Hilma af Klint

“You must learn to ignore fear, for without the will to believe in yourself, nothing good will happen”

Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) was a Swedish artist and mystic whose paintings are considered among the first major abstract works in Western art history.  A considerable body of her work predates the first purely abstract compositions by Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian.  She belonged to a group called "The Five", comprising a circle of women inspired by Theosophy, who shared a belief in the importance of trying to contact the so-called "High Masters"—often by way of séances.  Her paintings, which sometimes resemble diagrams, were a visual representation of complex spiritual ideas.

Oil on Linen 35x30 cm

After graduating from Swedish Royal Academy of Art, Hilma af Klint began working in Stockholm, gaining recognition for her landscapes, botanical drawings, and portraits. Her conventional painting became the source of her income, but her 'life's work' remained a quite separate practice.  In 1880 her younger sister Hermina died, and it was at this time that the spiritual dimension of her life began to develop.

Af Klint's work can be understood in the wider context of the modernist search for new forms in artistic, spiritual, political, and scientific systems at the beginning of the twentieth century.  There was a similar interest in spirituality by other artists during this same period, including Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich, and the French Nabis, in which many, like af Klint, were inspired by the Theosophical Movement.

In 1944, Hilma af Klint died at 81 in Djursholm, Sweden,  after a traffic accident. She had exhibited her work only a handful of times, for the most part at spiritual conferences and gatherings.

Vivienne Westwood 1941-2922

“Buy less, choose well, make it last”

Dame Vivienne Isobel Westwood was an English fashion designer and businesswoman, largely responsible for bringing modern punk and new wave fashions into the mainstream.  She came to public notice when she made clothes for the boutique that she and Malcolm McLaren ran on King's Road, which became known as Sex. Their ability to synchronise clothing and music shaped the 1970s UK punk scene, which included McLaren's band, the Sex Pistols. She viewed punk as a way of "seeing if one could put a spoke in the system".

Oil on Canvas 60x55 cm

Westwood was disenchanted with the direction that adoptees had taken punk in, many of them uninterested in punk's political values, viewing the style of the movement as a marketing opportunity instead of a medium for radical change; with the dissolution of the Sex Pistols, Westwood's inspiration for her eponymous line shifted instead to the 18th century.  She was particularly influenced by Pirates and the Incroyables and merveilleuses a radical movement amongst nobles who had survived the French Revolution which referenced the guillotine to which many had lost family members.

Westwood opened four shops in London and eventually expanded throughout Britain and the world, selling a varied range of merchandise, some of which promoted her political causes such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, climate change and civil rights groups.

Westwood died in Clapham, London, on 29 December 2022, aged 81. Former co-leader of the Green Party MP Caroline Lucas said of Westwood: "Such a legend, a huge inspiration, brilliantly creative and always a committed activist for people and planet – my thoughts are with her family and friends – RIP."

Emily Hobhouse 1860-1926

“I came quite naturally, in obedience to the feeling of unity or oneness of womanhood ... it is when the community is shaken to its foundations, that abysmal depths of privation call to each other and that a deeper unity of humanity evinces itself.”

Emily Hobhouse (9 April 1860 – 8 June 1926) was a British welfare campaigner, anti-war activist, and pacifist. She is primarily remembered for bringing to the attention of the British public, and working to change, the deprived conditions inside the British concentration camps in South Africa built to incarcerate Boer and African civilians during the Second Boer War.

Oil on Linen 35x30 cm

Born in Cornwall, England she had a difficult childhood early life as her mother died when she was 20, and she spent the next fourteen years looking after her father who was in poor health. When her father died in 1895, she went to Minnesota in the United States to perform welfare work amongst Cornish mineworkers living there.  After a failed engagement and the loss of her money she returned to England in 1898.

When the second Anglo-Boer war broke out she volunteered to help the women and children displaced by the war and being held in concentration camps. Criticised by the British Government and press on her return she felt she never received justice for her work.

Hobhouse was an avid opponent of the First World War and protested vigorously against it and through her offices, thousands children were fed daily for more than a year in central Europe after the war.

She settled in St.Ives, Cornwall until her death.  Her ashes were ensconced in a niche in the National Women's Monument at Bloemfontein, where she was regarded as a heroine but her death went unreported in the Cornish press.

Virginia Woolf 1882-1941

“The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”

Virginia Woolf was an English writer and is considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors. She pioneered the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.

Oil on Linen 35×30 cm

Woolf was born into an affluent household in London, the seventh child of Julia and Leslie Stephen in a family of eight that included the modernist painter Vanessa Bell. She studied classics and history Ar King’s College London, coming into contact with early reformers of women's higher education and the women's rights movement.

