Institute of Governance > Online Articles & Papers, by Author > Online Articles & Papers, by Date Published Online > 'Philistinism and Cultural Renewal': Essays on Education by Tony McManus / Paths of Perception - some itineraries in religion, science, philosophy
and poetics in Scottish-European history

'Philistinism and Cultural Renewal':
Essays on Education
by Tony McManus

Paths Of Perception -
some itineraries in religion, science, philosophy and poetics in Scottish-European history (1997)

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A beloved land is yon land in the east,
Alba with its marvels.

('Deirdre's farewell to Scotland')

The Aulder Alliance

The 'Auld Alliance' always was, for Scots at least, much more than a relationship with France. It meant (and perhaps it still can mean) a direct, continental relationship with Europe (France being the geographical bridging point) as opposed to, or as well as, an insular relationship with England. As a military alliance it forced England to fight on two fronts in the Middle Ages, thus ensuring French security. The purpose of England's desire for unity with Scotland, therefore, was to separate Scotland from Europe. Although this strategy had some success, the cultural-intellectual connection with Europe has proven stronger, ultimately, than the political-military aspect the connection adopted from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries.

The Auld Alliance is, then, really but one manifestation of an older relationship, dating back to Celtic times, with other European peoples and ideas, a relationship as old as Europe itself, a relationship better understood not in political-historical terms of wars and treaties, the construction and destruction of empires, but in the movements of people and ideas across the landscapes of the material and cultural worlds.

The Scottish contribution to this cultural convergence has flowed in two related currents of enquiry carrying ideas of perception on the one hand, and, on the other, a commitment to reason and freedom of thought, will and expression. We will trace these ideas through some of the streams of influence which they have followed in this period.

Celtic Flow

Already in the symbols carved into stone by the Picts we can see evidence of knowledge and speculation of a cosmological nature[1]. The Druids, who, it is assumed, derived much of their knowledge and practice from the Pictish culture which was subsumed into the Celtic, were an educating caste whose medium was poetry and it appears they attracted students from beyond their own shores. The images and ideas of the Druids were in the form of triads, ternary structures which passed into the peculiar Christianity of the Celts and from them into mainstream Christian thought and expression (the magi, the trinity, the tripartite cosmological structure ...). However, if Celtic Christianity was part of the 'universal' Church with its seat in Rome, it was a fractious partner in whom our key currents of thought concerning perception and freedom begin to find articulate expression and bring their bearers up against the obstacles of establishment Christianity.

With Paul as its inspiration and Rome its centre, papal Christianity was a religion of the town from whose culture it derived its ideology and practices and its essentially political nature. It was authoritarian in its doctrine and dogma, tightly structured in hierarchical form and rigid in its thinking. It taught through images of suffering in life and glorified images of the after-life. Its foundation stone was the doctrine of Original Sin and its aims were social and intellectual control. It laid the cultural ground for the most rigid, hierarchical, authoritarian economy of feudalism and the development of the European sun-kings, the tyrants of the divine right. It closed minds into narrow frameworks of obedience and shut out the pathways of enquiry; it took the feet from intellectual exegesis and sat it in the chair of equivocation; it generated hypocrisy and small-mindedness; it turned the natural world into a lifeless pageant of symbols, more eagerly expressed the more they could be made to symbolise the various manifestations of 'evil' (the serpent, the beast, the dark forest of the 'savage', night ...); its saints were canonised in blood and gore.

Celtic Christianity, evolving in a terrain of Pictish and Fenian confluences, was of a quite different nature. 'Everywhere else,' writes Ernest Renan, 'Christianity encountered an initial layer of Greek or Roman civilisation. Here (in the Celtic regions) it found a new ground, a temperament analogous to its own and naturally ready to receive it.'[2] For Renan, the key word here is 'naturally'. He speaks of:

the quite particular vivacity with which the Celts informed their feeling for nature. Their mythology is simply a transparent naturalism, not that anthropomorphic naturalism of Greece or India where universal forms, erected into living beings and invested with consciousness, tend more and more to detach themselves from physical phenomena and become moral beings, but a sort of realistic naturalism, love of nature for its own sake. [3]

The quality of perception is evident in this, the desire to see and feel things as they are, not as symbols of the elements in some ideal system. Its concomitant quality of free will and expression can be nicely indicated in this context of the Auld Alliance in reference to Jeanne d'Arc (whose exploits were foreseen by the Celtic seer Lailoken, or Merlin, and who went into battle to a Scottish march). At her trial, prosecuted in the city by the princes and bishops of Roman christendom, she was challenged about her 'voices'. 'Take me to a wood and I will hear them,' she replied. For this response Renan judges her 'more Celtic then Christian'.[4] Her enemies laughed in a manifestation of that attempt to marginalise such sentiments by mockery which has been a constant feature of the relationship between Celtic and establishment thinking into post-christian times also.

In total contrast to Rome's immobility, Celtic Christianity is in movement across the landscape, and European texts constantly refer to the wandering monks of Ireland and Scotland who, for centuries, flow in waves across the continent, preaching, teaching, philosophising, establishing monastic cells, moving on. Renan evokes them:

in the sixth, seventh and eighth centuries these legions of Irish saints inundating the continent ... up to the twelfth century the Scots served as masters of grammar and literature to the whole of the West.

