SOURCE: “The Enemy Versus the Zeitgeist: Cultural Criticism,” in The Enemy Opposite: The Outlaw Criticism of Wyndham Lewis, Ohio University Press, 1988, pp. 165-90.

THE ENEMY VERSUS MOSZKOWSKI

To explain his temerity in dealing with matters outside the arts, Lewis writes: “It has been suggested … that I should be better advised to ignore such things [as mathematical physics], and only attend to what happens in my own field. Now that I should be delighted to do if these different worlds of physics, philosophy, politics and art were (as, according to my view, they should be) rigidly separated” (TWM 9-10). But in the time-cult, of course, these worlds are not distinct; in fact, they are so full of parallels and influences as to seem not just unified but uniform. And so, Lewis finds, his analysis of the state of the arts must expand into an analysis of a culture.

In his concentrated attack on the time-cult in Time and Western Man, Lewis considers the theories of culture presented in three books: Spengler's Decline of the West, Whitehead's Science and the Modern World, and Alexander Moszkowski's Einstein, The Searcher. Spengler, with whom Lewis deals at length, and whom he calls the “philosopher of the Zeitgeist,” sees politics as the basis of culture; Whitehead sees science as the source not only of the modern world but of all cultures; Moszkowski, in his praise of Einstein's genius, indirectly suggests that philosophy (which is itself sometimes political) lies beneath even scientific theories. Each of these men serves Lewis as a spokesman for the primacy of one of the three main aspects of what he calls culture's “theoretic plane”—politics, physics, and philosophy. By examining their views, Lewis suggests and questions several different explanations of the ties among these fields. In each case he finds himself in partial agreement at the same time that he recognizes the inadequacy of any simple solution to a highly complex problem. And in each case, he hints at what his own account would be but backs off from any direct statements.

The discussion of Moszkowski comes first in Time and Western Man, but it is quite possibly the last Lewis wrote. It appears in the “Preface” to counter criticism of Lewis's interdisciplinary approach—as a tentative justification for speaking of a scientist like Einstein as if his ideas were like a philosopher's or an artist's. So in a sense it encloses the critique of the time-cult. Although it is short (much shorter than the chapters on Spengler), and although Lewis does not regard Moszkowski (unlike Whitehead) as of much real importance, this discussion nevertheless introduces in a particularly succinct form all of the major issues Lewis will confront every time he considers the nature of cultures. It also raises many of the questions Lewis will find impossible to answer in his own tentative solutions.

Moszkowski is not himself especially interested in the sources of the Zeitgeist, although he tacitly assumes its existence in his book about Einstein. But he does make a few comments Lewis finds useful in dealing with the relationship between scientific discoveries and contemporary political and philosophical theories. The question is this: Suppose we should find that a scientific theory significantly parallels a philosophical or political system current at the time of the discoveries on which that theory is built. Does such a parallel suggest that the scientist's work has been somehow directed by nonscientific concerns? If so, to what extent does the role of these external influences undermine the validity—the truth—of the discoveries or of the theories? The answer Moszkowski suggests in the case of Einstein seems to Lewis simultaneously compelling and repellent: he finds he must agree with Moszkowski's description of the situation, but he is torn between agreeing and disagreeing with his interpretation.

According to Moszkowski, Lewis tells us, scientific discovery and philosophy “‘are intimately interwoven with one another, and are only different aspects of one and the same process.’” Bergson's philosophy and the discoveries of Planck and Einstein, Moszkowski thinks, are so similar not by coincidence, but because they result from “‘a demand of the time, exacting that the claims of a new principle of thought be recognized.’” Moreover, science parallels politics: “‘[Einstein's] principle of relativity is tantamount to a regulative world-principle that has left a mighty mark on the thought of our times. We have lived to see the death of absolutism: the relativity of the constituents of political power, and their mutability according to view-point and current tendencies, become manifest to us … the world was far enough advanced in its views for a final achievement of thought which could demolish the absolute also from the mathematico-physical aspect’” (TWM 15, 16; Lewis's ellipses).¹ To Moszkowski, these similarities apparently mean that a certain kind of scientific idea can best succeed when society is ready for it, or as he says, when “the time is ripe.” He clearly does not think that science is made any less “true” by its affinities with less exact disciplines. On the contrary, he seems to regard the analogues to relativity theory as evidence of Einstein's genius. For Moszkowski, science, philosophy, and politics simply progress together.

Now certainly Lewis agrees that Einsteinian physics parallels contemporary political and philosophical constructs: Time and Western Man and the other Man of the World books are to a large extent based on their similarities. And he agrees that Bergson's philosophy somehow prefigured relativity theory. But if on the whole he accepts Moszkowski's descriptions of the state of affairs, he is much less sanguine about its implications. For Lewis, the general thrust of the analogies Moszkowski sees is to undermine any claims of science to truth. “If Moszkowski's reading of Relativity could be shown by some competent person to be true,” Lewis says, “then immediately we should know that the Relativity physics we had been taught to admire was not an achievement of the first order, and that we had been taken in, however much amused in the process. For such an ad hoc universe as would result from a desire to ‘banish absolutism,’ or equally on the other hand to ‘establish absolutism,’ and impose terrestrial politics upon the stars, would indeed be scientifically a farce, however intelligent a one. But,” he concludes, “so many eminent men of science have accepted Einstein's theory, that Moszkowski, as far as Einstein is concerned, must be wrong” (TWM 17-18). Where Moszkowski is happy to see the similarities between Einstein and Bergson as an illustration of the united front of progress in the modern world, Lewis views them suspiciously as signs of an insidious influence on a field—science—that ought properly to be impervious to outside forces. Moszkowski offers his views as praise of Einstein; Lewis would consider them a kind of insult. And so he concludes his discussion of Moszkowski by rejecting his ideas.

