The Cartesian Divide
As we have seen from the last instalment, it was Galileo who began the initial search for an understanding of the true nature of the world we see around us, by observing the motions of the planets through his telescope. For his efforts, he was victimised by the Catholic Church, forced to recant his ideas in public, and condemned to live out the remainder of his days in seclusion at his villa in Arcetri near Florence.
But the scientific quest that began with Galileo came in time to flower into a mighty tide of accomplishment that swept aside all opposition from the Church, until it stands today supreme and unchallenged as the final arbiter of the true nature of matter. But this triumph was not easy, nor was it swift, for this journey of investigation took many a contrary turn before it came to reach its vantage point of today.
The fundamental purpose of science is to organize and explain all human cognitive experience. The success of science, and the reason why it has proved to be the dominant description of reality on the planet today, is due to its success in achieving this objective. However, there is one way in which modern science is uniquely different from the investigations of the early Greeks.
The scientific spirit had its roots in the ancient culture of Hellenistic Greece. Some four centuries before the birth of Christ, the Greeks had systematically begun to question the nature of the world around them. However these early pioneers were content to derive an intuitive understanding of the universe based on philosophic reflection. Their laws of nature were intuitively deduced. They did not feel the need to prove their deductive laws by means of physical experiments.
It was to take almost two thousand years for the scientific method, as we know it today, to reach full maturity. It did so primarily in the person of Sir Isaac Newton, for it was Newton who stressed the necessity of linking observation and experiment into a unified system of rational investigation. It was not enough to theorise about the nature of matter. Newton insisted that these theories had to be tested by physical experiments, to ensure that they were in fact valid representations of reality.
For Newton the basis of all science was observation. In order for anything to be explained, it first had to be observed. If something could not be observed, it was pointless to discuss it and science could contribute nothing to an understanding of its nature. Newton recognized that these observations could be reduced to mathematical expressions, and it was his genius for mathematics that enabled him to codify many of the laws that form the basis of modern science.
But the early pioneers of science were faced with an immediate problem. If they were to succeed in their quest for an understanding of life, their first task was agree on what it was that needed to be explained. In other words, they had to agree on the observables. In this evaluation, it was clear that the experiences of life fell into two broad categories. The first of these categories were physical objects that existed outwardly in space. The second category of experience was subjective, and was characterised by inward states of mind.
It was the common experience of every person that their lives unfolded in a series of relationships with outward “things”. However, it was equally apparent that they interacted with these “things” according to subjective states of mind. These states of mind included thoughts, values, ideas and judgements, as well as a whole range of emotions. Before scientists could begin to explain all human experience, they first had to agree on how to deal with these contrasting categories of experience.
This dilemma was resolved by a French philosopher and mathematician by the name of Rene Descartes (1596-1650). Descartes introduced a radical division between mind and matter that has dominated western science ever since. He divided the world into a sphere of matter which he called “Res Extensa” (extended matter), and a sphere of mind called “Res Cogitans” (thinking matter).
Rene Decartes was responsible for establishing a fundamental dichotomy in science. This dualistic split into separate categories of mind and matter has come to be known as “Cartesian Dualism”. One of the most important consquences of the dualism propounded by Descartes was that the investigation of matter now fell within the province of science, while the study of the mind was elevated to the realm of philosophy.
A division began in which philosophical questions became increasingly divorced from science, and the scientific exploration of the universe became isolated from philosophy, which was increasingly devoted to an investigation of divine principles and the nature of man. In the space of one hundred years therefore, a subtle but profound change had overtaken science.
Whereas the astronomer Johannes Kepler had called himself “a priest of God in the temple of nature”, and Isaac Newton had regarded himself as one of the lineage of the mystic philosophers of old, now the French mathematician Marquis de Laplace could make his famous retort to Napoleon that God was a hypothesis of which he had no need. He went on to boast that given the distribution of particles in the primitive nebula, he could predict the whole future history of the world. The division between mind and matter was complete.
It was not until the late twentieth century that it began to dawn on perceptive scientific minds that this Cartesian Divide, splitting the world into separate worlds of mind and matter, was fundamentally flawed. They recognised that life is a continuum, just as much as space and time. It was Albert Einstein who proved that while objects appear to exist in a dimesion called space, and move about in a dimension called time, space and time were in fact separate aspects of the same continuum.
Therefore the idea that science can study one part of life (involving matter), and ignore another part of life (involving mind) is patently absurd. It is like studying one side of a coin and ignoring the other. The two sides are inextricably linked together, and one cannot hope to truly understand the one unless one is prepared to accept the role played by the other. So the science of today stands at a momentous point in history.
The science of tomorrrow stands ready to embrace a former foe. It stands ready to welcome back into its fold the prodigal son that was cast out all those centuries ago. It stands ready to heal the ancient wound, and unite once more the world of matter and the world of mind.
