Before The Pump Was Invented, What Did The Heart Do?

We Believe We Know The Truth Because Science Says The Heart Is A Pump. But That’s Ridiculous

Before The Pump Was Invented, What Did The Heart Do?

The purpose of this question is to make us see that our ability to understand the world is limited to what we know; but what we know is the cognitive product of what we experience — thought being encompassed within what is experienced — and experience is the result of interpreting what happens in our lives based on what we already know.

Which is to say, everything we directly perceive, feel, and think, is passed through the filter of our already conceived knowledge of, and understanding of, the world and ourselves. So we are limited in our attempts to understand something new, owing to the need to not just meet this new knowledge with an open mind, but also the need to understand how it fits together with everything else. But sometimes new knowledge does not and will not fit in.

When this happens, we find that we are cemented in place when we attempt to break free of the bounds of our limited knowledge and understanding of how the world works. We literally cannot easily leave old ideas behind, nor the language used to describe them. This means that we can only fit the new knowledge into our existing conceptual model of reality by literally making it fit the existing model, forcing it to cohere with everything else we know. But how much of what we know is truly factual? I use the example of the heart to highlight this point: Is the heart truly a mechanical pump and nothing more?

Today everyone knows that the heart is a pump. We all know what a pump is. But pumps are not natural — they are the result of technical arts having to do with material science, the harnessing of energy in various forms, and engineering that enables the right materials, engineered in an efficient way using our knowledge of fluid dynamics to accomplish some practical goal, such as heating your house, providing running water to it, enabling flush toilets, etc.

A heart, on the other hand, is natural. It is not a pump. Today we say it pumps blood, but even that knowledge was not known to people before the pump was invented and a correlation in function was made between pumps and hearts. But to say that a heart is a pump is an error. A heart is an organ within a living being — a biological whole that is more than its parts. A pump is just a piece of constructed equipment. Everything natural has a nature that is always much more than the discerning scientific mind can encompass. Every characterization is less than the actual being.

So what was the heart’s function before pumps existed to serve as a model?

In the fourth century BC the Greek philosopher Aristotle asserted that the heart was the seat of intelligence, motion, and sensation. It was, he said, a hot and dry organ, and the other organs, the brain and lungs for example, only existed to cool the heart.

In the second century AD in Rome, the Greek physician, surgeon, and philosopher Claudius Galenus, known as Galen, wrote a book titled “On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body” in which he asserted: “The heart is, as it were, the hearthstone and source of the innate heat by which the animal is governed.” and he described the heart’s functioning this way: “The complexity of [the heart’s] fibers… was prepared by Nature to perform a variety of functions… enlarging when it desires to attract what is useful, clasping its contents when it is time to enjoy what has been attracted, and contracting when it desires to expel residues.”

In the third century AD, in Roman Egypt, Plotinus, the Hellenistic Greek philosopher and founder of Neoplatonism, said that it was the heart that was the appropriate dwelling place for the spirited (as opposed to the appetitive, animalistic) part of the soul.¹

Andrés Laguna de Segovia, a Spanish humanist physician, pharmacologist, and botanist, wrote in 1535, “If indeed from the heart alone rise anger or passion, fear, terror, and sadness; if from it alone spring shame, delight, and joy, why should I say more?”

In 1628, the English physician William Harvey wrote in his “On the Circulation of the Blood” that “The heart’s one role is the transmission of the blood and its propulsion, by means of the arteries, to the extremities everywhere.”

Neither Harvey, nor the earlier Galen, characterized the heart as a pump, though they understood the heart’s role in moving blood through the body.

Galen thought that the sturdy walls and the valves of the pulmonary artery prevented a backward motion of blood during the expiratory contraction of the thorax, but that the thin walls of the pulmonary vein yielded to the compression of the contracting thorax during the expiration. By this mechanism, the blood was squeezed into the left atrium. Obviously Galen regarded the pumping force of the right chamber of the heart alone as insufficient to propel blood through the vascular anastomoses in the lungs as well as through the interventricular septum into the left heart. Thus, the forward flow of blood from the right to the left heart seemed to depend less upon the pumping action of the heart than upon the action of the thoracic muscles. It is difficult to imagine that Galen would have likened the heart to a pump that depends upon a force acting on the pipes leading into and from the pump.²

But it was only a short while later during the seventeenth century that the French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist, René Descartes, argued that the heart was like a pump or, better yet, a combustion engine (remember, the heart creates heat).

Of these descriptions, only Aristotle’s placing of the seat of intelligence in the heart is no longer held, all the others still inhabit our understanding alongside the modern scientific claim that the heart is a mechanical pump.

So for all the time humans have lived, the understanding that the heart was a pump only came into our consciousness barely little more than three hundred years ago, and as you can see, we still, for the most part hold onto the old ideas as well, if only in our language.

