Masters and Possessors

Descartes's Dream, Our Reality

At the end of “Longevity Escape Velocity”, I mentioned that subscribers to Pancake Victim Speaks will encounter repeated reflection on the end of René Descartes’s Discourse on Method. I quoted from Discourse 6 as translated by John Cottingham for Cambridge University Press.

This is not the first translation of Descartes’s Discourse I read, and while I’ve no doubt that Cottingham’s translation is excellent—I don’t know French, so can’t really say!—it lacks the drama that one might expect from someone like Descartes.

There are other translations that capture something of the Cartesian confidence and spirit, and the drama of Descartes’s radical ideas. Here is the same passage from the 1968 Penguin Classics edition, translated by F. E. Sutcliffe:

For they [Cartesian scientific discoveries] have made me see that it is possible to arrive at knowledge which is most useful in life, and that, instead of the speculative philosophy taught in the Schools, a practical philosophy can be found by which, knowing the power and the effects of fir, water, air, the stars, the heavens and all the other bodies which surround us, as distinctly as we know the various trades of our craftsmen, we might put them in the same way to all the uses for which they are appropriate, and thereby make ourselves, as it were, masters and possessors of nature. Which aim is not only to be desired for the invention of an infinity of devices by which we might enjoy, without any effort, the fruits of the earth and all its commodities, but also principally for the preservation of health, which is undoubtedly the first good…

There are two differences that make a difference. Sutcliffe renders “infinity of devices” to Cottingham’s “innumerable devices”, and “without any effort” is hard to even locate in Cottingham’s version (he has “facilitate our enjoyment” in roughly that spot…).

I love Sutcliffe’s version. Infinity of devices, without any effort. That sounds like Descartes.

Anyway, this isn’t really about translations of the Discourse. It’s about how wild the 17th century was. Sutcliffe’s version of the Discourse captures that wildness, the new hope that had dawned that earthly human life could be profoundly, unfathomably improved.

My sense is that it’s difficult for us to comprehend just how bizarre Descartes and his allies would have seemed to ordinary folk. We’ve grown so accustomed to Cartesian ways of thinking—whether about how the physical world works or about the role of technology in making things better—that to sympathize with Descartes’s original hearers is more or less impossible. Descartes’s intellectual vision has won such a decisive victory that understanding an alternative is like learning a whole new language from a different linguistic family.

Oh, and the other language talks only about things you’ve never seen.

The dissonance for Descartes’s contemporaries involved (at least!) two dimensions. First, Descartes’s vision of the future was inconceivable relative to the lived reality of 17th century Europeans. Second, that vision required the dismantling of the cosmos, and so would have seemed inherently destructive.

Descartes published the Discourse in 1637. The Thirty Years’ War was raging. Europe’s population was being ravaged by plague again and again. And again. (Not a decade earlier, Descartes’s native France had lost an estimated million souls in a three-year outbreak of plague…) After his confrontation with the Inquisition, Galileo was under house arrest. Social upheaval was on a dramatic upswing. Just one concrete data point on this lesser-known final point: in the period between 1635 and 1660, the annual average of popular revolts in France spiked to almost 18, up from only 3.5 in prior half century. (For more, check out this bonkers paper about the “global crisis of the seventeenth century”.)

Again: the lived reality of 17th century Europeans would have seemed incompatible with the Cartesian vision. But not only that, the theoretical significance of the Copernican Revolution, which stood at the heart of the broader scientific revolution that Descartes was advocating, would have seemed not only disruptive to life, but antithetical to it.

The dominant conception of the world leading into Descartes’s lifetime—a vision that shaped civilization throughout, it’s fair to say, more or less all recorded history—is one on which the space we inhabit is a cosmos. The idea, which has many and varied specifications, is that this world is an organic, harmonious whole, a unity in which things have a proper place, an orderly thing in which relations between things signify and organize and give meaning to individuals.

A cosmos, in other words, is a system.

One of Descartes’s more radical ideas is that the physical world is a universe rather than a cosmos. And a universe is not a system, not an orderly, complex entity that governs its parts.

A universe is a mere collection, a more or less random arrangement of parts. Anyway, so far as the universe qua universe is concerned, the arrangements are random. These parts are what they are all on their own, not by virtue of their role in the universe as a whole. So the natures of things comprising the unvierse have little or nothing to do with one another outside of the way their movements impact other individuals’ movements. The parts of a universe, therefore, have no broader meaning.

The trouble is that the idea that we inhabit a cosmos meant something to 17th century folk. It gave a logic to the environment they inhabited that allowed them to organize their lives along the tracks laid out by the cosmos as a whole. They knew how to live by understanding their respective places in the cosmos.

A universe provides no such (cosmic) guidance.

Even before Descartes’s Discourse, John Donne saw the problem. In 1611, in “An Anatomy of the World”, Donne reacts to the “new philosophy” coming into being through the work of Francis Bacon, Copernicus, and others. It’s flowering will begin with Descartes. Here is Donne:

And new philosophy calls all in doubt
The element of fire is quite put out,
The sun is lost, and th'earth, and no man's wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.
And freely men confess that this world's spent,
When in the planets and the firmament
They seek so many new; they see that this
Is crumbled out again to his atomies.
'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,
All just supply, and all relation;
Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot,
For every man alone thinks he hath got
To be a phoenix, and that then can be
None of that kind of which he is, but he.

Donne sees that the “loss” of the sun and the earth, and the “crumbling” of our social locations, is a harbinger of chaos. It means we have to invent ourselves.

As David Hume will more bluntly put it almost exactly a century after Descartes’s Discourse,

Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? Whose favour shall I court, and whose anger must I dread? What beings surround me? And on whom have I any influence, or who have any influence on me? I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, inviron’d with the deepest darkness, and utterly depriv’d of the use of every member and faculty. (A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739-1740)

The idea of world-as-universe—the rejection of the world-as-cosmos—would have seemed to Descartes’s contemporaries as radical, perhaps unfathomable, and certainly dangerous. The danger stems from world-as-universe’s incompatibility with the logic of living, as people had forever conceived it. We knew how to live because we knew what we are, and we knew what we are because we knew where we belonged. That belonging was a belonging in a distinctly cosmic order. It told us where to go, what to do, ordered by what we are in relation to other cosmically-organized individuals. The Copernican Revolution that Descartes defends in the Discourse is not only a scientific revolution, it is implicitly also an anthropological and therefore an ethical revolution.

Without the cosmos, meaninglessness looms because nature seems lost, and our nature with it.

This is what I mean when I say that Descartes’s ideas would have seemed not only inconceivable but destructive.

But, in Descartes’s mind, what were to others inconceivable, destructive ideas would be humanity’s salvation. No more toil. No more death. The new science, Descartes believed, would roll back the curse of the Fall.

Despite the lived reality of most folks in 17th century Europe, and despite the danger inherent it—perhaps because of these two things—Descartes vision spread like wildfire. His thought, with its bravado and hopefulness, captured the age. In the end, it changed the world.

Descartes’s ideas really have made our lives better. On average, we live longer, healthier, easier lives. But those same ideas have also, as Donne saw, made meaning hard to find, made us believe we must be one-of-a-kind, that we “have got to be a phoenix”.

This is the irony of Descartes’s movement: in making our lived experience better, we have lost our sense of meaning because we have lost our sense of self. And this loss has made our psychic experience worse in deep, important ways.

I call this the accidental war on humanity.

The question is: how will the war end?