Holism and vitalism
As part of their far-reaching system for world unity, jointly inspired by Wellsian dreams of a world state and League of Nations practical plans for international reconstruction, Kibbo Kift sought the union of art, science and philosophy. Hargrave argued that knowledge had become splintered into separate, specialist domains. With characteristic ambition, he saw their unification as an essential Kin duty. In his dizzying exposition of his movement’s aims, The Confession of the Kibbo Kift, published in 1927, Hargrave paraphrased scientist Claude Bernard at the end of the previous century. Bernard had yearningly predicted, ‘There will come a day when physiologists, poets and philosophers will all speak the same language and understand one another’; for Hargrave this time had come with Kibbo Kift.32 What we might describe today as an interdisciplinary aim was more of a mystical mission for the group; art, science and philosophy were considered to be the three core branches of the Tree of Knowledge, and their holy coalition was described as the manifestation of the ‘Sancgraal’ of the Knights of the Round Table, hidden in plain sight.33
In the Kinlog, the vast illuminated logbook of the movement, launched in 1924 to record the official history of Kibbo Kift for the benefit of future generations, Hargrave outlined their principles in the form of a twentieth-century Book of Kells (Figure 14.1). Amidst saga metre text and in a typical medieval-modernist artistic style, an illustration shows a classically robed artist, a gas-mask-clad scientist and a bearded philosopher collectively grasping the ‘Three-Edged Sword of Truth’ that will bring them together (Figure 14.2). Below this, a green-hooded figure representing a Kinsman emerges from a tangled flow of ideas, supported by a wreath of figures that reveal Kibbo Kift’s intellectual debts and inspirations. Among the ancient Greek, Egyptian and Chinese masters and sages depicted, one figure stands out temporally and stylistically – that of Henri Bergson.34
Bergson’s Neo-Vitalist writings, in Creative Evolution and other texts, had achieved mass popularity in the early years of the twentieth century, not least because his metaphysical concept of an unknowable and invisible force at the root of all living things seemed to offer the hope of a romantic reinsertion of spirit in an otherwise disenchanted, mechanistic world.35 Kinswoman Kathleen M. Milnes, an art teacher and the Kinlog ‘Scriptor’ (calligrapher and illustrator), was a particular devotee of Bergson’s theories and wrote about them effusively in her personal Kibbo Kift log. Bergson was also recommended reading in Kin educational guidance. Even when not named as such, a powerful philosophy of Neo-Vitalism was evident across Kibbo Kift thinking.36 At its most banal this was manifest in the regular use of the term ‘vital’ in group literature, as linguistic shorthand for the dynamism, progress and energy that Kibbo Kift venerated and saw its membership embodying. At a more profound level, the influence of new vitalistic ideas infused Kibbo Kift’s worldview and gave it philosophical justification.
Neo-Vitalism has been described by Oliver Botar and Isabel Wunsche as one of a number of ‘biocentric’ systems of knowledge and ideas popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; they position it alongside organicism, holism, monism and Neo-Lamarckism. While each had distinctive variations, all biocentric models held in common:
the privileging of biology as the source for the paradigmatic metaphor of science, society, and aesthetics; a consequent, biologically based epistemology; an emphasis on the centrality of ‘nature,’ ‘life,’ … the self-directedness and ‘unity’ of all life; a valorization of the quasi-mystical feeling of unity with all nature … a stress on flux and mutability in nature rather than stasis; and a concern for ‘wholeness’ as opposed to reduction at all levels.37
Biocentrism, or ‘biologistic Neo-Romanticism’, is located by Botar in particular in the Lebensphilosophie of Nietzsche and Bergson, and in the work of what he describes as ‘scientists with philosophical pretentions’, in which he includes Ernst Haeckel, Élisée Reclus and Patrick Geddes.38 All vitalistic philosophers were, as Richard Lofthouse has put it, also ‘impatient of traditional epistemological boundaries’.39 While Kibbo Kift’s intellectual bases were more eclectic than those drawn solely from biocentric sources, the names and approaches highlighted here each had a direct intersection with the group. Most literally, the holist biogeographers and educational reformers Reclus and Geddes lectured at Kibbo Kift meetings and led tours of prehistoric sites for members. Nietzsche’s Übermensch ideal is evident in Kibbo Kift desires for human perfectibility and the cultivation of a self-conscious elite. Several of Haeckel’s ideals, including the concept of the Monad as a concept to communicate the unity of existence (as opposed to the duality of mind and spirit), were key to Kin thinking – the Monad symbol even formed the basis of the group’s much-utilised insignia, the Mark.
