Descartes and the Disembodied Intellect

          There is a dimension implied by  Said's analysis of culture and imperialism that he does not follow out, though in a few places he seems to imply it.  The largely neglected domain of Said's analysis of culture is the relation of science and culture, that is to say, that just as, in our society, "culture is exonerated from entanglements with power", so is science, but even moreso. But it is much more difficult to question the origins of science in the same way. Scientific ideology is the religion of our culture. Since it is the myth in which the current cultural mind is most saturated, questioning it is resisted and refused.

             In other words, science cannot be questioned, but it is permissible to observe, as Said does, that art and literature of, say, imperial England, reflect the imperial will to power of England in the 17th-19th centuries. This is quite obvious in the way that paintings, novels and travel books from this period, represent the East, for instance.  As early as Marco Polo the East was seen in largely fabulous, false terms: oriental harems, gold cities, kingdoms of ivory and silver, spices, wealth beyond imagining. Behind the literary facade is a rapacious mercantile mentality which sees the East as a place to be exploited and eventually conquered.  The gold of the East, of course, was what Columbus was after when he sailed West, and it was from the East that 16th and 17th century Dutch and English merchants gathered much of their wealth. England at the time of Newton, in 1700, was already an expansive and growing empire.  There is a certain truth to the idea that Europe conquered the East by first conquering the West and the South, or Africa and America. The principle agent and beneficiary of this conquest was first the Netherlands and then England, and the principle intellectual achievement that occurred in Netherlands and in England, between 1600-1750 was probably the scientific work of  Descartes and Newton. Descartes and Newton should therefore be considered in relation to Imperial racism. And this is my point, that even if one begins by following of the cultural history of England, France and the Netherlands from the 17th to the 19th centuries, one cannot avoid the origins of science.

            Scientific philosophy begins probably with William of Occam, Roger Bacon and the Realist/Nominalist controversies about the meaning of the Eucharist.  Occam represents a changeover from a Christian theory of the domination of matter to a scientific one. Occam had argued, concerning the Eucharistic controversy, that "things that occupy the same space are equal...Christ and the bread occupy the same space", therefore they are equal. [1] This heretical position, which actually is implicit in the paradox of the Eucharist, implied that Christ, or 'reason' must enter into matter itself. In other words, the intellect, symbolized by the image of Christ could enter into matter itself, take control of it and exercise its power over it. In a sense, the rise of the scientific empire is merely a logical result of subjectvising the Christian-Roman Empire. The image of Christ becomes differentiated into the scientific reason and becomes the activity of science in its effort of gaining power over matter and nature. This means that science is not the enemy of Christianity, but is a logical unfolding of the Christ idea. If one translates the symbolic expression 'the word became flesh' into what the words have actually meant in history then the 'Word' is the human will to knowledge and power sublimated into the image of Christ and the 'flesh' is nature matter and the world that science exploits. "God became man in order that man could become God" Augustine had said. And the result of man's attempt to be god, that is to be all powerful and all knowing,  has been the atom bomb, environmental degradation and atrocities. The drive to become like God was the drive to obtain ultimate knowledge and power, and this has proven to be very destructive, despite what benefits it may have brought, or rather in conjunction with these benefits, since systems of knowledge/power escalate suffering and atrocity as they increase benefits.

             The earliest great Icon of modern science, and the man who pushed scientific philosophy along lines initiated by Occam and others was Rene Descartes.

Descartes pursued a particular variation of a theory of knowledge, which, in its main outlines, was already very old when he inherited it. The belief in the supremacy of the intellect, rather than a belief in the priority of life or rights, goes back at least to Plato and Aristotle, and certainly before them. One can trace it back into the shamanistic mists of tribal and mystery religions and mythologies. But in the Western world, it is usually Plato and Aristotle, together with Christ and the Judeo-Christian tradition that are accorded the origin of the idea of the supremacy of the intellect. The 'high' status of this idea derives from its ubiquity in justifying states, empires and social control.

      The elite nature of the intellect is defined by Plato as follows: "true opinion is a faculty shared, it must be admitted, by all men, intelligence by gods and a small number of men".[2] Intelligence is godlike and 'higher' than opinion. Plato goes even further in his drive to define ultimate knowledge and power in the Republic, where he defines his concept of the Good (agathon) as the Idea of ideas:           

The good...may be said to be not only the source not only of the intelligibility of the objects of knowledge,  but also of their existence and reality: yet it is not itself identical with reality, but is beyond reality, and  superior to it in dignity and power.[3] 

               Anything superior to reality is of course to be superior to everything. It is not difficult to see how this insight would become the source of Plato's theory of a totalistic society, rigorously structured into a merciless hierarchy.  The intellect is 'superior' to the ordinary world, the entire Cosmos, in Plato, is a devalued entity. Those who employ the Intellect are obviously superior to anyone else and deserve power over the world. The equation of the 'intellect' with a reality above and beyond our ordinary reality occurs in all the major religions. Placing intellectual supremacy outside of the ordinary world of time and space is a way of elevating it beyond question, into a nether realm. which, though it is illusory, gives the impression of granting ultimate rights and prerogatives. The state that has its basis in the grandiose and extravagant fiction of the Logos or Universal Reason is not a state that can be easily questioned.

