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Darwin and the Evolution of Modern Perspectives

Explore the profound impact of Darwin's theories on human origins and development, influencing 19th and 20th-century cultural narratives, including Modernism. Witness shifts in art, philosophy, and literature reflecting Darwin's ideas about humanity's animalistic origins and survival struggles. Delve into the existential questions posed by artists like Cézanne, Gaugin, and Picasso, challenging traditional views of human nature and purpose. Experience the unsettling beauty of artworks exploring the complexities of human existence and the mysteries of our ultimate destination in an indifferent universe.

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Darwin and the Evolution of Modern Perspectives

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  1. Darwin and the Narrative of Human Origins

  2. Effect • Not about direct authorial influence • But the operation of a radical new narrative of human origins and story of human development upon cultural consciousness (and unconsciousness) the evidence of which we can see in a range of cultural products and by-products of the human imagination in the late 19th century and early 20th. • Perhaps the greatest “effect” of Darwin is Modernism itself, the Great experimental period in western art from 1890-1940. • Effect, After-effect, Side-effect

  3. Perspective • Major, seismic shift in perspective • Exampled in Cézanne, where physical perspective no longer obtains; upheaval in the basic principles of the world. • “Copernican” in scope

  4. Paul Cézanne, Bibemus Quarry, 1895

  5. Gaugin’s Questions • Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? 1897

  6. Gaugin’s Questions • Where does humanity come from? What is humanity? How does humanity proceed?

  7. Where does humanity come from? • A more remote origin in an expanding recessive (geological) timeline. • A look further back to a more anterior origin. • The myth of Victorian progress punctuated as a reverse story of regress. • A fresh and startling glimpse into the animal/bestial origins of humanity. We come from animals.

  8. What is humanity? • Not advanced but “Primitive,” Savage, Disgusting; not singled out and superior to animals but continuous with them. • Darwin, Descent of Man (1871): “There can hardly be a doubt that we are descended from barbarians.” • Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899) • Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1899); animal drives, the irrational

  9. Kurtz

  10. Edvard Munch, Scream (1893)

  11. Pablo Picasso, Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon (1907)

  12. Man Ray, Noire et Blanche (1926)

  13. What is humanity? • A function of natural laws, processes, mechanisms. • Reduction to physiology and materiality. • Human consciouness a development of the function of animals; natural mechanisms. • Not the nature of the Romantic English landscape

  14. Romantic Nature

  15. Victorian Nature • “nature red in tooth and claw” Tennyson

  16. What is humanity? • Constant battle for survival; survival replaces purpose • Not fully formed by God but cobbled together by accident

  17. Man (Woman) not fully formed • Picasso, Head of a Woman (1936)

  18. What is humanity? • Man/Woman in Process • Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase (1912)

  19. Where are we going? • A creature looking before and after into an infinite unfolding of time with an acute sense of loneliness, alienation: no guide • Anxiety, ennui, despair, absurdity, accident • Purposeless proc ess? Loss of human agency? Waiting? • “The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come.” Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse • Becket, Waiting for Godot

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