Zeitgeist: the spirit of our age....

I have been studying the “modern” age in philosophy
for some time now…and I have been wondering about what
the “Zeitgeist” of our modern age looks like?

I believe that the things that have driven the “Zeitgeist” of prior ages,
literature, novels, philosophy, study of history… no longer drives our age…
for example, the Romantic age, roughly from French Revolution to today,
began with Goethe’s book, “The Sorrows of Young Werther”… first published
in 1774…or roughly 14 years before the French Revolution…

this “Strum und Drang” period of German literature played an essential part
in creating the Romantic Age in which we still live in…more on that part later…

one of the things that is important to remember about the Romantic movement is
that it emphasized intense emotion as an authentic source of experience…Romanticism
is an response to a couple of historical events, first, it is a response to the
“Enlightenment”… where the the motto was, “SAPERE AUDE” “Dare to know” or a bit more loosely,
as “dare to know things” or even more loosely, “Dare to be wise”…
the Enlightenment was a period that challenged people to overcome
the lies, fiction, the superstitions of the age…overcoming the “fiction” that is
the Church, both Catholic and Protestant…

the second historical event the Romantic movement was fighting was
the Industrial revolution…it is no surprise that the Romantic movement was
strongest in the beginning in England as it was England that the Industrial
revolution began and was strongest in for decades…

movements like the Enlightenment and the Romantic movement are reactions to
the movement and actions of the previous age…in opposition to, as it were…
the Enlightenment was intellectual and the Romantic movement wasn’t…
it has been said that the Romantic movement lasted from, according to the
sources I read, from 1800-1850… but as I said, I hold that it began with
the French Revolution and is still with us today…

so what movements drive our age today, I mean besides the Romantic movement?

oftentimes we can better understand an age, the Zeitgeist, in
its literature…its novels, poems, plays, ART, paintings,…
and what is the literature of the “Modern” age saying to us?

The best representative seems to be Kafka… and nothing is clear or
understandable in Kafka…his stories are of the Bureaucracies that dominant, both
his age and ours… recall, that Kafka worked in the Insurance industry… and was
trained as a lawyer…the age that Kafka lived in was part of the transition in
how society viewed it citizens… before the Industrial revolution, human beings
had names and were considered to be human, abet oftentimes treated badly,
yet, still considered to be human… and during the years after the French Revolution,
we transitioned from being human, having names to being a number in the system…
I have multiple numbers, I have a work number… I have a social security number,
I am unit 8 in my condo building, when paying bills, I must refer to the listed
numbers on the bill, not by name, but by the case number…and if I ever get in trouble
with the law, I am a case number in the courts…

so in one very real sense the Zeitgeist of our age is the transition of, or the devaluation
of human beings into numbers…my name is far less important then the numbers
I have been assigned to be…

we can also look at the paintings of the modern age… if we follow painting done
from 1800 to the First World War, we can follow the paintings done in the
Classical style, something that Da Vinci would have easily recognized to
“Modern” painting done beginning with the Impressionists, Monet, Renoir,
Manet, Cezanne as example… they started to break away from the classical
paintings done until that time…follow ART/painting done from 1500 to 1880
and you can see they were simply variations on a theme… portrait paintings,
studies of fruit, landscapes paintings…religious art…it is easy to follow
this type of paintings… and in beginning in 1870’s, 1880’s, we see a change
in paintings…they were reacting to the changes in society… the change in
the Zeitgeist of the age…we can see that these types of painting were
still classical but with changes… and we can follow these changes until
we reach the next generation of painters, the Fauvism, and then into
Picasso and Cubist paintings…and then painting itself split into factions or
schools, abstract art, Bauhaus, orphism, surrealism, and so on…

this diverse, new way of painting is a response to the change brought about
by the Industrial revolution and the political revolutions of the 20th century,
the Russian revolution for example, along with the scientific revolution brought
about by the new scientific ideas of Einstein and Freud…

