The Soul in the Stone E-Book

Ashley Curtis

• Herausgeber: Kommode Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 269

Beschreibung

The currently unfolding ecological catastrophe is the result of more than just deforestation, fossil fuel extraction, and factory farming. Behind the immediate causes of the degradation of our environment lies something else: a deeply rooted but ultimately absurd understanding of our place in the universe. Through a series of encounters with a striking array of protagonists - from revolutionary physicists and embattled philosophers to subsistence hunters and Himalayan shamans - The Soul in the Stone exposes the incoherence of the barren, human-centered perspective dominant in most societies today. It recommends instead an alternative worldview: one that acknowledges and honors non-human experience and, precisely because it does, is both more logically consistent and more fulfilling. And might just save the planet.

Leseprobe

The Soul in the Stone

by Ashley Curtis

© Kommode Verlag, Zürich 2022

Edited by Miranda Robbins

Cover Illustration by Stephan Schmitz

Typesetting by Anneka Beatty

eISBN 978-3-905574-05-0

Kommode Verlag GmbH, Zürich

www.kommode-verlag.ch

ASHLEY CURTISTHE SOUL IN THE STONE

WHY THE WORLDVIEW THAT WILL SAVE OUR PLANET IS MORE CREDIBLE THAN THE ONE THAT IS DESTROYING IT

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

The Bomb That White Dropped (I)

In which an astronaut tells of a cosmic epiphany,and the themes of this book get a scholarly christening

CHAPTER 1

The Good Bishop

In which famine depletes a wig-powder supply,and matter depends on the hand and the eye

CHAPTER 2

Saint David

In which states lay down limits and drivers obey them,and science is based on intractable mayhem

CHAPTER 3

Zombies, Armadillos, and Square Roots

In which specters and swamp creatures spook the Academy,and bats are much more than their neural anatomy

CHAPTER 4

Ravens, Elk, and Magic Bullets

In which a starving man drinks from the teats of a moose,and frames of reference determine truths

CHAPTER 5

Zooming Out and Zooming In

In which apples and oranges are summed,and measurement obscures what comes

CHAPTER 6

To Be or Not To Be

In which Peugeot produces a brand-new car,and existence is no more than what we are

CHAPTER 7

We’ll Always Have Paris

In which Holmes hears no barks and uncovers a horsewith them,

and Cartesians are guilty of anthropomorphism

CONCLUSION

The Bomb That White Dropped (II)

In which Francis the pope says what Francis his guide would,and we all can return to our animist childhood

APPENDIX

Pierre L. Ibisch and Norbert Jung, “The Noble Savage, or: Was It No Better in the Past?” (2020)

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

The Bomb That White Dropped (I)

In which an astronaut tells of a cosmic epiphany,

and the themes of this book get a scholarly christening

1

On December 26, 1966, a fifty-nine-year-old historian of medieval science and technology stepped up to the podium at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and dropped what ecologists later described as “an intellectual bomb.” Lynn White Jr.’s speech, published in March 1967 in the journal Science as “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” quickly became a classic in the field of environmental studies; it has been dubbed the “seminal paper in environmental ethics.” Widely reprinted in anthologies and textbooks, it is today a fixture of university courses in ecology, ethics, and environmental studies. It is all of five pages long.

White took some abuse for his essay. As his obituary put it, a “tide of protest from churchmen flowed across his desk in a growing stream of letters and articles.” He himself reported that he had been “denounced, not only in print but on scraps of brown paper thrust anonymously into envelopes, as a junior Anti-Christ, probably in the Kremlin’s pay, bent on betraying the true faith.” Little did it matter that he was in fact a practicing Christian and remained one until his death in 1987. At one point he remarked ironically, “I should have blamed the scientists.”

White had in fact blamed Christianity. He blamed it for an ecological crisis of global dimensions. “We would seem to be headed toward conclusions unpalatable for many Christians,” he warned.

