The Reenchantment of the World (4 page)

 

 

This is a truly remarkable passage, for it suggests for the first time
that the knowledge of nature comes about under artificial conditions. Vex
nature, disturb it, alter it, anything -- but do not leave it alone. Then,
and only then, will you know it. The elevation of technology to the
level of a philosophy had its concrete embodiment in the concept of
the experiment, an artificial situation in which nature's secrets are
extracted, as it were, under duress.

 

 

It is not that technology was something new in the seventeenth century;
the control of the environment by mechanical means in the form of
windmills or plows is almost as old as homo sapiens himself. But the
elevation of this control to a philosophical level was an unprecedented
step in the history of human thought. Despite the extreme sophistication
of, for example, Chinese-technology down to the fifteenth century A.D.,
it never had occurred to the Chinese (or to Westerners, for that matter)
to equate mining or gunpowder manufacture with pure knowledge, let alone
with the key to acquiring such knowledge.7 Science did not, then, grow up
"around" Bacon, and his own lack of experimentation is irrelevant. The
details of what constituted an experiment were worked out later, in the
course of the seventeenth century. The overall framework of scientific
experimentation, the technological notion of the questioning of nature
under duress, is the major Baconian legacy.

 

 

Although it may be reading too much into Bacon, there is a dark hint
that the mind of the experimenter, when it adopts this new perspective,
will also be under duress. Just as nature must not be allowed to go
its own way, says Bacon in the Preface to the work, so it is necessary
that "the mind itself be from the very outset not left to take its own
course, but guided at every step; and the business be done as if by
machinery." To know nature, treat it mechanically; but then your mind
must behave mechanically as well.

 

 

René Descartes also took his stand against Scholasticism and philosophical
verbiage, and felt that nothing less than certainty would do for a true
philosophy of nature. The "Discourse," written some seventeen years
after the "New Organon," is in part an intellectual autobiography. Its
author emphasizes the worthlessness of the ancient learning to himself
personally, and in doing so implicates the rest of Europe as well. I
had the best education France had to offer, he says (he studied at
a Jesuit seminary, the Ecole de La Flèche); yet I learned nothing I
could call certain. "As far as the opinions which I had been receiving
since my birth were concerned, I could not do better than to reject them
completely for once in my life time. . . . ."8 As with Bacon, Descartes
goal is not to "engraft" or "superinduce," but to start anew. But how
vastly different is Descartes' starting point! It is no use collecting
data or examining nature straight off, says Descartes; there will be time
enough for that once we learn how to think correctly. Without having a
method of clear thinking which we can apply, mechanically and rigorously,
to every phenomenon we wish to study, our examination of nature will of
necessity be faulty. Let us, then, block out the external world and sort
out the nature of right thinking itself.

 

 

To start with, says Descartes, it was necessary to disbelieve everything
I thought I knew up to this point. This act was not undertaken for
its own sake, or to serve some abstract principle of rebellion, but
proceeded from the realization that all the sciences were at present
on shaky ground. "All the basic principles of the sciences were taken
from philosophy," he writes, "which itself had no certain ones. Since
my goal was certainty, "I resolved to consider almost as false any
opinion which was merely plausible." Thus the starting point of the
scientific method, insofar as Descartes was concerned, was a healthy
skepticism. Certainly the mind ought to be able to know the world, but
first it must rid itself of credulity and medieval rubbish, with which
it had become inordinately cluttered. "My whole purpose," he points out,
"was to achieve greater certainty and to reject the loose earth and sand
in favor of rock and clay."

