Hey everyone, happy new year. I’ve wanted to make this video for a while now. First, to review my own thoughts as to what I’ve been loosely pursuing on the channel and also, to make clear for you what my method is philosophically and historiographically.
To do so, I’m going to talk about briefly Foucault, Damasio, Bourdieu, the Romantics, and, in conclusion, what I think is missing.
1. Introduction: Ethical History
At its simplest, I’m trying to pursue a kind of ethical history and philosophy. My fundamental concern is to search through our history of ideas to attempt to understand the attitudes, assumptions, and dispositions, that we have in the present, and to examine how they arose and what their potentials problems or benefits might be.
Whether it’s the history of a concept like health-care or the ideas of a philosopher like Descartes the purpose is always to ask, how does this relate to us today?
At its very simplest we might take the concept of the prison routine, as Foucault does, and try to understand why – historically and philosophically – it functions the way it does. How do we do better?
Ok, talking of Foucault, that’s a good place to start. What’s he doing?
As I phrased it in my last video:
A Foucauldian method is an attempt to identify the consistent and compatible signs that produce conceptual frameworks and set the criteria for what ‘normal’ human nature is at any given time, while broadly depicting the dominant attitudes, perceptions, and sensibilities any given society holds. Together, these phenomenon form epistemes of beliefs that historically have changed over time.
Taking madness as an example, in his own words Foucault says he wanted to ‘let classical culture formulate, in its general structure, the experience it had of madness, an experience which crops up with the same meanings, in the identical order of its inner logic, in both the order of speculation and the order of institutions, in both discourse and decree, in both word and watchword—wherever, in fact, a signifying element can assume for us the value of a language.’
Ok, so we’re looking for a structure – a conceptual framework – of attitudes, sensibilities, and meanings that have an inner logic and guide action.
Take one: utilitarianism. The greatest good for the greatest number. I lay out some problems with it as a way of thinking in my modernity series.
In the Fist of Modernity, for example, I explored how 19th century attitudes, perceptions, and sensibilities of criminality led to the birth of modern policing. The assumed logic of the period suggested that urbanisation was leading to an increase in crime, especially murder, when actually murder had been decreasing for centuries, and petty theft by the poor caused by poverty constituted the majority of offenses.
This justification is now seen to be irrational – based on false premises – but at the time the people involved clearly thought they were motivated by ‘rational’ utilitarian ethics. If the conclusions were not arrived at rationally, how were they arrived at?
Antonio Damasio: Somatic Markers
This is why we need some neuroscience like Antonio Damasio’s Descartes Error, which I looked at last month.
For Damasio, we’re not just rational – that’s not the only way we make decisions – our decision making apparatus has an emotional component. We make choices based on feelings, what he calls somatic markers.
He writes for example that ‘when we are faced with the need to select a particular course of action, we make the selection not only based on the facts of the situation and the intellectual analysis that favors the most advantageous choice, but also based on the profile and intensity of the affective accompaniment of the intellectual process.’
Somatic markers – the collection of feelings we get from bodily and mental impulses – highlight certain options for us to deliberate while eliminating others. They’re a kind of screening process.
What I’m interested in is how somatic markers are arranged socially in a system. We go back to Foucault’s idea of a ‘consistent and compatible conceptual framework.’
When the modern police force was born, for example, the idea of a criminal class was dominant. Organised, incurable, lazy, murderous, urban, biological. One scientist at the time argued that
‘‘By some accident of development, by some defect of heredity or birth or training, [the criminal] belongs as it were to a lower and older social state than that in which he is actually living.’
All of these attitudes contribute towards somatic markers which provide a kind of pre-cognitive structure to thought. We feel something and information enters our conscious mind based on that feeling, before we think through information rationally.
But how do we think more clearly about the relationship between Foucault and Damasio, or between the structural, the contextual, the environmental and the individual, the personal?
Bourdieu: Habitus
These attitudes, feelings, conceptual frameworks, pre-cognitive structures become both socialised and individualised somehow. That is, they’re consistent enough across a population and are subjectified into individual and varying behaviour.
Damasio writes that while emotions are individual, they ‘follow similar patterns across individuals, having been shaped by biological and cultural evolution to response adaptively to varied classes of individual and social situations.’
He continues ‘the actual “development” of somatic markers – the incorporation of an emotive response in the process of responding adaptively to the environment – is socially influenced.’
We can see affinities here with Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology, which has also had a big influence on me.
Bourdieu’s theory is in many ways about social coordination – how our habits, tastes, and ideas come to be synchronised across region, age, or class, for example. Bourdieu asked ‘how can behaviour be regulated without being the product of obedience to rules?’ Orchestrated without a conducted?
