Descartes

Excerpt from Kathleen Dean Moore, “Late at Night, Listening” in Earth’s Wild Music (Counterpoint Press, 2021), pp.150-156

One night after supper, my daughter and I strapped on headlamps, pulled on high boots, stuffed an extra flashlight in each pocket, and stepped out of the yellow circle of lantern light into the dark, heading to the cove… At the edge of the water we followed narrow beams of light through the strange land that appears and disappears with the phases of the moon, slowing rising from black water and sinking away by morning… Pink-striped anemones hung from thick stalks, heavy under their own weight. They shuddered when we touched them, and so did we. Orange worms hung from curling tubes, their own weight lengthening them into glistening threads. Wherever we looked, flat slabs of kelp shone in lamplight. Chitons, polished like leather, struck fast to rock. There were acorn barnacles as big as fists, barnacles on the barnacles, and leaf barnacles with fleshy necks…

“God, I wish Rene Descartes were here,” I said.

Erin laughed; she’s used to this. But it was true. Enlightenment philosophers have mapped out such a miserable, lonely world for us to live in. For three, four hundred years, we children of the Enlightenment have sat alone and damp-eyed in a world of nothing but stone and dumb brutes, the only spirit in a universe of matter and mechanical animal-clocks, the only shining eyes in a universe stripped of mystery, exposed to human understanding and control, reduced to human convenience. Lonely kings of the stony mountains, we warily watch the world through our weak and narrow beams of light, denying the existence of everything we can’t see clearly and distinctly, the unimagined other worlds watching us in the dark. I wish Descartes would plunk right down here on a slimy rock.

“It’s slipperier than you think,” I would warn him. He probably would struggle ot move around the kelp bed in his long woolen robes…and I know he wouldn’t understand my high-school French. …. “Here,” I would say, grabbing his hand. “Stick your finger into this anemone and feel it shrink away from you. Reach into the water. Try to touch those waving tentacles at the mouth of the tube. See them snap away? Reach out to touch the sculpin; look how it disappears in a puff of sand. Turn off your headlamp. All the eyes will vanish. Move once, just wave an arm, and every sound will stop. And you’ll be sitting in a world that is froid, sombre, muet et vide.” Maybe he’d look up startled. “And you, doubting the truth of anything you can’t clearly and distinctly perceive, will believe that the world is in fact cold, dark, silent, and empty.

“But if you sit still in the dark, breathing quietly, the world will come to life around you. Astonishment will rise in you like the slow tide, sliding in under the soles of your feet. And then you will understand: you are kin in a family of living things, aware in a world of awareness, alive in a world of lives, breathing as the shrimp breathe, as the kelp breathes, as the water breathes, as the alders breathe, the slow in and out. Except for argon and some nitrogen, every gas that enters your lungs was created by some living creature—oxygen by plankton, carbon dioxide by the hemlocks. Every breath you take weaves you into the fabric of life.”

He probably wouldn’t understand a word I said….

The dame arguments are offered, over and over again, in a dogged effort to preserve a place on the pedestal for humans alone. Here’s the most popular one: It would seem that humans are apart from and above the rest of natural creation for the Bible says God created man in his own image, several days after He created the birds of the air and the fish of the sea and gave man dominion over all the creatures that chip and bubble and roar. This might be a reasonable argument, based on Biblical authority, although scholars quarrel over the meaning of the words translated as ‘dominion.’

Mostly I worry that it’s only arrogance that makes humans think that because God made us last He must have made us best. Why couldn’t people as readily believe that by the time God got around to making people, He had run out of ideas, so He did a little recycling. There’s nothing wrong with learning from experience; that would truly be ‘intelligent design.’ The same systems that propel giant squid through the seas move blood through our hearts, and our cells use the same notation that directs the growth of red rock crabs. We breath the same oxygen as the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, and it turns to the same carbon dioxide in our lungs. To make our minds, our exalted minds, God blew into the brain of a lizard. Our great temples than the proportions of a snail.

It seems to me that if we truly are made in the image of God, then God, too, must be made of the stuff of lizards, or lizards are made of the stuff of God. We should rejoice in that god, and we should rejoice in every human being, and every squid and sculpin- the progenitors of what is divine in us.

A different argument comes from Descartes. Humans have minds, or consciousness, he wrote, “the thinking substance.” But plants and animals do not. So humans are apart from and superior to plants and animals.

The fact is, I don’t know for sure what animals are thinking, but neither did Descartes, and that seems like a good reason not to rush to judgment about what’s on an animal’s mind. New evidence emerges every year of sophisticated self-awareness, problem-solving, and communication in animals. Evolutionary biologist Marc Bekoff cites evidence of “Dogs that understand unfairness, spiders that display different temperaments, bees that can be trained to be pessimistic,” and now animals that have a sense of humor. Koko, the western lowland gorilla who learned sign language, once tied her trainer’s shoelaces together and signed “Chase!”

How suspiciously convenient it is to believe that humans have the monopoly of the universe on mind. If people are going to imprison dolphins and transmogrify the gallbladders of bears into fortifying elixirs, if they are going to scrape the bottom of the ocean bare and grind the hindquarters of black-tailed deer into patties, if they are going to reduce owl nesting sites to toilet paper and convince themselves that this is not a problem, then they will need to believe that humans have minds but other animals do not. But this is a matter of convenience, not truth.