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NEW FRONTIERS IN EDUCATION, CULTURE, AND POLITICS

CORPORATIZING
RURAL EDUCATION
NEOLIBERAL GLOBALIZATION AND
REACTION IN THE UNITED STATES
JASON A. CERVONE
New Frontiers in Education, Culture, and Politics

Series editor
Kenneth J. Saltman
University of Massachusetts, Boston
North Dartmouth, Massachusetts, USA
New Frontiers in Education, Culture, and Politics focuses on both topical
educational issues and highly original works of educational policy and
theory that are critical, publicly engaged, and interdisciplinary, drawing on
contemporary philosophy and social theory. The books in the series aim to
push the bounds of academic and public educational discourse while
remaining largely accessible to an educated reading public. New Frontiers
aims to contribute to thinking beyond the increasingly unified view of
public education for narrow economic ends (economic mobility for the
individual and global economic competition for the society) and in terms
of efficacious delivery of education as akin to a consumable commodity.
Books in the series provide both innovative and original criticism and offer
visions for imagining educational theory, policy, and practice for radically
different, egalitarian, and just social transformation.

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14741
 Jason A. Cervone

Corporatizing Rural
Education
Neoliberal Globalization and Reaction
in the United States
Jason A. Cervone
University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth
Weymouth, Massachusetts, USA

New Frontiers in Education, Culture, and Politics

ISBN 978-3-319-64461-5    ISBN 978-3-319-64462-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64462-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017954291

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
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microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
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publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
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lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For Emily
 Acknowledgments

This book began as my doctoral dissertation, so first and foremost I must

express my gratitude to my advisor Kenneth Saltman, without whose
insights and guidance these ideas never could have been connected to
form a coherent project. This book also would not have been possible
without the faculty and staff at UMass Dartmouth, particularly João
Paraskeva, Ricardo Rosa, Sheila Macrine, and Leila Rosa, as well as my
dissertation group Teresa Cruz and Michael Savaria, and the rest of Cohort
3. An earlier version of Chap. 3 appears in the Review of Education,
Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies and would not have been possible without
the editorial skills of Tyler Pollard. Special thanks must also go to Renie
Avery, Juan Lopez, and Lisa DiMartino for their patience while I balanced
school and work. Eric Cervone and John Cervone, whom I can always
look to for different perspectives. Finally, none of this would have been
possible without the love and support of Emily Holden-Cervone, who
made the effort to read through everything to ensure I was actually mak-
ing sense.

vii
 Contents

1 Introduction  1

Part I Consequences of Neoliberal Corporatization 11

2 Corporatizing Rural Schools 13

3 Religious and Market Fundamentalisms 39

4 Environmental Sacrifice 67

Part II Abstraction of Space and Minds 93

5 Production of Rural Space 95

6 Destructive Identities123

7 Conclusion151

Index159

ix
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

It is still too early for a postmortem on American politics, as it will be years

before the fallout can be properly assessed, but it is fair to say that the elec-
tion of Donald Trump to the US Presidency may have signaled the end of
the political establishment in the United States as we know it. As poll after
poll came in showing an inevitable victory for Hillary Clinton, it seemed as
though the status quo of neoliberalism with identity politics mixed in
would be enough to overcome the frightening rhetoric that was emerging
from the Republican side. However, rural America saw a large population
of angry, white men and women come out in droves to the shock of the
media and political establishment alike. Pundits were quick to jump to
conclusions about what could have spurred such an event. Many claimed it
racial; a white backlash to eight years of a black president, or that it was a
deep-seated misogyny that still runs through the country. Others claimed
that it was economic anger stirred from years of living in poverty watching
industries decline and jobs moved overseas. Others still explained that it
was a response to years of being ignored by mainstream politics. All of these
explanations are valid, but none seem to go deep enough or to recognize
the nuances and connections between all the issues being raised. There is a
deeper structural problem that manifests itself in these racist and misogy-
nist behaviors that come to a head in rural areas in the United States.
The white supremacists and neo-Nazis do exist and are a very real prob-
lem. The rampant misogyny directed at Clinton is also a serious problem.

© The Author(s) 2018 1

J.A. Cervone, Corporatizing Rural Education,
New Frontiers in Education, Culture, and Politics,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64462-2_1
2 1 INTRODUCTION

But these issues alone do not explain the groundswell of support Trump
received. Rather, this is the result of a large, extremely angry population
that lacks the ability to articulate or properly channel that anger. While
there is no excuse for the horribly sexist things said about Hillary Clinton,
to believe that she lost because rural voters would not consent to being
ruled by a woman is short-sighted and misunderstands both the realities of
rural political and economic life as well as what Clinton truly represents to
the rural underclass. As much as this was a vote for authoritarianism, it was
also a vote against political elitism. Identity politics aside, Hillary Clinton
epitomizes the political elite that has been out of touch with rural life in the
United States for decades. The democratic belief that it was her turn because
she was most qualified due to her experience and longevity in the political
elite runs counter to most ideals held in rural America. Again, this is not to
say misogyny does not exist or was not a large factor in the election. Hatred
of women in general is as ingrained and structural in the society as racism,
but it is not the reason for Clinton’s loss. Rather it is general apathy toward
this misogyny that allows people to overlook the things that Trump has
said. It is also unlikely a Clinton presidency would have done much to
change that. Like President Obama and Bill Clinton before her, Hillary
Clinton would have spent the majority of her term placating her Wall Street
friends and maybe dabbling slightly in identity politics possibly improving
family leave and speaking for equal wages in order to maintain a veneer of
Progressivism. Most likely she would have pursued a neoliberalized form of
feminism that lionizes female CEOs as if the way to equality is for women
to increase their representation in patriarchal capitalism rather than struggle
against the system that creates their oppression in the first place.
Sociologist Arlie Hochschild describes this phenomenon, writing that
many rural Americans feel as if they are unwanted in their own country.
She writes that from their experience they witness:

Strangers step ahead of you in line, making you anxious, resentful, and
afraid. A president allies with the line cutters, making you feel distrustful,
betrayed. A person ahead of you in line insults you as an ignorant redneck,
making you feel humiliated and mad. Economically, culturally politically,
you are suddenly a stranger in your own land.1

Hochschild captures perfectly the anxieties felt by the rural underclass

along with trying to understand their feelings of betrayal and anger at a
political elite that claims to represent the interests of the most oppressed
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

subsets of the population. Instead, the rural underclass views this as the
interests of others being placed before them, and their own struggles
being ignored and mocked while also being told they are the ones respon-
sible for the oppression. For them, there seemed to be a parade of
oppressed groups coming forward and being recognized, yet no one spoke
out for the white working class. Yet the result was that anger turned
toward the other groups who were seemingly cutting in line, rather than
the system that was consistently maintaining the rural underclass.
What seems to be happening here is the neoliberal education project
has turned on itself. For generations, corporate ideology has shaped the
rural United States in a manner to best suit capitalist accumulation. Rural
areas have been painted as backward as long as there have been urban
centers, and rural people have become victims of modernization, which in
the capitalist sense means industrialization. The result is lower wages,
fewer environmental protections, and a pushback against labor laws. Rural
youth are groomed to accept this as a natural evolution through neoliberal
education that focuses on job training rather than critical thought. When
the only ends a student is able to see are economic, it becomes much easier
to accept the corporate ideology as any job is better than no job, even if
that means surrendering political agency. Education also leads rural people
to adopt neoliberalized identities, that is identities focused on economic
ends, and identities that are individualized to the point where any eco-
nomic successes or failures become personal character traits. Lost in these
identities is a sense of community or belonging. This leads to the destruc-
tive identities being seen in rural America, the misogyny, racism and xeno-
phobia, as economic and political anxieties are causing tremendous stress
but education has not provided the ability to criticize and understand
power structures and that it is the very neoliberal ideology that they strive
to that is causing their discontent. As Hochschild points out, Donald
Trump acted as a release for this population, who saw the way his vulgar
comments created outrage among the liberal elite. Finally, someone was
sticking it to those people who had mocked and denigrated them for so
long. Hochschild describes that the feelings of elation produced by
Trump’s comments spoke to their emotional self-interest which overcame
the need to protect their economic self-interest.2 The conflation of the
economic and the emotional is a theme that will play heavily in this book,
as the corporatization of education is producing young people who are
seeing themselves primarily as economic actors and equating their self-­
worth with their ability to consume.
4 1 INTRODUCTION