He continues:

studious philologians and rugged philosophers, the hibernian monks were above all tireless copyists, and it is in part thanks to them that the work of the pen became a saintly work. [5]

This is a theme we shall see evolving in philosophical, scientific and poetical contexts. The key figure in Celtic Christianity is Pelagius, his key tenets the rejection of Original Sin and the consequent assertion that individual redemption can be achieved by free will, through the intellect and free choice of the individual, as opposed to the beneficence of Divine Grace. Pelagian thinking, placing reason before faith, is, therefore, utterly out of step with mainstream Augustinian Christianity. This is the case too with their very non-urban, eremitic and monastic lifestyles. As hermits they live in the most inhospitable places - rocks in the seas and lochs of Scotland and Ireland which bear their names still. The contemplative life in such land and seascapes is one which sees God in the world. This presence in nature, here and now, is opposed to the Judgement Day's monstrous avenger. In their nomadic periods these monks explore the world which is redolent with God for them, and teach their knowledge to others. When they settle into groups they adopt a monastic rather than diocesan style in which, although the Abbot is powerful, the rest of the community, often mixed, is collective and egalitarian in its social organisation and economic effort - 'proto-socialist' in John Morris's critical description. [6]

In this Celtic church, the saint was a learned person, a poet, not a martyr. Their main work is intellectual-contemplative and expressive and here, again, their free-thinking is evident because the books they compile and copy, as well as the official texts of the church, are Greek and Latin texts, and Celtic and other 'pagan' literatures. From this derives a breadth of, and respect for, learning, and a proficiency in languages. In expressing their knowledge they are naturalist poets who delight in the colourful details of the natural world, expressing an eternal mood in the world which has nothing to do with the Eternity of establishment Christianity:

The little bird
Has blown his whistle
From the point of his yellow beak:
He sends a song Over Loch Lo'g
A blackbird on a branch in the well-wooded plain. [7]

And they are direct and self-confident in their proselytising to the point of naivety, assuming that the truth will prevail, innocent of the duplicity of the political mind which confronted them and finally defeated them. 'There was no fear,' as Bernard Lehane puts it, 'that God might be a subtle front for Caesar.' [8]

The history of early Christianity, hence, to a large extent, the early history of Europe until the end of the first millennium, is the history of the struggle between the anarcho-intellectual Celts and the authoritarian-dogmatic establishment, between Free Will and Divine Grace, between the natural world and Original Sin whose perspective only allows for a nature which is a source of symbols. The weapons used against the Celts were the political trickery of double-talk which reduces sophisticated philosophical contemplation to mere equivocation, and abuse. For Jerome, Pelagius was 'that great mountain dog through which the devil barks.'[9] The Synod Of Whitby (663 AD), whose purpose was to put an end to Celtic divergences from the norm, concluded:

The only people stupid enough to put themselves out of step with the entire world are these Scots and their allies, the Picts and Britons, who inhabit some forlorn islands at the far-flung ends of ocean.

Similarly, St. Paul, in his epistle, addressed the continental Celts as 'You stupid Galatians!'. [10]

Despite all this, Celtic themes, structures, ideas and expression permeate the European Christian tradition in a cultural parallel to their physical migrations. As Kenneth White puts it, 'there is a pelagian line running through the whole of Western culture.' [11] For Robert Schumann, Columbanus, who, in the sixth century, traversed and retraversed Europe in a continuous religious-ethical-political dialogue, is 'the patron saint of those who seek to construct a united Europe.'[12] In Columbanus' world-view, freedom and reason are sacrosanct: 'Liberty,' he told the Pope, 'was the tradition of my fathers and, among us, no person avails, but rather reason.' [13] The poem on the life of St. Brandan, in the ancient tradition of the Celtic voyage-poems or Imramma, gave Europe the original model for the other-world vision. In Renan's words, it is 'one of the most astonishing creations of the human mind and, perhaps, the most complete expression of the Celtic Ideal'. He goes on to comment on the 'benevolent and gentle regard it casts upon the world':

It is a world seen through a crystal conscience which has no stain; one might say another human nature, such as Pelagius envisaged, which had never sinned. [14]

This poem, along with 'The Purgatory of Saint Patrick', furnished Dante with the models and images which he was to use to inform and shape his Divine Comedy in whose ternary verse form we can also hear a Celtic echo.

The Carolingian Renaissance in ninth century Europe appears to have been driven by the philosopher-monks of the Celtic regions who, according to Cappuynus[15], provided a quarter of its scholars. The Bishop of Auxerre speaks of them coming in 'crowds': 'All the most learned of them doom themselves to voluntary exile to attend the bidding of "Solomon the Wise"'. [16]

This Solomon was Charles le Chauve, King of France, and his great contribution to this Renaissance was to offer John the Scot[17], known as Erigena, the protection from Rome his pelagian ideas necessitated in return for the completion of a task for which the King could find no other European scholar fit - the translation of Greek and Latin texts, in particular that of the Pseudo-Dionysius. Erigena's great work, Periphyseon (De Divisione Naturae), seeks to establish the relationship between God and nature and is imbued with ideas of a clear Celtic origin - a 'Zen of the Druids' in P. Beresford Ellis' words[18] - and conclusions quite contrary to the anthropomorphic perspective of the established Church. For Erigena, it is impossible to speak of God in human language; hence it is not possible to speak even of the existence of God. He refers to God as 'the simple Essence underlying everything ... the very shape and beauty of forms'[19], in a language which is more at home in the philosophies of the orient, of Tao and Zen, than it is in the city of Christendom where his work was, of course, included in the Index of banned books.

All this intellectual influence disguises a concurrent wearing down of the Celtic tradition. The Vikings burned down the source cells which fed the European migrations, the political cynicism of the establishment proved a match, inevitably, for the political naivety of the Celtic philosophers, and the advent of Malcolm Canmore and Margaret to the throne of Scotland led to the romanisation of the church and the beginnings of anglicisation as Salisbury grew in ecclesiastical authority.

However, as we have already indicated, Celtic ideas and imagery continued to inform the ideas of the Christian church as a whole and the work of its poets and philosophers throughout the Middle Ages. In the thirteenth century John Duns Scotus's affirmation of the reality of the things of the earth, their individuality (haecceitas or thisness), his central tenet that it is possible to reach 'the presence of God' through knowledge of the material world, are clearly in tune with the Celtic strain. Inevitably, just as Pelagius's mobile mind met the immoveable Augustine, Duns Scotus's beached before the walls of Aquinas protecting the city of Faith against the tides of reason. [20]

However, the problem raised by Erigena remains a central problem, brought to light by the naturalism of the Celtic tradition: what is the relationship between our perception and the language we use to express it? It remains the core matter of philosophy and poetry in these regions to the present day from the opposition of John Duns Scotus to Aquinas's theology, through the ideas of the Latin poet George Buchanan, through the concerns of the intellectual and educational tradition known as the Democratic Intellect, to the ideas of Maxwell, Thompson and Geddes, and the poetics of Macdiarmid and White.

