Descartes’s metaphor likened scholastic learning and old cities as lacking a designer’s plan.

Evidence

Lyautey’s passion for the Discourse on the Method was not, perhaps, surprising. It was in the Discourse that European philosophy broke with the method of scholarship it had shared with the Islamic world. Such scholarship understood learning as a process that moved from text to text, as we saw with the learning of al-Azhar, constructing interpretation upon interpretation, one reading resting upon another like the buildings of a pre-modern city. What was wrong with such ‘book-learning’, as Descartes called it, was what was wrong with pre-modern cities. Descartes announced the West’s rejection of the scholastic tradition by comparing it to ‘those old cities’ which ‘are as a rule badly laid out, as compared with those towns of a regular pattern that are laid out by a designer’. The buildings of old cities, he explained, give no indication of such a designer, of the mind and intention that planned them. ‘In view of their arrangement - here a large one, there a small - and the way they make the streets twisted and irregular, one would say that it was chance that placed them so, not the will of men who had the use of reason.’ Just as the person was now understood as composed of mind and material body, the material world was to be arranged in such a way as to reveal this mind, this pre-existent plan or framework, this intention or will. The practice of colonial politics would be based on the same strategy of arranging, of ordering everything up so as to reveal a pre-existent plan, a political authority, a ‘meaning’, a truth. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 551

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s earlier chapters on al-Azhar learning and the colonial enframing theme, and to Heidegger’s Gestell concept Mitchell engages throughout.
• DEFINE: The Cartesian break with textual accretion is defined through the city-planning metaphor — learning as architecture.