Modern Temper Essay
Introduction of the Author
I felt it necessary to provide a brief summary of Joseph Wood Krutch. Krutch was a person who not only lived during a period between the Roaring 20s and the Great Depression but was a suspicious observer. This book, “The Modern Temper,” was described as provocative skepticism and intellectual iconoclasm; it aroused sharp debate when first publicized in 1929; and, it as pertinent today as it was in an earlier period of prosperity and progress. Krutch, who is providing in his own words, a new preface, compares his present convictions with his older ones; some conclusions are mellower, but his perception has proved remarkably astute and prophetic.
According to Joseph Wood Krutch, Renaissance man was not someone to read or research about. He was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he pursued science and was recognized with a B.A. from the regional university (Tennessee University). He was afraid of the emphasis subjected to technology and science since it would impose a threat to our wildlife and wilderness as well. He continued with his education career primarily on humanity at the University of Colombia, where he received both his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees. After completing his studies, he remained in the university and joined other members in the English department before he was appointed as the chair of dramatic literature. This is because he was a known drama critic and an editor as well. He later moved to South Arizona desert after retiring in 1952 due to respiratory infections. In the new environment, he became inspired concerning the beauty of the environment and started writing about conservation and nature.
Krutch’s World View
The world which human knowledge discloses to Krutch is wholly foreign to man’s insistent emotions. “What man knows is everywhere at war with what he wants.” His actions no longer reverberate through an intimately responsive universe, and the sensitive modern is filled with restive vagrancy. Metaphysical certitudes are seen as the premises of an artistic figment. Art, indeed, may yield the contours of a world friendly to its creator, but the materials of living are less tractable. Joseph Wood Krutch, as described by his peers, was a complete intellectual. He was able to observe the horrors, intricacies, and issues for the general public brought on by World War I. World War I was a difficult period for Krutch and his assurance of recognizing the best part of mankind. Krutch was not hobbled in thought from post-war disillusionment. For Krutch, the disheartening problem of the twenties arose when intellectuals put too much faith in science, without realizing the lowly position it held for the arts, and man himself. Don't use plagiarised sources.Get your custom essay just from $11/page
Generally speaking, Krutch used existential philosophy to rationalize an honorable position for the intellectuals whose services were evaluated in the modern world. Krutch’s intellectual reconstruction was a slow and challenging process. In the mid-nineteen thirties, Krutch began a re-evaluation of his earlier pessimism of the nineteen twenties. Still, by the nineteen fifties, he presented his new position on the “Modern Temper” and, thereby, Krutch returned to belief. The “Modern Temper,” published just before the United States plunged into the depression in 1929, showed Krutch’s disillusionment with the country’s intellectual climate. Krutch cautioned that science taught valuable lessons for the modern man because it revealed the world as being a place where the human spirit could not be happy. Krutch often contemplated that if a more primitive race of men, one less devoted to science and learning and, therefore, a race of men which believed in its importance, would be happier in the modern world.
Krutch feared that the communist experiment in Russia was an attempt to create this new race with men who would be more primitive in their wants and beliefs, and thus, more barbaric. Or perhaps, he speculated, the rising conditions of the common man in the United States indicated a coming of the new barbarians. Although, over the remainder of his life, Krutch continually considered the problems of modern barbarianism. In the “Modern Temper,” Krutch examined science’s influence on art, the artist’s notion of romantic love, and the feeling of uncertainty that prevailed in many quarters of American society (2)
In The Modern Temper, Krutch defined the world of illusions to be that of poetry, mythology, and religion. These illusions represented the world as a man would like it to be; scientists showed it as it really was. God, who had been perfectly understandable in poetry and religion because he had human desires and purposes, was reduced to nature in the world of science, and nature’s goal was not understandable in human terms. (3) (8)
An intellectual such as Krutch accepted the validity of science, and more and more, he began to doubt the world of illusions. Yet, only the world of illusions gave man reason to believe that his life had meaning and importance. His life became that of “the humblest insect that crawls from one annihilation to another.” Still, man was the only creature of nature who could question its purpose. But for Krutch, the thought of asking nature such a question made man even more miserable since either he would not be answered or the answer would not be to his liking. (4) (9)
Krutch continued his discussion of theological ideas in secular terms with an examination of the fate of romantic love in the modern world. Up until his generation, Krutch believed that the need for romantic love was an unquestioned and unshaken value. The twentieth-century novelist and scientist, Krutch generalized, had no intention of questioning romantic love or even the need for love. They wanted to assign more freedom to it. When scientists recognized the biological function of love, they soon assigned it only biological values such as the need for the survival of the species through propagation.