The question many are struggling to understand is why would this pop-
ulation not only identify with but openly embrace ideologies they know to
be harmful? When Hillary Clinton referred to Trump supporters as
“Deplorables” the reaction was for those supporters to openly identify
themselves as such.3 Clinton played right into the hands of the Trump
campaign, who were able to use it to justify the belief among rural
Americans that they were under attack by political elites from the Left.
Here was the epitome of political elitism attacking them directly. It is
important to remember that criticisms of the liberal elite are not pinning
the election of Trump on them. The biggest issue will always be the super-­
wealthy who maintain control through the spread of neoliberal ideology.
What the liberal elite must accept responsibility for and understand their
role in perpetuating the cultural divide between urban and rural. Slavoj
Žižek, regarding conservatism in the United States, notes that there are
two sides to the culture war. While the liberal concern for misogyny, rac-
ism, and religious fundamentalism that exists in many rural areas is valid,
Žižek points out that there is a coded class message in American liberalism
wherein the Left portrays itself as modern and progressive, thus situating
rural as primitive and ignorant.4 What is happening is essentially a class
attack being framed as cultural. The Democrats ‘focus on identity politics
was really a class antagonism wherein the left situates itself as the superior
cultural class ignoring the very real concerns being faced by the rural
underclass. Žižek notes, and it is an important note that must be recalled
throughout this book, that “Listening to ordinary people’s worries in no
way implies that one should accept the premise of their stance.”5 The rea-
sons for rural economic anxiety are not illegal immigration, transgender
rights, or an attack on Christianity. The way to overcome this line of think-
ing is not through class-based attacks, but through education.
Unfortunately, this is the precise moment when education is being increas-
ingly corporatized, denying youth the ability to critically understand and
engage with the mechanisms creating their anxieties and anger. If there is
to be any hope of understanding the “deplorable” mindset in rural
America. This understanding requires an examination of the ways neolib-
eralism has become the dominant ideology in rural America through cor-
porate control over traditional rural practices, coupled with the religious
fervor of fundamentalist Christianity, both of which have fostered a deep
mistrust of public institutions extending to a mistrust of democracy in
general. Anti-democratic ideologies are also being reproduced through
education, as fundamentalists are exerting control over public education,
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

and where they are not academics are being replaced by job training as
corporations push for workforce development over critical thought.
Corporate control over education is part of a larger push by corporations
to influence rural land use and environmental policy in an effort to maxi-
mize accumulation and minimize cost. Rural space thereby becomes
abstracted, a term coined by Henri Lefebvre, that is, commodified and
stripped of its’ ability to act as a real, lived space. Abstraction of space has
the consequence of abstracting the mindset of those who live there, who
begin to see themselves as economic actors, existing in a commodified
environment.6
This book describes the neoliberal impact on rural education, the iden-
tification with neoliberal ideology by rural youth and the manner in which
rural communities are being reshaped to serve the neoliberal global con-
text. The research also examines the interplay between neoliberalism and
the religious fundamentalist influences that are also prevalent in rural
communities and the manners in which these dual ideologies have created
anti-democratic mindsets within rural youth and in rural communities.
Past research into rural education has provided a wealth of knowledge, but
it has yet to be fully examined within a larger context. Much of the research
is focused on individual schools and communities, which does not allow
for a global view of the consequences of neoliberalism on rural education.
This book intends to build on this knowledge and research in an effort to
examine how rural life is being recontextualized by neoliberal globaliza-
tion as well as how neoliberal ideology has been able to redefine rural
communities, reshape identities, and push rural youth to become eco-
nomic actors, while removing the knowledge needed for them to become
political actors.
In addition to building on the work by rural researchers, this book also
examines the writings of critical theorists in order to examine the relation-
ships between politics, economic processes, labor and environmental poli-
cies, education policies, and ideologies. Many of the theories presented are
based on studies urban environments, which cast the city as a site of strug-
gle, as well as a reflection of society, which includes the juxtaposition of
extreme wealth and financial centers along with low-income housing and
pockets of extreme poverty. However, rural areas are undergoing the same
strategies and struggles, yet the research is not as present. Corporate
resource extractors are making tremendous profits while wages for rural
workers decrease, people move away, and communities decline. Much of
this can be tied to the urban-rural dynamic, wherein rural areas are
6 1 INTRODUCTION

s­ ubjugated by the urban, despite the urban being dependent on the rural
for resources. There is an increasing separation in urban and rural research,
notably when examining globalization and its’ consequences, despite the
fact that urban and rural environments are facing the same issues stem-
ming from the same causes, yet rural issues are often marginalized and the
rural experience ignored.
This book does not employ any specific form of traditional research
methodology; rather it uses critical social theory and critical geography in
order to create a conceptual analysis of the key structures and debates
affecting rural policy, specifically rural education policy. Rather than nar-
rowing in one question, or focusing on a single case study, it will attempt
to take the existing research in rural education, neoliberal influence on
rural communities, and the proliferation of privatization schemes affecting
urban and suburban schools. The purpose of this book is much broader
than a standard research project in that it aims to reconceptualize how
rural education, and rural communities in general are situated in the world
through analysis that expands on the work of the rural and school privati-
zation researchers. Through this effort, a clearer picture of the ways neo-
liberalism is currently affecting rural schools, and the ways it can further
influence education will emerge. It is important to note, this is not a
­criticism of the previous work done, nor is it meant to imply the analyses
are shortsighted. Rather, the many, various studies and ideas that have
been created will be taken into account in an effort to show how they con-
nect and build on each other in order to develop a new way of placing
rural education in a global context, rather than on individual communi-
ties. In doing so, this book hopes to present a theory of how rural areas
are contested, how knowledge is created and interpreted by rural youth,
and how dominant ideologies become self-identities even if they are not
being fully acknowledged or understood by the population. This effort
requires a synthesis of the work of many rural education researchers, as
well as research in the fields of geography, sociology, economics, and cul-
tural studies. The existing body of knowledge that has been created can
show how the perceived weaknesses that make rural communities so sus-
ceptible to neoliberal and anti-democratic ideologies can be used as
strengths in creating a radical democracy for rural communities.
There are two overarching parts to this book. The first three chapters
examine the role of market and religious fundamentalism on education,
economic, and environmental policy. The final two chapters examine how
these influences are shaping physical space and creating destructive
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

