Descartes

Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 2000.

“I’ve often wished that I could have been in the room when Descartes came up with his famous quip, “I think, therefore I am.” I would have put my arm around his shoulder and gently tapped, or I would have punched him in the nose, or I might have taken his hands in mine, kissed him full on the lips, and said, “René, my friend, don’t you feel anything?”

I used to believe that Descartes’ most famous statement was arbitrary. Why hadn’t he said, “I love, therefore I am,” or “I breathe, therefore I have lungs,” or “I defecate, therefore I must have eaten,” or “I feel the weight of the quill on my fingers and rejoice in the fact that I am alive, therefore I must be”? Later I came to see even these statements as superfluous; for anyone living in the real world, life is; existence itself is wondrously sufficient proof of its own existence.

I no longer see Descartes’ statement as arbitrary. It is representative of our culture’s narcissism. This narcissism leads to a disturbing disrespect for direct experience and a negation of the body.

Descartes had been attempted to find one point of certainty in the universe, to find some piece of information he could trust. He stated, “I suppose, then, that all the things that I see are false; I persuade myself that nothing has ever existed of all that my fallacious memory represents to me. I consider that I possess no senses; I imagine that body, figure, extension, movement and place are but the fictions of my mind. What then can be esteemed as true? I was persuaded that there was nothing in all the world.” Estranged from all of life, Descartes thought that everything was a dream, and he the dreamer….

But as Descartes continued his line of reasoning, the world congealed for him into two groups, the thinker, in this case Descartes (or more precisely his disembodied thought processes), and that which he thought (i.e. everything and everyone else). He who matters, and that which doesn’t….

He and many other philosophers eventually agreed that subjective personhood should certainly be grated to all of them, as well as to others with political, economic, or military power, while they decided that just as certainly it should not be granted to those who could not speak, or at least those whose voices they chose not to hear.

The latter group of course included women… It also included Africans… The same logic was used to deal with Native Americans who also occupied land the Europeans wanted…. It included non-Christians, whose poor choice of religion meant they were not fully human, and so could be enslaved. It included children born to non-Christians, whose poor choice of parents meant they too were not fully human, and so too could be enslaved. The definition of those precluded from being fully subjective and rational beings included anyone whom those in power wished to exploit. …

Searching for certainty, René Descartes became the father of modern science and philosophy. Even if his philosophy were not such an easy justification for exploitation, his search was fatally flawed before it began. Because life is uncertain, and because we die, the only way Descartes could gain the certainty he sought was in the world of abstraction. By substituting the illusion of disembodied thought for experience (disembodied thought being, of course, not possible for anyone with a body), by substituting mathematical equations for living relations, and most importantly by substituting control, or the attempt to control, for the full participation in the wild and unpredictable process of living, Descartes became the prototypical modern man….

It is not too much to say that a primary purpose of Descartes’ philosophy, and indeed much of modern science, is to provide a rational framework on which to base a system of exploitation. Descartes himself stated this plainly, as when he observed, “I perceived it to be possible to arrive at knowledge highly useful in life… and thus render ourselves the lords and possessors of nature.”…

The truth is that the physical cannot be separated from the nonphysical…Let me put this another way. Had Descartes been in the hold of a ship tossing violently in a storm, the contents of his stomach lurching toward his throat with every swell, his famous dictum may not have come out the same. By the same token, had he shared his room not with a stove but a beloved, he may not in that moment have believed that thoughts alone verify his existence, nor that “body, figure, extension, movement and place [were] but the fictions” of his mind….

Trust experience. Descartes’ inversion of what is to be believed makes no sense to me, not to any of my senses. Thought divorced from experience is nonsense.”