Afterword

2. Pansocial Ontology and the Priority of Relation

The central and most original insight of MS, from which all the rest of the system flows, is that all of nature, organic and inorganic, at all scales from atoms to stars and galaxies, consists of societies. This thesis implies the slightly less original but no less challenging theory that every entity has some form of mind, self, or subjectivity (the theory of panpsychism or 'psychomorphism').⁶ Tarde uses the term 'universal sociology' to describe this insight; however, it is necessary to distinguish the basic idea that all things are societies from the theoretical toolbox required to investigate these non-human societies, which will be furnished by a generalization of sociological theory in the usual sense, and more particularly of the theory set out in Tarde's sociological works. I will use the term 'pansocial ontology'⁷ for the former, which will be the primary focus here, reserving universal sociology in the narrow sense for the latter. In principle, the two are independent: one might imagine a whole range of competing universal sociologies on the basis of the same basic insight, and indeed, it can be argued that on certain points Tarde's own sociological views are in tension with the metaphysical imperatives of the system. That said, there is a continuous exchange of ideas between the two domains, making the distinction to some extent artificial, but it is of value in isolating the philosophically most distinctive contributions of Tarde's thought.

MS puts forward two arguments for pansociality (and panpsychism), one analogical and one conceptual. The argument from analogy is that reality is structured like a society, and the entities which make it up behave like living things. As Tarde notes, this analogy was familiar enough at the time of writing, in the form of the theory of society as analogous to a living organism, which was most exhaustively set out in Spencer's 'The Social Organism' but also had a broad appeal for many social theorists, and which can arguably be traced back to Aristotle's Politics. However, Tarde is not directly concerned to build on such theories.⁸ Their main failing is to deploy the analogy in a limited and inverted form relative to MS: limited, in that the analogy is restricted to living things and not extended to inorganic nature, and inverted, in that it compares society to an organism rather than vice versa, in the service of an organicist theory of society rather than a pansocial theory of the organism. Thus, while Tarde avails himself of the work of these theories where they are useful, his own use of the analogy has a rather different goal. In particular, as I will argue, the point for Tarde is not to hypostasize the social or exalt its importance as against that of the individual, but to utilize the relationship between individual and society as a model for metaphysical theory more broadly.

The implications of the analogical argument for pansociality are pursued in detail throughout MS, and need be only briefly rehearsed here. Any physical structure perpetuates itself by similar means to a social order: through educational and institutional discipline, the manipulation of incentives, the promulgation of ideologies and the threat of violence. One might say that for Tarde, all of reality, to the extent that it endures, has the character of the Sartrean practico-inert, the cooled sediments of once fluid social interactions. This implies that the apparent stability of macroscopic material phenomena is, first, only provisional—albeit on timescales vastly greater than that of a human society or culture—and, second, the outcome of a co-ordination among a huge number of elements whose being is not exhausted by their belonging to a particular aggregate, and which collaborate more or less willingly. As Latour puts it, Tarde refuses the distinction between the law and what is subject to the law.⁹ That is, rather than physical laws explaining the co-ordination and predictability of natural movements, the former are rather explained by the latter—or more precisely, they are nothing more than the social organization of the elements such that their intentions and beliefs are directed, by coercion or persuasion, towards a common goal. These ostensibly law-governed forms of organization are akin to political régimes, which may last for a considerable length of time, but will sooner or later fall victim to some form of evolutionary or revolutionary transformation.

The panpsychist side of the analogy is set out in terms of the theory of belief and desire as 'psychological quantities'. Without going into the detail of the theory,¹⁰ it enables Tarde to elaborate the mind- or self-like qualities of non-human things without ascribing to them, for example, a capacity for conscious thought or cognition. At the most basic level, desire is manifest in inorganic nature in the form of force, and belief as the constancy of material substance. Material bodies enter into conflicts, exchanges or dialogues with one another, changing their positions and movements as a result. The more complex systems of forces which act to coordinate and organize matter into physical or organic structures resemble institutions or ideologies which have the power to intimately shape the selfhood of their members or adherents.

As noted, however, the argument from analogy is not intended to stand alone, although it forms the basis of many of the most interesting theoretical elaborations of MS (and is not always expounded with absolute seriousness). There is also a conceptual or perhaps epistemological argument.¹¹ Tarde argues that we know ourselves immediately and from within not only as thinking subjects, or pointlike centres of cognition. Rather, our introspective self-knowledge is already complex and structured, in two ways. First, we are both mind and body, embodied minds or animate bodies. Second, we are members of a society, participants in a culture, and speakers of a language. He concludes by arguing that this immediate knowledge of ourselves is the only reliable knowledge of being we have, and in fact that the only way we can understand what beings are is on the analogy of our own being, which is defined primarily by the relations of body to mind and of individual to society.