Yet he is far from rejecting these ideas out of hand; in fact, he finds himself in so much agreement with Moszkowski (or with his interpretation of Moszkowski) that this final dismissal comes to seem as much a gesture of faith as an intellectual decision. For one thing, he welcomes Moszkowski's view of the ties between science and philosophy as an endorsement of his own attack on the tyranny of the time-cult over modern thought. Moreover, in light of his thorough dislike of the time-complex, it is not surprising that he takes advantage of this way of questioning Einstein's authority as an independent, objective thinker—and consequently the authority of philosophers and others who have built upon Einstein's theories. In this respect, I think, we can read Lewis's section on Moszkowski as a rhetorical maneuver that allows him to suggest a point of view he does not want to endorse openly himself. With Moszkowski as his foil, Lewis can raise but not answer a question about the credentials of relativity physics, and thus undermine one of the time-cult's foundations—without actually attacking either Einstein or his mathematics. Similarly, he can suggest that the time-cult may be based on a science that in turn may be politically and philosophically motivated—without directly arguing this view, and without implying that all cultures and all sciences must be motivated in the same way. With one hand, he disassociates himself from Moszkowski on the grounds that “many men of science have accepted Einstein's theory”; with the other hand, he allows Moszkowski to argue a point that is much in line with the substance of his own book. Lewis, we could say, uses Moszkowski as the voice of his Domestic Adversary.

But Lewis also has more disinterested reasons for leaning toward Moszkowski's relativistic point of view. He not only agrees with Moszkowski's description of the modern situation; he also agrees that earlier scientific paradigms have resembled the politics and philosophies contemporary with them. Both men use the example of Newton, whose theories are of course far more congenial to Lewis than are Einstein's. Generally speaking, Lewis argues, “It is mere superstition to suppose ‘a mathematician’ to be a sort of divine machine. In any reasonable, and not romantic, account of the matter, we must suppose the mathematical physicist not entirely unaffected by neighbouring metaphysical thought” (TWM 13-14). So, he concludes, “With the Moszkowskis and Spenglers we reach the point at which the system of the mathematical physicist becomes suspect, in exactly the same way as for long now we have been accustomed to regard with suspicion the system of the philosopher” (18). Lewis goes further here than Moszkowski: he points out that Moszkowski's own logic requires that scientific discovery and theory be regarded not as wholly objective or empirical but as partly determined by the scientist's preconceptions and biases. By extending Moszkowski's argument, Lewis makes it seem more extreme than it really is. Although this is not an unusual kind of rhetorical procedure for the Enemy, in this case, I think, he exaggerates not so much to attack his opponent as to try to clarify a possible explanation of cultural resemblances.

Lewis's interpretation of Moszkowski allows him to raise some difficult theoretical questions. Can we cast doubt on a scientific theory by attacking its philosophical premises? Or can we discredit a theory only through empirical testing? On the whole Lewis would answer that indeed a scientist's work can be vitiated by his personal presuppositions. He certainly thinks motives matter in such applied sciences as behavioral psychology, and he is inclined to think they also matter in the purer, more abstract sciences as well. After all, physicists are no less subject to preconceptions than anyone else; and, Lewis points out, in so metaphysical a field as relativity theory or quantum mechanics, the data are likely to be open to multiple interpretations.

In this belief Lewis aligns himself with the “relativist” side of the debate over another question: In what way (if at all) can scientific theories be refuted or proven? This question and its implications have occupied philosophers of science throughout this century; that Lewis was aware of the initial terms of the debate is clear in his scattered references to Pierre Duhem, who with W. V. O. Quine first argued that there can be no crucial experiments—experiments that establish the validity of a theory beyond all doubt. Significantly, Lewis's appeal to Duhem in the discussion about Einstein is encased in a paraphrase of Moszkowski: “Some of the ‘intuitions’ don't come off, owing to the unfortunate prevalence of the negative instance, but some do, like Relativity, though all subject, Moszkowski energetically does not think, to Duhem's law of reversal, whereby any physical system can be knocked over, and can rely on no experiment, however ‘crucial’” (TWM 16-17). Lewis would remind us that like Ptolemy, Copernicus, or Newton, Einstein may himself be improved on or overthrown by someone else's theory.

Now this line of thought is consistent with Lewis's emphasis on personality. The belief that we cannot divorce an idea from its source is a sort of converse of his opinion that people must be held responsible for their ideas. And his corollary argument that an impersonal and wholly objective criticism is impossible would extend logically enough into a similar argument about a wholly objective scientific theory. But at the same time, these views are decidedly at odds with his equally fundamental belief in the essential disinterestedness of the individual mind and its access to some stable truth. (Curiously, this ambivalence in Lewis also parallels one of the major philosophical splits within modern physics itself. One view, that held by Einstein, is that absolute truth exists and is potentially accessible to our knowledge. The second view, that held by Neils Bohr and Max Planck and derived from quantum mechanics, is that the presence of the observer itself alters reality in such a way that our access to knowledge is wholly a question of probabilities. This, I think, is one of the ways in which Lewis's complicated mind mirrors the complications of his time.) With his interpretation of Moszkowski and his appeal to Duhem, Lewis places himself in the awkward position of implying that complete independence and authority are impossible even for a thinker in a field as “pure” as mathematical physics—a position that would contradict Lewis's faith in the purity of the “not-self” and the potential universality of mind. In this position, too, he would seem to agree with the time-cult's belief in the subjectivity of knowledge—the “everything is relative” attitude he condemns as the vulgarized product of Einstein's theories.