i­deologies among rural populations. Chapter 2 takes a critical examination

of the privatization agenda put forth by neoliberal venture philanthro-
pists. It focuses specifically on the Rural Opportunities Consortium of
Idaho, a group that employs numerous advocates of privatization to
release research and policy reports pushing market solutions to education.
Several of these reports will be closely examined in order to show the
underlying anti-­democratic ideology and how ROCI is advocating for
defunding public schools in order to move public money into private
hands. These specific issues will be applied against the backdrop of broader
rural issues, showing how venture philanthropy is part of the greater trend
of neoliberal modernization taking place in rural America, since the begin-
nings of industrial capitalism. Chapter 3 examines the role of fundamen-
talist Christianity in shaping rural policy. Fundamentalism plays a
tremendous role in shaping rural governance, where fundamentalists have
managed to take over key roles in writing legislation regarding schools.
The chapter shows the ways fundamentalism is directly at odds with the
ideals of democracy, notably by eliminating the public sphere which is
viewed by fundamentalists as godless and sinful. Removing students from
public schools, defunding school systems, or pushing a religious curricu-
lum is providing rural youth an education in obedience and isolationism.
Neoliberal fundamentalists have been able to profit off of this religious
fervor by supplying homeschooling materials, and opening religious char-
ters. Chapter 4 examines the environmental effects of neoliberal and fun-
damentalist policy on rural areas. It examines how both ideologies shape
rural communities, and the ways education is both affected by them, and
reproduces them. Capital’s need to dominate nature, combined with fun-
damentalist Christianity pressing an end-times theology wherein preserv-
ing the environment is a meaningless venture. Under these dual ideologies,
capitalism takes on a sacred quality wherein any space not being used for
production is profane, and must be dominated, converted, and commodi-
fied in order to become sacred. The chapter will conclude with a descrip-
tion of a new direction for rural environmental education, which focuses
on decommodifying nature, examining the sociopolitical aspects of eco-
logical crises, as well as the scientific ones, and providing students the
opportunity to engage with their communities to reclaim nature and
reshape it in a manner that improves quality of life for all. Chapter 5
applies a critical geographic lens to existing literature in spatial production
and research in rural education to create a more focused understanding of
the ways neoliberalism is shaping rural spaces. It will recontextualize much
8 1 INTRODUCTION

of the existing research in a manner that will provide an understanding of

the relationships between the way space is produced and the effects on
rural youth. The chapter will also examine the roles of schools in rural
communities as they are affected by neoliberal ideology, and how they
reproduce said neoliberal ideology in return, which is causing a decline in
the quality of life in rural communities in the United States. The chapter
will focus heavily on Neil Smith’s theories of uneven development7 and
David Harvey’s dispossession by accumulation8 to examine the ways rural
communities are “modernized” in neoliberal terms, which generally
means industrialized, with workers’ rights and environmental laws rolled
back to a minimum to ensure cheap resource extraction. Education has
played a major role in reproducing this ideology through the use of a
decontextualized standardized curriculum that favors urban and subur-
ban values. Students are groomed through education to view success as
gaining the cultural capital to leave their rural homes for bigger and better
things, moving to urban areas and participating in the global economy.
Young people who are resistant to this type of education generally become
resistant to education in general, as a lack of critical education has left
them without the ability to understand their circumstances. Many of these
young people welcome low paying jobs in resource extraction, or agri-
business as a form of resistance, not realizing, or no longer caring they are
also a part of the neoliberal system. Chapter 6 will build off the ideas put
forth in the previous four by examining the ways anti-democratic ideolo-
gies are embraced rural youth and the kinds of identities being produced.
The chapter will seek to explain why authoritarianism has been embraced
in rural America and how the ideologies that create it are being repro-
duced in rural schools, what that means for rural youth, and their reac-
tions to it. This chapter will be based heavily on the work of Erich Fromm,9
notably his discussion on the ways those without power will allow them-
selves to lose their individuality in order to overcome feelings of inade-
quacy. Neoliberalism has stripped many rural Americans of economic
power and control over their lives resulting in feelings of resentment and
anger. Without a critical education, this population has not been able to
articulate an outlet or understand their own oppression, instead lashing
out at a perceived other, whether it be a racial other, immigrants, or the
“godless”. This chapter will also examine the interconnectedness of
rural policies concerning land use and labor, as well as ways neoliberal
ideology is ingrained and reshaping the very identities of rural youth.
These neoliberal identities result in young people being increasingly
 NOTES 9

focused on selfish economic ends for themselves rather than valuing and
seeing themselves as members and protectors of their communities with a
responsibility to improve the quality of life for all community members
through embracing radical democracy. This opens the doors for agribusi-
ness, energy companies, and other corporate giants to push for lax labor
and environmental laws in an effort to extract resources, natural and
human, in as cheap a way as possible without regard for community
impacts. Finally, this book will conclude with a discussion on how educa-
tion can overcome the anti-democratic ideology and acceptance of
authoritarianism that has become so prevalent in rural America. This will
involve a reexamination of the commons, specifically common schools,
and what it means to be a rural community in the United States today.

Notes
1. Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in their Own Land (New York: The New
Press, 2016), 222.
2. Ibid., 228.
3. Amy Chozick, “Hillary Clinton Calls Many Trump Backers ‘Deplorables,’
and G.O.P. Pounces,” The New York Times, September 10, 2016, accessed
March 18, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/us/politics/
hillary-clinton-basket-of-deplorables.html.
4. Slavoj Žižek, Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbors: Against
the Double Blackmail, Brooklyn: Melville House, 2016.
5. Ibid., 71.
6. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1991.
7. Neil Smith, Uneven Development, 3rd ed., Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 2008.
8. David Harvey, The New Imperialism, New York: Oxford University Press,
2003.
9. Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom, New York: Holt, 1977.
 PART I

Consequences of Neoliberal
Corporatization
 CHAPTER 2

Corporatizing Rural Schools

Despite the fears that President Trump would install a fascist dictatorship,
it seems far more likely at this point that the xenophobic nationalism that
was so prominent in his campaign speeches was simply bluster meant to
rile up the conservative base and cause mass distractions while quietly gut-
ting labor and environmental regulations.1 Since the election, Trump has
shown to be much more likely to ramp up the neoliberal policies also in
place by putting corporate billionaires in charge of every aspect of govern-
ment. The selection of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education belies this
point, as her record shows her to be much more in the Milton Friedman
education ideology than the Bernhard Rust. DeVos has been a longtime
advocate of privatization in education, particularly through philanthropic
endeavors.2 DeVos has chaired numerous organizations that push privati-
zation, such as the Alliance for School Choice and the American Federation
for Children, the latter of which is an amalgamation of privatization
­organizations.3 She has spoken openly about her role in creating and
advancing laws to aid in her efforts: “Reforms came about as the result of
an increasing focus on helping the right people get elected, helping to
craft good legislation, helping to get it implemented once it’s passed. …At
the American Federation for Children, we work at every stage of the con-
tinuum.”4 DeVos gained access to this continuum through her many cam-
paign donations and could offer little when asked by Senator Bernie
Sanders whether or not she would have been nominated as Secretary of
Education if not for her extreme wealth.5

© The Author(s) 2018 13

J.A. Cervone, Corporatizing Rural Education,
New Frontiers in Education, Culture, and Politics,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64462-2_2
14 2 CORPORATIZING RURAL SCHOOLS

The selection of DeVos will no doubt usher in the next phase of the
corporatization of education, a phenomenon that is far from new, but is
bound to reach unprecedented levels. Public school corporatization has
been well documented and analyzed,6 though it has been mainly focused
on urban districts and, to a lesser extent, suburban districts. Rural schools,
while not immune to corporatization, have largely been left alone as they
are often too small to generate a profit. That is not to say neoliberal policy
has not greatly influenced rural communities in the USA, as labor and
environmental legislation has greatly reduced worker rights and environ-
mental protection in an effort to allow for cheaper resource extraction.7
Neoliberal ideology has crept into school curricula, but the schools and
districts themselves have not been targets of the privatization efforts wit-
nessed in urban areas, such as the creation of charters. However, this could
be changing rapidly in the near future, as venture philanthropists have
begun looking at the ways rural schools can be corporatized in an eco-
nomically efficient manner. Idaho is at the forefront of rural corporatiza-
tion, as the J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Foundation has partnered with
several privatization advocates in the creation of the ROCI.

