Why was this patent absurdity so persuasive to Descartes and, following him, the intellectual elite of early modern Europe? First, Descartes, like many of his contemporaries, was enormously impressed with the sudden profusion in the seventeenth century of clockwork robots, “automata,” and machines. Since their workings were a predictable outcome of precisely measurable pieces of matter in motion, machines represented the most fully realized expression of “useful knowledge” based on res extensa. The explanatory power of mechanical knowledge was amplified by the fact that a number of the new inventions were instruments for measuring. By the time Descartes published his Discourse on the Method in 1637, the microscope, thermometer, pendulum clock, and telescope had all been invented and were radically extending the realm of what could be measured and mathematized.17
The application of machinery in the service of commerce added the incentive of profit — also calculated numerically — to manufacturing methods based on mass production of goods in factories. Finally, the superior truth of Cartesian science was demonstrated most emphatically by violence, as the machinery of killing annihilated the traditional societies that stood in the way of European expansion.
In applying the mechanical model to the earth and animals, Descartes was particularly impressed with vivisection — in which living cats and dogs were nailed by their paws onto boards in order to have their chests cut open to expose their still-beating hearts and breathing lungs. In the thrall of his mechanical revelation, Descartes fixated on the obvious similarity between a mechanical pump and the heart, and then he made a bold leap of logic, which was to become a monstrous leap in moral thinking. He postulated that a cat, for example, is nothing more than a kind of clockwork whose parts are so arranged that, when you nail it to a board, screams come out of its mouth.
[Animals]…are not rational, and that nature makes them behave as they do according to the disposition of their organs; just as a clock, composed only of wheels and weights and springs, can count the hours and measure the time more accurately than we can with all our intelligence.18
Cruelty to animals became an unofficial test of being a Cartesian. If you felt compassion for an animal, you simply failed to grasp the absolute separation between things of the mind and things of matter, between sentient humans and mechanical animals. Only humans had reason; therefore, only humans had feelings and could be moral agents. Descartes specifically attacked the notion that animals might have an inner life — a soul — as the most common source of error in the pursuit of reliable knowledge. Things of the mind might be ultimately unknowable, but the mind could recognize itself as absolutely separated from the body and nature. This doctrine, known as Cartesian dualism, eliminated in principle the moral constraints on doing with animals and nature what we would. Despite its obvious absurdity, this notion is almost universally embraced by industrial cultures. We see it on a mass scale in the cruelty of routine testing of pharmaceutical products on laboratory animals and in the heartlessness of our factory farms, in which animals are reared for slaughter as so much protein-per-unit-space-occupied, per-unit-input-of-feed.
Ultimately, we can say that Descartes’s ideas took their form to serve short-term human self-interest — the need for certainty under conditions of extreme existential anxiety. When we take a closer, un-Cartesian look at Descartes’s psychology, we can see the stages involved in how one man gradually turned away from the truth quest to develop a method that extinguished, in principle, the importance of the quest in public life. By carrying out this exercise, we reverse Descartes’s process and find ourselves beginning to recover the quest.
Descartes’s Dream
According to Descartes, res cogitans, things of the mind, were unknowable except for a few important exceptions — clear, evident intuitions. One was the reality of the doubting, thinking mind itself, hence his much-celebrated revelation cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I exist.” Also real and knowable were a few propositions of logic, the laws of mathematics, and a few supposedly self-evident propositions of theology. If we reflect for a moment in a wholistic fashion on the contents of consciousness at any particular moment, the fullness of experience becomes apparent. On the face of it the reality of the rational, thinking mind is no more or less self-evident than any other particular content of consciousness revealed through reflection, such as: “I sit contentedly on a warm rock watching a sunset with baboons — therefore I exist.” Why, then, was Descartes so convinced that the act of thinking, questioning, and doubting was more real than that of feeling and empathy?
From a psychological perspective, Descartes was like anyone else, an emotionally driven human being on a particular quest conditioned by time and place. Surprisingly, Descartes himself provides us with exactly such an un-Cartesian account of himself in the Discourse and more extensively in his journal Olympica.19 What is immediately striking is that he tells a story of an emotional revelation, a drama unfolding over time, taking place as unique events in the supposedly unknowable realm of things of the mind. These writings offer the strange spectacle of Descartes exemplifying elements of the truth quest, then coming to the conclusion that he should prohibit it for others.
He starts by describing how, despite having attended some of the best schools in Europe, he emerged disgusted with the state of philosophy, which seemed “built on mud and sand.” He notes that it had been studied by the most outstanding minds for centuries, yet it had failed to produce “anything that was not in dispute and consequently doubtful and uncertain.” In conclusion he describes his mental state as wracked by anxiety over the turmoil of the times, and he talks of his despair that he might never find the certain knowledge needed to improve the human condition.20 Descartes was desperate for certainty. Libido dominandi — the lust for power — comes to the fore.
Descartes had spent the summer directly involved in one of the military campaigns of the Thirty Years’ War, and this no doubt intensified his general sense of crisis. In late fall, he retired to winter quarters near Ulm. His search climaxed in a waking vision, reinforced by a series of dreams the following night of November 10, 1619. The dreams were highly symbolic but their meaning was clear to Descartes. He saw them as pointing to a new science based on mathematics as the key to that certain and useful knowledge he was seeking. The dreams were so profound, and so directly relevant to his quest, that he was convinced he had been graced with divine revelation. In gratitude he vowed to make an offering of a pilgrimage, on foot, from Venice to the shrine of Our Lady of Lorette, a vow he fulfilled five years later.
Descartes’s own account makes it clear that this entire, extraordinary process of discovery takes place within the realm of secondary qualities, the supposedly unknowable things of the mind. He experiences distress at the chaos and confusion of his time, anxiety over the failure of traditional wisdom, and fierce determination in searching for answers. He obviously values the spontaneous dreams and visions and then reflectively interprets them in the context of his life. He reacts, feels, considers, and creates meaning all within the subjective realm of his own mind. In addition, he communicates the meaning and value of his great discovery not through numbers but in the form of a narrative — the Discourse — a story describing a series of unique events. Oddly, his own certainty and relief is such that he neglects the decisive flaw in his conclusions: He is so enraptured by the results that he discards the process that led to them.
This is an extraordinary moment in the history of the West, where a drama unfolding in the psychology of one man catalyzes, then becomes emblematic of, a related process of transformation in the entire culture. This moment captures the contradiction that currently splits the modern mind, in which self-reflection attempts to annihilate itself in the spectacle of the genius telling his followers: “Do what I tell you, not what I do!”
By the same token, this account contains the kernel of a process of recovery and transformation for us today. Don’t only do what Descartes tells you to do. Do also what he does: question persistently; be open to the fullness of experience, including ecstatic revelation (like that of Descartes himself); reflect on the full amplitude of human experience in both its measurable and unmeasurable aspects; and then keep making connections between the part and the whole,