Fisher’s Lament, Tolstoy’s Locomotive, and the Freedom Hunch

 If we enquire into ‘what runs history’, into the possibility of any pattern, structure or law, we are left to examine the rush of statistics and wonder if it is sufficient to account for the chronicles of kings and commoners, the flowering of civilizations, and the evolution of religious forms. The historian H. A. L. Fisher, in one of the most quoted statements of modern historiography insists that there is no meaningful structure to be found in the random ness of historical process:

Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another as wave follows upon wave, only one great fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no generalizations; only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.[i]

Increased perspective in the rising tide of historical data forces us to consider that the eonic pattern reveals the counter-evidence to Fisher’s Lament. The philosopher Karl Popper challenged Toynbee to answer to Fisher’s Lament. Even as Fisher wrote, the discovery of Sumer, better insight into the classical phase, and a ‘post-transitional’ perspective on the rise of the modern was revealing the eonic snapshot emerging in fixer. We find an answer to the issue of historical regularity, answers, but what was the question? Confusion over the nature of historiography makes historical interpretation uncertain at best. We can approach the issue by distinguishing history from evolution, and applying our suggestion of the antinomy of freedom and necessity: the pattern requires a distinction of ‘eonic determination ’ and ‘free action’. From another perspective, this is ‘Tolstoy’s Locomotive’, the distinction of ‘systems and selves’, the distant cousin of the biologist’s distinction of ‘population and organism’.  

Fisher’s lament, with a tragic flourish, was perhaps a pessimistic or proto-postmodernist reaction to the horrors of the First World War, and the shock this created in the hopes of so many in automatic progress . His evocative statement was made in the wake of nineteenth century ideas of unlimited progress, and earlier ideas of universal history and is an indirect expression of the view that there is no discoverable historical pattern or direction. Beside it lie the many attempts to challenge the great philosophies of history that rose in the Enlightenment passing into the phase of German Idealism, then followed by efforts to approach its study scientifically, or the reaction to philosophies of history in the various forms of historicism , beginning with Herder. Both directional history, as in the idea of Progress , and the rise of empiricism, in tandem with the scientific Revolution and the discovery of evolution, rise in parallel and divide, to vie for a philosophic outcome in the self-understanding of modernism.

The use by Fisher of the term ‘waves’ is ironic, and highlights the ambiguity of his mixture of metaphors. In the new world of Quantum Mechanics we see a blend of wave theory, mechanics, and probabilistic ideas confounded together in a way to give a different meaning to the term ‘wave’. In the broadest picture, if we were to look at the great scale of world history to see it organized into a train of waves, we would conclude in the affirmative as to the existence of a pattern, attempt to let it assume the duties of progress, or yet again consider, as might a Buddhist wise to the Great Wheel, that this progression was either not progressive or a device of novelty concealing meaningless recurrence. The issue of cycl ical and linear views of history reemerges in a new form putting a new meaning on the idea of progress. Fisher’s lament is ambiguous, for in the implied critique of linear progressive views of history the distinctly antiquated ‘cyclical’ raises its head in a concealed form.   

Fisher’s lament bundles together four, or more, quite separate concepts, that of rhythm, plot, pattern, and predetermination that do not necessarily stand or fall together. That historical patterned emergence can also be a series of chaotic ‘emergencies’, such as the French Revolution, is still another crisscross of meaning. A rhythm need have no plot, and a dramatic improvisation might show little or no predetermination, and yet operate under the constraint of a conditioned future. Fisher invokes in general the theme of chance and necessity that has arrived even from ancient times as the enigma of historical action, and which posed the ‘atoms and the void’ of Lucretius against the Magian and gnostic world views that overtook the Ancient world with supernatural futurism, and swept away the developing sciences that could not compete with the religious syncretism of the times. The issue has ever since been caught up in the swirl of theological controversy as the Zoroastrian archetype in stale Augustinian form conditions thought and threatens to make ‘common sense linear time’ a religious monopoly, currently against the backdrop of evolution ary disputes over the place of natural selection, hence the random, in all arguments against design.

The hold of Fisher’s lament on many quotation-mongers and historical handwringers, as the magic sword to slay the dragon of macro-history, is also a testimony to the difficulties of the project of Universal History , and its cousin, the attempt to find laws of history. Conjoin these to evolutionism, the macroeconomic model, perhaps as cyclical forecasting, and the blends become arcane. From Augustine, and before, in the period of the Judeo-Zoroastrian prophets, thence to Kant or Hegel the question of Universal History has remained elusive, conditioned consciously and unconsciously by the context of concepts of theistic action, teleological geopolitics, or concepts of linear time, that has led to a healthy modern reaction.

