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The Technique of Thought
This page intentionally left blank
THE TECHNIQUE OF
THOUGHT
Nancy, Laruelle, Malabou, and Stiegler
after Naturalism

I a n Ja m es

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis

London
The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges the financial
assistance provided for the publication of this book by the Modern and
Medieval Languages Faculty at Cambridge University.

Portions of chapter 4 were previously published as “(Neuro)-­plasticity,

Epigenesis, and the Void,” Parrhesia 25 (2016): 1–­19.

Copyright 2019 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-­2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu

Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper

The University of Minnesota is an equal-­opportunity educator and employer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: James, Ian, author.
Title: The technique of thought : Nancy, Laruelle, Malabou, and Stiegler after naturalism /
Ian James.
Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2019 | Includes bibliographical
references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2018022886 (print) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0429-6 (hc) |
ISBN 978-1-5179-0430-2 (pb)
Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy, French—20th century. | Philosophy, French—21st century. |
Nancy, Jean-Luc. | Laruelle, François. | Malabou, Catherine. | Stiegler, Bernard.
Classification: LCC B2421 .J3645 2019 (print) | DDC 194—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018022886
UMP BmB 2019
for andrew james and sally howe
This page intentionally left blank
 CONTENTS

Preface ix

Introduction Post-­Continental Naturalism: A Question  1

1 The Image of Philosophy   15

2 The Relational Universe   55

3 Generic Science   121

4 Thinking Bodies   181

Conclusion The Eclipse of Totality  221

Notes  227
Bibliography  
233
Index 243
This page intentionally left blank
 P R EFACE

a lthough it h as its or igins in r ese a rch carried out in the middle

of the previous decade, this book was conceived and written between
2012 and 2017. This period witnessed the emergence of what has been
called the “post-­truth era.” As shown by the rise of Donald Trump in the
United States and the (narrow) vote in favor of the United Kingdom leav-
ing the European Union, the emergence of this crisis of public and po-
litical debate has had consequences that have yet to be fully resolved at
the time of this writing. The root causes of this phenomenon have some-
times been located in the economic and social exclusion that has been
the legacy of the 2008 global financial crash. The nature of modern digi-
tal media and the rise of social networking have also been blamed for
the loosening of the bonds between public and political discourse on the
one hand and verifiable truths or bodies of scientific and evidence-­based
knowledge on the other.
Some have laid the blame, at least in part, on the philosophical and
critical discourses that arose largely, but by no means exclusively, in
France in the last decades of the twentieth century and that were grouped
together under the banner of postmodernism. In overturning philosophi-
cal foundations, the argument goes, and in questioning the self-­identity
and unity of philosophical concepts or knowledge structures, such dis-
courses opened the door for widespread epistemic relativism, a disregard
for facts and truth, and a general undermining of objectivity. The reality
of the situation such as it has developed is unquestionably more complex
than such arguments admit, in part because debate in this area has often
been entirely divorced from any knowledge of the original philosophical
texts and contexts in question. The transmission of French and European
philosophical discourses into those of the Anglophone academy across

. ix

various disciplines will certainly be an important subject for future intel-
lectual historians, just as the wider phenomenon of the post-­truth era will
be for historians more generally. For now, though, it seems that traditional
modes of knowledge, and our theoretical or philosophical categories, no
longer allow us to fully understand this situation.
What is clear, however, is that a rift appears to be opening up between
what the great American naturalist Wilfrid Sellars called the “scientific”
picture of the world and the “manifest” pictures of the world belonging
to the multiple social, economic, and political communities of North
America, Europe, and beyond. Sellars’s dream of a unification of scientific
understanding with the everyday worldviews of diverse human communi-
ties appears to be far from its full realization. This comes at a time when
global environmental and security challenges are more pressing than ever
and when a sense of crisis continues to make itself felt on all fronts. With
climate change denial firmly entrenched in our politics and the return of
far-­right discourses into the mainstream, this sense of global crisis is inti-
mately bound up with the crisis of post-­truth culture and the widening
rift between the scientific and manifest world pictures.
The aims and scope of philosophical thought are necessarily modest in
relation to such a complex situation. Nevertheless, Sellars’s ambition for
philosophy to have some role to play in bringing together the scientific
picture of the world with ordinary conceptions and everyday worldviews
is perhaps more relevant today than ever. In bringing postphenomenolog-
ical and postdeconstructive philosophical discourses into dialogue with
scientific perspectives, thought, and knowledge, this book reflects a simi-
lar ambition. Despite many claims in Anglophone debates concerning
French theory in general and deconstruction in particular, there is noth-
ing in this book that seeks to undermine or relativize the validity of sci-
entific knowledge. Indeed, it proposes a strong, albeit novel and variably
configured, scientific realism that is compatible with a novel and variably
configured naturalism. In this context, philosophy of science debates that
oppose, say, realism to constructivism are superseded. Most importantly,
phenomenological and postphenomenological perspectives that deal
with individual or collective consciousness and first-­person qualitative
experience are brought and thought together with scientific perspectives
that are concerned with objective, physical, biological, and third-­person
quantitative knowledge. The post-­Continental naturalism proposed here
allows for the interactions between the scientific and manifest pictures
of the world to be rethought in entirely new terms.

x . P R EFACE
 The arguments that I make in this book are based in close reading,
interpretation, and further development of philosophical texts drawn
from a variety of traditions. I aim to be both as clear as possible in the
presentation of these texts and to make no assumptions about familiar-
ity with the material covered. I hope that those familiar with Anglophone
naturalism, science, or philosophy of science writing but unfamiliar with
French thought might read this book. By the same token, it is assumed
that those deeply schooled in French and Continental philosophy but
less well schooled in philosophy of science or naturalist debates will also
be readers. I have tried to make the readings and arguments accessible; I
therefore beg the patience of those for whom some of the material is all
too familiar.
All works referred to in this volume are cited in English or their English
translation. Where published English translations exist, they have been
cited by first giving the reference to the original French edition and then
to the translation. Untranslated texts are cited in my own translations (the
titles given in French with a translation in square brackets at first mention)
with page references to the original French editions.
Thanks are due to all those who have helped and supported during
the writing of this book. In particular I’d like to thank Philip Armstrong,
Cornelius Borck, Martin Crowley, Rocco Gangle, Irving Goh, Laurens ten
Kate, John Ó Maoilearca, Harold Pashler, Mauro Senatore, Anthony Paul
Smith, and Emma Wilson. Special thanks are due to Gerald Moore, with
whom I have shared the exploration of philosophy, science, and technics
over the past decade. I am also grateful to the University of Cambridge
and to Downing College for the period of extended research leave in 2015,
which allowed me to write the core of this book. The warmth, kindness,
and generosity of Jean-­Luc Nancy, François Laruelle, Catherine Mala-
bou, and Bernard Stiegler have proved to be invaluable throughout the
development of this project, and I owe them all a debt of gratitude. I also
thank the late Christopher Johnson, whose pioneering writing on French
thought and philosophy has left an indelible mark on my work, as it will
have done on many others. Special thanks go to both Aurélien Barrau
and Anne-­Françoise Schmid for their careful readings of chapters 2 and
3 respectively. I am particularly grateful to Aurélien Barrau for his invalu-
able indications and suggestions. I would also like to offer warm thanks
to Doug Armato for his support for this project, and to Gabriel Levin and
Mike Stoffel for their patient editorial work. My gratitude to Ruth Deyer-
mond for her generosity, intellectual stimulus, help, and personal support

P R EFACE . xi
remains infinite. Last, thanks go to my older brother, Andrew James, who
introduced me to the ideas of Einsteinian relativity and quantum physics
at an early age, and to my sister, Sally Howe, who invited me at an equally
early age to join a school philosophy club. For their role in making this
book possible, I dedicate it to them with love.

xii . P R EFACE
 INTRODUCTION
Post-­Continental Naturalism:

A Question

to pose the question of the “technique of thought” is to inquire into

the very essence and definition of philosophy itself. It calls into question
the way philosophy can, or should, be practiced, and with this the objects
of its inquiry, its relation to other forms of knowledge, and even perhaps
its ultimate aims or goals. To pose this question is to ask how and why
philosophy legislates for its own methods, procedures, and protocols,
and how, in so doing, it gives itself an image of what is—­or perhaps more
importantly what is not—­philosophy. This is a question that inescapably
evokes the divisions that define so much of twentieth-­century philoso-
phy and its separation into the analytic and Continental traditions. What
if the division and opposition of these two traditions are largely a matter
of technique? If this is so, then we could more easily, along with Richard
Rorty, “imagine a future in which the tiresome ‘analytic–­continental split’
is looked back upon as an unfortunate, temporary breakdown of com-
munication” (Rorty in Sellars 1997, 12).
The technique of thought, posed as a question for philosophy, provides
the guiding thread of this book as it seeks to elaborate something that
bears the name post-­Continental naturalism, a term coined by Mullar-
key (2006). It will become clear that if there is a something that can go by
this name, it is not a philosophical movement or school, and even less a
single unitary philosophy. Rather, it is a tendency that can be ascribed to
the four contemporary philosophers whom I discuss, philosophers work-
ing within a distinctly European, and specifically French, tradition. As a
tendency, it emerges from the way they each develop a range of different
techniques for thought, different images of what philosophy has been

