THESIS - CHAPTER THREE - A REINTRODUCTION

“Life without playing music is inconceivable for me… I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music… I get most joy in life out of music”

– Albert Einstein, violinist (Foster, 2005, p. 1).

“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts”

– Richard Feynman, conga drum enthusiast (Feynman, 2005, p. 187).

I felt skeptical about the narrative I was hearing starting in our first residency. Not only did I have certain doubts but such a diversity of scholars all arriving at the same set of conclusions felt too clean and simple to be real. My admittedly over-active sense of skepticism was doubly triggered because I knew virtually nothing of this René Descartes guy. Of course, we all discover new actors and aspects of history all the time, however I was reading this fellow as steering more of culture and history than even epoch-spanning global institutions all while being credited, I would argue, with delivering more misery than all of history’s tyrants combined. So, I had to learn more.

Encyclopedic Summaries

From the comfort of my Royal Roads dorm, I started my reintroduction to Descartes by reading the first two sites that arose from an Internet search of his name: his Wikipedia page and his entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. These were sure to give me a taste of the man and his ideas. Both sources were tantalizing and immediately left me with many more questions. I interpreted the most basic details of the man’s life and common quotations from him as corrosive to the interpretations we read throughout so much recent scholarship.[1]

Descartes’ personal context was what first struck me. He was born into a Roman Catholic family in the Kingdom of France, on the edge of the Holy Roman Empire during the height of the Church’s power and influence, nearly two centuries prior to the French Revolution. Further, I read that he attended a Jesuit school in his formative years. This made me assume that, like a mussel or barnacle accreting calcium from the sea to build its shell, Descartes' worldview and philosophy was formulated out of those mainstream Pope-approved postulates he was fully immersed in. Too, being infused with and firmly nestled in the Ancien Régime (with its mutualistic symbiosis between church and monarch, tightly held and strongly wielded powers of censorship and control, all simultaneous with a religious fervor precipitated by an outpouring of devotional texts) didn’t seem like the time or place one formed, never mind published, any overtly anti-spiritual works or even anything inspiring such.[2] In my world today, where information comes easy and dissent in many forms is often celebrated, sacrosanct are ideas of social determinism and the overwhelming influence of institutional power. Any argument that Descartes was under little or no such influence, therefore, and in the Late Medieval Kingdom of France, of all places, felt preposterous. If he was a more ardent agnostic or atheist, how free was he to express such views in this context – even in written correspondence or private conversation with others? And even if he was anti-religious to his core, I imagined that at the very least he still held something approximating a Christian worldview: professing basic Christian ethics as well as holding ideas such as the common Catholic notion of a soul, just as so many self-styled non-believers I know do today. In this light, I then wondered how his work became synonymous with sapping the world of all its soul and sacredness? That certainly couldn’t have been his intention, could it?[3] As a result, I felt I needed to look deeper into all of this.

What came next really piqued my interest and touched directly on Descartes’ faith. I found that he claimed to have had a series of strange dreams, visitations from a divine spirit, that revealed to him a unifying vision of all creation and forming the fundamentals of what would be a new philosophy. On the night of November 10th, 1619, while in the town of Neuburg an der Donau in central Bavaria, Descartes retreated from the cold to the warmth of his room where he slipped into three life-altering dreams. These visions, he said, imparted to him that all true wisdom and fundamental truths were interconnected, that systematic pursuit by way of reason could reveal them, and that this would be the central focus of his life. It is written that upon leaving his room he had synthesized all this and formulated his analytical geometry as well as a method for tackling philosophy by way of a mathematical method (“René Descartes,” 2019). To mark the experience, within months of these visions Descartes was on a pilgrimage to the Basilica della Santa Casa in Loreto, Italy; the temple enshrining the house in which it is believed the Virgin Mary lived and, in Descartes’ time, a statue of the Black Madonna with Infant Jesus. All of this seemed very much like the experience and behaviour of someone fully enwrapped in his faith. And, regardless of whatever else he wrote, with these dreams as inspiration for everything that came after (and no suggestion he ever walked back the claim), I wondered how he could be so readily interpreted as inspiring doubt toward Catholic teachings. This seemed like a man totally open to the mystical, not disavowing it or directed at eliminating all sacredness from the universe. For me at least, and at this early stage of inquiry, none of those negative notions I came across in course readings and what was said to be his beliefs or the foundation of his philosophy seemed to be congruent with his life experience or actions.

Another excerpt suggested the impression I had of Descartes was further off still. Quoted was an autobiographical note from his philosophical treatise Discourse on Method (1637), where he wrote:

I entirely abandoned the study of letters. Resolving to seek no knowledge other than that of which could be found in myself or else in the great book of the world, I spent the rest of my youth traveling, visiting courts and armies, mixing with people of diverse temperaments and ranks, gathering various experiences, testing myself in the situations which fortune offered me, and at all times reflecting upon whatever came my way to derive some profit from it. (“René Descartes,” 2019)

From where I was sitting this read like a reasonable take-away from my MAEEC residency. “Learning from the great book of the world” felt more like a tattoo you might get after graduating, or perhaps the subtitle to one of our instructors’ dissertations, than the self-reported orientation of someone responsible for disregarding and devitalizing the entire oozing, humming, thumping cosmos. Here we had someone highlighting the subjective, valuing experiential learning, seeking diverse viewpoints, and noting the power of reflection, too. To me, this stated disposition made Descartes seem not like a perfect antagonist to Environmental Education but like a firm proponent. This quote was followed by another – another that seemed to contradict not just what I believed Descartes to think but also how. Provided in a subsection on his philosophical work labelled “Dualism” was a selection from his Meditations (1641) that read in part:

Nature also teaches me, by the sensations of pain, hunger, thirst and so on, that I am not merely present in my body as a pilot in his ship, but that I am very closely joined and, as it were, intermingled with it, so that I and the body form a unit. (“René Descartes,” 2019)

To me, body and mind being so “closely joined” as to “form a unit” felt to be nearly the opposite of the catastrophic, atom-splitting bifurcation described in our readings. The assertion here, a unification informed by nature, paired with the knowledge that this was motivated by divine visions, gave the whole notion of Cartesian Dualism a very different feel, whatever its historical impact. It all seemed like something we might expect from Rachel Carson, Carolyn Merchant, Robin Wall Kimmerer, or any number of our other favourite environmental thinkers.[4] I was only more curious when I read (just a short scroll down the page to a section titled “Philosophical work” and under the subsection “Natural science”) that Descartes created what could be read as a formal systems theory that analogized his entire philosophy to a tree, one which placed metaphysics as its foundation. As Descartes explained in a written correspondence with his translator:

Thus, all Philosophy is like a tree, of which Metaphysics is the root, Physics the trunk, and all the other sciences the branches that grow out of this trunk, which are reduced to three principals, namely, Medicine, Mechanics, and Ethics. By the science of Morals, I understand the highest and most perfect which, presupposing an entire knowledge of the other sciences, is the last degree of wisdom. (“René Descartes,” 2019, n.p.)

Grounded in faith, Descartes imagined the universe as an inherently integrated system – or that’s how I read him.[5] Where I was confused before, I now felt lost.

Caping off my Wikipedia search was a link to a page on Descartes’ “Provisional Morals” within his Discourse on the Method (1637) that promised insight if not into his own thinking at least into the thinking he pressed his readers to take up. In “Part III: Morals and Maxims of Conducting the Method” he spelled out three critical principles for inquiry by radical doubt:

1. The first was to obey the laws and customs of my country, adhering firmly to the faith in which, by the grace of God, I had been educated from my childhood and regulating my conduct in every other matter according to the most moderate opinions, and the farthest removed from extremes, which should happen to be adopted in practice with general consent of the most judicious of those among whom I might be living.

2. Be as firm and resolute in my actions as I was able.

3. Endeavor always to conquer myself rather than fortune, and change my desires rather than the order of the world, and in general, accustom myself to the persuasion that, except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power; so that when we have done our best in things external to us, our ill-success cannot possibly be failure on our part. (“Discourse on the Method,” 2019, n.p.)

Alone these three rules of conduct were surprising; in concert with all that came before on this initial search, I was left flabbergasted. Translations of Descartes’ own words felt hostile to essentially all those readings that invoked his work and its repercussions. Where was all this “ecological mischief” David Orr had written of? If it was there at all, it seemed likely to be marinating in a potent pool of ecological wisdom and insight, or so it looked to me after just a small sampling of Cartesian quotes. Orr noted this philosopher’s “cold passion to remake the world” when the man’s aim and written commandment for others to follow was, as above, “to conquer myself rather than fortune, and change my desires rather than the order of the world.” How did these two conflicting ideas coexist? Descartes seemed to forward the most conservative platform possible in his writing: insisting upon adherence to custom, faith, law, and above all moderation. How then was he deemed such a radical revolutionary? Anything of the sort seems, to my reading, to fly in the face of his offerings to the world. I could not have felt more lost or agitated as a result of all this. We had this man’s ideas in writing and we’ve had nearly four centuries to make sense of them and track their repercussions. How then could there be so much easy and abundant contradiction floating around? I wondered if there were deeply contrary takes like this around the thinking of Newton or Darwin, say? Was there a school of thought out there arguing that Marie Curie did not discover radium and polonium and was not the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win a Nobel twice, and the only one to accept awards in two different fields? That’s what this was starting to feel like. What motivated this, I wondered? Descartes’ writings were not sacred texts, held by some as containing everything worth caring about and whose interpretation was being fought over by rival factions with competing worldviews. Or was that exactly what was happening?

Sitting with all of this, I noted in my school journal that the discourse surrounding Descartes could be framed in religious terms. A parallel to stories from the Old Testament seemed rather easy to make. I saw chapter three of Genesis all over this. We had a “tree of knowledge” and we also had an obvious analog to biblical Adam. I read Descartes framed as having eaten from the tree and causing the entire species to transition from organic Edenic innocence, in balance with the all-sacred Wholeness, to wholesale fragmentation and debasement. It also seemed clear that many contemporary voices were calling for the expulsion of all forms of Cartesianism, and just about anything that could be said to have been inspired by it, to prevent miscreant forces (just like Adam and Eve) from eating from the “tree of life” and thereby gaining immortality (or any other such threats to divine order posed by advances in science and technology, from genetic engineering to artificial intelligence and beyond.) There were other linkages, too. In Genesis, the one responsible for Adam’s lawbreaking was the snake, who in Jewish myth is often associated with divination and fortune-telling (Smith, 2015). Of course, Descartes’ method is framed as the toolkit (or in some readings the proto-scientific method that would evolve into the more powerful system we have today) used for making accurate predictions. Though perhaps reaching and potentially offensive, this analogy of mine did not seem totally ridiculous. I felt like what was being presented in environment-related discourses was a modern revision of the Christian creation story, something like The Fall 2.0.

