Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (54 page)

The fresh data that the new physics was producing had very practical ramifications that arguably have changed our lives far more directly than was at first envisaged by scientists mainly interested in fundamental aspects of nature. Radio, in use for some time, moved into the home in the 1920s; television was first shown in August 1928. Another invention, using physics, revolutionised life in a completely different way: this was the jet engine, developed with great difficulty by the Englishman Frank Whittle.

Whittle was the working-class son of a mechanic who lived on a Coventry housing estate. As a boy he educated himself in Leamington Public Library, where he spent all his spare time devouring popular science books about aircraft – and turbines.
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All his life Frank Whittle was obsessed with flight, but his background was hardly natural in those days for a university education, and so at the age of fifteen he applied to join the Royal Air Force as a technical apprentice. He failed. He passed the written examination but was blocked by the medical officer: Frank Whittle was only five feet tall. Rather than give up,
he obtained a diet sheet and a list of exercises from a friendly PE teacher, and within a few months he had added three inches to his height and another three to his chest measurement. In some ways this was as impressive as anything else he did later in life. He was finally accepted as an apprentice in the RAE and although he found the barrack-room life irksome, in his second year as a cadet at Cranwell, the RAF college – at the age of nineteen – he wrote a thesis on future developments in aircraft design. It was in this paper that Whittle began to sketch his ideas for the jet engine. Now in the Science Museum in London, the paper is written in junior handwriting, but it is clear and forthright.
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His crucial calculation was that ‘a B oomph wind against a machine travelling at 6oomph at 120,000 feet would have less effect than a 2omph head wind against the same machine at 1,000 feet.’ He concluded, ‘Thus everything indicates that designers should aim at altitude.’ He knew that propellers and petrol engines were inefficient at great heights, but he also knew that rocket propulsion was suitable only for space travel. This is where his old interest in turbines resurfaced; he was able to show that the efficiency of turbines increased at higher altitudes. An indication of Whittle’s vision is apparent from the fact that he was contemplating an aircraft travelling at a speed of 500mph at 60,000 feet, while in 1926 the top speed of RAF fighters was 150 mph, and they couldn’t fly much above 10,000 feet.

After Cranwell, Whittle transferred to Hornchurch in Essex to a fighter squadron, and then in 1929 moved on to the Central Flying School at Wittering in Sussex as a pupil instructor. All this time he had been doggedly worrying how to create a new kind of engine, most of the time working on an amalgam of a petrol engine and a fan of the kind used in turbines. While at Wittering, he suddenly saw that the solution was alarmingly simple. In fact, his idea was so simple his superiors didn’t believe it. Whittle had grasped that a turbine would drive the compressor, ‘making the principle of the jet engine essentially circular.’
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Air sucked in by the compressor would be mixed with fuel and ignited. Ignition would expand the gas, which would flow through the blades of the turbine at such a high speed that not only would a jet stream be created, which would drive the aircraft forward, but the turning of the blades would also draw fresh air into the compressor, to begin the process all over again. If the compressor and the turbine were mounted on the same shaft, there was in effect only one moving part in a jet engine. It was not only far more powerful than a piston engine, which had many moving parts, but incomparably safer. Whittle was only twenty-two, and just as his height had done before, his age now acted against him. His idea was dismissed by the ministry in London. The rebuff hit him hard, and although he took out patents on his inventions, from 1929 to the mid-193os, nothing happened. When the patents came up for renewal, he was still so poor he let them lapse.
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In the early 1930s,
Hans von Ohain,
a student of physics and aerodynamics at Göttingen University, had had much the same idea as Whittle. Von Ohain could not have been more different from the Englishman. He was aristocratic, well off, and over six feet tall. He also had a different attitude to the uses of his jet.
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Spurning the government, he took his idea to the private planemaker
Ernst Heinkel.
Heinkel, who realised that high-speed air transport was much
needed, took von Ohain seriously from the start. A meeting was called at his country residence, at Warnemünde on the Baltic coast, where the twenty-five-year-old Ohain was faced by some of Heinkel’s leading aeronautical brains. Despite his youth, Ohain was offered a contract, which featured a royalty on all engines that might be sold. This contract, which had nothing to do with the air ministry, or the Luftwaffe, was signed in April 1936, seven years after Whittle wrote his paper.