 Beside Hegel with his Napoleon riding through the town of Jena, we have Tolstoy’s hero at the battle of Borodino in his (fictional) account of the figure of this spearhead of modernity in the period of his invasion of Russia. The sense of greater historical determination, if not causality, that can come upon one is an experience that is not confined to scientists. One of the most poignant statements of ‘causality’ in the realm of thought is the final coda of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, whose final paragraph, after a long discussion of the forces of history, concludes, in an analogy of the rise of the modern non-theistic view of history to the transition from Ptolemaic to Copernican astronomy:

As with the question of astronomy then, so with the question of history now, the whole difference of opinion is based on the recognition or non-recognition of some absolute unit that serves as the criterion of visible phenomena. In astronomy it was the immovability of the earth; in history it is the independence of the individual—free will…

In the first case [of astronomy] it was necessary to renounce the consciousness of an unreal immobility in space and to recognize a motion we did not feel; in the present case it is similarly necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist, and to recognize a dependence of which we are not conscious.

We should brace ourselves momentarily before this feeling of historical determination, the sense of being in a great machine, in which even ideas of divinity are processed like all else, without actually declaring a belief in absolute historical determinism as extreme as that of Tolstoy, if that is what he is driving at. Tolstoy’s view is a remarkable Newtonian conception for a man who has just completed the rich and living universe of War and Peace, surprising for an artist of the times in an atmosphere of nineteenth century Romantic resistance to the ‘reductionism’ of scientific. His intuition should be a reminder that freedom has no denominations in paper. And it would seem to be the real Tolstoy, before he was driven to retrograde religious confusions to find the complement of arid mechanics in what was almost a second incarnation.[ii]

It is significant to recall the context of Tolstoy’s great work. It is beautifully apt, notwithstanding its subtle conservative cast, to our study of the eonic effect in describing the period of the Napoleonic invasion of Russia riding the great shockwave of diffusion of the forces of the French Revolution  and the onrush of the expanding wave of modernity that passed outward to set the phase of a New Age, the Age of the Locomotive. It is almost eerie that Tolstoy should have quested in vain for the motor of history, and yet, in his epic account, described the very contextual factor that must indicate its existence, and described for us the means to find it by seeing it, although he could barely have understood the implication of his own words.

There is a certain sadness in Tolstoy’s great work, and not a little of the reactionary, and one who shows a strain of the conservative de Maistre, the type of the arch-traditionalist who emerges to battle the forces of modern change. It is not often remembered that Tolstoy’s original plot was to have described the period of the Decembrists, the modernizing faction of the aristocracy that in the early period after the Napoleonic era attempted to transmit the influences of modernity to the reactionary society of Russia, whose backwardness goes so far toward explaining the confusions of later communism. Tolstoy pulled back from this plot, placing his drama in the period of the year 1812, to create the portrait of a society looking at the explosion of the new from the outside and one about to disappear forever in destruction. Tolstoy, as the tragic ending of his life made clear, was caught very much between two worlds. And the world he has so beautifully described has tempted too many to resist the tide of revolutionary freedom.

And yet even as he adopted this viewpoint of historical determination, Tolstoy impinged on a subtle contradiction, or difficulty, in the view of so-called scientific history, “Modern history has rejected the beliefs of the ancients [in ideas of the Divine Will guiding historical action] without providing new conceptions to replace them.” The reason is perhaps that, as a novelist, he was driven to simulate in his mind an entire structure of culture as it moves in history. A simulation with Tolstoy’s brain is somehow ‘state of the art’, although the result was intended as fiction. It is inevitable that one will sense that there must be higher ‘laws’ at work to regulate this whole, laws in which the factor of ‘will’ in some concoction of ‘triangulation’, to use Tolstoy’s metaphor, is not in contradiction to the force of events. It is simply a feeling that he had about his material. His point is one that will confront anyone who looks at the intermediate structures, between the high and the low, as it were, the microscopic and the macroscopic or cosmological, of human society, nation, and historical context, whose mechanical unfolding remains unaccounted for by the forces of ‘bootstrap materialism’, the laws of physics and chemistry, the most cogent source of the very sense of causal determination. It is not mysticism to consider that these are not the pure products of rationality, for as Tolstoy suggests, the period of great changes shows the scale of events. Tolstoy seems to be stumbling on a contradiction, although he sees that it is difficult to put one’s finger crux of the matter, as if the volition were a sort of machine of euclidean triangles of the ‘will’, in the metaphors of geometry and mechanics that haunt his appendix.

