Deep background

The origins of American popular culture can be traced back to a centuries' old hybridization with deeply racist overtones made clearest in the minstrel show, and a socially constructed “frontier” consisting of pioneers, wild Indians, bad men, and two-fisted (or two-gun) heroes. The innovative center of modern American popular culture emerged, most significantly, during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Extensive immigration and urbanization, along with technological and market breakthroughs, suddenly prompted a multifaceted mass culture where tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands and more could simultaneously enjoy the same newly minted music (definitely including dance), literature, vaudeville, and then film; likewise assorted items packaged for the emerging consumer, from California fruit to bicycles and even “vacations.”

Key newer sources of popular culture were rooted in the cultures of those who used English as a second language, and for good reasons. Among Jews especially, but also other groups, the most secular and socialistic-minded segment of the respective populations abjured the raw prejudices of older white America, on race issues in particular. Locked out of most existing business opportunities, newer immigrants by the thousands also rushed to embrace the burgeoning culture industry. There, within the evolving tastes and markets that the outsiders studied and learned how to shape, lay both the entepreneurial genius and the performative talent of impresarios, musicians, actors, athletes, and so on.

Introduction

Recognition of the role of blacks in American arts and particularly in twentieth-century music, raises fundamental questions concerning their contribution to the formal, white, and largely Euro-American based traditions. The works of the violinist and composer Clarence Cameron White, the performances of the piano prodigy Blind Tom Bethune, and the compositions of William Grant Still are essentially within the western concert tradition, written or performed by African American musicians. To argue otherwise is to imply that their music merits separate consideration purely on the grounds of color. This raises issues of authenticity in black music traditions, and the recognition or disregard of them, including matters of racial identity related to music production and performance. In this chapter what are variously considered as the “folk,” “vernacular,” or “popular” traditions are discussed, being those created and performed by blacks for themselves and, initially, for their own communities.

In 1619, after one of his first encounters with Descartes, Isaac Beeckman, pleased to find a kindred spirit, noted that “physico-mathematici” are “paucissimi” - very few. Aside from himself, Descartes, and perhaps Galileo, Beeckman knew of no others. A half-century later, Leibniz noted that “recent philosophers all wish to explain physical matters mechanistically (mechanice).” The period between witnessed a transformation in the concepts, methods, and institutions of natural philosophy, so remarkable that it is tempting simply to grant that Bacon’s promised “new instauration” - in later language, a revolution - was accomplished, and the philosophy of the schools wholly superseded.

That transformation was uneven and incomplete. Even in physics, though there was undoubtedly profound change in fundamental concepts, explanations of particular phenomena were sometimes almost rote “mechanizations” of explanations already found in scholastic works. At the outset, many of the phenomena themselves were not new. Even more so does this hold in chemistry and physiology. Descartes’s Treatise on Man, written in the early 1630s, though it “mechanizes” physiology, does so almost entirely on the basis of the anatomy and physiology of his nonmechanist predecessors. The program of the Treatise could have proceeded perfectly well without Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood and Kepler’s new theory of vision. Adherents of Aristotelianism, moreover, were not without resources to accommodate some, if not all, of the novelties of their rivals. Honoré Fabri rejected both Cartesianism and Gassendism.

Those whom we call “Hispanics” or “Latinos” - terms deriving from “hispanoamericano” and “latinoamericano” - are United States residents with roots in Hispanic America. While “Latino” is often used interchangeably with “Hispanic,” the nineteenth-century concept of “Latin America” from which “Latino” derives, broadly referred to the peoples emerging from Spain, Portugal, and France's colonies, whereas “Hispanoamérica” referred solely to the Spanish-speaking peoples formerly residing in the Spanish colonies. In common usage today, both terms refer to the US residents of diverse racial and historical backgrounds in the Spanish-speaking countries of the Americas, including the United States. The vast majority of them are of Mexican, Puerto Rican, or Cuban origin, and the presence of their ancestors in North America predates the arrival of English colonists. In fact, western civilization was introduced to North America and the lands that eventually would belong to the United States first by Hispanics. Many of the institutions and values that have become identified as “American” were really first introduced by Hispanic peoples - Spaniards, Hispanicized Africans and Amerindians, mestizos and mulattoes - during the exploration and settlement of these lands. Not only were advanced technologies, such as those essential to ranching, farming, and mining, introduced by the Hispanics but also all of the values and perspectives inherent in western intellectual culture. The Spanish and their mixed breed children continued to blend western culture with that of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and the peoples imported from Africa for five hundred years.