Given these findings, all the questions I had, the absurd conspiracy theory I was now nursing, and my difficulty understanding any of the above, it came as no surprise when I moved on from Wikipedia to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and discovered there the following recommendation at the conclusion to their introduction on this philosopher: “Those new to the study of Descartes should engage his own works in some detail prior to developing a view of his legacy” (Hatfield, 2014). It was true and, if nothing else, reading Descartes myself felt unavoidable.

What Next?

I was sure I would not be able to organize all of this, never mind make sense of it, over the span of just one weekend; certainly not during our short, on-campus residency. Any real hope of understanding began to feel like a terribly daunting task, one that I didn’t feel suited to. Though I like a puzzle as much as the next person and enjoy playing with ideas, I had no background in any of what seemed like pertinent themes: theology, philosophy, or psychology. Also, I already found modern texts difficult; older ones like Shakespeare or even Dickens were excruciating and I was not sure I wanted to go too far down such a road. Still, this felt important and I had so many ugly loose ends I wanted to sort out. If nothing else, given how on-topic it was, I could possibly turn this, what felt like scholarly work, into part of a thesis. Could I do that, I wondered? Should I? If I was going to make this my thesis topic, did I want to brand myself a species of dunderheaded troglodyte who would go and read the life’s work of this dead philosopher – someone receiving a posthumous scholastic crucifixion for committing what were said to be blatant crimes against the numinous and the beautiful – and then, in effect, defend that guy, as it seemed I was already doing? What kind of idiot does that? And why would a non-philosopher like myself undertake such a thing? And why would I burn all the fuel the task would require when there were so many other projects that would be frictionless and something others could be enthusiastic about? Why wouldn’t I do a project about children and the environment or about the restorative superpowers of fungi? No-one, possibly even me, would be enthusiastic about an Environmental Education thesis pontificating on possible interpretations of archaic philosophy. Still, I needed to read on.

How to Read René?

Given all the conflicting information, I wanted to read and interpret this philosopher myself. The language of the source material was the first clear and substantial barrier, however. I was convinced that his writing in Latin and Old French was problem enough for me; but then, of course, he also did so nearly four centuries ago. Were I fluent in his mother tongue, the landscape of ideas had shifted, or rather erupted, so dramatically between his time and my own that it seemed easier to contemplate the little we could reasonably have in common. Even this felt difficult for me. For fun, I considered what Descartes and I could talk about if we were to meet in person. I was certain that even if we shared a language we would still be bogged down just attempting to build what would likely be a tremendously shaky conceptual framework from which to begin.[6] I think about this kind of thing all the time and it’s still challenging to feel I’ve wrapped my head around how very different the world and our thinking on most subjects are today from that of any other time.

In one of our earliest readings in grad school was a quote from Raymond Williams that read, “We need new words because we need new relationships” (Pezzulo & Cox, 2017, p. 51). As someone with a degree in Communication and studying Environmental Communication, I couldn’t agree with this sentiment more. I don’t feel I can overstate the power of words and ideas or their derivations and transformations. One of the places David Abram (2017), Robin Wall Kimmerer (2017) and I see eye-to-eye is in the assessment that words are powerful, world-altering magic. As per Williams’ quote above, I don’t see the difference in number of words or shifting meanings within language over time, or between different languages (Descartes’ Latin and my English, say), as akin to simply having greater or fewer inert lexical LEGO blocks for building phrases out of. Instead, each word carries with it hidden powers to alter perception, experience, and relations. And yet, while words are powerful tools that may shift perspective and understanding, over enough time these lone word differences, and certainly many of them compounding, may fundamentally transform the world. They may be so transformative that they result in entirely different ways of seeing and understanding – in a manner not unlike evolving new sense receptors. At some point, and often pretty quickly, what happens is that our suite of perceptual and meaning-making tools begins to resolve entirely different realities, despite being aimed in the same direction. As I see it, this language change is more profound than the transition from the naked eye to using the simplest telescope or microscope, which alone caused a tremendous revolution in our understanding and worldview. That’s because the view of the objects these tools are trained on merely yield more detail of something recognizable. The shift in symbols and associations that come with an evolution in language eventually becomes so great that it is more like transitioning from the naked eye to a scanning electron microscope or a gamma-ray telescope (in which new and unforeseen worlds emerge, requiring both technological assistance just to process and then expert interpretation of what results).

To me, this seems obvious and makes the simplest task of merely transcribing language, word for word, appear difficult. I recall a quote within James Gleick’s fantastic, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. His prologue opens with a quote from “the father of information theory”, Claude Shannon (1916-2001), that reads, “The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning” (Gleick, 2011, p. 3).[7] Far more challenging than simple transcription is the need to navigate the additional conceptual, semiotic, and semantic inventions and revolutions that have occurred across time. This project of multiplying the lexical distance between different tongues by the semantic leaps separating author and reader is, I think, more confounding that we tend to believe. As a matter of fact, what I see as an abyssal chasm of language and perspective is most often overlooked entirely, as though it does not even exist.[8] I recognise this gap in mutual understanding less like a border, demarcating a shift or break in culture (in which critical differences may be present but are overcome with a little effort), and more as a cleavage so vast as to be more closely akin to the experiential barrier between species, wherein connection is possible but truly knowing another’s mind and world is at best unlikely.[9] It may seem absurd at first glance, but I believe the biological similarities between people blind us to almost everything in the world of meaning and lull us into a mistaken sense of commonality and mutual understanding when, in fact, so little correspondence exists that legitimate comprehension is doubtful. To my thinking, even if we share the same root language, a human alive just a few centuries or millennia ago could not have stared up at the stars and shared virtually any of the thoughts I have when I look up at them, nor could I ponder almost any of their thoughts.[10]

To get back to Descartes, without having read the man, I know that he and I share little common ground for understanding. From the most discrete objects or experiences to large, encompassing, worldview-orienting concepts, the entire information landscape and nearly every idea I have at my disposal is either substantively different or entirely alien from his. On the volume and rate of new information arriving in the world, there’s a quote from an acclaimed professor of history that reads, “A weekday edition of The New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in seventeenth-century.”This offers some perspective, but what’s amazing about the observation is that it was published by a Dr. Theodore Roszak (the same person who coined the term “Ecopsychology”) in his book titled, The Cult of Information, back in 1986 – prior to the Internet and when the newspaper was considered a staggeringly prolific source of new information (p. 11).[11] Inspired by this idea, John C. Maxwell (2002) estimated that “more new information has been produced in the last thirty years than in the previous 5,000” (p. i). And around this same time, a report from the University of California at Berkley explained “the amount of new information stored on paper, film, magnetic, and optical media has about doubled in the last three years” (School of Information Management and Systems, 2003, n.p.). That said, in the nearly two decades since these statements were made the production and distribution of information and the rate of change in ideas has accelerated such that attempting to quantify this (never mind understand it) has become an almost worthless endeavour. According to recent research, for example, global annual internet traffic will have exceeded three zettabytes in 2021 (Cisco, 2017). I like big numbers and still cannot conceptualize this myself. It’s a volume of journal articles, news reports, stock market transactions, phone calls, emails, photos, videos and more – none of which were concepts when Descartes was alive – so difficult to imagine that one may wish to frame it as something like a 108,000-year-long film communicated via online networks annually, but I feel is better framed as merely incomprehensible. And, of course, this is just to speak of the volume of information: the easiest bit to grapple with.

With regard to René, and still without any discussion of what he wrote, I encounter serious hurdles just making sense of how we talk about the man. And the problem here is the new information and ideas that have arrived as well as the semantic shift accompanying all of this. For instance, authors are forever referring to Descartes as a “scientist” and suggesting he was engaged in “science”. I believe these modern concepts, along with effectively all of the web of meaning and association they carry, certainly any I have, contain no tangible connection to Descartes – nor his predecessors, contemporaries, or many of those who immediately followed him. So, when Capra and Luisi (2019) write, just as others do, that Descartes was a brilliant “mathematician and scientist” whose work “resulted from the progress of science”, derived from his belief in “scientific knowledge” and that “in his mind science was synonymous with mathematics”, I have no idea what they are talking about (p. 22).

Sources agree the term science has its origin in the classical Latin scientia meaning knowledge, a knowing, also expertness, from the root sciens meaning intelligent or skilled (Barber, 2004; Barnhart, 1995; Harper, n.d.-b; Oxford English Dictionary, 2019a). Around the twelfth century and from the Old French, the word arrived in English with the spelling we know, science, but with meanings ranging from knowledge derived from reflection, experience, or study to secular knowledge or knowledge granted by God (Oxford English Dictionary, 2019a). This made me think that during this time and with such a definition, divine visions would have placed Descartes in the category of someone engaged in science. By the late-fourteenth century and in Middle English the term had the same spelling but took on ideas such as book-learning, skillfulness or cleverness, as well as craftiness (Harper, n.d.-b; Oxford English Dictionary, 2019a). It is also suggested that the term became consistently associated with “a socially embedded activity: people seeking, systematising and sharing knowledge” (Butler-Adam, 2015, n.p.). Would clergymen, teachers, and printmakers all be doing science, then? Seems so. Starting in the fifteenth century the word came to be synonymous with experiential knowledge as well as relating to “a skill, handicraft, or trade” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2019a). So, in this time a shipwright, candlemaker, or seamstress would be engaged in science, it seems. The word being associated with studies exclusive of the arts is said to have been attested to first only a generation after Descartes’ time, in the 1670s (Harper, n.d.-b.; Oxford English Dictionary, 2019a). Though still commonly referred to as “philosophy”, the more modern and restricted sense of the term science, that of relating to a body of methodical propositions and observations, came into being only in the eighteenth century (Harper, n.d.-b; Oxford English Dictionary, 2019a). And, relatedly, it wasn’t until June 24, 1833, at the third meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, that the word “scientist” was first uttered. In response to a complaint suggesting people stop using the term “natural philosopher” (argued to be both too general and too lofty a label), the English polymath, poet, essayist, and Anglican priest, Reverend Doctor William Whewell (1794-1866), formed a lexical chimera fusing the ancient Latin scientiawith artist (Snyder, 2012).[12] Ideas such as “scientific revolution”, “scientific method”, and “scientific notation” also come to us from the nineteenth century as well (Oxford English Dictionary, 2019a). Given this etymology, labeling Descartes a “scientist” or claiming he practiced “science” feels outlandish (though only to me, it seems). Even if this philosopher and mathematician used the term himself in his own writing any honest translation would not merely transcribe the word from Latin to English but replace the word, maybe with something like “scholarship” or “learning”. That this doesn’t always happen is all the more shocking when I consider how sensitive and precise most of us attempt to be about labelling people today – how critical we consider it that titles not be merely accurate and also earned but that a person self-identifies with a title before we apply it to them. In this light, labelling Descartes or anyone around his time or prior a scientist feels perfectly unjustified.[13] Further still, this suggests to me that the label is more than a journalistic convenience, a simple shortcut, but may be something of a political tool, an umbrella term applied to an unsavory cohort and meant to render them wholly “other”. As alluded to by David Orr (2004), he and many others are “tempted to round up all of the usual members of the rogue’s gallery” (p. 51). Curiously, this is something done while these same authors discuss holistic and unifying visions, the evils of othering, and the need to embrace nuance and complexity while seeking deeper connection with and understanding of the teeming, sympoietic messiness that is Being.