And so in a number of direct and indirect ways, Lewis backs off from a position with which he seems substantially to agree. For instance, he encloses his reference to Duhem in a kind of double negative: instead of simply explaining Duhem's ideas, he disagrees (through his sarcasm) with Moszkowski, who would in turn disagree with Duhem. And, I think, he realizes that he is on shaky ground in attacking physics with philosophy—particularly since he is no scientist. Significantly, this is the closest he ever comes to questioning relativity physics itself. In criticizing Moszkowski, a second-rate biographer and popularizer of science, he is on familiar ground; but criticism of Einstein would take him out of his depth.² Thus he concludes by bowing to the greater authority of other scientists—although even in this concession he avoids saying that Moszkowski's general view of the relationship between science and other disciplines is incorrect. He says simply, “Moszkowski, as far as Einstein is concerned, must be wrong.”

Lewis's own conclusion about the time-cult—or as close as he comes to one—is that it results from Einstein's work. As he explains (borrowing the new terminology), “A great many effects, a whole string of highly characteristic disturbances, come out of einsteinian physics, then. … The cause, if a cause we must have, is einsteinian physics” (TWM 12). He chooses to regard Einstein's work as the basis of his culture, I believe, because if anyone can approach pure disinterested thought, it is more likely to be a mathematician than a politician or a philosopher: of all the people Lewis sees as involved in the time-cult, Einstein would seem to be the least affected by preconceptions or inappropriate motives. Before Lewis brings Moszkowski into the discussion, then, he states his faith that “the physical investigations as to the structure of our universe which culminated in Einstein, were, for all any one need suppose to the contrary, as innocent as that … of any human arrière-pensée. Nor, further, were they necessarily at all metaphysical in origin” (13). Yet even in the attempt to “make his position clear,” he is strangely ambivalent. He brackets his relativistic argument with disclaimers, but these disclaimers carry less conviction than does the argument they would deny.

Lewis does not acknowledge the fundamental self-contradiction in these remarks about Einstein. But he does realize that he has argued two opposing views, and he does what he can to reconcile them. At the end of this introductory foray into the problems of the Zeitgeist, he offers a tentative resolution of the conflict:

It is only by fully accepting the evident fact that many men of science, or philosophers, are politicians, and their supposed ‘pure’ theoretic mind in reality merely a very practical one … that we can show that all theory and all theoretic men are not involved in those proofs and arguments. … There are no doubt good and bad times: in the bad ones these influences may be more powerful. The immense influence exerted on our lives by these ‘discoveries’ cannot leave us indifferent to the character of the instruments that are responsible for them—namely, the minds of the discoverers. But it is only the less fine instruments that can be influenced in that way and lend colour to spenglerism, that is our argument. This essay is among other things the assertion of a belief in the finest type of mind, which lifts the creative impulse into an absolute region free of spenglerian ‘history’ or politics. (17-18)

This is a solution we see over and over in Lewis's speculations about cultural unity. There are good times and bad times; there are first-rate and second-rate minds; and all cultures need not be as uniform as the time-cult. If he is not entirely certain about the quality of Einstein's mind, he has no doubt that the modern world in general is dominated by the second-rate. As I have said, this position is quite clearly a statement of faith—“the assertion of a belief in the finest type of mind”—as much as it is a recognition of the imperfection of reality. But if Lewis chooses a belief he himself recognizes as idealistic, he goes further in this instance and tries to devise an explanation that will accommodate both what he sees as the reality and what he desires as the ideal. If we look carefully beneath the analyses of the time-cult, we will find the Enemy's own model of culture.

THE CULTURE MODEL

In his role as culture critic, Lewis is far from alone. We can see him as part of two different though overlapping contexts: 1) the British tradition including such writers as Burke, Coleridge, Arnold, and Ruskin, and continuing into this century with Shaw, Eliot, F. R. Leavis, and Raymond Williams; and 2) the group of culture critics writing between the two world wars including such figures as Ortega y Gasset, Charles Maurras, Irving Babbitt, Julian Benda, and Oswald Spengler, all of whom follow arguments earlier developed by Burke, Taine, Nietzsche, and other European precursors. Lewis's ideas show the influence of both the British and the European traditions—not least because he had read so widely among these writers.³ Yet his vision of culture is also distinctively his own.

Lewis's most visible culture model is the one he offers in The Art of Being Ruled. This is a simple two-part model, not so much of culture as of social politics: there is a small class of true individuals capable of independent thought, and there are the unthinking masses who wish for nothing better than to be ruled. Lewis has several names for these groups—names that clearly indicate some of his sources: following Nietzsche, they are “masters” and the “herd”; following Bergson, they are “persons” and “things”; following Goethe, they are “Natures” and “puppets.”⁴ Such a vision is conspicuously authoritarian and has, for a contemporary reader at least, obviously distasteful practical implications; and, of course, it is difficult not to draw connections between this kind of thinking and Lewis's notorious political views. Fredric Jameson does so explicitly. This kind of culture critique, he says, always hides its own class interests behind the pretense of disinterested idealism:

Where [Lewis's] polemics become formally and ideologically revealing are those moments in which the idealist framework of the culture critique is briefly and with fitful, energetic impatience unmasked. At such moments, indeed, the rhetoric of conservative thought, which has ended up believing in its own official solicitude for Culture, gives way to the unpleasant and embarrassing cynicism of protofascism itself, which knows its intellectual practice as something other than the disinterested guardianship of universal values. In these moments, an embattled and Darwinian defense of the subject's own threatened position and individual vested interests breaks through the universalizing pretence of philosophical discourse; and the rights of privilege are openly affirmed against the threat to the self of some genuinely universal vision of human society.

