Downtown New York

Without the Twin Towers, Downtown New York is barely recognizable. Its dumpy oblong skyscrapers could be anywhere – Phoenix, Atlanta, Vancouver, Miami, Seattle, even Bogotá. Along with the Empire State Building, they were the defining insignia, the animistic totem of the tribe of New Yorkers. Now, Downtown could be anywhere, anyone’s.

Which is which?

Which is which? Answers at the bottom of this post.

The city’s identity is saved by the Empire State Building in Midtown, and the monumentally over-sized bridges of the East River. These symbols retain the distinctive arrogance of the new imperialism, as the palaces of London, Paris and Vienna manifest the contempt of the wealthy imperialist for his pillaged colonies.

Architecturally, in New York’s loss, we can see the indispensability of enduring landmark buildings in the definition of location. It is these iconic buildings which should reflect the people for whom they become a landscape, a permanent backdrop, and in reflecting them, also represent them symbolically, become their identity. Egypt and the Pyramids, Paris and La Tour Eiffel and Notre Dame, London has many defining landmarks – Tower Bridge, The Palace of Westminster perhaps above all. Thus architects have a responsibility to those in whose backyards they build – a responsibility of psychological affiliation. They must not construct their own personal visions, but use their vision to sum up the enduring and possibly concealed identity of the citizens and inhabitants of those places. These icons must be built to last, as a civilization’s identity lasts longer than the lifetime of one of its inhabitants. My identity as a Londoner comes in great part from absorbing a sense of myself through my surroundings: the River Thames, St Paul’s Cathedral, the Palace of Westminster, the BT Tower, Canary Wharf, views from Hampstead Heath and Kenwood House, Tower Bridge, the Eye, Westway, St Pancras; equally the future “identity”, inasmuch as such a thing exists, of future Londoners will continue to be fashioned by these same influences.

This necessity, for endurance and quality, must be in the forefront of an architect’s mind: will it last? is it a gift to the future of its setting? will it become part of the identity of its place? can it become its location? The swagger of riches, the two-fingered salute to socialism that the Twin Towers were, could only exist in New York, and so naturally came to be an allegory for the city.

Equally Tower Bridge, the Victorian re-invention of an idealised faux-Gothic memory, could only represent London: the centre of a country, perhaps more than any other, which is both proud of its past and hostage to it.

The Twin Towers were a timely emblem for New York and for New Yorkers. They perfectly pre-empted and went on to represent the phenomenal financial success of the 80s, they were a temple to the values of the modern capitalist paradigm. Like a symbol such as St Peter’s in Rome, they could be seen all over the city – a moral certainty, a harbinger of the new meritocracy, a reflection of what the city stood for, evidence that bigger was better. They were also what New York was to the world – confident, wealthy, brash, fearful, oversized, defiant, exhilarating.

Psychologically, psychoanalytically, Downtown Manhattan was castrated on 11/09. In "The Future Prospects of Psycho-Analytic Therapy" (1910, p144), Freud states that the child is “in fear of the father, in defiance of the father and in disbelief of the father.” This child wants both to ape his father, but also kill or castrate him. The instinctive urges of the child - of an adolescent civilization - attacked from envy what it both hates and yet aspires to be: a strong and self-determining civilization. This “father” (in this case perhaps an uncle – Uncle Sam) is powerful and vengeful, it can both bestow and withhold, save and destroy, punish and reward. Since 2001, America has reinforced the relationship of an inconsistent father alternately criticising and spoiling an angry juvenile son. Through retributions, wars, invasions and threats it punishes; simultaneously it rewards: cajoling, sweetening, rebuilding and making promises, expecting to raise the rest of the world in its own dysfunctional image, like a parent filling its child with all the faults it had.

Photos are, from top: Seattle, Miami, New York, Vancouver, Bogotá, Atlanta

Hair: Strength/Power

So we’ve seen the extent to which the loss or covering over of hair creates different kinds of shocks, punishments and taboos. Naturally the converse is also true: the ownership of great hair is a living allegory for the ownership of great power.

