A couple of years ago I culminated a personal odyssey by standing in the basement of a Paris museum exchanging stares with the skull of the French philosopher René Descartes. It seemed a surprisingly small and delicate vessel to have contained the brain that once thought "I think therefore I am" and other phrases of world-class weight. But a brain scientist will tell you that size doesn't matter: indeed, if saints' bones served as touchstones in the Middle Ages, this grim little object I beheld is arguably the touchstone of our time, the very relic of modernity.
On the eve of a presidential election that holds the possibility of historic change, it's worth pondering the significance of this relic. One reason for the hunger for change is that the years of the Bush presidency have coincided with a worldwide rise of fundamentalisms: Christian, Muslim, and secular. As we approach November 4, people are longing for a way out of a situation in which competing value systems continually threaten one another with extinction. No doubt this partly explains the choice of John McCain -- a non-ideologue who has spent his career at a distance from the Christian conservative wing of his party -- as the Republican nominee, and may also explain the rise of Barack Obama, a pragmatic, legalistic thinker who brings, to boot, the hope of a new epoch in America's long racial struggle.
The war of competing fundamentalisms in which we are caught goes back a long way. The modern era began with an outburst of efforts to probe the natural world: with telescopes, microscopes and dissections. The Church and absolutist states saw this activity as a threat to power, but mostly tolerated it as long as it remained random. Descartes made the threat more real by providing an intellectual foundation to the work of Galileo, Pascal, William Harvey and others. In 1637, this irascible, vain, restless Frenchman wrote a 58-page essay -- "The Discourse on the Method for Rightly Conducting the Reason" -- with the modest proposal to ground knowledge not on received wisdom from the Bible or kingly power but on human reason. The Cartesian method became the basis for both the scientific method and the reason-based political philosophy of the Enlightenment.
Yet Descartes himself was keenly sensitive to Church criticism. He tried to safeguard faith from science by creating a wall, splitting reality into two distinct parts: mind/soul and matter. However much "natural philosophers" probed the material world, he reasoned, they would never touch the eternal. But as the decades wore on and scientists were able to explain more and more of reality strictly in terms of matter, faith began to seem irrelevant.
At the same time, however, some of the "new philosophers" realized that reason was insufficient to deal with many aspects of life. It did very poorly at handling joy, transcendence, love, and the meaning of suffering. Thus the modern conundrum -- a split in our consciousness -- which is Descartes' legacy.
Curiously enough, Descartes' mind-body split has a literal side. So revolutionary did Descartes' contemporaries think his work that 16 years after he died his remains were dug up and people began taking pieces of them, some as tokens of the change he had wrought -- souvenirs of the birth of science -- others actually seeing his bones as religious relics, since, at the time, any inquiry into the heart of nature was deemed spiritual.
For several years I followed the twisting trails Descartes' bones took down the centuries. I uncovered varied stories involving scientists, priests, thieves, soldiers and politicians who bought, stole and puzzled over this philosopher's physical remains. But there was a common thread. Each story contained at its core a struggle over where meaning should be placed, in the religious or the secular. It happened in the 1780s, when the leaders of the French Revolution debated enshrining Descartes' bones in the Pantheon, a church-turned-secular temple, seeing him as a hero of democracy. It happened in the 19th century, when Descartes' (rather small) skull was used in the new field of anthropology to refute the prevalent theory that greater skull size was an indication of greater intelligence, and became caught up in that era's science-versus-faith debate.
Descartes' literal mind-body split continues today: his skull is housed in a science museum; the "body" of his remains are in a church. And the split in the modern value system continues as well. Of course, it's in the nature of fundamentalism to set up a strict divide. In fact, however, from the time of Descartes things were never black and white. As modernity matured, a three-way division that came into being. There was the theological camp, which held onto a worldview grounded in religious tradition. And there was a "radical Enlightenment" camp, which wanted to overthrow the old order, with its centers of power in the church and the monarchy, and replace it with a society ruled by democracy and science. But there was also a "moderate Enlightenment" camp, which argued that the scientific and religious worldviews aren't truly inconsistent, but need to be reconciled.
The radical secularists of today are right to be fed up with religious fundamentalism, but radical secularism has its problems too. For one, it thinks too highly of reason, or at least of the ability of humans to employ it. And it takes a too narrow view of reality. Religion, like art, is a way of negotiating the conundrum of existence. The French Revolution was the ultimate expression of the radical Enlightenment, in which attempting to cut religion away from society led to death and chaos. The American Revolution, by contrast, embodied the moderate Enlightenment values of inclusion and tolerance.
The intense interest in this presidential election may be due to a yearning to return to those values. It's our bad luck that 9/11 happened in the early days of an administration that was already disposed toward a theological worldview, fueling its own extremism, which in turn inflamed other fundamentalisms. Whoever wins on November 4, we can hope -- and pray -- for a leader who knows what René Descartes bequeathed us, right down to his bones.
