Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1913 (Special number))

THE RENAISSANCE OF THE IRRATIONAL

FIVE hundred years before Christ there lived a man in Ephesus by
name Heraclitus. He was a philosopher more modern than Bergson.
His doctrine was the Eternal Becoming. All things are in a per-
petual state of flux. Nothing exists; things only seem. The Absolute is
change. Fugacity is the Law. All is vibration, mobility. Mont Blanc is
a Niagara of atoms and force. Its unchangeability is an illusion. Our
bodies, our minds, our houses, our wills are traveling at an inconceivable
rate of speed nowhither, everywhither. Some things do not travel as fast
in this great cosmic simoon as other things; hence the illusion of rest, stability.
Heraclitus was the first great Western Irrationalist, the first great In-
tuitionalist, the first philosophic Anarch, the first Romantic. He was the
father of Hegel. Today the world is going back to Heraclitus of Ephesus.
What is the soul of the movement which may be summed up in the names
of Jules de Gaultier, Picasso, Remy de Gourmont, Anatole France, Claude
Debussy, Gustave Le Bon, Eduard Von Hartmann, Nietzsche, Stirner,
Maurice Barres, William James, Picabia? It is the sense of the Irrational
as principle of existence. It is the divination of Chance. It is the apotheosis
of the Intuitive.
From the lofty promontories of the abstract intelligence the artistic and
philosophic world hurls itself into the trumpeting, foaming sea of the Ele-
mental. The Intellect is bankrupt. It is only a park pond. The Mississippi
and the Amazon flow through the heart. All ends are myths. Life itself
explains life. Chance, danger and the irrational constitute the new Trinity.
Dionysus dances in menadic frenzy on the skulls of Darwin, Spencer, Taine,
Buckle and Haeckel. Keep away from shore, for there the fisherfolk called
logicians have sunk their nets. Stick to the open where the waves run high
and where you are tossed toward lying bewitching horizons. The rational,
the sure-and-fast is a cock-and-a-bull story.
And the giant figure of Heraclitus rises out of the East. “They have
come home to me again,” he says. But the Heraclitean danse macabre—for
Heraclitus was a philosopher of sorrows, the Schopenhauer of his time—has
become the Zarathustrian dervish whirl. The eternal snow-storm of atoms
flying in spiral billions from inconceivable zeniths to hypothetical nadirs
is now a storm of throbbing red corpuscles—the heart of the world is warm.
The individual is in the solar stream of a perpetually creative tendency.
Paradox of paradoxes! The new atheism is optimistic! Chance is a
beneficent god! The Irrational has become a faith! There is no “far-off
divine event to which the whole creation moves,” but—better yet!—each
moment is a near-at-hand divine event in which the whole creation is in-
carnated.
Again the paradox. Out of the heart of the most practical people in the
world—the Americans—have come the three supreme Irrationalists of the