The present increasing disruption of the global environment is the product of a dynamic technology and science … [whose] growth cannot be understood historically apart from distinctive attitudes toward nature which are deeply grounded in Christian dogma. … Hence we shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man. … Both our present science and technology are so tinctured with orthodox Christian arrogance toward nature that no solution for our ecologic crisis can be expected from them alone.

Although he bluntly maintained that “Christianity bears a huge burden of guilt,” White was not just targeting churchgoers. He considered that “Christian arrogance toward nature” was part and parcel of post-Christian, secular culture as well: “The fact that most people do not think of these attitudes as Christian,” he remarked, “is irrelevant. No new set of basic values has been accepted in our society to displace those of Christianity.” Atheists and agnostics as well as theists, then, remain infected with this relic of Christian dogma, often without even realizing it.

•

The bomb that White dropped is astonishing for the number of assumptions it blows up in so few pages. White argued (in 1966) that the ecological crisis was no longer local but unfolding on a global scale—affecting, among other things, the climate. He argued that its roots lie not in science or technology but in religion. He argued that even the secular Western worldview is based on religious tenets, and these tenets are those of the Judeo-Christian tradition. He argued that this tradition, and Christianity in particular, is based on a picture of humans as subduers, dominators, and exploiters of nature, which has no other purpose than to serve human ends. And most explosively of all, he argued that we will never escape the ecological crisis—not through science, not through technology, not through a new economics or politics—until we “find a new religion, or rethink our old one.”

White was unsure that such a change was possible, however. He noted with approval the interest that contemporary “beatniks” were showing in Zen Buddhism, “which conceives of the man-nature relationship as very nearly the mirror image of the Christian view.” But he thought it unlikely that a practice like Zen, so deeply conditioned by Asian history, would ever be viable in the West. Rather, he placed his hopes, such as they were, on “the greatest radical in Christian history since Christ: Saint Francis of Assisi.” White pointed out that Francis was so heretical that Saint Bonaventura—himself a prominent Franciscan—tried to suppress the early history of his own order. “The prime miracle of Francis,” White noted wryly, “is that he did not end up at the stake.”

In Francis’s heretical worldview, White saw a “unique sort of pan-psychism of all things animate and inanimate”—in other words, the conviction that all things, alive or not, have a mind or a mind-like quality.

With [Francis] the ant is no longer simply a homily for the lazy, flames a sign of the thrust of the soul toward union with God; now they are Brother Ant and Sister Fire, praising the Creator in their own ways as Brother Man does in his.

This view of what might be called a spirit in all natural objects is precisely what Christianity had ruthlessly rooted out in suppressing ancient paganism.

In Antiquity every tree, every spring, every stream, every hill had its own genius loci, its guardian spirit. These spirits were accessible to men, but were very unlike men; centaurs, fauns, and mermaids show their ambivalence. Before one cut a tree, mined a mountain, or dammed a brook, it was important to placate the spirit in charge of that particular situation, and to keep it placated. By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects. … Man’s effective monopoly on spirit in this world was confirmed, and the old inhibitions to the exploitation of nature crumbled.

In short, what White was looking for when he demanded that we “find a new religion” was not that we switch from Christianity to Islam or from Judaism to Hinduism. Nor was it a demand that only concerned overtly religious people. Whoever—atheist, agnostic, or theist—shares the view that humans are separate from nature and that nature’s most important role is to be of service to human needs and wants is, by White’s logic, unwittingly stuck in the web of a peculiarly religious, and specifically Christian, dogma.

•

Objections to White’s thesis have come from many quarters. As Heike Molitor and Pierre Ibisch of the Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development point out, even conservationists tend to take an anthropocentric (human-centered) approach toward the environment, one that “places human beings at the center of moral action” and only attributes “intrinsic value” to humans. In this approach, nature is to be conserved, for sure, but it is “to be conserved for human beings.” As a forestry professor wrote to White in 1973, “We save redwood groves because people enjoy them. If Saint Francis thought we should save them for squirrels, then he was preaching a religion for squirrels, not for men.”

