Descartes
22 June 2009
Here are the thoughts I had late last night.
You might have noticed that people like to believe things that are convenient to them. For example there are always these diet books coming out like How I Got To Look Like Summer Glau By Stuffing My Face With Pie, and a bunch of people buy these books and believe that they too can succeed with this method, not because of any evidence that it works, but just because they would like to stuff their faces with pie and also look like Summer Glau.
(I don’t mean to be sexist: the desire to look like Rafael Nadal works similarly. And this isn’t to say that some exotic diets might not work; I only mean that people’s interest in them is often unconnected to whether they work or not.)
That is only one example. People are doing this kind of thing all the time. For another example there are the works of Ayn Rand: a certain kind of person wants to be told that it is a noble thing to crush the weak, and so these works are popular. To this kind of person it all seems very reasonable, as though there could be no other conclusion.
I like Descartes’s Discourse on the Method. I remember reading it for the first time, maybe ten years ago. It is quick and clear and it seems to make a great deal of sense. Its thesis is that people think all kinds of things, but many of them are not true, and so what we need to do is forget all that former thinking, start out assuming nothing at all, and rebuild knowledge rigorously from the ground up. I like that idea (and I am not the only one), and I also admire the … is elan the word? with which Descartes dismisses all intellectual activity previous to himself.
It is in this work that Descartes says the famous thing that he said, “I think therefore I am,” the idea being, all this time he has been deciding that nothing is true and thinking various other outrageous thoughts, but then there must be some entity, which he calls himself, that is doing all this deciding and thinking, and so it is safe to say that this entity, at least, exists.
That’s the first conclusion he reaches, after assuming nothing: that he himself exists.
His next conclusion is that God exists. This argument, compared to the first, seems distinctly dubious to me, and I think to many other readers today. If you want to know more about it I will direct you to the original; but I want to note that it appears to be of a very different type from the first argument, and it is not at all clear that it belongs at the foundation of the structure of definite knowledge that Descartes is trying to build. It’s not unlikely that he wasn’t satisfied with it himself, but put it in only to mollify certain others; but regardless of why it’s there, it’s striking that, even in this document, which is devoted to reason and which lies at the heart of modern science, there is a claim that seems to us to come from a very different place and to be part of a very different world, but that is presented along with the rest as though it were all of the same.
That is, even at the beginning (to the extent that Descartes’s work is a beginning), we were using reason to demonstrate things that were convenient, and not necessarily things that were actually reasonable.
So the thought that I had, as I lay in bed last night, is that the real difference between the pre-modern and the modern eras is that, whereas then we were deceived by elites, now we are responsible for our own deception.
In a very general sense of course. Then the Church and other powerful groups would decide what was true based on their own interests; now we can more often decide based on ours. That doesn’t make most of the things we believe any more true, it only changes the agent of error.
True, it may give us a better chance of getting certain things right. We seem to know things for example about surgery and how to manufacture plastics that people did not know then, and that’s probably progress. On the other hand we might know less about other things; sometimes I wonder how much we have actually forgotten. Might it be good for us in some way to be compelled to believe things that we hate, and not allowed lazily to believe whatever we like?
After that I had strange dreams, and when I woke up it was cloudy again. I haven’t seen the sun for many days, even though yesterday was the solstice.
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