. 1

and should become, and then engage in different ways with scientific
perspectives and with contemporary scientific knowledge or thinking.
In so doing, they radically resituate the relation between philosophy and
science into an entirely novel series of configurations. On the basis of
this multiple reconfiguration of the relation between philosophy and sci-
ence, I propose a recasting of philosophical naturalism into a new form.
In this way, the term will take on a meaning and scope that will be rather
different from that which may currently be generally understood by this
term within the Anglophone tradition of philosophy, or indeed within its
various already existing Continental articulations. A robust and rigorous
questioning of the potential possibilities and limits of the term “natural-
ism” within philosophy more generally is therefore what the book as a
whole aims to provoke.
Jean-­Luc Nancy, François Laruelle, Catherine Malabou, and Bernard
Stiegler can all, in various ways, be described as postdeconstructive
thinkers, either because they were close friends, colleagues, or students
of Jacques Derrida, or because their work emerges out of a critique of
some of the impasses or problems of deconstruction. Given the wide-
spread perception among those less familiar with or opposed to Derri-
da’s work that it is in some way inimical to the scientific worldview and
somehow affirms an epistemic relativism of the worst kind, the associa-
tion of these post-­Derridean thinkers with any kind of philosophical nat-
uralism might appear problematic or tenuous at best, and incoherent
and untenable at worst. More importantly and substantively, Derridean
thought emerges from the critique (or, more properly, the deconstruction)
of a post-­Kantian, phenomenological, and therefore idealist or transcen-
dentalist tradition, which vigorously opposes itself to naturalism and to
naturalistic attitudes (e.g., psychologism, physicalism, and empiricism).
Yet as I argued in The New French Philosophy (James 2012), in the wake
of Derrida, each of these thinkers quite clearly affirms renewed forms of
realism and materialism. The argument of this book is that the thought
of each is rigorously and coherently compatible with a kind of naturalism
also, albeit one that, as post-­Continental, is somewhat different from what
has been understood as such hitherto.
As David Papineau notes, the term “naturalism,” although familiar and
widely used, carries with it “little consensus on its meaning” (1993, 1). The
more recent entry on naturalism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philoso-
phy confirms his view, noting that it “has no very precise meaning in con-
temporary philosophy” and that it is “fruitless to try to adjudicate some

2 . INTRODUCTION
official way of understanding the term” (https://plato.stanford.edu/index
.html). Despite this, any attempt to give rigor and coherence to a renewed
understanding of naturalism will have to respond precisely to the broad
tradition such as it evolved in the twentieth century and continues to
evolve today. In Philosophical Naturalism, Papineau for his part defines
the term with reference to three principal traits. First, naturalism carries
with it “the affirmation of a continuity between philosophy and empiri-
cal science”; second, for many naturalists, “the rejection of dualism is the
crucial requirement”; and third, for others, “an externalist approach to
epistemology” is essential (1993, 1). To this he adds a further commitment
that forms the central preoccupation of his own book: the commitment
to the doctrine of physicalism.
The post-­Continental naturalism that will be elaborated here rene-
gotiates these three commitments (and by extension the fourth) in new,
perhaps surprising ways. As will become clear, the continuity between
philosophy and science gives way to a relative autonomy of each with the
other, which nevertheless keeps them in a necessary relation of close prox-
imity and reciprocal exchange. Dualism is unequivocally rejected, but the
oppositions that naturalist antidualism can be said to presuppose—­those
of the transcendental and empirical, phenomenal and physical, mind and
body—­are all resituated in different terms.1
As resolutely realist, post-­Continental naturalism accepts that knowl-
edge has its origin in the real and by way of a causality or determination
of thought by the real. Yet it rejects the simplicity of the internal–­external
opposition that is implied in naturalism’s third essential requirement
(according to Papineau): an “externalist approach to epistemology.” The
relation of post-­Continental naturalism to what might be termed tradi-
tional naturalism is thus a complex one that needs to be carefully drawn
out over the course of this book. The key starting point has to be the first,
and perhaps most decisive, trait of naturalism: the continuity between
philosophy and science.

The Continuity between Philosophy and Science

The tradition of naturalism at stake here is largely American; it runs from

figures such as John Dewey, Frederick Woodbridge, Ernest Nagel, Sid-
ney Hook, and Roy Wood Sellars; through Wilfrid Sellars, W. V. Quine, and
David Lewis; to recent and contemporary developments within physi-
calism, eliminative materialism, and naturalized metaphysics (e.g., Paul

INTRODUCTION . 3
Churchland, Patricia Churchland, David Papineau, James Ladyman, Don
Ross, and Harold Kincaid). In relation to the question of the continuity
between philosophy and science within this tradition, the positions of Wil-
frid Sellars, Quine, and Lewis will be taken as paradigmatic. In “The Influ-
ence of Darwin on Philosophy,” Dewey declares, “Philosophy foreswears
inquiry after absolute origins and absolute finalities in order to explore
specific values and the specific conditions that generate them” (1951, 13).
In the work of these paradigmatic naturalist thinkers, Dewey’s declaration
takes on a radical and more systematic form. Yet as will become clear,
the continuity between philosophy and science that is affirmed by these
thinkers is by no means straightforward.
On the face of it, it would seem that the philosophy–­science continuum
that naturalism proposes implies a somewhat unequal relation whereby
the fundamental ambition of the former is more or less absorbed into
the scope and authority of the latter. This may seem to be borne out in
one of Sellars’s most famous phrases: “In the dimension of describing
and explaining the world, science is the measure of all things, of what is
that it is, and what is not that is not” (1997, 83). This in turn has implica-
tions for the way in which philosophy itself is to be practiced: “The proce-
dures of philosophical analysis as such may make no use of the methods
or the results of the sciences. But familiarity with the trend of scientific
thought is essential to the appraisal of the framework categories of the
common-­sense picture of the world” (81). To this end, philosophy will
need to develop a new language (a new technique, in the terminology
of this book) that will allow it to talk about “public objects in Space and
Time,” a language with its own “autonomous logical structure” that can
objectively—­that is, in an aperspectival manner that is analogous to the
objectivity of the scientific method—­explain phenomena (116). Such an
approach forms the linchpin of Sellars’s fundamental distinction between
the scientific and manifest images of the world and his affirmation of “a
sense in which the scientific picture of the world replaces the common-­
sense picture; a sense in which the scientific account of ‘what there is’
supersedes the descriptive ontology of everyday life” (82).
In matters of ontology and epistemology, science thus has the first
and last word, and naturalist philosophy must submit to the authority of
scientific knowledge and be guided in its procedures and technique by
the “trend of scientific thought.” Yet what might appear to be a straight-
forward subordination of philosophy to science is, in Sellars at least, far
more complex. For if science is the measure of all things “in the dimension

4 . INTRODUCTION
of describing and explaining the world,” philosophy does other things:
it gives normative descriptions through the acts of prescribing and pro-
scribing. More broadly it provides a framework for a synoptic vision that
would be “not simply a theoretical unification of scientific understanding
with our ordinary conception of the world but also embraces the practical
dimensions of human existence” (Delaney et al. 1977, ix). One of the most
interesting and original contemporary readers of Sellars, Ray Brassier,
notes, “Sellars’ rationalistic naturalism grants a decisive role to philoso-
phy. [ . . . ] Philosophy is not the mere under labourer of empirical science;
it retains an autonomous function as legislator of categorical revision”
(2014, 112). In the case of Sellars, the continuity between philosophy and
science keeps open a space of autonomy in which rational philosophical
reflection can proceed independently with respect to empirical scientific
knowledge.
Quine’s philosophy can perhaps be most readily taken as the paradigm
par excellence of the continuity between philosophy and science within
naturalist thought. His abandonment of the distinction between analytic
and synthetic truths as articulated in 1951 in “Two Dogmas of Empiri-
cism” (collected in Quine 1953) is decisive in this regard. This abandon-
ment, along with that of the other empiricist dogma of reductionism, has,
Quine notes, two principal effects.2 First, and most important, it leads to
“a blurring of the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics
and natural science.” Second, it instigates “a shift towards pragmatism”
(Quine 1953, 20). In this context, “ontological questions [ . . . ] are on a
par with natural science” (45). Epistemology is also grounded in natural
science, becoming a branch of psychology such that, as Quine argues in
The Pursuit of Truth, “The objectivity of our knowledge of the external
world remains rooted in our contact with the external world, hence in our
neural intake” (1990b, 36). This is the context in which Quine comes to
define naturalism in general as “the recognition that it is within science
itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and
described” (1981, 21). Therefore, naturalistic philosophy is “continuous
with natural science” and is also “naturally associated with physicalism
or materialism” (1990a, 257).
Once again, such formulations might appear unequivocally to affirm a
subordination of philosophy to science and to endorse a strongly reduc-
tivist scientism. And once again, in matters of ontology and epistemology,
science and the scientific method do indeed wield the ultimate author-
ity. However, it is worth noting that unlike some later naturalists, Quine

