, Chris Marsh, 16 May 2007

While working on the essay, ‘Dream On!: A Philosophical Study into Why Big Visions “Fail”’, it became necessary to make a start on writing up recent explorations into the philosophy which has been current during the period when capitalism emerged in Europe and America, and became consolidated worldwide. As in the main essay, the term ‘capitalism’ is used to refer to a period of time, an era three centuries long, specifically the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, which does not map nicely onto terms like ‘Modern’, ‘Early Modern’, and ‘Postmodern’, with their accepted but questionable chronologies.

The term ‘capitalism’ is not intended to refer to a distinct economic period of class-divided society, but to the centrally governed urban society of alienated individuals which has gradually and unevenly replaced the more natural arrangements of rooted, rural, self-governing (even when subject to taxation by despotic rulers), highly diverse cultures and communities that has existed around the world, and certainly in Europe (Anderson, Europe in the Eighteenth Century, 1987, p.69), for most of human existence. I do not intend mine to be a simplistic Marxist interpretation: a materialist ‘rational’ dialectic following Hegel, rather I see capitalism’s ‘duration’ of three centuries of historical time having a multiplicity of stages piled up like a Deleuzean ‘dry-stone wall’. (Deleuze, What is Philosophy?, 1994, p.23) With the subject of this study including the philosophy of the Enlightenment, I shall also touch on classical philosophy re-discovered during the Renaissance, which fascinated the French philosophes. Classical philosophy, of course, predates ‘capitalist’ philosophy, so the latter could instead be called ‘urban’ or ‘civilised’ philosophy, which was studied, discussed and developed by groups of lone thinkers, and which is very different from the shared mythologies, histories and theologies of rooted communities.

I use the word ‘philosophy’ in Deleuze’s sense, as the creation of ‘concepts’ distinct from science’s ‘functions’, and I am currently devising a philosophical concept of my own called ‘habitude’, connected to, but distinct from, Rupert Sheldrake’s science of ‘formative causation’.

In correspondence with Sheldrake, I quoted to him a passage from Deleuze’s Bergsonism which seemed to me to be close to Sheldrake’s ideas about time, particularly as encapsulated in the title of his second book, The Presence of the Past:

The past and the present do not denote two successive moments, but two elements which coexist: One is the present, which does not cease to pass, and the other is the past, which does not cease to be but through which all presents pass. It is in this sense that there is a pure past, a kind of “past in general”: The past does not follow the present, but on the contrary, is presupposed by it as the pure condition without which it would not pass. In other words, each present goes back to itself as past. (Deleuze, Bergsonism, p.59)

Sheldrake’s response was: ‘This is an interesting quote about Bergson and is of course very close in spirit to my own thinking, so much influenced by Bergson.’ That influence is not at all obvious in Sheldrake’s first book, A New Science of Life, in which Bergson is mentioned but not at length and mainly in the notes, which may be confirmation of Deleuze’s assertion that philosophy and science are two different things.

My first encounters with Bergson through Deleuze suggested that Bergson is ‘difficult’, but it turns out that it is Deleuze who is difficult, and Bergson himself very readable. Perhaps that is because what Bergson wrote accords with my own ideas and world view. I looked him up in what has been for years my ‘bible’ on philosophy, Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, and found that Russell was far from impressed. He concludes his dismissive section on Bergson with:

Of course a large part of Bergson’s philosophy, probably the part to which most of its popularity is due, does not depend upon argument, and cannot be upset by argument. His imaginative picture of the world, regarded as a poetic effort, is in the main not capable of either proof or disproof. Shakespeare says life’s but a walking shadow, Shelley says it is like a dome of many-coloured glass, Bergson says it is a shell which bursts into parts that are again shells. If you like Bergson’s image better, it is just as legitimate.

The good which Bergson hopes to see realized in the world is action for the sake of action. All pure contemplation he calls ‘dreaming’, and condemns by a whole series of uncomplimentary epithets: static, Platonic, mathematical, logical, intellectual. Those who desire some prevision of the end which action is to achieve are told that an end foreseen would be nothing new, because desire, like memory, is identified with its object. Thus we are condemned, in action, to be the blind slaves of instinct: the life-force pushes us on from behind, restlessly and unceasingly. There is no room in this philosophy for the moment of contemplative insight when, rising above the animal life, we become conscious of the greater ends that redeem man from the life of the brutes. Those to whom activity without purpose seems a sufficient good will find in Bergson’s books a pleasing picture of the universe. But those to whom action, if it is to be of any value, must be inspired by some vision, [end p.764] by some imaginative foreshadowing of a world less painful, less unjust, less full of strife than the world of our everyday life, those, in a word, whose action is built on contemplation, will find in this philosophy nothing of what they seek, and will not regret that there is no reason to think it true. [end p.765]