All this said, if there were no such problems with how we discussed Descartes (or at least with my understanding of this) there would still be far more pressing issues surrounding his ideas. As implied earlier, whomever and wherever you are at the moment you are reading these words of mine, I would argue you are unlikely to find much in your surroundings, on your person, or even arising in your consciousness that is significantly alike anything in Descartes’ world. Remembering that he died in 1650, even if you ignore any of the obvious things (anything that includes plastics or uses electricity, for example) and just seek out staples of conversation and modern life, what you are likely to find would be alien even to many of your most recent ancestors, even if you shared with them a culture and language. What seem like relatively primitive tools in 2021, for example, such as the paperclip, razor blade, barbed wire, or wrench are all brand new inventions (all arriving more recently than the term “scientist”). Everything from the match and the bicycle to dynamite and the guillotine; from the mason jar and thermometer to the piano and sewing machine; from tape to tampons and so much more would not even be figments of anyone’s imagination until centuries after Descartes – this so-called “modern” philosopher. Even virtually all the measurement, precision, ordering, and standardization that pervades our world and thinking were entirely absent from the mind of this genius mathematician from Europe. Ideas such as standardized measures (like the kilogram or meter, Fahrenheit or Celsius, or even standard time or simply the ability to keep time to the second) all had yet to arrive when Descartes was alive. All of these ideas and objects can appear trivial, but any one of them has transformative repercussions. For example, dying long before Daniel Fahrenheit (1686-1736) and Anders Celsius (1701-1744) meant that Descartes had no tool or measure for accurately assessing temperature. Now consider the importance we give today to the difference between two otherwise imperceptible measures, say 38°C and 41°C. This change in body temperature in the year 2021 may be the difference between having no real concern at all and dropping everything to rush one’s child or grandparent to the hospital. For Descartes, whose daughter Francine died at age five of scarlet fever – a death said to have transformed his life and set him on the path to his ultimate quest for universal answers to life’s biggest questions – he alone having a thermometer in this one instance may have altered not just these lives but the course of history. Or consider the global significance of an infinitesimal shift in ocean or atmospheric temperature of just a half a degree over the span of my entire life: the finding of the Fourth Assessment Report of the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (see IPCC Working Group I, 2007). One or two degrees of this sort is casually spoken of in the present as potentially being the difference between the continuation of our own and countless other species and a tipping point that may result in our collective extinction. That said, no part of this reality, this ecological dis-ease alone, never mind the tools or measures for its diagnosis or its proposed remedies, would make any sense to Descartes.[14]

This discussion is not about crude inventions and their applications. Relatedly, and in just the same way as above, our concepts surrounding cause and effect, natural and supernatural, wellness and illness have all changed and undergone a tremendous shift as well. In Descartes’ time a wide range of theories of disease were popular in Europe, for example. Two prominent concepts were related to “humours” and “miasma”. The first arrived from ancient Greece and Rome and insisted that illness resulted from imbalance between the four bodily fluids of blood, black and yellow bile, and phlegm – a belief which justified activities such as bloodletting. The second, miasma, considered exposure to the foul air from murky marshes, the mouths of beasts, or emanating from decaying matter as disrupting the body’s vital and otherwise harmonious functions (Karamanou et al., 2012; Moore, 2007). The belief about disease that sways my own perspective and actions in this time of global pandemic is germ theory. It’s an idea that wasn’t taken up by public health officials and medical professionals until decades after John Snow (1813-1858) had made sense of the London cholera epidemic of 1855. Even thirty years after the epidemic and all of Snow’s labours, even in London, miasma theory remained popular over the seemingly absurd proposition that illness could arise by way of direct fecal-to-oral transmission from a sick person (Johnson, 2006).[15] But when it eventually came, Snow’s revelation was a true revolution. However, there are still more obvious examples than the movement and impact of invisible pathogens.

Even the popular understanding of animal migration is brand new to the West and its accepted forms a radical deviation from prior thinking on the topic. For instance, in the Western world alone, since ancient times popular theories for what happens to birds in Winter have included ideas that, because they are not observed to nest locally, they metamorphose into or from other organisms such as mice or barnacles (see “Barnacle goose myth”, 2021).[16] Other explanations included that birds hibernate or transfer to the bottom of lakes, ponds, or the sea, as an amphibian or turtle might.[17] Using careful calculations based on observations from ornithology, astronomy, and physics, as well as readings from Scripture, near the start of the eighteenth century a Harvard professor proposed that birds do not make for the Carolinas or Florida, Central or South America when temperatures are too cold for them in Massachusetts but instead leave the Earth and fly a 400,000-mile roundtrip to the moon (Harrison, 1954). And it wasn’t until 1822 and the arrival of a very special stork in a field in Germany (the now famous pfeilstorch or “arrow stork” who was found with an African spear running through its neck) that it became more widely accepted that birds were more likely to fly just 1,000 miles south than transmute into other species or traverse open space (Macdonald, 2015).

Even Descartes’ faith, Catholicism, commonly defined by its steadfast tradition, has shifted momentously and would be nearly unrecognizable to him today. Around Descartes’ time, for instance, the Church considered charging interest on a loan to be a grotesque and immoral violation against God but the existence of limbo and practices of capital punishment and slavery were seen to be fully commensurate with the life and teachings of Jesus (see, Curran, 2003; Moehlman, 1934; Vatican International Theological Commission, 2007). So, in a very real sense apples have become oranges, or perhaps kumquats.

Navigating all of the above language matters, of course, is the work of a skilled translator and, though reluctant, I would have to find and rely upon such a person. In the meantime, given that I didn’t have a good translation of his life’s work at my disposal, it seemed I could start to think through some pertinent ideas on my own and with some help from Google Scholar. I started by narrowing my searching to those main concepts environmental educators and other adjacent scholars regularly brought up in reference to René Descartes: most notably his dualism and his clockwork metaphor.

It’s About Time

At the outset, I was particularly fixated on the clock symbol. Our readings suggested to me this philosopher’s innovation was to establish that the human body, animals, plants, and the rest of the corporeal world are all clock-like: mere matter that could be examined, taken apart, put back together, and ultimately explained by the interaction and movement of its components. And further still, that this hypothesis inspired the mechanism and reductionism of later centuries which in turn resulted or assisted in the corruption of the human spirit and the world (Capra & Luisi, 2019; Davis, 2010; Oakley, 2011; Orr, 2004; Sterling et al., 2005).

Even without reading Descartes, I could not imagine how any Late Medieval notion of a clock, or the constellation of sentiments surrounding it, could be anything like my own. The concept I had of a clock was a throw-away bit of extruded plastic paired with cheap electronics and a smattering of toxic metals and chemistry; an easily broken, battery-powered, sweatshop-produced contraption found in a towering heap within a giant cardboard box, between the potato peelers and lightbulbs, on sale at Ikea for $1.99. And time (that valuable thing a cheap clock delivers) was, in my experience, nearly everywhere, embedded in nearly everything, and often in more reliable, accurate, and easily accessed forms than coming from a contraption called a clock. As a result, it felt to me that clocks (not even a good source of time in the 21st century) were so cheap and obsolete that they maintained little meaning, value, or purpose above being nostalgic wall ornaments. I imagined that none of this could possibly have been so in Descartes’ time. Therefore, though true, stating that Cartesian philosophy compared all corporeal creation to a clock or clockwork seemed misleading. So then, what ideas could his metaphor have contained in his own time? I knew a little about old clocks. All the old clocks I had ever heard about were treasured. The really old ones were very large, housed in medieval European churches, and were even more culturally and materially valuable – and not so merely for their age. In my journal, I also noted Big Ben, that newer clock tower that was effectively the symbol of London, the seat of a multi-century globe-spanning empire. This thinking had my skepticism revving once again.

Over the span of several weeks, I began diving into the origins of Descartes’ mechanical clocks. There I discovered some fascinating context. In a work titled Understanding the Middle Ages: The Transformation of Ideas and Attitudes in the Medieval World, Kleinschmidt (2000) offered an entire chapter on the origins of clocks in Europe and the changing experience of time during this period. The author notes that Catholic mass demanded specific hours of worship which led monks and nuns to employ and improve upon water clocks, sand dials, and other time measurement devices for this purpose (p. 24).

This was a surprising and critical historical fact. Learning of this caused me to question whether or not the popular idea of the modern obsession with measurement and cold systematization was entirely bunk. What are commonly said to be the repressive and corrupting forces of clock-time, resulting in the ordering and quantification of the world – framed as defilements of nature in Bonnett (2007), Merchant (1990), Orr (2004), Plotkin (2003), and many others – was born not of the Scientific Revolution but came centuries earlier and was compelled by the ultra-faith of monastics within the religious sanctuary of the monastery. This blew my mind.

The author then wrote about how these simpler devices paved the way for Europe’s first mechanical clocks. Catholic monks, like Richard of Wallingford (1292-1336), were the original clockmakers and their works resided in churches where they served primarily religious purposes (Kleinschmidt, 2000, p. 26). It seemed this had to be a reasonable approximation of the foundation for any idea of clockwork with which Descartes wrote: a devotional tool for the ascetic class within the halls of the Catholic Church. Already, just one chapter of one book in, and this clock story was looking messy and interesting.