Venture Philanthropy and School Reform

In February of 2016, Albertson began running a series of advertisements
aimed at the public school system in Idaho. The main premise of these ads
is that the public school system is not preparing students for life after high
school. This lack of preparation is often the rallying cry of privatizers, as it
is vague enough to recognize there are issues with the education system
while not identifying any actual causes. Members of the school board of
Boise, ID, along with the superintendent took issue with Albertson’s
claims, noting that the so-called lack of preparation is being defined
merely as low SAT scores, and Albertson is undermining the work and
accomplishments of teachers and students within the state.8 The superin-
tendent of the Kuna, ID school district released her own statement noting
Albertson’s “misuse of data, attacks on hard-working educators, and
manipulation of educational partners and families” were a deliberate
attempt to destroy public education in the state.9 In addition to the ads,
ROCI has also released a series of research and policy reports of varying
and rather dubious quality, which will be analyzed later in this chapter.
Before getting further into ROCI and the venture philanthropy agenda
for rural education, it is important to briefly examine the ways corporate
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is put in no ironic spirit. Shaw is the one thinker of eminence who
has consistently advanced in the same direction as that of the true
Nietzsche—namely, productive criticism of the Western morale—
while following out as poet the last implications of Ibsen and devoting
the balance of the artistic creativeness that is in him to practical
discussions.
Save in so far as the belated Romanticist in him has determined
the style, sound and attitude of his philosophy, Nietzsche is in every
respect a disciple of the materialistic decades. That which drew him
with such passion to Schopenhauer was (not that he himself or
anyone else was conscious of it) that element of Schopenhauer’s
doctrine by which he destroyed the great metaphysic and (without
meaning to do so) parodied his master Kant; that is to say, the
modification of all deep ideas of the Baroque age into tangible and
mechanistic notions. Kant speaks in inadequate words, which hide a
mighty and scarcely apprehensible intuition, an intuition of the world
as appearance or phenomenon. In Schopenhauer this becomes the
world as brain-phenomenon (Gehirnphänomen). The change-over
from tragic philosophy to philosophical plebeianism is complete. It
will be enough to cite one passage. In “The World as Will and Idea”
Schopenhauer says: “The will, as thing-in-itself, constitutes the inner,
true and indestructible essence of the man; in itself, however, it is
without consciousness. For the consciousness is conditioned by the
intellect and this is a mere accident of our being, since it is a function
of the brain, and that again (with its dependent nerves and spinal
cord) is a mere fruit, a product, nay, even a parasite of the rest of the
organism, inasmuch as it does not intervene directly in the latter’s
activities but only serves a purpose of self-preservation by regulating
its relations with the outer world.” Here we have exactly the
fundamental position of the flattest materialism. It was not for nothing
that Schopenhauer, like Rousseau before him, studied the English
sensualists. From them he learned to misread Kant in the spirit of
megalopolitan utilitarian modernity. The intellect as instrument of the
will-to-life,[459] as weapon in the struggle for existence, the ideas
brought to grotesque expression by Shaw in “Man and Superman”—
it was because this was his view of the world that Schopenhauer
became the fashionable philosopher when Darwin’s main work was
published in 1859. In contrast to Schelling, Hegel and Fichte, he was
a philosopher, and the only philosopher, whose metaphysical
propositions could be absorbed with ease by intellectual mediocrity.
The clarity of which he was so proud threatened at every moment to
reveal itself as triviality. While retaining enough of formula to produce
an atmosphere of profundity and exclusiveness, he presented the
civilized view of the world complete and assimilable. His system is
anticipated Darwinism, and the speech of Kant and the concepts of
the Indians are simply clothing. In his book “Ueber den Willen in der
Natur” (1835) we find already the struggle for self-preservation in
Nature, the human intellect as master-weapon in that struggle and
sexual love as unconscious selection according to biological interest.
[460]