At the risk of seeming obsessed, lets stay with the iconography of the headscarf. We talked above about the taboo of concealing and revealing hair, and how this taboo is born from a strong desire for the thing which is concealed. So a headscarf, by definition, covers something exciting and desirable – this is in fact its stated purpose. I have written elsewhere about Foucault’s essay “We, Other Victorians”, in which he extends Freud in Totem and Taboo to question the motivation of creating such an obvious discourse (a pointer) to something we are pretending to hide. People conceal sexy things: breasts, ankles, and also long, dark, middle-Eastern locks, because they are so attractive they threaten to unshackle our inhibitions and cause civic unrest. For the security of our own society we cover up these sexual icons: they are withheld and rationed. Yet in covering them up we underline their powerful sexuality by emphasising them through the very fact of their proscription. We treat them as special hidden secrets, in a perverted attempt to rob them of their special sexual force. Furthermore, we explicitly grant the tabooed object the characteristic of being a locus of sexual attraction. In reality, the sexual attraction of a person is to be found in them as a whole; but by isolating and censoring one element – their breasts, or their hair – we are annexing that overall power into one place, which is then prohibited and tabooed. All physical censorship is synecdoche, in which the tabooed body-part stands for the sexuality of the whole person.

So the link to power? Well, having focused sexual power in one place, for example, in a Muslim woman’s hair, who then holds the key to all this power? Who can withhold or grant access to this illicit store of sexual energy? It is the woman herself who wears the headscarf. So in being the keeper of this strong desire, those women who wear headscarves hold under wraps a great deal of sexual power: the suggestive sexual power of the unseen, the withheld, the imagined, the unobtainable. In revealing her hair, that woman unleashes a sexual potency so strong it had needed to be contained. This fact is also seen through its converse: it is well known that wearing revealing clothes often has the opposite effect to the one intended: revealing too much is less sexy than leaving something to the imagination. Hence the tease is sexier than the strip. Anyone who has been given the privilege of seeing the hair of a woman who normally always wears a headscarf will have experienced first-hand the extraordinary power held by the unveiling of acres of wavy, shiny, black hair. In most respects these Islamic woman are by Western standards oppressed, or even brainwashed, but in this limited but important context they hold all the cards. Their enforced modesty (not just in hair, but in manners, abstention, shyness and so on) gives them a great power: the power to withhold and release sexual potential at will.

Moving on to more conventional and well-proven relationships between power and hair, one can look at innumerable mythical stories: Samson, whose trim by Delilah betrayed him and stripped him of his power;

Peter Paul Rubens - Samson and Delilah, National Gallery, London

Medusa, favourite of psychoanalysts, whose ophidian locks themselves turn people to stone;

Caravaggio - Medusa, Ufizzi, Florence

Nisos, protected by a magic lock of purple hair; Pterelaos, whose immortality, dependent on a gift of hair from Poseidon, is reminiscent of the cult of the reliquary (discussed in the next post, on hair, magic and superstition); and Apollo (also called chrysokomon – meaning with golden hair):

God of the golden bow,
     And of the golden lyre,
And of the golden hair,
     And of the golden fire,

Keats, Hymn to Apollo, 1815

Naming just a few is sufficient to see that ancient man saw in hair the same iconography as it has today.

In our own more recent and extant culture, a slightly comic example of this relationship is the visual link from big power to big wigs: literally, the Restoration wig, which persist today in the court-room.

The more powerful and senior you are, the bigger your wig, culminating in the huge wigs of high-court judges. In a 1992 consultation it was decided to retain the wig, as “it imbues in laypersons a sense of the solemnity and dignity of the law.” Big, fake hair then is the necessary bastion of authority, a placeholder of dignity, in the British legal system.

Politically, Berlusconi and his hair transplant may look like a typically buffoonish act,

but anyone who has been in ex-Soviet or east European nations during election-time cannot help but be in awe of the sheer hirsuteness of the candidates, their great Nietzschean moustaches signs of wisdom and reliability.

It may be very true that Berlusconi would not have been repeatedly re-elected had he allowed himself to go bald. If so, this could be seen as an embarrassing example of Italian voter ignorance, but also a soaring affirmation of the continuing power of big hair.

