Academic Writing and Clips Gary Bruce Smith
		Presently contracted as a Knowledge Producer for Instantknowledge.com
Lecturer in English at Vista University for the past eighteen years
			Extract for Study Guide

Modernism, expressed as the modern dilemma of consciousness, can only be under­stood in terms of an understanding of the development of Western culture. This means that you should have a certain degree of familiarity with the complex world events of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During this period the effects of various social changes that had preceded the twentieth century, such as the Industrial Revolution, changed perceptions of life and developed the modern urban mentality. The growth and legitimacy of science was another significant factor. Science, and the predominance of the scientific attitude in the modern world, also mean the development of rationality and a mechanical understanding of the relationship between man and the world. For example, the Darwinian theory of evolution was part of the scientific revolution that challenged existing perceptions, especially with regard to Religion. The theory of evolution suggested that humanity had not been created in the image of God, but that man had developed in an evolutionary line determined by natural selection. The law of natural selection that evolution ‘discovered’ also suggested that the strong survived while the weak perished. This was opposed to the ideas that formed centuries of religious beliefs.

What is important to focus on is the fact that all of these factors, and a host of others, challenged centuries of established order. This is extremely significant when we come to the various responses of modern artists to this century. In other words, the entire history of established attitudes and perceptions of life was challenged by ideas and reinforced by changing social circumstances. For example, there was development of science as a central dominating way of relating to the modern world is intertwined with the growth of industrialization and technology. Industrialization and the movement away from the rural and nature-based relationship of man to the environment led to different conceptions and the formation of different attitudes towards life. Technology itself provides an entirely new way of relating to self and world. One needs only think of modern reliance on television and the computer in this regard.

In much the same way that the established religious structures were being challenged by evolutionary theory and by science itself, perceptions of man’s own nature were being revolutionalised by the discoveries of explorers of the human psyche like Sigmund Freud. Within the context of modern science, Freud propagated the idea of the unconscious as a prime-determining factor in the understanding of the human self. This opened up a dark and mysterious aspect to the self, which had previously only been seen in terms of external factors determined by religion and society. Freud had opened up human nature to interpretation and uncertainty. This idea was further explored by another psychiatrist, Carl Jung, who suggested that all human behavior was linked to the understanding of the Archetypes of the unconscious. The Archetypes refer to deeper layers of the unconscious that are common to all cultures. This means that beneath the outer layers of external cultural and individual behavior, there lie deeper structures that are universally and culturally significant. For example, Jung found that various dreams and myths are shared by different cultures and by people from different social settings. What is significant for our study is that both Freud, and Jung opened up the question of the human self and suggested theories which were at variance with established and accepted ideas of what human nature should be. After Freud, human nature could no longer be explained in terms of clear, rational and unambiguous principles.