In the spring of 1882, Leslie rented a large white house in St Ives, Cornwall overlooking Porthminster Bay with views to the Godrevy Lighthouse. The family would spend three months each summer there for the first 13 years of Virginia's life and would later influence Woolf's novels Jacob's Room, To the Lighthouse and The Waves

Oil on Paper 28×28 cm

After her father's death in 1904, the Stephen family moved from Kensington to the more bohemian Bloomsbury, where, in conjunction with the brothers' intellectual friends, they formed the artistic and literary Bloomsbury Group. In 1912, she married Leonard Woolf, and in 1917, the couple founded the Hogarth Press, which published much of her work. They rented a home in Sussex and permanently settled there in 1940.

After the Second World War began, Woolf's diary indicates that she was obsessed with death, which figured more and more as her mood darkened. On 28 March 1941, Woolf drowned herself by walking into the fast-flowing River Ouse near her home, after placing a large stone in her pocket.

John Keats 1795-1821

“The winged Psyche with awaken’d eyes”

John Keats was an English Romantic poet. He was one of the main figures of the second generation of Romantic poets, along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, despite his works having been in publication for only four years before his death from tuberculosis at the age of 25.

Born in London his father, a livery-stable manager, died when Keats was 9 and his mother died when he was 15.  He worked as a junior house surgeon, at Guy’s and St. Thomas’ hospitals until 1817 when he devoted himself entirely to poetry.  Keats had first read Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene when he was eighteen and it awakened his love of poetry and shocked him into self-awareness of his own powers of imagination.

Oil on Linen 60x50 cm

The reviews of his early publications were mixed and after his death it was common to believe that these attacks had shaken Keats’s resolve and broken his health.  Most of Keats’ circle recognised the shortcomings of these early works: Shelley, for reasons of his own, exaggerated the effect of the conservative reviewers’ savage, and Byron was at first scornful of Keats’s weakness, as Shelley portrayed it to him, but refused to criticise him publicly after his death. Living in lodgings in Hampstead with his brothers, Tom and George, Keats met these reviews with a calm assertion of his own talents, and he went on steadily writing poetry.

In the summer of 1818 Keats went on a walking tour in the Lake District (of northern England) and Scotland with his friend Charles Brown, and his exposure and over exertions on that trip brought on the first symptoms of the tuberculosis of which he was to die.  On his return to London he met Fanny Brawne, a near neighbour in Hampstead, with whom he soon fell hopelessly and tragically in love. The relation with Fanny had a decisive effect on Keats’s development, but his uncertain material situation and his failing health made it impossible for their relationship to run a normal course. After Tom’s death from tuberculosis in the autumn of 1818 (George had already gone to America), Keats moved into Wentworth Place in Hampstead with Brown, and in April 1819 Brawne and her mother became his next-door neighbours and 6 months later they got engaged.

Oil on Linen 35x30 cm

It was during 1819 that he wrote the famous odes Ode to Psyche, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode on Melancholy, To Autumn and Ode on Indolence.  In style and power the odes represent Keats’s finest poetry; indeed, they are among the greatest achievements of Romantic art.

During 1820 Keats displayed increasingly serious symptoms of tuberculosis, suffering two lung haemorrhages in the first few days of February and in the winter he moved to Italy into a villa on the Spanish Steps in Rome, today the Keats–Shelley Memorial House museum.  The first months of 1821 marked a slow and steady decline into the final stage of tuberculosis and in February he died and was buried under a tombstone bearing no name or date, only the words, "Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water." When Keats died at 25, he had been writing poetry seriously for only about six years but was thought of as a poet whose talent, though its development was cut short, was the equal of Shelley’s and Byron‘s.

Oil on Paper 28x28 cm

Lord Byron 1788-1824

“Then stirs the feeling infinite, so felt In solitude, where we are least alone.”

George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, FRS, known simply as Lord Byron, was an English poet, peer and politician who became a revolutionary in the Greek War of Independence, and is considered one of the leading figures of the Romantic movement.  Byron spent his early years in Aberdeen, and was educated at Harrow School and Cambridge University. In 1809, he left for a two-year tour of a number of Mediterranean countries. He returned to England in 1811, and in 1812 the first two cantos of 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage' were published. Byron became famous overnight. In the wake of Childe Harold’s enormous popularity, Byron was lionized in Whig society. The handsome poet was swept into a liaison with the passionate and eccentric Lady Caroline Lamb, and the scandal of an elopement was barely prevented by a friend She was succeeded as his lover by Lady Oxford, who encouraged Byron’s radicalism.

In 1814, Byron's half-sister Augusta gave birth to a daughter, almost certainly Byron's. The following year Byron married Annabella Milbanke, with whom he had a daughter, his only legitimate child. The couple separated in 1816.  Facing mounting pressure as a result of his failed marriage, scandalous affairs and huge debts, Byron left England in April 1816 and never returned.

He contracted a fever from which he died in Greece in 1824. Deeply mourned, he became a symbol of disinterested patriotism and a Greek national hero. His body was brought back to England and, refused burial in Westminster Abbey, was placed in the family vault near Newstead. Ironically, 145 years after his death, a memorial to Byron was finally placed on the floor of the Abbey.

 'Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage' was published between 1812 and 1818. Dedicated to "Ianthe", it describes the travels and reflections of a world-weary young man, who is disillusioned with a life of pleasure and revelry and looks for distraction in foreign lands. In a wider sense, it is an expression of the melancholy and disillusionment felt by a generation weary of the wars of the post-Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras.

Sylvia Plath 1932-1963

“Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call.”

Sylvia Plath was one of the most dynamic and admired poets of the 20th century. Plath met and married British poet Ted Hughes, although the two later split. The depressive Plath was treated multiple times with electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and attempted suicide in 1953.  More ECT followed and although she seemed to have made a good recovery she committed suicide in 1963 after the breakdown of her marriage to Hughes.

Sylvia Plath oil on Linen 70x60 cm

Many of Plath’s posthumous publications were compiled by Hughes, who became the executor of her estate. However, controversy surrounded both the estate’s management of her work’s copyright and his editing practices, especially when he revealed that he had destroyed the last journals written prior to her suicide. Her work attracted the attention of a multitude of readers, who saw in her singular verse an attempt to catalogue despair, violent emotion, and obsession with death. She garnered accolades after her death for the novel The Bell Jar, and the poetry collections, Colossus and Ariel.  In 1982, Plath became the first person to win a posthumous Pulitzer Prize. 

Sylvia Plath Oil on Paper 25x23 cm

I have read a stunning biography of Plath by Heather Clarke titled Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath.  It tells the tragic story of her life giving careful analysis of her work and a compassionate understanding of her relationship with Ted Hughes.  I found it thoroughly inspirational and would strongly recommend it.

Pauline Boty 1938-1966

“Lots of women are intellectually more clever than lots of men…” .

Boty was a British painter and co-founder of the 1960s' British Pop art movement of which she was the only acknowledged female member. Boty's paintings and collages often demonstrate a joy in self-assured femininity and female sexuality, as well as criticism (both overt and implicit) of the "man's world" in which she lived. Her rebellious art, combined with her free-spirited lifestyle, has made Boty a herald of feminism.

Pauline Boty Oil on Linen 70×60 cm

Her unique position as Britain's only female Pop artist gave Boty the chance to redress sexism in her life as well as her art. Her early paintings were sensual and erotic, celebrating female sexuality from a woman's point of view. Her canvases were set against vivid, colourful backgrounds and often included close-ups of red flowers, presumably symbolic of the female sex. She exhibited in several group shows before staging her first solo exhibition at Grabowski Gallery in the autumn of 1963. The show was a critical success. Boty also took acting jobs supplement her income even making a brief appearance in a scene with Michael Caine in the 1966 film, Alfie.

In 1965 Boty became pregnant. During a prenatal exam, a tumour was discovered and she was diagnosed with cancer. She refused to have an abortion and also refused to receive chemotherapy treatment that might have harmed the foetus. Her daughter, Katy was born on 12 February 1966. Pauline Boty died at the Royal Marsden Hospital on 1 July that year.  She was 28 years old. Her daughter, died of an overdose on 12 November 1995 aged 29. On 1 July 2023, a Blue Plaque was erected for Boty at 7A Addison Avenue, Holland Park at her former home and studio. The unveiling was carried out by Natalie Gibson and Celia Birtwell with Sir Peter Blake in attendance alongside other friends, family and admirers of Boty.

Pauline Boty Oil on Linen 35x30 cm

Friedrich Nietzsche 1844-1900

“Art Raises is head when religions relax their hold”

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philosopher, cultural critic, composer, poet, writer, and philologist whose work has exerted a profound influence on modern intellectual history. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. Nietzsche resigned his chair at the University of Basel in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life; he completed much of his core writing in the following decade.

Friedrich Nietzsche, 2018 Oil on Canvas 71x61cm (Available for Sale)

Nietzsche agreed with Schopenhauer that there is no God, and that we do not have immortal souls.  He also agreed that this life of ours is a largely meaningless business of suffering and striving, driven along by an irrational force we can call will.  Nietzsche rejected Schopenhauer’s conclusion that we should turn away in disgust from such a world, reject it, and withdraw from it.  On the contrary, he believed that we should live our lives to the full in it, and get everything out of it.  The central question posed by Nietzsche’s philosophy is how best to do this in a godless, meaningless world.  In his 1883 book Thus Spoke Zarathustra (German: Also Sprach Zarathustra), Nietzsche has his character Zarathustra posit the Übermensch as a goal for humanity to set for itself. The Übermensch represents a shift from otherworldly Christian values and manifests the grounded human ideal.  One of the words he uses most frequently is “dare”; and perhaps his first commandment is: “Dare to become what you are.”  