 

 

The principle of methodical doubt, however, brought Descartes to a very
depressing conclusion: there was nothing at all of which one could
be certain. For all I know, he writes in the "Meditations on First
Philosophy" (1641), there could be a total disparity between reason
and reality. Even if I assert that God is good, and is not deceiving me
when I try to equate reason with reality, how do I know there is not a
malignant demon running about who confuses me? How do I know that 2 + 2
do not make 5, and that this demon does not deceive me, every time I make
the addition, into believing the numbers add up to 4? But even if this
were the case, concludes Descartes, there is one thing I do know: that I
exist. For even if I am deceived, there is obviously a "me" who is being
deceived. And thus, the bedrock certainty that underlies everything: I
think, therefore I am. For Descartes, thinking was identical to existing.

 

 

This postulate is, of course, only a beginning. I want to be certain of
more than just my own existence. Confronted with the rest of knowledge,
however, Descartes finds it necessary to demonstrate (which he does
most unconvincingly) the existence of a benevolent Deity. The existence
of such a God immediately guarantees the propositions of mathematics,
which alone among the sciences relies on pure mental activity. There
can be no deception when I sum the angles of a triangle; the goodness
of God guarantees that my purely mental operations will be correct,
or as Descartes says, clear and distinct. And extrapolating from this,
we see that knowledge of the external world will also have certitude
if its ideas are clear and distinct, that is, if it takes geometry as
its model (Descartes never really did define, to anybody's satisfaction,
the terms "clear" and "distinct"). Science, says Descartes, must become a
"universal mathematics"; numbers are the only test of certainty.

 

 

The disparity between Descartes and Bacon would seem to be complete.
Whereas the latter sees the foundations of knowledge in sense data,
experiment, and the mechanical arts, Descartes sees only confusion in such
subjects and finds clarity in the operations of the. mind, alone.9 Thus
the method he sets forth for acquiring gnowleage is based, he tells us,
on geometry. The first step is the statement of the problem that, in its
complexity, will be obscure and confused. The second step is breaking
the problem down into its simplest units, its component parts. Since
one can perceive directly and immediately what is clear and distinct in
these simplest units, one can finally reassemble the whole structure in a
logical fashion. Now the problem, complex though it may be, is no longer
unknown (obscure and confused), because we ourselves have first broken it
down and then put it back together again. Descartes was so impressed with
this discovery that he regarded it as the key, indeed the only key, to
the knowledge of the world. "Those long chains of reasoning," he writes,
"so simple and easy, which enabled the geometricians to reach the most
difficult demonstrations, had made me wonder whether all things knowable
to men might not fall into a similar logical sequence."10

 

 

Although Bacon's identification of knowledge with industrial utility and
his grappling with the concept of experiment based on technology certainly
underlie much of our current scientific thought, the implications drawn
from the Cartesian corpus exercised a staggering impact on the subsequent
history of Western consciousness and (despite the differences with Bacon)
served to confirm the technological paradigm -- indeed, even helped to
launch it on its way. Man's activity as a thinking being -- and that
is his essence, according to Descartes -- is purely mechanical. The
mind is in possession of a certain method. It confronts the world as a
separate object. It applies this method to the object, again and again
and again, and eventually it will know all there is to know. The method,
furthermore, is also mechanical. The problem is broken down into its
components, and the simple act of cognition (the direct perception)
has the same relationship to the knowledge of the whole problem that,
let us say, an inch has to a foot: one measures (perceives) a number of
times, and then sums the results. Subdivide, measure, combine; subdivide,
measure, combine.

 

 

This method may properly be called "atomistic," in the sense that knowing
consists of subdividing a thing into its smallest components. The essence
of atomism, whether material or philosophical, is that a thing consists
of the sum of its parts, no more and no less. And Descartes' greatest
legacy was surely the mechanical philosophy, which followed directly
from this method. In the "Principles of Philosophy" (1644) he showed
that the logical linking of clear and distinct ideas led to the notion
that the universe was a vast machine, wound up by God to tick forever,
and consisting of two basic entities: matter and motion. Spirit, in
the form of God, hovers on the outside of this billlard-ball universe,
but plays no direct part in it. All nonmaterial phenomena ultimately
have a material basis. The action of magnets, attracting each other
over a distance, may seem to be nonmaterial, says Descartes, but the
application of the method can and will ultimately uncover a particulate
basis for their behavior. What Descartes does, really, is provide Bacon's
technological paradigm with strong philosophical teeth. The mechanical
philosophy, the use of mathematics, and the formal application of his
four-step method enable the manipulation of the environment to take
place with some sort of logical regularity.

