Word: modern
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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After unifying mathematics and logic, Whitehead moved out into bigger playgrounds. "Philosophy," he remarked, "asks the simple question, 'What is it all about?' " Modern science had introduced new, disturbing concepts like relativity and the quantum theory that never bothered 19th Century thinkers. One of the first and ablest philosophers of modern science, Whitehead in Science and the Modern World (1925) sought to catch up with these experimental and theoretical advances, and organize them. Whitehead deplored the current tendency to overemphasize observation and experiment ("Can we elucidate the turmoil of Europe by weighing its dictators, its prime ministers...
...Modern psychiatrists, Mowrer said, have been a long while catching up. Freud's emphasis on repressed sexual energy helped put them on the wrong track. Human anxiety, reported Mowrer, is the result of dammed-up moral force, rather than dammed-up libido; as this force seeps out into a man's consciousness, he experiences it not as guilt about a real fault or sin, but as anxiety...
...might follow, and together with all other things in this space time world, interplaying with and complementing that supreme actual occasion, God. This is a cosmology in which there is no place for the hard, colorless, self-sufficient atoms of the past, but which grounds deep and firm the modern view that the fundamental realities are interrelated quanta events in a cosmic space time...
Ludicrous & Loving. Ready to grant most of the criticisms made of Wolfe, he admits that "no other important modern writer has appeared so often naive, extravagant, maudlin, ludicrous." But the strength of Wolfe's novels lies in their deep and loving evocation of significant segments of U.S. life; Thomas Wolfe's "image is the great national myth, the American Dream." No one else has so vividly rendered the inner tensions of ordinary, unintellectual small-town Americans-and done so in the traditional rolling phrases of the American declamatory style which Wolfe inherited from Whitman and Melville...
...manage to portray individual loneliness in a mechanized society and the conflicts of a world torn, between accumulation of money and development of personality. But what did Wolfe mean by his affirmation that "we shall be found?" Wolfe was himself lost; he had only the foggiest notions about modern science and modern thought and throughout his life he indulged in cracker-barrel sneering at intellectuals. He was a confused boy with a great gift for language, whose significance as a writer was, as critic Alfred Kazin put it, "that he expanded his boyhood into a lifetime...