             Aristotle's idea of the active and passive intellect had a similar purpose and design and would eventually come to be central to Thomas Aquinas and his justification of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in his Summa Theological, Aristotle defines the active Intellect as "immortal and eternal"  and it has the characteristic that it "brings all things about". In other words, the intellect, for Aristotle, as for Plato, is the source of all   universal  knowledge and active power. Plato's attempt at a Republic on the Island of Syracuse failed, but Aristotle had more success in his student Alexander, who took over most of the Mediterranean and the Middle East, conquering as far as India. Alexander declared himself a god, somewhere in Persia. The ideas of Plato and Aristotle served as a template for Empire.

           Descartes did little more than continue this tradition, in a somewhat altered from. The intellect is still the supreme agent of knowledge/power, but its relation with gods has been largely stripped away. Man's intellect is the supreme agent of meaning and change and thus the supreme embodiment of power.  Aquinas built a totalistic intellectual system around the ideas of Plato, Christ and Aristotle in order to justify the supremacy of the Catholic Church and Catholic Europe. Descartes would adjust the drive toward a totalistic system of knowledge and the total empire implied in it to slightly more secular values. The Cartesian views have tended to become religious and mythologized in their turn, of course. 

            There is a development from the totalistic system of Catholic knowledge exampled in Aquinas, to the more secular mechanistic philosophy insisted on by Descartes. In both cases the supremacy of the Intellect is upheld and as a consequence, the value of the world and of life in relativized and diminished. The monastic system depended upon the denial of the world, just as the puritan system of science would depend upon a similar denigration of the world and nature. The analogy

of the Monastic system and its relation to Christian hegemony and empire to scientific research and its relation to the European Empires and eventually the corporate empires of today is not merely a generalization.  Descartes is a pivotal figure in the transition from traditional Greek/Christian forms of knowledge/power to modern science and the  corporation and university.

            The Empire of the Intellect depends upon the unimpeachability of the presumption to intellectual supremacy. The assumed purity and infallibility of science is probably descended from the Church and the medieval view of the unimpeachable and infallible intellect. The doctrine that one should enter into contemplation of eternal truth and develop thereby a "contemptus mundi", a contempt for the world, is key to imperial intellect and its assumption of world superiority. Descartes' dream of total knowledge is a dream that reduces all of human, natural and cosmic life to a mechanism. Only the Intellect is free and stands above the devalued world, like a god. Descartes, as the famous story goes, wanted to know the one thing he could not doubt if a universal demon, "very powerful and cunning who ever employs his ingenuity in deceiving me" tried to tempt him. This story, with its overtone of Christ in the wilderness, is a story intended to justify the imperial intellect, which alone is a source of truth. The world of nature and beings outside the mind is seen as inferior, the result of demonic deceit, and thus easily reduced to mechanical exploitation.  The 'wilderness' is the world that Christ, Percival or Pasifal, and other mythical heroes of Western Romance must conquer. Traces of this even appear in T.S. Eliot's Wasteland. The wilderness must be conquered to prove the power of the abstractions, the mind, the supremacy of the European intellect, Christ and science.

            Descartes' dream of a total science should thus be seen as a stage in imperial conquest. The world would be ruled by science, which, Descartes was sure, as was Columbus or Oppenheimer at the moment of the first atomic explosion, was a gift from god.  The god concept, here, as elsewhere, is acting as a mechanism or symbolic screen on which purposes and intentions are projected.

            The dream itself, which Descartes claims happened on November 10,1619, consisted of Descartes dreaming of a book that united all the sciences in a "miracle of fundamental science". From this he eventually derived the 'Cartesian method' of doubt and proof that would become an abiding feature of the scientific method. Descartes was sure that this dream and the method were derived or sent from god, and thus must necessarily be "objective".[4] Descartes is here following an old established pattern of claiming prophetic legitimacy. He separated himself from the world, like Eziekal or Jonas, and after a ascetic renunciation of the world he receives a divine insight, which he then delivers to the world for its benefit.  One must admire the brilliance of the capacity for myth making that Descartes is demonstrating here, even if the ultimate object of the myth is questionable.

            Descartes was making a mythology that would help science both replace the old religion and become a new one.  Paul Feyerabend points out  that Church dogma and 'scientific truth' have much in common. "The development of Church dogma shares many features with the development of scientific thought". [5] But the reverse is also true. The development of scientific thought shares many features with Church dogma. Descartes created a mythology, just as the Church had. But in Descartes case, the mythology  is largely one that still holds us in its thrall, and it is this that makes it difficult to perceive and to question.