INTRODUCTION . 5
is relatively broad in what he admits under the name of science, includ-
ing “the farthest flights of physics and cosmology,” but also, interestingly,
“experimental psychology, history and the social sciences” (1990a, 252).
There would be much to debate here regarding the equivalent epistemo-
logical grounding that is implied in this formulation between, say, phys-
ics and history or the social sciences, and even between history and the
social sciences. Yet it is at the very least indicative of the inclusive char-
acter of Quine’s systematic vision. As he himself puts it: “Scientists and
philosophers seek a comprehensive system of the world” (1981, 9). Argu-
ably, this is consistent with his holism, the view that “the unit of empirical
significance is the whole of science” and that “the totality of our so-­called
knowledge or beliefs [ . . . ] is a man-­made fabric which impinges on expe-
rience only along the edges” (1953, 42). According to holism, any empiri-
cal fact or statement only has meaning in relation to sets of statements
and wider knowledge structures and in relation to the horizon of what
Quine calls “total science, mathematical and natural and human” (45).
Although philosophy in Quine’s naturalism is indeed continuous with
empirical science and is also bound both ontologically and epistemologi-
cally by scientific knowledge, the exercise of philosophical reason clearly
has, as it does in Sellars, a function that is not reducible to the content of
empirical statements or experimental constructs alone. Philosophy has
the role of dealing with theoretical and abstract questions that relate to
the coherence and systematicity of the whole or totality of knowledge over
and above the observation sentences of experimental research. Bound by
the authority of science and the scientific method (which has the task of
“specifying how reality really is”; Quine 1966, 219), philosophy neverthe-
less has a strong margin of independent authority in relation to the coher-
ent ordering of total science—­that is, the totality of knowledge in general.
This schematic overview of the continuity between philosophy and
science in the naturalist philosophies of Sellars and Quine indicates that
in each case, and in different but similar ways, such a continuity by no
means entails a relation of slavish subordination of the former to the lat-
ter. Rather, philosophy aligns itself with, and orientates itself toward, a
horizon of completeness or totality (the synoptic vision in Sellars and
total science in Quine) that gives it a specific autonomy and function as
philosophy, one irreducible to the sciences and to scientific theories as
such. Such an autonomy can be discerned in the thought of the third
philosopher taken here to be paradigmatic of naturalism: David Lewis.
Lewis’s doctrine of “Humean supervenience” offers perhaps one of the

6 . INTRODUCTION
strictest and most reductively materialist theses within the naturalist tra-
dition as outlined here. In many ways the doctrine offers an acid test for
any philosophical thinking that would like to call itself naturalist. Humean
supervenience closely recalls Sellars’s demand for a theoretical language
that would rest “on a framework about public objects in Space and Time”
(1997, 116) insofar as it claims that all explanations should make reference
to objects in time and space in order to qualify as true. As Lewis puts it, it
is the thesis that “the whole truth about a world like ours supervenes on
the spatio-­temporal distribution of local qualities” (1999, 224). This means
in consequence that “‘how things are’ is fully given by the fundamental,
perfectly natural, properties and relations that those things instantiate,”
and therefore also that “we may be certain a priori that any contingent
truth whatever is made true, somehow, by the pattern of instantiation
of fundamental properties and relations by particular things” (225). The
doctrine offers a general account of philosophical truth that is ontologi-
cal in character, namely that “truth is supervenient on being” (25). Being,
however, is taken to be the “physical” existence determined by science
such that “the whole truth supervenes on physical truth” (293) and that
truth in general “must be made true, somehow, by the spatio-­temporal
arrangement of local qualities” (228).
Quine, Lewis’s teacher, had already claimed that naturalism was
intrinsically associated with materialism and physicalism, and Humean
supervenience offers a radical articulation of this claim, transforming the
continuity between philosophical and scientific truth into an apparent
total identity of the one with the other in which the two become more or
less indistinguishable. Yet once again questions arise. First and foremost
is the question of whether Humean supervenience is itself compatible
with the fundamentals of physical science as we now know them, and
whether it can be taken to be true according to the terms the doctrine
sets for itself. Later proponents of a scientific or naturalized metaphys-
ics such as James Ladyman and Don Ross have questioned whether this
can be so, given that contemporary quantum mechanics (and specifically
the phenomenon of entanglement) overturns the concept of “locality” on
which Lewis’s doctrine relies (2007, 150). For his part, Lewis insists that
Humean supervenience is a “speculative addition” to the general natural-
ist claim that “truth supervenes on being” (1999, 225), and that what is
important is that as a doctrine or argument it has a philosophical value
insofar as it is a weapon against nonnaturalist arguments that pose some
kind of existence beyond the purely physical (dualism, transcendentalism,

INTRODUCTION . 7
phenomenalism, epiphenomenalism, and so on): “I defend the philo-
sophical tenability of Humean supervenience, that defence can doubtless
be adapted to whatever better supervenience thesis may emerge from bet-
ter physics” (226). Although it seeks to align philosophical truth with the
truths offered by fundamentals of physical theory, the doctrine also has an
autonomous status and utility that relates to its “philosophical tenability.”
Once again, an autonomous, independent, or indeed outright spec-
ulative dimension of philosophical thinking can be discerned within a
resolutely naturalist position that seeks to ground all ontological and
epistemological claims or truths within the sphere of scientific knowl-
edge. This is most clearly indicated in the context of Lewis’s treatment
of possibilia in On the Plurality of Worlds and in the doctrine of modal
realism that he develops in this work. “We have only to believe in the
vast realm of possibilia,” he writes, “and there we find what we need to
advance our endeavors. We find the wherewithal to reduce the diversity
of notions we accept as primitive, and thereby improve the unity and
economy of the theory that is our professional concern—­total theory, the
whole of what we take to be true” (1986, 4). In order to believe in this
vast realm, Lewis proposes that we accept the literal existence of many
different worlds existing parallel to our own and entirely inaccessible to
it—­worlds in which possibilities of our own physical space-­time being
are actualities in others. “Why believe in the plurality of worlds?” he asks;
“because the hypothesis is serviceable, and that is a reason to think that it
is true” (3). Put another way: “Modal realism is fruitful; that gives us good
reason to believe that it is true” (4); or later, “Modal realism ought to be
accepted as true. The theoretical benefits are worth it” (135). The ben-
efits in question—­all the benefits of Lewis’s powerful modal logic and the
plurality of actually existing worlds that accompany it—­are benefits for a
specific conception of philosophy, theory, and knowledge that is arguably
far more philosophical than scientific. The plurality of worlds claim, as a
truth statement made by philosophy in this contingent world, cannot be
defended as a truth on the basis that it is “made true, somehow, by the
spatio-­temporal arrangement of local qualities” (1999, 228). Rather, it is
simply taken to be true on the basis of an entitlement—­one that Lewis
assumes as it were philosophically, to “expand our beliefs for the sake of
theoretical unity,” and on the basis that “if thereby we come to believe the
truth, then we obtain knowledge” (1986, 109).
To point this out is not to suggest so much that modal realism and the
plurality of worlds claim are in contradiction with the doctrine of Humean

