Descartes' Dangerous Idea

Bifurcation & the foundation of the scientific worldview

Historians of thought are in general agreement that the philosophy of Rene Descartes marks a turning point that inaugurates the beginning of modern philosophy. Descartes’ mind/body dualism would cast a long shadow over subsequent philosophers, who would adopt various strands of idealism, materialism and dualism to try and make sense of (or do away with) this split. What is less recognised is that Descartes also inaugurated a second, more radical split, one which became so influential on the modern mind it is difficult for us to even recognise.

As well as separating mind and matter, Descartes bifurcates the world out there into res extensa and res cogitans. Res extensa is the world bereft of sensory qualities, namely the quantitative, extended aspect of objects accessible to science. The world as we perceive it - the red of the apple, the green of the tree, the scent of the rose - is res cogitans, the mental and subjective aspect of reality which is inaccessible to science. We can see how this lends itself to all kinds of subjectivism.

This division is what the 20th century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead calls bifurcation. In the words of Bruno Lautour:

“Bifurcation is what happens whenever we think the world is divided into two sets of things: one which is composed of the fundamental constituents of the universe— invisible to the eyes, known to science, yet real and valueless—and the other which is constituted of what the mind has to add to the basic building blocks of the world in order to make sense of them"

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What is being bifurcated is primary and secondary qualities, a distinction which would become central to the worldview of later philosophers (the primary/secondary quality distinction is central to the epistemology of Locke.)

This distinction was not an innovation by Descartes, but the revival of an old postulate of materialism: As early as the 4th century BC the atomist Democritus wrote that

"By convention there are sweet and bitter, hot and cold, by convention there is colour; but in truth there are atoms and the void"

And, shortly before Descartes, Galileo wrote that “tastes, odors, colors, and so on … reside only in the consciousness”. But it was Descartes that gave bifurcation a fuller metaphysical explication. Descartes was committed to replacing the Aristotelian assumptions of western thought and instead founding a theoretical basis for a mechanical science on mathematical principles. Of course, only a mechanical universe could be understood by a mechanical science, and the genius Descartes recognised that in that case all of the qualitative, phenomenological aspects of reality could not be accounted for:

“We can easily conceive how the motion of one body can be caused by that of another, and diversified by the size, figure and situation of its parts, but we are wholly unable to conceive how these same things (size, figure and motion), can produce something else of a nature entirely different from themselves, as, for example, those substantial forms and real qualities which many philosophers suppose to be in bodies .”

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Thus, the endeavour of a successful mechanical account of the universe necessitated bifurcating and demoting res cogitans to a secondary, private phantasm. Descartes here laid the foundations for the worldview that would overturn the Aristotelian/Thomist assumptions of the Middle Ages and make philosophical knowledge secondary to physics. Medieval scholasticism inherited an essentialism from classical philosophy which viewed an objects’ qualities as inseparable from the essence of the object. Separating, and subjectivising the secondary qualities of res cogitans was thus a radical break with what had come before.

In the Middle Ages:

“Not only did the world exist for the use of man, but it was also fully intelligible by the senses and in relation to the human uses of that world. The basic categories of this thought, of Aristotelian-Thomistic inspiration, were those of substance, essence, matter, form, quantity and quality. Such categories have, in modern thought, been replaced by time, space, mass, energy, etc., while quantity gains preeminence over quality.”

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The bifurcation premise was picked up by Newton. He incorporated this assumption into his Principia, which would form the basis for the scientific worldview. Newton's laws of motion provided a complete mathematical framework to describe the behaviour of physical bodies. The basic picture of things presented by Newton, which was seen to confirm the mechanical theory of the universe, became the basis of the scientific worldview which informed later philosophers and scientists alike. It is only since the 20th century that the problems of bifurcation have been seriously interrogated, but it continues to operate as a background assumption to most scientists and forms the basis for the still popular understanding of the universe as mechanism.

But since bifurcation was never and could never be demonstrated, why is it so hard for modern thinkers, especially scientists, to now think outside of it? While the bifurcationist approach to the study of the natural world does not necessitate a reductionist or scientistic worldview, and the scientific method is itself ontologically neutral, it is built on a methodological reductionism. From the practical starting point of assumed bifurcation and the limiting of knowledge to what can be expressed quantitatively, it is a small leap to turn this methodological assumption into a general rule, and outright deny the existence of any knowledge outside of its scope. One often observes among scientific thinkers that what are useful rules of methodology for a scientist (parsimony, verificationism) become for them general rules of ontology. And so it is for bifurcation: what began as a tacit ontology in the background of the scientific worldview has become explicit with the common affirmation of scientism/materialism as dogma today.

The End of Bifurcation

It was not until the 20th century that the Cartesian bifurcation premise came under serious interrogation. Edmund Husserl, the father of phenomenology, challenged Cartesian dualism by arguing for the “intentionality” of conscious acts: if consciousness is inherently intentional and directed towards something, this bridges the gap between the subjective and objective world. Husserl’s work aimed to show the intentional nature of numerous types of mental acts, including those related to everyday sense-perception. Against Descartes, Husserl and later phenomenologists argued for an understanding of consciousness which recognises it as an embodied, intersubjective realm of experience which is always shaped by it’s unique “lifeworld”.

Another thinker whose work put him at odds with the scientific worldview was Alfred North Whitehead. A mathematician by training who co-authored the Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell, Whitehead devoted his later life to Philosophy of Science. Whitehead recognised that something serious had gone wrong at the inauguration of the scientific revolution which had warped our picture of the world, and he came to identify the root of this error in the thought of Descartes:

“Science can find no individual enjoyment in Nature; science can find no aim in Nature; science can find no creativity in Nature; it finds mere rules of succession. These negations are true of natural science. They are inherent in its methodology. ... The disastrous separation of body and mind which has been foisted on European thought by Descartes is responsible for this blindness.”