According to Krutch, if he did not accept the strictly scientific interpretation of romantic love, the novelist did admit that love had less spiritual value. Consequently, novelists such as Huxley viewed love as only sexual gratification, which could be translated as “simple animal pleasure.” Viewed in that light, love became very accessible and common and, therefore, very trivial. Since scientific rationalism destroyed sexual taboos that were instigated by societal morals and beliefs, love became “less often a sin.” Still, since it had been devalued by scientific probing and easy accessibility, it became also “less often a supreme privilege.” (5) (10)
Believing that civilized man created romantic love since he could not recognize it in the savage world, Krutch admitted that man could give up the notion of love. Yet, since the man had not blessed himself with many values, Krutch insisted that he should not complacently give up any. Nature, which was very rigid in its laws for man, gave Krutch limited choices in the values he created. An important one of those choices, romantic love, was reduced by science to a biological urge. Krutch admitted that man became used to a Godless world, but he doubted that he would want to live in a loveless one as well. A loveless world, he mused, would teach man the true meaning of atheism. (6) (11)
Krutch insisted that in the past, men had lived “in order to love or even in order to eat,” but the world science opened for future generations was a world where men would live “in order either to gestate or to digest.” Krutch doubted whether the intellectual and artist would want to survive in a loveless world, yet they were in an inescapable bind. Modern man, with all the truth and knowledge science bestowed on him, could not retreat to a less complicated era; therefore, he accepted the verdict of science on romantic love. (7) (12)
Alarmed, Krutch related what he feared would happen; a new civilization would arise–one which could salvage love, honor, and duty in its literature. This new civilization would not be the world of the intellectual because “vitality is all on the other side.” The common people comprised the new society. The new civilization’s fascination would not be with art and learning, but with machines. The machines became fascinating, not because they saved labor, but because the civilization’s “heart is there.” (9) (14)
The seventeenth-century scientists assured the people that they served humanity. Ironically, Krutch noted, the twentieth-century scientist was certain that he aided mankind with his profession, but the critic noticed a little uncertainty in the scientific community of his day. Hence, Krutch argued that the popularity of the quantum theory among scientists was their reaction to the very narrow world they created. (10) (19)
Modern science even destroyed past notions formulated and proved by earlier scientists. Even as man learned to live with the laws of Newton’s physics, scientists such as Einstein worked to alter them. In other words, Krutch explained, Newtonian physics taught man that he could know the universe as he knew his own backyard, but modern science taught man that he did not even know his backyard. (11) (20)
With his avowal that science promises two things, an increase in man’s powers and an increase in his happiness or wisdom, it was more likely to keep the former, Krutch, demonstrated his personal disillusionment with the laboratory. The pessimistic conclusions in The Modern Temper showed that he discovered “the trick which has been played upon us,” and accepted the result that there was no place for the intellectual in the natural universe. The intellectual could choose to die as a man, but he would not choose to live like an animal. (12) (21) Thus, the intellectual stepped aside for the new man. Krutch speculated that the new man could be the Russian communist or the common American man. The intellectual community received The Modern Temper with both praise and measured caution. For example, Reinhold Niebuhr, the theologian, lectured that Krutch emphasized the pursuit of knowledge as being an important value. Yet, it was that very knowledge that threw Krutch’s life into disarray. Niebuhr warned that a modern rationalist was too quick to surrender when “a purely analytic approach does not yield the concept of purpose” in the universe. Ironically, he found Krutch to be “irrational so that he may cultivate rationality.” Niebuhr praised him for having the “virtue of realizing what it is that is lost when faith is gone.” (13) (22)
