Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
far as the material universe is concerned . . . would lay out a perfect piece
of mechanism.”
9
Descartes' mission was to solidify the new feel for
matter in a logically consistent and cogent portrayal of the natural world
as a “vast, self-contained mathematical machine, consisting of motions
of matter in space and time,” initiated and regulated by God, the divine
clockmaker.
10
The ideal of a clockwork universe implied, among other
things, the denial of any natural teleology as anthropomorphic; the posit-
ing of unobservable entities such as corpuscles or atoms as real and the
demotion of perceptual qualities to, at best, useful illusions generously
provided by nature to aid in our survival; and in general an idea of the
natural as dead, mechanical stuff emptied of any religious, aesthetic, or
moral qualities.
11
The mind (and with it all the meanings and values not
amenable to quantification) was simply locked up in a small part of the
brain, surrounded, if not yet engulfed, by an alien and alienating uni-
verse that could not but weaken previous convictions concerning the
reality of freedom and by implication moral choice. On a theoretical
level, Descartes was thus confronted with the rather daunting task of
explaining and, even more important, justifying a world both invisible
and in principle unlivable in human terms, a “nature,” in other words,
that simply does not exist from the standpoint of ordinary, perceptual
experience, which until this point in time had been the basis of the
Western belief in the world and humanity's place in it.
By grounding this new, theoretical nature in the consciousness of the
human subject, the famous
res cogitans
, Descartes constructed a dualism
between mind and matter that came to define modern philosophy in its
obsession with epistemological questions, in contrast to most of ancient
and medieval philosophy, which simply accepted the perceptual world
as true and proceeded to fashion a whole metaphysics on the basis of
this acceptance. To be fair to Descartes and his contemporaries, modern
science from the beginning seemed to entail a breach between a mecha-
nistic sphere of efficient causes and a strictly human realm of freedom
directed at final causes. Complicating this picture was the inclusion,
again scientific in origin, of the human body in the world-machine.
12
For
here, Descartes rightly saw, was an immediate threat to human auton-
omy, but only insofar as knowledge was believed to begin with sense per-
ception and hence with the use of
bodily
faculties, a hoary conviction he
was to cast into serious doubt. But his subsequent appeal to innate