Despite his dismissal of Bergson’s philosophy, Russell summarises it rather successfully, better – or at least more accessibly – than does Deleuze, for whom Bergson was very important; according to the translators’ introduction, Bergson put into Deleuze’s ‘tool box’ duration and becoming and multiplicities. The reason for Russell’s success may be due to a phenomenon Bergson himself points out: ‘Listen to the discussion between any two philosophers one of whom upholds determinism, and the other liberty: it is always the determinist who seems to be in the right. He may be a beginner and his adversary a seasoned philosopher. He can plead his cause nonchalantly, while the other sweats blood for his. It will always be said of him that he is simple, clear and right. He is easily and naturally so, having only to collect thought ready to hand and phrases ready-made: science, language, common sense, the whole of intelligence is at his disposal.’ (Bergson, The Creative Mind, p.41)

Russell on Bergson as a whole is actually very revealing of Russell’s own philosophy – if one can sidestep Deleuze’s distinction and allow a mathematician and scientist to have a philosophy, on the basis that Russell is certainly a student of philosophy. There is a poignant passage by Russell quoted in Sheldrake’s The Presence of the Past:

That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collisions of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system; and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be built. (Quoted in Sheldrake, 1988, pp.6-7, from Russell’s essay, ‘The Free Man’s Worship’, first publ. 1903, http://users.drew.edu/~jlenz/fmw.html)

That bleak picture of a mechanical universe inevitably running down by the second law of thermodynamics, is the prevailing worldview of secular science, and Russell believes in it – and I say ‘believes’ deliberately, because it is a matter of secular faith. But if one reads the entire essay from which this quotation comes, we find that Russell does not really believe in the main characteristic of that model, namely determinism; in particular, Russell clearly believes we can choose our attitudes to life and death and our relationships with others; our ‘philosophy’ is willed. In that sense, Russell’s philosophy is dualist: science’s determined universe coexisting with humanity’s willed one. And yet, Russell criticises Bergson for being dualist: ‘Bergson’s philosophy, unlike most of the systems of the past, is dualistic: the world, for him, is divided into two disparate portions, on the one hand life, on the other matter, or rather that inert something which the intellect views as matter.’ (Russell, 1979, p.757)

I think that Russell’s kind of dualism is typical of intellectuals who declare themselves atheists, people like Richard Dawkins of ‘selfish gene’ fame and Daniel Dennett (author of Consciousness Explained (London: Penguin, 1991)), who would not argue the case for atheism so passionately if they truly believed that how we all think is determined, and not subject to our wills, and their influence. Despite that, determinism is deeply embedded in human thought, common sense and language, percolating beyond writings on science to what to me is a curious part of ‘common sense’: this thing called ‘explanation’.

So, how is explanation a ‘thing’? What I mean is that it’s a curiosity, a puzzle. I’ll run the risk Bergson warned of, sounding silly because of trying to look outside a box using language that belongs inside it, but I’ll have a go at telling the story of the ‘explanation thing’.

Men (usually and historically it has been men) notice a pattern in a set of phenomena: projectiles follow similar paths and then fall to earth, planets have paths around the sun. Why? they ask, is it always like that?, and they come up with an ‘explanation’, and hence formulae for predicting how, in this case, bodies move, expressed in special language called mathematics. The generality of these formulae are called ‘laws’, and are presumed to exist, and ‘govern’ the universe. I argue that these ‘laws’ don’t exist beyond men’s minds and their discourses; they are merely other ways of describing patterns in sets of individual concrete observations of phenomena. So why is it that we like them? Why are even non-scientists happy with mechanistic models of ‘what happens’, ‘how it works’, happy to be told that there are laws and mathematical functions determining and predicting what will happen next, and why do we prefer these ‘explanations’ to descriptions of the observed patterns?

It is my belief that the idea of ‘laws’, and regulation and control, fits capitalist society, and the interests of the capitalist class. But it may be a chicken and egg thing, whereby the mindset where explanations are sought and taken for granted came first, and helped give rise to capitalism. I intend to study the development of Enlightenment philosophy with that question in mind. One thing I can observe here, is that the philosophising of the Church of the Ancien Régime, the Scholastics arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, or whether the whale which swallowed Jonah was male or female, would seem to have no practical or economic purpose, but the idea that only the Church could tell the rest of society what is true, was very powerful, and those who challenged that power risked death at the hand of the Inquisition.

