THESIS - CHAPTER TWO - AN INTRODUCTION TO DESCARTES

“It’s hard to know whether to laugh or to cry at the human predicament”

– Pema Chödrön, one who knows the wisdom of no escape (Chödrön, 2007, n.p.).

“The reader must, moreover, beware of raising objections to any of my statements, because it is very probable that he may understand my words to mean the exact opposite to what I intended to say…”

– Maimonides, guide to the perplexed (Maimonides, 1881, p. 21).

René Descartes first came to my full attention in the pre-residency readings of my first semester at Royal Roads. This French mathematician and philosopher’s name appeared all over David Orr’s 2004, Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect. Orr, described as a giant in the field, seemed to despise Descartes. In an early chapter titled, The Problem of Education, Orr established that:

Cartesian philosophy was full of potential ecological mischief, a potential that has become reality. Descartes’s philosophy separated man from nature, stripped all intrinsic value from nature, and then proceeded to divide mind and body. Descartes was, at heart, an engineer, and his legacy to the environment of our time is the cold passion to remake the world as if we were merely remodeling a machine. Feelings and intuition were tossed out, as were those fuzzy, qualitative parts of reality, such as aesthetic appreciation, loyalty, friendship, sentiment, empathy, and charity. Descartes’s assumptions were neither as simple nor as inconsequential as they might have appeared in his lifetime (1596-1650). (p. 31)

To add to this picture, Orr suggested that our species is growing less intelligent and, though partially blaming all of science for this ruination, the only name he put forward was Descartes’. He wrote:

I am tempted to round up all of the usual members of the rogue’s gallery from Descartes (‘I think therefore I am’), through all of the peddlers of instrumental rationality, artificial intelligence, and unfettered curiosity, all of whom are eminently blameworthy. (p. 51)

Within a chapter entitled, Love It or Lose It: The Coming Biophilia Revolution, Orr clarified the procedural downfall of our civilization. A subsection therein labelled, The Origins and Consequences of Biophobia, concludes with the author’s contention that modernization involved a dramatic departure from our historic perspective and, further, that the transformation is so complete that those of us alive at present are nearly incapable of considering anything different (2004, p. 132-133). To make this transition, Orr insists, we had to conceptually devitalize the entire natural world and specifically “…to distance ourselves from animals who were transformed by Cartesian alchemy into mere machines” (p. 133). And as a remedy to all this catastrophe, Orr recommends we form a new covenant with non-human animals, emphasizing that we must first “…discard the idea obtained from René Descartes that animals are only machines, incapable of feeling pain and to be used any way we see fit” (p. 149).

Following Orr, two more introductory readings offered convergent perspectives. In Environmental Education and the Issue of Nature Michael Bonnett (2007) reasoned that our present environmental crisis threatens both our spiritual and physical survival. To make sense of how we arrived at this predicament, he highlighted the social milieu and our evolved cultural attitude toward nature. Bonnett described a culture “whose underlying motives included the subordination and exploitation of nature” (p. 717). For this proclivity Bonnett credited the anthropocentrism of the Enlightenment which, he suggested, developed directly from the thinking of people like René Descartes, that seventeenth century luminary who, along with others, promoted the mastery of nature as the primary aim of science (p. 717). After establishing this context, Bonnett extrapolated the educational implications of a Cartesian outlook such as this. The trouble of teaching from this framing, Bonnett suggested, is that the very being of nature – as “a fluid world of open, many-faceted things in constant, and often mysterious, interplay – simply becomes invisible to an encounter preoccupied with intellectual (and material) possession achieved through the deployment of increasingly highly systematized and ossifying conceptual schemes” (p. 717).

