I'm warm, therefore I think

May 3, 2024 2:09 AM

Why have philosophers had so little to say about Descartes’s stove, and so much to say about his dreams, his resolve, and his conception of analytic geography on that winter’s night? Suppressing the agency of the stove makes it easier to tell a simple story about the agency of the individual thinker. But it has made it that much harder to discern the subtle yet powerful ways in which modern air conditioning technologies condition thought, culture, and social experience. from Descartes’s Stove by the author of Air Conditioning, Hsuan L. Hsu
posted by chavenet (21 comments total)

A lot of the success in my life has been due to luck and having the luxury of spare time, good health, and access to resources. And given how many billionaires have rich parents, I'm guessing the latter causes the former.

Not everyone will be a genius, but genius can come from anywhere. If you want a society of Descartes, you need society to provide access to resources such as food, stability, education, healthcare, and (yes, let's go ahead and add it to the list) air conditioning. Affluent people give their kids every resource to succeed (even if it involves cheating, bribes, or simple nepotism) while voting to take away free school lunches from other people's kids.
posted by AlSweigart at 2:43 AM on May 3 [12 favorites]

This is really interesting. I can't wait to get the book.
I'm thinking a lot about how perhaps the core challenge of our age is to move on from the compartmented rationality that has created our immense riches (and population explosion) to a more whole way of thinking. I mean a lot of great thinkers are suggesting that and have been since the sixties, but the truth is that it is easy to say but really difficult to do, because it is so ingrained in our entire approach to being.
posted by mumimor at 3:27 AM on May 3 [3 favorites]

imma send this to my HVAC friends
posted by clawsoon at 5:48 AM on May 3 [1 favorite]

The book's cover is a stunner.
posted by OrangeDisk at 5:54 AM on May 3 [2 favorites]

air-conditioning technologies that modify indoor temperatures in some places while intensifying the effects of climate change elsewhere?

Absolutely true, but it seems that AC gets more focus than heating, even though "Globally, heating caused about four times more emissions than cooling last year, according to the International Energy Agency." The world needs more AC, not less, powered by renewable energy.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 6:26 AM on May 3 [5 favorites]

mumimor: I'm thinking a lot about how perhaps the core challenge of our age is to move on from the compartmented rationality that has created our immense riches

The more I read about the first couple of centuries of the scientific revolution, the more that the rest of us ending up rich seems like an accident. The rationalists weren't trying to make our lives better, they were trying to figure out how to most rationally use pain and misery to produce maximum labour power with minimum inputs. The fact that ~20% of the world finally, after two or three hundred years of ever-increasing horror, ended up much better off as a result of scientific advancements almost seems like a mistake.

Speaking of pain and misery and using rationality to justify it, Descartes was out there cutting up live animals to see how they worked, apparently insulated from their screams of pain by his philosophy, I guess kinda like how the stove was insulating his philosophy from the weather.
posted by clawsoon at 6:43 AM on May 3 [6 favorites]

Imagine what a different world we might be living in if Descartes had merely gone to bed and pulled the covers over his head.
posted by Phanx at 7:18 AM on May 3 [3 favorites]

"Imagine what a different world we might be living in if Descartes had merely gone to bed and pulled the covers over his head."

Descartes was a good writer and a genius, but he wasn't the only one challenging our received understanding of the natural world. Hobbes, Gassendi, Pascal, Cavendish, and quite a few more, were doing meaningful, revolutionary work at pretty much the same time.

So, our world would be pretty much the same (minus a really great set of thought experiments for levels of skepticism).
posted by oddman at 7:36 AM on May 3 [1 favorite]

If you want a society of Descartes, you need society to provide...
money.

All those amazing confluences of creativity in certain times and places -- like London, Vienna, New York, or Paris -- it's the money/power that is or was centered in those places. The rest follows. Universities, cathedrals, art museums, grand projects, people with the time and money to nurture and consume art and literature at all levels.
posted by pracowity at 7:39 AM on May 3 [3 favorites]

The broad impact of AC is seen from Florida, the South and across the Southwest US, which boomed by population relocation, by tens of millions and counting.
posted by Brian B. at 7:49 AM on May 3 [2 favorites]

Imagine what a different world we might be living in if Descartes had merely gone to bed and pulled the covers over his head.

If only.
posted by The Manwich Horror at 8:25 AM on May 3 [2 favorites]

Descartes’s Stove

I saw them open for Appliance. They were a hot group.
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:00 AM on May 3 [4 favorites]

When I was a philosophy major (previous millennium) all the classes were in the afternoon and evening. One of the instructors said this was because Queen Christina required Descarte's tutoring at 5am in her drafty castle, where he promptly caught pneumonia and died. Likely apocryphal, but a good enough reason to stay warm in bed at dawn.
posted by condesita at 9:05 AM on May 3 [2 favorites]

Finally, a philosophical tool that I can use to boil water in Russell's Teapot! I've been pointing at it with a bunch of different razors to minimal effect.
posted by Pickman's Next Top Model at 10:19 AM on May 3 [10 favorites]

I'm thinking a lot about how perhaps the core challenge of our age is to move on from the compartmented rationality that has created our immense riches (and population explosion) to a more whole way of thinking

Reading a little Nietzsche negated for me any credibility for mind-body dualism, and therefore any line of thinking predicated on it. The mind-body split is a very influential, incredibly stupid idea. I wish my HS intro to philosophy course would've taught Nietzsche alongside Descartes instead of just drilling the latter into us.
posted by tovarisch at 2:05 PM on May 3 [2 favorites]

Yeah, that's putting DesCartes before the horse.
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:48 PM on May 3 [3 favorites]

It seems like a hell of stretch to say that Cartersian dualism could only arise in a heated space (especially as ideas about mind-body dualism certainly existed well before Descartes). Couldn't he just as well have had the same thoughts on a nice mild summer day?
posted by ssg at 4:57 PM on May 3 [1 favorite]

Imagine what a different world we might be living in if Descartes had merely gone to bed and pulled the covers over his head.

I snooze, therefore I lose.
posted by Western Infidels at 5:22 PM on May 3 [5 favorites]

ssg: Couldn't he just as well have had the same thoughts on a nice mild summer day?

We must next do Russian philosophy.
posted by clawsoon at 6:37 PM on May 3 [4 favorites]

Descartes vivisecting his wife's dog in order to make a point about circulation and the heart has somewhat soured me on him. You can take serene detachment from the physical too far. I refuse to believe anyone could do this without some stirrings of emotion, and I assume his belief that beasts are soulless automata allowed him to let "logical" thought and enquiry predominate over animal sympathy.

The warm room makes you cold, is what I'm trying to say.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 8:38 PM on May 3 [3 favorites]

(I also wonder what his poor wife made of this).
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 8:39 PM on May 3 [2 favorites]