Meanwhile in Britain Whittle’s overall brilliance was by now so self-evident that two friends, convinced of Whittle’s promise, met for dinner and decided to raise backing for a jet engine as a purely business venture. Whittle was still only twenty-eight, and many more experienced aeronautical engineers thought his engine would never fly. Nonetheless, with the aid of O. T. Falk and Partners, city bankers, a company called Power Jets was formed, and £20,000 raised.
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Whittle was given shares in the company (no royalties), and the Air Ministry agreed to a 25 percent stake.

Power Jets was incorporated in March 1936. On the third of that month Britain’s defence budget was increased from £122 million to £158 million, partly to pay for 250 more aircraft for the Fleet Air Arm for home defence. Four days later, German troops occupied the demilitarised zone of the Rhineland, thus violating the Treaty of Versailles. War suddenly became much more likely, a war in which air superiority might well prove crucial. All doubts about the theory of the jet engine were now put aside. From then on, it was simply a question of who could produce the first operational jet.

The intellectual overlap between physics and mathematics has always been considerable. As we have seen in the case of Heisenberg’s matrices and Schrödinger’s calculations, the advances made in physics in the golden age often involved the development of new forms of mathematics. By the end of the 1920s, the twenty-three outstanding math problems identified by David Hilbert at the Paris conference in 1900 (see chapter 1) had for the most part been settled, and mathematicians looked out on the world with optimism. Their confidence was more than just a technical matter; mathematics involved logic and therefore had philosophical implications. If math was complete, and internally consistent, as it appeared to be, that said something fundamental about the world.

But then, in September 1931, philosophers and mathematicians convened in Königsberg for a conference on the ‘Theory of Knowledge in the Exact Sciences,’ attended by, among others, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolf Carnap, and Moritz Schlick. All were overshadowed, however, by a paper from a young mathematician from Brünn, whose revolutionary arguments were later published in a German scientific journal, in an article entitled ‘On the Formally Undecidable Propositions of
Principia Mathematica
and Related Systems.’
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The author was Kurt Godei, a twenty-five-year-old mathematician at the University of Vienna, and this paper is now regarded as a milestone in the history of logic and mathematics. Gödel was an intermittent member of Schlick’s Vienna Circle, which had stimulated his interest in the philosophical aspects of science.
In his 1931 paper he demolished Hilbert’s aim of putting all mathematics on irrefutably sound foundations, with his theorem that tells us, no less firmly than Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, that there are some things we cannot know. No less importantly, he demolished Bertrand Russell’s and Alfred North Whitehead’s aim of deriving all mathematics from a single system of logic.
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There is no hiding the fact that Gödel’s theorem is difficult. There are two elements that may be stated: one, that ‘within any consistent formal system, there will be a sentence that can neither be proved true nor proved false’; and two, ‘that the consistency of a formal system of arithmetic cannot be proved
within
that system’.
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The simplest way to explain his idea makes use of the so-called Richard paradox, first put forward by the French mathematician Jules Richard in 1905.
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In this system integers are given to a variety of definitions about mathematics. For example, the definition ‘not divisible by any number except one and itself’ (i.e., a prime number), might be given one integer, say 17. Another definition might be ‘being equal to the product of an integer multiplied by that integer’ (i.e., a perfect square), and given the integer 20. Now assume that these definitions are laid out in a list with the two above inserted as 17th and 20th. Notice two things about these definitions: 17, attached to the first statement, is itself a prime number, but 20, attached to the second statement, is not a perfect square. In Richardian mathematics, the above statement about prime numbers is not Richardian, whereas the statement about perfect squares is. Formally, the property of being Richardian involves ‘not having the property designated by the defining expression with which an integer is correlated in the serially ordered set of definitions.’ But of course this last statement is itself a mathematical definition and therefore belongs to the series and has its own integer,
n.
The question may now be put: Is
n
itself Richardian? Immediately the crucial contradiction appears. ‘For n is Richardian if, and only if, it does
not
possess the property designated by the definition with which n is correlated; and it is easy to see that therefore n is Richardian if, and only if, n is not Richardian.’
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No analogy like this can do full justice to Gödel’s theorem, but it at least conveys the paradox adequately. It is for some a depressing conclusion (and Godei himself battled bouts of chronic depression. After living an ascetic personal life, he died in 1978, aged seventy-two, of ‘malnutrition and inanition’ brought about by personality disturbance).
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Godei had established that there were limits to math and to logic. The aim of Gottlob Frege, David Hilbert, and Russell to create a unitary deductive system in which all mathematical (and therefore all logical) truth could be deduced from a small number of axioms could not be realised. It was, in its way and as was hinted at above, a form of mathematical uncertainty principle – and it changed math for all time. Furthermore, as Roger Penrose has pointed out, Gödel’s ‘open-ended mathematical intuition is fundamentally incompatible with the existing structure of physics.’
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In some ways Gödel’s discovery was the most fundamental and mysterious of all. He certainly had what most people would call a mystical side, and he thought we should trust [mathematical] intuition as much as other forms of
experience.
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Added to the uncertainty principle, his theory described limits to knowledge. Put alongside all the other advances and new avenues of thought, which were then exploding in all directions, it injected a layer of doubt and pessimism. Why should there be limits to our knowledge? And what did it mean to know that such limits existed?

