The generations that lived thru the blood baths of Napoleon's rise to power and devastating campaigning of death for over a decade ignited the MODERN AGE almost as much as the inventions of the steam engine, the discoveries of oxygen and electricity, and the beginning of learning how mankind could start preventing disease and death, itself. It truly was the birth-time of Doctor Frankenstein's ability to prolong life and make it more ingratiating for a larger percentage of the population. The more extreme fanatical poetics of Dr. Frankenstein challenging or competing with the monolithic god himself, only made for more provocative literature. Yet this was precisely the effect and reality the generations of the early 19th century began experiencing the new worlds of their own designs. As throughout the 19th century the miracles of MODERN sciences kept multiplying and becoming more and more profound, transforming what we are. The expectations of a lifetime shifted from living to maybe 50 or 55 extended to living into one's 70s. The actual population of the human species will begin doubling after 1830 and continue to double every 40 or so years, growing from the unheard of number of a billion people on earth to todays population of over seven billion and still growing.
What is truly terrifying is how the effect of all this actually has trivialized the wonder of life as the struggle to take control of this existence reconstitutes itself in it's black silence. The mechanical ease had a two edged effect of at once bringing more of said ease to life and the quality of this new life : then, this emotional effect of trivializing life, of an apathey to life and a loss of value by those who merely inherit the comforts of this new heightened AESTHETICAL lifestyle and never learn how to earn such a position in all the earth, or more prosaically in our known Universe.
These voids and undefinable privileges in human life are a danger. NIETZSCHE as a late ROMANTIC on the Van Gard to enriching life to an AESTHETICAL perspective above a merely egopocentric or materialistic-selfism was at the core of the European Avant Garde of MODERNISM spilling into the 20th Century. The energy of this creative artistic mentality found one of its brightest SYMBOLIST philosophers in Friederich Nietzsche. Then the creative spirit and power of the newly christened MODERN ARTIST found unparalleled PLASTIC means of expression through the turn of the century and up until the first World War. As if the MODERN TRUTH as seen by one of the Modern Arts' greatest fathers : DENIS DIDEROT : proved itself in the rise of global configuration. DIDEROT hypothesized that truly great ART in society is bolstered about by truly grand events and traumatizing experiences in human life itself. The twentieth century almost in life imitating art fashion seemed to need the conflagrations of W.W.I and then W.W.II to perpetuate the momentum of the 19th centuries creative forces of making art and modern engineering feats. Once the second W. W. was over culture began it's descent into POST-MODERNIST fragmentation. The dumpster-diving French New Wave of the 50s and 60s. The beginning of a concerted descent of the FINE ARTS into the advertizing commodification of Americana beginning earnestly in the 1950s and exploding with POP ART culture of selling "product" in the 1960s. The lowering of higher AESTHETICS to street level bubble-gum and the heightening of low values to "higher" status in art became the CON and collision of a world without it's drama of a World activating War.
After W. W. ONE Western society exploded in a grasp for life in the Roaring 20's the new century added an even more fantastical grouping of inventions : airoplanes, light bulbs, telephones, cars, a race to rocket propulsion, new drugs to utterly reconfigure the human psyche' and physical well being. All making the 20th century an even more fantastical and amazing event than the outstanding achievements of the proceeding 19th century. By the last decades of this high powered century and now for the beginning of the 21st centuries we are beleaguered once again with an apathy, trivialization, and a counter vent to being born into all this amazing human wealth and invention without, for the majority of the vast population, being able to make a meaningful contribution to this aesthetic wealth. As the commercial marketing of people, gulps and commodifies on the small amount of celebrites who are allowed to gratuitously take some absurd credit for all the wonder of being part of humankind's (or Americana) enormous successes.
NIETZSCHE reminds us that taking credit for the wonder of the MODERN WORLD is an absurd falsehood but learning to become a "creative process" involved in the vast experience of being Artistic is the true value in being human. Once again pointing out that contributing and involving ourselves in this truly elevated context of being a human being continues to, if not more necessitates us as CITIZENS and INDIVIDUALS in this evolving construction to continuously up the stakes of Virtue, of Ethics, and Values in tandem with the capitalistic and exoskeleton extravagances of benefiting off of being in this human situation. This is the purpose of ART, AESTHETICS, philosophy, and the most cherished "states of mind" of the long existence of our race and it's culture :: the SACRED and the Reverencial "State of Being" and mind. This was the goal NIETZSCHE was envisioning and sacrificed his life attempting to extoll to the wonderous cultural heritage of Europeans and the future :: a culture giving itself a new birth in the MODERN WORLD.
Comments