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While Whitehead was in awe at the achievements of Newton and the scientific revolution - he terms the seventeenth century the century of genius - he recognised in it a deep fallacy. Whitehead observed that the modern worldview had fallen victim to what he called the ‘fallacy of the misplaced concreteness,’ this fallacy occurs when we mistake our abstractions - originally created out of pragmatic considerations - for reality itself. While the analogy of the universe as mechanism provided some useful methodological assumptions for scientists, the misplaced concreteness that occurred when this was assumed to be the reality of things has been habituated into a certain blindness in the minds of moderns.

Whitehead aimed to undo this at the level of ontology, returning to speculative metaphysics and crafting a picture of the world which did not bracket mind from the world. Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism presents the world as a complex and dynamic interconnected system engaged in a “creative advance into novelty”. In Whitehead’s form of pan-psychism the world is not composed of mind and matter, but of actual occasions, or temporal events each with a subjective and objective aspect. The aesthetic enjoyment of the poet listening to the bird’s song is as much a part of this interconnected whole as the bird and its composite molecules.

Inspired by the insights of Whitehead, the Catholic philosopher Wolfgang Smith has devoted much of his work to undoing bifurcation, specifically as it relates to interpretations of science. In his book The Quantum Enigma Smith argues that not only can we safely cast aside the bifurcationist premise of modern physics, but doing so in fact does away with many of the apparent paradoxes presented by the findings of quantum physics. Looking at the world without bifurcation means bringing back an old distinction between two distinct ontological realms: the corporeal realm of everyday objects which we perceive, and the physical realm, which we measure with the methods of science.

What is called for is an ontological distinction between the spatio-temporal world as perceptible and the world as conceived by the physicist: the corporeal and the physical, we shall say. It appears that Eddington was right: there are in truth “two tables.” There is namely the one I can see and touch, and the one made of “atoms and the void” which I cannot.

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By rejecting substantial forms, Descartes and Galileo reduced the corporeal world of everyday objects to the physical world of physical bodies or “matter”. We need simply do away with the bifurcation premise and this consequent reductionism, Smith argues, and we can then find a proper place for the seemingly perplexing findings of quantum physics as relating to the physical realm. This has been troubling for materialists, because it places a limit on the reductionism of science. Physicists are faced with a so-called “measurement problem”, Smith argues, because once they take their acts of measurement from the physical world and make it perceptible, it categorically transcends the world of physics. Corporeal entities are irreducible because they are an irreducible wholeness not subject to space and time.

Conclusion

Descartes cleared the way for the scientific revolution with his picture of a mathematicised universe. This vision, appealing in its simplicity and the great power of discovery it placed in the hands of physics, has come to dominate modern thinking in the materialism and subjectivism that now serves as the background philosophy of our civilization with the decline of Christianity. While the 20th Century produced men of remarkable genius who recognised and attacked the source of this problem in Descartes’ bifurcation, their critiques have yet to trickle down to the scientific community, who are largely still enthralled by Descartes’ mechanistic version of reality. This worldview also has devastating effects in the social realm; as recognised by later empiricists, it leads finally to the recognition of the inability of human reason to grasp the essence or reality of anything. Human reason becomes subject to utility, while the unbridgeable gap between mind and matter allows for extreme subjectivism. In our time, liberalism has become intensely focused on the moral worth of self-creation by the unmoored self.

Now it would be taking things a little far to blame a 17th century French mathematician for the excesses of today’s progressivism, but just as the project of the scientific revolution contained a tacit ontology which eventually became explicit in the form of scientism and materialism, many have also derived from it a tacit ethical picture of things. While the domain of physics is taken to be a closed, deterministic system, combined with our knowledge of evolution and the history of social progress as one of greater emancipation we see a tacit moral direction to things: the free-floating self is gradually liberated to a space of greater autonomy by technological progress. Science then, becomes not only the means by which we know the world, but the means of advancing this project of liberation through technological progress. Most do not consciously adopt this worldview, but it naturally fills the vacuum left by relativism. What we moderns are really incapable of formulating is a notion of teleology, which itself presumes that human reason is capable of really communing with reality beyond the observation of material causes.

The scientific worldview built atop Cartesian premises has shaped our assumptions about reality and our place in it in profound ways. Modern materialism, skepticism, subjectivism, and moral relativism followed naturally from the mechanical worldview made possible by Descartes’ bifurcation. Moving beyond this assumption, the error of which has long since been exposed by scientists and philosophers alike, will require a more holistic picture of reality and the nature of man’s intellect. Thankfully, in our inheritance from classical philosophy and the world’s religious traditions, we can turn and find a sacred, holistic picture of reality which has been the norm for human thought since the Axial age - the perennial wisdom of which still stands as repudiation to the failed assumptions of modern man.

1. http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/93-STENGERS-GB.pdf

2. René Descartes: Principles of Philosophy: Translated, with Explanatory Notes. Vol. 24. Springer Science & Business Media, 1984.

3. Woortmann, Klass. Religion and Science in the Renaissance. Brasília: UNB, 1997.

4. Whitehead, Alfred North. Modes of thought. Vol. 93521. Simon and Schuster, 1938.

5. https://www.scienceandnonduality.com/article/an-excerpt-from-physics-a-science-in-quest-of-an-ontology