Anti-Modernism and Discourses of Melancholy

Modernism and Melancholy

Although World War II resulted in mass atrocities and a scale of death unmatched in human history, from a cultural point of view World War I had implications that were equally far-reaching. Modernism was a multi-faceted phenomenon arising in the aftermath of World War I, which denied the adequacy of longstanding presuppositions of European culture. In fact, Heidegger's philosophy has been read by some scholars as reflecting a search for solid ground in a European world that lost its footing in the chaos following World War I, and perhaps never regained it.

Modernism rejected a number of optimistic Enlightenment assumptions regarding the rationality of the universe and human nature; modernist artists and thinkers thus began to represent the world and human nature as fragmented and chaotic, characterized not by order and reason, but by darker, more irrational forces. This sense of spiritual dislocation found expression all across the artistic and cultural spectrum. Freud's new science of psychoanalysis, with its theories concerning the unconscious mind, emphasized the irrational side of human nature, while Kafka's twisted tales of alienation represented a world turned upside-down. In music, Alban Berg's Wozzeck exhibited an atonality that was at once brilliant and disturbing as it radically called into question basic presuppositions about the nature of melody, harmony and scale. In modern art, the breakdown of the representative image was reflected in movements such as Cubism and Dada, with an increased tendency towards abstraction, fragmentation and distortion. Perhaps the most famous expression of this theme is to be found in Yeats' famous poem "Second Coming":

    Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold,
    Mere anarchy is unleashed upon the world
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere,
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned…
 
The aftermath of World War I has been described by many critics and historians as a loss of innocence. As The Great War unfolded over time, it became increasingly clear to thoughtful people on all sides of the conflict that this was a war unprecedented both in its brutality and its futility. This realization reflected a stark truth- that the European world prior to The Great War simply no longer existed, and one could never go back. Hence Paul Fussell, in his classic study The Great War and Modern Memory, writes in connection with the British war poets, that "for the modern imagination, that last summer ("our summer of 1914") has assumed the status of a permanent symbol for anything innocently but irrevocably lost".

The anti-modernist strain in Heidegger's thought can similarly be read as a form of "homesickness". Heidegger discussed this concept himself, writing approvingly of the romantic poet Novalis' interpretation of the philosophical impulse as homesickness (Heidegger Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics 5). In his later work, he also discussed the concept of "homelessness" especially in connection with the proliferation of technology as a fundamental characteristic of modernity. But what exactly does the discussion about "home" signify? When one is homesick, one yearns for a place to which one cannot return. But how can we clarify the feeling of loss experienced when one returns "home" when "home" no longer exists? (See Read) Consider the loss experienced by a tsunami survivor returning to a now leveled house and only the memory of dead or missing relatives. The survivor can only mourn a lost family, a lost world, and a lost innocence. In what follows, I will discuss the concept of "homesickness" on a larger cultural level. I will specifically analyze anti-modernist discourses of melancholy as reactions to the perceived disintegration of values in the aftermath of World War I. In Heidegger's case, fundamental themes in his philosophy (and his life) partly reflect an attempted retreat into a world before the dislocations of modernity. Heidegger rejected modernity as nihilistic and was critical of what he took to be a rootless, technology-obsessed, conformist society, out of touch with the fundamental rhythms of Being.

Source: David J. Rosner, https://journals.openedition.org/erea/596
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.

Anxiety and Existential Homelessness

Heidegger inquired into the nature of "Being" itself, without regard to time and place. Therefore his masterwork Being and Time has traditionally and fruitfully been read as an inquiry into the fundamental structures of the human condition as such, not relating to any specific set of cultural conditions. However, every work is a product of a historical context. This is an issue that has become increasingly acute in the field of Heidegger studies, since Heidegger's Nazism became a matter of public record in the late l980's. Heidegger's magnum opus can be read both as an analysis of the structure of the human condition itself, and (though he would vigorously protest against this reading) as a work which subtly reflects a profound cultural crisis.