The God that philosophers in the early modern period intended to refer to was the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition, which is to say, the being who created the world, who spoke to Moses from the burning bush, and who, through Jesus Christ, saved mankind from the consequences of sin. But who that being is, and what he means for human existence, was a matter of serious and sometimes mortal debate, even, and especially, within this tradition. This controversy is rather ironic because it was agreed that God had explicitly revealed himself through the texts that had come to be known as the Bible ( ”the book”).

Outside this tradition, there was not much of relevance. Islam was regarded as the paradigmatic religion of the infidel, and was summarily dismissed, especially insofar as it was thought to embrace a fatalism incompatible with human freedom and responsibility. Even so, it had a few important, if unacknowledged, influences. There is a connection, for example, between David Hume’s famous analysis of causation in terms of constant conjunction (via Nicolas Malebranche and Francisco Suárez) and the Arab occasionalist al- Farabi. Second, largely because of Jesuit missionaries, there was a certain interest in the Far East which at least shaped some philosophical thinking.

In their monumental work, The Development of Logic, Martha Kneale and William Kneale maintain that during the seventeenth century logic was “in decline as a branch of philosophy.” But an era that included Leibniz, who according to the Kneales “deserves to be ranked among the greatest of all logicians,” as well as Locke, who dismisses formal logic as “learned Ignorance” while writing “the first modern treatise devoted specifically to philosophy of language,” suggests drama and excitement, not decline. While traditional logic was indeed in decline, logic itself was being transformed into modern mathematical logic. Moreover, the turn away from formal logic was also a dramatic turn to natural language for insight and solutions to the problems of philosophy. These two turns, the mathematical and linguistic turns of early modern philosophy, are defining features of seventeenth-century European philosophy.

EARLY MODERN LOGIC

In 1626, the Dutch logician Franco Burgesdijk maintained that there were three kinds of logicians: Aristotelians, Ramists, and Semi-Ramists. While Aristotelians continued to develop Aristotle’s logic of categorical syllogisms and immediate inferences, Ramists sought alternative logics that captured reasoning that traditional Aristotelian logic ignored. Semi-Ramists, also called “Philippo- Ramists” after Luther’s collaborator Philipp Melanchthon, sought a synthesis of traditional and alternative logics, which included the search for formal methods to capture nonsyllogistic reasoning.

According to the Gospels, men do not put new wine in old bottles. Metaphorically speaking at least, philosophers of the early modern period tend to be exceptions to this rule. Descartes and his successors inherited a rich metaphysical vocabulary and set of categories from the ancient and medieval world; particularly in the work of Aristotle and his scholastic disciples, this conceptual framework had been devised to articulate a metaphysical picture of the universe very different from any which was likely to commend itself to philosophers in the age of the Scientific Revolution. Nonetheless, instead of rejecting this inherited framework wholesale, philosophers of the period tend to retain it in large measure while infusing it with radically new content. Such content was of course adapted to the task of providing metaphysical foundations for the new scientific world picture. And in the case of many philosophers it was also adapted to the goal of providing new bases for doctrines of traditional natural theology such as the immortality of the soul.

The contrast between the new wine and the old bottles may help to throw light on one difficulty posed by metaphysics of the early modern period. Readers approaching the metaphysical systems for the first time are struck by the fact that philosophers often seem to be announcing “news from nowhere”; the great metaphysical systems tend to be full of strange and extravagant claims, typified by Spinoza’s insistence that there is only one substance, Malebranche’s insistence that there is only one cause, and Leibniz’s insistence that no created substances causally interact with one another.