A 2016 article by Michael Nelson and Thomas Sauer makes clear that irritation with thinking like White’s persists in conservation circles today. “Some well known conservation leaders,” Nelson and Sauer note, “have referred to discussions about the philosophical and ethical foundations of conservation as ‘silly arguments that are diverting attention from the real business.’” They have “ridiculed those who take a principled non-anthropocentric stand, or anything other than a pragmatic position. … ‘The reality of conservation practice,’ [such leaders] assert, ‘is too complex and nuanced for [such] moral conviction.’”

Meanwhile, a faction of thinkers known as ecomodernists believes, contra White, that scientific and technical solutions will indeed see us out of the crisis, that our “religion” is irrelevant, and that White’s proposal is counterproductive because it asks us to give up a human-centered lifestyle that has been achieved with great difficulty and has much going for it. No one, they claim, would be seriously willing to trade our current and ever-improving standard of living for the poverty, discomfort, ill health, and pervasive violence of pre-industrial societies. Ecomodernists accordingly reject the ideal “that human societies must harmonize with nature,” insisting that “the earth is a human planet.” They favor technologically driven solutions to the ecological crisis that include a massive expansion of nuclear power, smart urbanization, agricultural intensification based on genetically modified crops, and carbon capture and storage. Some of them are also open to the idea of geo-engineering—literally, “engineering planet Earth.”

Geo-engineering involves employing even larger-scale technologies to defuse the climate crisis. Ideas include building huge machines that suck carbon out of the atmosphere; genetically engineering new plants that have more efficient (and black) leaves made of silicon; floating billions of strips of tinfoil in orbit around the earth to deflect sunlight; injecting sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere to block solar radiation; fertilizing the oceans with iron slurry to increase carbon-dioxide-consuming marine life; and, most recently, using giant cannons to blow trillions of tons of snow over Antarctica to reflect sunlight and thereby halt the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet—a collapse that would raise sea levels dramatically and inundate coastal cities.

While the ecomodernists state in their manifesto that “humans will always materially depend on nature to some degree” and that “even if a fully synthetic world were possible, many of us might still choose to continue to live more coupled with nature than human sustenance and technologies require,” their vision of “a great Anthropocene” will strike many as distinctly dystopian.1

•

While White and the ecomodernists share the goal of mitigating the climate crisis, their notions of how to do it—and why we ought to do it—couldn’t be more opposed. White’s own point of view is crystallized in his almost heretical reaction to a famous photograph: the Blue Marble.

Most of us know the Blue Marble: the iconic 1972 shot of planet Earth taken from a distance of 29,000 kilometers by one of the astronauts on the last manned mission to the moon. One of the most widely disseminated images in history, the picture has had powerful effects. As Michael Pollan put it in 2018,

The sight of that “pale blue dot” hanging in the infinite black void of space erased the national borders on our maps and rendered Earth small, vulnerable, exceptional, and precious … it helped to inspire the modern environmental movement as well as the Gaia hypothesis, the idea that Earth and its atmosphere together constitute a single living organism.

For Edgar Mitchell, one of the Apollo 14 astronauts, the effect of seeing this pale blue dot with his own eyes (before the famous photograph was taken) induced a mystical experience:

And suddenly I realized that the molecules of my body, and the molecules of my spacecraft, the molecules in the body of my partners, were prototyped, manufactured in some ancient generation of stars. [I felt] an overwhelming feeling of oneness, of connectedness. … It wasn’t “Them and Us,” it was “That’s me! That’s all of it, it’s one thing.” And it was accompanied by an ecstasy, a sense of “Oh my God, wow, yes”—an insight, an epiphany.