Before turning to these movements let us first reiterate the features of the Celtic ground from which they begin and which we have been surveying so far. These are: a commitment to reason (accompanied by an exuberance of imagination); a commitment to freedom of will and expression (with their corollary an openness which has no respect for authority as such); a naturalism which modifies revealed religion with an insistence on the reality of the world of the senses; a concern with the nature of perception which is sourced in that desire to see reality in the world; and, arising from all this, a concern with the nature of expression, with how we express our perceptions and the relationship between perception and language.

Reforming Ebb

George Buchanan (1506-1582) was the last of the great Scottish individual intellectuals to exercise great influence in France until some time after the Reformation. Born 'in the county of Lennox', evidence suggests that Buchanan's native languages were Gaelic and Scots.[21] In 1326, Bishop Murray had established a Collège des Ecossais in Paris with a distinctive 'Scottish Nation', and such was the political and cultural intimacy of the early 16th Century that, for Stephen Wood, France and Scotland were 'almost one nation'.[22] A formidable number of Scots studied, and, indeed, taught there, among them Boyce and Mair, and, eventually, Buchanan whose distinctive contribution to cultural life can be seen in the context of our earlier Celtic influences. Like his predecessors, he was renowned as a teacher, including of grammar, in Paris and Bordeaux where the European significance of his role as tutor to the great French essayist, Montaigne, is emphasised by Kenneth White in his study of the Scottish Latinist. White also points out Buchanan's poetic aim: 'to get literature out of the "bog" (Buchanan's expression) of Miracles and Moralities.'[23] Like John Scot Erigena he worked under the protection of the French King, Francis I, from the vengeance of the established church whose Franciscan Friars and the Scottish Cardinal Beaton had borne the acerbic brunt of his satirical pen. As a poet in Latin he is constantly judged as without his equal - 'a prince among poets'[24] - by his European contemporaries. Indeed, even the Pope Urban VIII, though judging him a heretic, was compelled to compliment the Scottish master's Latin version of the Psalms, and felt, as Irving tells it, ''Twas pity it was written by so great a heretic, for otherwise it should have been sung in all churches under his authority'. [25]

Neither, like his intellectual ancestors, had Buchanan time for authority per se. An anecdote tells of how the Countess of Mar remonstrated with him after he had 'chastised' his pupil, the future King James VI, whereupon Buchanan replied, 'Madam, I have whipt his arse, you may kiss it if you please.'[26] For Buchanan, 'all power derives from the people'[27] and, in pursuing that argument, he puts limits on the monarchy and promotes the rights of the people to resist poor kings in such a way as to diminish the concept of primogeniture - a concept alien to the Celts for whom, in theory at least, the King was the elect of the people, not just the son of the last one.

When Buchanan returned to Scotland to tutor the young Prince James, his presence there encouraged the Protestants of France to invest their hopes in the future King of Scots. Henri de Navarre, who was later to return to the Catholic fold when he became Henri IV of France, wrote to Buchanan encouraging him to train the youngster well in the precepts of Protestantism and to help him in cementing future alliances by paving the way for the marriage of James with his daughter, Margueritte de Navarre. Events circumvented these plans which would have seen a mighty reflowering of the Auld Alliance. However, Buchanan's political writings, especially the De Juri Regni apud Scotos, in Irving's words, 'established political science on its genuine basis',[28] the basis of freedom, and he states, 'it has taught modern philosophers to discuss the principles of political science with new freedom and energy'. [29]

His most ambitious work, however, comes in the line of Erigena's Periphyseon - the cosmological poem De Spherae in five (uncompleted) books in which Buchanan sought to describe the workings of the universe in the eternal language of Latin which would 'secure an unfailing succession of educated readers.'[30] That he was wrong in this and in the Ptolemaic system he expounds in his poem is of less interest here than the great expansive ambition the poem embodies, accompanied by a familiar attention to descriptive detail of the natural world. Writing of Taprobane (Ceylon) and the newly-discovered lands of Brazil, he says:

There the trees, elsewhere barren, of their own accord bear golden fruits, earth smiles in ever-richer hues, ambrosial odours exhale from grateful flowers, and the soothing breeze is quick with the songs of birds. [31]

However, Buchanan's accolades reflect a world which had, with the Renaissance, turned away from the naturalist, cosmological thinking evident in the earlier Middle Ages, towards the more inward-looking modes of Humanism. It was this Humanist perspective perhaps which led to the Reformation finally scuppering the Celtic project. One might have thought that the freedom of will and expression, the commitment to reason above superstition, and the placing of people before monarch, which were characteristics of the Reformers, might have led to a culture more rather than less conducive to free thought and expression. Perhaps the Reformation was too entangled in political interests, too much a thing of the towns to be able to retrieve the fresh, adventurous spirit of the early Celtic church. Its effect was to put in place a new religious establishment as static and authoritarian as its predecessor, equally thirled to the notion of Faith. In disconnecting itself from Catholicism and aligning the people against Queen Mary it thereby disconnected Scotland from France and Europe, turning her into the easily exploitable satellite of England.

Harbour of the Democratic Intellect

In Buchanan we see the beginnings of the paradox cited by George Davie at the opening of The Democratic Intellect. Though the Reformation brought Scotland closer and closer into the English sphere of influence and away from Europe, at the same time the distinct 'social ethics'[32], which the Scots were to develop consciously as a distinguishing factor between themselves and the English, renewed and revitalised the French and European intellectual convergences which had been the cultural characteristic of Scotland throughout the Middle Ages. For Davie, democratic intellectualism is the presbyterian contribution[33] which allowed the more positive, freer aspects of the Reformers' thinking to penetrate Scottish secular life and from there to influence French and European thinking in a way which was disallowed the religious life of Scotland - contributing thereby, no doubt, to the famed split personality of the Scots of modernity. Perhaps in the Democratic Intellect it is possible to see, however, that the Scots Presbyterians were, to some extent, reshaping the ideas of the early Celtic teachers for their own time. Perhaps the sources of the philosophical outlook go back further than the philosophy of Common Sense outlined by Thomas Reid in the eighteenth century.