8 . INTRODUCTION
supervenience as it is to underline that both doctrines should perhaps
be taken as contingent within and immanent to philosophical, rather
than scientific, practice. Indeed, Lewis (1999, 226) says as much about
Humean supervenience. Supervenience places philosophy in the closest
alignment and continuity with science (in particular with physics), and
modal realism prescribes a powerful technique for philosophy (modal
logic). However, the status of both of these foundational arguments of
Lewis’s naturalism is ultimately speculative. They are placed in the ser-
vice of a specific image of philosophy: as ideally articulated in “theoretical
unity” and as ordered toward an ideal horizon of “total theory.” This image
of philosophy is itself philosophical rather than scientific. Although it is
true that the ideals of the unity of science, and those of a scientific theory
of everything, may well be grounded in a single specific image of the scien-
tific enterprise, it is also transparently the case that (as will become clear
in chapters 2 and 3 in particular) such ideals are by no means consensual
givens within philosophy of science debates—­nor within the current mul-
tiplicity of scientific theories and modes of practice.
Standing back from this schematic overview of the continuity between
philosophy and science in the work of three paradigmatic and highly influ-
ential thinkers of the American naturalist tradition, a number of remarks
suggest themselves. It has been argued that this continuity does not in fact
imply a relation of subordination of philosophy to science. Rather, phi-
losophy delegates the task of knowing physical reality and of determining
what kind of entities can properly be said to exist to science while main-
taining for itself the role of regulating, rendering coherent, and ordering
the totality of knowledge as such and of orienting the general philosophi-
cal and (scientific) theoretical enterprise toward the horizon of a synoptic
vision (Sellars), total science (Quine), or total theory (Lewis). There is a
relation of mutual benefit and of reciprocal authority bestowal here. Phi-
losophy defers to science’s authority concerning knowledge of “how real-
ity really is” (Quine 1966, 219). It also absorbs this authority into its own
claims, protocols, and procedures. Strengthened—­and ontologically and
epistemologically legitimated—­by this alignment with and absorption of
scientific truth, philosophy at the same time maintains its own authori-
tative domain: that of regulative and speculative reason, its capacity to
stand above and rationally order the currently existing whole of knowl-
edge, and also to maintain the orientation of thought toward a futural
horizon of totality or total knowledge. In so doing, it also confers back
onto science the all-­important imprimatur of philosophical legitimation,

INTRODUCTION . 9
making science the cornerstone and first point of reference for knowledge
of natural being and existence—­that is to say, of all being and existence.

Naturalist Legacies and Counterlegacies

The principal focus here is the relation between philosophy and science
within the tradition of naturalism, and the question of whether the rene-
gotiation of this relation by the thinkers discussed in this book has led to
the emergence of something like a post-­Continental naturalism. Chap-
ter 1 analyzes the different ways in which Nancy, Laruelle, Stiegler, and
Malabou propose a series of specific images of philosophy. These images
could not be more different from the image that has been discerned in the
thought of Sellars, Quine, and Lewis above. First and foremost, they are
not derived from any initial appeal to the way empirical science encoun-
ters or knows physical reality. Rather, they are derived from encounters
with the history of philosophy, from readings of the tradition and histori-
cal trajectory of Western thought, and from attempts to articulate a funda-
mental structure of philosophical thought as such. The image of philoso-
phy they propose arises from an experience of thought itself rather than a
reference to the scientific experience or picture of reality. This derivation
of an image of philosophy from a reading or interpretation of the history
of philosophy itself is a standard procedure of Continental thought, and
the texts that are read in this context are drawn from this tradition: Kant-
ian transcendentalism, phenomenology, and existential phenomenology,
as well as their subsequent deconstruction. The names of, among oth-
ers, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida, and Deleuze will
loom large here.
This is a tradition based on the adventures of a transcendental moment
within thought, one that seeks by turns to ground itself, historicize and
absolutize itself, render itself existential or immanent, and otherwise
deconstruct itself. That this tradition is at best only problematically com-
patible with naturalism will for many go without saying. Certainly the leg-
acy of naturalist thought that has been bequeathed by Sellars, Quine, and
Lewis to recent and contemporary philosophy in the forms of eliminative
materialism, naturalized metaphysics, or reductivist physicalism suggests
its total incompatibility with the trajectory of posttranscendentalist and
postphenomenological philosophy engaged with here. So for instance
the eliminative materialism of Paul Churchland and Patricia Churchland
(discussed in chapter 4) inherits much from Sellars (Paul Churchland’s

10 . INTRODUCTION
doctoral supervisor) and seeks, as its name suggests, to eliminate from
the sphere of philosophical and ontological truth those dimensions of
experience that constitute the central preoccupations of the post-­Kantian
tradition: the transcendental foundations of knowledge, the first-­person
perspective of consciousness, and everything associated with the qualita-
tive nature of experience as it is subjectively and intersubjectively lived:
qualia, desires, beliefs, and so on. In the same way the naturalized meta-
physics, overt scientism, and resolute physicalism of James Ladyman and
Don Ross (discussed in chapter 2) and that of David Wallace (discussed
in chapter 3) take over, and radicalize further, the continuity between sci-
ence and philosophy proposed by Quine and Lewis. As will become clear
in later discussions, Ladyman and Ross as well as Wallace radically con-
strain ontology within the bounds of contemporary fundamental physics
(and in the case of Wallace within the bounds of a specific interpreta-
tion of quantum mechanics). In so doing, they also engage in a radically
eliminative gesture with respect to phenomenal experience (eliminating
the fundamental existence of objects or things, qualia, or, in the case of
Wallace, the experimental perspective that defines the quantum measure-
ment problem). In this context, it would appear to be a straightforward
conclusion that the posttranscendentalist and postphenomenological
images of philosophy offered by Nancy, Laruelle, Stiegler, and Malabou
are in no way compatible with naturalist thinking.
Other contexts, however, suggest that things might not be so straight-
forward. For instance, a distinct recent and still burgeoning philosophical
literature has sought to naturalize phenomenology. One might most obvi-
ously cite in this context the work on neurophenomenology by Francesco
Varela in The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience
(1991) and Humberto Maturana and Varela’s Autopoiesis and Cognition:
The Recognition of the Living (1980). One could mention other thinkers
who have tried to combine phenomenological accounts of embodiment
with cognitivist approaches, such as Antonio Damasio (1996, 2000, 2010),
Mark Wrathall and Sean Kelly (1996), and Hubert Dreyfus (1982).3 Yet other
works such as Shaun Gallagher’s and Dan Zahavi’s The Phenomenological
Mind (2012) powerfully argue argued that the phenomenological tradition
from Husserl through to Sartre, Merleau-­Ponty, and beyond can offer an
indispensable resource for thinking through issues that go to the heart
of contemporary debates around cognition, consciousness, and the sci-
entific exploration of both.4 This list is by no means exhaustive, and the
varied attempts over recent decades to naturalize phenomenology, and

INTRODUCTION . 11
to bring it into dialogue with biology and neuroscience in particular, sug-
gest that the antinaturalism that is clearly present at the beginning of this
tradition in its modern twentieth-­century trajectory (most obviously in
Husserl and Heidegger) is by no means an ongoing given of philosophi-
cal debate.
Another important context in this regard is to be found in a number of
recent developments within the tradition of Continental philosophy over
the past two decades. These include first and most prominently the align-
ment of Deleuzian thought with scientific perspectives. The development
over the last ten years or more of a series of disparate philosophical posi-
tions that have gone under the name of “speculative realism” should also
be cited. Such Deleuzian and speculative realist developments also over-
lap to a large extent with the recent emergence of different forms of new
materialism in the work of thinkers such as, among others, Jane Bennett,
Rosi Braidotti, Manuel DeLanda, Karen Barad, and Quentin Meillassoux.5
The relation of the thinking elaborated here to Deleuze and Guattari’s
conception of philosophy and science is discussed at length in chapter
1. Here it will be clear that post-­Continental naturalism is different from
anything that can be imagined by way of a Deleuzian naturalism and from
the various recent bodies of thought that have been inspired by Deleuze.
Through a close reading of What Is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari
1991, 1994), I argue that Deleuzian immanence does not allow for the
thinking of the limit (or of limits) that is engaged with here in relation to
both philosophy and science (specifically in Nancy, Stiegler, and Mala-
bou). There has been a significant focus on the ways in which Deleuz-
ian thought corresponds with already constituted scientific thought and
knowledge (e.g., complexity theory) and on how both Deleuzian meta-
physics and the scientific understanding of the universe come, in different
ways, to similar conclusions about reality (DeLanda 2002, 2). The spe-
cific negotiation with limits in relation to both philosophy and scientific
thought that is uncovered here leads to a significantly different perspec-
tive from that of Deleuze. What is of decisive interest here is the manner
in which both philosophy and scientific thought and practice interrogate,
or more speculatively engage with, that which is not yet, or indeed not
at all, conceptually or theoretically determined or determinable—­that is
to say, with what lies beyond currently constituted knowledge. Examples
of this abound in cosmology (Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Lee Smo-
lin), quantum physics (Bernard d’Espagnat, engaged with extensively in
chapter 3), or the biology of the origins of life (Nick Lane). This leads to