It is interesting that Tolstoy finally falls back on the idea of the locomotive, a charming metaphorical non-explanation that nonetheless expresses perfectly the notion of the ‘historical transportation’ of man throughout his own historical becoming, in an appropriate context of the new nineteenth century sciences of Thermodynamics, the first post-Newtonian progeny of the ancestors of the new studies of Complexity.

 A locomotive is moving. Someone asks: What moves it?…The only concept by which the movement of the locomotive can be explained is the concept of a force equal to the movement of peoples. The only concept by which the movement of peoples can be explained is the concept of a force equal to the whole movement of peoples.

Tolstoy spins on and on, page after page. The metaphor of a locomotive is quite less than what is needed for a theory, but far more pompous references to the ‘forces of history’ are not a wit more rigorous than this, so we can start with Tolstoy’s Locomotive, if it will convey us to a new theory of higher systems in the futures of thermodynamics. It is also a reminder that the evolution of the organism is two things, the passage of a population in one dynamic of ‘transportation’, and the emergence of ‘selves’ in that population, issues of consciousness. It is significant that the science of thermodynamics is itself the first step beyond the world of Newtonian mechanics, as it summons into existence by its theoretical inquiry into heat engines notions of irreversibility not implicit in the formulation of cosmo-mechanical laws of the early phase of physics.

And yet even as we are led to, if not rendered fearful by, the sudden perception of historical determination, the idea of Freedom, beside the idea of ‘free action’, which is something quite different, resurfaces irresistibly to challenge a sense of mechanics, and drives us to wonder if the eonic determination of the great struggles to gain freedom during mechanical revolution s might show a deeper proof of a Freedom Hunch. We cannot solve the ‘fact/value’ dilemma, but we can indulge in enough guesswork to know where to look. This hunch is a guess that we are dealing with a ‘system’ that can deal in ‘freedom’, for its trajectory would be different if it was idling near human self-creation, after cycles of intensive progression. This is no more than an observational sense of puzzled wonder, historical feedback with a fancy name, or... This could indeed start with a challenge to demonstrate macro-historical feedback. Philosophers and romantics will be pleased and then appalled at this thinking. For it really sneaks reductionism back into the fold.

It is the obvious objection to pure determinism that a pure machine would not go to the trouble of constructing dramas of freedom, a direct argument from meaning. There is the simple contradiction in determination and freedom, and the difficulty of its translation into free action. The logic behind this Freedom Hunch is simple, and, historicist or not, unconsciously convincing: the play is meaningful and the plot is about freedom: it can’t be a coincidence, and the circumstance is not likely to be superfluous. None of which constitutes proof. But it is this paradoxical causal ‘heresy’ that won’t depart, yet we cannot shake this other feeling. Usually, we feel either one way or the other; generally our philosophies have given us tranquilizing assurances of our freedom, and we require no hunch. Generally, if we espouse a philosophy of freedom, causality will nag us. If we espouse causality, we are left with a meaningless sequence whose plain and obvious spectacle is the ‘drama of freedom’, demanding to be the ‘meaning’ of history. This additional conceptual construct in addition to the distinction between ‘eonic determination’ and ‘free action’ might seem confusing, but is in fact a reminder that we are liable to confuse ‘free action’ with ‘Freedom’, which is not necessarily the case. For the evidence of history suggests otherwise, that Freedom is more a function of eonic determination, until man can define this Freedom in terms of his own free action. [iii]

In the search for the causality of history, the trail has always grown cold as the elusive quarry disappears into the metaphysics of Freedom. Ideas of ‘freedom’ will blind us, if we wish a diagnosis of our condition. We should grow suspicious, with a hunch about our subject, that something like Occam’s razor applies to our perplexity. We have a mass of historical data whose status must reduce to the law of causality. But we have a ‘plot’ whose theme of Freedom continually throws us off the scent. We should quietly wonder if the elusive ‘causality’ of history is not hiding behind Freedom as the mechanism disguised to our logical simplicities. Will this generate a contradiction? For if we reduce freedom to determination, can it be free? If we do not reduce freedom to historical determination, how might it evolve? We should be interested in the appearance of periods when the effect of the semi-causal eonic determination of Freedom emerges in the confusion of revolutionary ‘free action’ whose character shows an attempt to become free.