The Cross Section - RMB Blog

           "...love without meaning... murder without guilt.. the dazzle and madness of London today" That about sums it up don't it, more so today than when Francis Schaeffer wrote this book.  Keep these phrases in mind as you read.  I propose it is the theme for Chapter 10.  It is the theme of the world around us too. This chapter focused on how modern philosophy was disseminated through culture to society at large.  Painters were the first to inculcate their art with this philosophy.  Music composers were the second.  Third were those writing poems, novels, and movies.  This article will start off with a comment on how modern philosophy spread into scientific thought and then finish by looking at how philosophy affected movies in the early to mid-20th century. Positivism/Empiricism Fails Earlier I wrote about the rise and breakdown of modern science as its philosophical basis shifted.  Schaeffer touches on anothe...

  Existential, modern philosophy first spread into the general population through paintings as seen in my previous article .  After that musicians, poets, and novelists started in on the act.  Musical elements that expressed the separation of man from meaning in life started in classical music.   Later, similar elements were added to jazz and rock music. Modern Music Development The first one to start this shift in music was Ludwig van Beethoven in the Quartets he wrote in 1825 and 1826.  His music can't  be considered "modern" in that it expressed modern philosophical views. However, those who truly wrote modern music like Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) followed Beethoven's lead.                             "These Quartets are my highest articles of musical belief (which is                     ...

                                                          Nude Descending A Staircase - Marcel Duchamp Chapter 10 is a retelling of how existential philosophy made its way through all of society.  Chapter 9 focused on the philosophers and what they were teaching, and threw in a little about art and culture.  This chapter inverts that, spending most of the time discussing how art, music, and films spread this destructive heresy throughout the West. The general population was never going to adopt a new world view listening to bland lectures from philosophers.  But people will absolutely ingest ideas they hear in a beautiful song or see in a critically acclaimed movie.  That is the story in a nutshell.  Artists communicated through their output that mankind i...

  The picture is the cover to Axis: Bold As Love by Jimi Hendrix.  I thought it summarized the different ways modern man tries to find meaning without reason.  Among other things he searches in music, drugs, and Eastern religion, which show up in the cover art. In chapter 8 Schaeffer explains the Breakdown of philosophy and science, which was a shift away from reason in philosophy and to strict materialism in science.  The chapter contained multiple dual or parallel ideas ending with a dichotomy between faith and reason.  Dichotomy means to cut in two pieces with the remaining parts standing diametrically opposed. There isn't any duality in chapter 9.  Instead it records the long descent into nothing that started with the Breakdown  and continued through intellectuals spreading their ideas out into the general public.  At the end of the journey, existentialism and nihilism leave people in despair, so modern man tries to escape that despair by gra...

          Whence Come We? What Are We? Whither Do We Go? by Paul Gaugin This is a continuation from part 1, where I introduced chapter 8 and covered the Breakdown in science.  Part 2 will cover the Breakdown  in philosophy and conclude the chapter.  Pictured above is a painting by Gaugin which depicts how the idea of the noble savage was false. The Shift In Philosophy As I wrote in part 1 , non-Christian philosophers in the previous eras were optimistic that from logic alone, they could produce a unified theory of everything.  Schaeffer then describes a process where one philosopher would give his theory of the true universal and how it explains everything in existence (the particulars).  Then, the next philosopher would prove that theory false and give his own new theory.  The third philosopher would do the same in a loop that went on for centuries.  Along the way they retained hope that reason would prevail despite the series...