The Age of Anxiety 1914-1950

1
The Age of Anxiety1914-1950

• Chapter 28-1

2
Post WWI Political Order

• End of old dynasties Hohenzollern, Ottomans,
  Hapsburgs, Romanovs
• Democracies remained and took root France and
  Britain
• Germany Weimar Republic
• Czechoslovakia a new republic
• 1920s communist totalitarianism in Russia,
  fascism in Italy, 30s Nazism in Germany

3
Post WWI Age of Anxiety

• WWI was a blow to Western civilization
• People felt they had little control to change
  things for the better
• People saw themselves living in an age of
  continual crisis
• WWI
• Revolutions
• Political and financial crisis in 20s
• Depression, WWII, Cold War

4
Modern Philosophy New and Upsetting

• Before WWI most people still had the
  Enlightenment view reason, rights of the
  individual, progress possible
• Earlier critics of Pre WWI view rejected the
  general faith in progress and the power of the
  rational human mind

5
The Early Critics of Enlightenment Philosophy

• Friedrich Nietzsche 1844-1900
• Important critic of rationalism of the
  Enlightenment
• In Thus Spake Zarathustra claimed God is Dead
• Claimed Christianity embodied a Slave Morality
  which glorified weakness, envy, and mediocrity
• Individualism had to be quashed

6
Nietzsche

• In Will to Power said that only the creativity of
  a few supermen (ubermenschen) could successfully
  reorder the world
• Not widely read and appreciated until after WWI

7
Henri Bergson 1859-1941

• In the 1890s he had convinced many young people
  that immediate experience and intuition were as
  important as rational and scientific thinking for
  understanding reality

8
Georges Sorel 1847-1922

• Syndicalism a manifestation of anarchism
• His ideas foreshadowed the Bolshevik Revolution
  and the control of an elite few in Russia
• Believed that socialism would come to power
  through a great violent strike of all of the
  working people of the world

9
Sigmund Freud 1856-1939

• Freudian psychology first developed in the 1880s
• Traditional psychology assumed a single unified
  conscious mind processed sensory experiences in a
  rational and logical way
• Freudian psychology emphasized the greedy,
  irrational nature of humans
• By 1910 had gained a wide following

10
Freudian Psychology

• The ID (human unconscious) is driven by sexual,
  aggressive and pleasure-seeking desires so humans
  are not rational
• The ID battles the Ego and the Superego
• Ego Rationalizing conscious that mediates what
  a person can do
• Superego Ingrained moral values specifying what
  a person should do

11
Freudian Psychology

• Shattered the enlightenment view of rationality
  and progress
• Agreed with Nietzsche rational thinking and
  traditional moral values could cripple
  individuals with guilt and neurotic fears
• Many drew the conclusion that the first
  requirement for mental health is an uninhibited
  sex life
• Much post WWII sexual experimentation

12
Post War Critics and Pessimists

• Paul Valery 1871-1945 Poet
• Spoke of the cruelly injured mind besieged by
  doubts suffering from anxieties due to
  economic, political, social disruptions of the
  1920s

13
Ludwig Wittgenstein 1889-1951

• Part of the Vienna Circle of the 1920s and
  30s
• Developed Logical Empiricism (logical
  positivism) Philosophy is the only logical
  clarification of thought
• Abstract concepts God, freedom, morality, etc.
  are senseless since they cannot be tested by
  scientific experiment or demonstrated by the
  logic of mathematics
• Only experience is worth analyzing

14
Anti-utopian Authors

• Oswald Spengler 1880-1936
• The Decline of the West
• Every culture experiences a life cycle of growth
  and decline
• Western civilization is in old age
• Rise of the Eastern races

15
T.S. Eliot 1888-1965

• The Waste Land
• Depicted a world of growing desolation
• Considered the most famous long poem of the 20th
  century

16
Franz Kafka 1883-1924

• Portrayed helpless individuals destroyed by
  inexplicably hostile and surreal forces
• The Trial
• The Castle
• The Metamorphosis

17
Erich Remarque

• All Quiet on the Western Front
• Novel detailing the horrors of trench warfare
  during WWI