12 . INTRODUCTION
a different relation of philosophy to science than the one that Deleuze-­
inspired thought is able to articulate.
The distinctiveness of post-­Continental naturalism in relation to the
diverse philosophical positions going under the name “speculative real-
ism” is highlighted in an extended discussion of things and objects in
chapter 2. Here the work of Graham Harman offers a key point of refer-
ence and engagement. Harman’s object-­oriented ontology, with its reli-
ance on a renewed understanding of substance, is contrasted with Nancy’s
relational ontology, with its reliance on his specific reworking of the term
“sense.” On this basis, the distinctiveness of Nancy’s materialist realism in
relation to speculative realism is highlighted and the beginnings of some-
thing like a Nancean speculative naturalism discerned. Because many of
the thinkers of the new materialism (e.g., Bennett, Braidotti, De Landa)
either pass through or are heavily influenced by Deleuze, or can be situ-
ated within the speculative realist debate (e.g., Meillassoux), new mate-
rialism itself has not been given any separate or extended treatment.6
In many ways this book seeks to do for postdeconstructive thought
what naturalized phenomenology, Deleuzian naturalism, and new mate-
rialism have, in their diverse ways, set out to do: connect the Continental
tradition to scientific perspectives and thinking. Yet these already estab-
lished tendencies make this connection on the basis of different assump-
tions about the status of philosophy and the experience of thinking; this,
I argue, makes all the difference. After establishing in chapter 1 the dis-
tinct images of philosophy offered by Nancy, Laruelle, Stiegler, and Mal-
abou, each subsequent chapter examines the way their thinking can be
related to contemporary scientific perspectives and the way each explic-
itly engages with these. In chapter 2, the Nancean philosophy of sense and
ontology of singular plurality is first related to debates within contempo-
rary scientific metaphysics about the status of thinghood. Nancean sense
is then related to the questioning within biological thought concerning
the status of life and living entities. Third and finally, Nancy’s ontology is
related to questions within cosmology that concern the structure of the
universe and the metaphysics of science itself. In chapter 3, the impor-
tance of Laruelle’s thought for renewing the status of scientific realism,
as well as the nature of the scientific enterprise and its relation to wider
knowledge, are discussed. Insofar as Malabou and Stiegler share a pro-
found concern with consciousness, individuation and its relation to
embodiment, and neuroscientific and technoscientific contexts, they are
treated together in chapter 4.

INTRODUCTION . 13
 The questions that lie at the heart of philosophical naturalism, the rela-
tion of philosophy to science, the rejection of dualism, and the causation
of our knowledge of the world in and by the real, are reposed and reconfig-
ured in fundamental ways that remain firmly compatible with something
that can still be called naturalist. Yet the horizons of both philosophy and
science undergo a radical transformation in this process of reconfigura-
tion. The horizon of totality, unity, and completeness that underpins the
images of philosophy found in Sellars, Quine, and Lewis gives way to a
horizon of multiplicity, disunity, and incompleteness. Where analytic phi-
losophy found a path back to metaphysics in Quinian and Lewisian natu-
ralism, the post-­Continental naturalism elaborated here remains firmly
within the closure or deconstruction of metaphysical thought and foun-
dations. It thereby questions the image of science itself that both Ameri-
can naturalism and some scientific theories continue to propose. It also
enters into a significant dialogue in its own right with philosophy of sci-
ence debates relating to realism, instrumentalism, conventionalism, con-
structivism, and the unity of science. This transformation of horizons has
wide-­reaching implications for the way in which different areas of knowl-
edge, philosophy, and science, as well as the sciences, social sciences, and
humanities, relate to each other.
Above all, post-­Continental naturalism allows for the phenomenal and
qualitative dimensions of thought and conscious experience (known to
phenomenology), and the physicalistic or quantitative dimensions of
material existence (known to science) to be brought and thought together
without the one seeking to eliminate or otherwise downgrade the other.
These two dimensions are thought together in ways that avoid metaphysi-
cal totalization or unification, but that also move decisively beyond the
scientism, reductivism, and eliminativism that have become the hall-
marks of much contemporary philosophy that takes up the legacy of
American naturalism. Everything hangs on the way in which the think-
ers treated here reconfigure the fundamental image that philosophy pro-
poses for itself as philosophy, and then go on to enter into a different set
of dialogues and relations with science and scientific perspectives. As will
become clear, this fundamental reconfiguration of the image of philoso-
phy occurs within the context of an irreducible experience of thought,
one that engenders and even necessitates innovative and experimental
techniques for thought.

14 . INTRODUCTION
1 THE IMAGE OF PHILOSOPHY

gi v en th at the think ers discussed her e inherit from a tradi-

tion that begins with Kant and progresses through Hegelianism, neo-­
Kantianism, Husserlian phenomenology, existential phenomenology,
and then deconstruction, one of the key tasks of elaborating a post-­
Continental naturalism is to show that the transcendental moment of
thought itself is susceptible to naturalization or to being thought in natu-
ralistic terms without simply being abolished or eliminated. This task has
already been ongoing in different ways in the contexts of neurophenom-
enology, Deleuzian engagements with science, and new materialism.
Across the chapters that follow, I demonstrate this naturalization of the
transcendental to be configured by each of the four thinkers discussed
in a singular and distinct manner. It becomes the transimmanence of
sense in Nancy, the radical immanence of the Real in Laruelle, the or-
ganological conditioning of thought in Stiegler, and epigenetic plasticity
in Malabou. In each thinker, these instances are unequivocally material
in nature and allow for no ontological duality between thought and mat-
ter, between the phenomenal and the physical, between consciousness
and the body. Yet within this ontological continuity, the autonomous per-
spectives of thought, phenomenal perception, or consciousness are pre-
served rather than reduced or eliminated.
These various postdeconstructive naturalizations of the transcen-
dental do not, however, provide any kind of substantive ontological or
metaphysical ground or foundation for thought or being. Nor do they
provide any kind of basis on which to secure a sense of unity or totality
within thinking. Indeed, what will become clear in the discussions of this
and subsequent chapters is that the place of the transcendental within
thought and being is void of substance and becomes empty or vacant in

. 15

a manner that recalls Quine’s invocation in Theories and Things of “the
abyss of the transcendental” (1981, 22). The images of philosophy that
are elaborated here in relation to the four thinkers discussed all in vari-
ous ways articulate an experience of thought that is also an experience
of ontological groundlessness, vacuity, or void. One of the key questions
I pose in subsequent chapters is the extent to which scientific thinking
can similarly affirm the ontological groundlessness or vacuity of physical
existence or of the real such as it is known to science. However, it is with
thinking itself that the discussion must begin.

Thinking at the Limit: Nancy’s The Experience of Freedom

Nancy’s The Experience of Freedom (1988, 1993b) begins with an epigraph

taken from the first section of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: “For the issue
depends on freedom; and it is in the power of freedom to pass beyond
any and every specified limit” (1998, 397 [A317/B374]). As the title of his
work suggests, the freedom in question here is not a theme or question to
be taken up as the object of philosophical inquiry; rather, it is understood
in relation to an experience, and in particular to a specific experience
of limits: the limits of philosophy, of subjectivity, and indeed of thought
itself. Originally submitted as a dissertation for his doctorate, Nancy’s The
Experience of Freedom is principally an engagement with Kant’s thinking
of freedom and the key role it plays in critical philosophy and also with
Heidegger’s ontological understanding of freedom. Its arguments have
their origins in the deconstructive and Heidegger-­inflected readings of
Kant that Nancy elaborates on in his 1970s-­era essays, published in works
such as The Discourse of the Syncope: Logodeadalus (1976, 2007) and
L’Impératif catégorique [The categorical imperative] (1983). However, and
as will become clear, The Experience of Freedom (1988, 1993b) is also the
first explicit and sustained expression of an ontology of singular plurality
or of relational, worldly existence of the kind that receives further devel-
opment in the 1990s in works such as The Sense of the World (1993c, 1997)
and Being Singular Plural (1996, 2000). As such, it is arguably a pivotal
work in Nancy’s career as a philosopher, one that carries over the insights
of his earlier more commentary-­oriented writings of the 1970s and turns
them toward the accomplishments of his mature philosophy. Yet it is also
a work in which Nancy, perhaps more than anywhere else in his oeuvre,
calls into question the very operations and status of philosophy itself. In
this way, The Experience of Freedom arguably defines the manner in which

16 . THE IMAGE OF PHILOSOPHY

 Another Random Document on
Scribd Without Any Related Topics
the colony 3000 felt hats, cloth of check Flannel or some linen if that
can't be obtained sufficient for six thousand shirts and also six
thousand pairs of shoes"74 or as in Massachusetts a committee was
appointed to collect four thousand pairs of stockings.
The material after being collected was made up by regimental
tailors, the commanding officer was to make a report as to the
number of tailors employed in the regiment and also whether there
were not more tailors in the regiment than were employed in making
clothing.75
The women at home aided very materially in the clothing
problem by their spinning, knitting and collecting of linen.76 When
persons called on Mrs. Washington, whether she was at home or in
camp, they usually found her knitting and she had sixteen spinning
wheels running at one time.77 Other women all over the country
followed her example.
Instances, almost without number, are mentioned in diaries and
journals of the nakedness of the army, some without shoes, with
only pieces of blankets wrapped around their feet,78 thousands
without blankets,79 others with their shirts in strings,80 and added to
all that the paymaster without a dollar and the quartermaster in
almost the same situation.81
Even the soldiers had to suffer from the want of clothing yet
they were able to see the funny side of the situation. The story is
told in one diary of a party that was given by an officer for which
invitations were extended to all, the only restriction being that no
one with a whole pair of breeches could be admitted.82

