Bird brains out think Descartes

I've been reading Descartes' Discourse on Method over the past few days for a paper I'm writing, and I'm quite disappointed (though not surprised) that he is one of the foundational thinkers of the enlightenment. He quite effectively described our relationship with nature as the ultimate power struggle. Through his text there is a chasm between humanity and the rest of the world, to the point where he assumed everything that had come before his time came about as if by random accidents. This view, though aimed mostly at the ancients, is also directed at the rest of the world, those Wild and whole beings I talked about in my last post. They defied logic.

It really seems to me as if he had been writing as if he were an abandoned child, which is really striking, because he looks to all traditional knowledge as being suspect, possibly because the process of uprooting French traditional thought had been well underway through imperial and religious institutions by his time. Perhaps this process had merely given him the foundation for looking forward instead of backward, forget about doing both at the same time. Institutions are not only keen about the progressive gaze that carries them forward, but they are also keenly fixated on the past, not as an integrated process, say looking forward and backward at the same time, but in a way tends to memorialize the past through monuments and iconic structures that, as Don McKay argues, 'stand against mortality.' The Church and Empires both do this quite effectively, but then along comes Descartes, and seeing ruination everywhere in the past, sees nothing but uncertainty and decay in all things behind, so better to look forward.

In his treatise, Descartes becomes so obsessed with the severance between humanity and nature that he borders on the psychotic. It isn't really much of a surprise that as he is looking forward he finds the clock, a machine, to be a suitable metaphor for all things natural. He does, after all, reject traditional knowledge that might suggest otherwise, so the only reference point that he has to build his vessel to carry him forward is the machine. The psychotic detachment expresses itself in the following quote,

It is also very worthy of remark, that, though there are many animals which manifest more industry than we in certain of their actions, the same animals are yet observed to show none at all in many others: so that the circumstance that they do better than we does not prove that they are endowed with mind, for it would thence follow that they possessed greater reason than any of us, and could surpass us in all things; on the contrary, it rather proves that they are destitute of reason, and that it is nature which acts in them according to the disposition of their organs: thus it is seen, that a clock composed only of wheels and weights can number the hours and measure time more exactly than we with all our skin.

We can trust the clock because it moves along a linear path of cogs and gadgets that are more trustworthy than even our own skin. If properly maintained, a clock can exist long into the future, a straight trajectory that defies age, and the ruination of traditional knowledge... I personally don't buy it, and think the process of uprooting the past, memorializing and making iconic everything that becomes ruins is somewhat of a problem. I think it creates a new foundation in which the secular thought becomes the new religion, and new icons are created. We cannot escape the magnetic pull of an integrated mythic time that allows us to think of the past and future simultaenously. To this extent, I tried looking for it, but cannot find the quote (it may have been Hegel, actually), who said the seed bears the knowledge of the tree it will become. To me, this suggests the progressive path forward toward ultimate enlightenment. But it also neglects that the seed also contains the memory of the tree that went before it. It is both past and future simultaneously.

I also think its important to not mistakes ourselves for God, for one its a bit arrogant, it is also quite a responsibility. Nah, I'd rather take a humbler approach and consider those clever clever machines that is the bigger world around us, to be the gods. Its a good idea to take a step back from time to time and observe, as Descartes did, but then I think its also important to not judge based on experimentation and reason alone, but to just let dreams be as dreams and the world be as the world. Its okay if we don't have the world figured out by grid line after grid line. Who knows, maybe if we observe long enough we'll see that outcasts like Assisi were correct, and that most of the world's highly integrated indigenous belief systems were also correct, that indeed there is intelligence in the world that is outside of humanity, and if anything, it is humanity that could learn the terms of dialogue from the world, instead of perpetually dictating the straight lines of progressive thought back to it.

So, here you are, proof that cars, the machines that house humans, do indeed serve as the best nut crackers (voice over complete with that educated British guy):