Or as Raymond Williams says, “The concept of a cultivated minority, set over against a ‘decreated’ mass, tends, in its assertions, to a damaging arrogance and scepticism.”⁵

Because this is the only model Lewis states directly (and because it is so blatantly problematic), it has been the focus of attention for his readers and critics. Nevertheless, it is not the model of culture underlying most of his Enemy criticism. One of the problems in the two-part description—in terms of Lewis's Enemy principles—is that it puts artists and thinkers into the “master” group, where the potential purity of the “not-self” is muddied by issues of worldly power (since the masters are also the rulers). As a response to this unsatisfactory situation, Lewis evolved a second model. Still informed by the same influences, though now drawing more heavily on the British tradition, this more complex version accords more completely with the Enemy stance and the Enemy principles—both in its surface characteristics and in its submerged contradictions.

It is the second model that underlies the Man of the World books following The Art of Being Ruled—the rest of the Enemy criticism. Lewis never clearly explains this model; he never defines “culture” or “cult”; and he never describes his ideas about cultural unity or change. But just as we could discover his space-philosophy through his attack on the time-philosophy, here we can reconstruct this model from indirect evidence: from occasional remarks about the relationship between the time-cult and other cultures, from scattered comments about such things as the cultural role of the artist or the scientist, and most important, from the kinds of questions he asks and criticisms he makes of other writers who more explicitly address theoretical issues.

What we find is a three-part model of culture. At the bottom is the “social plane”; in the middle are the “middlemen,” those who have “second-rate” minds; on the top are the “first-rate” minds in whom the “pure speculative impulse” lives. Given this structure we can understand what distinguishes good cultures from bad ones, the decadence of the time-cult from the ideal Lewis would prefer. What changes is the balance of power.

The social plane consists of common men and women who are generally uninformed about the ideas they receive and use. It is a rather vaguely defined group. At times, it seems to combine the mindless masses, for whom Lewis has only disdain, with the purveyors of what we might call popular culture—artists like Anita Loos, the author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (see TWM 75), who in Lewis's eyes simply exploit the work of more serious and innovative creators. But most often, Lewis thinks of this level much more generously, as including his own reading audience of “general educated persons” and almost all artists. This is why in Time and Western Man, for instance, he divides his subject into the “literary, social and artistic plane” and the “philosophic and theoretic.”

When he expresses his wish that different fields should remain rigidly separated, he explains how he sees the role of the artist in the social plane:

To receive blindly, or at the best confusedly, from regions outside his own, all kinds of notions and formulae, is what the ‘creative artist’ generally does. Without knowing it, he receives into the central tissue of his work political or scientific notions which he proceeds to embody, if he is a novelist, in his characters, if he is a painter, or a poet, in his technique or emotional material, without in the least knowing what he is doing or why he is doing it. But my conception of the rôle of the creative artist is not merely to be a medium for ideas supplied him wholesale from elsewhere, which he incarnates automatically in a technique which (alone) it is his business to perfect. It is equally his business to know enough of the sources of his ideas, and ideology, to take steps to keep these ideas out, except such as he may require for his work. When the idea-monger comes to his door he should be able to tell what kind of notion he is buying, and know something of the process and rationale of its manufacture and distribution. (TWM 10)

As this passage indicates, the difference between the good times and the bad on the social level is one of self-awareness. In the good times, artists (and ordinary people) go to the trouble to inform themselves about ideas and ideologies; in the bad times, they simply accept them without question. This is why Lewis has embarked upon his critique of his culture: because “it would not be easy to exagerate the naiveté with which the average artist or writer to-day, deprived of all central authority, body of knowledge, tradition, or commonly accepted system of nature, accepts what he receives in place of those things” (Paleface 104). And this is why he specifically criticizes Pound for being a fashion-follower and Joyce for being more concerned about his craft than his metaphysics.

The second level consists of the “idea-mongers,” those with essentially practical minds who deliberately use ideas for their own purposes—and, in the process, usually distort them. At its most innocent, this group includes those in industry who exploit scientific discoveries in practical ways. But it also—and for Lewis most significantly—includes people motivated by politics and religion, “the influences that are most able to distort and cancel the pure speculative impulse” (TWM 248). Often we hear the Enemy's invective in Lewis's descriptions of this level: “The merely political revolutionary is thus, for the most part, an interpreter only of a creative mind. And he is, of course, very often, a very bad and corrupt interpreter; often he is a startlingly vulgar, peculiarly unscrupulous and self-seeking one.”⁶ These political middlemen are strong in the bad times and weak in the good. In his own time, Lewis thinks, too much power lies in the wrong hands—neither the thinkers' nor the workers', but the manipulators'. He explains, again:

The finest creations of art or of science, to-day as ever, only more so, reach the general public in a very indirect fashion. If that contact could be more direct it would be much more sanely ‘stimulating’. … It is upon the essentially political middleman, the imitative self-styled ‘revolutionary’, that I direct my main attack. It is he who pollutes on the way the prime issue of our thinking, and converts it into a ‘cultural’ or ‘scientific’ article, which is a masked engine of some form of political fraud, which betrays the thought of its originator. (TWM 150)

In a culture with fewer middlemen, those on the social level will receive ideas more directly, before they have become diluted or polluted; the responsibility of the artist and the general public to know about ideas will be easier to meet, and there will be fewer hidden political motives to entrap them.

