Decadence, Degeneration, and the End

Studies in the European Fin de Siècle

Marja Härmänmaa, Christopher Nissen, Jeffrey Walsh, Jeffrey Walsh

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137470867
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia europea

Art and literature during the European fin-de-siècle period often manifested themes of degeneration and decay, both of bodies and civilizations, as well as illness, bizarre sexuality, and general morbidity. This collection explores these topics in relation to artists and writers as diverse as Oscar Wilde, August Strindberg, and Aubrey Beardsley.

P A R T I

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The Twilight World

C H A P T E R 1

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Thermal Degeneration: Thermodynamics and the Heat-Death of the Universe in Victorian Science, Philosophy, and Culture

Mason Tattersall

During the nineteenth century, scientific notions of heat progressed from the concept that heat was a physical substance to a new energy-based thermodynamics. This development had a broad impact on European culture in the latter part of the century, particularly in the understanding of time. The temporal universe had traditionally been seen in human terms: it had a birth and it would have a death. In the medieval natural theological worldview, the macrocosm of the universe and the microcosm of man reflected each other reciprocally. The rise of an increasingly autonomous natural science that indicated no reason to expect a life span for the universe severed this tie. At the close of a century of increasing intellectual, economic, social, cultural, and religious change, this seemed to cast tiny, finite man adrift in a vast and infinite universe. Some found this liberating, some terrifying. The rise of thermodynamics, with its physical reasons for presupposing an impending end reintroduced, for good or ill, finitude into the natural scientific picture of the cosmos.

By mid-century many significant developments had taken place in the understanding of heat. The steam engine had driven massive social change. The physical theory of heat had been replaced with a mechanical theory and a new science of energy, now viewed as an indestructible quantity defined as the ability to do work. Developments in the scientific understanding of heat had also led to the concept of entropy,—a measure of the disorder of physical systems, of the unavailability of energy for transformations, or the inability to do useful work. Two observations underlay these developments: first, that various forms of energy were convertible (including heat into mechanical work), and second, that heat always flows from hotter to cooler bodies. Further exploration of these phenomena led to a new science of thermodynamics, embodied in two laws:

1) The energy of the universe is constant.

2) The entropy of the universe tends toward a maximum.

From these two basic laws of fundamental import, simplicity, and the most general applicability, there arose a set of intellectual trajectories that played out in fields as diverse as physics and poetry, theology and popular fiction. Entropy reintroduced a finite timescale and mortality to the natural history of the universe that the temporally open-ended views of materialistic mechanism had abandoned. For some, this rehumanized the universe, returning a mortality to it that mirrored our own. For others, this introduced a new kind of apocalypse; not a divinely sanctioned culmination, but a cold end brought on by meaningless mechanistic necessity, the philosophical implications of which were deeply ambiguous.

According to the new science, in any physical, chemical, or biological process, energy was always conserved. The sum total of energy in the universe always remained. Instead of disappearing, it was converted into other forms in the processes that we experience. Thus, the steam engine converted chemical energy stored in coal into heat, and then converted heat into work. No energy was lost in this process. But energy was, in fact, lost to us. In the conversion of heat into work, only a very small amount of the heat created by the burning coal was actually transformed into work. The rest was transferred to the cooler bodies around the engine. Although some energy was converted into work, the rest was dissipated. The rest of the heat was spread out, heating up other objects and the atmosphere. The energy was not lost, but, being dissipated as heat, it was lost to man,—“wasted” as William Thomson put it, “although not annihilated.”¹

Eventually, all usable energy would be converted into heat, which would disperse and diffuse, bringing the temperature of the colder parts of the universe up and the warmer parts down until everything in existence was at a uniform temperature. Once this happened, all energy (though not destroyed) would be useless to life. The sun would burn up all its remaining fuel, dissipating its energy into heat, which would be dispersed into space. The cessation of the sun’s furnace would bring all life on earth to an end; this would mean an end to the hydrologic cycle, the winds, and all usable energy on earth.² The motions of the planets would eventually be halted by the long, slow force of friction, dissipating celestial kinetic energy into heat, resulting in a cold, dead, motionless universe, as devoid of life as it was of useful energy (Smith and Wise 1989, 498).