Next on our reading list was Ann Dale’s (2001) At the Edge: Sustainable Development in the 21st Century. There, I found Dale also tackled the Cartesian legacy of the West. In a chapter titled, Paradigms, Myths, and Metaphors, Dale framed dualism as a central feature of the dominant worldview, while highlighting how an orientation of this sort may over-simplify, creating oppressive categorizations and false dichotomies. Noting earlier dualistic frameworks that influenced the culture (from Christianity to Zoroastrianism), the author also explained that the modern dualism we are enculturated in is typically attributed to René Descartes, who insisted on a critical distinction between mind and matter. “Descartes,” she explained, “led us to venerate dualism as the highest God” (2001, p. 16). She then offered a summary of the common sentiment surrounding his philosophy and its application, describing that:

[f]or Descartes, the material universe was a machine and nothing but a machine. ‘Matter’ had no purpose, life, or spirituality. Nature worked according to mechanical laws, and everything in the material world could be explained in terms of the arrangement and movement of its parts. Since Descartes, this mechanical picture of nature has been a central plank within the paradigm of science, at least until recently, when some have started to question it (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993; Hill 1993; Holling 1989/90; Jantsch 1980; and Merchant 1980). (p. 16)

Connecting still more sources and consequences, Dale added the perspective that the Cartesian reduction of nature to a machine was “…the separation of the heart from the mind (Head 1992),” and that, “[t]his separation has led to the decoupling of human society from its environment – a process of disembeddedness that has contributed to the destruction of nature (Rogers 1994)” (p. 17).

I interpreted Dale, Bennett, and Orr as offering a unanimous and damning appraisal of Cartesian thinking and to some degree the “I” responsible for this thinking as well. Their own and the broader consensus seemed to converge on the man having a novel and tremendously impactful philosophy that is now understood as deeply flawed and antiquated, having led astray not just our own culture but also the wider world it influences. I read that a kind of zero sum, human-first perspective was precipitated or at least assisted by Descartes; moreover, that this paradigm eventually overtook and catapulted much of our species away from all the beauty, succor, and interconnectedness we once saw in and felt with the rest of nature.

Discussing Descartes

Primed with these ideas, my cohort and I began our first week of our brief, three-week in-person residency with Descartes-related conversations of all sorts. In fact, as I recall, most classes, meetings, and get-togethers during our first week of residency involved some discussion of Descartes’ ideas and their impact. Together, we riled against Cartesian Dualism (simplified as the conceptual bifurcation of mind or spirit from body or matter) and challenged Descartes’ clockwork metaphor (comparison of the material world and its constituents to purposeless, spiritless, non-sacred machines) and all the materialist and rationalist associations accompanying this. We linked how these constructions – inclusive of the Enlightenment thought later inspired by them as well as the modern science that evolved from there – have largely unspun and fragmented the intricate web of interconnection we know existence to be, resulting in much of the calamity experienced today and anticipated for tomorrow.[1] Descartes seemed more and more like a real-life supervillain. And, therefore, condemnation of this character, who we all seemed to agree was ultimately responsible, felt nearly unavoidable.

By week two of our residency, I interpreted this constellation of critiques as undergirding a significant portion of the discipline as well as broader environmental discourses. I felt this way not because any of our instructors or interlocutors were particularly enthralled with Descartes; instead, he seemed integral to the shared perspective and lexicon. Encouraged to journal throughout our residency, one of my first entries was to articulate what I interpreted as the common premise, or a nested set of premises, at the heart of our dialogues and the literature we were exposed to. I wrote:

· Western civilization is both unique and uniquely problematic

· Science holds much responsibility for what is most problematic within the culture

· Much of what’s wrong with science may be traced to the writings of René Descartes

· Catastrophic within Descartes’ work is his philosophy, predominantly his dualism and clockwork metaphor

Doubtless, scholars and fellow students would question the veracity or quibble over the wording of each of the above points. That said, this did seem a reasonably accurate assessment when I wrote it and, though I don’t know who came into the program already holding these ideas, most of us were repeating them back over the course of our group activities and assignments. Mentioning nearly any concern at all, from melting permafrost to pipeline expansion, triggered a race to see who could first connect that idea to Cartesian Dualism. Then, along with our now-synchronized eye-rolling at our disgust with Cartesian thinking, we would compete to pin the most agreeably egregious tail to René Descartes, that ass. Simple and fun, this Descartes-bashing also clearly demonstrated our learning. And, as it turned out, all of this was just our initiation.