I have to stop at this point and say what I am not saying, and also anticipate what might be put forward to crush my silly idea. When I say that ‘explanations’ are simply restatements of observed patterns in another language, and have no power or agency, I am not saying that these laws are wrong in the sense of being useless. I have no objection to mathematical laws, functions, models such as fields, probability distributions, strange attractors and whatever else being used to make predictions and to devise technology. Also, this is not about the old problem of ‘free will versus determinism’, or logical arguments about causation, or the distinction between necessary connections and predictability, which may be impossible due to sensitivity to initial conditions, nor is it solved by ideas involving the wave structure of matter.

All I am saying is that science’s laws have no existence beyond scientist’s and others’ minds and discourses. There is no place for them in the universe itself, and following the death of God, no Mind beyond people’s minds for the laws to reside and act from. This idea is similar in some respects to the old presumption that there is a kind of platform outside the universe from which the whole thing or some part of it can be observed ‘objectively’. There is no such platform. We observe from our minds, aided by instruments, our observations arranged and ordered by our methods, theories and experimental approaches, but at the end of the day, it’s just us chickens – even just one chicken, myself/oneself.

A focus on, even an obsession with, the individual rather than the social and political is characteristic of postmodernism, and in art manifests as a romantic egotism. But the recognition of the contrast between these two perspectives is not new, take these two passages from Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Mary Barton, first published in 1848:

It is a pretty sight to walk through a street with lighted shops; the gas is so brilliant, the display of goods so much more vividly shown than by day, and of all shops a druggist’s looks the most like the tales of our childhood, from Aladdin’s garden of enchanted fruits to the charming Rosamond with her purple jar. No such associations had Barton; yet he felt the contrast between the well-filled, well-lighted shops and the dim gloomy cellar, and it made him moody that such contrasts should exist. They are the mysterious problem of life to more than him. He wondered if any in all the hurrying crowd had come from such a house of mourning. He thought they all looked joyous, and he was angry with them. But he could not, you cannot, read the lot of those who daily pass you by in the street. How do you know the wild romances of their lives; the trials, the temptations they are even now enduring, resisting, sinking under? You may be elbowed one instant by the girl desperate in her abandonment, laughing in mad merriment with her outward gesture, while her soul is longing for the rest of the dead, and bringing itself to think of the cold-flowing river as the only mercy of God remaining to her here. You may pass the criminal, meditating crimes at which you will tomorrow shudder with horror as you read them. You may push against one, humble and unnoticed, the last upon earth, who in heaven will for ever be in the immediate light of God’s countenance. Errands of mercy – errands of sin – did you ever think where all the thousands of people you daily meet are bound? Barton’s was an errand of mercy; but the thoughts of his heart were touched by sin, by bitter hatred of the happy, whom he, for the time, confounded with the selfish. (Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (London: Penguin, 1996), first publ. 1848, p.63)

 

‘You’ll say (at least many a one does), they’n getten capital an’ we’n getten none. I say, our labour’s our capital, and we ought to draw interest on that. They get interest on their capital somehow a’ this time, while ourn is lying idle, else how could they all live as they do? Besides there’s many on ’em has had nought to begin wi’; there’s Carsons, and Duncombes, and Mengies, and many another, as comed into Manchester with clothes to their back, and that were all, and now they’re worth their tens of thousands, a’ getten out of our labour; why, the very land as fetched but sixty pound twenty year agone is now worth six hundred, and that, too, is owing to our labour; but look at yo, and see me, and poor Davenport yonder; whatten better are we? They’n screwed us down to th’ lowest peg, in order to make their great big fortunes, and build their great big houses, and we, why we’re just clemming, many and many of us. Can you say there’s nought wrong in this?’ (Gaskell, p.66)

Returning to the ‘explanation thing’, if science’s laws, deterministic or not, necessitating and predicting or not, probabilistic to whatever degree, have no real agency or power over the universe, how is that that the universe is not just a mess, with no patterns to observe? This is where habitude comes in. Habitude – or Sheldrake’s ‘hypothesis of formative causation’, plus what he says about creation – says that the entire universe has two properties, one is that in expanding and cooling from the Big Bang onwards new complex forms ‘crystallise out’, the other is that resonance (which is a beautifully chosen word for this property) between occurrences of similar forms makes occurrences of forms like those more likely in the future.

There is of course much more to be said about habitude, but the subject of this piece was intended to be ‘The whats? and whys? of “capitalist” philosophy’, and the conclusion to the latter is twofold, firstly ‘capitalism’ has a set of social patterns developed and reinforced over 300 years; secondly, a crucial component of these social patterns is ‘explanation’, since ‘the idea of ‘laws’, and regulation and control, fits capitalist society, and the interests of the capitalist class.’ To understand how the social changes and the associated mindset arose requires, first of all, a study of the Enlightenment, which is what will be coming next.

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