[The
above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside
thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant. I
welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this
video.]
Books of intellectual history with this size and scope are always difficult to talk about. I’ve read some that were abysmal failures, while others were highly successful. If I had to place this one along a spectrum, it’s certainly close to the latter for a couple of reasons. First, a point which has nothing to do with the quality of the book itself, but that I admire nonetheless: it was written not by an academic with narrow scholarly interests, but a wonderfully eclectic generalist, William Everdell, who has taught in the Humanities Department at St. Anne’s School (yes, a private high school) in Brooklyn for the last forty years. There’s something about the passionate amateur that I’m perennially attracted to. I don’t think we have enough of them.
“The First Moderns” is good not only for what it covers just as well as other related books of intellectual history, but also because it covers a lot of relatively new territory. We know the usual suspects: Einstein, Rimbaud, Whitman, Russell, Kandinsky, Schoenberg, Strindberg, Picasso, and several dozen others. The names of Edwin Porter, Santiago Ramon y Cajal, and Valeriano Weyler, however, usually don’t make it into books of this kind. Do people even recognize these names anymore? Everdell also widens the scope of the book by covering not only names, but topics that usually don’t get mentioned. We are used to hearing Modernism defined in terms of music, philosophy, and the visual arts. Very rarely do we see mathematics and science discussed, let alone the invention of the concentration camp.
The theme into which Everdell successfully manages to fit most of his vignettes is that of discreteness, continuity, and discontinuity. One doesn’t ordinarily think of something like mathematics as being potentially Modernist, but the discussion of Georg Cantor, Richard Dedekind, and Gottlob Frege makes wonderful sense in this context. They explored topics like infinity (actually, infinities), set theory, and the theoretical fundamentals of the field, including questions like, “What is an integer?” All of this work blurred the traditional lines of continuity and discontinuity that earlier logic and mathematics had felt so confident with. We also get a wonderful and highly intelligent, though non-technical, account of Ludwig Boltzmann’s work with statistical mechanics and his defense of atomism. If matter is made of atoms – millions of them – how do we discover anything about a concept as abstract as “energy”? Everdell details the ways in which Boltzmann invented new mathematical tools to think about energy and entropy as statistical averages of extremely complex states. The work of Boltzmann and the people after him showed how, when multiplied by trillions and trillions, tiny, individual discrete atoms can have physical properties en masse like temperature, energy, or entropy (which are all, in fact, related to one another). Again, we see how the information about discontinuous atoms can in fact yield useful information about matter when thought of as continuous.
And even when we get lessons from art history, or music, or poetry with which we are perhaps almost familiar, Everdell adds new contexts, new names, and new layers that enable each chapter in the book to potentially morph into a book of its very own. He gives a beautiful account of Seurat’s invention and exploration of pointillism, the “invention” of blank verse with Whitman, Rimbaud, and Jules Laforgue, and a whole chapter on Hugo de Vries’ discovery of the gene and Max Planck’s introduction of quantum theory.
Books like this, in their inexhaustible attempt to explain what a concept (like Modernism) might mean to wide swaths of human experience and creativity inevitably can be as a bit listy. “He was important … and so was this, but don’t forget her…” et cetera, and Everdell hasn’t fully escaped that here. But if that bothered me, I would never read this kind of book – a kind of book which I love very much. I read this sort of stuff to learn about new connections between ideas they already knew of, and I can handle the narrative jumpiness if the information is presented in an intelligent way, and Everdell is certainly the kind of intellectual cicerone who is going to teach you something fascinating. If you’re interested in this time period and intellectual history as a field, I would recommend William M. Johnston’s “The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History, 1848-1938.” To be honest, it’s dry as hay and not nearly as interesting as Everdell’s book, but his sense of curiosity and the amount of sheer information covered is truly impressive. It complements the information in here nicely.
“The First Moderns” is good not only for what it covers just as well as other related books of intellectual history, but also because it covers a lot of relatively new territory. We know the usual suspects: Einstein, Rimbaud, Whitman, Russell, Kandinsky, Schoenberg, Strindberg, Picasso, and several dozen others. The names of Edwin Porter, Santiago Ramon y Cajal, and Valeriano Weyler, however, usually don’t make it into books of this kind. Do people even recognize these names anymore? Everdell also widens the scope of the book by covering not only names, but topics that usually don’t get mentioned. We are used to hearing Modernism defined in terms of music, philosophy, and the visual arts. Very rarely do we see mathematics and science discussed, let alone the invention of the concentration camp.
The theme into which Everdell successfully manages to fit most of his vignettes is that of discreteness, continuity, and discontinuity. One doesn’t ordinarily think of something like mathematics as being potentially Modernist, but the discussion of Georg Cantor, Richard Dedekind, and Gottlob Frege makes wonderful sense in this context. They explored topics like infinity (actually, infinities), set theory, and the theoretical fundamentals of the field, including questions like, “What is an integer?” All of this work blurred the traditional lines of continuity and discontinuity that earlier logic and mathematics had felt so confident with. We also get a wonderful and highly intelligent, though non-technical, account of Ludwig Boltzmann’s work with statistical mechanics and his defense of atomism. If matter is made of atoms – millions of them – how do we discover anything about a concept as abstract as “energy”? Everdell details the ways in which Boltzmann invented new mathematical tools to think about energy and entropy as statistical averages of extremely complex states. The work of Boltzmann and the people after him showed how, when multiplied by trillions and trillions, tiny, individual discrete atoms can have physical properties en masse like temperature, energy, or entropy (which are all, in fact, related to one another). Again, we see how the information about discontinuous atoms can in fact yield useful information about matter when thought of as continuous.
And even when we get lessons from art history, or music, or poetry with which we are perhaps almost familiar, Everdell adds new contexts, new names, and new layers that enable each chapter in the book to potentially morph into a book of its very own. He gives a beautiful account of Seurat’s invention and exploration of pointillism, the “invention” of blank verse with Whitman, Rimbaud, and Jules Laforgue, and a whole chapter on Hugo de Vries’ discovery of the gene and Max Planck’s introduction of quantum theory.
Books like this, in their inexhaustible attempt to explain what a concept (like Modernism) might mean to wide swaths of human experience and creativity inevitably can be as a bit listy. “He was important … and so was this, but don’t forget her…” et cetera, and Everdell hasn’t fully escaped that here. But if that bothered me, I would never read this kind of book – a kind of book which I love very much. I read this sort of stuff to learn about new connections between ideas they already knew of, and I can handle the narrative jumpiness if the information is presented in an intelligent way, and Everdell is certainly the kind of intellectual cicerone who is going to teach you something fascinating. If you’re interested in this time period and intellectual history as a field, I would recommend William M. Johnston’s “The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History, 1848-1938.” To be honest, it’s dry as hay and not nearly as interesting as Everdell’s book, but his sense of curiosity and the amount of sheer information covered is truly impressive. It complements the information in here nicely.
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