In A Queer Mother for the Nation (2002), Licia Fiol-Matta looks critically at the political and literary career of Chilean Nobel laureate Gabriela Mistral. Fiol-Matta analyzes, in particular, the “queer” aspects of Mistral's life: a series of affairs with women, a non-normative gender presentation perhaps best described as “female masculinity,” and a spectacularly nonreproductive maternal identity. Mistral's career as internationally renowned educator and poet depended upon her paradoxically maternal but celibate role as “Schoolteacher of America.” Fiol-Matta's study considers how these non-normative features of Mistral's life were deployed to abet state-sanctioned heteronormativity, patriarchy, and a racialized nationalism. Dominant understandings of gender, sexuality, race, and nation were consolidated - in Chile and across Latin America - not in spite of but through Mistral's demonstrable queerness.

From the perspective of the late 1980s, perhaps, one could make the case that in the United States, such a queer consolidation of dominant discourses was unthinkable. Queerness, in the United States, seemed at the time to mark the very limits of citizenship. Largely in response to the HIV/AIDS crisis, new forms of public dissent and civil disobedience had emerged, increasingly understood as “queer activism.” In the academy, likewise, new forms of critical analysis developed, called – from the early 1990s on – “queer theory” or “queer studies.”

Hollywood, soon to become the United States' national film industry, was founded in the early teens of the twentieth century by a group of film companies which came to Los Angeles at first to escape the winter conditions of their New York- and Chicago-based production locations. However, the advantages of production in southern California - particularly the varied landscapes in the region crucial for exterior, on-location photography - soon made Hollywood the dominant film production center in the country.

Hollywood, of course, is not synonymous with filmmaking in the United States. Before the early 1910s, American filmmaking was mostly New Yorkbased, and specialized in the production of short films (c. 1909, a one-reel short, or approximately ten minutes). At the time, French film companies dominated global film distribution, and it was more likely that one would see a French film in the United States than an American-produced one. However, by 1917, the effects of World War I on global film distribution - severely limiting French companies' abilities to release films world-wide yet having little effect on the global demand for new films - would allow the Hollywood film industry to expand and stabilize.

It was Henry Luce, the founder of Time, who in a signed editorial in his own magazine made popular the phrase “the American Century.” The century was then already more than two-fifths over. It was 1941, and the Japanese had not yet attacked Pearl Harbor. The argument rumbled on whether the United States should enter the war on the side of Britain against Japanese militarism and German and Italian fascism, as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt privately thought inevitable, or should remain neutral, as a majority of both Congress and public opinion still preferred.

Luce wrote of the American Century not out of triumphalist nationalism but as a prophet calling on his countrymen to take up a burden in the spirit of Christian sacrifice. America should save Britain, Luce said, but, more than that, “we must undertake now to be the Good Samaritan of the entire world.” He saw his country as destined to lift mankind “from the level of the beasts to what the Psalmist called a little lower than the angels.” The history of the rest of the American century can be seen as a commentary on the extent to which Luce's countrymen lived up to his vision, at home and abroad.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have long been recognized as an especially fruitful period in the history of Western philosophy. Most often this has been associated with the achievements of a handful of great thinkers: the so-called “rationalists” (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz) and “empiricists” (Locke, Berkeley, Hume), whose inquiries culminate in Kant’s “Critical philosophy.” These canonical figures have been celebrated for the depth and rigor of their treatments of perennial philosophical questions, concerning, for example, existence, modality, causality, knowledge, obligation, and sovereignty, as well as for their efforts to push philosophy in new directions, challenging many of the assumptions of ancient and medieval philosophy. In this connection, it has been argued that epistemology assumes a new significance in the early modern period as philosophers strive to define the conditions and limits of human knowledge. Yet early modern philosophers make major contributions in almost every area of philosophy, and in many cases their conclusions continue to serve as starting points for present-day debates. The chapters in this Companion are designed to acquaint the reader with the most important developments in early modern philosophy and to point the way toward more advanced studies in the field.