White, like Mitchell and so many others, also grasps the importance of the Blue Marble image. But after noting its power, he veers off in a very different direction:

Nothing touched the American spirit more deeply than our astronauts’ reaction to this planet seen from outer space: it was “Spaceship Earth.” The metaphor is, in fact, ecologically terrifying. A spaceship is completely a human artifact, designed to sustain human life and for no other purpose. It is no accident that some of our space men read from Genesis while on their voyage to the moon: the traditional Judeo-Christian view of the creation is precisely that it was planned in every detail for man’s use and edification, and for no other purpose. This indifference to the possibility of autonomy in other creatures has much facilitated our style of technology and thus has been a major force in polluting our globe.

The spaceship mentality is the final sophistication of this disastrous man-centered view of the nature of things and the things of nature, and it has the present allurement of seeming to offer ecologic solutions without sacrifice of the old presuppositions. We are in worse danger than we seem.

Ecomodernist and geo-engineering solutions represent the epitome of what White found “ecologically terrifying”—turning the planet ever more explicitly into a humanly engineered spaceship, offering solutions that don’t require the sacrifice of “the old suppositions.” In 1967, he warned of the possible consequences of such meddling.

What shall we do? No one yet knows. But unless we think about fundamentals, our specific measures may produce new backlashes more serious than those they are designed to remedy.

The possibility of backlash, generally ignored by ecomodernists today, was all too obvious to White. As a scholar of medieval technology, he was aware of the long chains of unintended side effects that have so often overwhelmed the good intentions behind the implementation of new technologies. But one doesn’t have to be a medieval historian to see this. The familiar technologies of more recent times offer up enough examples on their own. The wonder of mobility provided by the automobile and the airplane; the dream of cheap, unlimited nuclear power; the inexpensive, mass-produced products of the industrial revolution and beyond; the surge in agricultural productivity due to chemical fertilizers and pesticides; the efficiency of monocultures and factory livestock farming; the miracle of connectedness provided by the internet and the smart phone—these have their noxious side effects in toxic pollution; runaway global heating; ominous accumulations of nuclear waste and weapons; mass consumerism based on replacing rather than repairing, resulting in a global-scale accumulation of poisonous junk; depleted soils; extinguished and contaminated aquifers; plummeting biodiversity; and a disconnected loneliness amid the most networked society ever. Reviewing the unforeseen consequences of earlier technologies, one hardly feels optimistic when contemplating the much larger-scale interventions conceived by the geo-engineers.

•

White asked “What shall we do?” and answered “No one yet knows.” But in fact he had a pretty good idea. We should “find a new religion”—meaning not attend a different church but rather rid ourselves of certain fundamental values historically instilled in both our religious and our secular culture by two thousand years of Christianity. He also had a pretty good idea of what this new “religion” had to look like. In his 1973 essay he spelled it out: “The religious problem is to find a viable equivalent to animism.”

At this point, even the most patient among us might consider tossing White out the window. Because White’s “religious problem” is pretty huge—even huger, perhaps, than the problems that might result from seeding the upper atmosphere with sulfur dioxide. And the reason this “religious problem” is so huge is that if there’s one thing that most of our contemporaries agree on, it is precisely that animism is not viable. Animism—the experience that not only non-human animals but also plants, rivers, mountains, clouds, stars, rocks, and weathers are themselves perceiving and experiencing beings rather than inert and inanimate features of the world—tends to strike most of us as a primitive delusion, the naïve “magical thinking” of superstitious, unenlightened, pre-scientific peoples. The reason we left animism behind, according to this view, is not that we happened to prefer seeing humans as separate from and ruling over nature (though perhaps we did) but rather because our painstakingly constructed, peer-reviewed science is right and animism is just plain wrong. And so, Dr. White, even should we all wish to re-embrace animism to save our own lives, our children’s, and that of our planet, we could not do it—no more than we could suddenly start believing that the Earth is at the center of the solar system or that the stars are eternally fixed in their places in the firmament.