Wiglesworth (2006) added to this picture in his Science and Technology in Medieval European Life. Chapter eight, The Passage of Time: Calendars and clocks, explains how the mechanization of time in the form of mechanical clocks (“horologium” or “cloche”, in the native Latin) led to them moving out of the church and becoming desirable status symbols held in private by royalty. From there mechanical clocks moved on to became projects of prestige bringing fame to whole cites and entire regions. Not only were these costly projects, equivalent to many millions of dollars today, but they were also nothing like their modern abstract counterparts. At this time, clocks still maintained all their spiritual symbolism but in addition, they projected all of that loudly to the world, both visually and acoustically. These early mechanical clocks commonly contained elements like a border of scenes or figures from the bible, a mobile procession of saints, and/or displays reminding the public of church teachings as well as pertinent astrological data (Wiglesworth, 2006).

Clear connections between clocks and the rest of the natural world only grew during this period, too. To start, for centuries these time-keeping devices were not so accurate as to warrant a minute hand, never mind a second hand, and easily lost track of time over a relatively short period. As such, not only were they initially fabricated and calibrated by reference to the sun but they regularly needed to be recalibrated as they fell out of sync. So, there was no clock, clock-maker, or clock-owner not in constant engagement with the celestial. As well, many of these clocks were astronomical in nature and charted the movements of the sun, moon, planets, and stars as well as their phases. A synthesis of these realms, physical and metaphysical, was the common rooster automaton (a symbol of Christ’s passion) found atop many clocks and which could often be heard calling at dawn by way of an automated bellows.[18] A prime specimen from this time is the famous Prague Astronomical Clock (Prague Orloj). Construction on the project began in 1410 and, though it has been expanded and refurbished over the centuries, this four-storey masterpiece still dazzles crowds today.[19] As well as giving the date and four different readings of time (Babylonian, Old Bohemian, Central European, and Star time), it contains: an astrolabe depicting the state of the known universe with its constellations of stars and planets; an elaborate ring charting the movement of the sun and moon, as well as moon phases, and the relation of both to the signs of the Zodiac; a fully ornate annual calendar laid with gold and inscribed with the names of 365 saints to mark the day and feast of each one; all of which are topped by a celestial parade of the Twelve Apostles who march passed on the hour and are themselves watched over by a golden rooster (McFadden, 2019; “Prague Astronomical Clock,” 2019; Theodossiou, E. et al., 2009).

Dohrn-van Rossum (1996), in his History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders, provided still more provocative detail about clocks from this era with an entire chapter titled, From Prestige Object to Urban Accessory: The Diffusion of Public Clocks in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries. Here, the author shares how the building of a clock was of necessity a communal affair. These creations, he explains, often transformed into competitions between cities and territorial lords, in cooperation with and receiving funding from ecclesiastical institutions and kings, all of which resulted in them becoming still more beautiful and elaborate. As well as being prestige-enhancing projects, commonly developed for the beautification and honour of the city, these clocks were also described as being for not just the utility of the citizenry but also their ease and comfort. Though often taking pride of place in a tower at the center of town or on the highest wall of a city’s church, these works became more than a point of pride for its citizens or a tool for keeping time but functioned as a barometer for civic wellbeing. For instance, it is said that Charles V (1500-1558), Holy Roman Emperor and famous clock collector, made visit to a town’s clock his first point of inspection as the clearest sign of a competent and well-functioning administration (p. 154-157). Importantly, by the late 16th century, when Descartes was born – in addition to all the religious, prestigious, ostentatious, and civic functions – clocks had only grown more socially significant and useful as astrologers, astronomers, and seafarers alike pushed clockmakers for evermore miniaturization and precision (Álvarez, 2015). That said, these examples still arrived before the common ownership of clocks or the invention of pocket or wrist watches as we know them today; so, it was in this context I considered the ideas and impressions behind René Descartes’ metaphor must sit.

Reading all this convinced me Descartes was referencing something understood to be almost immeasurable in value and complexity, inspiring the awe of kings, and all while being intertwined with and expressive of community, faith, and nature. Construction of a clock required: the funds of a pope, emperor, or entire population; the skills of a coordinated team of astrologers and/or astronomers, mathematicians, engineers, architects, craftspeople, and other labourers, all of whom worked with the widest variety of materials. And, even with such orchestration, it may have taken an entire team years or even decades to complete such an impressive conflagration of ideas and expressions. When completed, these were enchanted marvels, works of public art, sculpture, storytelling, and magic brought together into a seemingly impossible multimodal simulacra of inherently entangled physical and metaphysical universes. These were artificial living things, uber-symphonies composed of interactions between collections of much smaller and often hidden mini symphonies; all of which could not help but cause observers to contemplate nature and the divine, life and death, heaven and hell. So, was it this clock to which Descartes was comparing an algae or mold, sea sponge or worm? What else could he or his contemporaries have had in mind? By comparison, for mere clocks it seemed to me these entities were more relevant and impressive in their time than projects like the Large Hadron Collider or International Space Station are in our own. I, for one, would never label these things miraculous, think of them as anything more than expensive lab equipment, and would happily sacrifice either or both to save any one of our oldest clocks.

The Origin of a Metaphor

All of this had me considering how seminal René Descartes metaphor could have been, given that clocks were so prominent and important for centuries before his time. Regardless of the intended meaning of his metaphor, was he the first or most popular, or even just the loudest or most prolific, person to analogize humans, the rest of life, or the material world with machinery? This was very much the impression our course readings left me with. Answering this could give me a better sense for whether or not he was the source of this idea or anything like it and, thus, how responsible he might be for gifting this concept to the world.

The earliest example of a clockwork universe I spotted in the literary wilds was implied in an introduction to astronomy by John of Sacrobosco (c.1195-c.1256), titled De Sphaera Mundi (On the Sphere of the Cosmos) published in 1230. Described as the most successful book of astronomy of its time, with manuscripts reproduced and used in universities for centuries, the text discusses the machina mundi (machine of the universe) and spells out further how “[t]he machine of the universe is divided into two, the ethereal and the elementary region” (Grant, 1974, p. 443). This was a shocking find as it approximated, in just a few words, two of the most common ideas attributed to Descartes: reference to the cosmos as a machine while also suggesting creation was a duality comprised of material and immaterial.

From there, I discovered a spiritual guide written in 1339 by the German mystic, Dominican friar, and Catholic saint, Henry Suso (1295-1366). Its title, Horologium Sapientiae, translated variously to Clock of Wisdom or otherwise as Wisdom’s Watch Upon the Hours, sets out in twenty-four chapters “the framing metaphor of the clock, not as a measure of duration, but in terms of the exaltation of the human spirit and body” (Bradbury & Collette, 2009, p. 360). Suso also notices throughout the work how both spirit and body, like a clock, require keen supervision and regulation to maintain proper function. This work of Latin, with its Middle English and Old French translations, is said to have been widely read through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and is considered a Medieval bestseller, as “one of the three most popular devotional treatises in Western Europe” (p. 361).[20]

Next in line was the famous work by poet and Medieval chronicler Jean Froissart (1337-1405). Titled, L’Orloge Amoureus (The Clock of Love) and written in 1368, the poem compares both Froissart’s love and his beloved to the latest and most astonishing technology on the scene: the clock escapement mechanism. Froissart likens the lover’s heart to the body of a clock, desire to the clock’s main wheel, and the regulating wheel he calls temperance (Bradbury & Collette, 2009).

Bishop Nicole Oresme (c.1325-1382) wrote his Le Livre du Ciel et du Monde (Book of the Heavens and Earth) around 1377. In it he describes the world as an horloge, “a regular clockwork that was neither fast nor slow, never stopped, and worked in summer and winter” (Frank, 2011, p. 85). In turn, Philippe de Mézières (1327-1405) used a clock metaphor in his 1389, Songe du Vieil Pelerin (The Old Pilgrim’s Dream). Advisor to five kings, two emperors, and two popes, de Mézières establishes the clock as his central metaphor and teaching tool; key to which, he asserts, are the clock’s properties of restraint, predictable movement, and reliable flows of energy (Bradbury & Collette, 2009).

Writing in Middle English around this period was Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400), who also spent time inviting his audience to think about and connect to clocks (Bradbury & Collette 2009). In addition, within his Parlement of Foules, Chaucer describes his character Chauntecleer, a rooster (with a possible religious connotation), as keeping time in “equal hours, hours of the clock, hours as measured in right ascension, equinoctial measure” (cited in Bradbury & Collette, 2009, p. 367).

And in the final year of that century, famous across Europe as a female writer and a kind of proto-feminist, and all while under the patronage of dukes and kings, Christine de Pizan (1364-1430) composed Epistre d'Othea (Othea’s Letter). Comparing humans to clocks, de Pizan wrote:

Temperance was also called goddess, and because of this our human body is composed of diverse things and must be tempered: according to reason, it can be symbolized as a clock, which has several wheels and weights, and always the clock is worth nothing if not regulated; similarly our human body does not work if temperance does not regulate it. (Bradbury & Collette, 2009, p. 362)

All of this clock-talk made it look like material, personal, and inner emotional worlds were commonly and popularly described as being clock-like – and not less than three hundred years prior to Descartes and across at least three languages (Latin, French, and English). Also, essential to this analysis, it was clear that these framings typically entered the culture by way of authoritative religious and artistic voices in devotional and poetic form. Today such characters would be considered the very antithesis of the cold rationalists and materialists who are said to have given us clockwork metaphors and a mechanistic worldview.

I then wondered about the thinking of Descartes’ more immediate predecessors and contemporaries. I soon discovered that in the seventeenth century this tradition of clock-likening was still being kept up and by some much more widely known authors. William Shakespeare (1564-1616) wrote his comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost around the time of Descartes’ birth. In it his character Lord Biron declares, at the end of Act III Scene I, “I seek a wife! A woman, that is like a German clock…” Around this same time, Shakespeare also writes in King Richard II, in Act V Scene V:

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me; For now hath time made me his numbering clock: My thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they jar Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch, Whereto my finger, like a dial's point, Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears. Now sir, the sound that tells what hour it is Are clamorous groans, which strike upon my heart, Which is the bell: so sighs and tears and groans Show minutes, times, and hours: but my time Runs posting on in Bolingbroke's proud joy, While I stand fooling here, playing the clock for him.

Lines comparing people with clocks are also to be found among the works of the renowned English poet John Donne (1572-1631). A selection from his 1611, An Anatomy of the World: A Funeral Elegy reads:

But must we say she's dead? may't not be said,

That like a sundered clock is piecemeal laid,

Not to be lost, but by the maker's hand,

Repolished, without error then to stand.

Most strikingly, I discovered that in 1605 (when Descartes was just eleven-years-old), Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) penned a letter to a colleague explaining his preoccupation with investigating physical causes and, moreover, his pressing aim to “show that the machine of the universe is not similar to a divine animated being, but similar to a clock” (Shapin, 1996, p. 33).[21] With that last example, I was satisfied that no one could reasonably argue (or at least I could not be made to argue) that it was Descartes who first placed in the popular imagination the idea that the cosmos or any of its constituents were like a clock.