Science seems to be especially corruptible. “When we say ‘science,’” he cautions us, “we can either mean any manipulation of the inventive and organizing power of the human intellect: or we can mean such an extremely different thing as the religion of science, the vulgarized derivative from this pure activity manipulated by a sort of priestcraft into a great religious and political weapon”; “So pure science is one thing; its application another; and its vulgarization a third” (ABR 4, 27). Comparing science and magic, Lewis writes, “‘Science gives as much power as was formerly given by magic,’ we started by saying. But it does not give it to the true magician, to the maker of the spells and the engineer of the machinery. Nor, still less, does it give it to the Everyman who handles the machinery and magical properties. There is a third character in the plot: and he alone is invested in all the marvellous power of Science” (TWM 311, my emphasis). Because science confers power, those who want power manipulate scientific discovery for their own ends.

Lewis also includes most of the time-cult's philosophers in this group of middlemen. Philosophic thought is at least as vulnerable to political pressures as scientific thought. Now, he explains, “By ‘politics’ to-day we must understand something very much wider than what was formerly meant” (TWM 163). “Politics and philosophy in Europe are traditionally a little too close together” (TWM 261-62); thus Bergson is “the first servant of the great industrial caste-mind”—or at best, “simply a very common but astute intelligence—naturally, and without other inducement, on the side of such a society, instinctively endorsing its ideals” (TWM 214). Not all modern philosophers seem to Lewis as political as Bergson, but he does think that because they depend so much on science, they are too much infected by its corrupt power.

In his objections to this state of affairs, Lewis is in sharp contrast to Spengler, for instance, who holds that philosophers should be practical people involved in politics and other affairs of the real world; Spengler is also content to observe the involvement of scientists in the world of action. In fact, Spengler's description of cultural ties would tend to put nearly everyone in this middle group—philosophers and scientists, politicians, artists, mathematicians, economists.⁷ In the case of the time-cult, Lewis is inclined to agree, though what Spengler accepts, Lewis deplores. Certainly he believes the uniformity of modern culture stems from its ties between science and philosophy:

When I speak of an ‘orthodoxy of thought,’ therefore, or a philosophic orthodoxy, I refer to this strict uniformity that ensues from the scrupulous following of the datum provided by the instruments of research, by philosophy and by all speculative thought. And the identity of philosophy or of speculative thought with politics is largely owing to the fact that both depend more and more absolutely upon machines of greater and greater precision, on machines so wonderfully complex and powerful that they usurp to a great extent the functions of independent life. But philosophy and speculative thought is, further, an emotional interpretation, and not entirely a soulless imitation, of technical discovery. (TWM 165)

It is on the level of the practical and often political middleman, Lewis believes, that philosophy and science come together.

It is because the connections among properly separate fields occur on this level that Lewis sometimes (and more often in later years) refers to the members of this group as the “Zeitgeist”—or personifies the “Zeitgeist” as if it were one of these politicizing middlemen. In The Art of Being Ruled he says, “The Zeitgeist has nothing to do with the workshop or laboratory, but is a phenomenon of the social world. … At all times he is a salon-spirit, the spirit of fashion” (431). (In Paleface he explains how “fashion” is “the emanation of some person, or some small inner ring of people” [120].) And in The Doom of Youth, he remarks, “Zeitgeist [is] the term we employ to indicate whoever it may be possessing the political power and wealth necessary to compel us to believe and do what he wants, and so make of our “Time” whatever he desires it to be.”⁸ These people—the ones with power and wealth, the ones who tie politics to science and philosophy and the arts—are the controlling “they” of Lewis's occasional paranoic sense of a conspiracy: the “third character in the plot.”

The level of pure thought, finally, is made up of the true revolutionaries, those who originate all really new ideas of all kinds. This level has clear analogues in the British and European traditions of culture critiques: it resembles, for instance, Coleridge's clerisy and Arnold's class of scholars and artists; it anticipates Eliot's cultured elite and Leavis's minority culture; and—perhaps most directly—it parallels Benda's clercs, “all those whose activity essentially is not the pursuit of practical aims, all those who seek their joy in the practice of an art or a science or metaphysical speculation, in short in the possession of non-material advantages, and hence in a certain manner say: ‘My kingdom is not of this world.’”⁹ Or as Lewis says, “Nature does in every generation endow a handful of people with invaluable and mysterious gifts, in the special fields of science, and of art, or in character and general ability, making them fertile and inventive where other people are for the most part receptive only.”¹⁰ Like Benda, Lewis includes in this third level, at least ideally, scientists, philosophers, and artists.

Because “revolution is first a technical process” (TWM 138), the group of pure thinkers is most likely to include scientists—mathematicians, chemists, and physicists. (It does not include such “soft” scientists as psychologists or behaviorists.) Lewis explains, “I believe that it requires a really very foul or else very fanatical person to live with ideas, and consistently to betray them: and secondly, the ideas themselves are apt to be refractory, and to have some say in the matter. The material of theoretic thought, at least, is not ‘personal,’ if its manipulator is” (262). Scientists whose work is both technical and theoretical may thus be able to avoid personal distractions. Consequently, Lewis is inclined to place science at the base of culture: “The ideal basis for an epoch would certainly be the instruments of research, invented for the advancement of the common good; and certainly the impulse behind all ‘revolution’—the will, that is, to pass from one epoch to another and better (of course)—is the work of the man of science” (160; my emphasis). Here Lewis is agreeing with Whitehead's argument in Science and the Modern World, though unlike Whitehead he continues with the caution that “unfortunately the best-organized and most powerful minorities will [i.e., want] a different thing to [from] the common good; and the more irresponsible power they obtain, the more their chosen interpreters (who are not, however, the great and inventive minds, but rather the opportunist and interpretative) expound the discoveries of science in a sense vaguely favourable to that power” (160). Ideally, at least, science can be pure.