So your ideas have been very interesting, Dr. White; your writing sparkles, and your insights into the history of technology and how it has been interwoven with the history of religion are enlightening; but when you ask us to go hunting for a “viable equivalent to animism,” you’ve lost your grip on the possible, and out the window you go.

2

Perhaps to no one’s surprise, I am now going to advise against tossing White out the window—at least not yet. I would ask you to keep him in the room until you’ve at least finished these pages. In them I will attempt—softly, gently, playfully, but also with utter seriousness—to make the case that animism is viable.

Historically, the great enemy of animism has been Christianity, working side by side with the colonial and capitalist ventures that it helped inspire. In speaking up on behalf of animism, however, I am not going to make the case against Christianity. After all, as White made clear in 1967, the man-nature dualism driving our ecological crisis is no longer correlated with who goes to church and who doesn’t. The philosophical opposite of animism is not its historical enemy but rather a more deeply embedded and almost invisible foundational worldview. And though this foundational worldview may in large part have derived from Christianity, it now also supports all manner of non-Christian convictions, including atheist and materialist as well as theist beliefs.

This foundational worldview, the philosophical opposite of animism, is known as Cartesianism. It takes its name from its most clear-cut exponent, the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes. The story Cartesianism tells about our place in the universe can be summarized as follows:

The physical world exists, with or without us. It is inert—not alive, not conscious. Into this world conscious creatures are born, like us, who become aware of the physical world for a time and then die and cease to be aware of it. And the physical world then goes on without them. This is true both on the individual level and on the cosmic level. (On the individual level: I was born, I experience the world, I will die. On the cosmic level: There was at first no life and no consciousness; life arose, and along with it, at some point, came consciousness; and life will die out, at the very latest when the sun runs out of fuel and engulfs the solar system.2)

If you read this paragraph carefully, I think you will find that it is not very exceptional. Rather, what it maintains seems entirely obvious. Cartesianism, at least as I will use the term, is not an esoteric, obscure, difficult-to-decipher doctrine. No. If the paragraph above strikes you as a reasonable description of certain basic elements of reality—no matter what else you may believe on top of it—you may consider yourself, like most of us, a Cartesian.3

This book will suggest that there is a problem with this paragraph, however. And the problem is not that what it says is wrong—the problem is far worse than that. The problem is that what it says is incoherent.

•

There is a huge difference between being wrong and being incoherent, and I will demonstrate this by comparing statements about a man named George with similar statements about a piece of wallpaper. If I say George is hungry when in fact George has just finished a large meal (and the thought of ingesting even another crumb is appalling to him), then my statement is wrong. This “wrongness” is quite easy to understand. All it takes is the little word “not.” I have said that George is hungry. In truth, George is not hungry. And so my first statement is incorrect.

If, on the other hand, I say the wallpaper is hungry, you will probably look at me very strangely. You will probably think there’s something wrong with me. While when I say that George is hungry you can simply tell me no, actually that’s wrong, George is not hungry, and think no more about it, if I claim that the wallpaper is hungry you will probably not correct me by saying that the wallpaper is actually not hungry. It is just as odd to say that wallpaper is not hungry as it is to say that wallpaper is hungry. Hunger is simply not a word that meaningfully applies to wallpaper. Instead of correcting me and telling me that no, right now the wallpaper is not hungry, you will instead reconsider what you think of me. And if I insist on my statement, you will wonder if I might not be somewhat deluded or insane. You would probably think the same if I instead insisted that the wallpaper was not hungry. You would think that I was—well, off the wall.

This book contends that the Cartesian worldview—the foundational worldview described in the italicized paragraph above—isn’t right or wrong like the statement about George but, rather, that it is incoherent, like the statement that wallpaper is (or isn’t) hungry. Parallel to this contention, it will suggest that there is another foundational worldview that is coherent.