In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and afterward a complete loss of his mental faculties, an illness almost certainly brought on by tertiary syphilis. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897 and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Nietzsche died in 1900.  In the late 19th and early 20th centuries Nietzsche exerted a widespread influence on creative artists, including playwrights August Strindberg and George Bernard Shaw, poets W. B. Yeats and Rainer Maria Rilke, composer Richard Strauss and novelists Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse.  His stoic heroism was a lasting influence on Albert Camus and Jean Paul-Sartre; the idea that we must confront the most difficult and unpalatable truths about ourselves without flinching, go on looking them in the eye, and live in the light of this knowledge without any reward other than the living of such a life for its own sake.

Immanuel Kant 1724-1804

“Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing can ever be made.”

Kant was born in the town of Königsburg in East Prussia and although he never left he became internationally famous in his lifetime.  An academic he didn’t publish until he was 57 when in 1781 he released one of the greatest books of all time, Critique of Pure Reason. Others followed in a rush of highly original works with a depth of ideas that made them very difficult to understand.   His work is the gateway to the most significant developments in philosophy beyond David Hume.

Immanuel Kant, 2018 Oil on Canvas 61x61cm (Available for Sale)

Before Kant most thinkers took it for granted that the limit imposed on what human beings can know is set by what there is: we can, in principle, go on finding things out until in the end there is nothing left to know.  Kant, developing an idea of John Locke’s, insisted that our knowledge is also limited by our five senses, our brains and our nervous system.  Therefore, anything that this apparatus can deal with is capable of being an experience for us.  But anything it cannot deal with can never be experienced for we have no way of apprehending it, but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.  So there are two limits on what we can know; what exists and our ability to perceive it.

Kant’s doctrine means that we can never know for certain that anything exists which our bodily apparatus cannot apprehend; which rules out knowledge of the existence of God and immortal souls.  However, it does not rule out the existence of God, only knowledge of the existence of God.  Consequently he demolished so-called proofs of the existence of God and since Kant it has been accepted by serious thinkers that the existence of God cannot be proved or disproved.

Friedrich Schiller 1759-1805

“Art is the daughter of freedom”.

Friedrich Schiller was born on 10 November 1759, in Germany, as the only son of military doctor.  As a boy, Schiller was excited by the idea of becoming a cleric and often put on black robes and pretended to preach but he eventually studied medicine. During most of his short life, he suffered from illnesses that he tried to cure himself.

One of the great German poets and dramatists, Friedrich Schiller studied the philosophy of Kant between 1793 and 1801 whilst recuperating from illness. In his essays he sought to define the character of aesthetic activity, its function in society, and its relation to moral experience. His early tragedies were attacks upon political oppression and his later plays we're concerned with the freedom of the soul - allowing man to rise above his physical conditions. He died of tuberculosis in 1805.

Arthur Schopenhauer 1788-1860

“Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.”

Arthur Schopenhauer was among the first 19th century philosophers to contend that at its core, the universe is not a rational place. Inspired by Plato and Immanuel Kant, both of whom regarded the world as being more amenable to reason, Schopenhauer developed their philosophies into an instinct-recognising and ultimately ascetic outlook, emphasising that in the face of a world filled with endless strife, we ought to minimize our natural desires for the sake of achieving a more tranquil frame of mind and a disposition towards universal beneficence. He is best known for his 1818 work The World as Will and Representation  (expanded in 1844), wherein he characterises the phenomenal world as the product of a blind and insatiable metaphysical will. Proceeding from the transcendental idealism of Kant, Schopenhauer developed an atheistic metaphysical and ethical system that has been described as an exemplary manifestation of philosophical pessimism, rejecting the contemporaneous post-Kantian philosophies of German idealism.

Arthur Schopenhauer, 2018 Oil on Canvas 140x120cm (Available for Sale)

Although considered to be a thoroughgoing pessimist, Schopenhauer in fact advocated ways — via artistic, moral and ascetic forms of awareness — to overcome a frustration-filled and fundamentally painful human condition. He has been dubbed the artist’s philosopher on account of the inspiration his aesthetics has provided to artists of all stripes.  Schopenhauer’s lack of recognition during most of his lifetime may have been due to the iconoclasm of his thought, but it was probably also partly due to his irascible and stubborn temperament.

Arthur Schopenhauer, 2018 Oil on Paper 28x28cm (available for Sale)

Although he never achieved the fame of such post-Kantian philosophers as Johann Gottlieb Fichte and G.W.F. Hegel in his lifetime, his thought informed the work of such luminaries as Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein and, most famously, Friedrich Nietzsche. He is also known as the first German philosopher to incorporate Eastern thought into his writings.  Since his death in 1860, his philosophy has had a special attraction for those who wonder about life’s meaning, along with those engaged in music, literature, and the visual arts.

Simone Weil 1909-1943

“Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life. “

Simone Weil was a French mystic and social philosopher, whose posthumously published works had particular influence on French and English social thought. Intellectually precocious, Weil also expressed social awareness at an early age. At five she refused sugar because the French soldiers at the front during World War I had none and aged 10 she declared herself a Bolshevik. After completing her studies in philosophy, classical philology, and science, Weil taught philosophy in several girls’ schools from 1931 to 1938 and often became embroiled in conflicts with school boards as a result of her social activism.

