Can a sophisticated individual rise above ideology?

I agree it isn't very old but it's longer than you suggest. It seems to be something to do with science.

Of course, modern psychology denies the split. As I do.

I meant a tendency to approach divesting oneself of socialisation to purify art. The Left Bank. Greenwich Village. Exiles. Like Shakespeare. Standing outside looking in disinterestedly. The ironic hard-on type of thing. Flaubert.

Precisely... all examples from the early twentieth century.

Flaubert, by contrast, was fond of boasting that if the French had read his Sentimental Education more carefully, the debacle of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune might have been avoided. And we don't even have to delve very far into Zola, for whom the scientific fervor of the late 19th century was an aid rather than a hindrance to social commentary. Taking a disinterested stance in their prose was far from a means of purifying the social element from art. On the contrary, it bound the two together even more intimately. The tendency toward "purification," it seems to me, begins with the likes of Valéry and Greenberg (to take two luminaries who actually used the term "purity").

Well okay. 12 decades is only a few I suppose.

I'm more meaning throwing off family, nationality and religion.

I've never read Valery or Greenberg. I'll look them up.

They all seem a bit mad to me. I relax visiting them. It used to be a perk of directors of madhouses to conduct tours of their domains. The denizens were encouraged to do their worst. I see TV like that. People who have lost their sense of proportion.