we can even consider the 20th century, the age of Einstein/Freud… we cannot
even understand the 20th century without some understanding of Einstein/Freud…

but a deeper look at Einstein as oppose to Freud, shows us that Einstein was
about the hard sciences, math, physics, astronomy… whereas Freud was
about the so called “soft” sciences… Freud dealt with the unconscious,
the emotional aspect of human existence… something that has been in
the works since the rise of Romanticism…Freud simply took the existing
ideology of Romanticism and turned it into something scientific…he made
emotions, scientific and something to take seriously…and this, I believe
leads us to the notion I presented earlier, that we are still in the Romantic
age…if one looks at the rise of Nazism, we can see the Romantic age all
over Nazism… the intense rise of emotionalism that is Nazism, the
hatred of Jews, the blaming of the Jews for all the ills of the German State…
that Nazism is, prejudice made political, stands as testament to its
Romantic heritage…an intense emotional response to the times…
read Nazi literature, one can easily see the influence of Romanticism
on it…oh, yes there are vague attempts to be “Scientific” but those
attempts are sham attempts…Nazism was anti-intellectualism, anti-thought,
and anti-science…real science anyway…the strength of Nazism is in its
emotionalism, not in its rationalism…

and I mentioned how Romanticism exists today, look at the modern Republican
party… the exact same strand of anti-intellectualism and anti-thought
and anti-science exists within the GOP today…inside the GOP, emotions
rule the day, not the intellect… note the rise of conspiracy theories within
the conservative movement… conspiracy theories by their very nature
are emotional responses to the world…modern day conservatives
have ruled out the entire enlightenment movement which says,
“Sapere aude” “dare to know”…the modern day conservative is
about the very thing that the enlightenment writers tried to stop,
superstitions, prejudice, bias, bigotry…take these “emotions” away
from the conservative movement and you take away the entire
conservative movement…

so how does any of this lead us to a “Zeitgeist” of our own age…

our very age is an divided, split age… at its heart is a dichotomy
between the scientific advancements of Newton, Einstein,
particle physics and the ensuing technology and the continuation
of the Romantic age in the modern day conservative…

the democrats/liberals are engaged in the “Enlightenment” project
of “Sapere aude” and the GOP/conservatives are engaged in the
Romantic project of making emotions the heart of all human experience
which then allows them to engage with prejudice, bigotry, bias, superstitions…

the ''Zeitgeist" of our age is this battle between the Romantic era and
the Enlightenment era…we are engaged in the battle for the soul
of the world within this engagement/war between Romanticism and the
Enlightenment…thus this explains the very static nature of society/the state/
the culture…because there is no winner in this long running war, we are stuck
in the middle waiting for a winner to emerge in which we can then begin
to work and engage with…

capitalism is an Romantic economic system, whereas communism is
a scientific economic system…

dictatorship/authoritarianism that the right wing/conservative loves so much
is an Romantic system… it holds, without any evidence, that once the
dictator/authoritarian take over, the world will suddenly become a “better”
place…that is Romantic to the core…in fact, I would suggest that
utopia’s are really right wing/conservative belief…kinda like in the way
that Heaven is considered to be an utopia… and partly why I have rejected
communism because of the idea that once the working class takes over
the means of production, we will suddenly have an utopia… not true
and in fact, this step simply leads to the next step, whatever that may be…

there is no final, end game that is true in religion, politics… communism for example,
we tend to think that the final economic system is capitalism, but that is just another
step into the next economic system, whatever that may be…once we understand
that our current existence, our current political, social, economic, cultural systems
are just steps along the way to the next wave of systems, be it social, economic,
cultural, political or even philosophical…

so as the “Zeitgeist” has changed from the beginning of the modern age,
from the french revolution to today, the current zeitgeist will change into
something else…what that will be, I have no idea and most likely will
be dead by that time…

Kropotkin

Hey big man, how you holding up?

K: I am fine…need anything?

Kropotkin