Simone Weil, 2018 Oil on Canvas 200x170 cm (Available for Sale)

To learn the psychological effects of heavy industrial labour, she took a job in 1934–35 in a Renault car factory, where she observed the spiritually deadening effect of machines on her fellow workers. In 1936 she joined an anarchist unit called the Durriti Column near Zaragoza, Spain, training for action in the Spanish Civil War, but after an accident in which she was badly scalded by boiling oil, she went to Portugal to recuperate. Soon thereafter Weil had the first of several mystical experiences, and she subsequently came to view her social concerns as “ersatz Divinity.” On returning to Paris, Weil continued to write essays on War, Peace, Labour and Management.  She was one of the first to identify a new form of oppression not anticipated by Marx, where élite bureaucrats could make life just as miserable for ordinary people as did the most exploitative capitalists

Simone Weil, 2018 Oil on Canvas 85x70 cm (Available for Sale)

After the German occupation of Paris during World War II, Weil moved to the south of France, where she worked as a farm servant. She escaped with her parents to the United States in 1942 but then went to London to work with the French Resistance. The exact cause of her death remains a subject of debate. Malnutrition and overwork led to a physical collapse, and during her hospitalization she was found to have tuberculosis. She died after a few months spent in a sanatorium.

Some claim that her refusal to eat came from her desire to express some form of solidarity toward the victims of the war. Others think that Weil's self-starvation occurred after her study of Schopenhauer who in his chapters on Christian saintly asceticism and salvation, had described self-starvation as a preferred method of self-denial.

Simone Weil, 2018 Oil on Paper 28x28 cm (Available for Sale)

Weil’s writings, which were collected and published after her death, fill about 20 volumes. Though born of Jewish parents, Weil eventually adopted a mystical theology that came very close to Roman Catholicism. A moral idealist committed to a vision of social justice, Weil in her writings explored her own religious life while also analysing the individual’s relation with the state and God, the spiritual shortcomings of modern industrial society, and the horrors of totalitarianism.

Harriet Martineau 1802-1876

“You better live your best and act your best and think your best today, for today is the sure preparation for tomorrow and all the other tomorrows that follow.”

Martineau wrote many books and a multitude of essays from a sociological, holistic, religious, domestic, and perhaps most controversially, feminine perspective; she also translated Auguste Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive as The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, Freely Translated and Condensed, 2 vol. (1853). Martineau said of her own approach to writing: "when one studies a society, one must focus on all its aspects, including key political, religious, and social institutions". She believed a thorough societal analysis was necessary to understand women's status under men.

Harriet Martineau 2018, Oil on Canvas 140x120 cm (Not Available)

Martineau began losing her senses of taste and smell at a young age, becoming increasingly deaf and having to use an ear trumpet. It was the beginning of many health problems in her life.  In 1839, during a visit to Continental Europe, Martineau was diagnosed with a uterine tumour.  She moves to a house in Tyneside to be near her brother-in-law, Thomas Michael Greenhow, who was a celebrated doctor in Newcastle upon Tyne.  Immobile and confined to a couch, her illness caused her to literally enact the social constraints of women during this time. Whilst there she wrote three works including Life in the Sickroom, considered to be one of Martineau's most under-rated works. It upset evangelical readers as they "thought it dangerous in 'its supposition of self-reliance'".

In 1845 she left Tynemouth for Ambleside in the Lake District, here she designed herself and oversaw the construction of the house called The Knoll, Ambleside, where she spent the greater part of her later life.  Diagnosed with fatal heart disease in 1855, Martineau began her autobiography in 1855 (it was published posthumously in 1877), but she lived another 21 years, producing eight more volumes of serious work, and became England's leading woman of letters, holding a kind of court at her tiny estate in Westmoreland, where she died on June 27, 1876.

Harriet Martineau 2018, Oil on Paper 28x28cm (Available for Sale)

The subsequent works offered fictional tutorials on a range of political economists such as James Mill and Jeremy Bentham. Martineau relied on the works of Thomas Malthus to form her view of the tendency of human population to exceed its means of subsistence. However, in stories such as "Weal and Woe in Garvelock", she promoted the idea of population control through what Malthus referred to as "voluntary checks" such as voluntary chastity and delayed marriages. Historically she is remembered as a tough-minded writer who fought great odds to achieve a distinguished literary career.

Edmund Husserl 1859-1938

“I Exist, and all that is not-I is mere phenomenon dissolving into phenomenal connections”

Born in Germany Edmund Husserl studied mathematics and philosophy and went on to establish the school of Phenomenology, the study of the structures of experience and consciousness.  Husserl agreed with Descartes that for each of us there is one thing whose existence is certain, and that is our own conscious awareness, therefore, if we want to build our conception of reality on sound foundations, that is the place to start.  But he also agreed with Hulme that when looking at an object my awareness is of the object, not of myself having the experience of looking at it.  I am directly aware of objects but not of myself as an object.  However, all attempts to prove that these objects exist independently of my awareness seem doomed to failure and hence on cannot prove the existence of the external world.  Husserl puts this to one side and assumes they exist as objects of consciousness for us and progress with what we are equipped to investigate.  This examination of consciousness and its objects became known as Phenomenology (1), because it treated everything as phenomena.  There is a phenomenology of everything not only our perception of material objects but also the arts, religion, the sciences and things internal to us such as pain, thought, feelings, memories etc.