Throughout the twentieth century, New York City was the supreme American example of the two powers exerted by cities - the “hard” power of finance - the world of “big men, big deals, big money, and big ideas” celebrated in Business Week - and the often intangible “soft” power of cultural and social influence. The Wall Street banker J. P. Morgan, and succeeding generations of the city's wealthy merchants, corporate moguls, bankers, and financiers, epitomized the domineering influence of finance upon the affairs of the city, and the extension of the city's influence across the globe as American wealth reached into every continent and every market. The city's cultural producers, its opinion-makers, editors, writers, and artists, an important component of the city's role as a producer and consumer of culture, played a decisive role in shaping something as intangible, and as influential as twentieth-century taste. At the heart of the city's influence lay in its success in projecting an idea or image of the city itself. The city was the home to some of the nation's most influential cultural icons. The more we learn about the creation of the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the elegant, assertive skyscrapers which created the Manhattan skyline (from the Flatiron, to the Woolworth, Chrysler, Empire State Buildings, and the World Trade Center), the clearer it is that when it came to projecting ideas of the city through selected icons, no place in America came close to the success enjoyed by New York. In popular songs, photographs, paintings - in the multiple forms of representation - these icons defined the city and its urgent modernism.

Introducing his Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, which was published in 1728, Francis Hutcheson remarked that the conclusions he was about to defend were none the worse for having been “taught and propagated by the best men of all ages.” Among the views that writers such as Hutcheson inherited were various images of the good life, some handed down from Roman antiquity, some derived from Christianity, and some, such as Machiavelli’s account of princely virtù, forged in comparatively recent times. While the most general of these interpretations offer a picture of the good life for humanity, a blueprint of the patterns of feeling and action to which all men (and in some cases arguably all women) should aspire, others are explicitly adjusted to persons of a particular gender, class, or profession, and to individuals who occupy several roles at once. Handbooks such as Cicero’s De officiis not only specify what is involved in being a good father, son, husband, or magistrate, but also indicate how the demands imposed by these relationships can be reconciled. Living virtuously is therefore partly a matter of experiencing passions that are held to be appropriate to one’s station and its duties, and ideally consists in possessing them to just the right degree. Furthermore, because any one role is defined in relation to others (that of a ruler in relation to that of a citizen, or that of a servant in relation to a master), the demands of a particular office are implicitly both social and political. With few exceptions, good lives are conceived as contributing to a cooperative existence within an organized community, and virtuous individuals are therefore expected to be emotionally capable of engaging in a range of common projects.

Spying and writing have always gone together. In Britain, where the modern intelligence agency was born, intellectuals moved smoothly back and forth between secret government service and the literary life, some, like the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, even spending the morning at the typewriter before consulting with MI6 after lunch. Somerset Maugham, Compton Mackenzie, Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, John Le Carré all placed their powers of observation and divination at the disposal of the British secret state while mining their experience of intelligence work in their fiction. It was not just a case of satisfying the reading public's apparently insatiable appetite for the espionage novel. There seemed to be some basic connection between the roles of writer and spy: both were iconic, even heroic figures in modern culture, necessarily detached from ordinary society, yet gifted - cursed, perhaps - with unique insight into the darkest realms of human existence. “I, from very early, lived a secret life, an inward life,” Le Carréonce told an interviewer. “I seemed to go about in disguise.”

In this respect, the spies of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) were no different from their British counterparts. Indeed, the “man of letters” was, if anything, even more conspicuous a figure in the upper echelons of the American secret service than in MI6. During World War II, Norman Holmes Pearson, a noted Yale professor of literature and editor, alongside W. H. Auden, of the five-volume Viking Poets of the English Language, ran “X-2,” the London-based counterespionage branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the United States' wartime foreign intelligence agency.

An overview

America, Gertrude Stein declared, was “the oldest country in the world because . . . America created the twentieth century” - not through art or literature, one infers, but through industry and invention. Thus it was Thomas Alva Edison, arguably, who inaugurated modernism in America. He electrified the country, he changed night into day - and he transformed sound for ever.