And yes, the foundational worldview that I will suggest is coherent is animism. Animism, just like Cartesianism, can support a huge variety of different and potentially contradictory worldviews on its foundation. Written accounts of these specific worldviews abound, some by members of surviving animist peoples and some by anthropologists who have attempted to immerse themselves in animist cultures. Leaving aside this fascinating diversity, however, the foundational animist worldview—the one shared by all the many second-level variations on animism that exist and have existed around the globe—could be summarized thus:

The physical world is not inert. Everything in it is in some sense (not necessarily a biological sense) alive and aware; that is to say, everything in it is an experiencing agent. This experience comes in wildly different forms and may be nothing at all like human experience. Yet it is capable, at times—perhaps sporadically, perhaps irregularly, and perhaps in a dreamlike fashion—of encountering and being encountered by humans.

The foundational animist worldview is pretty much the opposite of the Cartesian one, and if you are a full-blooded Cartesian of whatever stripe—religious, materialist, existentialist, humanist, etc.—the previous paragraph will seem incoherent to you. It has to seem incoherent to you. To claim that a rock experiences is not far from saying that wallpaper is hungry. The fundamental assumption of any Cartesian worldview is that the physical world exists independent of any consciousness. It is inert—that is to say, not experiencing—excepting those rare parts of it that are alive and aware. Animism cannot be other than incoherent to a Cartesian.

If animism has to appear incoherent to a Cartesian, however, how can we Cartesians evaluate it in a fair manner? The answer is obvious: by stepping outside of our Cartesianism. In other words, we need to suspend, at least temporarily, our belief in the tenets outlined in the first italicized paragraph. This is no easy matter as long as those tenets seem transparently and self-evidently true. We can pretend to suspend belief, of course, but unless we really mean it—unless we become convinced that our foundational Cartesianism is not transparently and self-evidently true—we have no chance of giving animism a fair shot.

This book thus tackles two closely related tasks. Not only does it have to present an argument that the assumptions of foundational animism are coherent; it must first dismantle those of Cartesianism—that is, it must make a credible case that they are not transparently and self-evidently true. Only then will the erstwhile Cartesian be in a position to evaluate animism in a fair way.

•

In order to accomplish this double mission, we will range far and wide. We will learn about the virtues of tar-water, study limericks that speak of trees and divinity, witness the despair of the greatest English-language philosopher, consider the difference between highway drivers and plummeting rocks, learn why so many university professors write papers about zombies, delve into the consciousness of bats and armadillos, watch a man turn into a raven and another into an elk, picnic beside a train conceived by Albert Einstein, measure the spiciness of hot peppers, eavesdrop on Hamlet as he contemplates suicide, and consider whether a chance meeting can be said to be meaningful.

And at the end of it all, we will return to Lynn White Jr. and the bomb he dropped. If I succeed in my attempt, White’s suggestion that we seek “a viable equivalent to animism” will not seem as far-fetched as perhaps it does right now. And if I do not, I hope you will at least have enjoyed an exhilarating ride.

This book is written in the spirit of play, and I do intend it to be fun. But it is also written in deadly earnest.

• •

The first claim of Cartesianism is that the physical world exists, with or without us. This is equivalent to saying that it is composed of stuff—“matter,” to use a more sophisticated term—and that this stuff is there, whether we perceive it or not.

In “The Good Bishop” we will pay a visit to a philosopher who makes the radical claim that matter does not exist—that the concept of matter is, in fact, incoherent.

• •

1The Anthropocene is a name proposed for our current geological epoch, an epoch characterized by significant human impact on the Earth’s geology and ecosystems.

2Perhaps this cosmic drama plays out in other parts of the universe as well, and perhaps in other universes—we may never know.

3You can layer a great many beliefs on top of Cartesianism. Religious people can layer a belief in divine creation and a non-physical afterlife; materialists can layer a belief in the physicality of consciousness; existentialists can layer an appreciation for the absurdity of being and the freedom and responsibility that come with it; secular humanists can layer a belief in the intrinsic value of human life and feeling; and so on. Despite their many and often irreconcilable differences, however, all of the above beliefs and almost all others rest firmly on two assumptions: that the world exists and that consciousness intrudes on it. This is why I refer to Cartesianism as a “foundational” worldview—it is the foundation, usually unseen and taken for granted, on which a wide variety of differing worldviews are all based.