It is the view that Darwin (via Malthus) brought to bear with

irresistible success in the field of zoology. The economic origin of
Darwinism is shown by the fact that the system deduced from the
similarities between men and the higher animals ceases to fit even at
the level of the plant-world and becomes positively absurd as soon
as it is seriously attempted to apply it with its will-tendency (natural
selection, mimicry) to primitive organic forms.[461] Proof, to the
Darwinian, means to the ordering and pictorial presentation of a
selection of facts so that they conform to his historico-dynamic basic
feeling of “Evolution.” Darwinism—that is to say, that totality of very
varied and discrepant ideas, in which the common factor is merely
the application of the causality principle to living things, which
therefore is a method and not a result—was known in all details to
the 18th Century. Rousseau was championing the ape-man theory
as early as 1754. What Darwin originated is only the “Manchester
School” system, and it is this latent political element in it that
accounts for its popularity.
The spiritual unity of the century is manifest enough here. From
Schopenhauer to Shaw, everyone has been, without being aware of
it, bringing the same principle into form. Everyone (including even
those who, like Hebbel, knew nothing of Darwin) is a derivative of the
evolution-idea—and of the shallow civilized and not the deep
Goethian form of it at that—whether he issues it with a biological or
an economic imprint. There is evolution, too, in the evolution-idea
itself, which is Faustian through and through, which displays (in
sharpest contrast to Aristotle’s timeless entelechy-idea) all our
passionate urgency towards infinite future, our will and sense of aim
which is so immanent in, so specific to, the Faustian spirit as to be
the a priori form rather than the discovered principle of our Nature-
picture. And in the evolution of evolution we find the same change
taking place as elsewhere, the turn of the Culture to the Civilization.
In Goethe evolution is upright, in Darwin it is flat; in Goethe organic,
in Darwin mechanical; in Goethe an experience and emblem, in
Darwin a matter of cognition and law. To Goethe evolution meant
inward fulfilment, to Darwin it meant “Progress.” Darwin’s struggle for
existence, which he read into Nature and not out of it, is only the
plebeian form of that primary feeling which in Shakespeare’s
tragedies moves the great realities against one another; but what
Shakespeare inwardly saw, felt and actualized in his figures as
destiny, Darwinism comprehends as causal connexion and
formulates as a superficial system of utilities. And it is this system
and not this primary feeling that is the basis of the utterances of
“Zarathustra,” the tragedy of “Ghosts,” the problems of the “Ring of
the Nibelungs.” Only, it was with terror that Schopenhauer, the first of
his line, perceived what his own knowledge meant—that is the root
of his pessimism, and the “Tristan” music of his adherent Wagner is
its highest expression—whereas the late men, and foremost among
them Nietzsche, face it with enthusiasm, though it is true, the
enthusiasm is sometimes rather forced.
Nietzsche’s breach with Wagner—that last product of the German
spirit over which greatness broods—marks his silent change of
school-allegiance, his unconscious step from Schopenhauer to
Darwin, from the metaphysical to the physiological formulation of the
same world-feeling, from the denial to the affirmation of the aspect
that in fact is common to both, the one seeing as will-to-life what the
other regards as struggle for existence. In his “Schopenhauer als
Erzieher” he still means by evolution an inner ripening, but the
Superman is the product of evolution as machinery. And
“Zarathustra” is ethically the outcome of an unconscious protest
against “Parsifal”—which artistically entirely governs it—of the rivalry
of one evangelist for another.
 But Nietzsche was also a Socialist without knowing it. Not his
catchwords, but his instincts, were Socialistic, practical, directed to
that welfare of mankind that Goethe and Kant never spent a thought
upon. Materialism, Socialism and Darwinism are only artificially and
on the surface separable. It was this that made it possible for Shaw
in the third act of “Man and Superman” (one of the most important
and significant of the works that issued from the transition) to obtain,
by giving just a small and indeed perfectly logical turn to the
tendencies of “master-morale” and the production of the Superman,
the specific maxims of his own Socialism. Here Shaw was only
expressing with remorseless clarity and full consciousness of the
commonplace, what the uncompleted portion of the Zarathustra
would have said with Wagnerian theatricality and woolly
romanticism. All that we are concerned to discover in Nietzsche’s
reasoning is its practical bases and consequences, which proceed of
necessity from the structure of modern public life. He moves
amongst vague ideas like “new values,” “Superman,” “Sinn der
Erde,” and declines or fears to shape them more precisely. Shaw
does it. Nietzsche observes that the Darwinian idea of the Superman
evokes the notion of breeding, and stops there, leaves it at a
sounding phrase. Shaw pursues the question—for there is no object
in talking about it if nothing is going to be done about it—asks how it
is to be achieved, and from that comes to demand the transformation
of mankind into a stud-farm. But this is merely the conclusion implicit
in the Zarathustra, which Nietzsche was not bold enough, or was too
fastidious, to draw. If we do talk of systematic breeding—a
completely materialistic and utilitarian notion—we must be prepared
to answer the questions, who shall breed what, where and how? But
Nietzsche, too romantic to face the very prosaic social
consequences and to expose poetic ideas to the test of facts, omits
to say that his whole doctrine, as a derivative of Darwinism,
presupposes Socialism and, moreover, socialistic compulsion as the
means; that any systematic breeding of a class of higher men
requires as condition precedent a strictly socialistic ordering of
society; and that this “Dionysiac” idea, as it involves a common
action and is not simply the private affair of detached thinkers, is
democratic, turn it how you may. It is the climax of the ethical force of
“Thou shalt”; to impose upon the world the form of his will, Faustian
man sacrifices even himself.
The breeding of the Superman follows from the notion of
“selection.” Nietzsche was an unconscious pupil of Darwin from the
time that he wrote aphorisms, but Darwin himself had remoulded the
evolution-ideas of the 18th Century according to the Malthusian
tendencies of political economy, which he projected on the higher
animal-world. Malthus had studied the cotton industry in Lancashire,
and already in 1857 we have the whole system, only applied to men
instead of to beasts, in Buckle’s History of English Civilization.
In other words, the “master-morale” of this last of the Romantics is
derived—strangely perhaps but very significantly—from that source
of all intellectual modernity, the atmosphere of the English factory.
The Machiavellism that commended itself to Nietzsche as a
Renaissance phenomenon is something closely (one would have
