Why Goethe

The nineteenth-century mania for the single cause, the error of taking a totality for a cause, and why origin is read the way an eddy is read.

Whoever opens Noventa e três & Walter Benjamin finds, in its first pages, complex systems and Goethe's theory of colours. In a book about the Brazilian First Republic this looks out of place. It is not.

THE SINGLE KEY

Ask anyone why the Monarchy fell. The answer usually comes like this: because of deep causes. The economy was changing, society was changing, the regime no longer served. This is called explaining from the base — and everything else, the ideas, the laws, the books, is called superstructure.

This was not one author's obsession. It was the whole nineteenth century. Each man found his key and opened every door with it. Comte found three stages through which humanity would pass in order. Marx found the economy. Freud found sexuality. Taine found race, milieu and moment.

It is worth noticing who was in the room. Comte's doctrine was what Benjamin Constant taught the officers of the Military School, and what Júlio de Castilhos would apply to Rio Grande do Sul. Ordem e Progresso, on the flag, is a single-cause theory of history written in cloth.

THE REST

Once the single cause is fixed, everything else is founded upon it through mediations. Each system with its own nexus. Institutions, legal contracts, the press, the school, the church, industry, the culture industry, the ideological apparatus, an infinity of propositions. But base and superstructure are not two things, one causing the other, according to the orientation of whoever is describing. Each is a complex system in itself, and so is each mediation. To say that one causes the other is to say that a thing causes its own description of itself through the description of the other, threaded with the wires that connect them.

And there is a larger problem. A cause must be something separate from what it causes. If the whole already contains the phenomenon, then saying that the whole explains it explains nothing: it gives the sum a name and calls that a reason.

Nobody is saying that causes do not exist. Within a totality there are chains of cause and effect, and they work: a telegram arrives, a troop marches, a man dies. That is explained exactly so, and it is what the documents show.

What does not work is to take the whole — the economy, society, the spirit of the age — and put it in the place of the cause. There are causes, and many. What there is not is the Cause. This does not mean gratuitousness, and it does not mean indeterminism.

This understanding nearly cost Benjamin his life. Adorno criticised his Baudelaire essay in exactly these terms: base, superstructure, mediations. And as early as 1918 Benjamin was already writing that no totality can be a cause or an effect, and that no effect and no cause can be a totality.

PLAINLY: WHAT IS AT STAKE

The Brazilian Republic was a political and ideological coup, with some social consequences. Economic and social questions were present, obviously, but they did not have the primacy that a certain historiography attributes to them. They dragged on throughout the whole process of republicanisation, and the government never took the decision to resolve them: it was intoxicated with the constitution of the new regime.

What raises the categories of the Great Revolution to the condition of major causes, and makes it seem that they would necessarily have to repeat themselves in Brazil, is not the facts. It is the ideologisation of those categories.

The Brazilian case comes much closer to the phenomenology of chaos: non-linearity, sensitive dependence, radical effects produced by minimal and accidental alterations in the initial conditions, a complex determinism. In the bundle of causes of 15 November 1889, what has primacy is the ideological excitement and the opportunism of a small group.

THE PICTURE THAT HOLDS US: WHY DOES IT PERSIST?

Because it is not a belief that can be refuted with facts. It is a picture. Wittgenstein wrote that a picture held us captive, and that we could not get outside it because it lay in our language, and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.

The picture, here, is that of a building. Below, the base; above, what rests on it. Once one speaks that way, the rest follows by itself: what is below supports, what is above is supported, and therefore explained. Nobody has to believe it. It is enough to speak that way.

Wittgenstein called this mythology, and not in the sense of fable. These are propositions that have hardened and come to function as the riverbed along which thought runs. One does not argue with a riverbed; one walks inside it without noticing.

That is why arguing against the picture is useless. What can be done is to show it as a picture, and that is what Benjamin taught.

GOETHE

Here the theory of colours comes in, and it stops being strange.

Newton passes light through a prism and concludes that white light is made of components. He explains what is seen by what is behind it. Goethe refuses the move. For him the phenomenon is what appears, and there is nothing behind it to be found: what is seen already is the thing. He called this the primal phenomenon, the Urphänomen, and wrote that the highest thing would be to grasp that everything factual is already theory.

This is not mysticism, nor a dislike of mathematics. It is a decision about where explanation stops: it stops at the phenomenon, and not at a hidden cause.

Benjamin takes this concept and does with it something Goethe had not done. In Goethe the primal phenomenon remains bound to nature; Benjamin turns it into a concept of history, and begins to call it origin — Ursprung. The origin is not the chronological beginning of anything. It is not the cause. It is the form recognised in an event.

THE EDDY

To say what origin is, Benjamin chose an image: an eddy in the river of becoming, which draws into its rhythm the material that passes through.

The image was well chosen, and it is not ornament. An eddy has exact properties. It holds its form while matter crosses it: the water composing it at one instant is already not the same at the next, and it goes on being the same eddy. It is not caused by the water, nor hidden behind it. It is a form the flow takes. It has no substance of its own, and even so it is real, identifiable, and produces effects.

Notice the verb. The origin does not produce the material: it draws it into its rhythm. It does not cause the facts; it organises them.

Benjamin wrote this in the 1920s. Turbulence was then the unresolved scandal of physics; Poincaré had opened the problem a few decades earlier, and it would be forty years before the mathematics of chaos existed. Benjamin reached for the one image that already contained the argument before there was a science of it: a stable structure inside a flow, without cause and without essence.

That is why Noventa e três & Walter Benjamin is a book that begins with complex systems. Nothing is being annexed from science to philosophy. What is being said, with a vocabulary that only appeared later, is what the image was already saying.

The application of this to the Brazilian case — 15 November, the hundred years between 1789 and 1889 — is in the next text, The day that could have been otherwise.