity. The Victorian Era was all about progress and getting a better life; the dystopian writers were concerned with proving this myth wrong and explaining how progress was not possible. World War I had inflated many people and had caused other people to question life and its progress.