A Cartesian Collection

It was at this time, after the above discoveries, that I picked up my first book about the man and his work. I found an edited collection of writings from Descartes scholar Roger Ariew, titled René Descartes: Philosophical Essays and Correspondence. Though brief, its introduction offered additional context and a taste of the life and times of this thinker. This intro and a first skim through the text made it difficult to understate how disliked Descartes and his writings seemed to be during his lifetime and beyond. This was problematic. I was anticipating that his overwhelming popularity or the widespread celebration of his ideas would make sense of the common interpretation I found in our readings. That is not what I learned. Descartes, it felt to me, mostly received vigorous pushback on his ideas from first publication to death – and, of course, as evidenced by our readings, the sentiment has not improved with time. In response to his first and arguably most influential publication, Discourse on Method, issued in 1637, even his own father considered him foolish (Ariew, 2000). Already disappointed René hadn’t taken up a career in law, his father Joachim judged him doubly ridiculous for having his silly ideas “bound in calf-leather” (Adam, 1910, p. 433).

Further, though only ninety pages long, René’s Meditations on First Philosophy, from 1641, is accompanied by nearly four hundred additional pages of defence to the vehement objections of friends, fellow philosophers, logicians, theologians, and other men of letters. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), most notably, rejected every one of Descartes’ ideas presented in Meditations (Ariew, 2000). Just two years after publication (and the same year Isaac Newton [1643-1727] was born), the University of Utrecht prohibited any teaching of Descartes’ work; an action the school’s rector, Gysberus Voetius (1589-1676), defended on pragmatic, pedagogical, and doctrinal grounds but seemed motivated by unwavering institutional commitment to the infallibility of every word of ancient Aristotelian philosophy (Verbeek, 1992). Serious formal condemnations like this kept coming throughout the rest of the seventeenth century. Following Utrecht’s lead, the University of Leyden banned Cartesian philosophy in 1648. And in 1662, twelve years after his death, Descartes’ ideas were being censored at the University of Louvain. The following year, for what they perceived as his deviating from the consecrated teachings of Aristotle and Aquinas, censors in Rome added Descartes’ works to their Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of Prohibited Books), which essentially removed his writing from public life across the Kingdom of France, throughout the Holy Roman Empire, and anywhere the Church held sway (Ariew, 2000). And apparently further denunciation of Descartes was required when, in 1671, the king along with the faculty of the University of Paris formally committed to rejecting any ideas connected to this philosopher. Twenty years later, in 1691, they went further by requiring all professors in Paris to sign a royal declaration that they had not come under the influence of Cartesian doubt (Ariew, 2014).

I remain unclear about why all of this censorship was required. Though there were a few self-styled Cartesians across Europe at this time, not only was their existence isolated and fleeting but many appear to have subscribed to a misreading of Descartes – the kinds of thinking he warned against and rejected outright in his publications and letters, such as unbridled doubt which could result in the rejection of tradition and authority (Ariew, 2000). To my mind, rather than expunging him, teaching Descartes would seem the surest antidote to all this. Perhaps even more important though, almost everything Descartes-related looks as if it was quickly overshadowed and then rendered obsolete with the revolutionary and rapidly ascendant view of the cosmos birthed by Isaac Newton’s 1687 publication, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) (see Danielson, 2000).

All the above context made me highly suspicious of the entire array of ideas attributed to Descartes and, resultantly, those ideas premised upon them. My provisional conclusion on the whole clockwork discourse was that the semantic leaps taken between Descartes’ time and my own made the metaphor messy and confusing if not entirely backward. And, whatever he wrote and intended, I could not imagine his words being a truly transcendent transformation from Sacrobosco’s (1230) machina mundi, cited earlier, or any of its many successors. It all seemed less probable still, given the popular and institutional dislike of Descartes’ ideas – ones which were so quickly and thoroughly cast asunder.

Mechanistic Machinations

Relating to clockwork, all along the common reference to clocks and machines as being synonymous left me perplexed. What came to mind when I thought of a machine was not a clock; instead, an easier and better fit were any number of twentieth century symbols of the Industrial Revolution: something noisy and composed of wheels, rollers, belts, bearings, springs, actuators, and the like and probably found on a farm or in a mill or factory and, as the century rolled along, eventually in an office. That said, I also knew how we used the phrase “simple machine” to refer to objects that do the most basic work, such as inclined planes and screws. Still, if someone asked me to name a machine I would not imagine door stop, pulley, or bolt to be among anticipated or acceptable responses. Because I was so resistant, for whatever reason, to slotting “clock” under the category of “machine”, I thought to look up the origins of the term. Within the Oxford English Dictionary, I found a splendid array of unexpected meanings and connotations. There I discovered the term arrived in English in the mid-sixteenth century by way of Old French from the much older classical Latin word “machina.” Both the ancient term and its newer form were understood as, “a material or immaterial structure, esp. the fabric of the world or of the universe…” along with being “a structure regarded as functioning as an independent body, without mechanical involvement” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2019b).

I did not know what to make of this. As noted earlier, like others, Sterling (2005) suggested that “[s]ince the days of Descartes and Newton, and the beginnings of the whole scientific revolution … the world has been seen fundamentally in terms of mechanism” (p. 23). To me this etymology strongly suggested the idea that a clock, say, was deemed a machine for being semi-autonomous and cosmos-like.[22] With this dictionary reference I really began to feel we had the whole story backward is some strange way. Since the Roman Empire and across much of the Mediterranean region, “machine” was understood to be something like what I mean when I say “space-time,” or “the patterns and connections that produce the world,” or “the underlying make-up of reality.” Descartes or anyone else then who suggests the world is a machine is seen in this light as profound in their thinking as noting that a girl resembles her mother or that fish taste of the sea.

Continuing on with this term, in addition to the original senses, and along with meaning “a scheme or plot” (what we would now differentiate as a “machination”), by Descartes’ time the word also described a “structure used for transportation or conveyance,” “a ship or other vessel” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2019b). This too was shocking. Helpfully, I discovered a description of machines from Descartes himself. In his publication The World (written between 1629 and 1633 but only published in its entirety in 1677, long after his death), he writes in chapter 18, “We see clocks, artificial fountains, mills, and other similar machines, which although they are made only by men, are not without the power of moving themselves in many different ways” (as cited in Ariew, 2000, p. 42). This confirmed a more relaxed and encompassing definition than my own; nevertheless, a sailboat, horse-drawn buggy, windmill, or fountain remained far from being either machines or clock-like to my mind. Again, we seemed to have a perception and translation discrepancy that remained unresolved, if not entirely unnoticed.

In this light, it was also suddenly relevant to return to the most famous line the philosopher used to describe his idea about the relationship between mind and matter. Descartes suggested that, even though it is material and machine-like, the body’s unique synthesis with the soul makes the relationship entirely unlike that between a sailor and their ship. This reference makes much more sense, to me at least, if a sailing vessel is considered by the author and his audience to be a “machine.” It also suggested to me that the idea he is attempting to get across is not that the material world or bodies are tantamount to purposeless and inert cogs and lacking any connection with the sacred (as I interpreted within the course material); instead, it seemed he feels all existence is both God-made and functioning as a whole integrated system without any need for constant outside effort or attention (like the grandest of all clocks), just as intended by his omnipotent Creator (the greatest of all clockmakers). I felt this interpretation was also corroborated by Descartes’ three visions of comprehensive cosmic unification. If that was so, again I had arrived at a highly conflicting perspective and set of connotations – all of which begged for further exploration of Descartes’ mind-body dualism.

Before I could do so, however, I was keen to further probe the ideas above. I searched for more information on early mechanical thinking. Again, I wanted to know what other people of Descartes’ era understood clockwork and this mechanical philosophy to be. Eventually, I discovered Marie Boas and her 1952 work on this very theme, titled The Establishment of the Mechanical Philosophy. In a discussion of the worldview of Sir Robert Boyle (1627-1691), Anglo-Irish inventor and natural philosopher, Boas explained that he “readily accepted Descartes’ notion of the physical world as an integrated whole”, and that “[a] body is not to be considered barely in itself, but as it is placed in, and is a portion of the universe” (Boas, 1952, p. 486). This again seemed to match with what I took as Descartes’ unified vision. The author then described Boyle’s comparison of the world to a machine but explained that this was not a disparaging analogy in the least. She cited him as saying ‘it more sets off the wisdom of God in the fabric of the universe…’ (p. 486). Boas also explained how Boyle borrowed Descartes’ comparison of the body to a machine and that he regarded the comparison to be flattering, that this ‘curious engine’ was “wonderful and admirable” (p. 486). All of this seemed to assert a set of ideas that were once again in conflict with those on the same themes found in our course readings.

Immethodical Doubt

Aside from eliciting more consternation in me, these findings turned me off further reading for some weeks. I felt like I was deeply mistaken. It seemed I had to be misinterpreting our course readings or otherwise the works of Descartes. Maybe it was both. If so, were these innocent misreadings or was I just being contrarian and difficult? Was I repeating my experience in Teacher Education? How was it that at the outset of this program, I was questioning what felt like central claims of the field, a field I had voluntarily entered? Was this some kind of self-sabotage? I could not easily answer any of these questions. If I was sincere and onto something, surely no one was going to take any of this well. And I couldn’t see how discussing any of it would be simple or present as anything but an episode of gaslighting in which I was sowing doubt for sport while also pitting myself against what seemed like the entire discipline. Yet, I also felt as though, if my reading was sensible, I was being seeded with doubt in a similar manner – which seemed rather strange. As I sat with these thoughts, our largest source of Descartes references arrived in my lap: Capra and Luisi’s text on systems thinking. I flipped it open to browse the content for the coming course and found a preface that noted “Cartesian mechanism”, an intro mentioning Descartes a dozen times, an entire section on him alone, and page after page of references to his thinking in the book’s index. I took that as a kind of cosmic provocation, a taunt that came at just the right moment. Obviously, I was going to keep digging into this, and precisely because it was difficult and messy and I felt so conflicted about it. I reasoned that I found it all very interesting, was becoming somewhat obsessed with this topic, and, of course, I didn’t have to share my thinking with anyone. So, with that I took up the project once again.

