Download Science, Philosophy, the Arts, and Religion

Science,
Philosophy,
the Arts, and
Religion
Section 14.76
Munch, Edvard (1863-1944)
The Scream (or The Cry)
1893
Introduction
• Modern society put great faith in
science
• Scientific advances were broad based
• Inner zone was epicenter of activity
• From 1875-1905 patents tripled in
US, quadrupled in Germany
• Changing conceptions of science
• The universe according to Newton
was unquestioned
• universe was regular, orderly,
predictable
• did not change over time
• New views challenged the idea of a
static universe
The impact of evolution
• 1859 Darwin The Origin of Species
• he took Hegel idea of evolution in the
metaphysical and the Enlightenment
idea in progress and applied it to man
• all species change with successive
small changes
• Unintelligent development
• species did not change by intelligence
or a purposeful activity but by chance
• passed on changes to offspring
• Natural selection and survival of the
fittest
• Most advantageous characteristics
would prevail
T.H. Huxley
• Known as Darwin’s bulldog
• Debated with the bishop of Oxford
• Darwin is denounced for saying
that human being came from
monkeys
• Fear that all human dignity,
morality, religion would collapse
• Darwin was an extension of the
changing view of nature
T.H. Huxley
Old testament was increasingly
challenged
Animalistic characteristics of humans
were recognized
What was so unnerving about
Darwinism was that Nature was no
longer harmonious
it really was red in tooth and claw
Good and bad based on survival
Change was everlasting and everything
was relative to time, place, environment
Short term success of a species or fitness
Darwinism merged with Realpolitic
(toughness of mind)
Social Darwinism
• Translated science into everyday life
• Some people were superior to others
• whites to blacks, Nordics to Latins, German
to Slaves, to Jews
• Upper class was most “fit”
• Sir Francis Galton
• Eugenics
• Goddard, Henry Herbert, Ph.D. The Kallikak
Family: A Study in the Heredity of FeebleMindedness.
– In considering the question of care, segregation
through colonization seems in the present state of
our knowledge to be the ideal and perfectly
satisfactory method. Sterilization may be accepted
as a makeshift, as a help to solve this problem
because the conditions have become so intolerable
• Some nationalities better than others
• Some nations better than others
“In considering the question of care,
segregation through colonization seems
in the present state of our knowledge to
be the ideal and perfectly satisfactory
method. Sterilization may be accepted
as a makeshift, as a help to solve this
problem because the conditions have
become so intolerable.”
Mr. M comments: I know you center block quotes, but
quotation marks should be used for all blockhead quotes.
Genetics, Anthropology, and Psychology
• Gregor Mendel (1822-1884)
• Austrian monk experimented
with cross pollination of
garden peas in his
Augustinian monastery
• Discovered how heredity
operates and how
hybridization takes place
• Published in 1866
• ignored until 1900
• Opened the door to the
modern study of genetics
Anthropologists
• Examined the “races” and various
cultures
• Favored races
• Some argued that whites were most
competent and that Nordics or
German and Anglo Saxons best
• Race consciousness
• Public became very conscience of
race
• Cultural anthropologists deflated
some of this by saying that their
studies indicate that no society was
better than another
Social relativism suggested varieties of
humans were simply adapting and surviving
Relativism
No society is better than the next
culture and morality, everything are
adaptations
Negation of values
What was right and wrong was just
psychological conditioning, opinion or point
of view
There are no absolutes
Anthropology and religion
•
•
•
•
Sir James Frazer (1854-1941)
wrote The Golden Bough
Compared various religions
demonstrated that most sacred
practices , rites and ideas of
Christianity were not unique and could
be found in numerous premodern
societies
• said there is a thin line between magic
and religion
• Undermined traditional beliefs
Sir James Frazer
Psychology
• The study of human behavior, led to
upsetting implications about the nature of
human freedom and rationality in the
1870s
• Wihelm Wundt (1832-1920)
• German who first launched it as a science
with new techniques
• Ivan Pavlov
• Animal and human behavior could be
explained by conditioned responses
• “conditioned” dogs to salivate
automatically at the ringing of a bell
• Conscious reasoning was challenged
• Implied that training not choice or
conscience reasoning governs human
behavior
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
• A Viennese physician who founded
psychoanalysis
• Believed that certain forms of emotional
disturbances like hysteria were traceable to
early life experiences
• Experimented with hypnosis and then
developed Free Association or free recall
• Bring repressed experiences to consciousness
• 1900 The Interpretation of Dreams
• Explored the role that the Unconscious plays in
human behavior
• Stressed dreams as a key to understanding the
unconscious
• Human behavior outside the conscious mind
was suggested
• Suggested humans were not essentially rational
creatures
• Challenged enlightenment assumptions
The New Physics
• 1890 saw a revolution in physics
• Newton’s Principia defined the universe
• Said the atom, the basic unit of all matter was like a hard solid
unstructured billiard ball, permanent and unchanging
• matter and energy were separate and distinct
• Newton was challenged by Einstein after several developmental steps
• Antoine Becquerel (French scientist) discovers radioactivity
disputing Newton’s atom
• Observed that uranium emitted particles or rays of energy
• Pierre and Marie Curie
• Developed the notion that atoms were complex and released energy
