Determinism

DETERMINISM. - It is the conception of a strict, necessary and inevitable dependence among the elements of a process of becoming that stand in the relation of cause and effect. According as it is a process in the field of nature or of the life of the spirit, whether individual or collective, we may have different forms of d.: physical, psychological, ethical, economic, historical, etc. D., however, is by no means bound to a materialistic conception of being and of spirit, but rather to the rigorous identification of cause and reason and to the consequent representation or conception of real becoming on the model of merely logical derivation in the relation of principle and consequence. D. therefore represents the most explicit and most demanding conception of the rationality of the universe to which science and philosophy aspire, and it presents itself in every epoch of the history of thought. The postulate and general principle of d. is that "every cause is necessarily followed by its effect," and this entails: 1) the pre-existence or antecedence of the cause with respect to the effect; 2) its determinability or knowability as cause, that is, the univocal and rigorous pre-existence of the effect in the cause; 3) the necessity therefore of the process of derivation of the effect from the cause, such as to ensure the perfect rationality of being and hence a science or knowledge of a rigorously logico-mathematical type. Therefore for d. contingency and chance are reduced to mere appearance, due to the provisional character and deficiency of our knowing and of our present means of investigation.

According to Democritus the physical becoming is subject to a total and rigorous necessity: πάντα τε κατ' ἀνάγκην γίνεσθαι, τῆς δίνης αἰτίνας οὔσης τῆς γενέσεως πάντων, ἦν ἀνάγκην λέγει (frg. A 1, Diels-Kranz, Die Fragmente der Forsokratiher, 5th ed., II, Berlin 1935, p. 84). It is in a text of Plutarch: "The causes of the bodies that are actually born or dissolved have had no beginning, but successively from infinite time all things absolutely, past, present and future, are governed by necessity" (frg. A 39; trans. V. E. Alfieri, Gli atomisti, Bari 1936, p. 87). Since the atoms turn out to have rigorously geometrical structures and move only by purely mechanical impulses, Democritus excludes entirely from nature chance (τ' αὐτόμικτον) and from human life fortune (τύχη), as Aristotle polemicizes against him (Phys., II, 4, in its entirety). But then one would fall into the most rigorous necessity, which excludes all contingency and accidentality in the world. In fact, Aristotle completes, if this fact happens because another happens, and this because yet another happens, up to a first one that does not happen by chance but by necessity, then everything will happen by necessity, beginning from the fact that was caused as first and up to that which is considered as effect" (Met.,

XI, 8, 1065 a 8 ff.). Aristotle's criticism aimed at safeguarding physical contingency due to the defectibility of sublunary bodies, as well as the very freedom that is essential to the responsibility of human action. Certainly under the influence of Aristotelian criticism, Epicurus abandoned the rigid mechanist d. of Democritus by admitting that the atoms in their fall undergo a clinamen, and thus a chink remains for individual initiative (cf. Epicuri Ethica, fig. 7; Col., VIII, ed. C. Diano, Florence 1940, p. 41); whereas the Stoics founded their moralism on the most rigid concatenation of events, under the yoke of εὐαρχήνη.

