Modern Temper: A Study and a Confession

by Joseph Wood Krutch

Book Overview

Krutch's incisive examination of the dilemmas faced by modern man has proved remarkably prophetic. This book stands as an unflinchingly honest examination of the major moral questions of our era. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0156617579
• ISBN13: 9780156617574
• Release Date: January 1956
• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.39 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

The sea of faith was once at the full

Krutch defines the modern temper in terms of the loss of a sense of the meaningfulness of life, and centrality of Man. The Darwinian revolution , the Copernician revolution the Freudian Revolution have made Mankind see itself as no longer the Center of all, with clear knowledge of Good and Evil, Right and Wrong. This picture of the modern Temper has its forbears, one might even say one can say it in the Bible itself, in Koheleth's 'vanity of vanities all is vanity'. Though Krutch defines the Modern Era in distinction to the Victorian Age that sense of certainties lost and gone is also present in it, as Arnold's great poem , "Dover Beach" indicates. Clearly the First World War was also a great historical watershed which for many broke the sense of Mankind's inevitable progress, and ultimate Goodness. Today we still struggle with the dilemnas and paradoxes Krutch ably outlines in this work. One caveat. In his last chapter he speaks about the force of a new primitive collective which will come and take over from the old , apparently, worn- out , too lost- in- thought great power the United States. He hints strongly that that will be Russia. We are well more than half a century from the time Krutch wrote this still in many ways relevant work. The Soviet Union has disintegrated. The United States, for all its problems and difficulties, remains the most vibrant large society in the world. On another level many of the dilemnas Krutch saw arising from the triumph of materialism and science have intensified with Man's increasing inventiveness and capacity for creation. We now have powers of creation undreamed sixty or seventy years ago. And they too raise questions about our ultimate meaning and understanding. This is a truly thought- provoking , elegantly and clearly written work. I recommend it highly. One more point. I do not think that Krutch foresaw the way precisely the dilemnas he indicated would lead to a new varied quest for 'spirtituality' and religion at all levels. This again is a sure indication of how human beings are far better at diagnosis than at prognosis.

A WINNING DEFEATIST:

Perhaps the most problematic thinkers of the past for us to assess are those who accurately diagnosed the diseases of modernity but succumbed to them anyway. In his 1956 Preface to this 1929 collection of interconnected essays that apparently appeared mostly in The Atlantic Monthly, the critic Joseph Wood Krutch sums up the crisis of the age of materialism and sciencism as follows: The universe revealed by science, especially the sciences of biology and psychology, is one in which the human spirit cannot find a comfortable home. That spirit breathes freely only in a universe where what philosophers call Value Judgments are of supreme importance. It needs to believe, for instance, that right and wrong are real, that Love is more than a biological function, that the human mind is capable of reason rather than merely of rationalization, and that it has the power to will and to choose instead of being compelled merely to react in the fashion predetermined by its conditioning. Since science has proved that none of these beliefs is more than a delusion, mankind will be compelled either to surrender what we call humanity by adjusting to the real world or to live some kind of tragic existence in a universe alien to the deepest needs of its nature. While you could hardly ask for a description of the psychotic effects of belief in Science, the flaw in Krutch's conclusion is obvious: the third option is simply to choose to believe in humanity instead of in biology and psychology. That such a humanism is predicated on faith in God rather than in science can hardly be a bar, since we know, and have known, that Reason itself is ultimately nothing but a faith. What Krutch and others who despaired of the human condition in an Age of Reason had essentially done was just to choose a "tragic existence in a universe alien to the deepest needs of its nature," when they could instead have chosen, as their ancestors always had, and as most Americans still do, a universe where the human spirit breathes free. The Modern Temper is a fascinating read and necessary to an understanding of the kind of spiritual nihilism that enabled Darwinism, Communism, Fascism, Existentialism, etc., but it is a a defeatist text. Mr. Krutch served a most lucid warning about the tenor of his times, but then ran up the white flag, which leaves the work fatally flawed.

Modernism vs retro-Victorian 'useful fiction'

In his book The Modern Temper, Joseph W. Krutch defined the title concept to mean the angst-ridden state of mind exhibited by people in the 1910's and 1920's who wanted to return to the simpler ways of Victorian certainties and principles, such as the concept of man radicaly differentiated from animals, the existence of universal moral truths, and the certain existence of God. Unfortunately for them, Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution hit the Victorian fan, thus beginning the gradual unravelling of God, absolutes, and other Victorian principles. William James himself added fuel to the fire by espousing pragmatism as a method to actively find out a belief system that fits in with people's experiences.The situation of people exhibiting that modern temper was akin to an adult nostalgically looking back to at his simple childhood, a world of poetry, mythology, and religion that was upset by the world of science. The ideal world was replaced by the world of Nature. The anthropomorphic God and human needs and feelings were ousted by Nature. Yet, there was a need to crawl back into the womb, as "the myth, having once been established, persists long after the assumptions upon which it was made have been destroyed, because, being born of desire, it is far more satisfactory than any fact".The failure of the laboratory and hence of science underlined this dilemma. The scientific method came to be applied in fields such as history, philosophy, and anthropology, so why not lay out the human soul on the dissection table and start hacking away? However, science was used to seek out a light, such as ultraviolet or infrared, that man, limited in sight by the visible spectrum, was unable to see. Mankind thus lost its faith in its findings to discover that sought-for moral world.The implications for love were likewise devastating. Formerly the thing that brought man closest to the divine state or the highest level possible, depending on how man saw himself, the value of love became a hormonal thing. Sex replaced love by demystifying and desanctifying it, increasing its accessibility.The long-term implications of the modern temper and the yearning of returning to the pre-Darwinian womb hints at the collapse of the American Empire. Krutch mentioned how philosophical debates sapped the vitality of Greece to the point that it was conquered by the Romans, who after building an empire yielding enormous riches and comforts, suffered the same fate under philosophically innocent barbarians.Metaphysics, which operated outside the realm of observable and objective reality, established certitudes such as ethics, whose realization caused a blooming of the human spirit. Yet science and applied Darwinism knocked down those certitudes like nine-pins, causing that human spirit to wilt as man realized the dissonance between the idealized world of his childhood and the harsh unrelenting world of Nature. The solution was to create the beneficent "fiction," transf

A prophetic work

Written in the pivotal year 1929, Krutch captured in this series of essays the sense of foreboding that led into the nightmare decade and a half spanning the Depression '30s and the conclusion of World War II. His essential theme is that "the modern temper," one of questioning and skepticism, had led Man to a frightening crossroads where the old myths of the past -- religion, dramatic tragedy, devotion to family -- no longer worked, yet the technology and psychological insights that had remorselessly torn these values apart offered no consolation other than the promise of more objective knowledge.Man was left instead, Krutch felt, with what is best described as the existential dilemma, although of course he didn't use this term. He saw Man as struggling to come to terms with the paradox of expanding knowledge. That is to say, the more we understand, the more it becomes clear that the universe of which we are only a tiny part spins according to its own laws, with no regard for Man's deep and abiding need for spiritual sustenance. Yet once Man has released the genie of technology and of skepticism, it is difficult to return to the old myths, in which Man was always placed at the center of the moral and spiritual universe.This is a bleak book, yet it does much to explain the blind adherence to ideology that characterized the disastrous fascist, totalitarian movements of the 1930s. In this regard, a good companion read (and one that reaches a very different set of conclusions) is Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning."