[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.447).11The machine is not offered here as a template for beauty, nor celebrated à la Italian Futurism as the source of a technological sublime, nor even regarded as a social datum demanding interpretation: it is presented in abstract terms as providing the conceptual means by which an alternative Weltanschauung might obliquely be gestured at.J.B.Bullen suggests that here lies the crucial difference between Fry’s and Hulme’s respective understandings of the Byzantine art onwhich they both drew as a model: ‘Hulme and Fry attach equal importance to therelationship between Byzantine art and modern practice, but differ about the nature of that relationship.For Hulme it is the abstract spirit of Byzantium that lives on in modern art, not its outward formal qualities’ (1999, p.674).The turn to this spirit is for Hulme neither a purely formalist matter nor a mode of passive imitation of older styles but rather the creation of a new art that, at most, can be said to ‘have certain analogies to the attitude of which geometrical art was the expression in the past’ ( CW, p.276).In Hulme’s understanding of it, a key aspect of contemporary geometric art was that it asserted the disjunction between the human and the divine and pointed to a realm of absolute value of a different ontological order fromanything appearing in the natural world.It is perhaps not surprising, then, to find him claiming that if ‘we think of physical science as represented by geometry, then instead of saying that modern progress away from materialism has been fromphysics through vitalism to the absolute values of religion, we might say that it is from geometry through life and back to geometry’ ( CW, p.426).Epstein was important to Hulme as the exemplar par excellence of thistransition from one Weltanschauung to another.The new art drew on archaism – as exemplified by the art of Byzantium or Egypt, for example – in order to express a controlled vigor and to disclose a profound shift in outlook.The key features of geometric art, as Hulme saw it, were stiffness, angularity, durability, permanence, and purification.The objects being depicted or sculpted were deprived of theirorganic, natural qualities so that the mutable could be transformed ‘into something fixed and necessary’ ( CW, p.274).The attitude underpinning this aesthetic insisted on the separation of the human from its animate form; driving a wedge between the two, it was based on ‘the idea of disharmony or separation between man andnature’ ( CW, p.274).For Hulme, the inorganic qualities of a machine-influenced art pointed to the early elaboration of a new pictorial lexicon that subordinated the natural world to a supernatural realm of value.Satisfaction and IncommensurabilityIn his last writings, collected together under the heading ‘A Notebook’, Hulmesketched out the basic lineaments of a Critique of Satisfaction, which would set out to dissect the often unconsciously held presuppositions underlying post-Renaissance humanist philosophy, and which once again drew on the lessons ofSorelian ideology critique.The purpose of this critique was not to reduce a series164T.E.Hulme and the Question of Modernismof complex strands to a simple unity but to establish the family resemblancesamong them, to try to work out why certain philosophical standards and ethicalcanons have seemed persuasive, in short, satisfactory.Hulme’s goal was touncover the antecedent assumptions that led the ‘truths’ of humanism to beaccepted in order to argue that its entire conception of reality was mistaken and to defend the view that there exist ‘many possible different ideals, or canons of satisfaction’ ( CW, p.431).He was, in short, insisting on the incommensurability of philosophical positions that depended on fundamentally opposed premises.The geometric art Hulme had championed provided an aesthetic critique ofhumanism.This was now buttressed by an explicit philosophical critique, whichtook humanism to task for its misguided conception of the human subject and ofthe social order.The aesthetic theory and the philosophical critique both hadexactly the same intention: to signal the break-up of humanism and to install in its place an alternative account of the nature of reality.It should already be clear that Hulme’s alternative was a dogmatic one, which insisted on human depravity andmaintained that all aesthetic, ethical, and political theories had to take this as their point of departure.The religious attitude as he conceived it was to be found inPascal’s Pensées, which articulated ‘exactly what I mean by a Critique of Satisfaction’ ( CW, p.432).Lest there be any doubt, he then added, ‘Everything that I shall say later in these notes is to be regarded merely as a prolegomena to the reading of Pascal, as an attempt to remove the difficulties of comprehensionengendered in us by the humanism of our period’ ( CW, p.449).Hulme in ‘Cinders’ articulated a conventionalist and pragmatist view of realitythat is at odds with his late absolutism; in the earlier piece he claimed: ‘Truths don’t exist before we invent them.They respond to man’s need of economy, just as beliefs to his need of faith’ ( CW, p.20).Hulme’s late position might then plausibly be read as a response to his need to overcome a far-reaching skepticism.When hecame to question the Bergsonian solution to the mechanist and determinist view of reality, his reaction was revealing: ‘I can never hope to attain in the future any“solidity” of belief.It is necessarily only a temporary illusion attaching to the moment of arrival.Now this would be an intolerable opinion.It is too thorough-going a scepticism for mental equilibrium.I must save myself by somecomforting theory from such a scepticism’ ( CW, p.156).It is thus arguable that in response to this shattering of his peace of mind Hulme came up with a ‘comforting theory’ at the end of his life, which enabled him to posit an Absolute thatindividuals could apprehend and that would confirm their aesthetic choices,structure their ethical lives, and guide their political designs.12 In Dominic Baker-Smith’s view, for example, ‘the appeal to religious models is made on behalf ofpurely cultural ends.What is at stake is a view of the nature of man with itsimplications for social performance in the arts and in politics’ (p.274).But I would suggest that to put it like this is to beg the very questions Hulme asked [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.447).11The machine is not offered here as a template for beauty, nor celebrated à la Italian Futurism as the source of a technological sublime, nor even regarded as a social datum demanding interpretation: it is presented in abstract terms as providing the conceptual means by which an alternative Weltanschauung might obliquely be gestured at.J.B.Bullen suggests that here lies the crucial difference between Fry’s and Hulme’s respective understandings of the Byzantine art onwhich they both drew as a model: ‘Hulme and Fry attach equal importance to therelationship between Byzantine art and modern practice, but differ about the nature of that relationship.For Hulme it is the abstract spirit of Byzantium that lives on in modern art, not its outward formal qualities’ (1999, p.674).The turn to this spirit is for Hulme neither a purely formalist matter nor a mode of passive imitation of older styles but rather the creation of a new art that, at most, can be said to ‘have certain analogies to the attitude of which geometrical art was the expression in the past’ ( CW, p.276).In Hulme’s understanding of it, a key aspect of contemporary geometric art was that it asserted the disjunction between the human and the divine and pointed to a realm of absolute value of a different ontological order fromanything appearing in the natural world.It is perhaps not surprising, then, to find him claiming that if ‘we think of physical science as represented by geometry, then instead of saying that modern progress away from materialism has been fromphysics through vitalism to the absolute values of religion, we might say that it is from geometry through life and back to geometry’ ( CW, p.426).Epstein was important to Hulme as the exemplar par excellence of thistransition from one Weltanschauung to another.The new art drew on archaism – as exemplified by the art of Byzantium or Egypt, for example – in order to express a controlled vigor and to disclose a profound shift in outlook.The key features of geometric art, as Hulme saw it, were stiffness, angularity, durability, permanence, and purification.The objects being depicted or sculpted were deprived of theirorganic, natural qualities so that the mutable could be transformed ‘into something fixed and necessary’ ( CW, p.274).The attitude underpinning this aesthetic insisted on the separation of the human from its animate form; driving a wedge between the two, it was based on ‘the idea of disharmony or separation between man andnature’ ( CW, p.274).For Hulme, the inorganic qualities of a machine-influenced art pointed to the early elaboration of a new pictorial lexicon that subordinated the natural world to a supernatural realm of value.Satisfaction and IncommensurabilityIn his last writings, collected together under the heading ‘A Notebook’, Hulmesketched out the basic lineaments of a Critique of Satisfaction, which would set out to dissect the often unconsciously held presuppositions underlying post-Renaissance humanist philosophy, and which once again drew on the lessons ofSorelian ideology critique.The purpose of this critique was not to reduce a series164T.E.Hulme and the Question of Modernismof complex strands to a simple unity but to establish the family resemblancesamong them, to try to work out why certain philosophical standards and ethicalcanons have seemed persuasive, in short, satisfactory.Hulme’s goal was touncover the antecedent assumptions that led the ‘truths’ of humanism to beaccepted in order to argue that its entire conception of reality was mistaken and to defend the view that there exist ‘many possible different ideals, or canons of satisfaction’ ( CW, p.431).He was, in short, insisting on the incommensurability of philosophical positions that depended on fundamentally opposed premises.The geometric art Hulme had championed provided an aesthetic critique ofhumanism.This was now buttressed by an explicit philosophical critique, whichtook humanism to task for its misguided conception of the human subject and ofthe social order.The aesthetic theory and the philosophical critique both hadexactly the same intention: to signal the break-up of humanism and to install in its place an alternative account of the nature of reality.It should already be clear that Hulme’s alternative was a dogmatic one, which insisted on human depravity andmaintained that all aesthetic, ethical, and political theories had to take this as their point of departure.The religious attitude as he conceived it was to be found inPascal’s Pensées, which articulated ‘exactly what I mean by a Critique of Satisfaction’ ( CW, p.432).Lest there be any doubt, he then added, ‘Everything that I shall say later in these notes is to be regarded merely as a prolegomena to the reading of Pascal, as an attempt to remove the difficulties of comprehensionengendered in us by the humanism of our period’ ( CW, p.449).Hulme in ‘Cinders’ articulated a conventionalist and pragmatist view of realitythat is at odds with his late absolutism; in the earlier piece he claimed: ‘Truths don’t exist before we invent them.They respond to man’s need of economy, just as beliefs to his need of faith’ ( CW, p.20).Hulme’s late position might then plausibly be read as a response to his need to overcome a far-reaching skepticism.When hecame to question the Bergsonian solution to the mechanist and determinist view of reality, his reaction was revealing: ‘I can never hope to attain in the future any“solidity” of belief.It is necessarily only a temporary illusion attaching to the moment of arrival.Now this would be an intolerable opinion.It is too thorough-going a scepticism for mental equilibrium.I must save myself by somecomforting theory from such a scepticism’ ( CW, p.156).It is thus arguable that in response to this shattering of his peace of mind Hulme came up with a ‘comforting theory’ at the end of his life, which enabled him to posit an Absolute thatindividuals could apprehend and that would confirm their aesthetic choices,structure their ethical lives, and guide their political designs.12 In Dominic Baker-Smith’s view, for example, ‘the appeal to religious models is made on behalf ofpurely cultural ends.What is at stake is a view of the nature of man with itsimplications for social performance in the arts and in politics’ (p.274).But I would suggest that to put it like this is to beg the very questions Hulme asked [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]