In psychoanalytic terms, men compete, in all walks of life, at all times, over the size of their phalluses. Men show off their phalluses in many ways, and many show it off on their heads too. It is both amusing and hard to avoid this equivalence when we look at people like Berlusconi, Peter Stringfellow, Fabio. Hair is a symbol of virility, sexual potency, youth. Their hair is a shiny, well-groomed and shoulder-length phallus.

Stringfellow: well-groomed, shoulder-length phallus

There is also a peculiar inverse of this: the skinhead, who seems to be boasting of his strength, in spite of having shorn himself. The skinhead is so strong in himself that he can rebel against the supremacy of the power of hair, drawing instead from his raw physicality. He shows his power by transcending the location of power in the hair. He, qua his body, is stronger than his hair. Perhaps we can say he has shaved off the phallus which hair represents, revealing that the phallus is his head itself.

In a very literal sense, knowledge is power, and notoriously to the criminal classes, all you need to know about someone can be found in a single strand of hair. While our complete DNA is to be found in almost every human cell, practically and forensically speaking, it is a person’s hair which most often is used to fix his identity. We could say that while our superficial fingerprints are on out fingertips, our real genetic fingerprint is most commonly accessed through our hair.

Tresses and Taboos 1: Femininity/Sexuality

A few years ago the French government, to keep true to their admirable secularity, banned “ostensible” religious dress in schools, effecting above all the headscarf. Sarkozy recently said that burqas (full body coverings) were “not welcome” in France, depriving women of an identity. The mood of the nation, as measured by my own anecdotal evidence and limited knowledge of the intellectual debate, is that headscarves are un-French, un-developed, un-Western. In hair, in women’s hair, femininity is located, say many French women and some French intellectuals. So to cover her hair is for a woman to negate her femininity. In denying her identity, her identity as an elegant Gaul, in some sense she is challenging the national gender stereotype and so threatening the alleged homogeneity of French women and the first woman, Liberté herself. The concealment of hair is implicitly compared to treason. To cover the hair in France is as taboo as to uncover the hair is in Islam.

Hair is a taboo because like all things that are taboo, it is desirable. The existence of a taboo is only required when there exists a desire that needs to be suppressed. Freud wrote on this topic with unapproachable insight in the essay Totem and Taboo, to which I direct the reader rather than attempt to paraphrase.

Hair is a locus of sexuality, which like all taboos is both sacred and forbidden. It is the taboo of women’s hair in Islamic society which reveals hair’s sexual potency. One doesn’t need to read Freud (so integrated into our worldview are his discoveries) to recognise that modesty must be enforced, in many cultures through hair-concealment, to ward off sexual desires, promiscuity, and the threat to family and the social status quo. While in Islamic countries hair, as the locus of sexual potency, is concealed to subjugate promiscuity, in France a different quality is located in the hair, and its concealment enacts a different taboo – the taboo of unfemininity.

The desire suppressed by one taboo in one culture may not be the same desire the same taboo suppresses in another culture. The two desires being tabooed by covering the hair: that of sexual promiscuity in Islam, and the need for femininity in France, show that the femininity of French women is then placed, through this taboo, alongside sexual promiscuity, as both must be located in the same place. This result would not have pleased the generations of feminists who fought to unshackle the second sex, and is perhaps a sign which reveals the continued chauvinism of the French intellectual aristocracy.

Now we come full circle. Sexuality and/or femininity are being ‘protected’ by making the wearing of a headscarf into an anti-French taboo. A taboo exists because what it taboos is in fact deeply desired – if it wasn’t desired, a taboo would not be required. So the taboo of hair coverage in France reveals a desire to have femininity denied. Does this desire just come from the oppressive husbands of Muslim women, or from the barbaric Koran? No, it comes from the top, from Liberté herself. Why? Precisely because this femininity has been aligned with sexual promiscuity. And what is “femininity” if it is not a convenient label for men’s desires: the sexuality with which men burden women. Finally Liberté wants, deep down, to burn her bra, to neglect her hair, as she once did, to break the tradition of female objectification, to unclasp the link from hair to sex, and in so doing crack open the synecdoche of hair as a physical locus of the notions of femininity.

