The aim of this article is to examine the growing predominance of audacity, or that which audaciously seeks to be taken as such, in all the manifestations of the art of our time. To do that, and to be able to agree or disagree with any meaning, it would be best to start by limiting ourselves to a definition which sets certain boundaries for the word audacity, which, by its very nature, defies that kind of qualification. The Petit Larousse can't help us out because it very cautiously defines audacity with such synonyms as boldness and daring, and for boldness and daring gives the definition of audacity, which once again proves that a dictionary is no more than an ingenious collection of tautologies. In order to break that vicious circle I venture to propose, without much rashness on my part, that we understand by audacity that attitude which consists of ignoring what is expected of you and daring to what no one else dares to do.

A dream, or perhaps a nightmare, could conceivably haunt the historian's night, in which he imagines that by some chance the agencies in our society which pour forth largesse to subsidize research should undergo a startling conversion and, frightened by social problems or wearying of the senseless march of technology, permit themselves for a moment to doubt whether what our civilization needs most is more and more instruments of destruction, trips to the moon, ever faster and noisier airplanes, etc. Suppose in sheer desperation they turned to the historian for help? What would he answer? It is perhaps comforting to know that such a turn of events is all but inconceivable. Still, the mere thought leads one to reflect, and to remark how little systematic consideration is given to this simple and obvious question. What can historians and history contribute to the solution of existing political and social problems?

The great achievement of “contemporary” economics has been the articulation, implementation, and public acceptance of the Keynesian revolution. The gestation period extended over some three decades, highlighted by these turning points: the publication in New York in 1936 of The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, the enactment ten years later of the Employment Act of 1946, which formally acknowledged the government's responsibility for maintaining full employment; the official recognition in 1954 by a Republican Administration of its obligation to employ “Keynesian” weapons to fight recessions and depressions; and the statement in 1965 by the apostle of modern liberalism (John Kenneth Galbraith) that the “new economics” was the “new orthodoxy,” as well as the admission by the vicar of economic conservatism (Milton Friedman) that “we are all Keynesians now.”

The knowledge of art is revealed, in the modern world, by a variety of mechanical and economic means, for which history had provided no parallel; the techniques of photography and of reproduction, working in concert with the opening of new markets for “cultural goods” lavish on an ever-increasing public reproductions of works of art. This revolution resembles that previously accomplished for the broadcasting of words and ideas, by the invention of printing; we do not yet know if it can be of the same importance in its field.

Science and poetry: it is sufficient to conjure up together these two terms of human experience to arouse an idea of opposition in some, an idea of exclusion in others and of suspicion in most. Two methods of perception of the exterior and interior world, at opposite ends of the human mind have produced two languages. They are so far from each other these two languages that have common origin, and after extending their branches to the opposite ends of the earth seem to be able to join together wishing to go beyond.

Modern man in the western world is constantly afraid of wasting time. He therefore measures time, uses it in small quantities, and conducts his activities in such a way as to waste as little as possible; he arranges his appointments with a remarkable degree of precision, his offices are known for their scrupulous punctuality, and the word “urgent” is nowadays used a great deal. Sportsmen are intent on breaking the kilometre record by a few tenths of a second, and the omnipresent instruments for measuring time—watches, clocks, chronometers, also agendas, calendars, etc., reveal the preoccupations of modern man. Civilization today shows itself acutely conscious of the value of time, and regards it as a sign of economic rationality that everyone should attempt to divide his time economically between all the tasks of which his existence is made up. “Time is money,” says the popular proverb, and one meets hundreds of people who express their anxiety “not to waste time” on activities of lesser importance, which “can afford to wait” or do not “deserve to have too much time spent on them.” So that the importance of a matter is measured in practice by the amount of time one is willing to spend on it. Equally, time itself gains in precision and exactness, and we try to fit into an incompressible period of time a mass of activities which would formerly have been spread over a longer period. Our civilization is the civilization of impatience.

Unlike positivism, which took the form of a protest by the individual against the canonization of the general, and unlike existentialism, which expressed a revolt of the concrete against abstraction erected into a dogma—structuralism is an ideology of capitulation to the bureaucratic and technocratic supremacy of means over ends and of society over individuals. The dogmatic systems of the last decades have finished by creating an intellectual atmosphere in which “the whole” is put in the foreground, leaving its component “parts” in the shade.

