Wild thing
How the philosophy of ‘animal spirits impacted our century
The principal “defect of cold, arid natures,” declared Ralph Waldo Emerson, “is the want of animal spirits. They seem a power incredible, as if God should raise the dead.”
The phrase “animal spirits,” according to Jackson Lears (a professor of history at Rutgers University and the author, among other books, of “No Place of Grace,” “Fables of Abundance” and “Something For Nothing”) was ubiquitous in the United States until well into the 20th century. In this book, Mr. Lears provides a cultural history of the concept, whichhe defines as “a bundle of beliefs and emotions” about the significance of spontaneous energy and intense, immediate experiences to individual lives and national policies.
Operating often but not always beneath the surface of conventional thinking, Mr.
Lears indicates, animal spirits
(and modern versions of it, including vitalism, life force and libido) presented alternatives to conventional thinking about a wide range of subjects: the relationship between feelings, subjectivity and reason; links between body and soul; freedom of choice, the essence of the ethic of individual responsibility; race; religion; health; arousal, a release of control and a propensity to play; consumption, credit, stock markets and speculative capitalism; the ethos of human mastery over nature.
Mr. Lears singles out William James and John Maynard Keynes as exemplary exponents of humane interpretations of the concept and “the greatest philosophers of uncertainty in the twentieth century Anglophone world.” James, he reminds us, condemned the exercise of “raw force,” opposed American imperialism and imagined a moral replacement for war. Keynes debunked exaggerated claims about rational self-interest, undermined “laws” of classical economics by demonstrating that predictions about the future are “fluctuating, vague and uncertain,” and advocated capital investments that promote the common good.
That said, Mr. Lears also acknowledges that animal spirits is a “loosely defined outlook,” with “blurred boundaries,” whose connotations changed over time, and “led in many directions,” including support for magnetism, mesmerism, clairvoyance, faith healing, positive thinking, individualism and libertarianism. More than Mr. Lears appears to recognize, this vagueness presents significant challenges when he applies the concept to an analysis of what he regards as “binary hierarchies” in morality and politics.
In a hyperbolic critique, for example, Mr. Lears describes the technocratic, algorithmic, statistical and game-theory-based “rationality” of mainstream economists and nuclear war strategists, which sells itself as a guarantor of certainty, and “departs from materiality and humanity altogether.” The failures of big business, big government and the euphemistically entitled Defense Department to reduce fears about the vagaries of the business cycle and the threat of nuclear annihilation, he asserts, have provoked “restive animal spirits” to take to the streets in mass protests.
In contrast, traditional notions of “reason,” rely on deliberation and judgment, “and take complexity and contingency into account.”
By the 1920s, the term “animal spirits” had been discredited as unscientific and supplanted by “vitality,” which highlighted spontaneity, musicality, physical grace and sexual allure. In the 1960s, Mr. Lears points out, “visions of a reanimated universe” appeared with the emergence of a counterculture, interest in Indigenous peoples, non-human creatures and the impact of global warming on the natural and built environment.
More recently, Mr. Lears suggests, a new evolutionary synthesis has begun to emerge. As they revise the conventional Darwinian view, scientists are exhibiting a greater sensitivity to a signature precept of “animal spirits:” the engagement of organisms in real historical time with the “contingent circumstances” of the worlds around them.
Although he believes we are “living in a very dark time,” Mr. Lears concludes his book with the hope that a return, for good or ill, “to the core of the vitalist tradition” — spontaneous feeling, exuberance, an embrace of uncertainty and an awareness of caprice, miraculous freshness of so many things, including life itself — may be on the horizon. “In this fraught and fateful historical moment,” Mr. Lears fervently believes, “there is no more compelling affirmative vision.”