And it is her terrified husbands and fathers - Sarkozy, the left bank intellectuals, the Law – looking on aghast, who are tabooing this break up, who are ostracising those who coincidentally manifest their fears. The Islamic woman does not aspire to emasculate La France, but she represents this potential defrocking. And why the Muslims? No-one seems to bother the tonsured Orthodox Jewish women, Buddhists, Krishnas, and the various other religious sects who shave their heads, qua being un-feminine, being un-French. Man fires taboos from the watchtowers at those who seek to escape the enforced prison of the manufactured woman, the manufactured France, and leave behind her “femininity”: sexuality, vanity, and judgementalism.

Decoding "Should": Self Denial and the False Subject

“Should” is just a word. Words do not hold meaning, but are signifiers, signposts that point to things we want to express. Our use of words is so familiar and expert that we can bury, in words, deeper intentions that we may not even be aware of. The word “should” is not just a signifier for obligation, it is a tool of self-denial, a harbinger of inevitable anxiety and failure.

There are several different ways we use “should”. We say: “I should give to charity”, “I shouldn’t spit on other people”, and “I have everything I want, I should be happier." These examples seem to vary in the origin of the obligation they demand – the first two external, the third internal. Actually they all involve a pressure whose source is external, but which is imposed on the self from the inside.

As an external pressure, “should” is like a straightjacket, a tool of self-denial. “I should be…” always implies “I should be how I am not.” As a reducer of self, it is one of the most damaging words in the our language.

But who is the real subject of this sentence? Who is this “I”? A Freudian might align this "I" with the Over-I (normally translated as the super-ego): the critical parent, the social norm. Lacan would elegantly sidestep the locus, asking instead, “For whom are you identifying with someone you are not?”

The “I” in “I should”, is not located in the self. “Should” is such a dangerous word because it stealthily imports a subject which is not really the agent. The agent, the I (Freud's super-ego) is not the self but the other. The “I” in “I should” is not really the self, not really “I”, but a projection of the other onto the self, by the self. Hence when you use the words “I should...”, you are substituting the other as the agent of your own life. Put another way, you are relinquishing living how you want, to live how someone else wants. Hence “I should be different to how I am” is self-denial. You might as well say “someone else is who I am”. Here self is handed over to the other to be justified externally. It is a clandestine transfer of power and a denial of self-worth.

Each time you think “I should be…”, you are importing a value which you do not naturally have. If you had it naturally, accessible to yourself without any external static, you would just say “I am” or “I must” or “I want.” In importing this value unnaturally, you show that you have not yet identified oneness-with-self. Instead, choices are coming for without: you are attempting to live someone else’s life. He who lives outside himself will always have some latent and uncomfortable sense of self-betrayal, at least a low-level anxiety, an existential guilt in which he can recognise that he denies himself but cannot locate this denial.

These imported values, this should-content, is set in another person’s, or society’s, register. If you aspire, unconsciously or consciously, to fulfil these values, these expectations, you will inevitably fail. This failure will not necessarily be caused by a lack of competence, but through category error. The should-content are expectations sourced from another set of experiences, another set of desires and forged by a potentially alternative value system. One’s own life cannot resonate meaningfully with this instrument. Anxiety comes from trying to locate the subsequent failure in the self, when in fact there is no failure at all. There is only self-denial, located in “should”.

Equally the voice of the critical person: “You should be different.” While this seems to be taking power from the other, it is a merely a projection in which the critical person is saying “I do not believe that worth can be located in the self. You should be different because I should be different.” Thus all criticisms of others are self-criticisms. As should-content is exported, it is reciprocally imported. It is well known that people who are critical of others are crushingly critical of themselves.