On 28 October 1929 the notorious stock market crash occurred on Wall Street, and U.S. loans to Europe were suspended. In the weeks and months that followed, and despite the misgivings of many, Allied troops prepared and then executed their departure from the Rhineland. In France, Georges Clemenceau died at the age of eighty-eight, while in Thuringia Wilhelm Frick was about to become the first member of the Nazi Party to be appointed minister in a state government. Benito Mussolini was clamouring for the revision of the Versailles Treaty, and in India Mohandâs Gandhi began his campaign of civil disobedience. In Britain in 1931 a National Government was formed to help balance the budget, while Japan abandoned the gold standard. There was a widespread feeling of crisis.

Sigmund Freud, then aged seventy-three, had far more personal reasons to feel pessimistic. In 1924 he had undergone two operations for cancer of the mouth. Part of his upper jaw had to be removed and replaced with a metal prosthesis, a procedure that could only be carried out using a local anaesthetic. After the operation he could chew and speak only with difficulty, but he still refused to stop smoking, which had probably been the cause of the cancer in the first place. Before he died in London in 1939, Freud underwent another two dozen operations, either to remove precancerous tissue or to have his prosthesis cleaned or renewed. During all this time he never stopped working.

In 1927 Freud had published
The Future of an Illusion,
which both explained away and yet amounted to an attack on organised religion. This was the second of three ‘cultural’ works by Freud (the first,
Totem and Taboo,
was discussed earlier: see above, page 141). At the end of 1929, as Wall Street was crashing, Freud delivered the third of these works,
Civilisation and Its Discontents.
There had been famine in Austria and attempted revolution and mega-inflation in Germany, and capitalism appeared to have collapsed in America. The devastation and moral degeneration of World War I was still a concern to many people, and Hitler was on the rise. Wherever you looked, Freud’s title fitted the facts.
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In
Civilisation and Its Discontents,
Freud developed some of the ideas he had explored in
Totem and Taboo,
in particular that society – civilisation – evolves out of the need to curb the individual’s unruly sexual and aggressive appetites. He now argued that civilisation, suppression, and neurosis are inescapably
intertwined because the more civilisation there is, the more suppression is needed and, as a direct result, the more neurosis. Man, he said, cannot help but be more and more unhappy in civilisation, which explains why so many seek refuge in drink, drugs, tobacco, or religion. Given this basic predicament, it is the individual’s ‘psychical constitution’ which determines how any individual adjusts. For example, ‘The man who is predominantly erotic will give first preference to his emotional relationships with other people; the narcissistic man, who inclines to be self-sufficient, will seek his main satisfactions in his internal mental process.’
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And so on. The point of his book, he said, was not to offer easy panaceas for the ills of society but to suggest that ethics – the rules by which men agree to live together – can benefit from psychoanalytic understanding, in particular, the psychoanalytic concept of the superego, or conscience.
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Freud’s hopes were not to be fulfilled. The 1930s, especially in the German-speaking countries, were dominated more by a complete lack of conscience than any attempt to refine or understand it. Nevertheless, his book spawned a raft of others that, though very different from his, were all profoundly uneasy with Western capitalist society, whether the source of concern was economics, science and technology, race, or man’s fundamental nature as revealed in his psychology. The early 1930s were dominated by theories and investigations exploring the discontents of Western civilisation.