Before Edison's phonograph, sound was ephemeral: something heard could not be heard again. True, certain sounds - music - could be documented in written scores; but such artifacts merely traced experiences that truly existed only in the moment. Recordings changed all that; and by making sound permanent, they altered music's very nature. “Modern” music, then, is in large part the story of sound technology, of its consequences, and of the responses by musicians and listeners.

In the beginning, recordings were mechanical. A reverse megaphone focused sound waves onto a diaphragm to which was attached a stylus; this etched an image of the sound onto a cylinder. To hear the recording, the process was reversed. There was nothing electrical, nothing chemical: the mechanism was wholly consistent with the technology for musical instruments, which took the relatively small sounds produced by an agitated string, a reed, or buzzing lips, and rendered them audible over a substantial distance. The gramophone differed only in that the sound source was a diaphragm activated by a needle driven by grooves in wax.

The title page of Christian Wolff’s Vernünftige Gedancken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen of 1720, the so-called “German Metaphysics,” shows a brilliant sun beaming through dark clouds above a peaceful rural landscape. A Latin phrase over the sun explains the picture: “light restored after clouds.” Many other philosophy books published in Germany during the first part of the eighteenth century carried similar pictures. In at least two the word Dispellam is shown at the top. Enlightenment or Aufklärung was the sun dispelling the clouds. The sun was reason; the clouds were ignorance and false belief. The darkness they caused was favorable to despotic government, overbearing priests, misguided religiosity, abusive nobility, repressive laws backed by ferocious punishments, unjust taxation, and stultifying economic practices. Enlighteners opposed these by trying to reform legislation, government, and penal systems, to increase religious toleration and the freedom to think and publish, to spread scientific knowledge, to improve education, and to rationalize economic policies. Success, they thought, depended on removing the dark clouds inherited from the past. Reason was the tool for the job. And philosophers were taken to be among those best equipped to show what reason could do and how it could help.

Great changes in the character and interrelations of western political societies were in progress during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Early modern philosophers either directly witnessed these changes or were able to reflect upon them from no great distance, as crucial elements of their recent political history. Unsurprisingly, then, early modern political philosophy was in important respects preoccupied with the theoretical underpinnings of the emerging political order, with its new institutions and new expectations of citizens and public officials. The theories advanced by political philosophers of the period in turn played their own modest roles in influencing the development of the modern political institutions with which we are familiar today. Their questions and problems were thus importantly related to our own, which allows early modern political philosophy to speak to many of us in a way that is perhaps not fully possible for the political philosophies of earlier periods.

I will stress here two great “divides” or transitions within the period that can help us to understand some of the most salient features of early modern political philosophy. The first of these divides is the theoretical divide between what we can call “political naturalism” and “political antinaturalism.” The second is the historical transition (mirrored by a corresponding transition in political theories) from political societies that existed as complex, hierarchical structures of overlapping religious and contractual relationships (such as those that characterized empire and the feudal order) to political societies that began to take the form of modern, sovereign, territorial states.

In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Richard Rorty attributes to René Descartes the invention of a distinctively modern notion of the mind. According to Rorty, Descartes deviated from previous thinkers, both Aristotelian and Platonic, in taking the realm of the “mental” to include both the “sensory grasp of particulars” and the intellectual grasp of universals. What makes these apparently heterogeneous kinds both count as mental is the fact that we have indubitable access to the various states. Thus, Descartes made indubitability the new mark of the mental. Rorty claims that this new mark was connected to a new conception of the mind as “an inner arena with its inner observer.” This new conception in turn rendered knowledge of what exists outside of the inner arena problematic, and thus made it possible “to pose the problem of the veil of ideas, the problem which made epistemology central to philosophy.”

There can be no doubt that Descartes deviated in some significant ways from the psychology of Aristotle and the later scholastics. However, the deviations are linked less to epistemological preoccupations with external world skepticism than to a concern to articulate a new metaphysical conception of the mind and its relation to the material world. The first of the three sections in this chapter considers the Aristotelian and scholastic accounts of the soul that serve as the foil for Descartes’s discussions, and then takes up Descartes’s view of the mind and its influence on his early modern successors.