A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels, and Systems of Thought

Introduction
THE QUESTION behind all other questions is the "why?" of human experience. The newborn's mind gropes for primordial understanding of the causal links between reaching out and human touch, crying and a mother's soothing voice, sucking and relief from hunger. Causal inquiry drives children's endless why questions as they try to make sense of life. While scientists try to limit themselves to the how of phenomena, an ultimate why lies behind all their observations and experiments. The concept of causality grounds physicists' study of subatomic events and astronomers' probing of the cosmos. Theologians look to God for ultimate first and final causes, while believers pray to God to modify miraculously the course of everyday causality. Psychiatrists struggle to discover why their patients become ill, just as historians investigate why wars break out and why civilizations rise and fall. Novelists build stories around motivation, which is the driving force for their characters' thoughts and actions. Causality is thus a centerpiece of the inquiring human mind, so fundamental to human understanding and so universal in its explanatory function that it would seem to transcend any historical development. This book ventures into such a history.
In the years since 1830, European and American thinkers transformed understanding of the causes of human behavior. These changes are evident in novels as well as in genetics, endocrinology, physiology, medicine, psychiatry, linguistics, sociology, economics, statistics, criminology, law, philosophy, and physics. Other researchers have studied changing ideas about causality in these specific areas, but no one has tackled a broad cultural history of this concept as my book undertakes to do.1
The thought of writing a history of causality first occurred to me in 1970, when I read an article by Henri Ellenberger on three types of mental illness that philosophically oriented psychiatrists interpreted in terms of defining causal modes.2 A causality of determinism dominates the depressed person, for whom everything seems to result from the pressure of circumstances over which he or she has no control. A causality of chance dominates the manic, for whom nothing happens according to any deterministic order and the future looms fraught with possibility--unpredictable and anxiety-provoking. A causality of intentionality dominates the paranoid, for whom nothing is the result of chance and everything is caused by menacing thoughts and deeds directed toward the patient.
Ellenberger's speculation that a mental breakdown might be related to the way causality was experienced suggested the deep constitutive power of causal understanding. His notion that individuals experience causality in different ways suggested that historical eras might experience it and try to understand it in distinctive ways. A literary source base for a history of changing ideas about causality occurred to me when I realized that the novelists who did most to define literary modernism--James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf--rejected the plot-driven novel and created novels that instead concentrated on the inner life of characters. Their work diminished the role of external pressures and specific motives such as those that had structured the naturalist novels of Emile Zola and Thomas Hardy, in which characters are governed by social, biological, and psychological forces. That literary shift suggested a cultural pivot for a history of causality.
But causal factors and motives were too broad a focus, because there are so many of them for countless possible human actions. For more than fifteen years, while working on two other books, I searched for a way to deal with the many causal determinants for the myriad human behaviors that historical experience includes. I eventually realized that such a history would have to focus on a single act in order to document historically distinctive thinking about its causes. But what was that act?
I discovered it in Roy Jay Nelson's study of causality in the French novel, which briefly discussed a novel by Andre Gide, Lafcadio's Adventures (1914), about an unusually motivated murder.3 While reading that novel I realized that murder suited my analytical purposes because, compared with other acts, it is exceptionally vivid and important and in most cases sharply focused in time and space. Murder superbly illustrates the various characteristics that action theorists offer to explain human behavior, because it is strongly intentional, highly motivated, full of meaning, the result of a desire or a "trying," directed at a clear goal, and usually "done for a reason."4 By focusing on murder, an act that remains relatively consistent over time, I could focus on historically changing ideas about its causal factors.