The book closest to Freud’s was published in 1933 by the former crown prince of psychoanalysis, now turned archrival. Carl Jung’s argument in
Modern Man in Search of a Soul
was that ‘modern’ society had more in common with ‘archaic,’ primitive society than it did with what had gone immediately before – i.e., the previous phase of civilisation.
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The modern world was a world where the ancient ‘archetypes’ revealed themselves more than they had done in the recent past. This explained modern man’s obsession with his psyche and the collapse of religion. The modern condition was that man knew he was the culmination of evolution – science told him so – but also knew that ‘tomorrow he will be surpassed,’ which made life ‘solitary, cold, and frightening.’
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Further, psychoanalysis, by replacing the soul with the psyche (which Jung clearly thought had happened), only offered a palliative. Psychoanalysis, as a technique, could only be used on an individual basis; it could not become ‘organised’ and used to help millions at a time, like Catholicism, say. And so, the participation mystique, as the anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl called it, was a whole dimension of life closed to modern man. It set Western civilisation, a new civilisation, apart from the older Eastern societies.
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This lack of a collective life, ceremonies of the whole as Hugo von Hofmannsthal called them, contributed to neurosis, and to general anxiety.
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For fifteen years, Karen Horney practised in Weimar Germany as an orthodox Freudian analyst, alongside Melanie Klein, Otto Fenichel, Franz Alexander, Karl Abraham and Wilhelm Reich at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. Only after she moved to the United States, first as associate director of the Chicago Institute and then in New York, at the New School for Social Research and
the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, did she find herself capable of offering criticism of the founder of the movement. Her book,
The Neurotic Personality of Our Time
, overlapped with both Freud and Jung but was also an attack on capitalistic society for the way it induced neurosis.
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Horney’s chief criticism of Freud was his antifeminist bias (her early papers included ‘The Dread of Women’ and ‘The Denial of the Vagina’). But she was also a Marxist and thought Freud too biological in outlook and ‘deeply ignorant’ of modern anthropology and sociology (she was right). Psychoanalysis had itself become split by this time into a right wing and a left wing. What may be characterised as the right wing concentrated on biological aspects, delving further and further into infantile experience. Melanie Klein, a German disciple of Freud who moved to Britain, was the leader of this approach. The left wing, which consisted in the main of Horney, Erich Fromm, and Harry Stack Sullivan, was instead more concerned with the individual’s social and cultural background.
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Horney took the line that ‘there is no such thing as a universal normal psychology.’
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What is regarded as neurotic in one culture may be normal elsewhere, and vice versa. For her, however, two traits invariably characterised all neurotics. The first was ‘rigidity in reaction,’ and the second was ‘a discrepancy between potentiality and achievement.’ For example, a normal person by definition becomes suspicious of someone else only after that person has behaved badly toward them; the neurotic ‘brings his or her suspicion with them at all times.’ Horney didn’t believe in the Oedipus complex either. She preferred the notion of ‘basic anxiety,’ which she attributed not to biology but to the conflicting forces of society, conflicts that act on an individual from childhood. Basic anxiety she characterised as a feeling of ‘being small, insignificant, helpless, endangered, in a world that is out to abuse, cheat, attack, humiliate, betray, envy.’
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Such anxiety is worse, she said, when parents fail to give their children warmth and affection. This usually occurs in families where the parents have their own unresolved neuroses, initiating a vicious circle. By definition, the neurotic personality has lost, or never had, ‘the blissful certainty of being wanted.’
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Such a child grows up with one of four rigid ways of approaching life, which interfere with achievement: the neurotic striving for affection; the neurotic striving for power; neurotic withdrawal; and neurotic submissiveness.
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The most contentious part of Horney’s theory, for nonpsychoanalysts, was her blaming neurosis on the contradictions of, in particular, contemporary American life. She insisted that in America more than anywhere else there existed an inherent contradiction between competition and success on the one hand (‘never give a sucker an even break’) and good neighborliness on the other (‘love your neighbour as yourself); between the promotion of ambition by advertising (‘keeping up with the Joneses’) and the inability of the individual to satisfy these ambitions; between the creed of unfettered individualism and the ever more common curbs brought about by environmental concerns and more laws.
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This modern world, despite its material advantages, foments the feeling in many individuals that they are ‘isolated and helpless.’
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Many would agree that they feel isolated and helpless, and maybe even neurotically so. But
Horney’s theory never explains why some neurotics need affection, and others power, and why some become submissive. She herself denied that biology was responsible but never clarified what else might account for such large differences in behaviour.

