Pursuing the Elusive 'Why?'

...This adroit step from the objective to the subjective gives Gay two advantages...

...These are essential, he argues, "since it is, after all, his perceptions that the actor takes as the reality on whose prompting he acts...

...Both of these advantages, however, mask a risk in Gay's gambit —what is too easily proved may not be proved at all...

...With this "valuable word," as Gay dubs it, the historian can justly claim that an opposing reading merely supplements his own, and does not refute it: Causes in history always act together and in abundance...

...As it happened, he chose "those who paint pictures and design houses rather than those who lie for money or kill for glory" because he W3s invited to address art students at New York's Cooper Union...

...instead, they work through the mediation of ideology, tradition and defenses, what Gay calls "worlds of perception...

...There are, he says, three principal causes in history: culture, craft and privacy...

...To say a person's perceptions of such things cause his actions is to say little, especially if, as with Manet, the depiction of "culture" in art is what wants explaining...

...The innovative abstractionist, Mondrian, was a solitary, uncertain craftsman and a mirror to his culture—reflecting its impersonal rationality and its spiritual longings?yet he turned to abstract art mainly because he feared natural things...

...Into this disorder comes Peter Gay, a remarkably erudite, eloquent and prolific historian of ideas at Yale...

...Gay includes within it the whole of public life: "social status, economic oscillations, administrative policies, political leadership, religious sentiments," plus tastes, manners, ideas, and so on...

...First, it opens the idea of cause to the Freudian doctrine of "overdetermination," which states that perceptions and motives, and by extension acts and events, have "more causes than they need...

...And here, too, Gay's analysis stops just where the difficult problems appear...

...Gay's theoretical intent aside, it must be noted that the three essays presenting his interpretations (with many pictures) are striking tributes to the affirming spirit in modernism...

...Others search out probable causes in the complex interdependence of events...

...Manet, Gropius and Mondrian each exemplify a different hierarchy of their importance...

...In outline, Gay's approach is simplicity itself...

...Privacy is also a capacious bag, containing all of family life, emotions, conscious hopes, and unconscious impulses...

...to make buildings that one could live in," than in the mechanisms of professional recruitment, training, discipline, rewards, pressures, and the indoctrination of architectural values—the kinds of influences that Robert K. Merton and Thomas Kuhn, for example, have studied in the sociology of science...

...At home with the traditionalists, he has forayed elsewhere as well...

...But Manet "found his values, and the principal impulses for his work, in the urban industrial society growing around him...

...Thus in Style in History (1974) and this new companion volume, Art and Act, he has lifted strategies from allies and enemies alike to strengthen the orthodox historian without baptizing him a social scientist...

...Style in History showed how rhetoric can affect interpretations of the past...

...Denying his own sensuality, he fled women, denounced nature (and loved New York City for its ab-stractness), rejected matter, and ultimately banished all semblance of objects from his paintings...

...Gay will convert no Marxists on this point...

...Still others, dismissing the traditional solutions as flummery, arm themselves with theories and methods from the social sciences and go after the true causes...

...He therefore illustrates the "primacy of culture...

...Craft is an equally inclusive cause, incorporating the large "domain of work and habit...

...Hence Manet was not moved by culture itself but by his ideological perception of it, Gropius not by craft but by his traditional obligation to it, Mondrian not by his desires but by his defenses against them...

...At a distance, then, Gay's portraits of his artists may seem true to life...

...Second, because subjectivity is a murky deep, Gay is not obligated to find every link in the causal chain that passes through it...

...And this sets Art and Act in contrast to the familiar version of that movement as an angry and bizarre "adversary" of 20th-century culture: Like the philosophes he has championed before, Gay's modernists celebrate their time rather than assail it...

...Culture, craft and privacy do not produce effects directly...

...Gay scents weakness better than most historians and has constructed his argument with built-in protections...

...Indeed, he has not so much portrayed the actuality of cause in history as its plausibility...

...Manet's distinctive art—the bold presentation of color, unconventional organization of space and unabashed portrayal of ordinary life —sprang partly from the "independence and conformity" of his character and partly from the experimental techniques he learned...

...Consider culture...

...The psycho-historian will not be convinced that an actual cause has been found in Mon-drian's (or anyone else's) twisted perceptions of himself...

...Some historians avoid coming to grips with the issue by leaving causation implicit in a sequence of developments: Ambitions precede actions, decadence precedes decline, and the like...

...The demands of craft consist less in...

...He can substantiate his argument by showing how culture, craft and privacy are causes in general...

...Art and Act goes farther—opposing the skeptics, who doubt the objectivity of historical knowledge, and such dogmatists as the Marxists and psy-chohistorians, who reduce everything with certainty to economic interests or horrid family dramas and unconscious conflicts—to present "a general scheme for causal investigation in history...

...Do governments fail for nothing...

...as Peter Gay says, "cause is a conjurer, concealing tricks . . . that even the experienced student cannot wholly anticipate...

...The most important of these is a nanslation of objective causes into subjective ones...

...Yet the "imperious Why...

...As Lloyd deMause, editor of the Journal of Psychohistory, recently wrote, "Any scientific description of the cause of adult historical events must first of all include the formation of the historical personalities involved, including their formation during childhood...

...Gay's intent being theoretical, his subjects could have been drawn from any area of human activity?all people, he says, whether poets, politicians, intellectuals, or bankers, are touched by the same forces...

...Reviewed by James Sloan Allen Teacher of Cultural History, New School and Manhattan School of Music It is impossible to think of history and not think of causes...

...say, Gropius' view of the "architect's obligation...

...Consequently, Gropius exemplifies the "imperatives of craft...

...baffles us...

...As to the causal scheme, it is deceptively difficult to fault...

...Yet his own psychology, in expelling determinism, is inclined toward impressionism...

...Gay has done perhaps as much as is possible to show how erudition, trained intellect and controlled intuition can refine the discipline and at least direct it toward objective knowledge...

...A more demanding interpretation would venture beyond Manet's acceptance of modernity as a primary influence to disclose the particular pressures of class, status, economics, and politics that affected him...

...but examined closely they blur, for the causes he presents are too large, indistinct and tangled...

...Surely not...

...He was a captive of the "claims of privacy...

...Gay discounts such a quest for "ultimate explanations" as blind to the complexity of psychological causation...

...The architectural canons he developed, though, stressing unornamented linear design, open functional spaces and the efficient use of practical materials like steel and glass, arose from the "architectural problem" of constructing "liveable space...

...he will want the roots of those perceptions?drives, resistances, reinforcements, etc.—laid bare amid the circumstances that energized them...

...Disclaiming the art historian's skills and purposes, Gay sifts the lives and creations of Edouard Manet, Walter Gropius and Piet Mondrian for clues to the origins of their work...

...Still, if Art and Act is not the science of history the dogmatists demand, neither is it a mere dabbling in the art of history...

...Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus in Weimar Germany, and initiator of the International Style in architecture, shared the modernists' hopes for a perfected political and material world...

...Do people act by chance...

...He pursued those hopes through his own anti-authoritarian temperament...