I’m enjoying being 30. I’m at peace with growing up, because it means not putting up with bullshit. We all have responsibilities, even if we’re not all fathers and mothers. That said, being 30 comes with the confidence to say “I ain’t giving time to this" and for me it’s having zero tolerance for puerile idealism (Dead Poets Society, John Lennon-isms), and effusive sentiments (I’d probably tell Young Werther “get over yourself!”)—for some people, intellectual self-indulgence annoys them, for me it’s the opposite: excessive emotion!
In the chaotic world we live in, I don’t need unnecessary feelings when I’ve got work to do. I can’t afford to indulge in extreme sadness or anger or entertain pathos. I find reading Heidegger relaxing. Reasoning and thinking helps me ground myself in a world where plenty of circumstances would otherwise trigger an emotional reaction.
Maybe men returning from the trenches felt the same way about a world that had forever changed…the war never left them. For some, those “storms of steel” would haunt them for the rest of their lives.
I don’t think we need to get conspiratorial about the zeitgeist that contributed to the emerging cynicism and “ugliness” that dominated artistic and philosophical expression in the immediate post-war period. We are not much different than our early-20th century ancestors. With only the space of a century separating us, we should find it easy to empathize with their suffering, loss, and newfound disgust vis-à-vis the apparent frivolity of 19th century aesthetics.
Romanticism could never survive the aftermath of World War I. Unlike many conservative philosophers who bewail the “loss of faith” and deplore the “death of god”, we don’t see a problem with a healthy dose of existentialism, if it was to cure Romanticism of its stylistic excesses. It did. They say that good times create weak men. Poets crying over flowers about some “ewige weibliche” were simply sheltered dandies who could afford to indulge sentiments of wonder, awe, and cartoonish “heroism”. A man like Ernest Hemingway, just returned from tending shrapnel wounds (and suffering several injuries himself), probably found Les Miserable a complete joke! Revolutions and wars are not “glorious” and nobody is singing and chanting and soldiers are not entertaining any sort of idealistic “philosophy” about some proposed ethical imperative of dialectical revolutionarism. In short, people just got tired of all the big fancy words and frilly lace because life ain’t fucking like that!
Why was Nietzsche so popular during the 20th century? Because his ideas were brutal and unforgiving, unlike other towering figures of German literature…
Germans and their Goethe Goethe Goethe…Goethe this, Goethe that…I’ve yet to find anything profound in 142 volumes on everything and nothing. Voltaire in France is the same…buoyant cosmopolitan polymath without a single substantial statement!
Let’s be clear. We are not only to highlight the emphasis on brutality in early 20th century art, but also the demand for only expedient and necessary intellectual expression. Modernists were not against profound ideas; they were against unnecessarily tedious and long-winded ways to express them…they simply didn’t have time to read 800 pages of purple prose! They did not want to give time to 142 volumes of intellectual dabbling!
The First World War inspired us to simultaneously cast off the excessive sentimentality of the Romantics and the unrestrained philosophizing of the Classicists. Art had to be real, and immediate, and Ideas had to be substantial and expressed as efficiently as possible!
There is no conspiracy, no tragedy to mourn. We just grew up, we’re still growing up.