Henry Adams and Existentialism: The Revelatory Entropy of the Dynamo
The 1900 World’s Fair displayed daring dynamos and great art, but most critically, it fueled the fire of Henry Adams’ Autobiography. This technological summit was a catalyst for the growth of Adams’ grim outlook on the American experience in the 20th century.
Both the son and grandson of former presidents, Adams was a well-known intellectual and a learned Medieval scholar. Turning from the personal and political beliefs of his family, peers and fellow academics, Adams fashions his own philosophy, that of the dark character and the moral implications of the approaching industrial era, in his essay “The Dynamo and the Virgin.” The piece follows the staunchly-American Adams as he travels to Paris as a historian to report upon the trajectory of Europe’s industrial technology. Looking past the priceless collections of art, Adams is struck by the indifference of the terrific dynamo; he sees it as the ideological and technological force of the coming century — what Pater would have called “the symbol of the modern idea.” As a historian, the cataloguer of human existence and change, Adams records the dawn of this “anarchical” machine as a closed system — as the alpha and omega — of the pre-industrial human experience.
In existential trepidation, the American sees the inescapable process of entropy — the energy of the absurd — in the dynamo. He suddenly realizes that his book knowledge and study of the past cannot account for the absurdity that modern technology predicates — a lapse that breaks “his historical neck,” and forces him to come to terms with his entropic existence at the precipice of the modern age. “Dynamo” is the record of Adams’ struggle to contextualize the physical and moral implications of the coming machine age; it is a proto-existentialist meditation on entropy that conceptualizes the loss of art and faith that Adams sees in modern America.
“Dynamo” is proto-existential because it identifies entropy — the source of the dynamo’s energy — as an absurd force. As a scholar, Adams is well aware of both entropy and the absurd, as well as their physical and philosophical similarities. Entropy corresponds with the existentialist theme of the absurd; the absurd is man’s inescapable search for meaning in his life within the ultimate disorder and randomness of an indifferent universe. Newton said the same in his 2nd Law of Thermodynamics: that entropy always increases in such closed systems, leading to a gradual decline into disorder over time.
When Adams enters the World Fair, he enters the absurd. He describes himself as “aching to absorb knowledge” but ultimately “helpless to find it” (Adams 364). He is haunted by the power of engines which “spouted heat in inconceivable volume” and that “might spout less or more, at any time” (Adams 366). Using the diction “inconceivable” and “might,” Adams conveys that he cannot comprehend the immense mechanical forces present at the fair, underscoring his uncertainty and dread for the century to come. Adams identifies the absurd in the dynamo which powers the break-neck speed of technological progress that Adams experiences at the end of the 19th century. He sees this absurd mechanical force that he cannot understand as unsustainable, unmaintainable and out of control.
It’s not just Adams that finds difficulty understanding the absurdity and speed of technological progress; Langley, a well-established engineer who guides Adams through the exhibitions, also admits that such new forces are “anarchical,” and decries that they deny “the truths of his Science” (Adams 366). Even though Langley’s scientific discoveries on rays and Radium were already well-accepted, their force, like the force of dynamo, was founded upon absurdity and predicated upon the unknown.
“Dynamo” is also proto-existential because Adams and his companion take a voyage into the unknown and search for meaning within absurdity. Experiencing the entropy of the dynamo, Adams steps into “a supersensual world, in which he could measure nothing except by chance collisions of movements imperceptible to his senses” (Adams 367). Lost to themselves and in the face of the unknown, both the historian and the engineer have to be “prepared for anything,” even, as Langley puts it, “physics stark mad in metaphysics”(Adams 367). Adams even goes as far to claim that anything we have ever known to be true is, in essence, artifice. In the past and in the present, scholars and historians have “achieved a sort of Paradise of ignorance vastly consoling to [their] fatigued senses” as a reaction to the absurd and to the unknown (Adams 366). Adams explains that entropy and change, which inexplicably tie to the absurd, are the only truths that we can hold on to.
As a result, the absurd isolates Adams. When Adams leaves the fair, he can’t help but see the absurd everywhere he goes. He ends his life “cover[ing]…thousands of pages with figures…laboriously striking out, altering, burning, experimenting, until the year had expired” (Adams 372). Like a plethora of other intellectuals of his age, Adams did not heed the warning of the the Greeks, did not heed the call of “be careful what you wish for”; be careful what you seek to know, because in searching, seeking and striving after knowledge you will only find chaos, entropy and the absurd. Man must come to terms with his existence at the whims of indifferent, absurd forces, knowing that he has no control over what is to come. This marks Adams and his nation’s turn from a faith-based consciousness to a secular one, chock-full of isolation and meaninglessness.
“Dynamo” is Adams’ treatise on loss — the loss that Adams sees in America at the end of the 19th century. Through entropy, Adams sees things slipping away, and is deeply distraught that his nation has never come and will never approach Ruskin’s standards for art, faith and individuality. First, Adams reflects upon the loss of American faith, arguing that “man had translated himself into a new universe which had no common scale of measurement with the old” (Adams 367). America has lost the unified faith of the past and “translated” itself into the absurd, where Adams and other Americans experience modern isolation. Adams sees the Dynamo as something that sacrifices and takes away our experience, our faith, our opportunity to create and to truly “be” and exist — the very things that Ruskin treasures about Gothic architecture. This leads to another of Adams’ anxieties, which is the loss of art in his newborn nation. As a historian, Adams sees art as a catalog of man’s energy over time; Art is a “symbol” that has the “force” to make man feel and act (Adams 372). However, due to its inexperience, America has lost — or never truly found — its Art. Like Adams concludes, “The true American knows something of the facts but nothing of the feelings” (Adams 369). In its inexperience, America has lost its identity in the absurdity of industrialization before it could ever self-actualize through art and culture.
Like Hopkins at the end of his terrible sonnet “Carrion Comfort” (“Wrestling with (my God!) my God”), Adams is in an intellectual, existential, and eternal “wrestle” with technological change along with us, the reader. And yet, despite all the loss we experience from our break with the past, Adams’ example in “Dynamo” shows that we still must live on and burn brightly in pursuit of knowing as we, aging and decaying, delve into chaos and the new century. In existential philosophy, humans must define their own meaning in life, and try to make rational decisions despite existing in an irrational universe. In the face of nothingness and meaninglessness, man must find meaning in life by embracing existence. In a parallel world, Dostoevsky’s Alyosha describes this act when he speaks of Ivan’s internal strain: “either rise into the light of truth, or… perish in hatred” (The Brothers Karamazov 655). Adams’ meditation on entropy charges the reader this present, existential task — and sends us on our way to tackle it as best we can.
Works Cited
Adams, Henry. “The Dynamo and the Virgin.” The Education of Henry Adams. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 9th ed., vol. 2, W.W. Norton & Co., 2012, pp. 364–372.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.