Monism, Haeckel’s nineteenth-century concept of nature as a singular whole, had started as a secular, materialistic creed in its first formation but by the end of Haeckel’s life it had become a vitalistic one.40 In later Monism and its related philosophical territories, all was one; all was spirit. In Neo-Vitalist thinking more broadly, even objects previously thought inanimate were understood to be charged with life force. In a 1925 article entitled ‘A Short Exposition of the Philosophic Basis of the Kibbo Kift’, Hargrave took up these ideas that bridged science and spiritual philosophy and put them into the service of Kibbo Kift. He celebrated the breakdown of the tripartite classification system of animal, vegetable and mineral, arguing that vitalistic forms of thinking confirmed instead a ‘blood relationship and atomic-kinship with Birds, Beasts, Flowers, Rocks, Stars and the Energy of all of the Suns’. Drawing from Kibbo Kift advisory councillor J. Arthur Thomson’s assertion that ‘phrases such as “dead” matter and “inert” matter have gone by the board’ in modern science, Hargrave argued that the latest thinking in the discipline now served to verify the ‘ancient seers and philosophers’.41
For Kibbo Kift, the assertion that matter could be composed of the same energy that underpinned all living things reinforced their philosophy of world peace and cosmic unity. In a striking passage that demonstrated spiritual immanence and atomic kinship at play in an evocative list of modern miscellany, Hargrave asserted that this new way of thinking:
means that teapots, chairs, mud, electric light bulbs, fingernails, hammers, steam engines, mountains, hats, shoes, needles, tram tickets, lilies, telephones, tents, dynamos, walking sticks, cow dung, churches, iron foundries, neckties, cats, human beings, steel plates, bricks and mortar, glass, sealing-wax, trees, thoughts, tables, music, flowers and flower-pots, clouds, gutter-gratings, books, food, buttons, machine guns, beads, rain, clocks, boots, ferro-concrete, eggs, sunlight, coal, stars, solar systems, slugs, pictures, maggots, wheel bolts, smells, darkness and light, collar-studs, speech, seeds, birds, bootlaces, insects, skeletons, pepper-corns, babies, Space, Time, Matter, all religions, all Spirits, all Matter(s) … all, all, are actually the ONE GREAT POWER.42
Within the sphere of biocentrism and its understanding of the complex interconnectedness of all things, new metaphysical understandings of the concepts of ‘nature’ and ‘life’ emerged. However indirectly these Lebensphilosophie and Naturphilosophie ideas travelled to Kibbo Kift, a pantheistic understanding of the natural world provided a core underpinning to the group’s beliefs. Anna Bramwell, in her history of ecological thought in the twentieth century, has documented the increasing tendency, post-Darwin, for God to be replaced by Nature; a personified force that she describes as ‘somewhat dominating’; this was ‘a Nature expected to educate and guide humanity’.43 Life, too – frequently capitalised and personified with divine qualities, as in many Kibbo Kift references – became less a descriptive term to summarise the passage from cradle to grave and more a stand-alone philosophical category.44 Herbert Schnadelbach, describing its application in the German context, notes that the life-concept was an ‘attack on a civilisation which had become intellectualistic and antilife, against a culture which was shackled by convention’. It stood for ‘what was “authentic”, for dynamism, creativity, immediacy’. ‘Life’, he notes, became the slogan of the youth-movement, and of educational, biological and dynamic reforms.45
An early organisational banner of a Lodge within Kibbo Kift makes this philosophy visible through an extraordinarily daring image for its time (Figure 14.3).
Executed in gold paint on black satin, under the heading Vita Sancta, the mystical banner depicts, according to its inscription, ‘The genesis of life: a spermatozoon fertilising the ovum introducing two chromosomes’. In this image, the moment of fertilisation is venerated, even fetishised; elsewhere in Kibbo Kift insignia, sperm penetrated eyes of Horus and mystical suns, not to indicate sexual licence but to celebrate philosophical élan vital. The banner’s subheading, ‘All Life is Life: There is no Life but Life’ is almost comical in its circularity but its purpose was to communicate the group’s vitalistic beliefs in a striking motto. The style of the refrain undoubtedly owed something to Hargrave’s talents in publicity; he earned his bread-and-butter income throughout the interwar period as a copywriter and commercial artist for a major advertising agency and knew the power of symbol, stunt and slogan. Other statements and chants that the Kibbo Kift corralled around were similarly cryptic but equally inflected with the union of physics and metaphysics, from campfire songs of praise for ‘Energy, Energy, Ceaseless Energy’ to the succinct spiritual encapsulation of interconnectedness, ‘One is One’.
Kibbo Kift’s arcane language and occult rituals suggest a highly idiosyncratic formation that could be dismissed as of only marginal relevance to the wider world. It is worth remembering, however, that alongside Kibbo Kift’s documented appeal to major public figures in the arts, humanities and sciences of the period, much of the material which seems outlandish to twenty-first-century eyes had significant status in the mainstream at its point of publication. Haeckel’s ideas, as Bramwell has pointed out, had mass distribution and influence: ‘For self-educated working men, his two-shilling works with titles such as The Riddles of the Universe, or The Wonders of Life … were a life-line to political awareness through scientific knowledge’.46 Bergson’s books were bestsellers; indeed Bergson himself became something of a celebrity. Perhaps the book that came most frequently recommended as a Kibbo Kift model for understanding the world was H.G. Wells’s biologically informed teleology, The Outline of History, which had been immediately successful on its release in 1919; by 1922 it had sold over a million copies.47 Thompson’s Outline of Science of 1921 aimed to build on Wells’s success and sold half a million copies in its first five years. These ideas were not marginal, even though their reinterpretations and adaptations in Kibbo Kift were often unusual. They fitted into a broader popularity of science in application and a willing embrace of a range of modernist ideas that were circulating in the utopian space of the immediate post-war years when culture needed to be remade from top to bottom.
