A post-Freudian overview of culture, from the Renaissance to the 20th Century

Artistically the Renaissance was the rediscovery of a classical ideal: the reintroduction of beauty, through art and form, as an end in itself. The modern world developed in homage to the ancient world, exhuming a new spiritual depth, a new humanism. This development of the individual, a global coming-of-age, and its ensuing expansion of refinement and sophistication, cannot be said to have widely occurred before the 14th century. Philosophically, the Renaissance is driven by a new translation of a complete set of the works of Plato, by Ficino in Florence in the middle of the 15th century. Until then, throughout the Christian Dark Ages, Aristotle had taken up practically the entire horizon of Western philosophy (then really theology). With the dissemination of Plato, the scholasticism of Aristotle was supplemented by the pantheism and spirituality of Plato. This appealed to the renaissance Italians as they sought to rediscover pagan Roman and Classical ideals, which in turn would ignite the development of the Uomo Universale and the new individuality. Such was Plato’s resurgent influence that already by 1511 Raphael considered him to be Aristotle’s equal and his counterpoise, painting the two of them as the twin axes of Western thought in The School of Athens. A few rooms away, Michaelangelo’s re-imagining of a much wider developmental theme is being born on the ceiling of the Sistene Chapel.

The School of Athens by Raphael, in the Vatican. In the centre Aristotle, in blue, gestures in benediction to the ground. On his right Plato points towards the heavens. Raphael is symbolically contrasting their respective subjects of inquiry.

After this new dawn of subjectivity came the need to quantify what had been uncovered. Once self-consciousness had developed around the sophistication of individuality, it needed to be understood. This is the rebirth of the objective. The Enlightenment was the rigourisation of this process: the development of the possibility of objectivity. Descartes is the philosophical justification, the theoretical underpinning of this process. Descartes finds the creative humanistic impulses of the Renaissance (and the Classical world) insufficient foundations for the truth he sought, and in The Meditations of 1641 locates these truths in a new space: the thinking mind. Here begins the disconnection of humanity from its shadow self, which had driven our culture, in the Greek tragedies, Shakespeare and the Renaissance artists. This disconnection still shackles us today. Not until Sartre is it realised that the terminal error in “I think therefore I am”, is that his “I” is just only the thinking “I”: the “I” who thinks is not the same as the “I” who is.

The Enlightenment, starting with the ruthless Cartesian pursuit of first principles harking back to Socrates, reached adulthood with the applied logic of the Empiricists. This pursuit of knowledge and its appropriation by an educated elite saw its physical manifestation in the founding of the academies of London and Paris. This was in turn challenged by the social and cultural inversions undertaken during the French Revolution. From the late 18th century a new tendency grows away from objectivity, back to the human, towards the irrational and the subjective. This movement is called Romanticism. Between the French Revolution in 1789 and the ascension of Queen Victoria in 1839, Europe sees the centre of gravity of genius shift from political philosophers and rationalists of the Enlightenment like Samuel Johnson, Gotthold Lessing, Hume, Smith, Hobbes, Locke, Franklin and Jefferson, to a new kind of revolutionary humanist. Socially, this period saw the Great Reform Bill, the Utopian vision of Fourier and the life of Mary Wollstonecraft. Kant, and later Hegel and Schopenhauer, give birth to Idealism, introducing the transcendental in addition to the phenomenal, and placing contradiction, not rationality, at the heart of philosophy. Now the Artist was rebel, pioneer and psychologist - Goethe, Beethoven, the Brontës, Blake, Turner and Byron. These Romantics sought to blast through the empiricist petrification of truth into mere knowledge, and to instead reclaim the Classical and Renaissance ideal that instead:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn, 1819

As the wheel turns these ideals too get overtaken. The zeitgeist shifts back, thanks in the main to the Victorians, to a new industrialisation, Empire, construction and vigour. In 1839 the invention of the Daguerreotype spells the elimination of artistic realism. Mass production crushes the relationship of the consumer to the artisan, isolating both. The age of steel was emerging from the age of stone.