The Surreal Corporeal

Upon returning to these readings I started where I left off, with Descartes’ (1677) The World. I was once again struck by chapter 18. I previously overlooked so much that would once more disrupt my prior reading and thinking about Descartes. Discussing the functions of machines such as human or animal bodies, René explains that not only do they digest food, respire, walk, and sleep, but they also see, hear, taste, smell, and feel along with having ideas, imagination, and memory. He also attributed to the body-machine the “appetites and passions”, which I read as inclusive of hunger, thirst, sexual desire, as well as emotions (as cited in Ariew, 2000, p. 43). None of these processes are undertaken by what he calls the “rational soul” but reside within and are orchestrated by the clockwork machinery of the body through their simple organization and interaction. The above perspective on bodies and souls corresponds to the thinking of the time and has little to do with modern interpretations that have only evolved very recently and rest upon new assumptions and understandings arriving from recent biology, psychology, and philosophy of mind.[23] Descartes defends and elaborates on this idea in a written dialogue with a friend, on October 3, 1637. Of a critic, he states:

…he supposes me to think that brutes see exactly as we do, that is, in being aware of and knowing that they see; this is believed to have been the opinion of Epicurus and is even now the common opinion of almost everyone. However … I expressly showed that brutes do not see as we do when we are aware that we are seeing. Rather, they see as we do when our mind is diverted… (p. 84)

This finding, or at least my own interpretation of it, blew me away. In Descartes’ world (though perhaps only according to me) there seemed to be no contradiction in talking about sentient machines! This felt like a violation of many of our readings, like that from Oakley (2011) which discussed “pushing back against unsatisfying frameworks of thinking inherited from previous eras, such as Descartes’ (1637) reductionist philosophy of animal bodies as machine-like mechanisms that can neither think nor feel pain” (p. 9). An unsatisfying framework likening non-human animals to senseless machines is not what I was getting from this philosopher. Elsewhere, as in part five of his Discourse on Method from 1637, he recapitulates, likening the body to an automaton – one containing all the properties we think of within a human except for the rational mind and its will. And once again he makes clear that, though he describes a machine, he means a truly miraculous thing handcrafted by God Himself which, as such, is “incomparably better ordered and has within itself movements far more wondrous than any of those that can be invented by men” (as cited in Ariew, 2000, p. 71). Of these miracles, mere clockwork, human or animal, he does not write that they are more wonderous than any that have been invented in Europe to date; instead, what I read there is effectively the opposite: they [mosquitoes, leaches, scallops, sea stars, and all other creatures] are “incomparably better [and] … far more wonderous than any of those that can be invented by men [even those seemingly miraculous astronomical clocks].” None of this or my interpretation of it seemed to jive with representations and quotations from our readings. The only thing Descartes appeared to deny animals was the one thing he also denies the human body: what he called the rational soul (able to reason and, thus, morally responsible to God). Vital here is what this would mean: that his was not a proposition that could be disconfirmed by typical counterevidence. Descartes was not making a falsifiable, empirical claim (he was not engaged in science); instead, his idea was based primarily on faith, by way of an approved reading of sacred text, and formed logically out of those faith-based truth claims. My interpretation of all of this then seemed hugely problematic. It meant that to refute Descartes would not require one to demonstrate that, say, the giant pacific octopus is sensitive or clever or enjoys a sophisticated emotional life (by making observations of their behaviour, taking fMRI scans of their nervous systems, or learning to speak cephalopod and then questioning them); instead, one would have to demonstrate that members of the species have their ability to uphold and defend Catholic teachings judged by Descartes’ Creator in the afterlife. Once again, I arrived at what I felt could not be a more contrary reading. So then, what of the other elephant in the room: Descartes’ mind-body dualism?

Cartesian Dualism

Some authors we read in the course of the program asserted very general ideas about Cartesian Dualism. Bai and Scutt (2009), for instance, noted that “[t]he current ecological crisis arises from our dualistic consciousness which separates mind from body and self from world” (p. 92). Similarly, Wahl (2016) suggested that, “To move on from the dominance of the ‘narrative of separation’ and into a ‘narrative of interbeing’ we have to heal the ‘Cartesian split’…” (p. 103). Others, such as Plotkin (2008), were more specific, remarking that, “Ever since Descartes, it has been increasingly common to speak of the soul as something that is ‘in’ us, like a ghost, a spirit, or an ether” (p. 36). I was in multipronged disagreement with these from the outset.

Regarding dualities generally, the first and most obvious consideration was that, just as Dale (2001) noted in chapter two of her, At the Edge: Sustainable Development in the 21st Century, two-sided thinking and even entire culture-wide epistemological or cosmological dualistic frameworks were everywhere. In addition to those Dale notes, I was reminded that the storm-god Marduk created the universe by doing battle with Tiamat (‘the glistening one’, Goddess of the Sea, and symbol of primordial chaos); and how, defeating her, he divided her divine flesh in two, forming distinct planes of existence: Earth and the heavens (Lambert, 2013, p. 454). That was from ancient Babylon and the cosmology contained in the Enûma Eliš, composed around 3,500 years before Descartes. From Indian philosophy I found Samkhya (Enumeration or Calculation), which was also dual in nature, strongly rational, and sounded an awful lot like Descartes. Possibly arriving around 1,900 years before Cartesian thought, the Samkhya school taught that there are a set of proofs for gaining knowledge and that the universe is comprised of two independent realities: one of prakṛti (matter) and the other puruṣa (consciousness), the unification of which is jiva (living being) (“Samkhya,” 2019). This set of ideas are the essence of Descartes’ philosophy and, to me, on their own strongly call into question how novel (Cartesian), Western, or modern this thinking is.

Also coming from Indian tradition is the Dvaita Vedanta (Dualism Conclusion). From the thirteenth century, these teachings espouse a reading of the Hindu Vedas in which God is separated into their own distinct reality from individual souls along with other key divisions such as those between matter and God, matter and individual souls, individual souls and one another, and between distinct forms of matter (“Dvaita Vedanta,” 2019). I also recalled that Chinese philosophy has its own powerful and encompassing dualistic framework of yin and yang (dark-bright or negative-positive), foundational to Confucianism and Taoism as well as forming the organizing principle for traditional Chinese medicine (Fang, 2012).

To my surprise, I discovered that Aztec culture is said to contain a plurality of dualities as well. Though strong debate exists around certain interpretations, some translate the deity Ometecuhtli (Two-Lord or Lord of the Duality) as living with his female counterpart Omecíhuatl (Two-Lady or Lady of the Duality) in Omeyocan (The Place of Duality or Double Heaven), the thirteenth and highest heaven (Meehan, n.d.). Less controversial appears to be the fact that the Aztec celebrated song and poetry that made keen use of double-meaning, dual terms, and couplets, especially for articulating complex or abstract ideas. The expression commonly translated into English as “poetry”, for example, is in xochitl in cuicatl (the flower, the song) (Tomlinson, 1995).

Closer to home, I also considered the moieties of the Pacific Northwest: those cultures who organized everything from customs and land to their history around a critical distinction between two clans, as in the Eagle and Raven among the Haida. Within Haida culture, too, exists other durable pairings and contrasts such as the belief that a person is in possession of two souls, that an animal may be two-sided and capable of appearing in human form, or even how paintings and carvings are often done in red and black and that these representations commonly emphasize strong bilateral symmetry (Pitek, 2018).

Not only did I consider Descartes to be making a holistic assessment with his dualism, highlighting a whole series of connections rather than enforcing an elemental division, but the above examples felt to be similar forms of two-sided thinking. That these and many other dualities and dualisms arose independently in many forms across time and space made it challenging to consider any such framing as particularly aberrant. To the contrary, I felt a lens such as this must be closer to the norm and seldom more than a mimicry, description, or explanation of patterns found within and all around us.

On that note, in my own thinking on this theme, as someone enamoured with biology and less impressed with our species than others seem, I wanted to deemphasize humans. I could not help but think about the countless organisms who appear to organize themselves around seemingly strict dualistic rhythms and frameworks such as light/dark, day/night, food/not food, alive/dead, high tide/low tide, rainy season/dry season, female/male, kin/foe, and so on. It seemed to me these dualities were so elementary that they were spelled out in the very bodies of members of a species. This could be nyctinasty in plants, the opening and closing of a flower’s petals or the leaves of many legumes; or it could be the wildly exaggerated sexual dimorphism found in many animal species, such as the peacock or the triplewart seadevil. In this way, dualisms such as these, fundamental and unavoidable, felt like they had been baked into large swathes of the spectrum of life on this planet for uncountable eternities. The idea, then, that some naked primates conceptualized other dualistic frameworks (though less fundamental and only very recently) and that just one of the newest of these is super-interesting and ultra-problematic did not feel terribly compelling. Worse still, in this light, much of the critique of Descartes felt far too narrow in scope – too focused on the modern, too firmly Eurocentric, and too anthropocentric – all while framed as essential antidotes to these errors.

Tackling what Descartes actually wrote on the subject did not help. The most common quote from Descartes on the distinction between minds and bodies, as above, refers to them as definitionally distinct yet unified – but in more than a mere symbiotic relationship. In the earlier Wikipedia reference, Descartes is quoted as saying of bodies and minds that they are “intermingled” and so “closely joined” that they “form a unit” (“René Descartes”, 2019). The book I was reading had a slightly different translation. There it says of bodies and minds they are “most tightly joined and, so to speak, commingled” such that “I and the body constitute one single thing” (cited in Ariew, 2000, p. 136). Elsewhere Descartes clarifies this point. He explains, “I am not that concatenation of members we call the human body. Neither am I some subtle air infused into these members, nor a wind, nor a fire, nor a vapour, nor a breath, nor anything I devise myself” (cited in Ariew, 2000, p. 109). Due to continued confusion about his meaning and intention, René later explains his focus and phrasing by sharing his observation that:

Many more people make the mistake of thinking that the soul is not really distinct from the body than make the mistake of admitting their distinction and denying their substantial union, and in order to refute those who believe souls to be mortal it is more important to teach the distinctness of parts in a human being than to teach their union. (cited in Cottingham et al., 1997, p. 209)

From all of this, I interpreted several critical points, all with key distinctions from the narrative I found in Environmental discourses. Most notably was the rejection of Plotkin’s determination that Descartes understood souls or minds to be “something that is ‘in’ us, like a ghost” (2008, p. 36). That would make sense to me if Descartes hadn’t given us the example of the captain in his ship which, as he says, the soul-body relationship is not anything like. Further, and tied to this, I find no substantial separation between soul/mind and body/matter in Descartes’ writing. And I read his idea as no more challenging, for a contemporary reader at least, than thinking about what we know from modern chemistry. Take something like water, for example. Hydrogen (soul/mind) and oxygen (body) can come together to form a unique element with its own properties: water (human). What was more, I could not see how this was radically different from any more modern thinkers, such a Carl Jung (1875-1961) who insisted that:

