Descartes' Bones
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.
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Thanks, borother. PleasePardonTersenessDueToWordCount.
A Zen poet, I challenge two assertions.
"John McCain -- a non-ideologue..."
McCain's ideology is militarism. How could you possibly miss that? You equate ideology with religion, excluding all others?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jacob-alperinsheriff/mccain-urged-reagan-admin_b_135431.html?show_comment_id=17207332#comment_17207332
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-dinges/mccain-meets-a-bloody-dic_b_137422.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/06/why-mccains-time-with-cou_n_132470.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/24/mccain-featured-in-iran-c_n_137626.html
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081023_communication_scholars_speak_out_about_negative_campaigning/
"The American Revolution, by contrast, embodied the moderate Enlightenment values of inclusion and tolerance." Unless you weren't included, like women, free African-Americans, and all slaves (only 3/5 of which were "included"), or white men who didn't own sufficient land.
[[[Absolute Supremacy / The Commons///[[[{{{Absolute Subjugation}}}]]]
The brackets and slashes represent the walls we hide behind, including the most fundamental wall of all: the self / other divide. A dominant group asserts privileged access to the Commons, simultaneously denying access to an underclass. Substitute any dom/sub pairing you like.
beloved/UNION/Beloved is our more perfect Union.
Until we get beyond the absolute dualism of 'Us Good Guys Here' vs. 'Them Evil-Doers Over There,' we'll be doomed to repeating the wars of the past.
I suspect Des Cartes, wherever he might be, is conjuring the question of his skull that Christ was said to ask of his tomb. To paraphrase, ... "Did you expect to find me here?"
We find him in his words, his writings, and his influence upon the methods of Human thinking and science in the broadest sense. Wider ripples every moment his name is mentioned, ... and ever larger.
What greater sense of immortality are we supposed to imagine for ourselves as scientists, seekers of knowledge than that our thoughts and beliefs influence other seekers of truth forever?
What greater spiritual pursuit than to believe that God has granted us minds to pursue an ever greater understanding of our capacities, and of the incredible diversity of the Universe?
Do you truly believe these are exclusive of one another? Are you that blind?
"Reason or Religion?" is truly a matter of deciding scope. What I can know and experience, I can understand firsthand. What I accept out of a faith beyond experience and understanding is rightly relegated to "religion", to faith.
What we can know firsthand is exclusive of what we feel we must take upon faith. For a scientist to criticize religious faith is no more rational than a religious believer denying the findings of science. There can be no union of those two pursuits, ... but there is also no exclusion, except out of ignorance, lack of education, or imagination.
As a Presbyterian Microbiologist, ... I know that the world consists of what I can know and understand, ... and also what I can not know, but still wish to understand if by no other way than my faith and my imagination to grasp something larger than what I can actually know.
"nobody's right if everybody's wrong" .
"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."
For this guy to say this shows that he has no understanding of what reason is. The Reign of Terror was clearly not rational, even if Robespierre and his fellow revolutionaries claimed it was. The American Revolution actually DID cut religion totally out of government, and only where religion and politics exist as separate entities can true religious freedom exist.
Exactly DMK! Religious faith has no place whatsoever in governance over people. It is subjective and unreliable, and highly prone to prejudice. Inclusion and tolerance should and must allow and excuse faiths that may contrast with the "norms", and still allow political participation without exception. We are one people.
"...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."
Russell, thank you for this excellent assessment of how at its roots, American democracy aims for the true Enlightenment balance of religion and reason. I am going to read your new book. Would that more in our country would open their minds to grasp these concepts.
The intersection of religion and science presents a unique opportunity today.
The creation/evolution discussion has led us to a state where science is claimed by both sides of the divide. The new line of research dealing with DNA sequencing presents challenge and opportunity. As it becomes possible to sequence everything, we have a way to show relationships between different branches of life better than could be done from the fossil record. This means the sequencing will show if life is a tree structure leading back to a common ancestor, or if contradictions in those sequences will make it impossible to link the tree and show life had to be come from different sources or creations. This is an opportunity for Christian colleges that would like to become involved in scientific research. They could invest in the machines and collect the samples and do the mathematical research, and it will all be scientifically duplicatable by those on the evolution branch of divide. Christians and evolutionists will come to agreement on if life on earth points to a common ancestor, and we will have Christian colleges to thank for doing the leg work.
This would allow the Christians to prove their creation scientists are real scientists. Being real scientists they will welcome the results even if those results have implications for their belief structure. Or if they prefer to look away and not do the experiment, then those who question their scientific honesty will have proof.
notb, that was brilliant, thank you for a good morning read.
I must take accpetion to the statement "Atheism probably exists as an aberration to fundamentalism"
Atheism is nothing more then a lack of belief in any kind of god.
If I do not believe in Santa, is that an aberration of Christmas? The Easter bunny to Easter?
A related thought: If atheism is a religion, then "not collecting stamps" is a hobby.
Like Jesus and Mohamed, Descartes was the father of a fundamentalist sect. Whether he would have approved of the nasty child is just biography. Cartesian dualism has done as much damage to history, nations, and lives as Christianity.
Exactly. Great post.
Utter bullshit. Descartes was no fundamentalist, nor did he found any "sect". This is just glib reductionism at its worst.
When there is too much contradiction between science and religion, a breech in these magistrates occurs in our minds and then the two sides cannot be contained separately anymore. That is what happened to me, I was raised Roman Catholic and then I converted into agnosticism (after I switched to Lutheranism so I could remarry in a church without paying the anulment fee). And I then woke up to find how blindly people follow their religion, as I did, because they were indoctrinated to it. Most of the faithful does not compare and choose what to believe, they were born into it. No reasoning, no revelation.
It was a book, Science and Religion, by Paul Kurtz that starting me on my path to agnosticism, when I wanted to rectify my internal conflicts between science and faith (e.g., the age of the earth, dinosaurs, evolution,...). And then I read Age of Reason by Thomas Paine, and various works by Carl Sagan, Robert Ingersol Green, Voltaire, and then on to Dawkins, Hitchens,...Skeptical Enquirer magazine.
Where faith exists, reason cannot.
Atheism probably exists as an abreaction to fundamentalism. And atheism, strictly speaking, has nothing to do with science, and is not even scientific, but more an unwillingness to admit to unknownability. Whereas science does not support any of the simplistic folklore of religions, science cannot do anything but enable inference as to the cause of existence, and inference is not science. Science, you see, fundamentally requires reproducible experimentation in order to establish proof. You can’t experiment with the creation, if there even ever was one, except on a tiny scale. Large scale experimentation is likely to lead to untoward consequences.
Science is therefore no threat to religion, never was and never can be. The only threat that it posses is making religious leaders work a little harder to explain why the obvious parables of religion should still be instructive to human conduct. Far from weakening a religion, thinking harder about it will strengthen it. That is the global mistake of several thousand years, for Descartes was likely not the first of his kind.
What is a threat to religion is other religions with competing gods. Science has never taken up arms and shed blood to destroy a competing philosophy, religions have. If science can mediate the differences between these faiths by eroding the dependencies of them all on absolutism, then it is the most benevolent force ever hewn by man.
It's a rather sad statement on the human condition when we consider that many citizens of our US of A have not yet managed to move beyond the times prior to the Enlightenment !
As I watched the McCain rallies, and listened to the "agents of intolerance" in the form of Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin, and most recently Saxby Chambliss, I was reminded of the incredible divide that continues to exist in this country between religious fanaticism and rational thinking.
I am a proud non-believer and while I have no qualms with those who hold well reasoned spiritual beliefs, I have absolutely no tolerance left for uninformed extremists of any kind. People who blindly follow like sheep and spread hatred, destruction and death have no legitimacy in the eyes of any god. Worse than these mental deficients are the people who would take advantage of their obvious stupidity to further their own agendas.
A fine essay indeed, Bravo! Thanks Russel.
I second the compliment. And I assume "Descartes' Bones" is the book title. Of course, the mind-body split dates back in literature at least to Plato. Descartes' cogito ergo sum is no more radical than the Greeks' "man is the measure of all things."
What Shorto fails to mention is that some advance has been made on Descartes, if only by way of admitting the prison of metaphysics we find ourselves confined in. Heidegger's identification of the "ontological difference," as both necessary and insufficient, informs our intellectual struggles. It also helps to explain why we need to continue to study Descartes.
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