Can we travel back in time? Most studies typical of social sciences are similar to a snapshot of a scene. A study with a time dimension built in is more like a movie, but compared to snapshot, more difficult to produce. Attempts to combine historical perspectives with quantitative methodology are hindered by technical and methodological difficulties. Longitudinal studies, where the same subjects participate in experiments over a length of time are difficult to conduct and, ultimately, are limited by the life span of subjects. Cross-sectional studies using different subjects for study of some phenomenon over a series of time intervals and have to make assumptions about the comparability of subjects, often difficult to substantiate. Furthermore, such studies can be continued onward only from the time of the original experiment, so, again, we cannot travel back in time. Another type of quantitative methods for capturing the historical perspective is content analysis of historical documents. Our elaboration of this method is called the trans-temporal cognitive matching. We conceptualize a historical document to be analyzed as an imprint of the cognitive system of its author, identify the key statements within the document, and submit them to a group of persons. As the subjects read the statements, the original author’s cognitions are ‘loaded’ into their cognitive systems and their reactions are recorded into a database. Next, the incipient structure of the document is reconstructed by factor analysis, providing us with the view down the well of time

 Renaissance of Romanticism  During the early stages of development of the Consciousness Scales, our theoretical considerations included a hypothesis that the contemporary revival of romanticism parallels the classical period of European romanticism. Contemporary philosophers and social scientists (e.g., Cotgrove, Horton, Finnegan, Greisman) have repeatedly suggested this hypothesis. Classical European romanticism as expressed in literature, music, paintings and sculptures was more than a style, a ‘manifestation of feeling,’ to use Charles Baudelaire’s expression. Starting in the 1750s, it gained wide influence at the turn of the century and lasted until about the 1850s. The romantic period is often divided into the early and the late periods, the great divide between them being the Napoleonic wars. Edmund Burke's Philosophical Inquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) was one of the early expressions of the romantic tenets expanded, among others, in the writings of Macpherson, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron and Goethe.

Heroism and Love  James Macpherson is best known for his Ossian (1762) telling of heroism and love in the Scottish Highlands. Schoolmaster Macpherson published his poetry as purported translations of the epic poems of the Gaelic bard Ossian, living in the third century. Contemporary readers may perhaps relate to the poem’s love passages, but will probably be taken aback by the ferocity of the other narrative. Ossian describes military glory, father-prompting son to engage in a battle, splendid visions of heroic encounters, and festivities following the victories. A recurrent theme in Ossian is the motif of a military leader who, alone, contemplates the coming battle, its likely gruesome course, and the probability of his own death. Ossian’s influence was strong. How strong? A circle of artists around one of the staunchest supporters of the French revolution, painter Jacques Louis David, dismissed all literature except Iliad, Bible, and Ossian. Russian translation of Ossian by Kostrov was dedicated to the field Marshall Suvorov, foremost among the conquerors of Napoleon. In his dedication Kostrov summarizes the military side of the poem and hopes that in Ossian, Suvorov will recognize himself.

Poets of the Lake  The poets of the ‘Lake School,’ Coleridge and Wordsworth are perhaps better remembered for their adventures and exploits than for their ballads. Coleridge planned to establish a utopian colony of farmer-philosophers on the banks of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. After the project fell through, Coleridge and Wordsworth departed for Revolutionary France where they lived through many romantic adventures. In France, Wordsworth fell in love with Annette Vallon, who bore him a daughter. After returning to England, Coleridge, unhappy with his wife, and Wordsworth, trying to forget Annette Vallon, used laudanum, opium dissolved in alcohol, to forget and to write. Coleridge become addicted, published ‘Dejection: An Ode,’ separated from his wife, and lived in the care of James Gillman, MD, who specialized in therapy of drug addicts. Wordsworth, trying to atone for his desertion of Annette Vallon, spent the rest of his life trying to record ‘spots of time,’ intense moments of his life when he experienced either extreme happiness or extreme sorrow.

