Cartesian Fallacy

"The universe is wider than our views of it."

- Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

"Logic does not lead us from the fact that we are an integral part of the web of life to certain norms of how we should live. However, if we have the deep ecological experience of being part of the web of life, then we will (as opposed to should) be inclined to care for all of living nature. Indeed, we can scarcely refrain from responding in this way. 

By calling the emerging new vision of reality 'ecological' in the sense of deep ecology, we emphasize that life is at its very center. This is an important issue for science, because in the mechanistic paradigm physics has been the model and source of metaphors for all other sciences. 'All philosophy is like a tree,' wrote Descartes. 'The roots are metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and the branches are all the other sciences.'

The systems view of life has overcome this Cartesian metaphor. Physics, together with chemistry, is essential to understand the behavior of the molecules in living cells, but it is not sufficient to describe their self-organizing patterns and processes. At the level of living systems, physics has thus lost its role as the science providing the most fundamental description of reality. This is still not generally recognized today. Scientists as well as nonscientists frequently retain the popular belief that 'if you really want to know the ultimate explanation, you have to ask a physicist,' which is clearly a Cartesian fallacy. The paradigm shift in science, at its deepest level, involves a perceptual shift from physics to the life sciences."

- Fritjof Capra (1939 - ) and Pier Luigi Luisi (1938 - )
The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision

"Nature is an infinite sphere
whose center is everywhere and
whose circumference is nowhere."

- Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662)

Imperceptible Chains

"If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole? But he may perhaps aspire to know at least the parts to which he bears some proportion. But the parts of the world are all so related and linked to one another, that I believe it impossible to know one without the other and without the whole.

Man, for instance, is related to all he knows. He needs a place wherein to abide, time through which to live, motion in order to live, elements to compose him, warmth and food to nourish him, air to breathe. He sees light; he feels bodies; in short, he is in a dependent alliance with everything. To know man, then, it is necessary to know how it happens that he needs air to live, and, to know the air, we must know how it is thus related to the life of man, etc. Flame cannot exist without air; therefore to understand the one, we must understand the other.

Since everything then is cause and effect, dependent and supporting, mediate and immediate, and all is held together by a natural though imperceptible chain, which binds together things most distant and most different, I hold it equally impossible to know the parts without knowing the whole, and to know the whole without knowing the parts in detail."

- Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662)

Skye: Hidden Beauty

"Poetry lifts the veil from the

hidden beauty of the world,

and makes familiar objects be

as if they were not familiar."

- Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 - 1822)

Postscript: an attribute of which - i.e., of "...lifting the veil" - one might reasonably well also ascribe to photography. It is almost an inconsequential fact that the triptych consists of, respectively, from left to right: some reeds nestled near the shallow end of a small loch near Trotternish's Old Man of Storr, a few pebbles found on the beach near Elgol, and some gentle patterns in water captured by the pier at Portree, the capital of Skye. Paraphrasing Borges' narrator (in "Pascal's Sphere"), who is quoted to have said that Pascal's image for the universe is an infinite sphere, "the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere,” one might say that beauty is infinite, "revealed everywhere, and centered nowhere." And nowhere is beauty made manifest, when visible, in quite as rich and sublime a form than on the Isle-of-Skye.

Infinity's Impenetrable Secret

"For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed."

- Blaise Pascal

(1623 - 1662)