Here is the Introduction from my 2011 book From Plato to Postmodernism: The Story of Western Culture Through Philosophy, Literature and Art. The Introduction is entitled “To the man with a hammer …”
human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but […] life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
Gabriel García Márquez (b1927)
Picture this scene in your head. Try to imagine that it’s really happening to you right now, and see it with your mind’s eye. In a moment I will ask you three questions about it.
You fall ill in an unfamiliar town. You arrive at the doctor’s surgery in the middle of the afternoon. The doctor’s secretary takes your details and asks you to sit down. A whole half an hour later the doctor appears, calls your name, and your consultation begins. After a brief conversation with the doctor, the nurse comes to take a blood sample.
Here are the three questions. As you pictured the scene in your head, (1) What gender was the receptionist? (2) What gender was the doctor? (3) What gender was the nurse? I’m less interested in what your answer is in each case than in the fact that you had to make a choice. You had to picture the receptionist, the doctor and the nurse either as a man or as a woman. Why did you choose one way rather than another? And can you be sure that the reason you think you chose one way is the real reason?
We will all make the choices we do for a whole host of reasons that have a lot to do with our upbringing, our education, our personal experience, the society in which we live and what we think the exercise is all about. We necessarily make assumptions all the time, filling in all sorts of gaps without always realising that is what we are doing. Some of these assumptions are reasoned, some are unthinking. Some are trivial, like looking for the keys first in the place you usually leave them. Some are of great importance, like trusting someone when they say ‘I love you’ or thinking that a job is worth leaving if you find it unfulfilling. These assumptions colour the way we understand everything (including what ‘understanding’ itself means), and every book we read, every painting we look at and every piece of music we listen to will come with its own set of assumptions and understandings.
Philosophy, literature, music and art can be much more deeply understood and much more richly enjoyed by someone who knows a little about the assumptions and ideas that were around when a work was made, just as we can better savour and appreciate a fine wine if we know a little about its provenance. Why does this philosopher think that way? Why does he paint like that? Why is it important that she wrote in that style? Our enjoyment of texts, paintings and philosophical ideas can often be frustrated because we are unaware of the big picture of Western cultural history within which those ideas and texts make perfect and glorious sense, but apart from which they can seem faintly ridiculous. The aim of this book is to provide the reader with just such a big picture, a map of Western culture that will help make sense of individual composers, authors, painters and philosophers. Visitors to Paris who travel up the one hundred and eight storeys to the top viewing gallery of the Eiffel Tower suddenly see the whole city in a different light. Museums, shops, streets and districts they had previously visited only individually can now be appreciated as part of a complex and interconnected whole stretching out as far as the eye can see. It is my hope that this book will provide just that sort of one hundred and eight storey overview, allowing the reader to take in the bird’s eye view of how ideas and movements link together and flow into each other, before descending back to ground level to explore them in more detail with a new enthusiasm and appreciation.
This book is not simply structured as a chronological survey of high points in Western thought, literature, art and music. First of all, it is written in two parts. The first six chapters paint a big picture of Western cultural history from Abraham (end of the third millennium BC) to nineteenth-century Romanticism, and the final three chapters follow three paths through the jungle of the late nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The reason for spending so much time in the last hundred years or so is that it allows space to explore how recent developments in Western culture can be better understood when viewed in the context of the big picture of Western history. Twentieth-century thought and culture, though closest to us, is also the period which often leaves us most confused, and so one of my aims in writing this book is to help readers understand how ‘postmodern’ art and philosophy make sense in terms of the Western story of which they are part.
Sooner or later a book like this will have to nail its colours to the mast on the question of what the ‘West’ is, and now is as good a time as any. By the ‘West’ I mean the geographical and cultural civilisation formed primarily by the two great influences of Greco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian antiquity, wherever that culture finds its changing frontiers (for example, the North American continent becomes part of the West during the seventeenth century). It is not a perfect definition, but there is no perfect definition. To be sure, the roots of Western civilisation can be traced back to long before the ancient Greek city states began to flourish in the eighth century BC. Crop planting and animal husbandry began in the late stone age around 10,000 BC, and any number of ancient civilisations pre-date the Greek city states of around 800 BC. Nevertheless, it is still helpful if not exhaustive to begin an investigation of the West with Greece and Rome, the first great civilisations to emerge in the modern geographic Western world.
If the West is difficult to pinpoint, then it is child’s play compared to attempting a definition of ‘culture’. For Abbott Lawrence Lowell (1856-1943), President of Harvard University from 1909-1933 ‘an attempt to encompass [culture’s] meaning in words is like trying to seize the air in the hand, when one finds it is everywhere except within one’s hand’. From the Latin cultura (cultivation, tillage, care bestowed on plants), ‘culture’ is not simply the opposite of ‘nature’, but it is helpful to understand it as a contrast to nature. Nature is the world around us as it exists without our express intervention. It includes the uncultivated natural world, the sun’s rising and setting, and our own anatomy. Culture, by contrast, is the world around us insofar as it is the product of our express presence or intervention. It includes a ploughed field, architecture, language, the meaning we give to the sun rising, science, technology, art, literature and song. It is important to stress that by this definition both the sciences and the arts are cultural endeavours, seeking to change and appreciate the world around us and producing knowledge and enjoyment.