Since psyche and matter are contained in one and the same world, and moreover are in continuous contact with one another and ultimately rest on irrepresentable, transcendental factors, it is not only possible but fairly probable, even, that psyche and matter are two different aspects of the same thing. (Jung, 1969, p. 161)

To my reading, this statement is perfectly Cartesian sentiment. More provocatively still, even with Descartes’ definitional distinction between these elements, I was not compelled (as the entire rest of the world seemed to be) to find a profound dualism established in his publications. To my reading, this philosopher proposed an indivisible tripartite relationship, a kind of synchronicity between the immaterial and finite (soul or mind) and the material and finite (body or matter) – all of which is composed and held together by the requisite infinite and immaterial (God). This third element cannot be missed or excised from Descartes’ equation. To me, the divine is the key element of his whole philosophy and potent throughout his writing. In fact, nearly every page he wrote, sometimes every paragraph and occasionally every sentence within a work, mentions God and makes clear reference to humans, the living world, and matter as being gifted by His incomprehensible and all-pervasive genius. This philosopher seems to clearly assert that his God is an active participant in the ongoing unfolding of the universe and that the Creator “continues to conserve it in the same fashion in which he has created it” (cited in Ariew, 2000, p. 37). This idea and his whole [trial]ism struck me as being far closer to a pedestrian seventeenth century biblical reading than the most novel and brutal amputation ever committed. And, for all my reading, I wasn’t sure then how contemporary pan- or cosmopsychism, for example, were so very different from Descartes’ view. Did he not assert that the universe is a fundamentally unified thing within which an uber-consciousness or mind-like aspect is key and instantiates all other consciousnesses? As far as I was concerned there was so little contrast between what was framed as archaic and brutal (Descartes and the Cartesian) and that which is said to be exciting and holistic (panpsychism) that I was inclined to consider these effectively indistinguishable.[24]

Into the ‘I’

Having had my ideas about these more important Cartesian ideas (clockwork, mechanism, and dualism) as well as the assumptions I had about who he was and what he was up to shattered, I wanted to better understand the idea for which Descartes was best known. Just as many others do, our readings such as those from Orr (2004) and Tuck et al. (2004) labelled him as the person who said cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). And, once again, when I went looking I found little that made sense. Descartes wrote nothing I would be comfortable summarizing with the above clean and elegant triumvirate of Latin. In his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), Descartes asked what, if anything, could be truly certain? This certainty he was after needed to be supremely so because he sought an unshakably solid foundation from which to launch the deepest possible inquiry into the nature of reality. Deliberating on this, he resolved that he would not be able to rely upon his thinking for the certainty he required. This was because, as he spells out, if a supernaturally powerful trickster attempted to deceive him there was nothing stopping this devious daemon from faking the whole of the world just as easily as it could manipulate all his feeble human senses. Afterall, he reasoned, his thinking and senses already failed him without such an antagonist. His “external senses”, such as vision and hearing, were easily confused by every-day illusions; similarly, he knew his “internal senses”, such as pain, were naturally corrupted in different ways, just as happens when an amputee experiences phantom limb syndrome, for example (cited in Ariew, 2000, p. 134). Though he could be so easily and routinely bewildered in these ways and others, what could not be questioned, Descartes reasoned, would be the metacognitive: the act of thinking about his thinking. Critical here is that, as Descartes spells out for his readers, by “thinking” he does not mean “ideas arising in consciousness” but instead something like “deliberation”: a narrow set of judgements that make use of his God-given reason, such as doubting or affirming, that would make him morally responsible to his Creator (Ariew, 2000).[25] Therefore, if a false notion or sensory experience were delivered by a cunning deceiver, he argued, this forgery itself would be inauthentic, yes, but the scrutiny he applied to it would be beyond question. In this way, the rational mind (gifted to all humans by God) interrogating experience, authentic or forged, forms the only truly robust foundation from which to begin a serious inquiry. This felt to me like little more than Descartes’ logico-deductive reasoning applied to his Catholic upbringing. And then, to my reading, Descartes doesn’t say anything like “I am only an entity that thinks” or “I’m absolutely certain I am only a thinking being”; instead, he offers something like, “The most robust knowledge possible is the belief that I am someone capable making judgments (and this capacity makes me responsible to God).” Given all of the above, a summary missing out these key elements (particularly a faith that has embedded in it personal and divine judgement) seemed unfair to Descartes and modern readers as it would almost inevitably result in confusion. What struck me then, as it does now, is just how much we love to make this kind of unforced error – and do so commonly.[26]

Empiricism and Positivism

The above interpretation of Descartes’ writing did more for me than disrupt the straightforward idea about his philosophical starting place. In our course readings and discussions, it was said of Descartes that he was one of the figures who inspired the empiricism and positivism of the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution. Typical of these assessments were those of authors Descola and Palsson (2003), who wrote about orientalism and the paternalistic paradigm being “the intellectual heirs of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and early positivist science (developed by, among others, Descartes and Francis Bacon), all of which instituted a series of decisive dualisms” (p. 76). And yet, the discussions on Cartesian thinking included above suggest the foundation of his epistemology was determinately anti-empiricist. Any system of thinking that suggests knowledge derives only or primarily from sensory experience, as I understand of empiricism, feels like it runs counter to Cartesian thinking. In this way, I could not see know how Descartes’ ideas could inspire empiricism except, perhaps, by its total rejection.

Troublingly, I felt the same way about positivism. Within the positivist approach “introspective and intuitive knowledge is rejected, as are metaphysics and theology because metaphysical and theological claims cannot be verified by sense experience” (“Positivism,” 2019). If this is one’s definition of positivism then, as I see it, René Descartes was a manifestly virulent anti-positivist. Why? Because metaphysics, theology, intuitive knowledge, and introspection comprise effectively the entire substance and system of Cartesian thought. To remove just one of these features from Descartes’ personal worldview or his proposed philosophy, nevermind all of them, and you could not possibly be left with anything that he himself would recognize. And then it seems worth asking on what basis such a philosophy could be said to be Cartesian? On my reading, this would be akin to removing the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus, the transubstantiation, and the immortality of human souls from Catholicism; or eliminating the earth, ecosystems, interconnectedness, and climate change within Environmental Education.

To make this clear, in a letter to his colleague Mersenne, titled On the Eternal Truths, Descartes wrote:

Now there is no one law [of nature, established by God] in particular that we cannot comprehend if our mind leads us to consider it, and they are inborn in our minds, as a King would establish his laws in the hearts of his subjects, if he had power enough to do so. (cited in Ariew, 2000, p. 28)

I would argue that in this one sentence introspection, intuitive knowledge, metaphysics, and theology may be seen as infused into the foundation of Descartes’ thinking; but, he continues:

On the other hand, we cannot comprehend the greatness of God, even though we know it. But the very fact that we judge him to be incomprehensible makes us esteem him further, as a King has more majesty when he is less familiarly known to his subjects, provided, however, that they do not for all that consider themselves to be without a King, and that they know him well enough to have no doubt of it … [for] the existence of God is the first and the most eternal of all truths there can be, and the only one from which all others flow (cited in Ariew, 2000, p. 28-29).

As a result of these revelations of mine, referring to Descartes as an empiricist or positivist, or suggesting he inspired either, struck me as absurd. It felt akin to claiming that commitment to a Jainist interpretation of the principle of ahiṃsā (non-violence) is what motivates the industrial-scale factory farming of pigs, or that abundant and indiscriminate casual sex is the best route to maintaining one’s virginity. All of this just stopped making any sense to me.

Inconclusion

The sum of all these mini solo inquiries left me feeling quite mad, like a hatter. Again, I didn’t feel I was experiencing cognitive dissonance. It felt more like I had ingested an entheogen and then found myself in an inexplicable universe in which physics and language were no longer operative. A universe of my own, hidden behind my own eyelids, that, try as I might, I was unable to press into language for others. “Descartes wasn’t a Cartesian”, “the arch-positivist was anti-positivist”, or “mechanism is inspired by and modeled after faith and nature”, all felt closer to glossolalia than coherent collections of words. It was an experience that left me saying nothing at all or otherwise wanting to force others (like my poor friends and family) to go on this weird, potentially arduous, or maybe even upsetting, trip with me. And I didn’t even want that for their edification but really just for myself, to be able to say, “See, I’m not crazy, this is a real thing!” Somehow, it seemed, I had wound myself back to the kind of upside-down world I was very uncomfortable with and thought I left behind in Teacher Education. Why was I so determined to get back there? I did not know. What I did know was this was a place I did not want to be; and so, to get through my degree and not repeat my Education experience, I closed my books and just stopped looking.

+ + +

FOOTNOTES

[1] This experience is partially responsible for the selected autobiography that begins this thesis.

[2] Descartes published his life’s work in the immediate aftermath of the Galileo affair, in which this pious Roman Catholic was condemned by the Inquisition for heretical depravity. His crimes included observing the moons of Jupiter, the phases of Venus, features of the Moon, and sunspots that – though directly contradicting Aristotle and Ptolemy – anyone with a telescope was also free to make. And, while the prohibition of observations and works like that of Galileo’s were eventually lifted, it is worth noting that even in the twenty-first century the position of the Catholic Church on this matter remains uncertain. Pope Benedict XVI, for example, throughout his life and in his official capacity with the Church continually explained that science improperly interferes with religion and that Galileo’s persecution was “rational and just” (Fisher, 2008).

[3] As I recalled, even the modern arch-Atheists, those as far removed from the influence of religion as any in Western civilization have ever been, people like Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris, advocate learning about religion as well as celebrating the sacred and numinous (see Geggel, 2017; PBS, 2007).

[4] Two other feelings that arose at this time are worth noting. Here I learned that the full title of Descartes Meditations is in fact Meditations on First Philosophy, in which the existence of God and the immortality of the soul are demonstrated. Though commonly done, I would argue that paraphrasing like this is inappropriate. Doing so within a text that argues Descartes killed the sacred feels to me like an attempt to mislead. For one example, David Abram (2017) referred this work as being directly responsible for driving out the sacred and causing people to see the cosmos as mere machine; however, as above, the situation seems much messier and more interesting than that. Simply including Descartes’ full title demands explanation and makes the assertion far more difficult to forward.

[5] I knew of other trees of knowledge and wisdom as well as trees of life and of immortality, and that these were nearly ubiquitous archetypes around the planet, from India to Iran to Iceland, and across time as well. I wondered if an image of his tree of all wisdom composed part of his divine visions or if the analogy came to him later.

