What bacteria taught me about metaphysics

What bacteria taught me about metaphysics

Hans Busstra, MA

Though we tend to forget it, science and metaphysics go hand in hand. What I find an intriguing fact is that, more or less at the same time that Van Leeuwehoek was building microscopes and discovering bacteria, a famous thinker, residing only 60 kilometers north, in an Amsterdam Canal House, was bowing his head on the mind-body problem. How does mind, consciousness, relate to the material world we perceive?

This philosopher was called René Descartes and he would install ‘dualism’ in the Western mind. Applied to bacteria: what was the reality status of Van Leeuwenhoek’s discovery, those tiny building blocks of life, which in the end were not perceived through a lens, but ‘through’ consciousness—which we, in turn, don’t understand? Now, I’m not a philosopher but a filmmaker. To my knowledge, there are no records of Van Leeuwenhoek and Descartes ever exchanging ideas. But the link I see between them is that Descartes’ division of mind and matter would enable the Western mind to get lost in the microscope.

Microbiology, chemistry and medicine don’t benefit from casting metaphysical doubt on microscopic images; it’s much more functional to regard what is being perceived as fundamental. Cells exist and by understanding them we can cure people. In other words: suspending metaphysics can be very functional.

In the documentary I was making about bacteria, I wanted to portray them in a new way.