18
Existentialism

• Took root in Continental countries after WWII
• Saw life as absurd with no inherent meaning
• The individual has to find his own meaning
• Most but not all were atheists
• Prominent existentialists Martin Heideggerf,
  Karl Jaspers

19
More Existentialists

• Jean-Paul Sartre 1905-1980
• Wrote that life had no meaning and that humans
  simply exist
• Was strongly attracted to communism
• Albert Camus 1913-1960 people have to find
  meaning by taking action against that with which
  they disagree

20
Christian Existentialists

• Shared the loneliness and despair of atheists
• Stressed sinful nature of man, need for faith and
  for Gods forgiveness
• Soren Kierkegaard 1813-1855 the rediscovery of
  his works led to a revivalism of fundamental
  Christian belief
• T.S. Eliot worked within a Christian framework

21
George Orwell 1903-1950

• 1984 The concept of Big Brother and his
  totalitarian state
• Used a new kind of language, sophisticated
  technology and psychological terror to strip a
  weak individual of the last shred of human dignity

22
Theater of the Absurd

• Samuel Beckett 1906-1989 Irish Playwright
• Waiting for Godot Two characters wait for Godot
  (GOD?) but he never comes
• Dialogue is disjointed and convoluted

23
The New Science

• Undermined the optimism of the enlightenment and
  faith in natural law
• The New Physics Challenged long-held
  Enlightenment ideas and led to uncertainty
• Max Planck Basis for quantum physics
• Albert Einstein Theory of Relativity
• Ernest Rutherford split the Atom
• Werner Heisenberg principle of uncertainty

24
Principle of Uncertainty

• Since it is impossible to know the position and
  speed of an electron, it is impossible to predict
  its behavior
• Heisenberg Principle The dynamics of an
  experiment alters the state of the subject

25
Impact of the New Physics

• The new universe seemed strange and troubling
• Universe is now relative except the speed of
  light
• Universe has no stable building blocks
• Physics no longer provided for easy, optimistic
  answersor any answers

26
Art

• Louis Sullivan (U.S.) Late 19th century
  pioneered skyscrapers
• Form follows function
• Bahaus Movement
• Walter Gropius designed the Fagus Shoe Factory
  1911 Germany
• Clean, light, elegant
• A real break with traditional architecture

27
Painting

• Cubism Picasso (with Georges Braque)
• Complex geometry, zigzaggy lines, angles
• Guernica 1937 bombing of Spain by the German
  Luftwaffe
• Non-representational art Kandinsky

28
Dadaism

• Dada a nonsensical word
• The art mirrored the belief that the world did
  not make sense
• Delighted in outrageous conduct
• Marcel Duchamps Mona Lisa with a mustache

29
Surrealism

• Salvador Dali
• Influenced by Freud
• The Persistence of Memory

30
Music

• Igor Stravinsky Most important composer of the
  20th century
• Rite of Spring experimented with new
  tonalities
• Arnold Schonberg pioneered 12-tone technique

31
Movies

• First moving pictures 1890s naughty peepshows
  and penny arcadesParis first
• Charlie Chaplin (English) 1920s first king of
  the Silver Screen
• German studios specialized in expressionist
  dramas The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919)
• Talkies in 1927

32
Movies

• Motion Pictures were the main form of
  entertainment of the masses until after WWII
• Motion Pictures, like the radio, became powerful
  tools of indoctrinationespecially in countries
  with dictatorial regimes Russia, Germany

33
Motion Pictures

• Lenin encouraged the Soviet film industry
• Sergei Eisenstein directed the most famous
  Russian films
• He dramatized the Soviet view of history
• Leni Riefenstahl in Germany specialized in
  documentary propaganda like Triumph of the Will
  of Nazi Party Rally at Nuremberg in 1934

34
Radio

• Marconi developed transatlantic wireless
  communication in 1901
• Used by military in WWI
• 1920 first major public broadcasts in U.S. and
  Great Britain
• Most countries (not U.S.) had direct control of
  radio by the government ie. BBC
• Used for political propaganda