Putting Descartes Before the Horse

Abstract

This chapter examines the origins of the modern energy paradigm or orthodoxy. “Putting Descartes before the Horse” means looking at the ideas and values that precede and are built into modern machines. The chapter uses Descartes and the clock of medieval monasteries to capture the crucial shift to a mechanistic paradigm or worldview. It then critiques the Aristotelian paradigm of energy with its emphasis on different energies for each kind of thing. The key insight of the modern energy paradigm, one with scientific and political ramifications, is the notion of energy as a universal currency or a perfect similarity operating across different kinds. This is the energy that has changed the human condition and the climate.

[A]nd thus make ourselves the masters and possessors of nature.

Rene Descartes (1637)