Lord George Byron (1788-1824)

Byron's Love Affairs  Lord George Byron is best known for his series of love affairs, the most memorable being his passion for his half sister, Augusta Leigh. To break this infatuation, he married another woman. However, this marriage did not last long. His wife left him twelve months later, taking their infant child with her. To forget, Byron left England for Switzerland where he met Percy Shelley, who lived there after being expelled from Oxford University for publishing his Necessity of Atheism (1811). In Switzerland Byron wrote Manfred (1817), in which he described his love to Augusta Leigh and his sense of guilt for loving his half-sister. From Switzerland Byron moved on to Venice, where he wrote Don Juan (1819) and met young, beautiful (and married) Teresa Guiccioli, with whom he lived for several years. He escaped this relationship by going to help the Greeks, then struggling against the Turks. Shortly after reaching Greece, and before he could find death on the battlefield, Byron contracted an illness and died of fever. Delacroix commemorated these events in his famous painting Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi (1826) where a woman standing on rocks symbolizes Greece stained with blood. Some see in the greenish tint on the woman's breast the presaging of Byron’s imminent death. Byron is best remembered for his characters Childe Harold, Manfred, and Don Juan, seeking to atone for their dark deeds by acts asserting personal freedom. The Byronic hero is close to Goethe's Faust.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

Suffering of Young Werther  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is best known for his Faust (1808), and countless love affairs, spanning countries and age differences. During his young years Goethe courted the beautiful Charlotte von Stein, a married woman seven years his senior. The young Christine Vulpius bore him a son in 1789. They married in 1806. Still widely read is his correspondence, Briefweschel mit einem Kinde, with Bettina von Arnim, 36 years his junior. Early romanticism probably gained its best expression in the Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers (1774), Suffering of Young Werther. This book was a bestseller that influenced a whole generation. Together with Macpherson’s Ossian and Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie, Goethe’s Werther was Napoleon’s favorite reading matter. He carried a copy of Werther with him during his 1812 military campaign in Russia.

 Absorption Scale  We continued our expansion of the Consciousness Scales by content analyzing Goethe's Werther and included another scale, called the Absorption Scale. The Absorption Scale can be characterized by its component items, such as ‘I like to watch cloud shapes change in the sky’ and ‘Textures-such as wool, sand, wood-sometimes remind me of colors or music.’  The absorption scale is predictive of hypnotic susceptibility and sensitivity to altered perception, such as experienced during the use of hallucinogens such as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, and marijuana.

 

Similarities and Differences between Romantic and Neo-Romantic Movements

Distance: Two Centuries. Time Flow: Negative  The target structure of our trans-temporal cognitive matching project was derived from Goethe's Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers with the referent structure provided by our Consciousness Scales. The temporal distance of the target structure from the referent structure was about two centuries. The source document was content-analyzed by a group of judges who read the book and recorded sentences expressing quantifiable value judgments. Sentences selected by two or more judges were assembled into a questionnaire with agree-disagree response categories. This questionnaire was administered to a group of 60 subjects. Following item analysis, the Goethe scale was constructed from the best discriminating items. The content validity of the Goethe scale was substantial with selected items evenly distributed over all chapters of the book. The scale was also internally consistent; its reliability estimated by Kuder-Richardson's Formula 20 was equal to .75. Results of this experiment indicated that the American Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s was indeed a neo-romantic movement. Obviously, the Classical Romantic Movement and the American Neo-romantic Movement were not identical. Using multiple regression analysis, we estimated the degree of their overlap by computing the amount of variance common to the referent target structures. Using the stepwise multiple regression and evaluating the statistical significance of the variance contribution of each scale included at successive steps, we continued the regression analysis until the 5% significance level was exceeded. The obtained multiple correlation was .76. Expressing this finding as a percentage, the amount of overlap between the romantic revival of the sixties and early seventies and the romantic movement at the turn of eighteen and nineteen centuries was about 58 percent.

Warp: n - Dimensional Subspace within the Hyperspace  The referent structure was conceptualized as to describe the substructure of fundamental ideological orientations and to capture ideological, psychological and philosophical characteristics of the neo-romantic movement of the opening decades of the second half of the present century. It included scales based on content analysis of Reich's Greening of America and Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Additional scales included were Tellegen and Atkinson's Absorption scale and Tellegen's Normative scale. The Absorption scale measured openness to absorbing and self-altering experiences. Tellegen's Normative scale measures preferences for structured societal rules and orderly society, based on legalistic principles and rigid ethical values. It indexes a lack of anomie and presence of internalized standards of conduct. Goethe’s scale correlated with all scales indexing the neo-romantic cognitive styles and showed virtually no relationship to the modes of thought typical of normative opinions and attitudes. Factor analysis of the correlation matrix returned two eigenvalues greater than one for the preliminary principal components solution. Squared multiple correlations were used as communality estimates in the principal factors solution. Communalities were iterated until converged. Two extracted factors accounted for 60% of the total variance and for 59% and 41% of the common variance. The factor matrix was rotated by Varimax into the simple structure. The location of the Goethe’s scale within the Consciousness structure is shown in the figure below.