In an ideal culture, philosophers will also belong to this level. Lewis explains: “In order to be humane and universally utilizable, philosophy must be abstracted from these special modes and private visions. There must be an abstract man, as it were, if there is to be a philosopher” (332). (Here Lewis again disagrees with Spengler, who argues that “higher thought” possesses no “everlasting and unalterable objectiveness.”¹¹) But of course, since philosophy is so much less technical and so much more personal than pure science, philosophers are less likely to attain this degree of abstraction. Here, too, the uniformity of philosophic thought in the time-cult demonstrates its failure. Pure thought is individual, and so ideal philosophers would necessarily resemble each other much less than do those who base their work on relativity physics.

Finally, this third level includes true artists. Art, Lewis explains, “is a constant stronghold … of the purest human consciousness” (TWM 39). “In art, as in everything else, all revolutionary impulse comes in the first place from the exceptional individual” (41); “From this point of view the true man-of-science and the artist are much more in the same boat than is generally understood” (199). Lewis places artists in this group—or the best artists—partly because of the large role technical problems play in the arts (as in the sciences), and partly because he sees artistic creation as occurring in a trance or a dream state. Art, too, is like magic: “The production of a work of art is … strictly the work of a visionary” (198). The artist must take care to maintain his creative isolation: “What it is really essential to press upon the attention of the reader is this: that the least distraction on the part of a great intelligence from his task of supplying pure thought, is fatal; its result is the same as in the case of a plastic or other artist when he allows himself a similar distraction” (309-10). Ideally, an artist can remain free from impure motives and impulses and maintain what Lewis calls a direct access to reality. (Again, this is of course not a new idea with Lewis, but a clear legacy from the romantics.)

In the good times this group of scientists, philosophers, and artists—the level of the “first-rate”—is strong; in the bad times, it is dominated by the impure thought of the middleman. As a critic, then, Lewis seeks “to dissociate from the pure revolutionary impulse of creative thought all those corrupt imitations which confuse so much the issue” (ABR 429). When this group of pure thinkers is strong, culture is diverse since it evolves directly from individuals; when it is weak, culture is uniform since the work of individuals is diverted into narrow practical channels.

This three-level model presents a few immediate problems. The most conspicuous internal problem is that the model contradicts itself on the role of art and artists. Given Lewis's insistence on his own identity as a painter, this is not an insignificant difficulty. Lewis seems to see the artist as both the beginning and the end of a culture—as both the source and the result of the spirit of an age. He explains the difference between politics and art in a way that makes this problem clear:

If you want to know what is actually occurring inside, underneath, at the centre, at any given moment, art is a truer guide than ‘politics,’ more often than not. Its movements represent, in an acuter form, a deeper emotional truth, though not discursively. The Brothers Karamazov, for example, is a more cogent document for the history of its period than any record of actual events. … So if art has a directer access to reality, is truer and less artificial and more like what it naturally grows out of, than are politics, it seems a pity that it should take its cue from them. (TWM 136-37)

But listen to the voice of the Domestic Adversary describing much the same idea:

But is there such a thing as ‘an artist’? Or to what degree is there such a thing? … For artistic creation must express something. … If it is the famous ‘personality of the artist’ to which expression is given, in the art-form, why then that precious ‘personality’ has been built up out of a number of components, has it not: which, closely enough inspected, would be found to betray a political complexion. (MWA 272-73)

“All art must be a political expression to some extent,” he admits; “all creative activity at the best of times must have been influenced, if not controlled, by political necessity” (ABR 420, 430). As the truest historians of their period, artists respond to what is around them; they are susceptible to influences. But then they cannot at the same time be as free from influences and as independent of their Zeitgeist as Lewis wishes them to be.

We can look at this contradiction in two ways. To some extent it is a dilemma that Lewis has inherited with the romantic notion of the artist's special nature and role. Compare this passage from Ruskin, for instance: “The art of any country is the exponent of its social and political virtues. The art, or general productive and formative energy, of any country, is an exact exponent of its ethical life. You can have noble art only from noble persons, associated under laws fitted to their time and circumstances.” As Raymond Williams points out, “The question of the ‘goodness’ of the artist is, however, at times ambiguous. At times, he must be good in order to reveal essential Beauty; at other times he is good because he reveals essential Beauty—other criteria of goodness are irrelevant.”¹² From this perspective the contradiction is not Lewis's own.

But the problem is also typical of Lewis's own thinking: it repeats in a slightly different form his arguments that one can be personal and impersonal at the same time, that individual “eye” can be the same as “common sense,” that the self and the not-self are fundamentally one. But what in those arguments he can present and justify as paradox, here resolves into clear contradiction. Because the artist receives impressions from society and culture, he or she can express the Zeitgeist: the artist is therefore part of the first level. Because the artist is free from the superficial impressions of the Zeitgeist, he or she can express the true nature of reality: the artist is therefore part of the third level. Nor is this a contradiction that can be solved with a distinction between first- and second-rate artists—though such a distinction can mask the contradiction.¹³