Having thought a little about the West and about culture, our next question is this: How shall we describe what it is like to be part of a particular culture? Some writers like to use the term ‘worldview’ to capture a person’s culture. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a worldview is ‘a set of fundamental beliefs, values, etc., determining or constituting a comprehensive outlook on the world; a perspective on life’. That is pretty good, but sometimes people use the word more narrowly, focussing predominantly on ideas at the expense of rituals and habits, as if all there is to human life is a set of philosophical ideas. In this book I have found ‘ethos’ and ‘sensibility’ to be more useful terms in capturing what it is like to be part of a particular historical culture. From the Greek ethos (nature, disposition), an ethos is a way of holding oneself in the world, the web of assumptions, behaviours, ideas, aspirations, rituals, thought-forms and ‘characteristic spirit’ (OED) typical of an individual or of an age. It is a difference in ethos that accounts for how an ancient Greek warrior, a medieval peasant and a Romantic poet can all look upon the same grove of trees and see three very different things.
We also need to issue a health warning about historical periods. Dividing history into segments as if it were a string of sausages necessarily flattens out nuances and overlaps. The medieval period did not end the day before the Renaissance started, and people did not wake up in the fourteenth century, draw back the curtains and grumble that it was still fifty years before the Renaissance would finally arrive (unless they happened to be called Petrarch, but more about him later). It is hard to talk meaningfully without using such labels at all, but if they are good servants then they are bad masters, and we should be suspicious of the artificial neatness they can imply.
In this book we will approach the development of Western literature and music through the lens of genre. While a dictionary may tell us that a genre is a category of artistic composition, such a sweetly unassuming definition belies the importance of generic concerns. Genre can be literary (epic, tragedy, detective novel), artistic (landscape, crucifixion painting, installation), or musical (symphony, fugue, minuet), and in each case every genre brings with it a set of expectations that can either be fulfilled or frustrated to varying degrees. It is only in broad terms then, that we can talk of genre as an unproblematic ‘category’. Differences in genre are not simply a question of form, but a question of world. The conventions of a tragedy, for example, reflect a particular ethos and a particular understanding of reality, causing a particular world to unfold with its own values, concerns and limits. If something is said differently, something different is said: just ask the worker who has just been sacked by text message rather than face to face. The relation between a text and a genre is a dialogue, not a dictat, and so it is necessary to have some familiarity with the conventions and expectations of a genre in order to understand how a given work is challenging or affirming them. We shall see that the prevalent genres at any given period reveal a great deal about the values and outlook of the society in which they flourish, and that any period re-writes the rules and re-draws the categories of genre in its own image. Generic expectations act as a counterpoint with which the melody of a work can resonate and contrast. In the chapters that follow, titles of non-English literary texts, artistic works and musical compositions are given in translation, except where the work is referred to in English by its original foreign language title.
In a book of this size, as with travelling to the top of the Eiffel Tower, any gain in the breadth of the view we can take in must inevitably be at the cost of a loss of detail. Every reader of this book will no doubt find themselves throwing their hands up at some or other inexplicable or unpardonable omission. Why is there a great deal more about ancient Greece than ancient Rome, and a great deal more about Christianity than Judaism? Why is there only a word on jazz? Where is the history of colonialism? Can there really be nothing on Islam? How can you not discuss film? What has happened to the women writers? To each reader exasperated at my omissions, I beg pardon and contrive no excuse other than the constraints imposed by a book of this size. My hope is that each reader will move on to fill in more detail on the map of Western culture that this book sketches. Other readers will be able to find exceptions to many of the assertions made in these pages, and may take exception to the threads I follow. Isn’t the history rather Whig? Isn’t the philosophy rather ‘Continental’? Aren’t there exceptions to what you are saying? There are indeed exceptions, and I shall be mentioning some of them as we go along, but there can be no exceptions at all if there is nothing for them to be exceptions to. A view which is all exception and no general rule is partial and tendentious, and it is only with a clear grasp of the generalities that we can begin to make sense of the exceptions as exceptions and the nuances as nuances. All models and approaches are selective and reductive and if we are looking for a perfect generalisation we will not find one. As Norbert Wiener puts it in his Philosophy of Science (1945), ‘The best material model of a cat is another, or preferably the same, cat’.
I would be delighted if this book could sound a note for education, where education is understood as more than training. The tradition of a liberal education (Latin: educare, to rear, closely related to educere, to lead forth) is more than a course of training that prepares the individual with specific skills to be a specific cog in a specific machine. Mortimer Adler puts the case well (and provocatively) in an essay on education in his Syntopicon (1952):
The traditional meaning of the word ‘liberal’ as applied to education entails a distinction between free men and slaves. Slaves, like domesticated animals, are trained to perform special functions. They are not treated as ends, but as means, and so they are not educated for their own good, but the use to which they are put.
There is nothing wrong with training to perform special functions. We need hairdressers, lawyers, plumbers, doctors, bricklayers and even the odd university professor. Such training is good and necessary, but it is emphatically not everything there is to education. We do not learn simply in order to perform a particular function better, to climb the employment ladder higher, or to get a good job. Education literally ‘leads forth’; it sets out without knowing where it is going, questioning its world and itself in the process. Education asks questions to which there are (as yet) no definitive answers, for which there are no cash prises, which don’t immediately help to perform a special function. Education explores what it means to be a human being in ways that will never make you rich, but that lead to deeper and different ways of understanding what it means to be rich or poor. If training instructs us how to hammer a nail more efficiently, education asks what we are hammering for, why we find the finished product beautiful, and what our hammering says about us and our way of life. In other words, education forces us to think about the ‘why’, not simply about the ‘how’. Practically as well as etymologically, a liberal education is a free education. I would be delighted if readers of From Plato to Postmodernism found the book a help to their formal or informal education, and a provocation to think. ‘To a man with a hammer’, said Mark Twain, ‘everything looks like a nail.’ As we survey the cultural history of the West, this book is an invitation to examine our own assumptions, our own ethos, our own hammer.