supposed, obviously) akin to Darwin’s notion of “mimicry.” It is in fact
that of which Marx (that other famous disciple of Malthus) treats in
his Das Kapital, the bible of political (not ethical) Socialism.[462] That
is the genealogy of “Herrenmoral.” The Will-to-Power, transferred to
the realistic, political and economic domain, finds its expression in
Shaw’s “Major Barbara.” No doubt Nietzsche, as a personality,
stands at the culmination of this series of ethical philosophers, but
here Shaw the party politician reaches up to his level as a thinker.
The will-to-power is to-day represented by the two poles of public life
—the worker-class and the big money-and-brain men—far more
effectually than it ever was by a Borgia. The millionaire Undershaft of
Shaw’s best comedy is a Superman, though Nietzsche the
Romanticist would not have recognized his ideal in such a figure.
Nietzsche is for ever speaking of transvaluations of all values, of a
philosophy of the “Future” (which, incidentally, is merely the Western,
and not the Chinese or the African future), but when the mists of his
thought do come in from the Dionysiac distance and condense into
any tangible form, the will-to-power appears to him in the guise of
dagger-and-poison and never in that of strike and “deal.” And yet he
says that the idea first came to him when he saw the Prussian
regiments marching to battle in 1870.
 The drama, in this epoch, is no longer poetry in the old sense of
the Culture days, but a form of agitation, debate and demonstration.
The stage has become a moralizing institution. Nietzsche himself
often thought of putting his ideas in the dramatic form. Wagner’s
Nibelung poetry, more especially the first draft of it (1850), expresses
his social-revolutionary ideas, and even when, after a circuitous
course under influences artistic and non-artistic, he has completed
the “Ring,” his Siegfried is still a symbol of the Fourth Estate, his
Brünhilde still the “free woman.” The sexual selection of which the
“Origin of Species” enunciated the theory in 1859, was finding its
musical expression at the very same time in the third act of
“Siegfried” and in “Tristan.” It is no accident that Wagner, Hebbel and
Ibsen, all practically simultaneously, set to work to dramatize the
Nibelung material. Hebbel, making the acquaintance in Paris of
Engels’s writings, expresses (in a letter of April 2, 1844) his surprise
at finding that his own conceptions of the social principle of his age,
which he was then intending to exemplify in a drama Zu irgend einer
Zeit, coincided precisely with those of the future “Communist
Manifesto.” And, upon first making the acquaintance of
Schopenhauer (letter of March 19, 1857), he is equally surprised by
the affinity that he finds between the Welt als Wille und Vorstellung
and tendencies upon which he had based his Holofernes and his
Herodes und Mariamne. Hebbel’s diaries, of which the most
important portion belongs to the years 1835-1845, were (though he
did not know it) one of the deepest philosophical efforts of the
century. It would be no surprise to find whole sentences of it in
Nietzsche, who never knew him and did not always come up to his
level.
The actual and effective philosophy of the 19th Century, then, has
as its one genuine theme the Will-to-Power. It considers this Will-to-
Power in civilized-intellectual, ethical, or social forms and presents it
as will-to-life, as life-force, as practical-dynamical principle, as idea,
and as dramatic figure. (The period that is closed by Shaw
corresponds to the period 350-250 in the Classical.) The rest of the
19th-Century philosophy is, to use Schopenhauer’s phrase,
“professors’ philosophy by philosophy-professors.” The real
landmarks are these:
 1819. Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. The will
to life is for the first time put as the only reality (original force,
Urkraft); but, older idealist influences still being potent, it is put
there to be negatived (zur Verneinung empfohlen).
1836. Schopenhauer, Ueber den Willen in der Natur. Anticipation
of Darwinism, but in metaphysical disguise.
1840. Proud’hon, Qu’est-ce que la Propriété, basis of
Anarchism. Comte, Cours de philosophic positive; the formula
“order and progress.”
1841. Hebbel, “Judith,” first dramatic conception of the “New
Woman” and the “Superman.” Feuerbach, Das Wesen des
Christenthums.
1844. Engels, Umriss einer Kritik des Nationalökonomie,
foundation of the materialistic conception of history. Hebbel, Maria
Magdalena, the first social drama.
1847. Marx, Misère de la Philosophie (synthesis of Hegel and
Malthus). These are the epochal years in which economics begins
to dominate social ethic and biology.
1848. Wagner’s “Death of Siegfried”; Siegfried as social-ethical
revolutionary, the Fafnir hoard as symbol of Capitalism.
1850. Wagner’s Kunst und Klima; the sexual problem.
1850-1858. Wagner’s, Hebbel’s and Ibsen’s Nibelung poetry.
1859 (year of symbolic coincidences). Darwin, “Origin of
Species” (application of economics to biology). Wagner’s “Tristan.”
Marx, Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie.
1863. J. S. Mill, “Utilitarianism.”
1865. Dühring, Wert des Lebens—a work which is rarely heard
of, but which exercised the greatest influence upon the succeeding
generation.
1867. Ibsen, “Brand.” Marx, Das Kapital.
1878. Wagner “Parsifal.” First dissolution of materialism into
mysticism.
1879. Ibsen “Nora.”
1881. Nietzsche, Morgenröthe; transition from Schopenhauer to
Darwin, morale as biological phenomenon.
1883. Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra; the Will-to-Power, but
in Romantic disguise.
 1886. Ibsen, “Rosmersholm.” Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und
Böse.
1887-8. Strindberg, “Fadren” and “Fröken Julie.”
From 1890 the conclusion of the epoch approaches. The
religious works of Strindberg and the symbolical of Ibsen.
1896. Ibsen, “John Gabriel Borkman.” Nietzsche, Uebermensch.
1898. Strindberg, “Till Damascus.”
From 1900 the last phenomena.
1903. Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter; the only serious
attempt to revive Kant within this epoch, by referring him to
Wagner and Ibsen.
1903. Shaw, “Man and Superman”; final synthesis of Darwin and
Nietzsche.
1905. Shaw, “Major Barbara”; the type of the Superman referred
back to its economic origins.
With this, the ethical period exhausts itself as the metaphysical had
done. Ethical Socialism, prepared by Fichte, Hegel, and Humboldt,
was at its zenith of passionate greatness about the middle of the
19th Century, and at the end thereof it had reached the stage of
repetitions. The 20th Century, while keeping the word Socialism, has
replaced an ethical philosophy that only Epigoni suppose to be
capable of further development, by a praxis of economic everyday
questions. The ethical disposition of the West will remain “socialistic”
but its theory has ceased to be a problem. And there remains the
possibility of a third and last stage of Western philosophy, that of a
physiognomic scepticism. The secret of the world appears
successively as a knowledge problem, a valuation problem and a
form problem. Kant saw Ethics as an object of knowledge, the 19th
Century saw it as an object of valuation. The Sceptic would deal with
both simply as the historical expression of a Culture.
 CHAPTER XI
FAUSTIAN AND APOLLINIAN
NATURE-KNOWLEDGE
 CHAPTER XI