Thermodynamics painted a startlingly new and remarkably encompassing picture of the universe. Energy was constant but changed form. Time was unidirectional (as opposed to the reversibility of processes in Newtonian mechanics). Energy was constantly becoming less usable for man; it was constantly being transformed into heat, which was constantly being diffused. This was leading, inevitably, to a final state, where all energy will have been transformed into heat and spread out evenly. Entropy will have reached its maximum. All the energy of the universe will still be there, but it will be useless. All large-scale motion will have ceased,—transformed into vibrations of the particles of matter,—and all life will have died. The cosmos will be left a cold, dead expanse of matter.

Reactions to this picture varied. Some tried to find a way out.³ Some saw it as proof of God’s design; others saw it as detrimental to religious ideas. Thomson’s group saw the two laws as highlighting the unidirectional nature of God’s creation.⁴ This was proof that the universe was created (it had a definite beginning) and that it was moving toward an inevitable end. In drafts of his “On the dynamical theory of heat,” Thomson couched the issue in religious terms, expressing irreversibility, directionality, and dissipation in terms of “a cosmological, and indeed theological principle.” Smith and Wise point to the “depth of his belief that irremediable losses must occur,” pointing to Thomson’s quoting Psalm 102:⁵

The material world could not come back to any previous state without a violation of the laws which have been manifested to man . . . without a creative act or an act possessing similar power . . . “The earth shall wax old &c.” The permanence of the present forms and circumstances is limited. Mechanical effect escapes not only from agencies immediately controlled by man, but from all parts of the material world, in the shape of heat, & escapes irrecoverably, though without loss of vis viva. (Smith and Wise 1989, 317, 330)

Thomson saw this irreversibility as proof of the teleological, unidirectional time scheme of the Bible. He was no biblical literalist, but this vision of a finite universe served as a rebuttal to the infinite or cyclical conceptions of the materialists.⁶ It returned a life span to the cosmos. The macrocosm of the universe again mirrored the microcosm in man: it had been born; it would die.

This was a time of great change in British religious life. In England, in the wake of Tractarian crises, dissent, evangelical movements, and continuing division within the Church itself, the situation was precarious. The Scottish Presbyterian Church likewise was undergoing massive convulsions. Thomson and his allies saw themselves as providing a middle course between extremes: a rational Christianity, in harmony with science, with a natural theology grounded in the laws of thermodynamics and the science of energy:

As Scottish Presbyterian culture manifested every sign of disintegration, the promoters of the science of energy began to represent the new natural philosophy as a counter to the seductions of enthusiast Biblical revivals on the one hand and evolutionary materialism on the other. (Smith 1998, 6)

The heat-death was part of God’s plan for the history of the universe. The new science was used to promote this Christian rationalist view; science and belief went hand in hand in this new cosmology, but there were competing views. Mechanism was a real threat, and a general shift in scientific thought away from natural theology was on the rise.

Thomson, with his rationalist natural theology, was caught up in the religious turmoil of nineteenth-century Britain. He tried to use his science to chart a middle course, between the unscientific and the irreligious, believing religion and science to be mutually compatible and in harmony with each other. He was promoting a course between the Scylla of scientific naturalism/materialism and the Charybdis of biblical literalism. He responded to the second danger by making no speculations about the actual details of creation (though his time-span was long enough to displease literalists immediately). He attacked the first danger head-on. Since Thomson and the North British group took reversibility to be the core doctrine of materialism, they imagined that the irreversibility inherent in thermodynamics was in itself sufficient to disprove it.

John Tyndall was part of a new generation of scientific naturalists. Though not a thorough (or exclusive) materialist, he was against any sort of natural theology and pushed for the separation of religious and scientific questions. Tyndall was more of a problem than others who thought along the same lines because he was a physics insider. He was well connected in London, “at the very heart of elite metropolitan science,” and he “wielded an unsurpassed knowledge of German physics, particularly that which related most directly to energy and thermodynamics” (Smith 1998, 179, 180). But the worst thing about Tyndall was that he did not attack or dispute thermodynamics, he co-opted it. Tyndall championed the conservation of “force,” but from a naturalistic rather than a natural theological standpoint. His cosmological views included the new science of energy, but they excluded the theological. And here was a crucial issue: although Thomson and his group saw it as such, there was no logical reason to suppose that the directionality of thermodynamics and the finality of the heat-death presupposed a Christian cosmos.

Tyndall’s 1874 address at the British Association for the Advancement of Science left his position clear, proclaiming: “The impregnable position of science may be described in a few words. We claim, and we shall wrest, from theology the entire domain of cosmological theory.”⁷ Tyndall became a target of ...