Structuralism idolizes structure at the expense of its components, and structural analysis at the expense of induction and generalization. For the structuralists, supporting elements are seen merely as interrelated elements, and things related to one another are swallowed up by the relations between them. In their eyes, the elements that make up a structure are in themselves meaningless; they exist only by virtue of being grouped according to a certain pattern of organization. Only relations are regarded as constant, and thus as proper objects of a science; properties are merely ephemeral and illusory.

Broadly speaking, the situation that preceded ours can be summed up as follows: formed by tradition artists worked for a rich or fairly rich clientele, or for the State who commissioned them; their works were periodically made the object of official exhibitions (salons presided over by a committee or inspired by amateurs or connoisseurs), or in the form of private shows, both indeed appealing to the same “élite”—on whom Proust has left us some exemplary pages. The rest of the public was composed for the most part of people who had no access to art, who never entered a museum or a gallery, much less a salon, still less the studio of an artist; in short, for whom art had no existence except some names—Rembrandt, Raphael, Michelangelo—who remained names. Between the “élite” and the no-man's-land, a “fringe” public, made up of those who wanted to have, for reasons of taste, of curiosity, or for other motives, an initiation to art, to have some idea of it, and who went periodically to museums, to exhibitions, or who gathered information by reading. It is noteworthy that school hardly played any part: artistic teaching being most often reduced to “drawing lessons” where one learnt to copy Egyptian or Roman plaster casts, engravings, pictures, in short, to copy a design. As for books, they became confused with the same grisaille of printing and line-drawings, which, indeed, reappeared in the windows of bookshops and even in the town…

The traditional morality of conscience, according to Freud, is based for the most part on the suppression of the instincts. His psychoanalytic theory provides a genetic and functional account of how and why this is so. Genetically, the theory purports to explain the ontogenetic and phylogenetic development of the traditional morality of conscience. Functionally it attempts to explain the failure of this morality and propose an alternative theory which will work out better in practice. Each part of his theory can be discussed separately, but neither can be divorced completely from the other. Freud's theory is not only an explanation of what morality in fact is from a descriptive scientific point of view, but also what morality ought and ought not to be from the normative standpoint of psychoanalysis. Thus, each part of the theory is integrally related to the other.

History is implied in the object, the same as in researches; it is that which partly creates it. The choice of the questions that arise à propos of long historical periods is neither fortuitous nor chaotic. One can discern tendencies that explain themselves on both the historical and sociological planes. In formulating his questions the historian adopts a point of view having itself a certain historic dimension. The different methodologies on the subject of the relative value attributable to such and such a type of problem do not only anticipate numerous aspects assumed by the historical processes of the past. They depend equally on the way in which history and the historian are wedged into contemporary life. The problems of history, the questions themselves that arise constitute a fragment of the history that makes them. History depends then on the future; on the specific correlations established between the present, the contemporary historical reality and the functions that history assumes at the moment, on the one hand, and the knowledge of the past, on the other hand.

The creation of any empire is comprehensible only in terms of the passion that carries it along, exceeds its historical dimension and returns to a cosmic dimension that is common to the whole of time. Great historical phases are only established in and as history by a passion that is the foundation and the cancellation of their historicity. The peoples who were called Barbarians were only called this for the way in which their upheaval of history was felt to be a cosmic and natural happening, beyond history in as much as it did not issue from history and expected nothing from it either. They were “all or nothing” in the pure state; they demonstrated at one and the same time the fact of having nothing to lose and everything to gain; they were the mixture of the origin and the end of the times; they were the irruption of the cosmic as such within the very core of history.

When the first snow flutters down onto the roofs and streets of London, Moscow or Zürich, it is “news”—although the same thing happens about the same time every year. The fact that this (usually very transitory) white splendour is news is demonstrated by the fact that the editors of the local papers in these three cities inform their respective readers of it. The readers—or those of them who live in the area—will have usually already noticed the meteorological event for themselves. Those who live elsewhere, and who read the report and look at the pictures of it, will of course not have noticed the fact for themselves. The two groups of readers will pay a very different degree of attention to the news-item, depending on the importance it has for them. But if this first snow affects international air traffic, due to the closing down of one or other airport in the three cities, then it becomes, through its effects, a piece of “news” for the travel experts, and perhaps even the economic experts, of the mass media, and it is accorded national or even international publicity.

The phenomena of fashion are inextricably mixed with an infinite variety of behaviours that challenges simple enumeration. A theory offers itself nonetheless in the form of an explicit description of the structures that support its evolution. Meeting the phenomena of fashion in their most disconcerting characters—their omnipresence, the paradox of an imitative behaviour that serves the prestige of the individual, their changes—we set ourselves to isolate the principles on which it works. Thus, in the course of investigation, we have been put in possession of an explanatory model of which it will be sufficient for us to verify if it regulates the other aspects under which fashion can appear. A model that is simple enough, because we propose to show that one has said everything that the manifestations of fashion can be when one has recognised there a manifestation of sociability, of imitative origin and playful character.