FAUSTIAN AND APOLLINIAN NATURE-

KNOWLEDGE
 I
Helmholtz observed, in a lecture of 1869 that has become famous,
that “the final aim of Natural Science is to discover the motions
underlying all alteration, and the motive forces thereof; that is, to
resolve itself into Mechanics.” What this resolution into mechanics
means is the reference of all qualitative impressions to fixed
quantitative base-values, that is, to the extended and to change of
place therein. It means, further—if we bear in mind the opposition of
becoming and become, form and law, image and notion—the
referring of the seen Nature-picture to the imagined picture of a
single numerically and structurally measurable Order. The specific
tendency of all Western mechanics is towards an intellectual
conquest by measurement, and it is therefore obliged to look for the
essence of the phenomenon in a system of constant elements that
are susceptible of full and inclusive appreciation by measurement, of
which Helmholtz distinguishes motion (using the word in its everyday
sense) as the most important.
To the physicist this definition appears unambiguous and
exhaustive, but to the sceptic who has followed out the history of this
scientific conviction, it is very far from being either. To the physicist,
present-day mechanics is a logical system of clear, uniquely-
significant concepts and of simple, necessary relations; while to the
other it is a picture distinctive of the structure of the West-European
spirit, though he admits that the picture is consistent in the highest
degree and most impressively convincing. It is self-evident that no
practical results and discoveries can prove anything as to the “truth”
of the theory, the picture.[463] For most people, indeed, “mechanics”
appears as the self-evident synthesis of Nature-impressions. But it
merely appears to be so. For what is motion? Is not the postulate
that everything qualitative is reducible to the motion of unalterably-
alike mass-points, essentially Faustian and not common to
humanity? Archimedes, for example, did not feel himself obliged to
transpose the mechanics that he saw into a mental picture of
motions. Is motion generally a purely mechanical quantity? Is it a
word for a visual experience or is it a notion derived from that
experience? Is it the number that is found by measurement of
experimentally-produced facts, or the picture that is subjected to that
number, that is signified by it? And if one day physics should really
succeed in reaching its supposed aim, in devising a system of law-
governed “motions” and of efficient forces behind them into which
everything whatsoever appreciable by the senses could be fitted—
would it thereby have achieved “knowledge” of that which occurs, or
even made one step towards this achievement? Yet is the form-
language of mechanics one whit the less dogmatic on that account?
Is it not, on the contrary, a vessel of the myth like the root-words, not
proceeding from experience but shaping it and, in this case, shaping
it with all possible rigour? What is force? What is a cause? What is a
process? Nay, even on the basis of its own definitions, has physics a
specific problem at all? Has it an object that counts as such for all
the centuries? Has it even one unimpeachable imagination-unit, with
reference to which it may express its results?
The answer may be anticipated. Modern physics, as a science, is
an immense system of indices in the form of names and numbers
whereby we are enabled to work with Nature as with a machine.[464]
As such, it may have an exactly-definable end. But as a piece of
history, all made up of destinies and incidents in the lives of the men
who have worked in it and in the course of research itself, physics is,
in point of object, methods and results alike an expression and
actualization of a Culture, an organic and evolving element in the
essence of that Culture, and every one of its results is a symbol.
That which physics—which exists only in the waking-consciousness
of the Culture-man—thinks it finds in its methods and in its results
was already there, underlying and implicit in, the choice and manner
of its search. Its discoveries, in virtue of their imagined content (as
distinguished from their printable formulæ), have been of a purely
mythic nature, even in minds so prudent as those of J. B. Mayer,
Faraday and Hertz. In every Nature-law, physically exact as it may
be, we are called upon to distinguish between the nameless number
and the naming of it, between the plain fixation of limits[465] and their
theoretical interpretation. The formulæ represent general logical
values, pure numbers—that is to say, objective space—and
boundary-elements. But formulæ are dumb. The expression s = ½gt²
means nothing at all unless one is able mentally to connect the
letters with particular words and their symbolism. But the moment we
clothe the dead signs in such words, give them flesh, body and life,
and, in sum, a perceptible significance in the world, we have
overstepped the limits of a mere order. θεωρία means image, vision,
and it is this that makes a Nature-law out of a figure-and-letter
formula. Everything exact is in itself meaningless, and every physical
observation is so constituted that it proves the basis of a certain
number of imaged presuppositions; and the effect of its successful
issue is to make these presuppositions more convincing than ever.
Apart from these, the result consists merely of empty figures. But in
fact we do not and cannot get apart from them. Even if an
investigator puts on one side every hypothesis that he knows as
such, as soon as he sets his thought to work on the supposedly clear
task, he is not controlling but being controlled by the unconscious
form of it, for in living activity he is always a man of his Culture, of his
age, of his school and of his tradition. Faith and “knowledge” are only
two species of inner certitude, but of the two faith is the older and it
dominates all the conditions of knowing, be they never so exact. And
thus it is theories and not pure numbers that are the support of all
natural science. The unconscious longing for that genuine science
which (be it repeated) is peculiar to the spirit of Culture-man sets
itself to apprehend, to penetrate, and to comprise within its grasp the
world-image of Nature. Mere industrious measuring for measuring’s
sake is not and never has been more than a delight for little minds.
Numbers may only be the key of the secret, no more. No significant
man would ever have spent himself on them for their own sake.
Kant, it is true, says in a well-known passage: “I maintain that in
each and every discipline of natural philosophy it is only possible to
find as much of true science as is to be found of mathematics
therein.” What Kant has in mind here is pure delimitation in the field
of the become, so far as law and formula, number and system can
(at any particular stage) be seen in that field. But a law without
words, a law, consisting merely of a series of figures read off an
instrument, cannot even as an intellectual operation be completely
effective in this pure state. Every savant’s experiment, be it what it
may, is at the same time an instance of the kind of symbolism that
rules in the savant’s ideation. All Laws formulated in words are
Orders that have been activated and vitalized, filled with the very
essence of the one—and only the one—Culture. As to the
“necessity” which is a postulate in all exact research, here too we
have to consider two kinds of necessity, viz., a necessity within the
spiritual and living (for it is Destiny that the history of every individual
research-act takes its course when, where and how it does) and a
necessity within the known (for which the current Western name is
Causality). If the pure numbers of a physical formula represent a
causal necessity, the existence, the birth and the life-duration of a
theory are a Destiny.
Every fact, even the simplest, contains ab initio a theory. A fact is
a uniquely-occurring impression upon a waking being, and
everything depends on whether that being, the being for whom it
occurs or did occur, is or was Classical or Western, Gothic or
Baroque. Compare the effect produced by a flash of lightning on a
sparrow and on an alert physical investigator, and think how much
more is contained in the observer’s “fact” than in the sparrow’s. The
modern physicist is too ready to forget that even words like quantity,
position, process, change of state and body represent specifically
Western images. These words excite and these images mirror a
feeling of significances, too subtle for verbal description,
incommunicable to Classical or to Magian or to other mankind as like
subtleties of their thought and feeling are incommunicable to us. And
the character of scientific facts as such—that is, the mode of their
becoming known—is completely governed by this feeling; and if so,
then also a fortiori such intricate intellectual notions as work, tension,
quantity of energy, quantity of heat, probability,[466] every one of
which contains a veritable scientific myth of its own. We think of such
conceptual images as ensuing from quite unprejudiced research
and, subject to certain conditions, definitively valid. But a first-rate
scientist of the time of Archimedes would have declared himself,
after a thorough study of our modern theoretical physics, quite
unable to comprehend how anyone could assert such arbitrary,
grotesque and involved notions to be Science, still less how they
could be claimed as necessary consequences from actual facts.
“The scientifically-justified conclusions,” he would have said, “are
really so-and-so”; and thereupon he would have evolved, on the
basis of the same elements made “facts” by his eyes and his mind,
theories that our physicists would listen to with amazed ridicule.
For what, after all, are the basic notions that have been evolved
with inward certainty of logic in the field of our physics? Polarized
light-rays, errant ions, flying and colliding gas-particles, magnetic
fields, electric currents and waves—are they not one and all
Faustian visions, closely akin to Romanesque ornamentation, the
upthrust of Gothic architecture, the Viking’s voyaging into unknown
seas, the longings of Columbus and Copernicus? Did not this world
of forms and pictures grow up in perfect tune with the contemporary
arts of perspective oil-painting and instrumental music? Are they not,
in short, our passionate directedness, our passion of the third
dimension, coming to symbolic expression in the imagined Nature-
picture as in the soul-image?

