MAN IS PERHAPS NOT THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE.
The crisis of humanism and the New Man of the avant-gardes (1909-1930)
After the First World War (1914-1918), Europe is overwhelmed by an economic, social, and political crisis. This terrible conflict, with its new weapons of mass extermination causing millions of deaths and mutilations, reveals to what extent man has "let himself be outstripped by the tools of civilization," according to architect Walter Gropius's formula. Humanity no longer seems to master the effects of its inventions: in reality, these have led it to the murderous chaos of war, thus putting into crisis the definitions of man in force since the Renaissance. The man postulated by humanism – harmonious and unified, rational and perfectible, aspiring to peace and the Good, master and organizer of an anthropocentric universe – no longer seems appropriate to the catastrophic situation in the West at the beginning of the 20th century.
This crisis of humanism that the Great War reveals is a deep structural crisis, difficult to grasp, whose symptoms are already perceptible in the 19th century. Friedrich Nietzsche's thought, for example, violently calls into question the founding ideals of humanism, which according to him prevent life and frustrate desires; the philosopher also rejects grand discourses, of which humanism is a part: "Beware even of every grand word, of every grand attitude," he warns. While affirming his power, Nietzsche's Übermensch rejects anthropocentrism, he wants on the contrary to restore to the universe its original dimensions – chance, chaos, becoming.
Our thesis opens with an analysis of the links between the First World War and the crisis of humanism. Propaganda discourse seeks to mask the absurdity of war and justify the massacre by adapting humanist values to the situation. The hero of this new humanism is an ideal man supposed to restore universal values in this Europe considered decadent, an ideal that carries within it all virtues – the New Man. Associated with the valiant soldier who died for the homeland, the New Man is a generic being, ideally proportioned, posed as the ultimate guarantor of the nation's eternal moral values. He justifies not only the millions of deaths, but also nationalisms.
Avant-garde artists and writers react differently to this structural crisis. Some join, sometimes involuntarily, the propaganda discourse; they defend a nostalgic position aimed at restoring humanism and advocate a man having perfect mastery of his acts and their consequences, a man who dominates the universe. For them – our thesis notably deals with the Futurists and the Bauhaus –, the New Man is the personification of a social metaphysics that is both national and universalist. He expresses the desire for a homogeneous public and society. His virtues and qualities are the unique, unified, and codified model on which the new world will be built. Enchanted by the idea of a better life and a new meaning, these avant-gardes propose a New Man who, in certain aspects, approaches that of totalitarianisms.
Other avant-gardes do everything to desacralize the totalizing model that remains in the humanist tradition, by opposing to it a fragmented man, exploding his limits, multiple. In the continuity of Rimbaud's "I is another," the Dadaists explore the ways through which multiplicity is realized and the plural becomings of man are expressed. The surrealist movement also resists the unified New Man, despite André Breton's ambiguity who erects his own complexity as a model. The journal Documents edited by Georges Bataille and Carl Einstein openly rejects humanist anthropocentrism by bringing the human figure back to its base materialism and proposing an antihumanist vision of art history.
The artists who gravitate around Dada, Surrealism, or whose works are reproduced and commented on in Documents are not the first to formally break with the humanist model. Manet had already destructured the system of signs of humanist painting through the "dispersion" of his subjects and his tendency to treat human figure and things alike. The avant-garde artists that we analyze – Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, Kurt Schwitters, Johannes Baader, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico – go even further, however, by definitively rejecting anthropocentrism, the unified and fixed I, coherent and rational perception. To the universal and eternal New Man, these creators oppose a protean being, constantly becoming, mixed with the universe, but not dominating. Their works are inscribed in a movement of thought that, like James Joyce's writing at the same moment, overturns the definitions of art, identity, and the subject.
Unlike other studies dealing with this subject, such as Micheline Tison-Braun's entitled La Crise de l'humanisme. Le conflit de l'individu et de la société dans la littérature française moderne, our thesis approaches the problem of humanism without humanist nostalgia. Humanism is envisaged there as a historical given and not as a positive and virtuous concept a priori. Through the transversal analysis of a precise period, whose full complexity we are beginning to understand today, our thesis proposes to reconsider the stakes of the statement "I am a man" in this violent and murderous beginning of the 20th century. Our study thus brings arguments to the philosophical debate on humanism, very intense in the second half of the 20th century, a debate in which art history will participate very little.