FROMDOMINANTSTOTHEDAMNED
IAN JAMES KIDD provides a new look at Charles Fort’s work by placing it within the philosophical context of its era
IAN JAMES KIDD marks the centenary of The Book of the Damned by examining it in the context of the philosophical background of its time. What emerges is not Fort the ‘foe of science’ but a modern, metaphysical thinker who embraced a world of constant flux.
Charles Fort’s The Book of the Damned was published a century ago. It was widely reviewed in newspapers and scientific journals throughout late 1919 and early 1920, with most critics finding the style irritating, the ideas intriguing, and the purpose obscure. Interestingly, the science journals were kinder. Popular Astronomy found it a “strange book”, if “very readable and suggestive”. Newspapers were meaner, the New York Times scorning its “jerky, Rabelasian” style and dismissing it as “a quagmire of pseudo-science and queer speculation”. Fortunately, some reviewers offered happier verdicts. A review in the Chicago Daily News, by the screenwriter Ben Hecht, gave us the term ‘fortean’. Captivated by the book’s imagination and originality, Hecht declared indifference as to Fort’s purposes and sincerity: “Mountebank or Messiah, it matters not.”
Attempts were made to interest leading men of letters and public intellectuals. The results were mixed. HG Wells famously dismissed Fort as a “damnable bore”, offended by his talk of “orthodox science”. “Science is a continuing exploration,” wrote Wells. “How the devil can it have an orthodoxy?” Others were less certain in their judgements, and confessed their perplexity. In the New York Public Library, librarian Edmund Pearson found it “readable” with “evidence of great industry, and some indication of scholarship”, such that it didn’t seem “the work of a crank”.4 Still, the impressionistic prose, torrents of odd data, and speculative dithyrambs still led to its classification as ‘Eccentric Literature’, provoking an angry public letter from Fort.
Such varying remarks point to three main readings of The Book of the Damned. First, it’s an industrious piece of crankery, maybe even an elaborate practical joke; second, an intemperate polemic against science; third, a vivid celebration of independence of mind and critical defiance of dogmatism. An additional interpretation lurks on the margins: Book of the Damned as a serious contribution to philosophy.
Granted, there’s a loose sense of ‘philosophical’, to mean critical and openminded, earnestly challenging received wisdom and complacent certainties, and all that. But I mean philosophy in the more technical sense of consciously participating in a wider tradition of serious, systematic reflection on reality and the place of human beings within (or perhaps without) it. The ‘philosopher’ reading was confined to those
of Fort’s contemporaries who were also, tellingly, his close friends: the novelist Theodore Dreiser (who famously got the book published) and the writer Benjamin DeCasseres. Some later forteans have echoed this view, pre-eminently FT founder Bob Rickard and the late John Michell. Otherwise, though, there is little sense that Fort belongs to the history of philosophy. After all, doesn’t he urge us to “substitute acceptance for belief”, something surely incompatible with philosophical systemmongering and confident discoursing on life, the Universe, and everything?
Well, no, since belief-mongering and system-building are only some of the ways of doing philosophy. Fort’s hostility to dogmatism was, anyway, clearly motivated by certain philosophical convictions – polemics usually have their purposes. Consider the opening lines of Book of the Damned: “we shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded” – indeed, that science has “falsely excluded.” Confronted with remarks like this, appeals to Fort’s temperamental anti-authoritarianism seem too psychologistic. We can search for deeper motivations for a critique of Dogmatic Science. Considered in the light of fin-desiècle styles of philosophy, such concerns fall quickly into place. To see this, let’s start with one of the most influential ‘pro-science’ 19th century philosophical movements – positivism.
Wells famously dismissed Fort as a “damnable bore”
POSITIVISM AND DOGMATISM
For all his originality and independence of mind, Fort was philosophically a man of his time. It was natural for him to engage with positivism, founded by Auguste Comte (1798-1857), who urged a double confidence in science: as the privileged source of knowledge and our best hope for moral and social progress. Comte’s aspiration was to organise all the sciences on a scale from the
general to the particular, governed by the science he founded: sociology. In this vision, the disciplines develop in an historical dynamic, each one preparing the way for another (physics presuppose maths, biology presupposes chemistry, and so on; and some sciences tend to ‘absorb’ one another).
The result is a stirring vision of science as a rational, progressive enterprise, captured in Comte’s famous ‘Doctrine of the Three Stages’. In the initial ‘theological’ stage, events are explained in terms of supernatural personal beings (gods, spirits), which are then succeeded in the ‘metaphysical’ stage by abstract entities (atoms, forces). The final ‘positive’ stage then dispenses with dogmatic commitment to entities altogether, focusing on abstract laws that skilled technocrats can manipulate to advance the human good.
Fort actually started out with a paradigmatically positivist project: comparing diverse phenomena in order to identify underlying laws that could be levered for human purposes:
“I had a theory. Because of the theory, I took hundreds of notes a day.