In most areas of daily life, people within the same civilisation share conversant values, so following your own values mostly corresponds with following society’s or parents’ value systems. Hence thinking “I shouldn’t spit on other people” normally doesn’t involve low-lying existential guilt and anxiety. Perhaps we use Kant’s Categorical Imperative, or some other a priori value mode to create values from within. It's not really important: trying to unearth a priority has always been the category error of philosophy – where things come from is not as important as that they come from somewhere: not all truths need justification, and a priority does not reveal itself to us when questioned.

For whatever reason then, most people within a given society share values, and hence are able to exist with seemingly external should-contents, like "I shouldn't kill my neighbour", without a sense of self-betrayal. These in fact, for whatever conditioned or a priori reason, come from within, not without. Most things are bad because we sense so from within, not because society imposes badness on them. In the cases where values are imposed from without, perhaps something like 'weight-loss is always desirable', we collectively know it to be wrong, do it anyway, and accordingly suffer under an element of collective anxiety.

Naturally, even within society, individuals' values are not completely homogeneous. There are many value-divergences between individuals within the same society, whether they're "I should watch less TV" or "I must pray five times a day". We tend to come up against these dilemmas at life-crossroads or crises. When given a new option we wonder "what should I really be doing with my life." Using “should” is a way to deny individual choice at a time it is needed most. Instead of asking ourselves “what should I do?”, our real inner voice is trying to ask “what do I really want?” If we relocate our solution back into the society’s murky fog of contradictory values, we beckon on an ongoing sense of failure.

Rilke, in Letters to a Young Poet, implies this with respect to writing. His querent searches outside himself for justification. He asks for Rilke’s opinions on his work, perhaps he has asked Rilke explicitly “Should I write?” Rilke responds:

You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you - no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself… Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple "I must," then build your life in accordance with this necessity.

Instead of searching for an “I should”, Rilke counsels to simply know the “I must”. Act only from within, and disregard that which comes from without - in the case of the young poet, to be above reviews and praise. "Should" reveals that something is not coming wholly from within, or at least is not acknowledged as such. This is the content we do not need, and whose presence burdens our honesty and our self-worth.

If you are not sure about the truth or the meaning of what I have written here, test it and let me know. Try avoiding saying “I should…” and see how it feels. You may find it instructive, highlighting how much we all, without realising, locate our values outside of ourselves. It may also be liberating, giving you a new strength to take back those values and reclaim and rename your desires. Overall, it may allow you to read between the lines of what you really want.

Instead of “I should…” try saying for example:
“I want…”
“I will…”
“I’d feel better doing…”
“I might…”
or as Rilke suggests, “I must.”

Equally, instead of “you should…”, trying saying for example:
“you could…”
“do you want…?”
“some people think that…”
"most people..."
“it’s kinder to…”

I crushed my spirit over the last year, spending a long time feeling a failure for not enjoying a life I felt I was living in the shoes of someone who had themselves loved it (as I was led to believe). The possibility that this divergence of experience of the same place was in fact just a reasonable divergence of values, was hidden by my over-reliance on “should”: I said out loud "I should enjoy this because someone else did, someone else would be". I now see the self-contempt this sentence conceals, as I was telling myself internally: "I hate being me because I am not someone else", and "It's my fault that I am like me, and not like another". I was denying my self and losing contact with my core values, or even blaming these core values for my state. Instead of loving and following my values, they became an albatross around my neck. Now I realise - if you are not holding all the cards, you're in the wrong game.

Evolving out of “should” is one step towards not repeating self-denial, and for rebuilding an authentic “I”. Finding the “I must” amongst all the “I should”s helps construct authenticity and allows self-worth to grow.

The Phallus and the Womb

Men create not because of the presence of the phallus,
but from the absence of the womb.

The human phenomenon that psychologists seek to explain is something like: Why do we behave how we behave? Why, for us alone, does doing seem to be so much more important than being? Why do we create, why do we strive, why do we compete, why do we destroy? What’s really going on?

Freudian psychoanalysis has a clear reason. The root is the phallus.

From birth the phallus, or lack of phallus, obsesses and possesses us. If we have one we are frightened we will be, first literally, and later metaphorically, castrated. If we don’t have one, we are covetous of the father’s phallus, and later give birth in order to produce a male heir and therefore possess this phallus. So powerful is the phallus, that women want to reproduce in order to get their hands on one.