            Descartes rationalism is based on the espousal of radical doubt. Everything may be doubted except the 'Cogito'- the 'I think' in his famous formula, "I think, therefore, I am".    The monastic separation from the world in view of assimilation to the power of god who is reflected in the theocratic state, becomes subjectivised in Descartes. The detachment from the world becomes not a flight from the world to a monastery, but a flight inward, into the reason and the intellect. Descartes does not flee the world to seek unity with the all powerful symbol of god, rather he seeks to make the human reason into an all-powerful agent of domination and change. Descartes is explicit about this. The thinking ego of the scientist must reject "the quicksand and the mud" of the ordinary world, what Plato called the "beastliness of the multitude" and withdraw to a place "as solitary and retired as the most remote deserts". [6] But the desert that Descartes seeks is not in the Egypt of the Desert Fathers, or in the mountains of Tibet, but in his own body. The empire of the Cartesian intellect rises out of the 'quicksand and the mud' of the ordinary world of ordinary people.  The supremacy of thought is erected into an absolute, and both human bodies, all other bodies, and the world itself become a mechanism to be objectivized, and exploited. Descartes created a nearly ideal philosophy for European conquest: nearly infinite technology, infinite advantages and inquiries leading to as much power and wealth as might be gathered. Beyond the exploited world, Descartes could sit detached in mental purity, certain of himself alone, like a computer talking to itself in the dark, the ghost finally eradicated from the machine and human frailty and human bodies eliminated from the Intellect and the dream of total power.

             It is Descartes Dream and the ideology that is implicit in it, that stands at the beginning of the history of European science. Descartes supplied a mythical structure that not only appealed to Europeans in their drive for intellectual supremacy, but he envisioned a method by which this supremacy could be implemented. He separated mind from nature and made all of matter and motion in nature an object to be exploited.

The Europeans were 'free', that is, at least those who could profit from the new science and the technologies that grew from it, which turned out to be very few.

            The Cogito, or the neutral intellect, is an outgrowth of Descartes' own readings in Scholastic philosophy.   The disinterested intellect is separated from the world. The mind is to inhabit a desert, like the Church fathers, but in secular mode, and from there proceed to the logical dissection of the world for freedom, science and power. He literally replaced 'science' for god. Science is not neutral. Bacons injunction to "put nature to the rack and compel here to answer our inquiries", is a similar injunction to gain power in all directions and over all things. It cannot be separated from the procedure of conquest and Manifest Destiny. Perhaps a strain of Descartes leads to Marx and libertarian social thought,  as Chomsky maintains, but the original dream of Descartes is about total power and knowledge.

            Descartes wants to internalize the Christian domination of outward nature through a discipline of inward intellectual supremacy. He accomplished this by transforming the Eucharistic paradigm of the scholastics into the mathematical paradigm of science, and this greatly expanded opportunities for power and exploitation, and it is on this that his fame principally rests.  The knowledge system of Christianity had been relatively static in its social implications. Descartes retained the myth of the supremacy of the intellect, but he transformed it into a dynamic theory of change. The agent of this change would be mathematical thought and the scientific method. The result of this is a profoundly antidemocratic vision of scientific supremacy.  But it is also a vision that would be enormously useful in justifying the new merchant empires that were growing around Descartes, both in the Dutch republic were he migrated, and in England, which would usurp  the Dutch Empire. Science was created to serve the 'freedom' of the merchant classes. The Cartesian method became a means of power and profit for these classes. Descartes notion of freedom,  was a theory of power, not of rights.

            Science has been closely allied to conquest, atrocity and political powers for at least 400 years, first with the Dutch and English and then with the French, Americans, Germans, Russians, Japanese and Chinese.  It is not merely a matter, as Chomsky was written me in a letter, of "confusing the critique of science with the critique of the social role of science".  "Science" (in itself), is a mentality, a created procedure: it is not outside history.  It only promotes itself as being outside human and ethical realities. Historically, science and its social role are not different categories: the ideology of value neutrality has its history too, and the essence of this ideology is maintaining the illusion of science as a detached, abstract, disembodied entity that is beyond question. The notion that science per se cannot be questioned is no more true than that the God concept cannot be questioned, or the History concept. Indeed these are related systems of abstraction, as I have tried to show throughout this book. Science is a social creation.  Science was created and allied with the conquest and with the class of rich Europeans who plundered the New World.

                The conquest of the world by Europeans and the enabling of this conquest by western religion and science are inseparable occurrences, both equally  justified by complex ideological systems ranging from Manifest destiny, to Christianity to Natural Selection. Science itself, as well as the civilization that created it should be questioned. Darwin's truth is an ethical nightmare. The "truth" of the ethical nightmare of the Darwinian system brings into question the cogency, validity and ethical soundness of the Darwinian system or the scientific mentality that generated it.