Reid's philosophy, developed to counter the sceptical and intellectually adventurous philosophy of David Hume, can be seen in two ways both of which appealed to the French for very different reasons. On the one hand, what Davie calls the 'avoidance of political or ideological commitment'[34] of Scottish Common Sense Philosophy was the very point of appeal to the French for, as Kenneth White has pointed out,[35] the French state, attempting to settle down into post-revolutionary stability, required a philosophy both intellectually satisfying and politically neutral. For Théodore Jouffroy, 'la philosophie écossaise' provided 'a check on extremism'. [36]

Common Sense philosophy as expounded by Reid offered succour to the religious and political conservatives because its idea that 'all knowledge got by reasoning must be built upon first_principles', these last being common concepts held 'intuitively' by everyone but only referable to 'common sense', not provable by any means, is obviously open to exploitation by those who wish to refer these 'first principles' to faith in God (Reid's anti-sceptical purpose) or to the needs of the State. As such, Common Sense Philosophy could act as a block to that far-reaching adventurous contemplation and expression of the world we saw as characteristic of the early Scots wanderers in Europe and which, especially in Hume, had excited the great intellectuals of pre-revolutionary France such as Voltaire who declared Scotland to be the main source of ideas.

In this way, Common Sense Philosophy is part of the Rationalist perspective established in the seventeenth century and reflected in the mechanics of Newton. It is reason but without the exuberance of imagination we noted earlier. Science replaced philosophical speculation as the preserve of intellectuals as God was neatly put into the background (the necessary 'first principle', the cosmic 'clockmaker'), leaving scientists free to derive the mechanistic laws which govern the world of nature (the 'clock'). Again, this Rationalism, like the Renaissance Humanism it joins, is, for all its glorious discoveries, a more rigid and narrow point of view on the world than the expansive world-view of our earlier thinkers.

However, as a distinctively Scottish contribution to this Rationalist-Humanist age, does Common Sense philosophy disguise an attempt (somewhat groping in the dark, perhaps) to reach that 'simple essence underlying everything' of Erigena's Periphyseon? In the tradition of the Democratic Intellect, all knowledge and experience is grounded in philosophy (both in the etymological sense of the love of knowledge and in the particular sense of a view on the world) and is also aiming towards further philosophical development. Functionalism is far from neglected in this (a brief reference to the range of developments emanating from Scottish engineering, medicine, science etc. in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will suffice to demonstrate that); on the contrary, it is felt that the needs of the community will be best served by an educational culture whose source and aim is philosophical.

The perspective is, then, generalist rather than specialist, and, in education, breadth is espoused and specialisation delayed for as long as possible. The current in fact flows against the pure, specialist scientism which Newtonian physics developed. In the particulars of a key subject area such as mathematics, the bent is towards geometry rather than algebra. In this mathematical context, Hamilton's comment seems to illuminate the field:

The process in the symbolic method (i.e. the algebraic) is like running a railroad through a tunnelled mountain; that in the ostensive (i.e. the geometrical) is like crossing the mountain on foot. The former carries us, by a short and easy transit, to our destined point, but in miasma, darkness and torpidity, whereas the latter allows us to reach it only after time and trouble, but feasting us at each turn with glances of the earth and of the heavens, while we inhale health in the pleasant breeze, and gather new strength at every effort we put forth. [37]

It is this perspective on things which put Scottish thinking back on its continental road and which made 'la philosophie écossaise' attractive, from a more genuinely intellectual perspective, to the French among whom, earlier, Diderot had been a vociferous critic of Newtonianism. Jouffroy puts a similar point to Hamilton's in a rather more abstract way as he sees Common Sense Philosophy ('the primitive vision', he calls it) as centred on the difference between la vue - 'seeing' (the whole) - and le regard - 'looking at' (the parts):

'looking at' follows on from 'seeing', reflection from feeling, analysis from involuntary synthesis. The peculiar field of the primitive vision is expansive and obscure; analysis distinguishes but is narrow. Also philosophy, when it perceives its object clearly, only perceives the parts; common sense, which has seen nothing clearly, has seen the whole. [38]

This is not very satisfactory. However, it merely reflects what is for Davie the history of the Democratic Intellect: the history of the struggle for the metaphysical perspective in a world increasingly controlled by science and its objective needs. In Scotland, this was also a political struggle against English cultural hegemony in much the same way as the Celtic church was in conflict with the Roman, but the clear import of Davie's work is that this was not a 'provincial' conflict but a matter of European significance as, in holding on to its own cultural tradition, Scotland was retaining her ancient links, through France, with European culture. What has been characterised as dour, crusty conservatism, might be better viewed as a grim determination to harbour their perspective on reality from the increasingly functional context of the capitalist project in the nineteenth century.

Davie's view is that the boat was sunk but, as we saw with the Celtic Christian ideas, the inevitable defeat is, in reality, a movement underground which allows for later re-emergences. If the Scottish mathematicians held on to the pre-eminence of abstractionist geometry, which sees a line as the movement of a point, against atomistic algebra, which sees a line as a series of extensionless points, then perhaps they were proven at least fifty per cent correct to have done so when, a century later, quantum physics came to its revolutionary conclusion that it is impossible to tell whether the basic matter of existence be particle or wave, that is, substance or movement.

In its insistence on speculation and on the relation of parts to the whole, and in its (admittedly vague) sense of an underlying unity to the forms of existence, we suggest then, that the Democratic Intellect is the early modern manifestation, or post-Reformation recrudescence, of the ancient cultural relationship between Scotland and France, and thence Europe.