CHAPTER 1

The Good Bishop

In which famine depletes a wig-powder supply,

and matter depends on the hand and the eye

In 1744 the Bishop of Cloyne, Ireland, published the best-selling book of his lifetime. It ran through six editions in the first year of its publication and was titled Siris: A Chain of Philosophical Reflections and Inquiries Concerning the Virtues of Tar-Water. In 1752, a year before his death, he published a sequel: Further Reflections on Tar-Water.

The bishop’s recipe for making tar-water was to place a quart of pine tar in a large glass vessel and pour a gallon of cold water over it. Stir for four minutes with a ladle or a stick, then let stand for 48 hours. At this point the liquid can be poured off. Its color ought to be no lighter than that of French white wine, and not darker than Spanish. The general rule for taking it was to drink half a pint morning and night on an empty stomach; children and “squeamish persons” were permitted to dilute it and take it more frequently.

This regime, the bishop claimed, would cure all manner of afflictions. He described a family with seven children during a smallpox epidemic. The six children who drank tar-water “came very well through the infection.” The seventh “could not be brought to drink the tar-water,” and we are to understand that he died. Tar-water was effective at curing “so many purulent ulcers” that the bishop tried it on “other foulnesses of the blood,” including “cutaneous eruptions” and the “foulest distempers … pleurisy and peripeumony.”

•

The writer of Siris—a man whom the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant would later dub “the Good Bishop”—promoted tar-water so energetically out of concern for his flock. Cloyne, an isolated and impoverished rural area, had recently been hit by epidemics of smallpox and dysentery—or, as the bishop colorfully termed it, “bloody flux.” The bishop’s country was described in a contemporary letter addressed to a British parliamentarian—“The Groans of Ireland”—as “the most miserable scene of universal distress, that I have ever read of in History.” Besides disease, it suffered from a “scarcity of bread (that in some places come near to a Famine).” So scarce was bread, in fact, that the bishop, in a gesture of solidarity with his congregation, stopped using flour to powder his wig until after the fall harvest.

The bishop thought he had found an inexpensive way to maintain the health of a devastated population. But his best-selling book did not stop at establishing the physiological virtues of tar-water, or at providing a scientific explanation for its effectiveness. Its third aim, as the Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy puts it, was to “lead the mind of the reader, via gradual steps, toward contemplation of God.” The word “Siris” in the title is derived from the Greek word for “chain,” and the bishop’s “chain of philosophical reflections” leads from tar-water, albeit in a somewhat meandering fashion, to divinity.

Which brings us, somewhat abruptly, to God.

•

The virtues of tar-water have been by and large forgotten in the intervening centuries, but the bishop’s earlier writings have not. It is these early works, penned in his mid-twenties as a struggling research fellow at Trinity College Dublin, that make him a well-known if misunderstood figure today. For in these early writings, more strongly and effectively than any other philosopher, George Berkeley, the future Bishop of Cloyne, denied the existence of matter.

When someone says to you, “You’re so materialistic,” they usually mean that you care too much about consumer goods, possibly at the expense of more important things like human relationships or noble causes. But materialism can also refer to something other than an addiction to shopping: the belief, quite prevalent in academic circles, that the universe and all that is in it can be satisfactorily explained through nothing more than matter. That is, it can be satisfactorily explained with no need for any God, spirit, purpose, or meaning beyond what we matter-built people with our matter-built brains ourselves invent.

Those who disagree with such materialists generally think that something exists in addition to matter—say, the human spirit, or God, or a life force. But they generally concede that, of course, matter also exists. Matter is physical stuff: chairs, tables, rocks, water, atoms. The debate between materialists and non-materialists tends to concern whether there is anything besides matter, not whether matter itself exists.