II

It follows then that all “knowing” of Nature, even the exactest, is

based on a religious faith. The pure mechanics that the physicist has
set before himself as the end-form to which it is his task (and the
purpose of all this imagination-machinery) to reduce Nature,
presupposes a dogma—namely, the religious world-picture of the
Gothic centuries. For it is from this world-picture that the physics
peculiar to the Western intellect is derived. There is no science that
is without unconscious presuppositions of this kind, over which the
researcher has no control and which can be traced back to the
earliest days of the awakening Culture. There is no Natural science
without a precedent Religion. In this point there is no distinction
between the Catholic and the Materialistic views of the world—both
say the same thing in different words. Even atheistic science has
religion; modern mechanics exactly reproduces the
contemplativeness of Faith.
When the Ionic reaches its height in Thales or the Baroque in
Bacon, and man has come to the urban stage of his career, his self-
assurance begins to look upon critical science, in contrast to the
more primitive religion of the countryside, as the superior attitude
towards things, and, holding as he thinks the only key to real
knowledge, to explain religion itself empirically and psychologically—
in other words, to “conquer” it with the rest. Now, the history of the
higher Cultures shows that “science” is a transitory spectacle,[467]
belonging only to the autumn and winter of their life-course, and that
in the cases of the Classical, the Indian, the Chinese and the
Arabian thought alike a few centuries suffice for the complete
exhaustion of its possibilities. Classical science faded out between
the battle of Cannæ and that of Actium and made way for the world-
outlook of the “second religiousness.”[468] And from this it is possible
to foresee a date at which our Western scientific thought shall have
reached the limit of its evolution.
There is no justification for assigning to this intellectual form-world
the primacy over others. Every critical science, like every myth and
every religious belief, rests upon an inner certitude. Various as the
creatures of this certitude may be, both in structure and in sound,
they are not different in basic principle. Any reproach, therefore,
levelled by Natural science at Religion is a boomerang. We are
presumptuous and no less in supposing that we can ever set up
“The Truth” in the place of “anthropomorphic” conceptions, for no
other conceptions but these exist at all. Every idea that is possible at
all is a mirror of the being of its author. The statement that “man
created God in his own image,” valid for every historical religion, is
not less valid for every physical theory, however firm its reputed
basis of fact. Classical scientists conceived of light as consisting in
corporeal particles proceeding from the source of light to the eye of
the beholder. For the Arabian thought, even at the stage of the
Jewish-Persian academies of Edessa, Resaïna and Pombaditha
(and for Porphyry too), the colours and forms of things were
evidenced without the intervention of a medium, being brought in a
magic and “spiritual” way to the seeing-power which was conceived
as substantial and resident in the eyeball. This was the doctrine[469]
taught by Ibn-al-Haitan, by Avicenna and by the “Brothers of
Sincerity.”[470] And the idea of light as a force, an impetus, was
current even from about 1300 amongst the Paris Occamists who
centred on Albert of Saxony, Buridan and Oresme the discoverer of
co-ordinate geometry. Each Culture has made its own set of images
of processes, which are true only for itself and only alive while it is
itself alive and actualizing its possibilities. When a Culture is at its
end and the creative element—the imaginative power, the symbolism
—is extinct, there are left “empty” formulæ, skeletons of dead
systems, which men of another Culture read literally, feel to be
without meaning or value and either mechanically store up or else
despise and forget. Numbers, formulæ, laws mean nothing and are
nothing. They must have a body, and only a living mankind—
projecting its livingness into them and through them, expressing itself
by them, inwardly making them its own—can endow them with that.
And thus there is no absolute science of physics, but only individual
sciences that come, flourish and go within the individual Cultures.
The “Nature” of Classical man found its highest artistic emblem in
the nude statue, and out of it logically there grew up a static of
bodies, a physics of the near. The Arabian Culture owned the
arabesque and the cavern-vaulting of the mosque, and out of this
world-feeling there issued Alchemy with its ideas of mysterious
efficient substantialities like the “philosophical mercury,” which is
neither a material nor a property but some thing that underlies the
coloured existence of metals and can transmute one metal into
another.[471] And the outcome of Faustian man’s Nature idea was a
dynamic of unlimited span, a physics of the distant. To the Classical
therefore belong the conceptions of matter and form, to the Arabian
(quite Spinozistically) the idea of substances with visible or secret
attributes,[472] and to the Faustian the idea of force and mass.
Apollinian theory is a quiet meditation, Magian a silent knowledge of
Alchemy the means of Grace (even here the religious source of
mechanics is to be discerned), and the Faustian is from the very
outset a working hypothesis.[473] The Greek asked, what is the
essence of visible being? We ask, what possibility is there of
mastering the invisible motive-forces of becoming? For them,
contented absorption in the visible; for us, masterful questioning of
Nature and methodical experiment.
As with the formulation of problems and the methods of dealing
with them, so also with the basic concepts. They are symbols in
each case of the one and only the one Culture. The Classical root-
words ἄπειρον, ἀρχή, μορφή, ὕλη, are not translatable into our
speech. To render ἀρχή by “prime-stuff” is to eliminate its Apollinian
connotation, to make the hollow shell of the word sound an alien
note. That which Classical man saw before him as “motion” in space,
he understood as ἀλλοίωσις, change of position of bodies; we, from
the way in which we experience motion, have deduced the concept
of a process, a “going forward,” thereby expressing and emphasizing
that element of directional energy which our thought necessarily
predicates in the courses of Nature. The Classical critic of Nature
took the visible juxtaposition of states as the original diversity, and
specified the famous four elements of Empedocles—namely, earth
as the rigid-corporeal, water as the non-rigid-corporeal and air as the
incorporeal, together with fire, which is so much the strongest of all
optical impressions that the Classical spirit could have no doubt of its
bodiliness. The Arabian “elements,” on the contrary, are ideal and
implicit in the secret constitutions and constellations which define the
phenomenon of things for the eye. If we try to get a little nearer to
this feeling, we shall find that the opposition of rigid and fluid means
something quite different for the Syrian from what it means for the
Aristotelian Greek, the latter seeing in it different degrees of
bodiliness and the former different magic attributes. With the former
therefore arises the image of the chemical element as a sort of
magic substance that a secret causality makes to appear out of
things (and to vanish into them again) and which is subject even to
the influence of the stars. In Alchemy there is deep scientific doubt
as to the plastic actuality of things—of the “somata” of Greek
mathematicians, physicists and poets—and it dissolves and destroys
the soma in the hope of finding its essence. It is an iconoclastic
movement just as truly as those of Islam and the Byzantine Bogomils
were so. It reveals a deep disbelief in the tangible figure of
phenomenal Nature, the figure of her that to the Greek was
sacrosanct. The conflict concerning the person of Christ which
manifested itself in all the early Councils and led to the Nestorian
and Monophysite secessions is an alchemistic problem.[474] It would
never have occurred to a Classical physicist to investigate things
while at the same time denying or annihilating their perceivable form.
And for that very reason there was no Classical chemistry, any more
than there was any theorizing on the substance as against the
manifestations of Apollo.
The rise of a chemical method of the Arabian style betokens a new
world-consciousness. The discovery of it, which at one blow made
an end of Apollinian natural science, of mechanical statics, is linked
with the enigmatic name of Hermes Trismegistus,[475] who is
supposed to have lived in Alexandria at the same time as Plotinus
and Diophantus. Similarly it was just at the time of the definite
emancipation of the Western mathematic by Newton and Leibniz that
the Western chemistry[476] was freed from Arabic form by Stahl
(1660-1734) and his Phlogiston theory. Chemistry and mathematic
alike became pure analysis. Already Paracelsus (1493-1541) had
transformed the Magian effort to make gold into a pharmaceutical
science—a transformation in which one cannot but surmise an
altered world-feeling. Then Robert Boyle (1626-1691) devised the
analytical method and with it the Western conception of the Element.
But the ensuing changes must not be misinterpreted. That which is
called the founding of modern chemistry and has Stahl and Lavoisier
at its turning-points is anything but a building-up of “chemical” ideas,
in so far as chemistry implies the alchemistic outlook on Nature. It is
in fact the end of genuine chemistry, its dissolution into the
comprehensive system of pure dynamic, its assimilation into the
mechanical outlook which the Baroque age had established through
Galileo and Newton. The elements of Empedocles designate states
of bodiliness (bezeichnen ein körperliches Sichverhalten) but the
elements of Lavoisier, whose combustion-theory followed promptly
upon the isolation of oxygen in 1771, designate energy-systems
accessible to human will, “rigid” and “fluid” becoming mere terms to
describe tension-relations between molecules. By our analysis and
synthesis, Nature is not merely asked or persuaded but forced. The
modern chemistry is a chapter of the modern physics of Deed.
What we call Statics, Chemistry and Dynamics—words that as
used in modern science are merely traditional distinctions without
deeper meaning—are really the respective physical systems of the
Apollinian, Magian and Faustian souls, each of which grew up in its
own Culture and was limited as to validity to the same.
Corresponding to these sciences, each to each, we have the
mathematics of Euclidean geometry, Algebra and Higher Analysis,
and the arts of statue, arabesque and fugue. We may differentiate
these three kinds of physics (bearing in mind of course that other
Cultures may and in fact do give rise to other kinds) by their
standpoints towards the problem of motion, and call them
mechanical orderings of states, secret forces and processes
respectively.

III

Now, the tendency of human thought (which is always causally

disposed) to reduce the image of Nature to the simplest possible
quantitative form-units that can be got by causal reasoning,
measuring and counting—in a word, by mechanical differentiation—
leads necessarily in Classical, Western and every other possible
physics, to an atomic theory. Of Indian and Chinese science we
know hardly more than the fact they once existed, and the Arabian is
so complicated that even now it seems to defy presentation. But we
do know our own and the Apollinian sciences well enough to
observe, here too, a deeply symbolical opposition.
The Classical atoms are miniature forms, the Western minimal
quanta, and quanta, too, of energy. On the one hand perceptibility,
sensuous nearness, and on the other, abstractness are the basic
conditions of the idea. The atomistic notions of modern physics—
which include not only the Daltonian or “chemical” atom but also the
electrons[477] and the quanta of thermodynamics—make more and
more demands upon that truly Faustian power of inner vision which
many branches of higher mathematics (such as the Non-Euclidean
geometries and the Theory of Groups) postulate, and which is not at
the disposal of laymen. A quantum of action is an extension-element
conceived without regard to sensible quality of any kind, which
eludes all relation with sight and touch, for which the expression
“shape” has no meaning whatever—something therefore which
would be utterly inconceivable to a Classical researcher. Such,
already, were Leibniz’s “Monads”[478] and such, superlatively, are the
constituents of Rutherford’s picture of the atom as positively-charged