37. Chastellux, Travels in America, p. 58.

38. Journals of Congress, Vol. II, p. 190.
39. Journals of Congress, Vol. III, p. 322.
 40. See, Lyman, Journal, App. and Thacher,
Military Journal, p. 62.
41. See, Thacher, Military Journal, p. 62.
42. Meigs, Journal, (Oct. 15, 1775) p. 233.
43. Thayer, Journal, (Oct. 28, 1775) p. 12.
44. Ibid.
45. Headley, Chaplains and Clergy of the
Revolution, p. 100, and Thayer, Journal, Nov. 1,
1775.
46. Thayer, Journal, (Nov. 1, 1775) p. 14.
47. Headley, Chaplains and Clergy of the
Revolution, p. 100.
48. Barton, Journal, (Aug. 27, 1779) p. 7;
Burrows, Journal, (Aug. 27, 1779) p. 43.
49. Burrows, Journal, (Aug. 30, 1779) p. 44;
Hubley, Journal, (Oct. 1, 1779), p. 166.
50. Barton, Journal, (Aug. 27, 1779), p. 7.
51. Burrows, Journal, (Aug. 27, 1779) p. 43;
Fogg, Journal (Aug. 29, 1779) p. 94.
52. Davis, Journal, Hist. Mag. Ser. 2, Vol. III,
p. 203.
53. Dearborn, Journal, (July 7, 1779) p. 74.
54. Trevelyan, American Revolution, Vol. I, p.
327.
55. Waldo, Journal (Dec. 21, 1777) p. 132.
56. Thacher, Military Journal, p. 180.
57. Ibid., p. 80.
58. Hubley, Journal, (Oct. 1, 1779) p. 166.
 59. Roger, Journal, (June 24, 1779) p. 248.
60. Coits, Orderly Book, (July 7, 1770) p. 36.
61. Lyman, Journal, (Nov. 21) p. 127, and
(Dec. 3, 1775) p. 131.
62. Greene, Life of Greene, Vol. I, p. 141.
63. Greene, Life of Greene, Vol. I, p. 141.
64. Lossing, Life of Washington, Vol. VI, p.
572.
65. Kapp, Life of Steuben, pp. 116–117.
66. Henry, Journal, in Penn. Ar. Ser. 2, Vol. XV,
p. 59.
67. Ford, Washington Writings, Vol. III, p. 13.
68. Ibid.
69. Ibid. and "Uniforms of the American Army"
in Mag. of Am. Hist., Vol. I, p. 476.
70. Elbert, Orderly Book, p. 7.
71. Lewis, Orderly Book, (Aug. 18, 1776), p.
77.
72. Lewis, Orderly Book, (April 3, 1776), p. 13.
73. Lewis, Orderly Book, (April 3, 1776), p. 13.
74. Elbert, Orderly Book, (Mar. 16, 1708) p. 8.
75. American Archives, Ser. 5, Vol. I., pp. 302,
456.
76. Thacher, Military Journal, p. 234.
77. Humphreys, Catherine Schuyler, p. 171.
78. Shreve, Journal, Am. Hist., Mag. Vol. III, p.
568.
79. Thacher, Journal, May 26, 1775.
80. Waldo, Diary, (Dec. 14, 1777) p. 130.
81. Ford, Washington Writings, Vol. III, p. 146.
82. Kapp, Life of Steuben, p. 119.
 Chapter III
HEALTH AND SANITATION

The health of the soldier was not entirely forgotten. Those in

authority made an attempt to prevent or at least to lessen the pain
and suffering of those who were taken sick or were wounded in
army service, but often the measures of prevention instituted, the
methods of checking contagion and the means of allienating pain
were of the crudest sort and to us of the twentieth century they
seem almost inhuman. It must be remembered that not even our
simple remedies of today were known then, not to mention our
modern methods of combating disease.
The continental congress thought of that phase of army
conditions and on July 25, 1775, the following provisions were
made. For an army of twenty thousand men a hospital was to be
established under the direction of a Director General, his salary was
to be four dollars per day. He was to superintend the whole, furnish
the medicines and bedding and make a report to and receive orders
from the commander-in-chief. Under the director there were to be
four surgeons, one apothecary and twenty surgeons' mates, each
receiving two-thirds of a dollar per day, whose duty it was to visit
and attend the sick. There was also to be a matron who had under
her direction the nurses, one for every ten sick soldiers.83 Then in
July 1776, the resolution was passed that the number of hospital
surgeons and mates was to be increased in proportion to the
increase in size of the army not to exceed one surgeon and five
mates to every five thousand men and to be reduced as the army
was reduced.
Dr. Church was appointed by congress as director, but before
October 14, 1775, he had been taken into custody for holding
correspondence with the enemy84, and on October 17, 1775, Dr.
Morgan was elected in his stead.85 But even after the new director
was appointed there was still room for complaint for Washington
wrote to Congress "I am amazed to hear the complaints of the
hospital on the east side of Hudson's river. * * * I will not pretend to
point out the causes; but I know matters have been strangely
conducted in the medical line. I hope your new appointment when it
is made, will make the necessary reform in the hospital, and that I
shall not, be shocked with the complaints and looks of poor
creatures perishing for want of proper care, either in the regimental
or hospital surgeons".86
Congress had made several attempts to organize the hospitals
and in July 1776, resolutions had been passed which defined more
fully the duties of the various officials both of the departmental and
the regimental hospitals.87 There was to be a director and under him
the directors of the various departmental hospitals.88 But since there
were only a few departmental hospitals and those few often a long
distance from the scene of battle it became necessary to have
branch hospitals or regimental hospitals. At the head of those were
persons known as regimental surgeons, who were to make reports
of expenses, and lists of the sick to the director of the departmental
hospital and receive supplies from him.
The plan was then that the soldiers were to be cared for by the
regimental surgeon as long as it was possible and then they were to
be sent to the departmental hospital for further care.89 These two
systems seemed to interfere with each others work and there was
always jealousy existing between the director of the general hospital
and the surgeons of the regiment. "There will be nothing but
continued complaints of each other; the director of the hospital
charging them with enormity in their drafts for the sick and they him
with the same for denying such things as are necessary. In short
there is a constant bickering among them which tends greatly to the
injury of the sick * * * The regimental surgeons are aiming, I am
persuaded, to break up the general hospital."
 The two most representative departmental hospitals were, it
might be said at Bethlehem and Sunbury, but there were others at
Reading, Lititz and Ephrata. Bethlehem was a Moravian village and
was in the midst of military affairs almost continually from 1775 to
1781; in fact it was twice the seat of a hospital. On December 3,
1776, an order was sent to the committee of the town of Bethlehem
as follows:
"Gentlemen,—According to his excellency General Washington's
Orders, the General Hospital of the Army is removed to Bethlehem
and you will do the greatest Act of humanity by immediately
providing proper buildings for their reception the largest and most
capacious will be the most convenient. I doubt not, Gentlemen but
you will act upon this occasion as becomes men and christians * * *
"90
It was by the above process that the little peace loving village of
Bethlehem and many others like it were thrown into confusion and
dwelling houses or other buildings were turned into hospitals, the
men began to play the part of nurses, to help care for the sick and
dying sent from camp, and the women prepared lint and bandages.
The buildings which under ordinary circumstances could
accommodate about two hundred were made to accommodate five
or six hundred.91
The housing accommodations of the regimental hospitals were
even more varied, for they were housed in any thing from a capital
building92 to a log hut,93 including private homes,94 church,95 barns,
and court house,96 depending upon what happened to be near the
camp. A hut or group of huts were sometimes built for the purpose
in or near the camp. They were built in a manner similar to the
dwelling huts97 only larger with furnishings as meagre, straw for the
bed98 tells the tale of equipment.
But the hospitals were of little value if there were not able
physicians99 and antiseptics and anaesthetics were almost unknown.
Besides the lack of skill and proper medicine and instruments, for
some of the instruments described are almost unconceivable, there
was a lack of cleanliness in conducting the operations for that was
not insisted upon then as it is today.100 Of hospital methods Dr.
Waldo wrote December 25, 1777, "But we treat them differently
from what they used to be at home under the inspection of old
women and Doct ——, We give them mutton and Grogg and avoid
pudding, pills, and powders."101 This perhaps was a little extreme,
but it at least reflects the conditions. Thacher described the awful
condition in which soldiers came to the hospital with wounds
covered with putrified blood and full of magots which were
destroyed by the application of tincture of myrrh.102
Director-General Shippen, in explaining the causes of the
mortality among the soldiers attributed it to; "The want of clothing
and covering necessary to keep the soldiers clean and warm, articles
at that time not procurable in the country;—partly from an army
being composed of raw men, unused to camp life and undisciplined;
exposed to great hardships and from the sick and wounded being
removed great distances in open wagons."103
As to the kind of disease most prevalent and the number in the
hospitals because of sickness in proportion to those there because of
injuries, some idea can be formed from the hospital reports sent in
weekly from the departmental hospitals.
Although some of the diseases listed in the reports are unknown
to us now and there is no way of knowing what the proportion the
sick was of the entire army in that section. However, the returns do
state the number sick during the various seasons, and show in which
season of the year there was the most sickness.
The following are the returns from the Sunbury hospital for the
four seasons of the year, spring, summer, fall and winter.

