Contingency, Habit, Being

There follow some quick thoughts on reading Emile Boutroux’s 1874 philosophy thèse, De la contingence des lois de la nature.

The essential movement of Boutroux’s De la contingence is a double gesture of logical affirmation and then empirical wiggling. He establishes in the first chapter, ‘de la nécessité,’ that the only true necessity, the only true determination, is that which applies to a priori causal syntheses. He says, “c’est seulement aux synthèses causal à priori qu’appartient la nécessité tant objective que subjective: elle seules peuvent engendrer des conséquences analytiques entièrement nécessaires” (13). There is another form of necessity, of fact rather than logic, submitted to rigorous empirical testing. Boutroux says, “Celle-ci existe lorsque la synthèse que développe l’analyse est posée à priori par l’esprit et unit un effet à une cause. Lorsque cette synthèse sans être connu à priori, est impliquée dans un enseble de faits connus, et qu’elle est constamment confirmée par l’expérience, elle manifeste, sinon la nécessité du tout, du moins la nécessité de chaque partie, à supposer que les autres soient réalisées” (14). Having established these conditions for necessity, Boutroux then proceeds up the chain of being, showing at each stage that those laws we believe to be posed a priori are, first, in fact derived from experience and, second, do not meet the conditions of the second kind of necessity in an entirely rigorous way. Boutroux constantly reminds us that “il s’agit ici, non de l’être en soi, mais de l’être tel que le considèrent les sciences positives, c’est-à-dire des faits donnés dans l’expérience” (16). In this sense, the ideas of causality and of possibility, are not given a priori, but rather are drawn from experience. Boutroux, this is to say, presents us with a rigorous definition of necessity, and then demonstrates at successively ‘higher’ levels of reality, that this necessity is an idea we derive from experiment and experience (the words are slightly ambiguous in French, but Boutroux does not, here, draw a sharp distinction between the two), and that even at this level, given the incomplete nature of our knowledge, there cannot be said to be strict causality.

Ravaisson, in his ‘rapport’ on the state of French philosophy published a few years before Boutroux’s thèse, marked out the divergence between those who began with the higher, and derived the lower, and those who began with the lower, and built their way up into the higher. Boutroux’s intervention, in a sense, is to reject this dichotomy. The physical world is imagines in a strictly hierarchical fashion, along an ascending, stepped scale not so much of complexity, as of contingency. Although no step can be derived from those below it, or conversely made to yield up the ‘truth’ of the one above it, it is important that we do not have simply overlapping sets of rules, but a genuine hierarchy. The laws of one step on the ladder cannot explain (though they apply within) a different step on the ladder.

The bulk of the book is taken up with the elaboration of this way of thinking and the erecting and demolition of various objections to it. Consciousness, he says, is simply not reducible to its component physical parts. Boutroux continually inquires after the relation of what we assume and our experience. Metaphysics, together with claims to absolute necessity, is cordoned off into its proper field, excluded from the given world. It is this negative and defensive part of Boutroux’s book that functioned as a touchstone and foundational text for the epistemological tradition. But this was only part of Boutroux’s project. It is not enough to reject determinism, a positive ideal must also be erected. This aspect of the book, which links it strikingly to Ravaisson’s De l’habitude, seems to have been less important for the founders of the RMM. This second, constructive, part of Boutroux’s work is crucial, however, if we want to contextualize him more broadly, and understand how his work could have been read.

The question of probability is important. If, later on, it would be possible to regard the physical world as, at a certain level, essentially probabilistic, Boutroux does not yet arrive at this point of view. It seems to me that his contingency is not based on chance, but on irreducibility. At the very least, I am comfortable saying that Boutroux is enormously cagey on the question of the epistemological status of statistics, skeptical at best.

Particularly interesting are Boutroux’s discussions of the relation of law to fact. He says, “les lois sont le lit où passe le torrent des faits: ils l’ont creusé, bien qu’ils le suivent” (39). At the end of the chapter ‘de l’homme,’ Boutroux has mounted a sort of sneak-attack on the supposed law of the conservation of psychic energy. He is willing, perhaps, to accept the idea, but fragments it so that it applies not to all people equally, but to each in a particular way. He says, “plus que tous les autres êtres, le personne humaine a une existence propre, est à elle-même son monde. Plus que les autres êtres, elle peut agir, sans être forcée de faire entrer ses actes dans un système qui la dépasse.” Individuals, by making their own facts, make their own laws, “la loi tend à se rapprocher du fait...L’individu, devenu, à lui seul, tout le genre auquel s’applique la loi, en est maître. Il la tourne en instrument; et il rêve un état où, en chaque instant de son existence, il serait aisni l’égal de la loi et posséderait, en lui-même, tous les éléments de son action” (130). This dream in which actions are coterminous with laws is evidently a re-import of the Kantian imperative back into the realm of the physical, a smearing together of the moral and the physical realms, of the ideal and the real. This is perhaps why, at the end of Boutroux’s text, he speaks a great deal about the good and the beautiful, but not at all about the true.

