How Shall We Then Live, Lesson 8, “The Age of Fragmentation”

Impressionism and the Fragmentation of Reality

Pissarro, Sisley, and Degas were following nature, as it was then called, in their painting. They were Impressionists. They painted only what their eyes brought them. But was the reality behind the light waves reaching their eyes?

After 1885, Monet carried this to its conclusion, and reality tended to become a dream. With Impressionism, the door was open for art to become the vehicle for modern thought. As reality became a dream, Impressionism began to fall apart.

These men, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat, all great post-Impressionists, felt the problem, felt the loss of meaning. They set out to solve the problem, to find the way back to the reality, to the absolute, behind the individual thing, behind the particulars.

Ultimately, they failed. I am not saying that these painters were always consciously painting their philosophy of life, but rather that in their work as a whole, their worldview was often reflected. Cezanne reduced nature to what he considered its basic geometric forms.

In this, he was searching for a universal which would tie all kinds of individual things in nature together. But this gave a broken, fragmented appearance to his pictures. In his bathers, there is much freshness, much vitality, an absolute wonder in the balance of the picture as a whole.

But he portrayed not only nature, but man himself in fragmented form. I want to stress that I am not minimizing these men as men. To read Van Gogh's letters is to weep for the pain of this sensitive man.

Nor do I minimize their talent as painters. Their work often has great beauty indeed. But their art did become the vehicle of modern man's view of fractured truth in life. As philosophy had moved from unity to fragmentation, so did painting.

Modern Art, Chance, and the Loss of Unity

In 1912, Kandinsky wrote an article saying that insofar as the old harmony, that is a unity of knowledge, have been lost, that only two possibilities remained, extreme abstraction or extreme naturalism.

Both, he said, were equal. With his painting, modern art was born. Picasso painted it in 1907 and called it Les Demoiselles d 'Avignon. It unites Cezanne's fragmentation with Gauguin's concept of the noble savage using the form of the African mask, which was popular with the Parisian art circle of that time.

In great art, technique is united with worldview. And the technique of fragmentation fits well with the worldview of modern man. A view of a fragmented world and fragmented man and a complete break with the art of the Renaissance, which was founded on man's humanist hopes.

Here, man is made to be less than man. Humanity is lost. Speaking of a part of Picasso's private collection of his own works, David Douglas Duncan says, of course, not one of these pictures was actually a portrait, but his prophecy of a ruined world.

But Picasso himself could not live with this loss of the human. When he was in love with Olga and later Jacqueline, he did not consistently paint them in a fragmented way. At crucial points of their relationship, he painted them as they really were, with all his genius, with all their humanity.

When he was painting his own young children, he did not use fragmented techniques and presentation. I want you to understand that I am not saying that gentleness and humanness are never present in modern art.

But as the techniques of modern art advanced, humanity was increasingly fragmented. The opposite of fragmentation would be unity. And the old philosophic thinkers thought they could bring forth this unity from a humanist base.

And then they gave this up. And the modern thinking has accepted fragmentation as a defeat, really. A defeat that human mentality beginning from itself can bring forth a unity of thought and of life. Now, by unity, what we mean is that which would include.

All thought and all of life.

And it can be achieved if indeed God has spoken and has not been silent. And in giving is the facts that man couldn't find for himself. There is a unity inside of which all that marvelous diversity which then man can study has a unified place, whether it's in knowledge or in values and in life.

Dadaism, Absurdity, and the Rejection of Chance

It was Dadaism which carried the concept of everything being a matter of chance to its logical conclusion of the ultimate absurdity of everything, including humanity. This is Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase.

Duchamp perhaps understood most clearly and consciously the absurdity of all things, including man, on the basis of modern man's worldview. Here he carried fragmentation further. The human being disappeared completely.

He realized that this absurdity of all things included the absurdity of art itself. This is one of his ready-mades. He took any object near at hand and simply signed it. The philosophers from Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Kierkegaard onward had given up a hope of a unity of life and of knowledge and had come to a fragmented concept of reality.

Then the painters painted that way. However, the artists, being sensitive men, came more quickly to the understanding of what the end of this view would be. And that is that all things are absurd. The American Jackson Pollock is perhaps the clearest example of deliberately painting in a way that says all is chance.

This is how Pollock went about creating some of his art. Thus, his paintings were a product of chance. But wait, is there not order in these lines of paint? Yes, because you see, it is not really chance that shaped his canvases.

The universe is not a random universe.

It has order.

The movement of this swinging can of paint follows the order of the universe itself. The universe is not what these painters said it is. It was a bankrupt humanistic philosophy which first taught that reason leads to pessimism and that optimism is only to be found in the area of non-reason.

Modern Music from Beethoven to Cage

This basic idea filtered down to art and then to classical music and later to popular music. It started with Beethoven's Las Quartets. You could not call these modern, but there was a shift from the previous music.

In France, Claude Debussy opened the door for modern music. Many of us have a profound admiration for his music and enjoy it very much indeed. But Debussy did open the door not to non-resolution as the German composers did, but to fragmentation, a fragmentation parallel to the fragmentation in painting, a fragmentation which was a great influence.

On almost all of the world's music.

Almost all the following composers of classical music, as well as the later forms of jazz and rock. In Germany, after Beethoven's quartets, came Wagner and Mahler, then Schoenberg with his 12-tone Rho.

Here's perpetual variation, but never resolution. This is Karl Heinz Stockhausen. You're listening to the published score of electronic music. Concern with the element of chance was part of Stockhausen's work.