Heidegger's analytic of anxiety is discussed in connection with the contingency of human life and its inevitable confrontation with death. How is such anxiety in itself part of a larger discourse of melancholy? According to Heidegger, anxiety is not something that can be overcome - contrary to the teachings of many therapeutic and religious systems offering freedom from anxiety, or inner peace. This is because it is a fundamental structure of the human condition. Man is the only creature on Earth (as far as we know) who must live with and come to grips with his finitude. Anxiety is not "fear" (which has as its object a specific concrete threat), but rather is characterized as a free-floating "uncanny-ness". This anxiety has as its object no specific thing in the world; rather its object is being-in-the world as such. I have been thrown into the world, certain only of my own finitude. Heidegger uses the German term "unheimlich", to describe the feeling of anxiety, which literally means "unhomelike" or a sense of "not-being- at-home". Authentic being can only come out of a process of confronting and accepting my death as my "ownmost" possibility (that can belong only to me alone) and my "uttermost" possibility (for there may in fact be nothing whatsoever after death).

Anxiety was discussed extensively by Kierkegaard, Freud and others; the focus on analyses of anxiety in European thought during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was implicitly engendered by the subversive nature of philosophy itself, from the early modern period onwards. How does a society properly function when, in John Donne's words, "a new philosophy calls all in doubt"?

    And new philosophy calls all in doubt,
    The element of fire is quite put out,
    The sun is lost, and th' earth, and no man's wit
    Can well direct him where to look for it.
    And freely men confess that this world's spent,
    When in the planets and the firmament
    They seek so many new; they see that this
    Is crumbled out again to his atomies.
    "Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone…
    (John Donne An Anatomy of the World; The First Anniversary).

Paradoxically, the philosopher whose method consisted primarily of "calling all into doubt" was the founder of modern philosophy, Descartes. Although much of Heidegger's Being and Time constitutes a refutation of Descartes' rationalism, the two philosophers share commonalities regarding the original impetus for their respective lines of questioning. Descartes' quest for certainty and his methodological process of "calling all into doubt" seem pathological to the contemporary reader if studied (as it often is) divorced from cultural context. It becomes fully intelligible only when one considers the scientific revolution's radical questioning of many of Europe's basic assumptions. Descartes' philosophical methodology "called all into doubt" because he was delineating exactly what he could know for certain in a world which now seemed uncertain indeed.

Heidegger's emphasis on "not-being-at-home" can also be read as a reaction to the spiritual dislocation of Europe reflected in nineteenth century philosophy and letters, culminating in the period between the World Wars. Heidegger also wrote extensively on Nietzsche and European nihilism, the horrible implications of which Nietzsche so presciently foresaw. But I will argue that even in Being and Time, awork thatimplicitly reflects the cultural crisis which Nietzsche diagnosed, Heidegger is searching for solidity in an increasingly fragmented world. When basic cultural presuppositions are suddenly revealed to be inadequate, anxiety and melancholy may be the only possible authentic responses. The upheavals of interwar Germany reflected the loss of the solidity of many traditional cultural presuppositions. Heidegger's conservatism may be explainable, at least in part, as a reaction to this loss. Heidegger's attachment to the land and to the lifestyle of the peasantry also needs to be considered in this context. His nationalism and even his involvement with National Socialism can be better understood (though certainly not morally justified in the latter case) by viewing his philosophical project at least partly as an attempt to find "roots" and "ground" in the face of the profoundly felt loss of yesterday's world.

Authenticity and Heidegger's Search for Solid Ground

A discourse of melancholy also figures into the way Heidegger describes his central notions of authenticity and inauthenticity. Heidegger believes that we exist fundamentally with others and therefore that the consciousness of the other is part and parcel of my own being and consciousness. We are born into a complicated previously existing social nexus with its own rules, assumptions and conceptual framework. Thus, as a necessary and fundamental structure of the human condition, being with others is neither good nor bad. Of course, positive relations such as love and friendship can only arise out of social being. But Heidegger also speaks disapprovingly of an anonymous "they" consisting of "everyone and no-one":

Melancholy and Pastorale

In the aftermath of a destructive and ultimately pointless world war, modernism reflected the realization that the traditional ideals of European culture could no longer hold. Yet Heidegger wrote much of his work at his hut in Todnauberg, deep in the Black Forest. He never felt comfortable in urban environments, nor among "the intelligentsia", preferring instead to dwell among the peasants near the wood paths, fields and forests. After declining teaching offers in cosmopolitan Berlin, the cultural epicenter of Weimar modernism, he defended his decision with Why we Remain in the Provinces, a text which may itself be read as a classic artefact of anti-modernism.