In other words, Why is it the case that we are more likely to choose or adopt certain practices rather than others?
The likelihood of liking certain music, adopting certain cultural practices, or theorising a modern police force in a specific was is the result of what Bourdieu calls the habitus and has similarities with Damasio’s somatic marker theory.
The habitus is a ‘predisposition, tendency, propensity, inclination’ toward a certain belief, attitude, and perception based on ones social position. Adopting a certain gesture, saying thank you, aligning yourself to a political group, enjoying certain films, whatever it is, rewards you with cultural capital. In short, certain things are approved and certain things are not.
Damasio writes that in ‘early in development, punishment and reward are delivered not only by the entities themselves, but by parents and other elders and peers, who usually embody the social conventions and ethics of the culture to which the organism belongs.’
He continues ‘It is likely that as we were being socially “tuned” in infancy and childhood, most of our decision making was shaped by somatic states related to punishment and reward.’
Ok, so these three thinkers – Foucault, Damasio, and Bourdieu are complicated so if you want to refresh yourself take a look at my videos on them in the description below. They’re also, of course, not the only pillars of my method but they do encapsulate a large part of what I’m trying to achieve.
In all of them I think we can also see tacit critiques of the type of standardization typical of enlightenment rationalism; that there’s ‘one’ way of doing thing. This should always be resisted, but why? There’s something left out: the future.
The future is where I’m unsure, what I’m interested in pursuing next. The poststuctural turn emphasised how all of this inevitably moves, shifts, and changes over time. As Deleuze argues every moment is different from the last, every tree different from the other, everything evolves, but we are structured by the habitus, by the episteme, by the pre-cognitive. In that, we have something to fight against, to analyse, to understand.
As Bourdieu says, ‘in each of us, in varying proportions, there is part of yesterday’s man; it is yesterday’s man who inevitably predominates in us, since the present amounts to little compared with the long past in the course of which we were formed.’ Ideas of the past are embodied today in rulebooks, laws, institutions, and attitudes, the abstract made concrete.
How do we reattach ourselves to the past so that we can more effectively determine our futures?
Thinking about how to best pursue an as yet developed future is obviously a timeless and difficult question but one I want to pursue over the next year. The closest I’ve come to a starting point is Deleuze, and the Romantics, who emphasised how we cannot detach ourselves from the world, but are connected to it through our feelings, affects, our imaginations. There’s a powerful relationship between the embodied episteme, the structure, and our ability to imagine as yet unactualised worlds. We are, in short, a creative, innovative species. Everything we do is imbued with this imaginative creativity.
When we choose to look at, analyse, or try to understand the past, or a philosopher, we do so with present concerns in mind and we creatively imagine or rearticulate, or put to use, what they’ve said. When an historian writes a history they ‘imagine’ a narrative or choose a topic because of its suitability in the present ‘for’ the future.
Historians transform sterile chronicles – events and dates with no beginnings or ends, interpretation or analysis – into stories by identifying, ordering and adding to the individual data contained within them. They produce narratives according to ideological, aesthetic, and linguistic norms and beliefs in the present.
Every sentence we write is drawn from our moral and personal attitudes about the world and is in some way constructed based on our beliefs about the ‘appropriateness’ of them. We are always thinking in terms of ‘usefulness’, ‘aptness’ , and ‘correctness.’
The romantic historians shared these beliefs. They idealised elements of the past, poeticising them in the present, with the intention of contributing to an improved human future.
Augustin Thierry, for example, wanted to write a national history of France so that the ‘reader’s imagination’ and ‘human sympathy can attach itself to entire populations’.[6] Thomas Carlyle called for ‘stern accuracy in inquiring’ and ‘bold imagination in expounding and filling up.’[7] John Stuart Mill praised Carlyle’s The French Revolution for its combination of fact and feeling, ‘the history of the French Revolution, and the poetry of it, both in one… the truest of histories.’[8]
Conclusion
So that’s where I am. It’s rough, it’s always changing, and of course, there are countless other thinkers and concepts that should be included here, and hopefully will be more in the future.
To conclude, the purpose – the motivation – is always to explain, to understand, so as to be able to carry forward those causes that have the general effect of being beneficial to us and to avoid the ones that tend to do us harm. The task of history is always ethical, always ideological, always creative, and always about the future.
With that in mind, to me, there’s no clearer place to start than the history of genocide. If we can understand the causes, the warning signs, the conditions that lead ordinary people to commit heinous acts, then we might be better placed to innoculate our own contemporary societies from these seemingly timeless dangers. We might learn some surprising moral lessons along the way too. That’s something I’ll be turning to next time.