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The Case of the Scottish Enlightenment Periods Of Charting the Causes of Intellectual Creativity: The Case of the Scottish Enlightenment Periods of intellectual creativity and change are of obvious intrinsic interest to scholars and commentators, and it is no surprise that these periods tend to attract much attention and discussion. The challenge for commentators, however, is to avoid either of two forms of reductionism. In the first form of reductionism, periods of intellectual creativity are reduced to the genius (or geniuses) who are taken to be the largely unpredictable figures with whom such periods become identified, and their philosophical and intellectual works are in turn seen to transcend nearly everything but the intellectual influences of other geniuses. With such geniuses, it is believed to be largely futile to search for causes. This form of reductionism avoids historical analysis and generalization in two ways: 1) it reduces historical factors to the inexplicable specificity and singularity of the intellectual him/herself (i.e., their genius); and 2) the significance of the intellectual’s work is taken to transcend the historical setting in which it was produced, and hence one can avoid studying historical circumstances altogether.1 The second form of reductionism reduces the intellectual’s works to being merely the epiphenomenal consequence of socio- economic conditions, or to a set of abstract principles so abstract they lose touch with the concrete uniqueness and specificity of the period under study. Marx and Hegel can be seen as two of the more prominent examples of this form of reductionism. Most intellectual historians have shied away from the more egregious forms of either reductionism, and yet perhaps because of this one finds a relative absence of interpretive work directed towards formulating general principles that might help one to understand the conditions for the possibility of intellectual creativity and change. One does not find this absence in other disciplines within the humanities; e.g., economic history, world- systems history, and linguistics each has their own prominent theoreticians who have set forth various principles to account for various types of change.2 The reason this has not been widely adopted in intellectual history, I argue, has to do with the continuing effects of the two forms of reductionism – i.e., it is believed that one cannot adequately account for intellectual creativity by abstract principles, for these principles are taken to be an 2 attempt to make predictable what cannot be predicted – the emergence of genius. Or it is believed that these principles abstract from the concrete flow of history to the point of avoiding history altogether. In other words, attempting to explain periods of intellectual creativity by means of abstract principles would itself be, as is often presupposed, an example of the second reductionism. Efforts to avoid reductionism have resulted in roughly two types of intellectual history: 1) those which focus on the philosophical content of the period, including intellectual influences as well as contemporary debates and quarrels; and 2) those which focus on the economic and social environment in which the figures worked, while keeping this content largely separate from the philosophical content of the intellectual works of the period. There have been some notable exceptions to this tendency in intellectual history. Quentin Skinner, for example, has argued that intellectual historians need to move beyond focusing simply upon the texts and consider what the author of the text intended to do by writing such a text.3 Doing this, Skinner argued, will both resolve many of the difficulties associated with attempting to “understand” what was said in the text, and it will help to place the work in its historical context.4 Stephen Toulmin and Steven Shapin have argued much along these same lines, taking to heart Wittgenstein’s claim that “only in the stream of thought and life do words have meaning.”5 These works have been extremely important contributions to intellectual history, and I do not take issue with their arguments. My only criticism of this approach is that it is not abstract enough. In short, the approach set forth here will modify Skinner’s and Shapin’s question: “what are they, the intellectuals, doing with their work?” I’ll grant that political goals are part of what authors intend to achieve in their work,6 but for the sake of developing an abstract principle I feel will be better able to connect the philosophical works and ideas of intellectuals with the historical circumstances in which they worked, I argue that what intellectuals ultimately intend to do is to reduce becoming to being, or they are attempting to think becoming.7 Inspiration for this approach arises from Nietzsche, and from Gilles Deleuze’s development of Nietzsche’s work. Nietzsche, for example, was quite straightforward in 3 his claim that “the world viewed from inside, the world defined and determined according to its ‘intelligible character’ – it would be ‘will to power’ and nothing else”8; and in his later elaboration Nietzsche argues that “to impose upon becoming the character of being: that is the supreme will to power.”9 All is an effort to reduce becoming to being. In further developing this theme, Deleuze emphasizes the ambiguous, transitional phase in the process whereby something becomes something else (i.e., an identifiable being). Rather than being a simple matter of A becoming B (A Æ B), Deleuze argues that there is an ambiguous phase, AB, wherein what is becoming is no longer A, nor is it yet B: hence Deleuze would formalize it as A Æ AB Æ B. In an example from the book he wrote with Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, they argue that in the process of sedimentation one can indeed say that sand becomes sedimentary rock (A [sand] Æ B [sedimentary rock]), but it is not that simple. Once the sand is deposited downstream, the layers of sedimentary particles are then transformed through a process geologists call cementation. The pores between particles that were previously filled by fluid become replaced, as additional layers increase the gravitational pressure upon lower layers, by agents (e.g., silica and hematite in the case of sandstone) that act as a cement that binds the particles and creates a new entity – sedimentary rock. As a result of this “cementation” process, sand (A) has become sedimentary rock (B), but during this process there is an ambiguous transitional phase during which the sand is neither completely the particulate matter which was carried downstream, nor is it, while undergoing “cementation” (i.e., becoming) completely sedimentary rock.10 One can say, then, that in the transition from A to B there is an ambiguous phase, AB, wherein the identities that are becoming – sand (A) becoming sedimentary rock (B) – are indistinguishable; or, to put it more precisely, they are neither the identities they were nor are they the identities they are becoming. Thus the formalization, A Æ AB Æ B.11 The key to thinking becoming, according to Deleuze, is precisely to understand this transitional state, AB. Deleuze argues, however, that the concepts used to understand this state should neither be too abstract or not abstract enough.12 The conceptualization of AB is too abstract when it neglects the concrete processes themselves in all their uniqueness, specificity, and complexity. In other words, this conceptualization commits what we 4 referred to above as the second form of reductionsim common to intellectual history – e.g., Marx’s economic determinism. The conceptualization is not abstract enough when it is used to understand a single, unique concrete process and fails to generalize so as to be applied to other contexts and processes. This is the first form of reductionism – i.e., the reduction of intellectual history to the unpredictable, chance appearance of geniuses. How, then, are we to conceptualize the transitional state, AB, and how are we to use it in interpreting intellectual history? To this question, Deleuze’s and Guattari’s work, though promising in its suggestiveness, is often encumbered with difficult neologisms and conceptual apparatus; nor do they utilize the concepts they develop to clarify the relationship between an intellectual’s work and their concrete, historical context. To remedy this situation I propose we adopt some concepts that have been developed within chaos theory and the study of dynamical systems. The concepts developed here have been utilized to understand and account for concrete, dynamic processes – i.e., they are attempts to think becoming – and they are also abstract enough to be applied to many different contexts.13 Therefore, as an initial approach to conceptualizing the transitional state, AB, I offer that it be interpreted as an increased state of energy. Rather than a simple transition from A through AB to B, the phase AB, at least within dynamical systems theory, raises the number of structural possibilities, possibilities that are no longer present once the transition to B is complete. One can then formalize the process as follows: A Æ↑ABØÆ B. Ilya Prigogine has referred to this increased level of structural possibilites as “dissipative structures.” Such dissipative structures emerge when a system is far from equilibrium. The beginning state A, as well as the completed state B, are systems at equilibrium, but during the far from equilibrium transitional period, dissipative structures appear with what one can call organized, structured chaos. A famous example of such a dissipative structure occurs in the Berlusov-Zhabotinsky reaction. At a transitional, far from equilibrium state between two stable, equilibrium states, a series of structured waves and concentric circles appears. The point to stress here, and this will be our entryway to intellectual history, is that the increased structural possibilites of AB are not what 5 becomes established once equilibrium returns, but these structures are no less real – there really are concentric circles and waves.
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