I have a profound admiration for thinkers like Descartes. Whether right or wrong, people who go about life with the project of founding an entire philosophical system, from scratch, are admirable. Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger: people who dedicated their entire existence to create a whole new way of thinking. If that seems like an easy or rewarding lifestyle, answer me this: did Nietzsche have teeth? You wouldn’t know, since he never smiled. Kant was so stuck up that he would always take his walks at the same time; people in that era said they would set their clocks to his promenades. Once, Kant crossed a friend he hadn’t seen in ten years. The friend happily talked and tried to catch up. Kant got so upset, he decided to never take that route again, because this guy had broken his deep train of thought. Fun people to invite to your dinner party, right?
I imagine most people understand the point of the Cartesian cogito, but let’s restate it here. Descartes’ troubles evolved around solving the timeless question: how do I know other people are alive? And the question that ravages contemporary, unsophisticated minds: how do we know we’re not in a simulation? It’s basically what your 17-year-old nephew, coming back from watching The Matrix for the first time, kept blabbering on about at the dinner table.
The Wachowski’s have stated The Matrix was based on Thomas Stackhouse’s “Synarchism” theory, which is more of a crackpot political concept than anything else. They focused it more on control and oppression, giving it an LGBT spin if you really watch the movie closely.
However, The Matrix’s famous steak scene is pure Descartes. Our buddy René substituted the matrix for an evil demon who was constantly tricking him. He starts with a traditional, solipsistic argument: if I look out the window and see people walking outside, how do I know they’re really people? How do I know they’re not machines walking about under their hats and cloaks? Classic solipsism, or the idea nobody exists except for you.
Descartes then takes a spin and focuses on himself: how do I know everything I feel or grasp in reality is not the work of an evil demon trying to trick me? I perceive the world through external input and sensations, and these can be false, as in a dream. How do I know I’m not in a demon’s dream as we speak?
The answer, as you all know, is the cogito ergo sum formula: I think, therefore I am. Now, I hope your philosophy teachers explained that “to think” here simply means to doubt. Descartes isn’t thinking about how many doughnuts he’s going to have for breakfast (or pains aux chocolat, you purists), he’s doubting he exists. This establishes his first certainty: I can’t doubt that I’m doubting. I am a thinking mind, or a res cogitans as he put it.
I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am: this is the axiomatic principle Descartes is going to use to build a whole system outwards based on anti-solipsistic certainty. Also known as the Cartesian Method, but you already knew that.
Moving away from Cartesianism
Many philosophers have poked holes in Descartes’ approach. Wittgenstein, for example, is going to reject the idea that you can think in abstractum, devoid of language structures, and Heidegger is going to correctly point out that “thinking” is something that happens in-the-world, not outside of it. If you’re not playing a philosophical language game, as Wittgenstein put it, the whole Cartesian argument makes little to no sense. Wander around the streets of your city mumbling about demons tricking you and nothing being epistemologically knowable, and you’ll wind up in the looney bin. But if someone comes up to you and asks you what you’re doing, and you answer, “I’m a philosopher”, they’ll leave you alone (and probably get their children as far away from you as possible).
If you’re in Heideggerian-philosopher mode, you’ll act like that, wondering if the hand in front of you is really your hand or if the redness in the color red is universal. If you’re in Heideggerian-carpenter mode, you’ll just ask someone to pass you the red hammer.
However, this line of critique is insufficient for me. The flaw is, as Heidegger put it, in the verb “to be”. I think, therefore I am: you think, therefore you are… What exactly? You’re definitely playing some sort of philosophical language game, but how does that relate to who you are?
Post-existentialist schools of thought, and post-language based philosophy, tend to look at everything else outside language. Instead of focusing on this limited approach to reality (which eventually pushed Wittgenstein to quit philosophy and become a monk), contemporary philosophy is looking towards meaning structures outside the linguistic realm.
Basically, if you’re “thinking” then it’s too late: you’ve already made a huge amount of assumptions (about the nature of reality, about yourself, about your role in society…) that have no basis, whatsoever. You’ve tacitly accepted a bunch of things. This is a huge point of contention between philosophy and the “natural” sciences. When a scientist says he’s “measuring the speed of light objectively”, a philosopher will quickly point out that, in order to make any measurement at all, he’s assuming the world is objective and measurable (ontology) and that he can use his tools to derive a number that represents something about something (epistemology). But neither his ontological assumptions, or his epistemological ones, are based on solid ground. We’re talking about inter-subjective common ground at best: all the scientists agree the world is materialistic and external (not a projection of our minds, or a trick from Descartes’ demon). No wonder scientists hate us…
My approach, then, is to look at the transcendent meaning-making structures present before language codifies reality. You “are” when you pierce the language entrapment, through the various ecstatic experiences known by mankind since the dawn of time. When people report they felt “oneness” with their environment after a week of meditation, or that “the presence of God” (insert whatever you want there) was made manifest after they fasted for three days and then went to the Mosque, these are pre-linguistic experiences.
These experiences are not only pre-linguistic, they’re anti-linguistic: if you insert language into them, the ecstatic experience evaporates. You have to not think about anything in order to live them.
Of course, this isn’t easy, that’s why people spend years training themselves to attain such states. The end, on the other hand, is always the same: a profound knowing, not based on rational deduction or logic, that you are.
We’ll try and get into the details of these experiences in another post. For now, I’d just like to conclude by saying: I don’t think, therefore I am, or Descartes for the XXIst century.
Rethinking Descartes
Hi Vincent, you really could be a good philosophy teacher. Are you ? If not you should, kids would adore you and perhaps even find interesting to read such dullards as Descartes or, worst, Heidegger !