Edmund Husserl 2017, Oil on Linen 35x30cm (Private Collection)

Husserl drafted the outline of Phenomenology as a universal philosophical science. Its fundamental methodological principle was what Husserl called the phenomenological reduction. It focuses the philosopher’s attention on uninterpreted basic experience and the quest for the essences(2) of things. On the other hand, it is also the reflection on the functions by which essences become conscious. As such, the reduction reveals the ego for which everything has meaning. Hence, Phenomenology took on the character of a new style of transcendental philosophy, which repeats and improves Kant’s mediation between Empiricism(3) and Rationalism(4) in a modern way.

(1) Phenomenology is the philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness.  Phenomenology, in Husserl's conception, is primarily concerned with the systematic reflection on and study of the structures of consciousness and the phenomena that appear in acts of consciousness. Phenomenology can be clearly differentiated from the Cartesian method of analysis which sees the world as objects, sets of objects, and objects acting and reacting upon one another.

(2) Essence is the intrinsic nature or indispensable quality of something, especially something abstract, which determines its character.

(3) Empiricism is the theory that all knowledge is based on experience derived from the senses. Stimulated by the rise of experimental science, it developed in the 17th and 18th centuries, expounded in particular by John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume.

(4) Rationalism is the theory that reason rather than experience is the foundation of certainty in knowledge.

Søren Kierkegaard 1813-1855

"Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards."

Søren Kierkegaard is generally regarded as the founder of existentialism (1).  Born in Denmark he enrolled at the University of Copenhagen in 1830 but did not complete his studies until 1841. He was studying at a time when the dominant philosopher of the age was Hegel.  Hegel, said Kierkegaard explained everything in terms of huge great sweeps of ideas in which actual things, individual entities, are unmentioned despite the fact that it is only individual things that exist. Abstractions, generalisations, do not exist in the same sense: they are our own inventions that facilitate understanding.  But in order to understand something that does not exist we have to explore coming to terms with uniquely individual entities because that is all there is.  This is especially true of human beings.  Hegel had seen the individual as fulfilling himself only when absorbed into the larger and more abstract entity of the organic state, whereas in fact, said Kierkegaard, it is the individual himself who is the supreme moral entity, and therefore it is the personal, subjective aspects of human life that are the most important.  Because of the transcending value of moral considerations the most important human activity is decision making: it is through choices we make that we create our lives and become ourselves.

Søren Kierkegaard, 2017 Oil on Canvas 61x61cm (Private Collection-USA)

In what was perhaps his earliest major work Either / Or  (1843) he suggests that people might effectively choose to live within either of two "existence spheres". He called these "spheres" the aesthetic and the ethical.  Aesthetic lives were lives lived in search of such things as pleasure, novelty, and romantic individualism. Kierkegaard thought that these goals would eventually tend to decay or become meaningless and this would inevitably lead to much boredom and dire frustration.  Ethical lives, lived very much in line with a sense of duty to observe societal and confessional obligations would be easier to live, yet would also involve much compromise of several genuinely human faculties and potentials. Such compromise would inevitably mean that Human integrity would tend to be eroded although lives seemed to be progressing in a bourgeois-satisfactory way. 

Neither of these "existence spheres" seemed to him to offer fully satisfactory lives to Human beings and in his later works he suggested that there was a third, religious, "sphere" where people accepted that they could "live in the truth" that they were "individual before the Eternal" to which they belonged. By living in this truth people could achieve a full unity of purpose with all other people who were also, individually, living in the same truth. This is the choice that he made for himself in his own efforts to live a life which he considered to be valid.

Søren Kierkegaard passed away, possibly from tuberculosis on the 11 November 1855. His work remained limited to Scandinavia, but the 20th century saw the revival of his philosophy, although many thinkers only went along with Kierkegaard up to the point where introduces the relationship of the individual soul to God.  Consequently two parallel traditions of existentialism developed side by side.  Christian existentialism and Humanist existentialism.  The later has roots in the work of Nietzsche, who was an atheist but its most distinguished representative in the 20th century was Martin Heidegger.

(1) Existentialism is a philosophical theory or approach which emphasises the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will.

Martin Heidegger 1889-1976

"Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one."

Martin Heidegger is widely acknowledged to be one of the most original and important philosophers of the 20th century, while remaining one of the most controversial.   Born in Germany and raised a Roman Catholic he studied  theology at the University of Freiburg while supported by the church, but later he switched his field of study to philosophy under Heinrich Rickert and Edmund Husserl. He received a doctorate in philosophy in 1913 and became a lecturer at Freiburg in 1919, assuming the  leadership of the movement that Husserl had founded, phenomenology (1).