Geotechnic Currents

The main drift of influence in the period covered by Davie's The Democratic Intellect is from Scotland to France. The French Encyclopoedists' inspiration came from Edinburgh; Charles de Rémusat in the Revue des Deux Mondes (1856) eulogises the Scottish contribution to France of 'reason, imagination, the love of truth, poetry and nature'[39]; and Victor Cousin, who as Education Minister in the 1830's made Thomas Reid required reading for French students,[40] lists 150 years of Scottish philosophical influence in France from Hutcheson, Smith and Hume of the Enlightenment, through the metaphysics of Reid and Stewart, to Hamilton and Flint in the late nineteenth century. [41]

With Patrick Geddes, Scottish intellectual life is re-energised from the opposite direction. Botanist and biologist by formal and informal education, Geddes was uncomfortable with the established interpretation of Darwin's theory of evolution as promulgated by Huxley with whom he worked in London, the interpretation summed up in the phrase 'survival of the fittest' which appears to give priority to competition and aggression in the evolution of forms. In his reading of Herbert Spencer's Principles of Biology, Geddes found confirmation of his own intuition that co-operation was at least as important a part of the evolutionary process as competition. Geddes went to work in Brittany and from there Paris, in the passing making an important discovery not without relevance to our context here, that the basic substance of plant life - chlorophyll - exists in some forms of animal life. In France, Geddes found his intellectual home and the two major influences on his thinking: Frédéric Le Play (whose sociological formula Lieu - Famille - Travail became Geddes' touchstone 'thinking machine' - Place - Work - Folk ) and Auguste Comte who saw the social sciences as the culminating point of the work of the conventional sciences in a whole world-vie[42] . In other words, Geddes found in France the stirrings of a movement back towards a generalist and philosophical spirit in European thinking. And he made it his aim to further this by uniting the two approaches to the social sciences - the particular approach of Le Play and the general approach of Comte. From these heights he turned a radical, critical eye back on the culture from which he had sprung, castigating the conventional scientist as 'necrologist' rather than 'biologist', and declaring that 'the age of mechanical dualism is ending.' [43]

He calls for a new way of looking at and living on the earth in a way which brings us back to the qualities of perception, to that combination of reason and exuberance of imagination, and insistence on the reality of the things of the world which we established as ancient concerns whose glimmer had, in the meantime, somewhat dimmed:

Not even with the marvel of the developing egg, nor with the mystery of seed-bearing in the flower, does the naturalist begin; but with the opening bud, with wandering deep into forest and high upon hill; in seeing, in feeling, with hunter and with savage, with husbandman and gypsy, with poet and with child, the verdant surge of Spring foaming from every branchlet, bursting from every sod, breaking here on naked rock-face, there on rugged tree-bole till even these are green with its clinging spray. [44]

In this passage, which echoes in content and drift the passages quoted above from Hamilton and Jouffroy but takes them further and with a more sensual, even erotic, conception and expression, Geddes looks forward to the 'geotechnical' world evolving from the 'neotechnics' and 'paleotechnics' of the previous two hundred years. And, interestingly, his multi-disciplinary approach to human existence on the earth leads him to an aesthetic conclusion which we will see developed by another Scot who was to look initially to France to nurture his ideas, Kenneth White. In Geddes's vision, the perceiver, and the expression perception stimulates, are back on board:

When we add up the aesthetic subfunctions of all 'necessary' ultimate products, and add to this the vast quantity of purely aesthetic products, we see how small the fundamental element of production has become in relation to the superior, and reach the paradoxical generalisation that production - though fundamentally for maintenance - is mainly for 'art'. [45]

Which is to give a radical, enlargening inflection to the philosophical source and aim of the Democratic Intellect.

D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson who, like Geddes, taught at the University of Dundee, also had a project of extensive ambition, in the field of biology, which he explored in On Growth and Form. He engages with one of the central problems we have been dealing with here - perception of the world and the language required to express it. Fundamental to Thompson's approach, and strongly in line with the Scottish tradition, is, while insisting on the specialised knowledge and methods of his field ('there are fields where each, for a while at least, must work alone' [46] ), to recognise the necessity in human knowledge for a co-habitation of science and philosophy:

Physical science and philosophy stand side by side, and one upholds the other. Without something of the strength of physics philosophy would be weak; and without something of philosophy's wealth, physical science would be poor. [47]

In this, Thompson is moving science away from the split with other areas of thought, particularly philosophy, occasioned by Newtonian dynamics, the split which Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers term 'the disastrous dialogue' [48] , and which we have suggested was partly what the struggle for the Democratic Intellect as described by Davie, was about. Similarly, earlier, in France, Diderot, whose encyclopoedist's mind could not find Newton's clockwork universe anything other than ridiculous, had pointed to growth and development in forms (in anticipation of Thompson, Maxwell and Geddes) as the required areas of study - that is, biology and chemistry as opposed to physics.

However Thompson is equally opposed to philosophical presuppositions interfering with the work of the enquiring mind. He points to religious demands for a 'final cause' as the main source of interference since Bacon's day and, like Geddes, he is wary of the potential of Darwin's ideas to become a debilitating Darwinism:

So long and so far as 'fortuitous variations' and the 'survival of the fittest' remain engrained as fundamental and satisfying hypotheses in the philosophy of biology, so long will ...(they) tend to stay 'severe and diligent enquiry'. [49]

He affirms the need for intellectual freedom to explore his intellectual territory, without pressure to conform to preconceived positions, in the hope that something new will emerge.

Thompson's aim is, by studying the various manifestations of 'growth and form' in the world - 'the waves of the sea, the little ripples on the shore, the sweeping curve of the sandy bay between headlands, the outline of the hills, the shape of the clouds ... cell and tissue, shell and bone, leaf and flower...'[50] - to find what formal unities of a universal kind may lie beneath their differing forms. He is aware that few have attempted this:

The search for differences or essential contrasts between the phenomena of organic and inorganic, of animate and inanimate things, has occupied many men's minds, while the search for community of principles, or essential similitudes, has been followed by few; and the contrasts are apt to loom too large, great as they may be. [51]

He looks forward to a language which could describe the theory of morphology he proposes - a challenge taken up eventually by Dr. René Thom in France.