[6] I was trained my whole childhood to be quick to notice and exclaim how similar we all are. In adulthood I’ve hung onto this but have grown quick to insist on our staggering differences as well. The example I like to use is how on my first trip to Indonesia someone asked where I was from. She didn’t know Canada and so I was excited to pull out the map in the back of my journal. My acquaintance was certain this combination of satellite images of each continent was terrifically wrong. Having grown up in Sumatra she knew the island was only surrounded by smaller islands and so, for example, Malaysia couldn’t be on a peninsula connected to mainland Southeast Asia. She also knew 6,000 kilometers across was too big for any country (mostly because that was bigger than Indonesia and so such a proposition was ridiculous on its face). And, as any fool knew, these images were taken by an American satellite presented to exaggerate the area of North America. We tried negotiating a common understanding, each of us making our case, but in the end she just laughed at my clever though fruitless attempt to brainwash her with my outlandish Western propaganda and was delighted, too, by my naiveté and what could only be a clear example of the abject poverty of Canadian education and media systems. Descartes and I would share none of the common language or understanding I shared with this person.

[7] Doubtless, future generations will marvel at the staggering and persistent volume of lost meaning and intent, the constant mistaking of sincerity for sarcasm or vice versa, and just the numbing confusion humans trade in daily via text of all manner – and that they do so all while insisting they themselves are perfectly clear in their encoding and are also skillfully decoding the correspondences of their family, friends, and colleagues (see, e.g., Kruger, et al., 2005; Riordan & Trichtinger, 2017).

[8] We might think this work is the common task of any editor or translator; however, in our course readings and in the two encyclopedia entries I perused, this seventeenth century philosopher (whose native language was Old French and whose second language was Latin) is frequently quoted verbatim, in modern English, and without any context or qualifications. This strikes me as impossible and yet it is endemic.

[9] I hope we can all easily relate to a skink basking in the sun, an echidna scratching her back, or a cassowary having a yawn. As different as we are, I imagine most of us feel like we know what our friends are feeling; but to me it seems like the height of hubris to demand there is no possibility of a vast terrain of difference between my own yawn and that of a bird.

[10] If I see light passing from Heaven through ten thousand pin pricks in a celestial veil just beyond reach and you imagine a septillion throbbing balls of nuclear plasma, the smallest of which are a million times the size of the earth, I don’t think we are merely seeing something different or having different thoughts. (Different are: a cappuccino and a cortado, a turtle and a tortoise, Vishnu and Shiva). Instead, I would argue that our experiences are not in meaningful correspondence.

[11] Notice that, even if Dr. Roszak’s assessment was wildly off at the time of publication, the contrast between the landscape of ideas in Descartes’ time and that of our own is at least as stark if not immeasurably more so than it was in the ‘80s. Also interesting is that Roszak’s book is full of talk about Descartes and the last chapter is titled “Descartes’s Angel: Reflections on the True Art of Thinking,” and discusses how our minds cannot be reduced to simple data processing.

[12] Interestingly, the word “scientist” was nearly rejected because it too closely approximated “economist” and “atheist”, both of which were deemed objectionable. This helps make my point, given that these three words are closely related if not nearly synonymous in many circles today, as seen in our readings. To shed further light on the thinking of the time, I also discovered that a magazine article from 1840 made sense of the novel term by reference to the Italian Renaissance. There the author likened da Vinci to a scientist, on the grounds that he was one who sought the truth, while Correggio by contrast was an artist because he asserted it (NPR, 2010). Again, I would argue that this sentiment too has reversed. I think of us as framing scientists as the ones asserting what is true and artists seeking it. And then I would note that this reversal has happened in less than two hundred years.

[13] I read this trend as something akin to referring to the Caribbean pirates of the sixteenth century as “Nazis” or fifteenth century Incans as “Maoists”. One may have a reason for doing this but, except in very limited cases, I feel more is lost than can possibly be gained. I haven’t yet explored how the History of Science field negotiates the labels science and scientist, yet, however it is done, that sense-making doesn’t appear to have percolated into broader scholarly practice or common usage.

[14] Even the concept of extinction itself was viewed as a violation of God’s complete and perfect order and was not even accepted as a coherent philosophical notion until many generations after Descartes (Rowland, 2009). Though integral to Charles Darwin’s work, the reality of extinction was still being fought about as late as the nineteenth century when the idea was taken up not as a catastrophic ending but an autogenic feature of nature’s beautiful cycle (Sepkoski, 2016). Ideas such as mass extinction are newer still and were not firmly accepted prior to the seminal work on marine fossils by Raup and Sepkoski at the end of the twentieth century (Raup & Sepkoski, 1982).

[15] Miasma remains the accepted thinking almost everywhere I have travelled. When I acquired a paralyzing gut infection on one of my last trips to Indonesia, for example, my Papuan friend walked me through how to cure the illness and avoid future troubles. He explained that the “bad wind” had snuck in through the soles of my feet, because I was not acquainted with where and how to walk, and that only a special kind of leg massage could milk the offending brume from by being. My experience of East Africa has been similar, where – even in urban settings and among the youth – a complex mixture of miasma, magic, “the evil eye”, and God’s wrath are causes of illness (explicitly not sewage, spoiled pork, mosquitoes, or a lifetime of ingesting coal smoke and diesel exhaust). The veracity of such beliefs is implied by the regular spending of people’s hard-earned resources on removing curses, warding off daemons, and countering other spiritual attacks.

[16] There’s a marvelous account by Giraldus Camrensis (1146-1223) from his expedition to Ireland, regarding the nature of a goose (Branta "anas" leucopsis) said to emerge each year fully formed from barnacles:

There are likewise here many birds called barnacles, which nature produces in a wonderful manner, out of her ordinary course. They resemble the marsh-geese, but are smaller. Being at first in gummy excrescences from pine-beams floating on the waters, and then enclosed in shells to secure their free growth, they hang by their beaks, like seaweeds attached to the timber. Being in process of time well covered with feathers, they either fall into the water or take their flight in the free air, their nourishment and growth being supplied while they are bred in this very unaccountable and curious manner, from the juices of the wood in the sea-water… (Wright, 1862, p. 36.)

[17] In 1555, Swedish archbishop Olaus Magnus (1490-1557) added to the accounts of his travels, titled Historiae de gentibus septentrionalibus (A Description of the Northern Peoples), that swallows did not migrate or overwinter in nests or hollows but instead in the unfrozen muds found deep under water. Of these swallows, Magnus is said to have claimed: They gathered over lakes and rivers, before plunging headlong into the depths and allowing themselves to sink to the bottom. There they remained, immersed in mud, until the coming of the spring (Lee, 2000, n.p.).

[18] For additional examples and their descriptions see: “Gdańsk Astronomical Clock,” 2019; “Horloge astronomique de Chartres,” 2019; “Lund Astronomical Clock,” 2019; Olomouc Astronomical Clock,” 2020; “Rostock Astronomical Clock,” 2020; “Strasbourg Astronomical Clock,” 2020; “Wells Cathedral Clock,” 2019.

[19] Any image search for this grand clock will yield pictures of a sea of onlookers just as likely as intimate wedding portraits of couples posing with this magnificent construction. I think this speaks to the clock’s lasting impression and value – not as a wretched symbol of our waywardness but of what nature and life can inspire.

[20] In his prologue, amazingly, Suso also explains the work came to him as a vision from God in the form of a clock. He writes:

So the mercy of the Savior deigned to reveal this present little book in a vision, when it was shown as a most beautiful clock, decorated with the loveliest roses and a variety of ‘well-sounding cymbals,’ which produce a sweet and heavenly sound, and summon the hearts of all men up above (Suso, 1994, p. 54).

[21] Kepler: better known as a scientist, for his laws of planetary motion, and being a figure in the Scientific Revolution; less known for being a royal astrologer and arguing his theological convictions for the coherence between scripture and a newly formulated heliocentrism (Danielson, 2000; Popova, 2019).

[22] Too, this made the earlier phrase from John of Sacrobosco, machina mundi, feel mistranslated. In light of this etymology, “machine of the cosmos” reads like a straight translation of the words but not a conveyance of the intended meaning. Written in 1230, the author must have meant his reader to imagine “the fabric [the relations of the material and immaterial elements] of the universe” or perhaps the “hidden genius of the cosmos” and not “the simple, inert, clock-like cogs and wheels” that “machine” connotes for me today.

[23] Descartes arrives at very different definitions, capacities, and effects for bodies, minds, and their constituents than we understand today. And, like most of us, his beliefs and language appear to have shifted somewhat over his lifetime, too. In addition, he conflates ideas I consider distinct and is also careful to draw distinctions between things I consider identical (or just non-existent.) For example, throughout his work Descartes talks about different species of souls (contending with more ancient notions of vegetative, animal, and rational ones); he considers the “rational soul” and “the mind” synonymous though “states of the mind” appear unrelated in a sense I still do not comprehend; he is careful to isolate things like “having a pain” (there being a toothache, say) and “feeling a pain” (being aware of said toothache), and many more ideas across complex, overlapping realms of experience. All of this makes things exceptionally hard to follow for someone who finds much of his work to be wild contortions of language and thinking. Not only did it seem I would need much more time to makes sense of all this, but I think one must be a true philosopher to really comprehend much of it; for example, what it means to have a toothache you cannot feel. (Isn’t that just a tooth?)

[24] Though my lack of understanding possibly impedes my differentiating these ideas, confusion about the nature of life or consciousness, and just the persistent trouble even defining these terms, seems as certain as a thing can be. So, when and where one personally wishes to draw a line demarcating bounds, or even rejecting the idea of boundaries altogether, seems equally like wild speculation and a denial of so much that conspires to confound these and related issues. From where I sit, it seems more reasonable to admit our ignorance than take a strong stance on any of the above. (Carl Zimmer, a favourite author of mine, published a new book at the beginning of this year titled Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to be Alive on just this theme. This will be the next book I tuck into when all this grad schooling is out of the way.)

[25] And it seems that this deliberative “thinking”, bound up with morality and faith, is what he refuses sloths and sea cucumbers when he says that he denies non-human animals “thought, not life or sense” (as cited in Ariew, 2000, p. 297).

[26] I am reminded of Darwin’s thinking on evolution by natural selection being frequently summarised to “survival of the fittest.” Though presented as an accurate paraphrase and intended to inform, the line can only confuse. Not only did the phrase not come from Darwin himself but survival is only one aspect of selection and far too much rests upon a definition of “fitness” that is not in common usage and is opaque to any reader without essential context.