While Lewis Mumford scolded Krutch for wishing “the dilemma upon himself,” others debated parts of the book, although they did not refute the general thesis. (14) (23)
Bertrand Russell recognized Krutch’s anguish to be “the despair which has beset intelligent people in recent years,” but he claimed that it was “a passing malady.” (15) (24)
The popularity of The Modern Temper in intellectual circles gave Krutch an immediate opportunity to expand on his perplexing conjectures. In the Modern Temper, Krutch remains true to his probe of the modern intellectual’s alienation from the natural world. He insisted that the greatest questions facing man were, “how great is the difference between man and nature, and what does this difference mean?” (16) (25)
For his part, Krutch claimed that “a gulf” lay between man and nature. He divided the world into “the world of matter and animal instinct which we call nature” and the “world of human motives and values.” (17) (26)
To be sure, he insisted that virtue existed in the natural world since animals and insects were known to defend their homes and offspring. But the problem was that animals lived on instinct; the man had to make choices. The inherent nature of an animal allowed it to live in harmony with its world, but since man relied on choices, he developed an attribute the animal did not have. A man possessed intelligence, and he, alone, could make value judgments. Man depended emotionally on the values he assigned to love, art, knowledge, duty, honor, and patriotism. (18) (27)
Conclusion
Krutch wrote that an imagination, fruitful and loyal, calling itself a religion, or miscalling itself philosophy, had erected a world, obedient to our deepest yearnings, wherein man was central and a spirit greater than his own infused his actions with an abiding, universal significance. According to Krutch, the intellectual came to rely more on his capabilities since the common man allowed his societal values, which were more animalistic and instinctive, to override his individualism. I believe that Krutch’s intellectualism caused him to search for proof of hierarchy in America, and he placed the common man at the bottom of that hierarchical scheme.
In The Modern Temper, Krutch doubted whether literature could avert the challenges of science. Still, in Experience and Art, he declared that that was precisely what the artist-intellectual must do. Science had not really destroyed the basis of poetry by disavowing magic, religion, or metaphysics. Krutch insisted that literature was inspired by whatever man “is capable of believing.” In other words, although science disrupted the world, literature “rationalizes and gives temporary form” to live. Krutch expected literature “to read some sort of order into the bewildering complexity of phenomena.” According to Krutch, an artist’s imagination could rise above the dictates of science, he could create values, and they were not necessarily dependent on the tenets of science. So, through literature, Krutch began to work himself out of the dilemma he found himself in with the conclusion of The Modern Temper. He reaffirmed man’s creative powers. The intellectual could still live happily in the natural world even though nature opposed him. The powers to create and imagine enabled Krutch to transcend nature’s grasp. According to Krutch, the common man still lived in accord with nature, but the intellectual could guard against any domineering tactics from nature. But even as Krutch discovered and reaffirmed the role of the intellectual, it became endangered, not from without but from within.
In my opinion, Krutch limited the meaning of science to mean the uninvolved examination and perception by researchers of men and nature without considering the effect their discoveries may have on the human soul. According to Krutch, Scientists were not inspired by any imperceptible qualities of man. Krutch speculated that one outcome would be the intellectual people’s acknowledgment of the natural explanation behind affection while as yet attempting to clutch some optimistic and emotional reasons. As Krutch explained, the intellectual would figure out how to acknowledge love as a sightless hunger of an animal, which then associates the link to God.”
However, Krutch perceived that an artist might have issues with any dual intention concerning love. For instance, Aldous Huxley, Krutch believed, searching for love in his books, yet just found silly and candid physiological details.