Martin Heidegger, 2018 Oil on Linen 35x30cm (Available for Sale)

Subsequent stages of Heidegger’s early philosophical development show the influence of a number of thinkers and themes, including the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s concern with the irreducible uniqueness of the individual, which was important in Heidegger’s early existentialism; Aristotle’s conception of phronēsis, or practical wisdom, which helped Heidegger to define the peculiar “Being” of the human individual in terms of a set of worldly involvements and commitments; and the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey’s notion of “historicity,” of being historically situated and determined, which became crucial in Heidegger’s view of time and history as essential facets of human Being.  Consequently Heidegger’s main interest became ontology or the study of being.

In his fundamental treatise, Being and Time, he attempted to access ‘being’ by means of phenomenological analysis of human existence, what he called Dasein,(2) in respect to its temporal and historical character. Heidegger placed an emphasis on language as the vehicle through which the question of being can be unfolded. He turned to the interpretation of historical texts, especially of the Presocratics, but also of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and Hölderlin, and to poetry, architecture, technology, and other subjects. Instead of looking for a full clarification of the meaning of being, he tried to pursue a kind of thinking which was no longer “metaphysical.”

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He criticized the tradition of Western philosophy, which he regarded as nihilistic, for, as he claimed, the question of being as such was obliterated in it. He also stressed the nihilism of modern technological culture. By going to the Presocratic beginning of Western thought, he wanted to repeat the early Greek experience of being, so that the West could turn away from the dead end of nihilism and begin anew. His writings are notoriously difficult. Being and Time remains his most influential work and became a major source for the understanding of existentialism, a philosophic movement that was growing in importance and popularity among academics and intellectuals. Existentialist thinkers influenced by Heidegger included Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

After WWII his reputation was scarred by his affiliation with the Nazi party, he was forbidden to teach, and in 1946 was dismissed from his chair of philosophy. The ban was lifted in 1949 and during the last three decades of his life, from the mid 1940s to the mid 1970s, Heidegger wrote and published much, but in comparison to earlier decades, there was no significant change in his philosophy.

(1) Phenomenology is the philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness without appeal to philosophical or scientific preconceptions about their nature, origin, or cause.

(2) Dasein (is a German word that means "being there" or "presence" and is often translated into English with the word "existence".  Heidegger uses the expression Dasein to refer to the experience of being that is peculiar to human beings. Thus it is a form of being that is aware of and must confront such issues as personhood, mortality and the dilemma or paradox of living in relationship with other humans while being ultimately alone with oneself.

Mary Wollstonecraft 1759-1797

"I do not wish women to have power over men; but over themselves."

Mary Wollstonecraft was born in London into a picturesquely bleak family. She had a violent alcoholic father, and a weak, unsympathetic mother. Despite her inauspicious beginnings, she dragged herself upwards, eventually becoming a self-supporting bestselling international human-rights celebrity. 

In 1784, Mary, her sister Eliza and her best friend, Fanny, established a school in in the progressive Dissenting community of Newington Green. From her experiences teaching, Wollstonecraft wrote the pamphlet Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787).

Mary Wollstonecraft, 2018 Oil on Linen 71x61cm (Private Collection - USA)

When her friend Fanny died in 1785, Wollstonecraft took a position as governess for the Kingsborough family in Ireland. Spending her time there to mourn and recover, she eventually found she was not suited for domestic work. Three years later, she returned to London and became a translator and an adviser to Joseph Johnson, a noted publisher of radical texts. When Johnson launched the Analytical Review in 1788, Mary became a regular contributor. Within four years, she published her polemical works, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (published anonymously in 1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), both public letters in angry reaction to texts by men whom she considered powerful and wrong-headed. The first answered Edmund's Burke's nostalgic and conservative Reflections on the Revolution in France, which argued for the status quo because human nature could not take too much change or reality, and the second responded to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's educational work Emile, which proposed that a girl's education should aim at making her useful to and supportive of a rational man.

Mary Wollstonecroft, 2017 Oil on Paper 28x28cm (My Collection)

When her feelings for the married painter Henri Fuseli threatened to overwhelm her, she left for France in 1792 to join other English intellectuals, such as Thomas Paine, in celebrating the French Revolution.  Having just written the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft was determined to put her ideas to the test, and in the stimulating intellectual atmosphere of the French revolution she attempted her most experimental romantic attachment yet: she met and fell passionately in love with Gilbert Imlay, an American adventurer. Wollstonecraft put her own principles in practice by sleeping with Imlay despite not being married had her first child with him.  While nursing her firstborn, Wollstonecraft wrote a conservative critique of the French Revolution in An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution. She also wrote a deeply personal travel narrative, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, but in 1795 Imlay left her and she attempted to commit suicide.

