Tarnas on Modern Art

Here is a good moment from Tarnas—on contemporary art as an expression of late modern angst.

It was not simply that the old formulae had been exhausted, or that artists sought novelty at any cost. Rather, the nature of contemporary human experience demanded the collapse of old structures and themes, the creation of new ones, or the renouncing of any discernible form or content whatever. Artists had become realists of a new reality—of an ever-growing multiplicity of realities—lacking any precedent. Thus their artistic responsibilities sharply diverged from those of their predecessors: radical change, in art and society, was the century’s overriding theme, its dominant imperative and its inescapable actuality. Yet a price was paid. “Make it new,” Ezra Pound had decreed, but later he reflected, “I cannot make it cohere.” Radical change and ceaseless innovation lent themselves to unaesthetic chaos, to incomprehensibility and barren alienation. The late modern experiment threatened to fray out into meaningless solipsism. The results of incessant novelty were creative but seldom enduring. Incoherence was authentic but seldom satisfying. Subjectivism was perhaps fascinating but too often irrelevant… the arts in the twentieth century became notable for a certain quality of graceless transiency, an undisguised self-consciousness regarding their own ephemeral substance and style. (The Passion of the Western Mind, 392)

The Passion of the Western Mind

I have just finished reading The Passion of the Western Mind, by Richard Tarnas (Pimlico: 1996 [1991]). This was an incredible experience. Tarnas’ overview of the development of Western philosophy is stunning in its detail, clarity, and excitement. The book is genuinely perceptive and almost shockingly engaging. Particularly noteworthy is its generous and sympathetic engagement with the Christian tradition, its brilliant explanation of the significance of the scientific revolution, and its perceptive analysis of the precarious existential situation of the late-modern mind. Here is a passage on the latter concern:

This double bind of modern consciousness has been recognized in one form or another since at least Pascal: “I am terrified by the eternal silence of these infinite spaces.” Our psychological and spiritual predispostions are absurdly at variance with the world revealed by our scientific method. We seem to receive two messages from our existential situation: on the one hand, strive, give oneself to the quest for meaning and spiritual fulfillment; but on the other hand, know that the universe, of whose substance we are derived, is entirely indifferent to that quest, soulless in character, and nullifying in its effects. We are at once aroused and crushed. For inexplicably, absurdly, the cosmos is inhuman, yet we are not. The situation is profoundly unintelligible.

Tarnas does not end here, however. He sets forth a positive vision for the transcending of this deep dislocation of the modern psyche through a spiritual reintegration with the universe, our primal ground of being. I do not find his suggestion compelling. Yet it is this attempt to go beyond the present crisis of Western thinking that permits such a sympathetic and honest appreciation of Western intellectual
history, and for that we need to be deeply appreciative.