A similar problem underlies the ideal role of the scientist. Although Lewis wishes the scientist to represent pure speculative thought, as we have seen, he has serious doubts that such purity is possible. This scepticism has two different sources. One, he doubts that any real person can maintain the necessary isolation: “You cannot insist enough, it seems to me, on the human factor in the man of science. Scientific discovery or the teaching of science is one thing, and the man of science as private man, reflecting on his functions and applying his discoveries or selling them to other people, is another” (ABR 266). Two, as a Berkeleyan idealist, Lewis believes that we create our world through perception, thought, and memory—not that there is a real world we can hope to experience without these aspects of personality and mind. He asks about the scientific discoverer: “Is he not directed to some extent in that by what he wants to discover? Has he not often a blind eye for what he does not want; and does he not always interpret what has been discovered, by himself or other men, as he wants to understand it, or as somebody else requires him to?” (TWM 161). His own answer to this question, again, is that “It is mere superstition to suppose ‘a mathematician’ to be a sort of divine machine. In any reasonable, and not romantic, account of the matter, we must suppose the mathematical physicist not entirely unaffected by neighbouring metaphysical thought” (13-14). Even in his own terms, the basis for Lewis's ideal culture is “superstitious” and “romantic.” And for this classicist, “the ‘romantic’ is the opposite of the real (22, Lewis's emphasis). Again, this is another manifestation of the fundamental conflict in Lewis's thinking between his insistence that we must always recognize the role of personality in thought and his belief that we can think impersonally.¹⁴ And his affirmation of the potential purity of the scientist over his belief that his ideal is superstitious and romantic repeats his philosophic choice of Berkeleyan illusion over realistic nihilism.

The difficulty in Lewis's culture model extends even further than these internal contradictions. It shares with all culture critiques a problem of perspective: from what position does the critic analyze his culture without being shaped by it? As that of an artist belonging to level three, presumably, Lewis's vision of culture would be free of any personal or worldly influences. (Thus this characteristic assertion: “I advance the strange claim … to act and to think non-politically in everything, in complete detachment from all the intolerant watchwords and formulas by which we are beset. I am an artist and my mind, at least, is entirely free.”¹⁵) Yet as that of an artist belonging to level one, his vision would be specialized, partisan, and personal—and this is the advertised perspective of the Enemy.

Moreover, of course, Lewis's ideal culture—his Golden Age—is highly unlikely to occur in the real world. And if it did exist, it would hardly be a culture at all in our usual sense of the word. It would be strongly individualistic, and consequently very diverse; there would be almost no influences among its creative members, since each would work independently of everyone else. It would be a culture with little or no unity. Furthermore, it would be ahistorical. Its members would be no more influenced by their predecessors than by their contemporaries. It might change as its individual members changed, but its perspective, ideally, would be that of the static pure present, not an historical perspective.

Lewis's allegiance to the value of personality and his philosophical preference for stasis over time and motion lead him to create a model based on the timelessness of mind and the independence of individual genius; they do not allow him to embrace either cultural unity or unified cultural change as anything other than symptoms of disintegration and decadence. Again, Lewis himself seems to recognize the inflexibility of his scheme. He remarks, at one point, “When you get well into the centre of the consciousness of any time (and we have just illustrated this by the greek consciousness), there is certainly a unity there, for, if for no other reason, it is after all a time” (TWM 256); and he cautions us, “So we must in this investigation remember … that, though a ‘new thing in philosophy,’ nevertheless some and indeed a great deal of merging and interpenetration is to be found everywhere in the world of thought of any time whatever” (257). These statements appear right in the middle of his critique of the unity of the time-philosophy, and we must recognize them as important qualifications of his own judgments of both modern culture and his ideal culture; here once more is the voice of the Domestic Adversary.

As we might expect from all these structural resemblances between Lewis's three-part model and his critical and philosophical principles, this view of culture is also remarkably consistent with his stance as the Enemy. To attack the spirit of one's age as he does in this role, one must argue that any Zeitgeist is secondary to individual achievements. Thus his continual sense of difference leads Lewis to oppose the concept of a Zeitgeist and to insist not only that it is possible to think without being pressured by cultural fashion, but also that independent thought is essential to culture.

Here again we see the negative side of this position: this kind of self-justification suggests Lewis's uncertainty about his authority as an outsider. Raymond Williams's remarks about Orwell's exile status will illuminate Lewis's situation as well: “The exile, because of his own personal position, cannot finally believe in any social guarantee: to him, because this is the pattern of his own living, almost all association is suspect. He fears it because he does not want to be compromised (this is often his virtue, because he is so quick to see the perfidy which certain compromises involve). Yet he fears it also because he can see no way of confirming, socially, his own individuality; this, after all, is the psychological condition of the self-exile.” (And, Williams notes, “The cost, in practice, [of Orwell's adoption of this stance] was a partial abandonment of his own standards: he had often to curse, wildly, to keep others away, to avoid being confused with them.”)¹⁶ Lewis's Enemy, too, is forced by the logic of his self-exile to defend himself: his sense of being opposed by his own actual culture compels him to imagine an ideal one where he would feel at home.

Yet we can also see this model as a successful extension and justification of the Enemy stance. On Lewis's analysis the person who acts alone will be the one responsible for real change: “All revolutionary impulse comes in the first place from the exceptional individual” (TWM 41). As Nietzsche says, “The time will come when … we shall no longer look at masses but at individuals who form a sort of bridge over the wan stream of becoming”; “The aim of mankind can lie ultimately only in its highest examples.” But in an age of uniformity like ours, these individuals will look like heretics. “All effectual men are always the enemies of every time,” argues Tarr; “All activity on the part of a good mind has the stimulus of a paradox.”¹⁷ “Truth,” Lewis proclaims, “is always ‘heretical’: and it is always the truth of a minority, or of an ‘isolated mind’ … the truth-bearing individual is always ahead of the rest of the world, although no one could claim that they willed him, and strained towards him, in order to reach his higher level. Rather he drags them up by the scruff of the neck” (TWM 466-67). With this, perhaps the ultimate Enemy maneuver, Lewis-the-Enemy becomes Lewis-the-“truth-bearing individual”: his very opposition to the dominant thought of his time proves him not wrong but right.

