Man. And machine.

~ and Descartes' animals

Descartes wanted to reduce animals to machines. He could not find humans either, but finally he reduced it to, “I think, therefore I am.” But animals don’t think—therefore they are reduced? Welcome to dystopia.

What is the purpose of an anthropologist, a social theorist, a sociologist, or a nurse? Their work, in my opinion, has to do with how persons act with one another (or behave towards one another) and not just with objects. For a nurse in not an auto mechanic, replacing the alternator.

So how one interacts with a person is different from how one interacts with an object. Well, in 1650 or something Descartes was looking at animals as machines so he also had trouble finding what to say about the existence of humans. To some persons, the study of human interaction is boring.

So, human relations are not mechanical and someone therefore needs to talk to them. I don’t care if it’s a social worker or a social theorist, it’s not mechanical. You would need to talk to them and understand them. Otherwise where is your compassion? Our intellectuals, in many cases, instead turn them into objects.

Continuous interaction, the more animate sort of thing, seems to bother the Western mind. If we consider two persons, side-by-side, “I think therefore I am” is not much of a conversation.

'“Hi, I am Jakob. I think! Therefore I am!”

Same here, Jakob. I too think, I too am.

Boring; not much of a conversation.

I think we can do better. A human being is a lot more than mere existence, or physical existence. After all, a corpse too has physical existence. This brings up the opportunity to ask a profound philosophical question of what the difference is, Say between a corpse and a living person? In the Descartes tradition the answer might be that the corpse no longer thinks. So, the significance of a corpse being dead is that it is inanimate and no longer thinks? This is much the same as asking about the transition between life and death. Why was it life in the one case and an inanimate corpse in the other? The man thinks. This is all Descartes could come up with.

So what?. Any living being, be it a microbe or be it a tiny bug, is a profound thing. Such a being is graceful; such a being acts with elegance. The animal world is alive with awesome grace, precision, and complexity, which takes us beyond the question of whether the animal is a machine or not. It goes far beyond whether it (the animal) thinks or not. Descartes was before Darwin: and so Descartes did not know about Darwin. Thus, he may not have been fully aware that humans and animals are related.

“I think, therefore I am” therefore sounds quite lame.

So, I only hope it sounds better in French!

Finally: this [added]. There is a difference, in English, between “exist” and “be.” For the organism, “to be” is more than merely to exist: it is to live.