Horney’s feminism was new but not unique. The campaign to gain women the vote had exercised politicians in several countries prior to World War I, not least in Austria and Great Britain. Immediately after the war other matters had taken priority, both economically and psychologically, but as the 1920s passed, the status of women again became an issue.

One of the minor themes in Virginia Woolf’s
Jacob’s Room
is the easy effortlessness of the men who led Britain into war, and their casual treatment of women. Whereas all the men in the book have comfortable sets of rooms from which to embark on their fulfilling lives, the women always have to share, or are condemned to cold and draughty houses. This was a discrepancy Woolf was to take up in her most famous piece of nonfiction,
A Room of One’s Own,
published in 1929. It appears that being turned away from an Oxbridge college library because she was a woman propelled her to write her feminist polemic. And it is certainly arguable that the greatest psychological revolution of the century has been in the female sensibility.
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By 1929 Virginia Woolf had published six novels. These included
Jacob’s Room,
in the miracle year of 1922,
Mrs Dalloway
(1925),
To the Lighthouse
(1927), and
Orlando
in 1928. Her success, however, only seems to have made her more unsettled about the situation most female writers found themselves in. Her central argument in the 100-page essay was that ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.’
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Her view, which was to be echoed by others in different ways later in the century, was that a writer ‘is the product of his or her historical circumstances and that material conditions are crucially important’ – not just to whether the books get written but to the psychological status of the writer, male or female. But women were the main focus of her attention, and she went on to show how, in Britain at least, until the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882, a married woman’s income legally belonged to her husband. There could be no freedom of the mind, she felt, without freedom of circumstance. This meant that prior to the end of the seventeenth century there were very few women writers, and those who did write often only dabbled in it. Woolf herself suffered, in that the boys in her own family went to boarding school and then to university, whereas she and the other girls were educated at home.
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This brought several consequences. Female experience was underreported in fiction, and what experience was reported was inevitably distorted and/or restricted to certain kinds. For example, she felt that Jane Austen was not given access to the wider world that her talent demanded, with similar restrictions applying also to Elizabeth Barrett Browning: ‘It cannot be doubted that the long years of seclusion had done her [Browning] irreparable damage as an artist.’
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Though she felt feminist anger, Woolf was very clear that such anger had no place in fiction, which should have larger ambitions for itself, and she criticised
earlier writers, like Browning and Charlotte Brönte, for giving way to that anger. She then moved on to consider the ways in which the female mind might complement the male mind, in an effort to show what literature has lost by the barriers erected against women. For example, she considers Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s notion of the androgynous mind, with male and female qualities coexisting in harmony, to be open to all possibilities. She makes no case for the superiority of either sex, but rather for the mind that allows both sympathies equal access. She actually wrote that it is ‘fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex.’
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She herself described
A Room
as a trifle, but she also said she wrote it with ardour, and it has certainly been a huge success. One reason is the style. When the book was published, in October 1929, it was reviewed in the
Sunday Times
of London by Desmond MacCarthy, who described it as ‘feminist propaganda’ but added ‘yet it resembles an almond-tree in blossom.’
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Woolf’s style is conversational, intimate. She manages to be both angry and above anger at the wrongs done to women writers, and would-be women writers, in the past. She devotes pages to the lunches she has eaten at Oxbridge colleges – where she says the food is much better in the women’s colleges than the men’s. And she makes it matter. Of course, Virginia Woolf’s fiction should be read alongside
A Room of One’s Own.
She did help emancipate women not only by her polemic but also by her example.