as they decayed
• Max Planck (German physicist) describe the release of energy as
quantum
• energy was emitted or absorbed in specific and discrete unites or
bundles (quantum) and not emitted smoothly
• Niels Bohr (Danish physicist) suggested atoms consisted of nucleus
and surrounded by electrically charged electrons (electricity)
• like a mini solar system
• Indications are that matter was transmutable (alchemy)
• Convertible into energy
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
• German born Jewish genius
• developed the theory of relativity in a
series of paper (1905-1916)
• e=mc2
• Space, time and motion are not absolute
• Relative to the observer and the observer’s
movements
• Unified field theory
• Gravitation, electromagnetism, and
subatomic behavior
• The orderly Newtonian universe was being
replaced by a messy, relativistic space-time
continuum
• Werner Heisenberg “uncertainty
principle”
• Velocity and position of the individual
electron
Trends in philosophy and the arts
Agnosticism
• Most intellectuals of this time were positivists
• Belief that scientific methods provide the only positive
knowledge of the world
• Anything unknowable to science is therefore
unknowable period
• Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)and Ernst Haeckel (18341919)
• English and German positivist who popularized
agnostics
• Agnosticism: God is un-provable
• they were strong believers in evolution
• evolution of society was toward the increasing
freedom of the individual
• Governments exist to maintain freedom and justice
• Governments should not coddle the weak and unfit
• But he did believe that altruism and charity were
ethical virtues that had evolved in the fittest
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
• German philosopher who developed the Superman
theory
• Was a radical thinker and had a low opinion of
modern, democratic society
• Superman was
• a noble being who would create new ethical values
and philosophical truths
• Would dominate the masses
• Most values (love, helpfulness, patience, hope,
humility, Christian ethnic) are slave moralities of the
weak to disarm the strong
• the Superman would possess courage, intellectual
excellence, character (Lion, Scarecrow, and Tin Man
all in one)
• human beings are driven more by their instincts (their
Will to Power) than by reason or rational
• he was considered unbalanced and insane
The Arts
• Portrayal of social problems
• Emile Zola in France & Henrik Ibsen
in Scandinavia turned to the portrayal
of social problems to produce realistic
literature dealing with the themes of
life (Industrial strife, strikes,
prostitution, divorce, insanity)
• reflected the new attitudes
(Relativism, irrationalism, social
determinism)
• Focused on unconscious mind
• No Absolutes!!
• Paul Gaugin
– Painter who fled to South Seas,
abandoned his family and modern
Europe and this new attitude
Fringe
• some art became
incomprehensible to the
average person
• Books without punctuation
• Atonal music
• Abstract paintings and
sculpture
• Munch, Van Gogh
• Art was not “for” something
• Art was for the sake of art
and artists
The Churches and the Modern Age
• Threats to religion
• More threatened after 1860 than ever
(Darwinian evolution)
• So many fundamental premises of
traditional religion had been directly
question or outright denied (Creationism,
uniqueness of Christian tenants)
• Bible was studied in a technical historical
sense
• David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874) wrote
Life of Jesus
– explained miracles of Jesus as myth
• Ernest Renan (1823-1892)
– Gave secular explanations to the Old
and New Testament
• Material progress more important to
people than religion
L'Antechrist By Ernest
Renan (1873)
Challenges to Protestantism
• Church attendance began to decline
• Protestantism traditionally emphasized
their own private judgment over the
authority of the clergy
• Were divided into two groups
• Modernists
• Aware of scientific contradictions
• saw the Bible as an Allegory
• Customary observance by people whose
minds were elsewhere
• Fundamentalists
• Literal and unchallenging
• Revival after WWI
Catholicism resists
• 1864 Pius IX he wrote Syllabus of Errors
• Denounced current ideas of science
• gave a long list of wrong current ideas
including rationalism and science
• was a warning to Catholics
• 1854 the dogma of the Immaculate
Conception of the Virgin Mary was
announced as truth
• 1870 Vatican I
• first since Council of Trent
• Council proclaimed the dogma of papal
infallibility
• when pope speaks ex cathedra (on matter
of faith and morals)
– speaks with a a final and supernatural
authority that can’t be questioned
Pope Pius IX
1846-1878
Vatican City
• 1870 as Vatican Council was sitting
Italian State took Rome (taking
Pope’s temporal power but actually
enhancing his spiritual)
• Lateran treaty of 1929 papacy
recognized the Italians state and Italy
conceded the existence of a Vatican
City (1 square mile)
• Rerum Novarum
• Leo XIII (1878-1903) upheld private
property but found fault with
capitalism for its poverty and
insecurity
• It also criticized socialism b/c of its
materialism and antireligious
• Recommended that Catholics form
their own socialist parties
Jewish Emancipation
• Science and secularism had same
dissolving effect on Orthodox Judaism
(sparked Reform Judaism)
• Liberalism allowed them to be
accepted and blend into most
European countries
• A fear of assimilation
– would lead to a loss of Jewish
identity
• Anti-Semitism also was a barrier to
assimilation
– Russian pograms, Dreyfus case,
ethnic theories of pure race, social
Darwinism
Hungarian Jewish journalist Theodor Herzl
observed first hand as a reporter in Vienna
the Dreyfus affair
founded the Zionist movement which called
for the establishment of a Jewish state in
Palestine where all world Jews might find
refuge