Back in England Mary recovered, finding new hope in a relationship with William Godwin, the founder of philosophical anarchism. Despite their belief in the tyranny of marriage, the couple eventually wed due to her pregnancy. In 1797, their daughter Mary (who would grow up to be Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein), was born. Ten days later, due to complications of childbirth, Wollstonecraft died of Septicaemia aged 38.  For many years, the scandalous aspects of her life (such as her two children born out of wedlock) were more noted than her works.  After her death Godwin published her last most radical novel Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798), as well as a memoir of her life. This revealed the fact that Mary had not been married while having a sexual relationship with Imlay. As a result her demand for rational female education, which had been accepted by most thinking women, became almost forgotten in the light of her implied demand for sexual freedom.  Overnight she became toxic and Wollstonecraft’s enemies couldn’t contain their glee: here was proof irrefutable that she was a whore, a “hyena in petticoats” as Horace Walpole described her.

Wollstonecraft’s legacy was trashed for well over a century and even today, despite a number of outstanding modern biographies, there’s still no significant memorial to her anywhere although Maggi Hambling, the British artist was commissioned in May 2018 for a commemorative statue.  It will be erected in Newington Green, London,  which is known as the birthplace of feminism because of Wollstonecraft’s roots there.

Sources:

https://www.biography.com/people/mary-wollstonecraft-9535967

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/wollstonecraft_01.shtml

Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712-1778

“Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains”

Swiss born Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of the greatest European thinkers of the 18th century and his work inspired the leaders of the French Revolution and influenced what became known as the Romantic generation.  His mother died soon after his birth and he only had a little formal education from his father before he went into exile and Rousseau was parceled out to a country minister and then an uncle.  He led an itinerant lifestyle wandering from job to job and having five illegitimate children by an uneducated serving girl.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 2018 Oil on Linen 66x56 cm (Private Collection - UK)

Rousseau reached Paris in 1742 and met Denis Diderot, another provincial man seeking literary fame. He contributed an article about music to Diderot’s Encyclopedia but it was his prose that brought him his lasting reputation.  In 1750 he published his first important work 'A Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts' with the central theme that human beings were born good but become corrupted by society and civilisation. In 'Discourse on the Origin of Inequality' he claimed that original man, while solitary, was happy, good and free. The vices dated from the formation of societies, which brought comparisons and, with that, pride. 'The Social Contract' of 1762 suggested how man might recover his freedom in the future. It argued that a state based on a genuine social contract would give men real freedom in exchange for their obedience to a self-imposed law. Rousseau described his civil society as united by a general will, furthering the common interest while occasionally clashing with personal interest. 

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Rousseau’s political philosophy has had an enormous influence providing the movements leading up to the French Revolution with their emotional and intellectual fuel.  It offered a different conception of democracy from John Locke’s, one which flourished and was actively followed until the late 20th century. This forcible imposition of the general will is the opposite of the Locke model preserving individual free will, and became the basic idea underlying the totalitarian movements of Fascism and Communism.  His philosophy claimed to represent the will of the people while denying individual rights, allotting a key role to charismatic leaders.

Émilie du Châtelet 1706-1749

“If I were king, I would redress an abuse which cuts back, as it were, one half of human kind. I would have women participate in all human rights, especially those of the mind.”

Émilie Du Châtelet was born in Paris and married Marquis Florent-Claude de Châtelet-Lomont in 1725. In 1733, she met Voltaire who became her lover and life-long intellectual companion. They retired to Du Châtelet's husband's estate—Cirey—which was remodeled to include a laboratory with several instruments for their on-going scientific experiments.  Together they spearheaded Newton’s revolution in France and without her contributions, the French Enlightenment of the 1700s would have looked very different.

Émilie du Châtelet, 2018 Oil on Canvas 109x91cm (Private Collection)

In her intellectual work, Du Châtelet focused on natural philosophy, particularly that of Newton, Leibniz and Christian Wolff. Her advanced abilities in physics and mathematics made her especially able to write capably about Newton's physics. She thus contributed to the shift in France away from an acceptance of Cartesian physics and toward the embrace of Newtonian physics. Nonetheless, she was more than just an expositor of others' works, and she was not interested in physics alone. Indeed, still squarely in the tradition of natural philosophy, Du Châtelet sought a metaphysical basis for the Newtonian physics she embraced upon rejecting Cartesianism.

Émilie du Châtelet, 2018 Oil on Canvas 140x100cm (Available for Sale)

As a feminist she pulled no punches and wrote of her struggle to educate herself in higher mathematics and physics (because girls were denied access to good schools, let alone universities): “If I were king,” she wrote, “I would reform an abuse which effectively cuts back half of humanity. I would have women participate in all human rights, and above all, those of the mind.”

Emilie died at the age of forty-three but despite her short life, Emilie was a truly unique woman and scholar. Among her greatest achievements were her Institutions du physique and the translation of Newton's Principia, which was published after her death along with a "Preface historique" by Voltaire.

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