Notes

1. Alexander Moszkowski, Einstein, The Searcher, trans. Henry L. Brose (New York: Dutton, 1921), 87, 89.

2. Another of Einstein's biographers, Ronald W. Clark, calls Moszkowski “a Berlin litterateur and critic who moved on the fringes of the Einstein circle”; he also calls Moszkowski's book “a vulgarization of science more unusual then than it would be today” (Einstein: The Life and Times [New York: Avon, 1971], 306).

3. Comprehensive discussions of the first tradition—the British—can be found in Lesley Johnson's The Culture Critics and Raymond Williams' Culture and Society. Neither of these books, however, mentions Lewis. Michael Levenson's A Genealogy of Modernism also deals with this tradition and implicitly includes Lewis. Jameson (see p. 128) and Wagner have both discussed Lewis's similarities with the second group of writers.

   Lewis had clearly read most, if not all, of the figures I mention. He frequently acknowledges his agreement with Arnold (largely through quotation) and Benda; he mentions Nietzsche frequently, sometimes in agreement, sometimes not; and he devotes considerable direct attention to Spengler.

4. Raymond Williams, talking about Carlyle, notes “the kind of contempt for the ‘masses’—Swarmery, ‘Sons of the Devil, in overwhelming majority’, ‘blockheadism, gullibility, bribeability, amenability to beer and balderdash’—which has remained a constant element in English thought.” See Culture and Society, 83.

5. Jameson, 129; Williams, 263.

6. The Diabolical Principle and the Dithyrambic Spectator, 136.

7. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, vol. 1, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926), 42, 47, 378.

8. The Doom of Youth, 135.

9. Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals (La Trahison des Clercs), trans. Richard Aldington (William Morrow & Co., 1928; New York: Norton, 1969), 43. Also see p. 191. In Time and Western Man, which preceded this book, Lewis quotes Benda's earlier Belphégor; then, in The Diabolical Principle and the Dithyrambic Spectator, he writes: “The problem of art, or of the intellect, and of its relation to politics, has, since I, as an artist, first propounded it in my Revolutionary Simpleton and in Time and Western Man, become popular. M. Julien Benda in France has taken it up. M. Benda, whom I quoted in my book, is a man of resource. In his latest work (La Trahison des Clercs) he makes an effective use of my writings (by some oversight he has forgotten to mention my name, but that is just as well, for he arrives at conclusions very different from mine or appears to misunderstand what he has read: it is for that reason no doubt that he abstains from any mention of his sources)” (121).

10. The Diabolical Principle and the Dithyrambic Spectator, 128.

11. Spengler, 41.

12. Williams, 136. Williams quotes the Ruskin passage from an appendix to Modern Painters (Library edition), 2:38-39.

13. In the late The Demon of Progress in the Arts (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1955), Lewis offers several remarks that point to some of the difficulties in his own earlier theory (here we hear the Domestic Adversary over the span of his career). From the perspective of his decades of writing politically and socially engaged books, both fiction and nonfiction, he criticizes the separation of the arts from social responsibility: “The absurd things which are happening in the visual arts at present are what must happen when an art becomes almost totally disconnected from society, when it no longer has any direct function in life, and can only exist as the plaything of the intellect” (46). When he is objecting to Herbert Read's art criticism, he writes, “The ideal autonomy imagined for the painter, the tendency to speak as though what is seen enjoys a privileged position on the earth, is characteristic of a time in which theories are substituted for anything real and solid. What, after all, is the ghastly autonomous privilege, the splendid isolation, about which I have been speaking, except a private latitude to do whatever one likes, provided no one else suffers any inconvenience? … Men who trumpet such theories live in the van of ‘culture’; they belong to the camouflaged section of the public services, where with fanfares and resounding words, the absence of culture is gloriously concealed” (62). And he comments critically that Malraux is “inclined to endow the visual arts with mystical revolutionary attributes” (75). All these remarks are clearly critical of the culture model I examine here.

14. The ideal role of the philosopher suggests similarcontradictions. Compare Hayden White's summary of Nietzsche's argument in The Genealogy of Morals:

    The philosophical ideal of his own time, Nietzsche said, imagines a ‘pure, will-less, painless, timeless knower’ with the objective of attaining a ‘pure reason, absolute knowledge, absolute intelligence.’ But all these concepts, Nietzsche held, ‘presuppose an eye such as no living being can imagine, an eye required to have no direction, to abrogate its active and interpretative powers—precisely those powers that alone make of seeing, seeing something.’ This ideal obscures the fact that ‘all seeing is essentially perspective, and so is all knowing. The more emotions we allow to speak in a given matter, the more different spectacles we can put on in order to view a given spectacle, the more complete will be our conception of it, the greater our objectivity.’

    In different places Lewis offers both sides of this conceptual opposition. See White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 354.

15. The Diabolical Principle and the Dithyrambic Spectator, 37.

16. Williams, 290-91. Lesley Johnson, in a discussion of various sociologists' studies of the role of intellectuals, notes that “‘the traditional position of intellectuals, of being rejected by their society, has resulted in a traditional response of rejecting their society’ … the structures of dissent are the necessary context for the intellectual … the outsider status of the modern intellectual is essential to his universalizing, critical approach.” See The Culture Critics, 7.

17. Tarr, 215-16 (1928); 245 (1918); the two versions are almost identical. Tarr is answering Anastasya's comment that “‘The most effectual men have always been those whose notions were diametrically opposed to those of their time.’”