John Smyth quotes Daniel Boorstin:

>   "In this long quest, Western Culture has turned from seeking the end
>   or purpose to seeking causes--from the Why to the How.  Might this
>   empty meaning from our human experience?"

Max Weber who trained a very sharp eye at the evolution of Victorian
society theorized that at the core of it lay the Entzauberung, the
disenchantment, of the world.  The turn was away from the world as an
enchanted, a sacred, an ideal place, and instead toward a world as an
instrument of the will of the individual.  The word "will" of course
introduces Schopenhauer who had originally proposed this view.  Wagner
and Mahler are said to have been deeply affected by Schopenhauer's
thinking.  Indeed, Charles Taylor writes in his _Sources of the Self_,
"In Mahler's Third Symphony we have one of the great expressions in
music of Schopenhauer's theory of the will.  In the first movement,
in particular, we sense the force of will emanating in nature."

But neither Schopenhauer, nor Wagner, nor Mahler were about replacing
the old enchantment with the hard reality of modern science.  Rather they
quested for what it was in us, as individuals, that might be encouraged in
order to achieve oneness with All.  I think it is this that was at the nub
of post-Victorian aesthetics.

Denis Fodor                     Internet:[log in to unmask]