March 6 to 13, 1780

"Wounded 4
 Dysenteria 1
Diorrhoea 0
Rheumatism 2

Ophthalmia 1
Asthma 1

Ulcers 1
—

Total 10"104

July 13 to September 22 1779

"Pleurisy 0

Peripneumony 2
Angina 1
Rheumatism 14

Bilious fever 8
Intermitting fever 0

Putrid fever 0
Dysentery 19
Dyarrhea 11

Gravel 12
Cough and Consumpt. 4
Hernia 5
Lues 14

Epilepsy 2
Itch 2
Ulcers 9

Wounded 33
—

Total 126"105

November 1 to 7 1779
"Dysentery 5

Diorrhoea 2
Rheumatis 2
Intermit. 2

B. Remit. 5
Asthma 1

Ophthalnia 2
Ulcers 2

Wounded 11
—
Total 30"106
 January 24 to 31 1980
"Wounded 6

Intermitting fever 0
Dysenteria 1
Diarrhoea 1

Asthma 1
Ophthalnia 1
Rheumatism 3

Ulcers 2

—
Total 15"107

If the above tables are any index at all the most dangerous
season was summer in spite of the crowded unsanitary conditions of
the winter quarters. They also show that the number in hospitals
due to sickness was larger that the number due to injuries received
in battle.
Smallpox was one of the most dreaded of all the diseases,
mostly because there were few ways of combating the disease.
Inoculation was only slightly known and there was much opposition
to it, even sermons were preached on the question it was so much
discussed.108 The British knew the New England people were
especially opposed to it and were known to send out spies to spread
the disease in the American camp which Shreve wrote "killed more
Yankees than they did".109
The disease was especially serious in the Northern army causing
greater dread than the enemy.110
 Thacher in his Military Journal emphasizes another disease which
caused a great deal of suffering but strange to say there was only
one remedy for it and that was a furlough for the disease was home-
sickness. In reality that was a fact which caused anxious moments
for General Washington for the men were continually trying to bribe
the physicians to declare that they were unfit for duty.111
Other provisions were made for the health of the soldiers
besides the establishment of hospitals. The others were along the
line of prevention, such as keeping the tents and huts clean and dry,
the careful preparation of food, the washing of clothes, caring for
refuse,112 and the soldiers own personal cleanliness.113

83. Journals of Congress, Vol. II, pp. 209, 210,

211.
84. Journals of Congress, Vol. III, p. 294.
85. Ibid., p. 296.
86. Ford, Writings of Washington, Vol. V, p.
204.
87. Journals of Congress, Vol. II, p. 568.
88. The country was divided into departments
or divisions and in each department there was
what was called a general departmental hospital,
in distinction to the regimental hospitals where
the soldier received immediate care, before
being sent to the general hospital.
89. Coit, Orderly Book, (June 7, 1775) p. 36.
90. Jordon, "Military Hospitals at Bethlehem
and Lititz during the Revolution" in Penn. Mag.
Vol. XV, p. 137.
 91. Jordon, "Military Hospitals at Bethlehem
and Lititz during the Revolution" in Penn. Mag.
Vol. XX, p. 137.
92. Lewis, Orderly Book, (June 11, 1776) p.
49.
93. Chastellux, Travels in America, p. 70.
94. Thacher, Military Journal, p. 31.
95. Ibid., p. 112.
96. Jordon, "Continental Hospital Returns,
1777–1780," Penn. Mag. Vol. XXIII, p. 38.
97. Chastellux, Travels in America, p. 70.
98. Elbert, Orderly Book, (Feb., 11, 1778) p.
101.
99. American Archives, Ser. V, Vol. III, Col.
1584.
100. Goodale, British and Colonial Army
Surgeon, p. 10.
101. Dr. Waldo, Diary (Dec. 25, 1777) p. 31.
102. Thacher, Military Journal, p. 112.
103. Jordon, "Military Hospitals at Bethlehem
and Lititz during the Revolution" Penn. Mag. Vol.
XV, p. 137.
104. Jordon, "Continental Hospital Returns
1777–1780", Penn. Mag. Vol. XXIII, p. 219.
105. Jordon, "Continental Hospital Returns
1777–1780". Penn. Mag., Vol. XXIII, p. 211.
106. Jordon, "Continental Hospitals Returns,
1777–1780", Penn. Mag. Vol. XXIII, p. 216.
107. Ibid., p. 217.
 108. Sermon quoted in Mass. Hist. Soc. Pro.
Ser. 1, Vol. IX, p. 275.
109. Shreve, Journal In Am. Hist. Mag., Vol.
III, p. 565.
110. American Archives, Ser. 5, Vol. I, p. 145.
111. Ford, Writings of Washington, Vol. III, p.
447.
112. Ford, Writings of Washington, Vol. III, p.
5.
113. Coit, Orderly Book, (June 1, 1775.), p. 15.
 Chapter IV
RECREATION IN CAMP

