A the Determinist Case

A The Determinist Case As indicated in Chapter I, most nineteenth-century determinists understood 'heredity' and 'environment' as including everything that made a man what he was. Conception was generally recognised as the dividing line between the respective dominions of these two groups of factors, although meticulous demarcation experts still tussled over borderland issues such as congenital syphilis and the other hazards that the unsuspecting foetus could encounter during gestation. Nineteenth-century determinism was largely based on the assumption that matter could neither be created nor destroyed: an assumption that was implicit, if not always stated. No phenomenon, be it a person, a thought or an event, could have an autonomous existence that owed nothing to its antecedents and surroundings. Everything was the outcome of the interaction of pre-existing factors, which were themselves the product of earlier factors: each object or occurrence was a link in a mesh of causal chains, stretching back to 'the beginning of things' (in a world still joyously uncomplicated by Einstein). The word 'chance' had no place in this scheme of existence, except to designate something that was unexpected by the participants or observers of a particular situation. Philosophical text-books were rich in illustrative examples of why 'chance' should be banished from academic speech: the many written by Scottish professors showing an understandable predilection for unhappy incidents involving falling roof slates-the influence of environment being nowhere more evident than in a philosopher's choice of illustration. (These would demonstrate how the lethal impact of a falling slate on a passer-by was the nodal point of many causal chains; and they would similarly explain how in principle an omniscient being could trace back each chain to the dim beginnings of existence.) The contemplation of such examples confirmed determinists in the sobering if familiar view that all things-acts, thoughts and states of being-were shaped by the interplay of their antecedents and surroundings and could not be otherwise than what they were. For things to be different, there would need to be extraneous, formative influences that were not part of the sum total of existing matter; it would require autonomous 'spiritual' elements that existed independently of the material world. On such an analysis, only the believer in supernatural forces, such as God and the non-corporeal soul, could envisage a logical alternative to determinism. Between determinists and their opponents, a great deal of misunderstanding surrounded the phrase, 'free will'. Most determinists saw the individual as having a specific identity, and recognised that he made active choices between alternative courses of action. Yet, in conceding this, they stressed that his identity and predilections were themselves the product of inherited characteristics, upbringing and surrounding pressures, past and present. Moreover the choices open to him Man and Society in Nineteenth-century Realism were likewise dependent on circumstances that lay beyond his power to control. The chooser might be 'free' to follow his own inclinations, but fundamentally his inclinations were not of his I)wn choosing. Even ifhe sought to assert his freedom by opting for the alternative he liked less, that too would be a product of his prevailing state of mind-and this in reality would be the only alternative open to him. On this showing, the phrase 'free will' seemed to determinists to be a misnomer. And yet they were faced with the singular fact that there were atheists and materialists who rejected determinism and professed their faith in free will. In some cases, this attitude sprang from misconceptions concerning determinist claims. They erroneously supposed that there was no place for the unexpected in a determinist view of human behaviour, and accused determinists of naIvely imagining that prediction lay within their grasp. In fact determinists were at pains to point out that mankind would always lack sufficient data to make prediction a reality, except in simple cases. Other critics who attacked them belonged to what would now be called the trolley-bus school of thought. They represented an articulate expression of what a large section of the thinking pu blic still believes today. Upholding the golden mean of moderation, they eschewed the extremes of determinism and free will: represented in the twentieth-century garage of concepts by the tram and the motor bus. They denied that Man was a tram, perpetually condemned to run along the rails of heredity and environment. They would have equally denied, however, that Man has the freedom of movement of the motor bus, able to go where it likes, as long as it is fed with petrol and succeeds in avoiding sizeable obstacles. For them, the true analogy of Man would have been the trolley bus, a vehicle that cannot stray further than the length of its trolley masts from the wires of heredity and environment, and yet enjoying a considerable latitude of movement. Attractive though this qualified view might be, it presented the same problem as the more absolute type of free-will concept: it presupposed a degree of autonomy that has to be accounted for. Like the driver of the trolley bus, the particular will is an entity with origins; it cannot materialise out of nothing. To do so would require either self-generation or supernatural intervention: possibilities that were both discounted by the materialist opponents of determinism. Rejecting both God and the non-corporeal soul, they confined the will's existence to the briefspan between conception and death-and yet still claimed for it an autonomy that was only partially conditioned by heredity and environment. How this could be, they failed to make clear. In practice, however, they and other nineteenth-century voluntarists largely based their faith on subjective experience. As Dr Johnson had said before them, 'Sir, we know our will is free, and there's an end on't'. But, as Flaubert and other Realists discovered (see p. 67), once the intellect accepted determinism, subjective experience tended increasingly to follow suit. The individual who analysed his own decisions became progressively aware of his identity as an accumulation of needs and attitudes, constantly if imperceptibly modified by its successive encounters with the outside world. His sense of personal responsibility nevertheless remained a reality on the level of subjective experience; and George Eliot, among others, was at paiTls to show how determinism and a concept of morality could be reconciled (see pp. 94 -7). It was arguable, moreover, that the determinist was intellectually more disposed to The Determinist Case regard the attitudes and shortcomings of others with understanding and sympathy; even ifhis generosity did not always keep pace with his intellect. He was also more compellingly aware that men were dependent on each other for such improvement as they could achieve; each was part of the other's environment. Admittedly the individual's readiness to respond to others' needs was itself a determined response-or so the logic of determinism would demand. But helping others could still bring him satisfaction and self-fulfilment on the level of subjectivity; and this too was an issue that George Eliot considered closely (see pp. 94-7). It followed that determinists also had a reply to the many critics who rejected determinism on the grounds that it impoverished the quality oflife by eliminating the ennobling functions of choice and responsibility. It goes without saying that objections of this sort were not themselves arguments; one might as well deny the proposition that old men grow feeble, on the grounds tl,at it affronts human dignity. Yet there remained in these objections, based on human self-esteem, an assumption that many determinists wished to challenge, notably George Eliot. For her, life was positively enriched by the web of causality that linked all men: the dead, the living and the yet-unborn (see pp. 96-7). And, in her view, what seemed lost on the level of objective reality, 'responsible choice' and the like, was fully retained on the level of subjective experience (see pp. 94-7). Not all determinists, however, were so easily reconciled to the implications of their professed beliefs. Many took a more sombre view of its consequences for human self-respect; and writers such as Biichner, Flaubert and Ibsen accepted the voluntarists' verdict that determinism emptied life of meaning. Yet they were equally insistent that to deny determinism was no solution. For them, Man's only claim to some surviving shred of dignity was to face up to the unpalatable truths of life, with stoicism and courage. B Tristram Shandy, Determinism and Prediction Among much else, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759-67) was an exuberant monument to the anarchic possibilities of determinism. Although many of the architects ofdeterminist thought had refrained from suggesting that life had a specific purpose, they had nevertheless tacitly assumed that it had a certain unity of direction. Calvinism had envisaged a divine plan, as indeed did many of the Deists. Even the materialists, such as Hobbes, had seen the human struggle as having discernible and comprehensible characteristics: if unedifying, it at least conformed to rational expectation. Similarly the evolutionists ofthe late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw life evolving in what seemed to them a progressive and desirable direction (see pp. 32 - 5). Sterne, however, saw determinism as rich in the unexpected. Pray, Sir, in all the reading which you have ever read, did you ever read such a book as Locke's Essay upon the Human Understanding? ... It is a history-book, Sir, ... of what passes in a man's own mind ... Sterne had learned from Locke, among much else, that the mind at times may associate sense impressions that have no rational connection, other than a coincidental link in time or circumstance.

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