It is certainly to Democritean mechanism that the conception Galileo forms of causality returns, according to the formula that is read in the Dialogo dei massimi sistemi: "If it is true that of an effect there is only one primary cause and that between the cause and the effect there is a firm and constant connection, it is a necessary thing that, whenever a firm and constant alteration is seen in the effect, a firm and constant alteration be in the cause" (Opere, ed. Naz., VII, Florence 1933, p. 471). In the new physics therefore of Galileo-Newton the d. of phenomena turns out to be decomposed into a series of elementary actions exercised by spatio-temporal continuity on the material point in motion, so that both the individual movements, and their whole, and their resultant, will always turn out to be strictly determined in every sense. This conception had its philosophical formulation in Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason, to which the principle of cause formulated by Kant as the "second analogy of experience" also remains faithful as regards determinist structure — which is precisely the way of conceiving the succession of experience in time according to necessity. This conception had its most explicit formula in Laplace: "Nous devons envisager l'état présent de l'univers comme l'effet de son état antérieur et comme la cause de celui qui va suivre." The correspondence between the antecedent and consequent states must be absolute: "Une intelligence qui, pour un instant donné, connaîtrait toutes les forces dont la nature est animée et la situation respective des études qui la composent, si d'ailleurs elle était assez vaste pour soumettre ces données à l'analyse, embrasserait dans la même formule les mouvements des plus grands corps de l'univers et ceux du plus léger atome; rien ne serait incertain pour elle, et l'avenir comme le passé serait présent à ses yeux" (Théorie analytique des probabilités, 3rd ed., Paris 1820, p. VII). This conception, which dominated the whole of the 19th century, had the support not only of materialism and positivism but also of rationalism and criticism (F. Enriquez). It was instead energetically combated by the "philosophy of contingency" advocated by Boutroux (preceded by Secrétan and Ravaisson), whose significance lies in modern French philosophy's opposition to every form of abstract intellectualism and in the affirmation of the original freedom of the spiritual life that emerges upon matter: such freedom crowns the dynamism of "spontaneity" that is found at the bottom of every being in different degrees and forms. The idea of "necessity," as also that of "force," is derived from our spirit, from moral and aesthetic life, and therefore a priori: "Elle serait le symbole le plus matériel de l'obligation morale et de l'attrait esthétique, c'est-à-dire de la nécessité consentie et sentie" (E. Boutroux, De la contingence des lois de la nature, 5th ed., Paris 1905, p. 169). The laws of nature are therefore not something absolute and self-subsistent, but represent a certain degree of penetration of matter by the spirit and not vice versa, as materialism would have it. In this struggle against d. Bergson was joined by cultivators of the philosophy of science such as G. Milhaud, J. Tannery and H. Poincaré, and by neo-idealism, which especially in Italy won its case against materialist positivism.

In psychology the principle of d. was much favoured in the "doctrine of association," both as an attempt at explaining representational dynamism (v. IDEE, ASSOCIAZIONE delle) and as a hypothesis on the genesis and the behaviour of habits or operative complexes (e.g., behaviorism). Both psychoanalysis, by deriving conscious life from the unconscious sphere, and the Gestaltpsychologie of Wertheimer's school, as long as it affirms the so-called "principle of isomorphism," that is, of the correspondence (and therefore dependence) of "representational" and operative "forms" on "physical forms," or on the structural physico-chemical conditions (the Quer-funktionen = "transverse connecting currents": Wertheimer) of the nervous system, remain prisoners of determinism. It is well known, on the other hand, how the most recent physical investigation of subatomic microstructures, contrary to Laplace's hypothesis, increasingly orients itself toward an indeterminist conception, inasmuch as with Planck's discovery of the quantum (h) physical energy has revealed itself to be discontinuous (Heisenberg's uncertainty principle). But there is lively dispute over the meaning of this indeterminism, namely whether it is intrinsic to the development of the physical process as such or whether it depends solely on our means of experimentation and on our limited capacity to know the factors present in a process. In any case, the rigid Democritean-Galilean mechanist concept of nature and its laws proves inadequate both in the natural sciences and in the life sciences, which instead accept the principle of "probability" and express the becoming of processes in the form of "statistical laws."

Thus one of the most serious difficulties that the science of all ages had sought to raise against the possibility of free will, which seemed a rupture of causal determinism, falls away. Psychological determinism, in this more precise sense, maintained that the "choice" of the will was determined either by the conditions of the object, insofar as it is the greater good among those present (objective ontological determinism: for example, in Leibniz), or by the conditions of the subject, insofar as the choice is conceived as the resultant of the constellation of conscious or unconscious forces and motives operating in the consciousness (psychological determinism). Every conception of freedom that makes human action depend on cosmic agents, for example the movement of the stars, must arrive at determinism — an error that the author of the Errores philosophorum (that is, Giles of Rome according to J. Koch) attributes to Al-Kindi: "Erravit enim, quia simpliciter et absque condicione asseruit futura pendere ex condicione supercaelestium corporum" (J. Koch, Giles of Rome: Errores Philosophorum, trans. by J. O. Riedl, Milwaukee 1944, p. 46, 14-15). Economic determinism is the conception that explains history and its crises of civilization exclusively in terms of economic conflicts, understood above all as "class struggle," so that the economic factor proves primary and determining with respect to all the others (moral, religious, scientific, artistic, etc.), as Marxism maintains, which by virtue of this hermeneutic principle has been called "scientific socialism." V. LIBERTÀ: MATERIALISMO.

Cornelio Fabro