Backgrounds and Characteristics of Modernism
1. A sense of loss of ontological grounding. Ontology is the branch of metaphysics that
deals with the nature of being, so a loss of ontological grounding is a feeling that what
people believed about existence, value, and identity is in flux, that perhaps there is no
knowable (by man) ground of value and identity. Some of this feeling comes from
challenges to accepted ways of knowing such as

19th century science and its ability to explain the universe and life, the influence
of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, evolution and thermodynamics

Industrialization which displaces people from their traditional, often agrarian,
roots.

Changes in philosophical thought (think of Mr. Ramsay and the table in the tree)
which suggested that what we perceive as “reality” is shifting and uncertain, not
validated by some outside authority.

The waning influence of Christianity, often because of its associations with state,
capitalism, hypocritical moralism, and the status quo. Critical studies of the Bible
as a historical document.

An increasing awareness of the existence and offerings of other cultures and
religions which had differing world views, and a willingness to examine those
world views.
2. A sense that culture had lost its bearings that there is no center (or centre, if you
will), that cultural values are bankrupt.
3. A sense that traditional values such as capitalism, religious faith, a belief in
progress had led to catastrophe on a grand scale, that is WWI, and the wastelands of
rampant industrialization, the breakdown of traditional society, exploitations of other
races and cultures (Ireland? India? Africa?), and the rise of a civilization based on greed
and power (Cecil Rhodes, corruption, the Titanic even)
4. A shifting view of the universe from a finite, known world system into an open
relativistic, changing alien universe. Think about relativity and Einstein.
5. A change in the locus of authority from traditional sites like the Church, government,
class, the Bible, to the individual, the phenomenological (lived experience), thus locating
authority in the personal and individual rather than the social or accepted.
6. The expansion of ideas and studies which draw on the nature of the individual
(psychology, democracy) and in art, the importance of individual perception such as
impressionism, post-impressionism, and eventually cubism.
7. The idea that forces governing human behavior, including the most powerful and
formative ones, are hidden in psychology, the unconscious, economics, and politics.
The increasing importance of Marx, Freud, Nietzsche. The idea that within these fields
may be keys to power relations, economic power, madness, social control, etc.
8. A move toward the mystical and symbolic as ways of recovering a sense of the holy
and true in human experience and of creating some semblance of sustainable ontological
ground. Think about Jung and his archetypes, about James Frazier and his study of
comparative religions and mythologies, Yeats and his symbolism and mysticism, his
interest in the odd mystical societies like the Golden Dawn, the popularity of Evelyn
Underhill’s work on mysticism etc.
9. An increasing emphasis on form and shape, perhaps as an effort to organize the
whirl of ideas and destruction of traditional structures.
10. A continued questioning of gender relations and indeed, all power-based relations.
11. A continued drive toward experimentation in language and questioning of how
and if language conveys meaning.