In wide perspective, we have two repeating poles: the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the materialism of the Industrial Revolution, and the humanism of the Renaissance and the irrationality of Romanticism. Finally, at the start of the Twentieth century, Freud is able to reveal these poles as the flints whose sparks charge the dynamo of the human experience. By internalising the irrational, psychoanalytic theory makes sense of these opposites. The irrational (or individual) and the rational (or social) are different evidence of the same phenomenon. They are translations. The move from Renaissance to Enlightenment to Romanticism to Industrialisation can be internalised: the human contains within him the irrational, which, in order to become rational, projects onto the material. These internal states occur historically only in virtue of being projected from Self onto Other. It is towards the reunification of this dichotomy of the human self: from mutually exclusive states occurring consequently to complementary states occurring simultaneously, that we now evolve.

The 'Uomo Universale' and the Zen Master: Therapeutic reflections

On the one hand the Zen master: he wants for nothing, wills nothing and takes nothing. He is actionless, has made no-thing into the only thing he needs, and is always content. For him each moment is the best moment: in one arresting parable, a strawberry is equally delicious eaten in a palace or eaten while plunging to his doom. On the other hand the Renaissance man says yes to life, his aspirations and determination know no bounds. He is all-sided, entering with intensity and action all life around him, sensitive, dignified, a lover of beauty and a pursuer of the perfect. Such is his aim to fulfil himself and engage with life that he truly believes that man can do all things if they will.

Where can these two poles interact? Both love the world. The Zen master loves what is: without judgement, his love comes through acknowledgement, of the immeasurable depth, space and energy which courses through him irrespective of life situations. The Renaissance man loves what the world represents: possibility, breadth and expansion. He is an eternal optimist, judging each thing, absorbing what is good and seeking to alter what is not. Both act from within, driven internally by an unending thread of certainty. One is water, who contours to what is presented to him, shapeless and yet indestructible. From his core emanates acceptance. The other is a forge, who takes what exists and manipulates it until it fulfils his definition of beauty. He is driven by integrity and self-belief.

Which are you? To whom should you aspire? Perhaps it is a question of ability. One could say that there are two types of people. Those who can achieve all they desire should not compromise in the unwavering pursuit of fulfilling their will. Conversely those whose vision is not matched by their determination or by ability or life situation, whose will is destined to be unfulfilled, should adopt a position of zen-like resignation. The latter must be merely happy with what is, the former can aspire to what could be.

This is the dangerous old analogue mistake of dividing the world into doers and not doers, affirmative and negative, on and off. Really these two poles should be seen as simultaneous, as by-products of a different and universal condition: the obligation to act from within; to have both self-belief and acceptance; the integrity to act and the integrity to yield. If the Renaissance man is active and strong but lives in a perpetual state of becoming instead of being, so that fulfilment is always one more achievement away, he will never live well. He however who can do out of love, but also love that which is not done, is always in communion with all that life is.

We may think of each person as being like a spinning wheel in motion. We have an external part, a rim, an outer level which is always in contact with the ground, the face which engages physically with the world. This moving part could be a wheel of fortune over which we have no control, or it could be our actions, our will manifested as movement. But we also have a hub, an internal fixed point. While moving physically through space inside the wheel, itself it stays motionless while all around it whirrs. This point does not move but allows movement, it is the fundamental into which everything is anchored, it is the stillness within. The Zen master lives having seen only the stillness of the static core and aspiring to that state; the Renaissance man sees just that the wheel goes round and aspires to become the dynamic edge.

We are profoundly each of us both an internal peace and an external restlessness, a static core and a dynamic face. Ultimately we must aspire towards both states, to have an outer purpose which orbits around a nucleus of integrity. But the hub, the crux, must be prior: there cannot be good external movement without internal stillness, as a wheel’s rotation will not be true around an insecure hub.