If stability is the truth of the physical world, so also is change. Both are present everywhere, but the great chain of being is constructed by increasing change, indeed, this is expressed in terms of being and its law. Boutroux says, “dans les mondes inférieurs, la loi tient uns si large place qu’elle se substitue presque à l’être; dans les mondes supérieurs, au contraire, l’être fait presque oublier la loi. Ainsi tout fait relève non seulement du principle de conservation, mais aussi et tout d’abord, d’un principe de création” (139-40). Necessity is understood here in something like a Kantian way—it is an imperative and an ideal, rather than a fact. Each level of reality takes as its ideal the one above it. Compare this idea of a hierarchy of necessity and freedom to Ravaisson, in De l’habitude: “La limite inférieure est la nécessité, le Destin si l’on veut, mais dans la spontanéité de la Nature; la limite supérieure, la Liberté de l’entendement. L’habitude descend de ‘une à l’autre ; elle rapproche ces contraires, et en les rapprochant elle en dévoile l’essence intime et la nécessaire connexion” (97). Boutroux retains hierarchy, and the basic idea of a chain of being, but some things have changed, though perhaps somewhat subtly. We can perhaps say that Habit, for Ravaisson, is the sliding of willed actions into unconscious performance, their regularization and becoming routine. How different is this from Boutroux’s metaphor of law as like a riverbed carved out by the flow of fact?

In this light, Boutroux’s ‘system,’ built around contingency, presenting an ideal of pure understanding towards which one strives, appears as remarkably mystical. Metaphysics does not provide a mode of intellectual access to the world, but rather an unrealizable but motivating ideal. Ravaisson seems almost the more content to understand. I suppose Ravaisson’s stance is the serenity of rationalism, and that Boutroux’s mystical frenzy is the defensive result of overcompensation for the encroachment of vulgar materialism.

A great deal more could and should be said in particular about Ravaisson's and Boutroux's handling of the concept of being. I think Boutroux has taken an important step toward a conception of being as radically discontinuous, and would therefore represent an interestingly non-Bergsonian development of Ravaisson's thought. The next step for me to take here is, in any case, looking over the relevant work by Jean Beaufret and especially Dominique Janicaud’s Ravaisson-Bergson book. More laterally, it seems that Boutroux’s book fits into a sort of cohort of work appearing just after the fall of the Second Empire—I think that Janicaud puts it in a box with other thèses by Alfred Fouillée and Jules Lachelier. I know already a bit about Fouillée, Lachelier might be worth looking at.

De l'Habitude

In a book store yesterday, looking for something else, I ran across Félix Ravaisson’s De l’Habitude. There were two editions, a PUF edition that also included a much later essay (De l’Habitude was first published in 1838), and a colorful and glossy little Rivages edition that was a few euros cheaper. In retrospect, I don’t know what I was thinking to have bought the Rivages. I think it’s the same house that put out a similar-looking edition of a few Bergson essays on politesse that I also bought on impulse, and with which I was not especially impressed (probably because they were not serious essays at all, but discourses given on the distribution of prizes at lycées—fascinating documents, but not for their deep thoughts on politesse). All evidence suggests that their strategy—slim volumes in attractive packaging—is successful.

In this particular case, I don’t mind. The essay is perhaps best described, despite the anachronism, as a phenomenology of habit. On one level, Ravaisson means by habit just what is meant by common usage: one becomes ‘used to’ doing certain things in certain ways. In order to explain what habit is more deeply, however, Ravaisson is obliged to explain the nature of being. The text begins and ends, circling back on itself, with a consideration of being, “la loi universelle, le caractère fondamental de l’être, est la tendance à persister dans sa manière d’être” (32). The last sentence of the essay summarizes the connection of being to habit, and is a nice example of Ravaisson’s prose: “La disposition dans laquelle consiste l’habitude et le principe qui l’engendre ne sont qu’une seule et même chose: c’est la loi primordiale et la forme la plus générale de l’être, la tendance à persévérer dans l’acte même qui constitue l’être.” (111-2).

The generative principle of habit is the same as that of being, but habit is available to us in as much as we live, and therefore move and change. Ravaisson says, “l’habitude n’implique pas seulement la mutabilité; elle n’implique pas seulement la mutabilité en quelque chose qui dure sans changer, elle suppose un changement dans la disposition, dans la puissance, dans la vertu intérieure de ce en quoi le changement se passe, et qui ne change point” (31). So habit cannot be discussed without setting out a whole doctrine of being in the world, a whole anthropology. This Ravaisson does in wonderful apperçus, and in a few lucid assertions, drawn from the medical science of his day, some of which we might no longer accept—but this doesn’t make a great deal of difference.