Of course, we believe that we now know the truth because science has confirmed that the heart is a pump. But that’s ridiculous. A pump moves a liquid from one place to another — it doesn’t circulate it. Pipes, in conjunction with a pump, provides the means to circulate a fluid, if the pipes are designed to do so. And naturally, it’s just a small step to conceive of blood vessels as ‘pipes’. But is this the truth? Not at all. Blood vessels are much, much more than pipes. And the heart is much more than a pump. And neither are mechanical, like an engineered pump is. So do any of these ideas truly encompass what a heart is? No.

Imagination let’s us conceive of what we haven’t yet experienced, such as the heart being a pump, but again, what we can imagine is constrained by what we already know. So even our imagination can’t stray far from the limitations of our current understanding, which until the pump was invented, there was no chance that it could be seen to be like a pump. Even then, it took almost two millennia to assert the likeness. Archimedes designed the screw pump in 200 BC, and through those millennia, improvements and new designs were created. But even until today, no engineered pump works in the same way as the human heart. Why then, did Déscartes make the leap to label it so? Because he was a mechanical materialist, the avant garde of physical causality that has become our paradigmatic understanding of reality within which our knowledge is constructed — in which everything is considered to be a machine, including all non-human animals, and the human body.

Our final difficulty here is that, to convey a truly novel understanding to someone who is firmly locked into the current understanding, we have to use words to describe the new understanding that are defined within the old paradigm — and this includes ourselves. If the current vocabulary and conceptual understanding is not used, there will be little or no comprehension of what is being said. But this keeps us chained to the old paradigm.

The advancement of knowledge is a slow process, subject to many obstacles, and prone to false halts along the way, caused by the sheer weight of old ideas that are no longer useful.

It is only when what we know is completely undermined that we can start anew. We cannot develop a new understanding built upon a precedent understanding that will diverge very far at all from what we already thought was the case.

The objective of the meditation techniques shared in Tranquillity’s Secret is to see through what we think we know. But if we do not seek out a new understanding, a new paradigm, that completely rebuilds our body of knowledge into a new way of seeing the world, then we are sentenced to continue to use the old paradigmatic understanding, even if we deny that we are, whenever we try to describe the new way of seeing things in language that is structured by the old understanding.

The only way to escape our being cemented in place is to clean the slate and start anew guided by what we have seen through. That means we have to fence-off certain ways of thinking and understanding in order to more productively entertain radically new ideas.

So to be able to use meditation in this pursuit you have to be open to having your old ideas undermined. If you are not open to that, then you will reflexively sabotage your meditation practice and the insights it can bring.

Thomas Edison, when interviewing new prospective employees, would buy them soup and watch what they did. If they added salt and pepper before tasting it, then he knew they were too inflexible to entertain what they might otherwise notice in their research, and therefore that person would not be the kind of employee he was looking for.

But is accepting a different paradigmatic understanding as a doctrinal system — rather than going through a meditative practice — an easier way to go to get to a new understanding? It may be easier, depending on how complicated the doctrinal system is, but you can’t escape your old paradigmatic understanding this way. Instead of sweeping out the old, you will mangle the doctrine until you can integrate it with your already existing understanding — this being the way we usually learn ‘new things’.

This phenomenon of mangling new ideas to fit a pre-existing understanding is why elementary Buddhism includes the “two truths doctrine” which allows students to continue to operate under their old paradigmatic understanding while learning the new; but ultimately, they must let the old understanding go, because, as I’ve said, it keeps us cemented in place.

Descartes’ characterization of the heart as being an internal combustion engine seems ridiculous on its face. But so is his characterization of it as a pump. And while you can surely agree wholeheartedly with the first statement, because it is ridiculous in our understanding à la mode, and yet, you just as surely see the second statement as being ‘obviously’ false. Why is that? Why is it obviously false to you? Can’t you even entertain another view? Try it on for size for a little while?

There is a reason that humans believed for so many thousands of years that the heart is the source of heat in the body — because they could feel the heat. If you have ever given someone a long heart-to-heart, “heartwarming” hug, you can feel it too. But don’t go looking for a thermometer to measure it, as a scientist can’t find the heat there. Just open your heart and feel the warm loving heat that flows out into the other’s heart, and returns to yours — if they too have an open heart. Or work with your breath, the way the ancients did, long before Aristotle (Empedocles wrote about it, the Chinese and Tibetans still do it), you will be warm on a cold night. These are phenomena that scientists cannot measure, but only scoff at because of their limiting view of reality. Yet, for thousands of years no one would doubt that the heart produced heat, except those that had a ‘stone-cold’ heart.

Pay attention to our language, because evidence of these older, truer ways of speaking abound.