             Jefferson's letters to Lewis and Clark carry much the same mixture of scientific research and advocacy of  cultural supremacy. This leads Jefferson into advocating extermination of the Native Americans.  Jefferson said that the Indians must "be pursued to extermination". The Cartesian world view, while not directly involved in the American Holocaust, is certainly a general framework of thought which is implicit in the project of the European Conquest.  Said says, if I read him correctly, echoing Howard Zinn, that no system of knowledge can be disembodied or removed from its cultural context or from the consequences which it produces. There is no "it" , no amoral, neutral truth that is beyond question or ethical inquiry. The impersonal, amoral truth is a fiction, a "necessary illusion". Through much of the history of the last 300 years "science", "civilization" and "empire' are indistinguishable concepts and practices. Separating them may soothe some people's consciences, but the history indicates these things act in concert, not in separation.

             Science was and is allied with the imperial powers. Descartes mechanical philosophy was undermined by Newton  by the end of the 17th century, as Chomsky points out,  but the mechanical ideology lives on-- and Descartes' original dream of total knowledge- his original drive for a total system of scientific explanation conceived when he was a young man, also lives on. They do so within science, IBM, NASA or Genentech.  The world is not divided up into an area of an abstract, scientific or religious knowledge hovering somewhere in neutral abstract space, and everything else proceeding in its usual human and natural way. The imperial project of a total explanation of matter and motion and mind continues, just as the Conquest Continues. The ideology of progress is Cartesian and Baconian. Descartes first title for his Discourse was "Project for a Universal Science Which Might Raise our Nature to Its Highest Perfection".  This is a theory of history, which he imagined will be dominated by his own divine method. What is not said is who will suffer so that this "Perfection" can be brought about.  The idea of 'perfection', of 'total, universal truth', of a complete description and codification of reality has had disastrous consequences. This should be questioned, and the role of science in atrocity further examined.

            It seems clear from the research I have done for this book, that the Cartesian system of rationalism, the Cogito, the ideology of the free, disembodied and detached intellect, leads to the victimization of ordinary people.[7] The Cogito exalts the intellect and alienates life and humanity. The human bankruptcy of the Cartesian drive for total scientific knowledge of the universe is apparent in the photos of Nagasaki after bombing, where nothing human remains except smoking ruins and the dust of black rain.  It is true that Descartes softened his original dream of total knowledge expressed in the Discourses, later in his life, but his dream lives on.

            This is an important point to my thesis, which needs to be grasped to some degree for the paper as a whole to be understood.  Descartes separated himself from the world, not only as a result of following an historical pattern going back to desert asceticism and Platonic idealism, but he did so in seeking to develop what he calls a total science. The separation of mind from body and the resulting view of all matter and life as mechanism would have disastrous consequences.  Cartesian rationalism and Francis Bacon's empiricism formed the intellectual project of science. But the civil religion or cultural theology that has now become the ruling ideology of our day has only begun to be questioned. The transcendent intellect and its drive for total knowledge becomes the rationale for world empire, for total science and for conquest. The conquest and its atrocities follow upon the view of the mind as an abstract entity which stands in disinterested alienation and separation from the object of its study. Nature becomes a de-natured entity, an object to be used and exploited- something one dominates rather than something one participates with.

            To express this somewhat differently, the Mosaic idea that God defined himself as "I am that I am" is subjectivised by Descartes into the idea  that "I think, therefore I am". In both cases human consciousness has been raised out of its context into an absolute or transcendental position. Consciousness is set up as a supreme value over any other value. this belief in the supremacy of human consciousness as the 'measure of all things' and the source of all legitimate authority and 'objectivity', can also be found in Plato, Augustine, Aquinas and others, including more recent thinkers like Einstein. Augustine used the idea of transcendental consciousness as a means to justify the 'truth', authority and power of the Roman Catholic Empire, just as Descartes used the idea of  the conjunction of being/thinking as the basis of his justification for a Universal Science. The Intellect, in the language of Christian metaphysics, is "true man and true god", which is to say that exercises authority over all domains, high and low, heaven and earth. This presumption obtains, whether the supremacy of the intellect is turned towards the gods through symbols, whether it is turned towards men in a social contract, or whether it is directed to phenomena through science wherein it presumes superiority over the object of study. The secularization of the Intellect does not change its presumption to elite and executive status. Whether it claims divine right, or secular domination through science the intellect claims a godlike abstraction and detachment. This allies the intellect automatically with power. The modern conjunction of science and the state is thus a development out of the older conjunction of religion and the state.  The conjunction of science and the state or religion and the state both seek to unite themselves in the conjunction of "political power and philosophical intelligence" that Plato sought to grant to the Philosopher Kings.  

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