Consciousness in the Cosmos: From René Descartes to David Bohm’s Revolution

Abstract

This article sets out to locate the contributions of David Bohm within the cultural history of efforts to overcome the problems generated by the Copernican system and Cartesian dualism. After deploring the marginalization of Bohm’s contributions by thinkers whose purposes correspond to his own, the article summarizes the issues that led to the modern quest for unified knowledge. In the process, it questions the interpretation of Descartes as proposing an irreducibly dualist worldview, instead bringing to light the complexity of his thought and the context where he articulated his famed division of mind and matter. Indeed, as with Pascal, Descartes meant to secure the independence of the self from the objective world of quantities. While their solutions were not entirely satisfactory, others continued the quest. Bohm is one such thinker, whose contributions in this regard cannot be dissociated from the search for bridging consciousness and the cosmos, for unified knowledge.