On Growth and Form, springing as it does from the generalist tradition of Scotland, written in an erudite style pointing to philosophical as well as scientific work elsewhere, notably from (and in) the French, is clearly in the Scottish-European line of 'natural philosophy'. His work is redolent with the features we have been identifying so far - he approaches the elements of the real world with delighted fascination and speculates on the unity to be found in all this diversity, a unity intrinsic and immanent. [52]

René Thom's Stabilité Structurelle et Morphogenèse 'attempts a degree of mathematical corroboration'[53] of D'Arcy Thompson's 'classic' and he inscribes his work, as did Thompson, in 'the 2500 year-old ideas of the first pre-socratic philosophers, Anixamander and Heraclitus':

... they had the following fundamentally valid intuition: the dynamical situations governing the evolution of natural phenomena are basically the same as those governing the evolution of man and societies. (Thom's italics) [54]

This is an idea revived also, as we have seen, by Geddes under the influence of Le Play and Comte.

Thom's aim, then, is to find a mathematical language in which to describe the growth and form of the elements of the material universe. He speaks of 'catastrophe points', the moments when the meeting of forces leads to the development of form, and attempts to define the number and nature of such 'morphological archetypes'. Like Thompson, he is looking for the underlying rhythmic unity in the diversity of the phenomenal world. The mathematics is, to the uninitiated, pretty impenetrable if intriguing, but when he comes out of that language to generalise, we can recognise another echo of our theme: the same fascinated attempt to perceive and express reality as a whole as well as in its particulars:

... a plant, for example, is nothing but an upheaval of earth towards the light, and the ramified structure of its stem and root is the same as that found when a stream of water erodes a cliff and produces a mound of debris. [55]

Here, Thom's language echoes that of Heidegger's re-reading of basic Western philosophical/scientific concepts such as physis and logos, in the light of their original use by the pre-socratic philosophers. Physis, for Heidegger, is emergence into the light, logos is the gathering or collectedness of things. In this schema, phenomena emerge, stand and endure in the light, and are apprehended by the human observer. [56]

As well as paying tribute to Thompson, Thom also acknowledges the influence of the theories of 'chreods' and the 'epigenetic landscape' of C. H. Waddington who was Professor of Animal Genetics at the University of Edinburgh and co-founder of the Centre for Human Ecology there. Waddington places Thom's work as 'one of the most original contributions to the methodology of thought in the last several decades, perhaps since the first stirrings of quantum and relativity theories'.[57] He is aware of concerns, which Thom himself is sensitive to, that his approach may occasion especially among mathematicians for whom his practice of moving to and from mathematical and philosophical speculation 'could be treated as daydreams'. However, using the word 'dream' in the sense of 'speculate' or 'contemplate', Thom replies in the language of his own morphological theory:

... is not day-dream the virtual catastrophe in which knowledge is initiated? At a time when so many scholars in the world are calculating, is it not desirable that some, who can, dream? [58]

There, we can hear the beginnings of a move towards a poetics, similar to the move we saw Geddes begining to make, the desire for a language in which to compose the perception of the world.

James Clerk Maxwell [59] made a similar stand for speculation, saying, 'I find I get fonder of metaphysics and less of calculation'.[60] In this, Davie sees Maxwell as a particularly stubborn adherent, against all the attacks of the nineteenth century context, to the philosophy-science axis in Scotland which perpetuated the Renaissance ideals of the old European alliance even in a land dominated by Presbyterianism. Maxwell, like Thompson and Thom, was interested in the moments in living systems when things change, where new energies are unleashed. He developed a theory of 'singular points' which systems reach where the laws of deterministic dynamics break down and motion and change become indeterminate. The amount of energy required at these 'singular points' to reach a new configuration can be extremely small and yet have massive effects. He talks about how a rock can be loosed by a tiny movement in frost crystals which can thereby detonate a devastating amount of energy, how a little spark starts a forest fire, how one spore blights an entire crop: 'At these singular moments, influences whose physical magnitude is too small to be taken account of by a finite being, may produce results of the greatest importance.' [61]

Maxwell's work was little understood in his own time but its significance was seen by Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers whose La Nouvelle Alliance (1979) published as Order Out Of Chaos in English in 1984, picks up on his 'singular points' as one of the ideas looking forward to a new science which replaces the closed networks of dynamics with 'open systems' which exchange energy with the environment. They speak of 'far-from-equilibrium' (that is, unstable, anarchic, chaotic) conditions which reach 'bifurcation points' where chance allows 'fluctuations' to push the systems towards a new order - 'dissipative structures'. In the most complex, unstable systems 'strange attractors' appear adding to the chaotic unpredictability of the process. For such chaotic situations to lead to formal order some form of 'communication' must be occurring within the molecular systems involved. Life, then, arises out of these disordered, chaotic turbulences. Dissymmetry, disorder and chance are the characteristics of life; equilibrium, symmetry and determinism, the characteristics of death. 'Life,' say Prigogine and Stengers, is the 'expression of self-organising processes in nature.' [62]

While even Quantum Mechanics, which re-established the role of the observer in relation to nature/the world, continues to insist that symmetry and order are still there but that we observers, limited and constrained by our involvement, just cannot see them, the new science envisaged by Prigogine and Stengers reveals dissymmetry and disorder as the nature of nature, heightening the importance of the observer in perception, the apprehension of reality, giving scientific justification to Heidegger's philosophical description

René Thom, being determinist in his outlook, is highly critical of Prigogine's work which introduces chance and chaos as facts rather than as illusions of universal systems. However, the similarity of language in these 'singular', 'catastrophe' and 'bifurcation' points indicates a similarity of concern in these thinkers (to whom we add D'Arcy Thompson): a concern with what Prigogine and Stengers call 'the central problem of Western ontology - the relation between Being and Becoming.'[63] At what point, and with what processes and energies involved, do forms evolve? And in what constant framework do these evolutions occur? From what stillness does movement emerge?