I cannot reproduce the remarkable analyses and assertions at which Ravaisson arrives. Habit is what develops when, through the repetition of action, the resistance and effort required to overcome it, decrease, and the action becomes dissociated from the will (volonté). The will, rather than intelligence, is the seat of the individual personality, so habit is really the dissolution of this personality, and the distribution of the intelligence that carries out action into the parts of the body that act. An example much less poetic than those that Ravaisson suggests would be tying one’s shoes. At first you had to think hard to do it, but eventually the active thought gets in the way, you let your hands take over—we’d call that muscle memory today, though habit implies a great deal more than muscle memory.

Because habit is the dissolution of the individual will into the organs of the body, it can become the principle of living being which allows us, or our understanding (entendement), to get a glimpse of that which is otherwise far below it. One’s instincts, Ravaisson says, were never habits, but our habits can become so like instincts as to be nearly indistinguishable from them (82, 95). Habit, then, is access to nature, “l’habitude peut être considérée comme une méthode, comme la seule méthode réelle, par une suite convergente infinie, pour l’approximation du rapport, réel en soi, mais incommensurable dans l’entendement, de la Nature et de la Volonté” (83). It is Ravaisson’s philosophical heritage, I think, to be concerned about effort and resistance (how are we to know we are, if there is not resistance to our will?) and to therefore place the individual with the will. What requires, for me, a real intellectual leap, is the radical separation between will and nature. By the end of the 19^th century, and I think still today, resistance and will is equal not to understanding, but to life itself. When, I wonder, did the change take place?

In the paragraph following the above quote, there is a passage that I suspect, if I really understood what Ravaisson means by ‘Nature,’ I would understand. He says, “L’habitude...C’est une nature acquise, une seconde nature, qui a sa raison dernière dans la nature primitive, mais qui seule l’explique à l’entendement. C’est enfin une nature naturée, oeuvre et révélation successive de la nature naturante” (83). What are all these verbal forms doing ? I understand the force of the passage, I think, but not what he is doing with the concept of nature.

The cosmology that emerges from this is something like the great chain of being. The spectrum of being is united by a single principle of life, “La limite inférieure est la nécessité, le Destin si l’on veut, mais dans la spontanéité de la Nature; la limite supérieure, la Liberté de l’entendement. L’habitude descend de ‘une à l’autre ; elle rapproche ces contraires, et en les rapprochant elle en dévoile l’essence intime et la nécessaire connexion” (97). What I find fascinating about this is the suggestion, made here and there, that this chain of being, united in principle, is in fact united only by habit. It is united in appearance; the nature of our access to it guarantees its unity.

In a bold move that is perhaps in keeping with certain tropes of Cousinian philosophy as I recall it (effort and resistance and will), Ravaisson makes the mindlessness to which habit reduces us the condition of distinct thought. Ravaisson rejects the possibility for pure thought to generate change:

Avant l’idée distincte que cherche la réflexion, avant la réflexion, il faut quelque idée irréfléchie et indistincte, qui en soit l’occasion et la matière, d’où l’on parte, où on s’appuie. La réflexion se replierait vainement sur elle-même, se poursuivant et se fuyant à l’infini. La pensée réfléchie implique donc l’immédiation antécédente de quelque intuition confuse où l’idée n’est pas distinguée du sujet qui la pense, non plus que de la pensée. C’est dans le courant non interrompu de la spontanéité involontaire, coulant sans bruit au fond de l’âme, que la volonté arrête des limites et détermine des formes (107).

My impulse is of course to historicize this. I want to know what other people were saying, and the degree to which this was a creative distortion and unlawful extension of the ideas current at the time (which is, I think, a possible description of what Bergson accomplished in his Essai). I know relatively little about this period in French philosophy (now I know more), and I read this little essay only yesterday and today. So I am in no position to accomplish that historicization—perhaps it has already been done.

I think my next steps will be to read the essay Bergson wrote on the occasion of Ravaisson’s death, and perhaps parts of Ravaisson’s 1867 book on 19^th century French philosophy. Since I went with Rivages rather than PUF (never again!), I don’t have real notes or bibliographic material, but the avant-propos (not dated, but I assume written recently) does mention these texts. It is otherwise intent on establishing a Ravaisson-Bergson-Heidegger lineage, which, I must say, I hope I would have arrived at without its help. Certainly one could go through and match passages in this essay to similarly worded ones in the Essai sur les donnees immediates de la conscience--they'd mean different things, but sound the same. Similarly, the author of the avant-propos (Frédéric de Towarnicki, who I suppose was one of the French delegation to Heidegger after the war, along with Jean Beaufret) mentions that Proust met Ravaisson in 1899, and gives us a pretty line from A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. Proust must certainly have known this essay. I am surprised, actually, that I hadn’t heard of it in connection with him, but perhaps I have and just don’t remember.