Climate Criminals: René Descartes
Since Descartes had no concept of greenhouse gas emissions or global warming while he was writing his famous Meditations, it is unlikely that he could predict our current ecological crisis. He was writing one hundred years before the invention of the steam engine and two hundred years before the combustion engine. But if you conceptualize the issue of climate change as a single entity, you would find René Descartes’ philosophy in the deepest roots of today’s ecological crisis.
Possibly more than any other single philosopher, Descartes restructured the foundation of Western thought, shaping it perfectly to support the extractive capitalism of colonialism and the industrial age. Descartes’ major contribution to our climate crisis is what is known as the Cartesian split. Through a dualistic theory, Descartes reduced the world into two basic substances: the mind—or the metaphysical—and the body—or the physical. This reduction not only separates the mind from the physical body, but it also separates the mind from the physical, natural world. It also allowed Descartes to question the very existence of nature.
Before Descartes, questioning the existence of nature would be philosophically preposterous. Nature was central to everyone’s experience and there was a metaphysical, even spiritual, connection between humans and the natural world. According to Aristotle, questioning the existence of nature or our connection to it would defy logic, rendering it pointless. But Descartes questioned Aristotle’s certainty. He questioned the reliability of the human senses, and therefore questioned the existence of everything in the physical world. The only certainty that Descartes finds is the certainty of his own cognitive existence. If he is able to doubt reality then surely that means he exists; if he didn’t exist, he wouldn’t be able to ponder existence. The most famous iteration of Descartes theory is “I think, therefore I am.”
Descartes is admitting that even if the world is deceiving his senses, he has to exist in order to be deceived. Through this realization, he not only questions the untested reality of the natural world, but he also places the individual thinking self at the center of the perceived universe. His philosophy turned every physical part of the world—including nature—into something quantifiable, and then Descartes’s theory gave man the power to do all the quantifying. And what else is colonialism and capitalism other than the quantification of the natural world?
It’s no wonder that Descartes is considered the founder of modern philosophy and science. After his theories took root in Western thinking, “the hierarchy of sciences…no longer came to be ordered…according to their being, but in relation to the thinking ego.” In other words, the physical world is defined by what we think about it instead of by how our senses experience it. (A modern-day example of this phenomenon is believing a weather forecast on a screen more than the actual weather outside your window.) Descartes’s philosophy severed our connection to nature and shifted the power dynamics between man and the natural world.
Before the Cartesian split, Europeans thought of themselves as living within nature, collectively floating in its physical and metaphysical substance. After the Cartesian split, Europeans thought of themselves as a substance altogether different and separate from nature. Nature was entirely physical and human thought was entirely metaphysical, and once humans were something different from nature, they were also separate from it.
Human perception became the foundation for all of reality, and by placing humans at the center of the universe and separating their thought processes from the physical world, Descartes “paved the way for modern anthropocentrism…[where] plants and animals…are nothing other than simple machines totally devoid of interiority,” and all the natural world is a “storehouse of resources for human consumption” (Kureethadam, 118). As Martinican poet and activist Aimé Césaire points out “colonization = ‘thingification’” and the Cartesian split was the “thingification” of everything that exists outside the individual Western mind.
Sources: Joshstrom Isaac Kureethadam’s The Philosophical Roots of the Ecological Crisis: Descartes and the Modern Worldview and Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism.