 

 

The identification of human existence with pure ratiocination, the idea
that man can know all there is to know by way of his reason, included
for Descartes the assumption that mind and body, subject and object,
were radically disparate entities. Thinking, it would seem, separates me
from the world I confront. I perceive my body and its functions, but "I"
am not my body. I can learn about the (mechanical) behavior of my body by
applying the Cartesian method -- and Descartes does this in his treatise
"On Man" (1662) -- but it always remains the object of my perception. Thus
Descartes depicted the operation of the human body by means of analogy to
a water fountain, with mechanical reflex action being the model of most,
if not all, human behavior. The mind, res cogitans ("thinking substance"),
is in a totally different category from the body, res extensa ("extended
substance"), but they do have a mechanical interaction that we can
diagram as in Figure 3, below. If the hand touches a flame, the fire
particles attack the finger, pulling a thread in the tubular nerve which
releases the "animal spirits" (conceived as mechanical corpuscles) in the
brain. These then run down the tube and jerk the muscles in the hand.11

 

 

There is, it seems to me, an uncanny similarity between this diagram
and that of Laing's "false-self system" depicted in the Introduction
(see Figure 2). Schizophrenics typically regard their bodies as "other,"
"not-me." In Descartes' diagram, too, brain (inner self) is the detached
observer of the parts of the body; the interaction is mechanical, as
though one saw oneself behaving as a robot -- a perception that is easily
extended to the rest of the world. To Descartes, this mind-body split was
true of
all
perception and behavior, such that in the act of thinking
one perceived oneself as a separate entity "in here" confronting things
"out-there." This schizoid duality lies at the heart of the Cartesian
paradigm.

 

 

 

 

 

Descartes' emphasis on clear and distinct ideas, and his basing
of knowledge on geometry, also served to reaffirm, if not actually
canonize, the Aristotelian principle of noncontradiction. According to
this principle, a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time. When
I strike the letter "A" on my typewriter, I get an "A" on the paper
(assuming the machine is working properly), not a "B." The cup of coffee
sitting to the right of me could be put on a scale and found to have a
weight of, say, 5.24 ounces, and this fact means that the object does not
weigh ten pounds or two grams. Since the Cartesian paradigm recognizes
no self-contradictions in logic, and since logic (or geometry), according
to Descartes, is the way nature behaves and is known to us, the paradigm
allows for no self-contradictions in nature.

 

 

The problems with Descartes' view are perhaps obvious, but for now,
it will suffice to note that real life operates dialectically, not
critically.12 We love and hate the same thing simultaneously, we fear
what we most need, we recognize ambivalence as a norm rather than an
aberration. Descartes' devotion to critical reason led him to identify
dreams, which are profoundly dialectical statements, as the model of
unreliable knowledge. Dreams, he tells us in the "Meditations on First
Philosophy," are not clear and distinct, but invariably obscure and
confused. They are filled with frequent self-contradictions, and possess
(from the viewpoint of critical reason) neither internal nor external
coherence. For example, I might dream that a certain person I know is my
father, or even that I am my father, and that I am arguing with him. But
this dream is (from a Cartesian point of view) internally incoherent,
because I am simply not my father, nor can he be himself and someone
else as well; and it is externally incoherent, because upon waking, no
matter how real it all seems for a moment, I soon realize that my father
is three thousand miles away, and that the supposed confrontation never
took place. For Descartes, dreams are not material in nature, cannot be
measured, and are not clear, and distinct. Given Descartes' criteria,
then, they contain no reliable information.