In adulthood, this phallus continues to grip us (rather than the other way round) with its subversive demands. It pervades our desires and our actions. So suffuse is its power, according to psychoanalysts, that in an effort to maintain this Theory of Everything, they may tie themselves up in strange concepts and images like: “the woman has taken the phallus”, and “if you speak you may be castrated”. Most clients find such interpretations at best reductive, undermining the complexity of their experiences; and this jargon, these ex cathedra explanations, patronising. At worst it is incomprehensible or offensive. Some clients may find these interpretations powerful perhaps more from the graphic imagery than from any deep instinctive resonance with personal experience.

But if there is some element of physical sublimation, perhaps it is not the phallus, but the womb, wherein our fear is born.

A fact is that women give birth, men cannot. A woman (although not all choose to), can know that they have a purpose utterly fundamental for everything to exist. Reproduction is the definition of life, and women manifest it. Men can never experience the miracle of childbirth. It is this colossal inadequacy which triggers all the activity of men.

Why does culture exist, why do we create art: why was most of it done by men? Because men don’t give birth.
Why do we seek answers, why do we hunger for scientific progress: why are most scientists men? Because men don’t give birth.
Why do we cluster together into social groups, compete, build, organize, create laws, and rule: why are most rulers, philosophers and architects men? Because men don’t give birth.

Our fear is not of losing the phallus, it is an existential fear of death without reproduction (more on the existential connection to the womb forthcoming). This fear is not exclusively male, but it is men whose proximity to reproduction is not quite tangible. Having sex is not solely reproductive, and men are conditioned to want it without twinkles in their eyes. Pregnancy and birth are not normally present concerns to men. The whole process of insemination and childbirth is kept, as it were, at arm’s length from men. Women on the other hand are reminded monthly of their ability to conceive and of their virility.

So the fear of being sexually or phallically inadequate is in fact an existential fear about death and meaninglessness. Hence “castration anxiety” is in fact “sterility anxiety”. “Phallic competition” is in fact “reproductive competition”. Half the race feel disconnected from the reproductive purpose of life. They know this, and they know they will die. This is why being is not enough, and they revert to doing.

Instead of children, men give birth to the things they create. It is in this that they must prove themselves. They seek to suppress their anxiety of not having a womb by reproducing endlessly in the material world. Men cannot rely on any inherent tangible meaning, qua men. They have no qualities. So every activity becomes a need to prove one's worth. Life is a debt. Women can pay it off by giving birth. Men must pay it off by earning their value, proving their worth. This is the competition between men. It’s not the size of the phallus, it’s the size of the offspring.

To extend Freudian concepts, girls do not want to sleep with their fathers because they covet his phallus, but because they can reproduce with him. They are themselves evidence for his reproductive powers. Girls compete with their mothers not for the father’s phallus, but for his sperm. Boys do not want to sleep with their mothers and kill their fathers because of phallic envy, but because this would be the fastest and most obvious way to reproduce. “She had a baby for him (I am it), and now I overcome him and she will have a baby for me.” The notion of competitive dad is not about the fear of the son castrating the father, but that the son is virile and the father sterile.

How did Freud miss this incredibly obvious fact that women alone give birth, and attribute as the crux of his theory to the phallus and not the womb? Perhaps mostly we can attribute this massive oversight to his culture. All around him (and us) stand the works of men, the characteristics of men, great competing creations, artificial phalluses. Women were so rarely thought of that perhaps he simply overlooked them. So complete is man’s sublimation of his reproductive inadequacies that his creations and powers at the time of Freud (and all before him), had undermined the importance of women until they had no powers and little influence. As he looked about him, Freud saw the fruits of his gender’s loins. He saw sex manifesting as art and creation, death manifesting as destruction, and he saw it all happening at the hands of man. Of course therefore, it would be to a male characteristic that he would attribute all this. Men create, so it must be in man the cause of the creation. But it is not. Women, not men, hold in them the manifestation of the will to life.

Men create not because of the presence of the phallus, but from the absence of the womb.

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.