The transformation of a traditional society into a modern well-knit organic structure can be demonstrated in various ways. In this paper an attempt will be made to study a village in North Bihar, in the district of Saran. This village, Dharampur, is about 8 miles north-east of Chapra the chief town of the district, and some 10 miles from Khairah, the nearest station on the North Eastern Railway. The old people claim that originally their ancestors inhabited another village, Panchpatra, about a mile to the south of the present settlement. There, according to legend, ghosts used to shower bones onto the roofs the houses. The inhabitants, disturbed at their work, and terrified, decided to seek the help of a Sâdhu Ramadas who lived in a nearby monastry. The saint indicated a site which he blessed, and the construction of the new village began. Thus it is clear that the migration as well as the site of the present village were linked with traditional factors, represented in this instance by the intervention of ghosts and by the Sâdhu. This incident may have happened about 200 years ago; today the former village is known as Dīha, meaning ancient dwelling place.

In the character of witchcraft as a universal phenomenon of human beliefs, though also as a manifestation of behaviour and social institutions, there is something indistinguishable that for a long time has interested and intrigued many authors concerned with widely differing spheres (historians, sociologists, anthropologists, writers, poets, etc.). Already in the 16th and 17th centuries the new humanism, begun by the Middle Ages, was accompanied by a renewal of interest in “occult sciences,” “white” or “black,” and the positivism of the last century itself was transformed without eliminating the fascination for witchcraft indicated in the researches on satanism.

The purpose of this paper is to examine those aspects of modern dynamic psychiatry which could stimulate philosophical thought and perhaps lead even to collaborative investigations between the disciplines of psychiatry and philosophy. Although the overlap of their interests is obvious, there is an astonishing lack of communication between workers in these fields.

Avant-garde art has reached a paradoxical situation: it has become accepted by the bourgeoisie. Though professedly anti-traditional from the beginning, it built up a tradition of its own; an aesthetic and morality of uncompromising permanent revolution. The containment of the avant-garde, which began during the 1950s and has been one of the most interesting social developments in art, broke the continuity of more than one and a half centuries of non-conformism and rebellion.

Everyone who has anything to do with modern art recognizes the importance of Cubism, an importance that goes beyond the quality of individual pictures and resides in their bearing on the entire tradition of the past. Cubism not only changed the face of art for all the coming generation, it did so with a suddeness unprecedented in the history of artistic innovation. All other movements of so extreme a character had taken at least the lifetimes of two or three artists to accomplish their aims. Cubism became at once the most influential movement on the continent; within a decade it had run its course and made its impact. Nothing in the arts can compare with it. Still, it is not altogether singular.

Giovanni Morelli (1816-91), the Italian connoisseur, in the 1870’s and 1880’s, writing under the pseudonym Lermolieff worked out a method for distinguishing original works of art from copies. His method was a curious one, involving the study of small and unimportant details of the painting in order to discover the authentic touch of the master. An illustration from his book, Italian Masters in German Galleries shows ears from paintings by the Florentines Leonardo da Vinci and Lorenzo di Credi, and through the differences in form between these two details, Morelli believed he could distinguish two artists of the same school. A second illustration from Morelli's book shows that conversely, two different parts of the body bear a family resemblance to one another—here the hand and ear are both long, thin and tapering forms. In his study of paintings in the Borghese Gallery, Morelli explained how such details could help the connoisseur identify a master: “Copyists can never have any character or style, for ‘form’ in their works is not due to their own idea … As most men, both speakers and writers, make use of habitual modes of expression, favourite words and sayings, which they often employ involuntarily and sometimes even most inappropriately, so almost every painter has his own peculiarities, which escape him without his being aware of it … Anyone intending to study a painter more closely and to become better acquainted with him, must take into consideration even these material trifles (a student of calligraphy would call them flourishes), and know how to discover them …”

In a previous essay, the authors attempted to define, in phenomenological terms, the artistic and critical attitudes.

The artistic attitude was seen as the attempt to create the image of a total world, which could be enjoyed or viewed in terms of an attitude of everyday life; that is to say, that the created image was so all-encompassing, so total, and so complete, of a concreteness and vividness, such that the viewer could suspend perceptions of all other worlds and respond directly and immediately to the world created as a work of art.