Factor Analytic Structure of the Romantic and Neo-romantic Movements. Click the graph to view this structure in the virtual reality space. Next, click the Fit navigational control.

Values Shape Our World  At this point we were really impressed by the stability of our structure, built over decades, and encompassing widely different opinions and values. This factor analytic structure provided a conceptual framework for integrating elements of personality theory and capturing tenets of disciplines ranging from psychobiology to quantitative history. Consciousness Scales appeared instrumental for the classification of basic human values and description of hierarchically ordered structures of derived values. We believed that empirically validated, quantified description of these value structures is the prime task of quantitative social science. We shared this belief with the Nobel laureate, Roger Sperry, who wrote that, ‘human values stand out as the most strategically powerful causal control now shaping world events.’ Roger Sperry also reaffirmed our belief that the value system to which we subscribe to, guide our destiny. In his words, ‘more than any other causal system with which science now concerns itself, it is variables in human value systems that will determine the future.' In this belief Sperry was endorsing Meinecke who about two decades earlier asserted that 'the search for causalities in history is impossible without reference to values. Behind the search for causalities there always lies, directly or indirectly, the search for values.' However, our structure did not have a name. It was no longer a structure comprising only the Consciousness scales. It contained among the scales measuring the basic polarities of values also the Pirsig’s Zen scale, Goethe’s Romanticism scale and Tellegen’s Absorption scale. While the other scales dealt with readily comprehensible entities, the Zen scale and the Absorption scale were rather unorthodox type of scales.

Snake Handling in the Appalachian Mountains  The author of the Absorption scale is Auke Tellegen, a Scandinavian immigrant to the United States and Professor of Psychology at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Tellegen enjoys conducting innovative and unusual studies. Our favorite is his study of the snake handling cults in the Appalachian Mountains, which describes his observations of members asserting their ardent religious beliefs by enduring bites of poisonous snakes. If one’s religious convictions are pure and strong enough, they'll survive the snake bite. His Absorption scale was aimed, however, at different targets. It was designed to measure the degree of operative-inoperative involvement, modes of time perception, trust proneness, hypnotizability, and critical appraisal.

Categories of Dionysian and Apollonian Styles of Thought

Apollonian-Dionysian Scales  One day, perusing the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, the author noticed an article by Spiegel, reviewing work done in the course of validation of his Hypnotic Induction Profile. It identified structural components of two personality types that Spiegel called Apollonian and Dionysian, borrowing the concepts and terminology from the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. Spiegel described the Dionysian personality type as including the focal-peripheral type of space awareness, orientation toward the present in time perception, externalized locus of control, high trust proneness, suspended critical appraisal, high affiliation, high inoperative involvement and tactile preferred contact modes. His description of the Apollonian type included the peripheral-focal type of space awareness, orientation toward past and future in time perception, internalized locus of control, low trust proneness, immediate critical appraisal, operative involvement and visual preferred contact modes. These psychological attributes are summarized in the table on the left. The Apollonian - Dionysian categories captured some facets of the Consciousness scales and for some time we called them the Apollonian-Dionysian scales.

The East-West Scales  The second unorthodox scale in our set was the Zen Scale. We attempted to unravel its mysteries by reading Ames’ Zen and American Thought, Barrett’s Zen for the West, and even Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, but to no avail. We even visited the Zen garden in Kyoto, Japan, only to learn that in addition to its twelve boulders resting on a smooth surface of neatly raked sand it also has a thirteenth’s one, visible only to the initiated. No matter how hard we tried, the thirteenth boulder remained invisible to us. Then, by pure serendipity, we discovered Gilgen and Cho's East-West Scales. Based on an analysis of modes of thought typical of traditional Eastern and Western civilizations, the East-West scales contrast the assumptions of both civilization types pertaining to key ethical and epistemological issues as summarized in the adjacent table.

Factor Analytic Structure of the East-West Dimension. Click the graph to view this structure in the virtual reality space. Next, click the Fit navigational control.

References