2316. Harvie, Ferguson wrote: The correspondence between the macrocosm and microcosm was transformed, during the Renaissance, into a new metaphor of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. The cosmos became a unified but unbounded structure ordered through universal laws of nature. The intimate reality of human experience could no longer be conceptualized as a metaphor or symbol of an all-inclusive order. The human world must conform to the same laws as the rest of nature. Yet the dignity of man, which had been one of the central ideas of the Renaissance, seemed to imply a privileged status for the human. This difficulty, the paradox of Renaissance humanism, lies at the intellectual heart of bourgeois psychology. No sooner had the claim to dignity been established, through the assimilation of man to nature (in Arcadian or Utopian forms), than it was lost. Man did not inhabit a centralized and degraded world; he assumed the dignity of celestial motion. But, in consequence, his soul was no longer the mirror of the world. The unique advantage of his position as an observer of the cosmos was lost. True, the cosmos was no longer held to be the means to proclaim an ultimate truth; but even as a mechanism it appeared baffling. Its regularities could be formalized through the quantitative language of mathematics, but the cause of its order remained mysterious. Was human nature similarly unknowable? Was it not equally contrary to presume that man was a mystery to himself? These purely intellectual considerations were, additionally, ways of describing the new social reality of commodity exchange. The commodity embodied a dual reality. As exchange value it expressed the universality of necessary relations. It created a world of ‘nature’ within which man could live, a world which appeared to have sprung up magically around him and now sustained itself by the power of its own indwelling forces. As use-value, however, the commodity was ultimately relinquished to the ‘irrationality’ of the human subject. The division between microcosm and macrocosm gave way, then, to the distinction between object and subject. ‘Human nature’ was, just as much as the physical cosmos, inexhaustible. As ‘subjectivity’, the human was an interior cosmos. But what was its specific mechanism? A series of attempts were made to ‘save the phenomenon’; to ‘explain’ human reality in terms of universal laws and, at the same time, clearly distinguish between the peculiar quality of human experience and all that lay beyond it. Cartesian dualism is the first step towards the self-consciousness of the bourgeois ego. The radical distinction between matter and mind, itself hinting at the momentous split between the view of the ‘object world’ exclusively in terms either of exchange or of use, cleared the way for the direct ‘application’ of physical concepts to human activities. This, of course, was not Descartes’ intention, but as so often demonstrated in the history of ideas, innovators are powerless to exercise control over the effects of their ideas. Once the ‘qualitative’ character of human experience had been confined to a particular category, it could be fully explored by the methods developed within quite different fields of study. These methods were to be Newton’s, rather than Descartes’, and the disciples of Newtonian ‘corpuscularism’ rather than those of their master. Although, especially in France, controversy surrounded the ultimate significance of Newtonianism for a philosophy of nature, his ‘methods’ were freely borrowed and uncontroversially adopted as the foundation for a new ‘science of man’. Just as the cosmos had to be described in a form commensurate with the new social reality of commodity exchange, so the human ‘qualities’ hidden within such a reality could appear philosophically only as elements within a theory of the market. Society was composed of commodities; individuated objects defined by the universal attribute of exchange-value (labour). The cosmos was composed of individuated objects, bodies, that differed only quantitatively (by mass) and thereby established invariant relations with other bodies. The ‘internal’ reality of human nature, in spite of its ‘ultimate’ irrationality as ‘pure subjectivity’, could be grasped as a similar ‘internal market’ upon which some universal quantities were exchanged. First, therefore, human nature became a universal defining criteria, the ‘species being’ of man. This had not been the case, of course, in feudal society. There only particular human beings existed, specific qualities held fleetingly within a living subject. The bourgeois revolution, opposing all feudal restriction upon internal ‘freedom’ of the market, created the individuated ‘ego’ as a new historical actor. ‘Sensationalism’ was the first and perhaps the most successful version of bourgeois psychology. Its initial appeal rested on its claim to offer a systematic and comprehensive account of subjectivity adequate to the new ‘scientific’ world view. Hobbes of course, even before Newton, had proposed a radical materialistic psychology. It was, just for this reason, rejected. ‘Mechanism’, not ‘materialism’, was the key to the new intellectual order. Even nature could not be grasped as a purely ‘material’ phenomenon, and a properly scientific approach began with the recognition of the limits of our commonsense notions of physical causality. The world contained nothing but matter in motion, but that was not to say that every phenomenon was reducible to the effects of ‘contact’ and collision among its elemental particles. One of the leading ‘corpuscular’ philosophers, Robert Boyle, insisted upon the importance of ‘emergent’ and functional relations for any reasonably satisfactory account of even simple physical phenomena. The ‘texture’ of matter, its internal organization, gave rise to many of the ‘sensible qualities’ through which we recognized it. Sensationalist psychology, in its more sophisticated variants at least, was fully alive to these distinctions. Even where it appeared to be an attempt to reduce psychology to physics, or physiology, it was careful to preserve the ‘dignity’ of its subject matter by making the particular and unique quality of subjectivity its ultimate frame of reference. The emergence of the self as the active principle of a materialist psychology was inevitable once the classificatory division between matter and spirit (exchange and use) had been established. It was expressed less systematically but more brilliantly by Diderot, for whom ‘individuality is the subjectivisation of reality’ rather than simply a ‘feeling point of nature’, and less brilliantly but even more comprehensively by d’Holbach. The latter indeed goes so far as to propose the self as the gravitational principle of the subjective world. Rather than attempting to ‘explain’ subjectivity as a particular effect of matter in motion—as we find, for example, in Hobbes, and thereby assimilating man to a universal category of nature—sensationalism progressively accepted the separateness of human nature as a ‘spiritual’ phenomenon. As such it had to be described and understood in terms of its own internal relationships. The human subject then became an interior cosmos, a psyche, qualitatively distinct from, but ordered homologously to, the ‘system of nature’.”
Posted on: Thu, 23 Oct 2014 16:30:40 +0000
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