Educational Philosophies Definitions

Expressionism is a modernist movement notably in painting, film and literature that originated and developed Germany before and after the First World War. This artistic tendency can be considered as a form of resistance to bourgeois culture. The defining characteristic of this artistic tendency is the attempt of the artist to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas. In art history, the term “Expressionism” refers to the work of Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and others associated with the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider, a name derived from the title of Kandinsky’s painting of 1903) group which held exhibitions in Munich in 1911 and 1912. Heavily influenced by the Swiss critic Wilhelm Worringer’s comments on “Abstraction” and rejecting both Impressionism and Naturalism, Expressionist painting uses distorted lines and perspective and forms and bold colors to express raw emotion and spirituality. Although the Blaue Reiter group itself was short-lived, the Expressionist style became extremely popular after the First World War, and influenced the later Neue Sachlicket school, as well as the cynical portrayal of the Weimar Republic in Georg Grosz’s satirical drawings, the photomontage of John Heartfield and the images of the modern city in the “picture books” of uncaptioned woodcuts produced by the Belgian Frans Masereel. The systematic distortion and introspection characteristic of the style resulted in its being derided and banned as Entartete Kunst (degenerate art) by the Nazi regime. Expressionist cinema is characterized by stark black and white contrasts, highly theatrical sets and screenplays that deal with the supernatural and the diabolic. The classic expressionist films are The Golem (1914, directed Paul Wegener and Henrik Galeen) and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919, directed Robert Wiene), and the classic study is Lotte H. Eisner’s The Haunted Screen. Expressionist cinema supplies the iconography for many later horror films, such as the original Frankenstein (1931, directed James Whale). Some of Brecht’s plays, such as Baal and Drums in the Night, are sometimes described as expressionist but the most significant literary manifestation of the tendency is Alfred Doblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, which uses techniques pioneered by James Joyce and John Dos Passos to paint a kaleidoscopic picture of Berlin. The famous exchange between Ernst Bloch and György Lukács took place in the pages of Das Wort (The word), an expatriate literary journal published in Moscow between 1936 and 1939. Ostensibly about expressionism, it is in fact a very broad debate about the politics of the Avant-Garde. Responding to an article in which Lukács reiterates his “reflection theory” of realism, Bloch criticizes the Hungarian critic for having elaborated a doctrine of permanent neoclassicism that denies the very possibility of an avant-garde in capitalist society, and for dismissing any experimentation in the arts as being decadent because it abandons the classic realism of Balzac. Bloch himself argues that avant-garde movements ranging from expressionism to surrealism can be anticipatory and can provide a vision of a more humane future. In his reply, Lukács insists that all modern literary schools produce only a frozen and superficial image of reality because the social alienation of modern writers means that they cannot discover the underlying truths about society. Expressionism is singled out for criticism on the grounds that it discourages revolutionary clarification. Its decadence is contrasted with the progressive realism of Thomas and Heinrich Mann and Maxim Gorky. In a coda to the debate which was not published in his lifetime, Brecht for his part attacked Lukács’ theory of its dogmatic formalism and its ahistorical reliance on a very limited range of novels. The original exchange between Bloch and Lukács, with Brecht’s comments and later comments on the debate made by Adorno, is translated with explanatory material in Bloch et al., Aesthetic and Politics.

The term dialectical materialism was not actually used by either Marx or Engels, but came to mean “Marxist Philosophy” in the 1930s when texts such as Stalin’s Dialectical and Historical Materialism and the Textbook of Marxist Philosophy prepared under the auspices of the Leningrad Institute of Philosophy began to codify the enormous body of work produced by the founders of Marxism into a set of laws applying to both society and the natural world. The main sources are the later works of Engels, and especially Anti-Duhring and the post-humously published Dialectics of Nature. Lenin’s manuscript notes on Hegel’s Science of Logic, written in 1914 and first published in 1929, are also an important point of reference. Dialectical materialism, often abbreviated as “Diamat”, asserts the primacy of matter over consciousness, and of the material conditions of existence over intellectual life. In particular, as adopted by the Soviet communists as their official philosophy, dialectical materialism refers to the belief that “political and historical events result from conflict of social forces and are interpretable as a series of contradictions and their solutions.” And this conflict is believed to be caused by materials needs. We can make sense of the term more meaningfully if we view it from the vantage point of Hegelian philosophy. As is well known, for Hegel, the movement of history is driven by Reason (Mind or Geist). So, in Hegelian philosophy, there is the primary of consciousness (or Reason) over matter. In his engagement with Hegel’s philosophy, Marx argues that it is matter that drives history; hence, in Marx, there is the primary of matter over consciousness. This is precisely the context of Marx’s famous claim that he has turned Hegel on his head. Now, it must be noted that in dialectical materialism, change is asserted to be the outcome of a dialectic between contradictory elements at every level from social revolution to alterations in the composition of matter itself. This process is governed by three laws, namely: 1) the law of the unity and conflict of opposites, 2) the law of the transition of quantity into quality, and 3) the law of negation. The law of the unity and conflict of opposites states that all phenomena consist of mutually contradictory elements, and that change is the result of their internal contradictions. The law of the transition of quantity into quality describes how quantitative changes always lead to qualitative change. The movement that unites atoms into molecules is an example of the transition from quantitative to qualitative change in the physical sciences, while the accumulation of capital that eventually destroys the social structures of feudalism illustrates the same process at the sociohistorical level. The law of negation is derived mainly from the first volume of Marx’s Capital. Here, every stage of the development of the private ownership of the means of production grows out of its predecessor and negates it. It is then negated it its turn by the development of its internal contradictions. Viewed from this perspective, capitalism is said to have come into being by negating or destroying feudalism and will in turn be negated by the rise of socialism and communism. In his influential essay on the materialist dialectic, Louis Althusser understands dialectical materialism as a “theory” of scientific practices which transforms the ideological products of social practices into ‘knowledges’ or scientific truths. Critics of orthodox Marxism point out that the attempt to transform dialectical materialism into a philosophy of nature, or even of the natural sciences, turns it into a form of “positivism” or “scientism”.