That fall [1883] … the last of the bison herds was slaughtered by the Wasichus [Europeans]. I can remember when the bison were so many that they could not be counted, but more and more Wasichus came to kill them until there were only heaps of bones scattered where they used to be. The Wasichus did not kill them to eat; they killed them for the metal that makes them crazy, and they took only the hides to sell. Sometimes they did not even take the hides, only the tongues and I have heard that fire-boats come down the Missouri River loaded with dried bison tongues. You can see that the men who did this were crazy. Sometimes they did not even take the tongues; they just killed and killed because they liked to do that. When we hunted bison, we killed only what we needed. And when there was nothing left but heaps of bones, the Wasichus came and gathered up even the bones and sold them.12
From the primal point of view, wilderness is the closest face of the mystery of creation. From the Liberal point of view, the primary value of wilderness is in its potential for the private production of wealth — ultimately, marketable commodities. Part of the immediate universal appeal of Liberalism comes from its simplicity and the directness of its appeal to the most basic of human impulses: freedom, power, comfort, and wealth. Another part of its appeal is the fact that it presented itself as rational — the application of an empirical, scientific approach to government. A year after Isaac Newton published his monumental Principia Mathematica, the grand synthesis of mechanistic science, Locke modestly presented his own work as the contribution of a mere “under-labourer” to the “incomparable Mr. Newton.”13
But science offered a profoundly materialistic definition of truth, based on measurement and control of the natural world in the service of the production of material wealth. Such a science could not, by definition elucidate the good life. This separation of value and fact, paralleling the separation of church and state, or spirituality and politics, is at the heart of Liberalism’s abandonment of the quest. To understand how the use of science is implicated in our crisis and how it might serve in its transcendence, we need to look more closely at the conditions under which it emerged.
Deformation of the Soul: The Scientific Revolution
The revolutionary founders of the modern Liberal state understood science as the fruit of God-given rationality and the key to human liberation. They were also for the most part devout Christians who still believed in the literal truth of the Bible as God’s word. But the practical importance of science as a method of “certain knowledge” grew, and as science increasingly contradicted literal biblical descriptions of the natural world, the political relevance of the entire religious, ethical, and philosophical sphere declined. Religion and philosophy became private matters, as did all questions of value and meaning, other than the self-evident value of Liberal institutions as impersonal, legal mechanisms for checking and balancing individual self-interest. Science became equated with publicly reliable knowledge. The Liberal principles of minimal government and the invisible hand of the market further undermined the role of religion and philosophy.
In 1543 Copernicus initiated what was to become the scientific revolution by publishing an obscure mathematical text, De Revolutionibus de Oribum Celestium, in which he argued that the movement of the heavenly bodies could be more elegantly explained, using a simpler geometry, if one assumed that the earth and the planets rotated about the sun rather than the other way around. Copernicus had been inspired to consider this radical hypothesis by the rediscovery of classical Greek texts and the mystical Pythagorean notion that the world was constructed according to mathematical laws. Since medieval Christian cosmology regarded the heavens as the realm of divine perfection, and since mathematical laws were perfectly true, it seemed obvious to Copernicus that God would construct the heavens mathematically. At bottom Copernicus was as much persuaded by the mathematical elegance of this new model as he was by its practical capacity to explain and predict the movement of the heavenly bodies. This equation of mathematical elegance, precision, and truth became a cornerstone of the scientific method.
Medieval cosmology, however, was based on the notion of a Great Chain of Being, with the stable immovable earth below and the perfect heavenly bodies spinning above. The fact that the mathematics of Copernican astronomy literally turned medieval cosmology upside down had profound repercussions for epistemology, philosophy, and politics, which are still playing out in our present moment. The elegant certainties of mathematical proofs, and the capacity of mathematical formulations to explain, predict, and then control so much of the natural world, displaced religion and philosophy in intellectual life. Even more unsettling was the fact that science could contradict direct experience. Few things are more obviously true to human senses than the fact that the earth is solid and unmoving and that the blazing sun moves across the sky. Mathematics persuaded us of the opposite. In the ominous words of Galileo, the greatness of Copernicus’s intelligence was in allowing mathematics to “rape” his senses.14 Much of modern philosophy has still not recovered its center after being displaced by science.
The Italian mathematician, physicist, and philosopher Galileo Galilei took Copernicus’s insight about the explanatory power of mathematics and helped turn it into a fundamental epistemological and ontological principle. He argued that the deeper significance of Copernicus’s achievement was to show us that the universe is constructed mathematically, and so mathematics needs to be understood as the language of a true philosophy and a useful science: “Philosophy is written in that great book…of the universe.” And it is written in the language of mathematics, whose “symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.”15 By working closely with practical men — the gunners and artisans in the arsenals of Venice — on the eminently practical matters of ballistics, he developed the experimental method in which the mathematics that explained the heavens so brilliantly was applied to moving objects on earth. In so doing, he directly connected the act of cognition to manipulation, and technology became the embodiment of mathematical reason.
The French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes, inspired by the power of mathematics, then developed a coherent metaphysical system that enthroned this mechanical, mathematical method as the exclusive path to that certain knowledge that would make us “masters and possessors of nature.” Since this powerful method of mathematics could only deal with numbers, Descartes’s bold philosophical move was to assert an absolute distinction between those experiences that could be quantified (and dealt with by mathematics) and those that could not. Certain knowledge was henceforth confined to the world that could be measured, the world of tangible external things, which Descartes called res extensa. These were the unambiguous qualities of shape, weight, and movement — or in the language of physics, mass, extension, and motion — what Galileo called primary qualities. Almost everything else was unknowable, existing only in the realm of res cogitans, “things of the mind,” what Galileo called secondary qualities. It is hard to overestimate the world-changing significance of this intellectual gambit. Suddenly, in one move, Descartes rendered all the qualities of taste, smell, and color, the full range of human emotions — including all the grand passions of love and hate, grief and joy, despair and hope — unknowable and, by implication, irrelevant to what really mattered!
When they [res cogitans] are judged to be certain things subsisting beyond our minds, we are wholly unable to form any conception of them. Indeed, when anyone tells us that he sees colour in a body or feels pain in one of his limbs, this is exactly the same as if he said that he there saw or felt something of the nature of which he was entirely ignorant, or that he did not know what he saw or felt.16
Common sense tells us the opposite is true. The world of emotions and feelings is not only real but where we spend much of our time. When we feel nothing, we value nothing and life loses its meaning. To consign the fullness of our emotional life to the irrational and thus unknowable was an extraordinary act of metaphysical mutilation.