Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

Romanticism, the will, Bildung, Weber’s sense of vocation, the Volkgeist, the discovery of the unconscious, Innerlichkeit . . . the theme of the inner life, the second, inner, or as Kant called it the higher self, runs as strongly through nineteenth-century thought as it does throughout history, if not more strongly. A predominantly German concern with the irrational, it has been seen by some as forming the ‘deep background’ to the horrors of Nazism in the twentieth century (with the creation of the superior human being – the individual who has overcome his limitations by the exercise of will – as the goal of human history). That is not a trivial matter but it is not the main concern here. Instead, we are more interested in what this helps us conclude about the history of ideas. It surely confirms the pattern discussed above, of man’s recurring attempts to look deep inside himself in search of . . . God, fulfilment, catharsis, his ‘true’ motives, his ‘real’ self.

Alfred North Whitehead famously once remarked that the history of Western thought consisted of a series of footnotes to Plato. At the end of our long journey, we can now see that, whether Whitehead was being rhetorical or ironical, he was at best half right. In the realm of ideas, history has consisted of two main streams (I am oversimplifying here, but this is the Conclusion). There has been the history of ‘out there’, of the world outside man, the Aristotelian world of observation, exploration, travel, discovery, measurement, experiment and manipulation of the environment, in short the materialistic world of what we now call science. While this adventure has hardly been a straight line, and advances have been piecemeal at times, and even held up or hindered for centuries on end, mainly by fundamentalist religions, this adventure must be counted a success overall. Few would doubt that the material progress of the world, or much of it, is there for all to see. This advance continued, in accelerated mode, in the twentieth century.

The other main stream in the history of ideas has been the exploration of man’s inner life, his soul and/or second self, what we might label (with Whitehead) Platonic – as opposed to Aristotelian – concerns. This stream may itself be divided into two. In the first place, there has been the story of man’s moral life, his social and political life, his development of ways to live together, and this must be counted a qualified success, or at least as having a predominantly positive outcome. The broad transition in history from autocratic monarchies, whether temporal or papal, through feudalism, to democracy, and from theocratic to secular circumstances, has certainly brought greater freedoms and greater fulfilment to greater numbers of people (generally speaking, of course – there are always exceptions). The various stages in this unfolding process have been described in the pages above. Although political and legal arrangements vary around the world, all peoples have a politics and a legal system. They have concepts of justice that extend well beyond what we may call for simplicity’s sake the law of the jungle. In an institution such as the competitive examination, for example, we see the concept of justice extending beyond the purely criminal/legal area, to education. Even the development of statistics, a form of mathematics, was at times spurred by the interests of justice, as we saw in Chapter 32. Though the achievements of the formal social sciences have been limited in comparison with those of physics, astronomy, chemistry or medicine, say, their very evolution was intended as a more just improvement on the partisan nature of politics. All this must be accounted a (perhaps qualified) success.

The final theme – man’s understanding of himself, of his inner life – has proved the most disappointing. Some, perhaps many, will take issue with this, arguing that the better part of the history of art and creation is the history of man’s inner life. While this is undoubtedly true in a sense, it is also true that the arts don’t explain the self. Often enough, they attempt to describe the self or, more accurately, a myriad selves under a myriad different circumstances. But the very popularity in the contemporary world of Freudianism and other ‘depth’ psychologies, concerned mainly with the ‘inner self’ and self-esteem (and however misguidedly), surely confirms this assessment. If the arts were truly successful, would there be a need for these psychologies, these new ways of looking-in?