The Limits of Our Demystified World

“…I desire you to consider, I say, that these functions imitate those of a real man as perfectly as possible and that they follow naturally in this machine entirely from the disposition of the organs-no more nor less than do the movements of a clock or other automaton, from the arrangement of its counterweights and wheels.” René Descartes, L’homme

We live in Descartes’ world, but do we belong here? Is this the world as it ought to be?

Descartes wrote his Meditations on First Philosophy to prove (a) the existence of God, and (b) the distinction between the soul and Body. It was not out of great piety that he undertook this metaphysical task. He wanted to clear a space for the advance of the sciences by demystifying the physical world, reducing it all to mechanical bodies. Descartes is infamous for having conducted experiments on cats, dropping them into boiling water and watching their responses. He was at peace in his conscience because after all, given that animals do not have souls and that everything that does not have a soul is simply a mechanical body, animals must be simply mechanical automata. But of course, by that standard the human body is also mechanical.

Catherine Wilson informs me that Descartes caused quite a stir in his day for these views. This world is God’s world which he has ordered and which operates according to his good plan. People of the time viewed messing with it through technological science as impious, even demonic. Descartes’ project was to transform our view of nature—to demystify it—so that we could understand its principles of operation, rework it, and make ourselves masters and possessors of it, as he put it in part IV of his Discourse on Method.

I confess that demystified nature seems perfectly right and holy to me. This is a dimension of the medieval mind that I cannot fathom. It reminds me of my first (and last) reading of the Arthurian tale. People were slaughtering each other and throwing away their own lives for reasons of honor and medieval propriety that was completely beyond my ken and seemed tragically needless to me. Similarly, medieval notions of a physical world with moral and spiritual content, including notions of holy ground and holy space, strikes me a superstitious. The Temple and its contents in the Old Testament is different, of course. If God explicitly sets something or someone aside as holy then it’s holy.

In going down this road, Descartes was following Francis Bacon who was trying to accomplish the same goal and overcome the same opposition. We see this not only in his scientific writings included in The Great Instuaration, but also in the Essays. In “Of Riches” (#34) he promotes the view that anything can be bought and sold without impropriety, in contrast to Naboth’s view of his vineyard. Today, you can sell your church building or bulldoze it and put up a gas station. No problem. It’s just a building. Symbolically, it presents problems when what is architecturally a church building is transformed into an art gallery (Upton MA), a public library (Seacliff NY), or a café (Newton MA)

But am I missing something? In demystifying nature, Descartes made everything mechanical, even the human body, and thus the appropriate object of rational control. Yet, we have enough health left in us that we have not gone the whole distance in that direction. The human body is still holy in a sense. We speak of “desecrating” a corpse, an vacated human body. Is this just superstition? We might donate organs or even our whole body for research purposes. That required passing a significant threshold. But we would not donate our bodies for fertilizer in the family garden, or as food for the poor. The secret of Soylent Green was a horror.

We view other things as in a sense holy, or objects of reverence, such a things pertaining to civil religion. The flag requires particular treatment. You don’t throw it in the garbage. It must be disposed of with care and respect. We treat graveyards and battlefields the same way. Try building a shopping Mall or amusement park when the north and south spilled blood at Gettysburg or Antietam.

So are we being superstitious in these things—the battlefields and our bodies (for which we show greater respect when we’re dead than when we’re alive)? Should we fully rationalize and demystify? Or have we overly demystified? Have we hollowed out our understanding of some things that are actually more multidimensional? I think it is extremely unlikely that we have got it just right?