This ties him in with John Cage. Cage believed the universe is a universe of chance. To express this, he produced music by chance. Cage's music turned out to be sheer noise. Significantly, he entitled this composition Music for Marcel Duchamp.

John Cage was another one who could not live with this concept of a chance universe because it does not fit the universe which exists. Cage was an expert in the knowledge of mushrooms.

He himself said,.

I became aware that if I approached mushrooms in the spirit of my chance operation, I would die shortly. His theory of the universe did not fit the universe that exists. Why is the airplane carefully formed and orderly and what Cage produced is utter noise?

Because the airplane must fly in the universe that exists and there are orderly flow lines in the universe that exists. The universe is not what Pollock in his paintings and Cage in his music said it was.

And because Cage's music does not fit what man is either, it had to become increasingly spectacular to keep us interested. What a contrast to Bach, who had much diversity and yet always resolution. As a Christian, believed that there was resolution for the individual and for history.

As the music that came out of the biblical teaching of the Reformation was influenced by that worldview, so the worldview of modern man shapes modern music.

Is this still art?

Is it not rather a bare philosophic intellectual statement separated from the fullness of who man is and what the universe is? Tending to be only a bare intellectual statement rather than a work of art, it often has become anti-art art.

Fragmented Poetry, the Novel, and Film as Vehicles of Modern Thought

After philosophy, art, and music, poetry, the novel, and drama became the vehicle for these ideas. In the English-speaking world, T .S. Eliot's The Wasteland came first.

Le prince d 'Aquitaine a la tour abolique. These fragments I have shored against my ruin. By then I'll fit you. Hieronymus mad again. Data, diadvam, damiata. Shanti, shanti, shanti.

You see, he matches a fragmented message with a fragmented form of poetry. Just as Picasso opened the way for a fragmented concept of life in Les Demoiselles d 'Avignon, so fragmented poetry in the English-speaking world began with T .S. Eliot's Wasteland.

Later, Eliot became a Christian, and his form of writing changed from that of The Wasteland. More and more, philosophy was expressed not as formal statements of philosophy as such, but rather in the novel and other art forms.

Sartre wrote Gnossia, Camus, The Stranger, and The Plague, and Simon de Beauvoir, L 'Invité. In the 60s, many of the basic philosophic statements were made through the cinema, and being carried by the cinema, they reached a far wider circle of people than had ever been the case through painting or literature, let alone through the writings of the philosophers.

Among these films were Silence and the Hour of the Wolf by Bergman, Juliet of the Spirits by Fellini, Blow Up by Antonioni, Belle du Jour by Bunuel. They showed pictorially and with great force what it is like if people are only machines, and also what it is like if people try to live in the area of non-reason.

In the area of non-reason, there is no way to distinguish between right and wrong, or even between what is objectively true and that which is illusion or fantasy. A good example is Antonioni's Blow Up.

The advertisement for the film reads, murder without guilt, love without meaning. In this film, there are no certainties concerning moral values and no human categories either. Blow Up has no hero. All one has is Antonioni's non-hero.

All there is is the camera,.

Which just goes click, click, click,.

And the human factor has disappeared. Some of the films of that period went even further. The last year, Marienbad, Juliet of the Spirits, The Hour of the Wolf, Belle du Jour. They were saying something even more profound.

They were saying that as modern man leaps into the area of non-reason to try to find his optimism without reason, that he not only does not have any categories for moral or human values, but he does not have any certainty upon which to distinguish between reality and illusion.

The picture has a realistic line. They are not dreams.

Fantasies of the spirit, there's no difference between the dream and the reality.

It is my only way to live in reality. For a creature, I think that what he does is his only reality. To don't give meaning to the reality means that you don't understand no more reality. A reality can appear also like a monstrous thing without any meaning.

Bergman, Silence, and the Problem of Reality Without God

Bergman was a clear case at this point. He directed The Hour of the Wolf, where one cannot tell the difference between what is real and what is fantasy. Was what was being presented really happening or was it in the mind of one of the characters?

If people begin only from themselves and think that they live in a universe in which there is no personal God to speak, a universe such as Bergman indicated in his film Silence, then they have no final way to distinguish between reality and fantasy or illusion.

But Bergman, like Sartre and Camus, could not live consistently with his own position and therefore the background music for the film Silence is Bach's Goldberg variations. Bergman said, there's a small, holy part of the human being where music speaks.

Bergman also said that while he was writing the script for the film Silence, that he had the music of Bach's Goldberg variations playing in his home and the music interfered with that which was being set forth in that film.

The Christian knows why music speaks. He knows the people are not a product of chance. He knows the people are made in the image of God. And on this basis, it is understandable that music is music to man.

And because God has spoken in the Bible, there is not silence. And there are certainties concerning moral values and human values. And there are categories upon which to distinguish between reality and fantasy.

For the people with the humanist position, this is not so. Within the humanist position, there is no base for knowing. Christianity is not romantic. The Bible is not romantic about man. Man is seen as fallen.

Man is seen as rebellion. Man is seen as rebellious against God with all the goodness of God and with all the knowledge he has. On one hand, from the surrounding universe and its form and the manishness of man.

And on the other hand, from the more detailed knowledge of the Bible and the revelation of Christ. Man is a rebel. And we know Christian does not romantically think that this can be just leapt over. But having said that, a Christian is not a pessimist.

He's not a pessimist on two levels. First of all, history is going someplace. And a part of the Christian message is that Christ is coming back. And this is the final solution. But every Christian who really understands the scripture, also every generation, he is waiting and fighting and struggling and doing all that he can.

Not only to see individuals become Christians, but the culture touched by these individual Christians.