Descartes Discourses

Retrospectively, these earliest readings and discussions were an excellent preface to what would follow. The same sentiments from our introductory readings and discussions – from a kind of civilization-wide metaphysical disorder to what might be construed as a suicidal separational psychopathy, all formulated and prescribed by some dead guy named René – reappeared throughout our first year. I would say Descartes was the most consistent thread in all our readings. However, to merely suggest that this thinker came up a lot fails to capture the experience; and looking only at any one course or from the perspective of one instructor the volume would probably seem mild. As a result, heretical as it feels to quantify these references to Descartes (a fellow critiqued in these very readings for initiating an overly analytical and mathematical framework), some numbers may be useful. For an overview, references to Descartes came up in the required and suggested readings in three of five Environmental Education and Communication courses.[2] We came across dozens of books and articles therein highlighting the reach and supremacy of Cartesian philosophy, as well as its failings. Within these 32 texts were more than 200 individual mentions of the names “Descartes” or “Cartesian” alone; with still further references to ideas commonly attributed to, synonymous with, or said to have been directly inspired by this Frenchman.[3] A sampling of these interpretations of Descartes follows.

Among this Cartesian compendium within our course material, Capra and Luisi’s (2019), The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision offered an abundance of Descartes references. The book attempts to illuminate the origins of modern systems perspectives, the implications for this thinking, and then speculates on portents for the future. In its overview and synthesis, the text covers a sweeping range of themes from mathematics to panpsychism. Doing so, the names “Descartes” and “Cartesian” alone appear no less than 133 times on just 50 pages, most of these in the first quarter of their book. Again, the uniqueness and perniciousness of Descartes’ philosophy is corroborated as well as its deep saturation into the culture. A summary of their unified systems view as well as their sense of René Descartes’ legacy comes when they explain that what is so radical about the perspective they advance is the work it does overcoming the Cartesian thinking so long plaguing Western civilization (Capra & Luisi, 2019).

Further readings focused on Descartes’ role in transforming the culture by engendering a mechanistic paradigm. In Linkingthinking: New Perspective on Thinking and Learning for Sustainability, Sterling (2005) spelled out how:

The idea of the ‘root metaphor’ is critical. A metaphor answers the question, ‘What is the world like?’ For over 300 years, the answer has been ‘Like a machine’. Since the days of Descartes and Newton, and the beginnings of the whole scientific revolution that changed Western thought, the world has been seen fundamentally in terms of mechanism. (p. 23)

The author suggested Descartes gave us, or at least popularized, the clockwork metaphor to conceptualize all components of the cosmos. “René Descartes, the French philosopher,” Sterling wrote, “favoured the metaphor of a clock, and this was the basis of ‘mechanism’ in the 18th century whereby everything in the universe was seen as produced by mechanical forces” (p. 23). In a later reading, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, David Abram (2017) shared this understanding but also highlighted that from Descartes’ segregation of mind from the material world we got not simply mechanistic thinking but as a direct consequence the Western assumption of a single and wholly determinable objective reality. Abram suggested that:

…it was only after the publication of Descartes’s Meditations, in 1641, that material reality came to be commonly spoken of as a strictly mechanical realm, as a determinate structure whose laws of operation could be discerned only via mathematical analysis. (p. 32)

Philippe Descola seemed to agree with all of the above while exploring other consequences to thinking of this sort. Within his chapter, Constructing Natures: Symbolic Ecology and Social Practice, from the 2003 collection, Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives, the author tackled the worldview of Western civilization and what he saw as its appetite for world destruction. Descola explained:

As for predatory naturalism, it is less a value than an old European practice, born in the Middle Ages when large tracts of forest were cleared for cultivation; a practice which acquired its legitimacy with Cartesian philosophy, and its full expression with the mechanisation of the world…” (p. 93)