The theory:
That all things are one; that all phenomena are governed by the same laws; that whatever is true, or what we call true, of planets, plants, and magnets, is what we call true of human beings;
That if, among such widely dissimilar phenomena as the moon, the alimentary canal of an ant eater, and glacial erosions, we can discover uniformities, there we have the associations of events commonly called laws, which may equally be in control of human affairs —
Oh, yes, I know all about the antiquity of this philosophy; back to Comte anyway.” 7
Obviously, this positivist phase was abandoned, as Fort recalled in a 1929 memoir describing his shift from story writer to an ‘immature metaphysician, psychologist, sociologist’:
“In the years 1912-1913, the met. [metaphysician] was almost all in me. Then came the BOOK OF THE DAMNED. It expressed me as a met., but the data of it started a new self or the interests that compose a self that then expressed in NEW LANDS.”
What Fort abandoned was the vision of reality presupposed by positivism – that there are strict, delineable differences between discrete things, which are apt for tidy categorisation. Positivism posits strict differences – the chemical and the biological, the theological and the metaphysical – such that “the spirit of abrupt difference”, said Fort, “is the spirit of positivism”.
The Book of the Damned decisively rejects this tidy vision of reality. Its startling opening chapters present a very different vision: of reality as a single “intercontinuous nexus”, of “quasi-things” that “merge away” into one another, existing in a state of ghostly “intermediatism”. Within this rather Buddhist vision of a fluid world of process and change, no sense can be made of positivist aspirations to define and classify, activities that require, impossibly, the “breaking of Continuity”. Fort therefore rejected positivism as the doctrinal expression of a “universal attempt to formulate or to regularise – an attempt that can only be made by disregarding or denying”, attempting to “draw a positive
line between the objective and the subjective.” If all things are merging and inter-continuous, there are no positive differences, only a “seeming of distinctness, the seeming of individuality”.
Already, we see that Fort had deeper grounds for his critiques of ‘Dogmatic Science’ than a mere dislike of dogmatic people prone to dismiss reports of falls of fish and frogs. A deeper metaphysical vision was at work. Tiffany Thayer – erstwhile, idiosyncratic Secretary of the Fortean Society – urged readers of TheBookofthe Damned to skip over its opening chapters, dismissing them as “jejune”. [9] But those are the most profound, since in them Fort was describing his guiding vision of a reality where “nothing can attempt to be, except by attempting to exclude something else”, of “quasi-things” striving to achieve some “positive difference” and become “more nearly real”. Those who know their history of philosophy will be quick to spot parallels: Nietzsche and Schopenhauer’s cosmologies of the will, Bergson’s élan vital, Spinoza’s conatus and, later, Whitehead’s process philosophy.
Fort’s metaphysics doesn’t just sit in the background. It explains his deep hostility to ‘Dogmatic Science’. Within an inter-continuous nexus, there is “no basis for classification”, demarcation, or
“damnation”, since there’s no final, positive basis for distinguishing things. “Positivism is Puritanism”, quipped Fort, each premised on a capacity to distinguish positive from negative, saints from sinners, the acceptable from the damned. But as the catalogues of data show, such tidy classifications have “never been attained; but that Science has acted, ruled, pronounced, and condemned as if it had been attained.”
Fort’s catalogues of ‘damned data’ offer challenges to these practices of damnation, upsetting sharp demarcations by presenting ‘intermediate forms’ and actual impossibilities. Stones do not fall from the sky, for there are no stones in the sky – so what about the stones that fall from the sky? In a sense, Fort sought what Karl Popper, a few decades later, called ‘falsifications’ – make your claims, then seek data to disconfirm them! Properly used, then, a “procession of data that Science has excluded” exposes the arbitrariness of our exclusions, and, in the process, restores our sense of the fluidity of our reality.
If so, Fort’s main objection to positivism was metaphysical: the modern scientific enterprise proceeds on the assumption that the world consists of distinct things, open to neat categorisation. But that’s not right. Look at the data, ‘damned’ and accepted, and one starts to apprehend one single, inter-continuous nexus where phenomena merge and repel then merge again, a dynamic reality of pseudo-things “striving to break away from the underlying that denies them identity of their own”. Dogmatic Science denies these deep facts about the world. This is the heart of Fort’s doctrines of Continuity and Intermediatism.
As Fort recognised, this is heady stuff. Chapter 15 opens with a wry remark: “Short chapter coming now, and it’s the worst of them all. I think it’s speculative.” So where did this metaphysical vision come from? We don’t know if Fort read Nietzsche, although he did read Bergson, Spinoza, and Hegel, those three being some of the few philosophers he ever mentioned by name. But the main metaphysical debt of Book of the Damned was, I think, to one of the most influential philosophers of the 19th century – Herbert Spencer.
Fort’s metaphysics explains his deep hostility to dogmatic science
INTERMEDIATISM
Spencer was a giant of Victorian intellectual life, a leading Social Darwinist who coined the term “survival of the fittest”. Any educated person of the late 19th century knew his work, even though his reputation dimmed after 1900. Dreiser, for instance,