Intangible Materialism: The Body, Scientific Knowledge, and the Power of Language

2. The Faces of Consilience: Levels of Understanding and the Negative Science of Semiotics

35 The only objects whose behavior is truly “simple” exist in our own world, at the macroscopic level. Classical science carefully chose its objects from this intermediate range. The first objects singled out by Newton—falling bodies, the pendulum, planetary motion—were simple. We know now, however, that this simplicity is not the hallmark of the fundamental: it cannot be attributed to the rest of the world. —Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order out of Chaos At the beginning of Stephen Gaukroger’s masterful intellectual biography of Descartes, he tells a remarkable story. “Since the eighteenth century ,” he writes, there has been in circulation a curious story about Descartes. It is said that in later life he was always accompanied in his travels by a mechanical life-size female doll which, we are told by one source, he himself had constructed “to show that animals are only machines and have no souls.” He had named the doll after his illegitimate daughter, Francine, and some versions of events have it that she was so lifelike that the two were indistinguishable. Descartes and the doll were evidently inseparable, and he is said to have slept with her encased in a trunk at his side. Once, during a crossing over the Holland Sea some 2. The Faces of Consilience: Levels of Understanding and the Negative Science of Semiotics 36 The Faces of Consilience time in the early 1640s, while Descartes was sleeping, the captain of the ship, suspicious about the contents of the trunk, stole into the cabin and opened it. To his horror he discovered the mechanical monstrosity , dragged her from the trunk and across the decks, and finally managed to throw her into the water. We are not told whether she put up a struggle. (1995, 1) This remarkable story—which Gaukroger assures us is apocryphal, even though late in the nineteenth century Anatole France made it a theme of a novel—suggests the economy of Cartesian understanding, the basic equation he grasps between “macroscopic mechanical phenomena ” and “microscopic mechanical processes” (70) within “a thoroughly mechanist cosmology which takes as its foundations a strictly mechanist conception of matter” (255). I begin my discussion of the plurality of modes of understanding with both Descartes’s dream of understanding the world through a strictly mechanist conception of matter and the narrative and scandal to which it gave rise because there has always been, I think, a sense that mechanical explanation leaves too much out in its aims at simplicity , accuracy, and generalizability. I begin also with E. O. Wilson’s remarkable book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, because he shares with Descartes a wonderful passion for comprehension, not for saving the appearances (as Descartes’s scholastic teachers had hoped) but for saving the essences.1 Wilson imagines himself the inheritor of Descartes’s dream to account for all phenomena by “the linking of facts,” as he says early in his book, “and of fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation” (1998, 8). In the last chapter of his book, Wilson again asserts his argument “that there is intrinsically only one class of explanation. It traverses the scales of space, time, and complexity to unite the disparate facts of the disciplines by consilience, the perception of a seamless web of cause and effect” (266). These sentences present Wilson’s definition of consilience: a “single parsimonious system” (5) of “organized knowledge” (44) that is materialist, secular, and unified. Wilson is a biologist of some note, having studied the organization of ant communities throughout his career and having published, twenty-five years ago, a book entitled Sociobiology that argued for the possibility and necessity of describing biological phenomena without recourse to vague, “social” or “purposeful” explanations. In Consilience, he even describes the bodies of ants as “walking batteries of glands filled with semiotic compounds” (70)—which is, I should say, the way I The Faces of Consilience 37 have thought about myself since adolescence. The determinist–causal model of explanation presented in Consilience, I suspect, would have allowed Descartes to fulfill his dream and perhaps to achieve at least an intellectual companionship that seemed to elude him. (His daughter Francine died in 1640 and left him with what his contemporaries described as “the greatest sorrow that he had ever experienced in his life” [Gaukroger 1995, 353].) I have great sympathy for Wilson’s materialist project, just as I have...