Mauro Grün (2005) was similarly convinced of our collective impairment and insisted that, “…although Descartes’ legacy has undergone important modifications, we are still, at the deepest level of our thought process, Cartesian thinkers” (p. 157). The key element of this Cartesian thinking we find ourselves shackled to is autonomy, the author argued. This autonomy, he said, prevents our comprehension of the complexity of both our environment and the current ecological crisis. To conclude, Grün highlighted what he felt was a central conflict within an environmental education. The entire project, he argued, faces complex contradictions including being seen as the ‘spiritual side of the curriculum’ and aiming to provide a holistic education while being simultaneously infused in the antithesis of both: a Cartesian-inspired curriculum (Grün, 2005). Other authors, such as Stephan Harding (2016) in his, Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia, touched on counter-spiritual aspects as well. Noting Descartes’ contribution to the legacy of science and its persistent attempt at undermining religion, Harding related how:

[Science’s] earliest practitioners and proponents, amongst them Bacon, Descartes and Galileo, were convinced that a new basis for certainty must be founded on reason rather than on simple faith in established dogmas and what were seen as the superstitious beliefs of the common people. (p. 31-32)

Though the above read simply as historical fact, a later reference offered something a little more theoretical and pointedly critical of Descartes. Harding explained to his readers that:

In science, Descartes’ fundamental division between living human subjects and dead external objects has seen to it that personifying (and the loving that accompanies it) are considered nothing more than mere projection and ‘fantasy’. But today we can now realize that it was Descartes who was projecting, and that his fundamental division of mind from matter was itself a great fantasy – a chimera that we need only dissolve in order to find our true home in the great psyche of the world. (p. 44)

Damning as the above read, it appeared to fit cleanly into the consensus found among our readings. In a final example of this, Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) was just as frank as Harding in her, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Among her prose, Kimmerer shared her perspective that “[g]ardens are simultaneously a material and a spiritual undertaking…” (p. 123) and that such a radical idea is difficult for scientists, “so fully brainwashed by Cartesian Dualism, to grasp” (p. 123).

Other authors were keen to note further consequences of the multi-faceted disengagement with reality brought on by Cartesian thought. Andy Fisher took the Cartesian disconnect and linked it to the worst of the field of psychology and to the evils of capitalism as well. Against what he referred to as psychology’s methodological individualism, Fisher (2013) called on people to embrace more relational approaches (such as Buddhism, feminist psychology, and Indigenous methods) that may help overcome not just the paradigm within modern psychology but the “ecodestructiveness of the capitalist system, which uses a Cartesian machine model of reality in isolating and extracting individual parts from the interrelational whole of nature to give them monetary value” (p. 169).

In her chapter Imagining Earth, within the collection Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth (Vaughan-Lee, 2013), Geneen Marie Haugen concurred with our other readings while giving this seventeenth century thinker some additional, or at least more specific, responsibility for the entire modern scientific and industrial enterprise – which she said is born out of the acceptance of Descartes ideas. “How else [than with Cartesian Dualism],” Haugen concluded, “would we bear vivisection, mountaintop removal, rivers poisoned with effluents?” (2013, p. 160). Just like Haugen above and Orr in our introductory readings, Arne Naess (1998/2008) elaborated on the impact of Cartesian philosophy on our relations with our non-human kin, emphasizing that it is no coincidence “Descartes is also the main proponent of the view that animals are insensitive machines and nature has value only as a resource for human beings” (p. 201). A similar sentiment came from Oakley (2011) who offered the world a more holistic conception of animals and our relationship to them as a way of “…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).

A synthesis of these assessments, highlighting the meteoric impact of this Late Medieval thinker, came from celebrated anthropologist and National Geographic explorer Wade Davis. In his Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World, Davis (2010) insisted that it was with Descartes where we went wrong and that his thinking hit like the spiritual and philosophical equivalent of the doomsday rock that helped to end the dinosaurs and snuff out so much life on the planet. “The universe, declared René Descartes in the seventeenth century, was composed only of ‘mind and mechanism,’” and, Davis insisted, “[w]ith a single phrase, all sentient creatures aside from human beings were devitalized, as was the earth itself” (p. 120).'

