Space, time and the artist : the philosophy and aesthetics of Wyndham Lewis.

My study, in Part I of this thesis, of Wyndham Lewis's philosophical
principles outlined in Time and Western Man (1927), reveals a mode of
thought which is inspired and determined by beliefs about visual art
and its metaphysical significance. The ultimate rejection of the
philosophies of Bergson, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and the
'Space-Timeists' such as Spengler, Whitehead and Alexander, in pursuit
of a 'philosophy of the eye' was, I argue, fashioned according to
aesthetic objections. 'Time-values' are challenged by 'space-values',
ideally expressible for Lewis in the static, spatial medium of visual
art.
The aesthetics of Vorticism, discussed in Part II, was formalized in
the two Blast journals (1914-15), and provides the key to an
understanding of Lewis's later philosophy in its negation of
Bergsonist-related doctrines. His aversion to chronologism' had
emerged in various ways well before the public launch of Vorticism and
had subsequently achieved a subtle, effective coherence in the 'logic
of contradictions' which directed the theoretical strategies of Blast.
But In modernism Lewis recognized 'empty' abstraction and thus the
taint of the time-cult itself. As a method of working, abstraction
was not abandoned, but was directed away from the sensational and
emotional in the service of intellect and rational thought.
In order to clarify the interdependence of art and philosophy in
Lewis's thought, I propose two schematic models. The first
characterizes Lewis's philosophical principles and posits the concept
of the vortex as Lewis's noumenon. The second superimposes the
aesthetic values and form of the vortex symbol itself as a prior
justification of the philosophical schema: each 'model' is clearly
incomplete without cognizance of the other. Since, for Lewis, the
essential character of Vorticism was first expressed in art practice,
the findings of this thesis support Lewis's own retrospective view
(1956), that Vorticism was a 'new philosophy' in visual form.