Future Primal. Louis G. Herman
individual and the story and state of the larger community. Of course, in formulating his ideas, Descartes was not alone. He was heavily indebted to the achievements of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, and his framework was in turn developed, qualified, and articulated by others who followed, culminating in the grand synthesis of Sir Isaac Newton.
The scientific method emerged together with a rapidly growing, global, industrial capitalist economy to produce a remarkably uniform, characteristically Western way of experiencing and thinking about the world. These habits go so deep that even highly intelligent critiques of modernity, like those of many self-proclaimed postmodernists, as we shall see, reveal quintessentially Cartesian, and thoroughly modern, reflexes.
Deus Ex Machina
Today, we can see one particularly vivid reductio ad absurdum of mechanistic Cartesian science in the hypertechnological fantasies of cryogenicists, roboticists, and nanotechnologists who fantasize about transcending the messy biology of the human condition through robots and androids. Futurists Gregory Paul and Earl Cox point out that humans evolved as better hunter-gatherers, but we are only “marginally adapted for high level physics and novel writing, like the archaeopteryx for flight.” Marvin Minksy, MIT professor and researcher on artificial intelligence, laments that we have not become conspicuously smarter since Shakespeare or Euripedes. He notes that humans can only learn and remember about two bits of information per second. Even if we did nothing but learn twelve hours a day for a hundred years, the total sum of information would only be about three billion bits — less than we could store on a memory disk from 1998.21
If we start from our self-evident, fully embodied human consciousness, the fallacy is obvious: the mechanists unconsciously assume what they are trying to prove. They implicitly define intelligence mechanically, then triumphantly declare that machines do it better. The roboticist Rodney Brooks’s cheerful posthuman futurist fantasy celebrates genetic engineering as indicating “the very deep extent to which we are biological machines…molecules interacting with each other according to well defined laws, combining in predictable ways, and producing, in our case, a body that acts according to a set of specifiable rules. We are machines, as are our spouses, our children, and our dogs. And we are now building machines that will match and surpass us. Resistance is futile.”22 Dr. Robert Haynes, who was the president of the sixteenth International Congress of Genetics, concluded that “it is no longer possible to live by the idea that there is something special, unique or even sacred about living organisms.”23
These facile pronouncements about the human condition are generated by a method of inference — mechanistic science — that, as we have seen, begins from an already mutilated understanding of human consciousness. The method reproduces the Cartesian error of forgetting that we have chosen to focus exclusively on the primary qualities of res extensa that can be measured. We forget the freedom of the in-between. We forget we made a choice to treat the world as a machine, not because it is a machine, but because, if we treated it as if it were a machine, then we could get a certain type of knowledge useful for practical ends.
Descartes made the archetypal Faustian bargain. His deal with the devil required that we give up the science of soul for the science of wealth and power. Having turned away from considering the soul, we compounded our sin by repressing reflection, and with it the memory of having made the deal in the first place.
Technocrats entirely miss the point when they argue that machines can perform mechanistic functions more efficiently — compute data faster, shoot straighter, dig deeper, lift heavier, travel faster. Efficiency is hardly the point of being human. Cultural historian William I. Thompson says it best: “For the mechanists, the flesh is slow, sloppy, and wet, and, therefore, primitive.…[But] slow and wet is the ontology of birth and the act of making love.…Fast is fine for the programmed crystalline world of no surprises and no discoveries, but slow is better for the creative world of erotic and intellectual play.”24 It is exactly our inefficiency that gets to the heart of the human condition. Being embedded in our biological messiness explains our mortality; the sting of death, loss, and grief; and the joy and struggle of loving, of bringing up a child, writing a song, dancing, and philosophizing. Embracing this keeps us close to the irreducible mystery of the way nature works itself into the body, the body into consciousness, and consciousness back into nature.
The philosopher of science E. A. Burtt, in his 1925 masterpiece The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, talked of “metaphysical barbarism” as the price we paid for the power of modern science, which he, along with many others since, thought worthwhile. Today, in an age marked by genocide, weapons of mass destruction, and ecocide, it seems long past due to renegotiate the terms of our culture’s Faustian bargain.
The Contradictory Logic of the Heart — Dialectics
One of the great ironies of modernity is that we have now exposed the philosophical absurdity of the Cartesian world-machine at exactly the same time that machinery has become nearly ubiquitous, defining almost every aspect of our direct experience of reality. Virtually every object in the room where I write — books, chairs, tables, computer, phone, and lamp — has been machine made. The components of the house itself — the sheetrock walls, the windows and blinds, the doors and floors — were all fashioned by machines. We live our lives moving from one manufactured interior to another. The primary reality of our wilderness origins has been eclipsed from direct experience, literally buried under our ever expanding cities. Faith in the Cartesian abstraction has led us to create a secondary reality that embodies that abstraction. We experience the world-as-machine because we live in a machine-made world.
The logic that got us here goes back to an original act of splitting: between agriculture and wilderness, or the fence that separated the civilized farm from undomesticated nature. From this has flowed a whole series of related, supporting splits: the outer objective world of matter from inner, subjective life, the rational from the irrational, idea from emotion, the human from the animal. One can trace a philosophical thread from Descartes back to humankind’s original alienation from wilderness. In each case of the above pairs, the first term is privileged over the second in a hierarchical dualism that is tearing our world apart. This brings up a fundamental issue about types of logic that we need to be clear about in recovering the quest.
Splitting reality into pairs of absolute opposites requires the deductive logic of noncontradiction, also called syllogistic logic. This stipulates that one thing, or A, cannot be something else, such as B, and still be A (A cannot be not-A). This seems self-evident and very useful, since it allows us to define pieces of reality unambiguously, as if they existed like parts of a machine. Each thing is understood as wholly distinct in itself and distinguishable from everything else. Defining each individual thing as isolated requires a related process of abstraction from the field of experience, taking things apart and then analyzing how they fit together. Our primary methodological habits have become abstraction, analysis, and critique. But the process of dismantling and separating cannot, in principle, make meaning. Meaning requires putting things together, making connections; it requires narrative description, integration, reconstruction, and synthesis, all of which run on a different logic.
For example, what of Descartes’s poor cat? In strict Cartesian fashion we can describe the beating heart of a living animal in abstract, measurable terms, even accounting for its changing dimensions over time — the volume of its chambers, the force of contraction, and the speed and pressure of the blood flow. But the truth is, when disconnected from the body, the heart no longer works, and neither does its owner. A living heart can only be understood in context. The separated pieces need to be reconnected and related through a process of creative integration and synthesis. This recognizes that the beating heart requires breathing lungs and healthy kidneys, oxygenating and detoxifying the blood flowing in the coronary arteries, feeding the heart muscle. We deepen our understanding of the healthy heart by recognizing the role of diet, exercise, environment, and general lifestyle. Further, as we consider these issues, in order to evaluate any particular heart, we ultimately must account for the mental and emotional state of the whole living creature in relationship with its total living environment. The bigger the picture, the more relations established, the deeper and more meaningful