A Discourse Analysis

Some of the explanation for what is framed as Descartes’ fame and infamy is undoubtedly that his ideas arrived at the time and place they did: in Europe at the beginning of what would eventually be known as the Scientific Revolution. His thoughts (from our place in the cosmos to human nature, consciousness, and perception) may then be seen as obvious predecessors to so much scholarship that followed. It is true that discussing almost anything of concern to Environmental Education can easily find its way into subject areas Descartes was keenly focussed upon. Whether delving into outdoor education, climate change, overconsumption, Gaia hypothesis, or cosmopsychism, themes from psychology, moral philosophy, or the natural sciences may employ ideas or terminology associated with, or otherwise presented in pointed opposition to, those found coming from this person – considered by some “the father of modern philosophy” (“René Descartes”, 2019). In fact, whole domains of thought are now associated with Descartes, and some are even synonymous with his name. Concepts such as rationalism and empiricism, determinism and materialism, physicalism and atomism, anthropocentrism and subjectivism are all said to be inspired by the man (see, Husserl, 2013/1960; Merchant, 1980; “René Descartes”, 2019). And, just as Capra and Luisi (2019) explain of their own work, the terms Cartesian, mechanistic, and reductionist are often employed interchangeably (p. 35). Further, and most significant, is that nearly everyone arguing for what needs changing within the culture makes some attempt, as you would expect, to diagnose how we arrived at what are now deemed problematic orientations and assumptions. And if one starts from the premise that an over-emphasis on rationalism, materialism, or dualism is at the heart of what’s wrong with the dominant modern worldview then any critique will find it difficult to avoid a certain Late Medieval thinker.

In the dozens of works referencing Cartesian philosophy throughout our program, I read the same consensus as I found in our pre-residency readings. These suggested to me that: A) Descartes initiated and peddled dangerous falsehoods; B) that these falsehoods have helped bewilder either our entire species, one culture, or any individual subscribing, in part or in whole, to this discredited dogma; and C) this bewilderment has resulted in clear and egregious personal, societal, and/or ecological harm. I read this seemingly ubiquitous and reinforced framing as foundational. I also read little or no equivocation in these texts and found it difficult to imagine more striking or encompassing condemnations than what these books and articles present. There appeared little room, from my standpoint, to interpret these readings as anything but objective descriptions of Descartes’ philosophy, human history, Western civilization, science, and modernity – all of which culminates, as I read it, in comprehensive denunciations of all of the above. I interpret either the volume of references to the man and his work or the substance of these inferences alone as indicating the significance these authors give to René Descartes; together this quantity and its essence suggest to me that this man should be read as one of the most cataclysmic forces the universe has ever known. If I were a teacher and I gave my students only the readings from our courses and then asked them on a test, “Who was René Descartes and what was his legacy?”, an acceptable response would be in the realm of, “The root cause of the thinking responsible for the ruination of Western civilization and much of the non-human world.” An answer deviating much from this would seem a strange misreading of these texts.

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FOOTNOTES

[1] This is how I experienced these conversations. I am not sure how emphatic or encompassing these condemnations were intended to be. This may be contested but I believe most of us said and wrote all of these ideas back to our instructors in a variety of forms and fora. The impact of this and dialogues like it may be an interesting subject for further discussion and research.

[2] For a compete list of these texts see Appendix. It is also worth noting that Descartes came up in a fourth class, our research methods course, though the course was not environment oriented and the reading was not required. Still, there I found Descartes mentioned when researching phenomenology, where I read that it “was seen as a movement away from the Cartesian Dualism of reality being something ‘out there’ or completely separate from the individual (Jones, 1975; Koch, 1995)” (Laverty, 2003, p. 23).

[3] Although absent his name, the following is exemplar of a strongly implied reference to Descartes, his philosophy, and that inspired by it found within the literature:

The detached observer, relying on dualistic logic and the power of reason, aims to explain the functioning of each part in order to get an understanding of the whole. This mechanistic approach took its guiding metaphors from how a clock-maker or mechanic takes apart a watch or a machine, in order to understand or ‘fix’ their workings. This is clearly a useful method for machines, but life is more complex than a machine. (Wahl, 2016, p. 87)