If there must be a certain proportion of work and play in every

one's life to make for efficiency, then the soldier of the Revolutionary
War was far below normal in the scale of efficiency for recreation in
any organized form is found to have been entirely lacking.
But before too severe a judgment is placed upon this lack of
recreation the conditions the soldier left at home must be studied.
Recreation as such had not been a part of his daily routine. It has
been estimated that nine-tenths of the people lived in rural districts
leaving only one-tenth for the cities,114 an estimate which no doubt
is true. The people had never thought of the problems of bad
housing, congestion, or recreation. They had had the whole of
nature for their home and the whole of the frontier to wrestle with.
Speaking of the people a generation or two later, Dr. F. L. Paxson
says in The Rise of Sport, "The fathers of this generation had been
sober lot unable to bend without breaking, living a life of rigid and
puritanical decorum interspersed perhaps with disease and
drunkedness, but unenlivened for most of them by spontaneous
play."115
Thus in studying the life of the soldier at home before he went
into the army camp, even the slightest traces of twentieth century
recreation are found to have been lacking, but that does not mean
that those people never forgot their work. It would be hard to find a
more hospitable group. They were never too busy to entertain.
There was the occasional jollification with rum or beer, the card
party, the ball, the concert, the theater, and of a more rural type the
picnic and the "corn husking".116
 The conditions in camp were different than those at home. The
problems of bad housing, congestion and recreation were then
factors to be considered. There was the small unsanitary and poorly
ventilated hut with twelve to sixteen men and sometimes even more
crowded into it. When the troops first went into winter quarters
there was plenty to do in the way of exercise for there were logs to
cut and huts to build, but those were soon completed and the men
were crowded together with nothing to do.
Something had to happen, the monotony of the dreary days had
to be broken. This was brought about in several ways.
Often the punishments ordered by the court martial were
administered publicly in camp just to enliven the common routine.
When a man was sentenced to death, but had been pardoned by
those in charge, the force of going through the punishment was
carried out. The condemned man was brought to the side of his
newly dug grave, he was bound and blind-folded, the firing party got
in position, the fire lock even snapped, and as might have been
expected, the culprit sometimes died of the shock.117
The hanging of a man was a gala day in camp and the place of
hanging was almost as popular as an amusement park of today;
"Five soldiers were conducted to the gallows according to their
sentences. For the crimes of desertion and robbing the inhabitants, a
detachment of troops and a concourse of people formed a circle
around the gallows and the criminal were brought in on a cart sitting
on their coffins and halters about their necks"118
It was frequently stated in the sentence given by court martial
that the punishment whatever it was, riding the wooden horse,
riding the rail, receiving the biblical "Thirty-nine" lashes, or running
the gauntlet,119 was to take place at some time when all the soldiers
were together as at the beating120 of the retreat or at the head of
the regiment.121 Punishments ordered by court martial in that way
served two purposes. They furnished amusement for the soldiers at
the same time the purpose for which they were intended, that of
making an example of the misbehavior of one of the soldiers.
While the Virginia riflemen were in camp at the siege of Boston
there was a practice which served both as a source of amusement
and as a display of marksmanship. There were two brothers, one of
whom would place a board five inches wide and seven inches long
with a bit of white paper in the middle of it about the size of a dollar,
between his knees while the other at about sixty yards distance
would shoot eight bullets through it without injuring the brother.122
The duel was another common practice which seemed to furnish
amusement besides deciding the honor of some individual.123
Hunting, too, was a means of cheering the dreary days, but this
too was often "Killing two birds with one stone", for often the
soldiers went hunting to provide the regular rations, but at other
times it was done just for the sake of the sport to be found in it. The
following is taken from a New York paper of December 12, 1785. "A
Fox hunt. The Gentlemen of the army with a number of the most
respectable inhabitants of Ulsler and Orange purpose a Fox Hunt on
the twenty third day of this instant to which all Gentlemen are
invited with their hounds and their horses. The game is plenty and it
is hoped the sport will be pleasant * * * "124.
Along with the hunting frays went fishing125 and nutting126 trips
which added a little variety to the ordinary camp scenes. There were
several days celebrated by the Americans at that time which meant a
holiday for the soldier with perhaps an extra allowance of rum127 or
meat. Some of those days were Christmas, Thanksgiving, Fourth of
July, May day, Commemoration of the French Alliance, or a
celebration following a victory. The celebration usually consisted of a
parade, a sermon by the chaplain followed by a banquet and
perhaps a dance for the officers, and extra rations for the
privates.128
Another celebration mentioned by several diaries and one which
seemed to be a joyful occasion was as one writer said "and (we)
convert(ed) the evening to celebrate as usual wives and sweethearts
which we do in plenty of grog".129
There were a few games which served to shorten some of the
long dreary days for the soldier, some of them were; fives,130
shinny,131 goal,132 ball133 and a kind of football.134 No description of
the above games has been found, but to judge by the context they
were all outdoor games.
The diversions discussed so far in this chapter have all been
outdoor games, but the real test came when the soldiers were
crowded into the huts during the winter months with nothing to
think of but their own miserable conditions. Since no one had
thought of organizing the soldier's leisure time he had to invent
something for himself. The first things thought of, naturally, were the
amusements which had existed at home. Card playing came to his
mind, but in the army the game of cards or any other game of
chance was absolutely forbidden by order of congress and the
commander-in-chief. "Any officer, non-commissioned officers, or
soldier who shall hereafter be detected playing at toss up, pitch and
hustle or any other games of chance in or near the camp or villages
bording on the encampments shall with out delay be confined and
punished for disobedience of orders * * * The general does not
mean by the above order to discourage sports of exercise and
recreation, he only means to discontinuance and punish gaming".135
In another order Washington said, "Men may find enough to do in
the service of their God and their country without abandoning
themselves to vice and immorality".136
Dancing had been another form of entertainment at home but
that too was usually impossible because of the lack of room. That
was especially true at Valley Forge and other camps, but at
Morristown, however, a large room in the commissariat store house
was reserved for dancing,137 lodge meetings, and the like for the
masons had chapters in the army camps.138
 At home the soldier had also had his friends and dinner parties,
now he had soldier friends, but the only way for him to keep in
touch with former friends was by letters and that was a very
irregular and uncertain way for mail could only be sent from camp or
brought to camp when some one was going home on a furlough or
new recruits were coming into camp.139 The nearest the soldier
came to his social dinner and evening at home was the rallies from
barracks to barracks when every body who could sing sang.140
As for the officers in camp, their leisure time was better provided
for. They lived in better quarters, generally, at least larger ones.
They, too, had the advantage of being entertained at the homes of
the people living in the vicinity of the camp. Even if one's
imagination must be drawn upon in order to make the recreation of
the private seem recreational, at least, there was a side of camp life
which presented a more pleasant picture "If our forefathers bled and
suffered they also danced and feasted."141 The letters and diaries of
the young officers tell of the gaiety of the war. Even in midst of the
gloom at Valley Forge there was drinking from cabin to cabin and
dinners in honor of visiting foreigners. No sooner was the army in
winter quarters than the ladies began to appear, for Mrs.
Washington, Mrs. Greene, and Mrs. Knox made it a practice to spend
the winters with their husbands. Mrs. Washington was in the habit of
saying that she always heard the last cannon fired in the fall and the
first one in the spring.142
As soon as the wives appeared, the gaiety began among the
families of the officers, the dinner was the favorite method of
bringing the families together. "General Greene and his lady present
their compliments to Colonel Knox and his lady and should be glad
for their company tomorrow at dinner at two o'clock".143 Often the
dinners were in name rather than in reality, for officers and privates
suffered alike when food was scarce, but the social time did not
depend entirely upon the supply of food. One such dinner is
described as having been potatoes with beech-nuts for dessert.
 The usual round of pleasure for the officers was dancing,
dinners, teas, sleighing parties, horse-back parties, or the
celebration of some day or event. Of the dance General Greene
wrote on March 19, 1779, "We had a little dance at my quarters a
few evenings past. His excellency and Mrs. Greene danced three
hours without one sitting down upon the whole we had a pretty little
frisk".144 Another such affair is described as follows: "There were
subscription balls in the commissary store house at which
Washington in black velvet, the foreign commanders in all their gold
lace, General Steuben being particularly replendent and the ladies in
powdered hair, stiff brocades and high heels made a brilliant
company."145
In the large it can be said that, the recreation of the American
soldier during the Revolutionary War, was invented to supply the
need felt rather than an institution thought out before. Some of the
practices would hardly be classed as recreation, but they helped to
break the monotony and that was the object desired whether it was
by enjoying a fellow soldier's punishment or playing an innocent
game of ball.

114. Sherrill, French Memories of 18th Century

America, p. 181.
115. Paxson, F. L., "The Rise of Sports." Miss.
Valley Hist. Review Vol. IV. p. 143.
116. The facts pertaining to society at home
has been collected from books of travel of the
period just previous to the war; Chastellux,
Travels In America; Sherrill, French Memories of
18th Century America and others.
117. Belcher, The First American Civil War, Vol.
II, p. 83.
 118. Thacher, Military Journal, (April 20, 1779)
p. 158.
119. Barton, Journal (Aug. 22, 1779) p. 7.,
Hearts, Journal Sept. 9, 1785.
120. Hearts, Journal (Sept. 9, 1785) p. 68.
121. Coits, Orderly Book, (July 10, 1775), p.
43.
122. Virginia Gazetta, 1775 quoted Hart & Hill,
p. 229.
123. Thacher, Military Journal (Feb. 1779) 155.
124. New York Packet, Dec. 12, 1782, quoted
in Am. Hist. Mag. Vol. III p. 389.
125. Elmer, Journal (June 24, 1779) p. 81,
Livermore, Journal (May 27, 1779) p. 180.
126. Military Journal of Two Private Soldiers, p.
77.
127. Clinton, Order Book quoted by Headley, p.
265.
128. McHendry, Journal, (Dec. 9) p. 211, and
(Sept. 25, 1779) p. 207. Blake, Journal, (July 5,
1779) p. 39; Linermore, Journal, (July 5), p. 182;
and (Sept. 25, 1779), p. 188; Norris, Journal,
(July 5, 1779), p. 225., Hardenberger, Journal
(Sept. 25, 1779) p. 184.
129. Burrows, Journal, (Oct., 2, 1779) p. 50,
Elmer, Journal, (July 3, 1779) p. 84.
130. Shute, Journal, (June 13 and 14, 1779) p.
268.
131. Ibid., (July 23, 1779) p. 264.
132. Lyman, Journal, p. 118.
 133. Ibid. and Military Journal of Two Private
Soldiers, p. 70.
134. Fitch, Journal, (Sept. 14, 1775) p. 57.
135. Washington, Orderly Book, quoted by
Ford, Writings of Washington, Vol. III, p. 155.
136. Washington, Orderly Book, quoted by
Ford, Writings of Washington, Vol. III, p. 429.
137. Trevelyan, American Revolution, Vol. IV,
p. 54.
138. Penn. Archives, Vol. II, p. 18.
139. Fitch, Journal, (Dec, 5, 1775), p. 88.
140. Humphreys, Catherine Schuyler, p. 177.
141. Humphreys, Catherine Schuyler, p. 167.
142. Ellet, Domestic History of the Am. Rev., p.
40.
143. Greene, Life of Greene, Vol. I, p. 193.
144. Greene, Life of Greene, Vol. II, p. 161.
145. Humphrey, Catherine Schuyler, p. 176.
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