He and Ibsen were joined in this concern with the intensity of the inner life by the Russians, by Tolstoy, Turgenev, Pushkin, Lermontov and above all Dostoevsky. Some of the most original investigations of what J. W. Burrow has called ‘the elusive self’ were Russian, possibly because Russia was so backward in comparison with other European nations, and writers there had less standing and were more rootless.64 Turgenev went so far as to use the term, ‘superfluous man’ (Diary of a Superfluous Man, 1850), superfluous because the protagonists were so tormented by their self-consciousness that they achieved little, ‘dissipating their lives in words and self examination’.65 Rudin, in Turgenev’s 1856 novel of that name, Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), Stavrogin in The Devils (1872), Pierre in Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869) and Levin in Anna Karenina (1877) all attempt to break out of their debilitating self-consciousness via crime, romantic love, religion or revolutionary activity.66 But Dostoevsky arguably went furthest, in ‘Notes from Underground’ (1864), where he explores the life – if that is what it is – of a petty official who has come into a small inheritance and is now retired and lives as a recluse. The story is really a discussion of consciousness, of character, selfhood. Although at one stage, the official is described as spiteful, vengeful and malicious, at other times he confesses to the opposite qualities. This inconsistency in personality, in character, is Dostoevsky’s main point. The petty official ends up confessing: ‘The fact is that I have never succeeded in being anything at all.’ He doesn’t have a personality; he has a mask and behind the mask there are only other masks.67
The link to William James’ and Oliver Wendell Holmes’ pragmatism is clear. There is no such thing as personality, in the sense of a consistent entity, coming from within. People behave pragmatically in a variety of situations and there is no guarantee of coherence: in fact, if the laws of chance are any guide, behaviour will vary along a standard distribution. Out of that, we draw what lessons about ourselves that we can, but the Russian writers were apt to say that we often make these choices arbitrarily, ‘just in order to have an identity of some kind’.68 Even Proust was influenced by this thinking, exploring in his massive masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past, the instability of character over time. People in Proust are not only unpredictable, they assume incompatible characteristics in a disconcerting manner, while others are the complete opposite.69
Finally, there was Nietzsche (1844–1900). He is generally thought of as a philosopher, though he himself claimed that psychology occupied pole position among the sciences. ‘All psychology has so far got stuck in moral prejudices and fears; it has not dared to descend into the depths . . . the psychologist who thus “makes a sacrifice” [to explore such depths] . . . will at least be entitled to demand in return that psychology shall be recognised as the queen of the sciences, for whose service and preparation the other sciences exist.’70 Walter Kaufmann called Nietzsche ‘the first great (depth) psychologist’ and what he was referring to was Nietzsche’s ability to go beyond a person’s self-description ‘to see hidden motives, to hear what is not said’.71 Freud also acknowledged a debt to Nietzsche but that debt was far from straightforward. In showing that our feelings and desires are not what we say they are, Freud arrived at the unconscious, whereas for Nietzsche it was instead the ‘will to power’. For Nietzsche, the elusive or second self wasn’t so much hidden as insufficiently recognised. The way to self-fulfilment, self-realisation, was through the will, a process of ‘self-overcoming’ or breaking the limits of the self. For Nietzsche, one didn’t find one’s inner self by looking in; rather one discovered it by giving an outward expression to the inner, by striving, by acknowledging that such motives as pride existed and were nothing to be ashamed of but entirely natural; one discovered oneself when one ‘overcame’ one’s limits.72
Nietzsche thought the scientific cult of objectivity irrelevant, that – as the romantics had said (though for him they were often hypocrites too) – one made one’s life, one created one’s values for oneself – only by acting did one discover one’s self. ‘The self-discipline and constant self-testing which concentrated and intensified life . . . were at the opposite pole from the self-denial and repression which . . . diverting the will to power inwards against the self, breed as in Christianity, self-hatred, guilt, rancour towards the healthy, fulfilled and superior . . . In a world characterised by the flux of consciousness and bare of any metaphysical guarantee of moral meaning, the idea of vocation offered an obvious way of testing, forging, stabilising the self in a social context, through chosen, regulated, disciplined activity, and self-chosen acceptance of its obligations.’73
Underneath it all, modernism may be seen as the aesthetic equivalent of Freud’s unconscious. It too is concerned with the inner state, and with an attempt to resolve the modern incoherence, to marry romanticism with naturalism, to order science, rationalism and democracy while at the same time highlighting their shortcomings and deficiencies. Modernism was an aesthetic attempt to go beyond the surface of things, its non-representationalism is highly self-conscious and intuitive, its works have a high degree of self-signature, yet another climax of individuality. Its many ‘-isms’ – impressionism, post-impressionism, expressionism, fauvism, cubism, futurism, symbolism, imagism, divisionism, cloisonnism, vorticism, Dadaism, surrealism – are a sequence of avant-gardes, understood as revolutionary experiments into future consciousness.74 Modernism was also a celebration that the old regimes of culture were gone and buried, and that art, alongside science, was taking us into new concepts of mental and emotional association, its experimental forms – both absurd and meaningless at the same time – redeeming ‘the formless universe of contingency’.75 There was too an impatience for change, amid the belief of the Marxists (still a new ‘faith’ at the time) that revolution was inevitable. Nihilism was never far beneath the surface, as people worried about the impermanent nature of truth, as thrown up by the new sciences, and by the very nature of the human self in the new metropolises – more elusive than ever. The doctrine of ‘therapeutic nihilism’, that nothing could be done, about the ills either of the body, or of society, flowered in metropolises like Vienna. The apposite work here is Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, a fantasy ostensibly about a work of art that functions as a soul, which reveals the ‘real’ self of the main character.
Which is what made The Interpretation of Dreams such an important and timely book and set of theories. Freud (according to non-specialists inhabiting a ‘pre-revisionist world’) had introduced ‘the respectability of clinical proof’ to an area of the mind that was hitherto a morass of jumbled images.76 His wider theories brought a coherence to the apparently irrational recesses of the self and dignified them in the name of science. In 1900 this appeared to be the way forward.
Conclusion
The Electron, the Elements and the Elusive Self
The Cavendish Laboratory, in the University of Cambridge, England, is arguably the most distinguished scientific institution in the world. Since it was established in the late nineteenth century it has produced some of the most consequential and innovative advances of all time. These include the discovery of the electron in 1897, the discovery of the isotopes of the light elements (1919), the splitting of the atom (also in 1919), the discovery of the proton (1920), of the neutron (1932), the unravelling of the structure of DNA (1953), and the discovery of pulsars (1967). Since the Nobel Prize was instituted in 1901, more than twenty Cavendish and Cavendish-trained physicists have won the prize for either physics or chemistry.1