Feb 27 2009
It’s all René Descartes’ fault
René Descartes was sure his new method of thinking about things wouldn’t cause much problem for the church; at least that’s what he said. But once he separated the mind from the body, all hell (in the church’s eyes anyway) broke loose.
This history - coming down to us in a 350-year long battle that continues to rage - is chronicled by Russell Shorto, in his Descartes’ Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason. And this history has in fact been illustrated by the very fate of Descartes’ own remains, as they were frequently dug up, evaluated, and reburied.
Shorto describes Descartes’ project - to strip away everything he could doubt until he found an undoubtable bedrock of fact upon which to build real knowledge - as a shift in thinking so major that the western world view has a Before Descartes and an After Descartes divide.
Before Descartes, knowledge came from unsupported assumptions about the world, based on faith in decrees from some authority. That authority, in Descartes’ time, was the church, which taught a biblical world view with a bit of Aristotle mixed in. But the French philosopher realized that all of that teaching could be doubted, and he replaced that authority with the one thing he discovered that he couldn’t doubt: that he was a “thinking thing.” If thinking was going on, there was something doing it, and to try to deny that fact would actually prove it instead, since something would have to think about it in order to deny it. Hence, his famous summation: “I think, therefore I am,” or the Latin, “Cogito, ergo sum.”
Once Descartes had that solid fact, he could again build outward, adding knowledge as he went. And from this beginning, the modern scientific method was born, and our multitude of scientific knowledge resulted. This world view even played a role in politics, helping to justify both the American and French revolutions, as ruling authority was cast off and political power was said to reside in the individual.
But you have to give the church credit: despite the philosopher’s assurances, the religious institution knew perfectly well that Descartes’ work took authority out of the divine realm and put it in the mind of the human being, who would now demand evidence and proof of things. In fact, this method of knowledge separated the mind from the body altogether (some kind of incorporeal mind being capable of analyzing and acting on the physical world), creating the “mind/body problem” that philosophers have wrestled with ever since.
Indeed, even the church, in its various modern manifestations, now must rely on the same methods and thought processes as its opponents, as it continues to battle for the primacy of faith. And it is faced with the ironic fact that it now has to fight against the reunion of the mind and body, since modern materialists now want to unite the mind with the body (i.e. the brain), and remove the need for a transcendent soul altogether.
Shorto traces the history of all these developments by following the fate of Descartes’ bones. As they were frequently dug up and reburied (the location depending on whether the church or the Revolution held sway at the time), people took bits of the bones for themselves. Affording them the same kind of honour given to religious relics, these people hallowed Descartes as a sort of secular saint of reason. And when trying, on more than one occasion, to decide if the skull possessed by the French Academy of Sciences really belonged to the philosopher, the members used all the scientific methods of evaluation that had been developed to that point. So Descartes himself became not only the founder of the method, but one of its objects as well.
Russell Shorto weaves the history of modern thought with the history of Descartes’ bones in an informative, easy to read way, explaining how our current battles of “faith versus reason” are the replaying of a conflict that has gone on for more than three centuries. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in this conflict, or just in the history of western thought in general.
(If you’d like to hear Shorto himself describe the book, watch this Amazon video.)
________________________________________
******************************
******************************
Thanks, you guys. I enjoyed this book a lot because it refreshed my own mind about a lot of things. I had majored in philosophy in university for a couple of years, and my vague recollection was that while we always tended to start with Descartes, he had a bit of an over-simplistic view of things, and later philosophers were the real heavyweights.
Whatever happened with the later thinkers, he certainly opened the door for them. I hadn’t really understood, till I read this book, just what a huge impact he’d had. I think that wasn’t stressed in my philosophy classes as it should have been — possibly because we’re now living in the post-Cartesian world and it’s so normal to us that even professional philosophers don’t remember what a difference he really made.
Adrian, I gathered that Descartes, too, didn’t think there was such a big problem with keeping the mind and body separate, since he was still partly working within the spirit/body assumption. The real problems started when the thinkers after him could never explain just how this immaterial something-or-other could influence the physical (e.g. an immaterial mind or spirit making a physical hand move). That’s when it started to collapse into just what you’re thinking of, that the “I am” gave rise to the “I think.” And of course, as the church recognized this, that’s when they incongruously found themselves fighting against the reuniting of mind and body.
I’m glad you guys enjoyed the post. This was a really interesting book.