The implications of this argument can be seen at both logical and ontological levels. The logical implication is that relation is prior to being (this, again, is why 'ontology' is not a strictly accurate term for the Tardean theory). The idea of an entity which exists in itself is logically posterior to the complex structures of the ensouled body and the social person, although simpler to describe. In particular, the ideas of mind or material object, or person or society, do not pre-exist this relation but rather are constituted by and within it. The ontological implication is that the basic nature of reality is animate and socially connected. For certain purposes one may wish to abstract from this fundamental truth—for example, in positing purely material things with no psychic aspect—but this will be at the cost of ignoring their basic, relational, reality.

As against a large part of the mainstream philosophical tradition,¹² then, we do not first encounter ourselves, then a material reality outside ourselves, and then other persons or selves as the exterior of that exterior, but rather encounter first ourselves as social and embodied beings, and then material reality as an abstraction from this social embodiment. It is at this point that the conceptual argument for pansociality rejoins the argument from analogy. Tarde sees the supposed characteristics of the physical world—the forces of gravity or magnetism, or the solidity of matter itself—as humans' introspective self-perceptions, externalized and congealed to the point where their true origin is obscured. As much as an animistic re-enchantment of the cosmos, this might be seen as an extension of the Xenophanean or Feuerbachian critique of religion to the domain of physics. Where generations of social scientists have followed Vico in holding that society is more intimately and hence more adequately known than the natural world, if less precisely, Tarde radicalizes this argument to the point where only society is known, and the natural world can be known only insofar as it is itself composed of societies.

Tarde elucidates the specificity of his position here (pp. 16ff.) by comparison with the panpsychist but non-pansocial monistic ontologies popular in his own time, which generally rest on some form of dual-aspect strategy: that is, they hold that there is a single (type of) substance, which has thought and materiality or extension as attributes, aspects, or descriptions, and thus that all material things are capable of thought.¹³ The problem with such theories is that the concept of thought has no ontologically significant meaning in its own right, but derives its content purely from an introspective sense of selfhood: hence it tends to become a pure interiority without empirical content, merely doubling what is already known with an illusion of depth. Indeed, for some of its 19th-century proponents this lack of content seems to have been a major point in its favour, in that it facilitates the reconciliation of Christian or quasi-Christian doctrines of an immaterial and immortal soul with an avowedly materialistic account of the nature of reality.

By contrast, the social-individual and mind-body relations are both known immediately and introspectively and have complex ontological structures of their own. Hence, our introspective knowledge of our own being is not separate from our understanding of the rest of reality, but of itself provides the logical blocks from which the latter is built. As MS sets out to explain, the nature and coherence of the universe as a whole can be constructed from this basic relation. These two monolithic dualisms, mind against matter and structure against agency, whose irresolution is the original sin of ontology and social theory respectively, are not resolved by the pansocial theory so much as generalized, and the tension they generate harnessed to the motor of cosmic evolution.

Notes

6. Neither MS nor this afterword are terminologically exact on the vocabulary of minds and selves; MS uses ‘mind’, ‘spirit’ and ‘psyche’ and their derivatives more or less interchangeably. However, the decision not to adopt Tarde’s own term ‘psychomorphism’ and its companion ‘sociomorphism’ is deliberate, since their tentativeness is belied by the theory itself.↩
7. The term ‘pansocial’ is coined (avoiding the misleading connotations of ‘pansocialist’) on the model of ‘panpsychist’ and ‘pantheist’. Not only the model: as noted, Tarde’s theory is also a panpsychism, and in his own terms a ‘myriatheism’ (p. 25), which might be less elegantly paraphrased as polypantheism.↩
8. Elsewhere he criticizes them strongly, although for rather different reasons than those which concern us here (see Social Laws (Les Lois sociales), ch. I).↩
9. B. Latour, ‘Gabriel Tarde and the end of the social’.↩
10. Further detail can be found in Tarde’s essay ‘Belief and Desire (‘La Croyance et le désir’, in Essais et mélanges sociologiques). On my reading, the value of this theory of ‘psychological quantities’ is heuristic rather than foundational; I would also argue that, considered as an ontological postulate rather than a methodological guideline, it is one of the weaker points of the argument. However, other readings place much greater emphasis on this aspect, including those as different from each other as Lazzarato’s and Latour’s (M. Lazzarato, ‘Gabriel Tarde: un vitalisme politique’, in G. Tarde, Monadologie et Sociologie, ed. cited; B. Latour, ‘Tarde’s idea of quantification’, in Candea, The Social, cited above).↩
11. In a fuller exposition, this argument might be reconstructed in a number of forms, for example, as a transcendental argument or one from conceptual parsimony. Hartshorne, following Whitehead (and independently of Tarde), nicely summarizes the general idea: ‘If feeling is the most general category of the immediately given, then we can form no more general category by which to describe existence in general than this very character’ (C. Hartshorne, Whitehead’s Philosophy, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1972, p.28).↩
12. Roughly, the part which goes from Descartes to Husserl; see the latter’s sixth Cartesian Meditation.↩
13. Such panpsychist monisms are by no means moribund, as demonstrated by the work of Galen Strawson. These ontologies are sometimes described as Spinozist; this seems wrong to me, for the reasons set out in the remainder of the paragraph.↩