Whatever their differences, the importance of these thinkers is in these similarities of concern and the way they seek to apply their once specialist areas to the contours of the real world, to the real dissymmetrical, fractured world of shorelines, waves, leaves, creatures. Of equal interest is the conclusion to which this desire leads them, that a sort of aesthetics, a poietics, underpinning their scientific-philosophical worlds, is required for their perceptions to be composed into a whole apt for expression

Prigogine and Stengers' title - 'The New Alliance' - refers to the necessity, evident in their approach to science, for a new coming together of (atemporal) science and the (temporal) humanities. The West has been living with 'two cultures' and the result has been 'disastrous':

For the ancients, nature was a source of wisdom. Medieval culture speaks of God. In modern times, Nature has become so silent that Kant concluded that science and wisdom, science and truth ought to be completely separated. We have been living with this dichotomy for the past two centuries. It is time for it to come to an end.[64]

Putting the observer back into science means reuniting Philosophy and Science. The other implication of this work is to do with expression. For, if 'communication' is an integral part of the process of growth and form in nature, then it re-establishes the relationship between nature and expression. It leads Prigogine and Stengers to speak of science conducting a 'poetical interrogation of nature (in the etymological sense that the poet is a "maker")'.[65] No more will it suffice, idiomatically or literally, for the thinker on the world to assume that 'it goes without saying.'[66] On the contrary, the world, and its perception by the human observer, only 'go' with saying, with expression. To be human is to express one's perception of the world. Which brings us back to the sort of vision we were dealing with at the beginning.

Time is the key factor here. Classical dynamics rejected the very existence of time within its systems, leaving temporal contemplation to philosophy and the arts. The new science envisaged by Prigogine and Stengers does not dispose of timeless, reversible Newtonian physics, seeing it as applying to systems between 'bifurcation points', but it puts time at the heart of the life-creating chaotic processes surrounding the creation of 'dissipative structures'. And this dialectic between the timeless and the temporal, the reversible and the irreversible, leads them, in their turn, like our previous thinkers, to an aesthetic contemplation:

It is hard to avoid the impression that the distinction between what exists in time, what is irreversible, and, on the other hand, what is outside of time, what is eternal, is at the origin of human symbolic activity. Perhaps this is especially so in artistic activity. [67]

The Ocean of Eternity

Few, if any, have pursued such a poetics with the vigour and intellectual rigour of Kenneth White who represents the culminating point of the Scoto-European exchange we have been outlining here. White's poetic work and philosophical ideas are imbued with the images and contours of the Scottish land and seascapes. But, like Geddes, it was in France in the mid-sixties, where he went to live, the France of Breton, Artaud, Deleuze, Bachelard, Michaux ... that he discovered the intellectual context in which to develop his now considerable oeuvre which grows in world-wide influence making him, after Burns, the most translated of Scottish writers.[68] White frequently refers to the work of Prigogine, Thom and other leading figures at the forefront of scientific developments as he works out the synthesising aesthetic he seeks in his essays and to which he gives the name 'geopoetics', a name which provides a suitable term for the movements we have been observing here - the identifying characteristic of the human being as the need to express perception of the world.

How could it be that the Scotland of the Democratic Intellect should fail to satisfy the need of its most daring thinkers? Perhaps it had finally become, by the twentieth century, 'British' rather than 'Scottish'. Geddes, certainly, was clearly jolted by the excitement he felt in the French milieu in contrast to the dullness he had left behind, and White speaks in similar terms of the 'mediocratic'[69] British cultural context of the early sixties. For Davie, the latter stages of the Democratic Intellect which he describes in his The Crisis of the Democratic Intellect were characterised by Masson's injunction to 'internalise' the distinctive Scottish elements in what he was prepared to accept as a British culture. The Scottish influence (which he recognised and favoured) would best be continued not by overt advocacy and expression, rather by quiet participation in British society, allowing the distinctive Scottish contribution to come through, as it were, on its own.

Macdiarmid attempted to break this compliance with the British project by reopening the intellectual current in Scottish life, starting himself from a thorough and wide reading in the French poetic tradition of Laforgue, Valéry etc., and by consciously adopting a resurrected Scots language in which to express himself. In philosophical terms, Macdiarmid's move was all about perception. New, clearer vision can only be achieved, according to Davie, through an aggressive challenge to the routine, accustomed modes of perception. As Heidegger was to put it, in everyday life now we do not speak, we merely 'opine'. People do not see what is really there, but see what they are encouraged to see unless and until someone or something forces them to look differently - from a new angle (Macdiarmid goes up into space for many of his early poems) and/or with new linguistic apparatus. This is the function of Macdiarmid's synthetic Scots - it stops people thinking that 'it goes without saying' and forces them to pay attention in a new way to the world, perception of which had become deadened by 'a heavily technical and traditional vocabulary which weakened and hid the life in ideas.' [70]

But Macdiarmid went far beyond this; the volcano he ignited (and personified), spat out material from all over the world, from disciplines and cultures, minority and majority, across the globe and across time - ideas such as had never been considered as part of mainstream culture before, except of course on the continent to which the Scots had been increasingly struggling to remain connected. Something of a 'catastrophe point' all of his own, he undertook by himself, then, a massive shifting of Scottish cultural-intellectual perspectives which many of his compatriots are still trying to get into focus.

Davie's analysis of Macdiarmid's earlier work is driven by his view of perception as the central concern of the Scottish mind. In this view, perception is confirmed by social language. The eye is confirmed by the ear through the agreement (or perhaps the disagreement?) of another that what we think is, is. For Kenneth White the social context, derivative of the Humanist and Rationalist perspectives, has been part of the problem which has obscured our perception of reality, not part of the solution. Macdiarmid, too, was angling for a similar perspective in his great poem 'On a Raised Beach' when he says:

What happens to us
Is irrelevant to the world's geology
But what happens to the world's geology
Is not irrelevant to us.
We must reconcile ourselves to the stones,
Not the stones to us.
Here a man must shed the encumbrances that muffle
Contact with elemental things, the subtleties
That seem inseparable from a humane life, and go apart
Into a simple and sterner, more beautiful and more oppressive world,
Austerely intoxicating: the first draught is overpowering;
Few survive it. [71]

This is an exhortation to the more expansive perspective on the world and a poetics of perception such as we have seen kindled in the previous decades by Maxwell, Thompson and Geddes and already a-glimmer in the intellectual life of the continent, but here with a surer feel that the focus of reality is in the world of the earth, and that, to use the terminology of our Celtic ground, if the monastic (social) context is necessary, the hermit's (individual) method must inform and inspire it.