Technos and Pathos

Heidegger's critique of the modern ethos concerning technology can perhaps also be read as lamenting the loss of roots and community, mourning the loss of a direct, non-exploitative relationship between man and nature. Certainly, the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the omnipresent threat of nuclear war today have vindicated Heidegger's argument that technological man has appropriated, converted and exploited the majesty of nature into mere "standing reserve" for his own purposes. But there are other aspects of Heidegger's critique that also involve the discourses of melancholy, especially in terms of the overarching theme of cultural mourning. For example, although Heidegger never witnessed the rise of the computer and the internet in the post-modern age, I believe that he would have diagnosed the proliferation of this technology as contributing to the overall impoverishment of human community ("being-with-others").The following section of this essay to some degree draws upon the work of Hubert Dreyfus, who has written a number of important works on philosophical questions concerning computer technology, and has also astutely explicated Heidegger's critique of Cartesianism and its implications for the philosophy of technology. I will emphasize these themes explicitly in the context of "discourses of melancholy", as further examples of Heidegger's critique of the rootlessness and disconnectedness afflicting modern (and by extension, postmodern) existence.

In order to understand Heidegger here, we need to isolate some of the basic assumptions of his critique of Descartes' epistemology. The Cartesian separation of the subject from the world (mind / body) constitutes, for Heidegger, a basic misconception. It defines a person as a self-enclosed conscious mind, epistemologically disconnected from the world. Cartesian thought has thus led to a number of philosophical pseudo-problems, e.g., the "problem of other minds", orthe "problem of the external world." These are pseudo-problems because human beings do not first exist and then somehow have to "find the world." Human being is essentially and from the outset being-in-the-world. Being-in-the world and being-with-others are not contingent facts that somehow could be otherwise, or propositions that are in any ways in need of proof, but rather are our starting assumptions, necessary structures of the human condition itself.

Given this radically concrete, context-bound premise, Heidegger might well have viewed some variations of the current proliferation of computer technology as symptomatic of a deeper cultural dislocation. Consider children playing computer games in a "virtual" playground, staring at screens for hours instead of climbing on actual trees outside. What happens when people begin to spend more and more time online, slowly starting to live lives that are more "virtual" than "real"? At what point do virtual contexts become impoverished versions of (or inadequate substitutes for) face-to-face, physical interactions? What might Heidegger have said about other post-modern, technologically mediated phenomena such as distance education, where entire courses of academic study are offered online, rather than in a traditional classroom, not to mention even more curious developments such as online dating, or "cybersex"? Postmodernist thinkers like Baudrillard have famously described the "reductio ad absurdum" occurring when reality itself becomes indistinguishable from the simulations (or "simulacra") generated by image-based media. What will come next?

Contemporary developments in computer technology reflect advances in terms of efficiency and accessibility, but what has been lost? These experiences, as they are mediated through computer screens, involve a loss of immediacy and direct, face-to-face human connection/interaction. Computer mediated contexts involve a paradoxical kind of interaction in which one is simultaneously "being-with" and "not-being-with" others, as the other is somehow present in cyberspace but not physically "here." In this sense, they somehow are "uprooted", existing on one or more levels abstracted from physical reality. Just as cyberspace is "everywhere and nowhere", Heidegger would probably have viewed these new technologies as offering "everything and nothing", another symptom of a scientifically-advanced but increasingly rootless, disconnected and alienated post-modern world. This is thus another example of how Heidegger's thought can be read through anti-modernist lenses as a discourse of melancholy.

The discourses of melancholy explored in this paper therefore all implicate mourning and loss as reactions to modernist culture. These discourses of melancholy can be also seen as relevant to postmodern developments. They thus constitute an important aspect of our cultural inheritance, a theme which recurs universally whenever a society loses its foundations, whenever "a new philosophy calls all in doubt."