The Modern Mind Quotes

“One of the many innovations of modernism was the new demands it placed on the audience. Music, painting, literature, even architecture, would never again be quite so 'easy' as they had been.”
― Peter Watson, A Terrible Beauty : The People and Ideas That Shaped the Modern Mind - A History

“...for example, if Freud is wrong, as i and many others believe, where does that leave any number of novels and virtually the entire corpus of surrealism, Dada, and certain major forms of expressionism and abstraction, not to mention Richard Strauss' 'Freudian' operas such as Salome and Elektra, and the iconic novels of numerous writers such as D.H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann and Virginia Woolf? It doesn't render these works less beautiful or pleasurable, necessarily, but it surely dilutes their meaning. They don't owe their entire existence to psychoanalysis. But if they are robbed of a large part of their meaning, can they retain their intellectual importance and validity? Or do they become period pieces? I stress the point because the novels, paintings and operas referred to above have helped to popularise and legitimise a certain view of human nature, one that is, all evidence to the contrary lacking, wrong.”
― Peter Watson, A Terrible Beauty : The People and Ideas That Shaped the Modern Mind - A History

“For many scientists, as Lyotard concedes, scientific knowledge is the only form of knowledge there is, but if so, how then do we understand fairy stories and law?”
― Peter Watson, A Terrible Beauty : The People and Ideas That Shaped the Modern Mind - A History

“...a useful coorective to the triumphalism of some scientists. For example, Maddox went out of his way to emphasise the provisional nature of much physics - he referred to black holes as 'putative' only, to the search for theories of everything as 'the embodiment of a belief, even a hope' and stated that the reason why the quantum gravity project is 'becalmed' right now is because 'the problem to be solved is not yet fully understood' and that the idea that the universe began with a Big Bang 'will be found to be false'.”
― Peter Watson, A Terrible Beauty : The People and Ideas That Shaped the Modern Mind - A History

“Computable Numbers’ into practice.21 This was”
― Peter Watson, The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

“He adored talking about the rich….
But his real wealth was literary. He had read many thousands of books. He said that history was a nightmare during which he was trying to get a good night’s rest. Insomnia made him more learned.”
― Peter Watson, The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

“The discipline of history is particularly important in this context because while science has had a direct impact on how historians write, and what they write about, history has itself been evolving. One of the great debates in historiography is over how events move forward. One school of thought has it that ‘great men’ are mostly what matter, that the decisions of people in power can bring about significant shifts in world events and mentalities. Others believe that economic and commercial matters force change by promoting the interests of certain classes within the overall population. In the twentieth century, the actions of Stalin and Hitler in particular would certainly seem to suggest that ‘great’ men are vital to historical events. But the second half of the century was dominated by thermonuclear weapons, and can one say that any single person, great or otherwise, was really responsible for the bomb? No. In fact, I would suggest that we are living at a time of change, a crossover time in more ways than one, when what we have viewed as the causes of social movement in the past – great men or economic factors playing on social classes – are both being superseded as the engine of social development. That new engine is science.”
― Peter Watson, The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

“Our century has been dominated intellectually by a coming to terms with science.”
― Peter Watson, The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century