For Kenneth White, for whom Macdiarmid's poem, like his cultural earth-shaking, is a major reference point, perception is not so much to be confirmed by social language, rather perception is expressed in poetic language. The ear, for White, is part of that which is engaged along with the eye, in apprehending reality. He translates the words of Prigogine and Stengers quoted earlier - 'a poetic interrogation of nature' - as 'a poetic listening in to nature'[72] (our emphasis), which is literally closer to the original French - 'une écoute poétique de la nature'.[73] For White, the paths to perception are trod by the individual, alone, alert, in 'communication' with the landscape, and 'disencumbered' of the conditioning of our education and upbringing which are, still, largely determined by the mechanistic world view of Newtonian dynamics. For him, 'post-modern' means a world which has come out of that world-view and its rationalism, dualism, and humanism, to a movement, both fluid and concentrating, of thought, practice and expression, firmly grounded again in perception of the reality of the world, where thought becomes 'cartography', practice a 'way' and expression a natural event culminating from these movements the way, to recall Thom's and Heidegger's descriptions, a flower, a mountain, a creature is the concentrated expression of the landscape. If science has had to readmit time to its calculations, then perhaps art needs to rediscover a sense of the eternal such as we detected in the early poetry of the Celtic regions, which had been submerged in the increasingly humanist concerns of the arts, divorced from science, from contemplation of the world, in the dissipation of knowledge and experience into discrete and jealous categories. Kenneth White's global concept of Geopoetics, in reintegrating science and poetics, the fields of knowledge and experience, in working on the vocabulary and the rhythms and tonalities required to express it,[74] seeks a 'sense of world' which contains 'a high level of abstraction and a deep sensation'[75] - words which logically point forward from Geddes, Thom and Prigogine, but which also point back to Pelagius and Erigena, and out to the other fields indicated by Macdiarmid.

With White then, in the late twentieth century, the auld alliance movement from Scotland to France and to Europe has become a movement from Scotland to France and then out to the world as he 'maps the coordinates' of a global culture which may be inevitable but which must be as intellectually rigorous, clearly perceptive and lucidly expressive as the 'aulder alliance' was in its highest moments, and which will be so, perhaps, if, following his example, those old connections can be further renewed. His image in the poem 'Scotia Deserta' is of a Scotland in which the natural elements of her world, seas, coast, rock, bird and animal, reverberate with being when perceived by minds such as we have been looking at here. From this 'Scotia deserta' he describes a programme which existed in the past and which he offers again for the future as an atlantic possibility for cultural renewal in the world:

Pelagian discourse
atlantic poetics from
first to last. [76]

Footnotes

Bibliography

Boardman, Philip The Worlds of Patrick Geddes Routledge and Kegan Paul 1978

Brown, P. Hume George Buchanan Humanist and Reformer: a Biography David Douglas 1890

Chadwick, Nora The Celts Penguin 1991

Davie, George Elder The Democratic Intellect Edinburgh University Press 1961

Davie, George Elder The Crisis Of The Democratic Intellect Polygon 1986

Duclos, Michele ed Le Monde Ouvert de Kenneth White Presses Universitaire de Bordeaux 1995

Ellis, P. Beresford Celtic Inheritance Constable 1992

Heidegger, Martin An Introduction to Metaphysics Yale University Press 1959

Irving, David Memoirs of George Buchanan Edinburgh 1807

Jackson, Anthony The Symbol Stones of Scotland The Orkney Press 1990

Kay, Billy The Auldest Alliance BBC Radio Scotland 29.11.95 & 6.12.95

Lehane, Brendan Early Celtic Christianity Constable 1994

Macdiarmid, Hugh Collected Poems Martin Brian & O'Keefe 1979

Macdonald, Murdo ed. Edinburgh Review no 88 Polygon/EUP 1992

MacMillan, D. George Buchanan: a Biography Edinburgh 1906

Prigogine, Ilya & Stengers, Isabelle Order Out Of Chaos Heinemann 1984

Prigogine, Ilya & Stengers, Isabelle La Nouvelle Alliance Gallimard Folio 1989

Renan, Ernest 'La Poésie des Races Celtique' in 'Essais de Morale et de Critique' in Vol.2 of Ouevres Complètes ed Psichari, Henriette Calmann-Levy 1948

Thom, René Structural Stability and Morphogenesis trans. D.H.Fowler W.A.Benjamin Inc. 1975

Thompson, D'Arcy Wentworth On Growth and Form Cambridge University Press 1917

White, Kenneth 'Ces moines venus de la mer' offprint St. Malo 1992

White, Kenneth 'Talking Transformation' Cencrastus no 40 Summer 1991

White, Kenneth 'Perspectives Ouvertes' in Cahiers de Géopoétique no 5 Spring 1997

White, Kenneth La Figure du Dehors Grasset 1986

White, Kenneth L'Esprit Nomade Grasset 1987

White, Kenneth The Bird Path Mainstream 1989

(Published Online: 28 June 2006)

Other essays available

Introduction by Lindsay Paterson

[This essay] Paths of Perception (1997): an essay on the Celtic and European basis of Scottish thought.

Philistinism and Cultural Renewal (2000): a general cultural critique, with particular attention to the state of education.

New Labour and the Poverty of Ideas (2001): a political polemic, arguing that the UK Labour government and its predecessors have come close to destroying the intellectual basis for social renewal.

Higher Still and Lower Yet (1997): critique of the reform to the examination system in the senior years of Scottish secondary schools that was put in place between 1994 and 1999.

Inaugural Lecture to the Scottish Association of Teachers of Language and Literature (1999): political activism set in the intellectual context explained in the other essays.

Background paper by Lindsay Paterson

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