Archetypes of Wisdom

1. Archetypes of Wisdom Douglas J. Soccio Chapter 9 The Rationalist: Rene Descartes

2. Learning Objectives • On completion of this chapter, you should be able to answer the following questions: • What is rationalism? • What is the coherence theory of truth? • What is the “methodic doubt”? • What are innate ideas? • What are a priori ideas? What is a posteriori knowledge? • What is skepticism? What is cogito? • What is the “evil genius”? • What is materialism? What is Cartesian dualism? • What is the ontological argument? • What is the mind-body argument?

3. The Problem of Authority • The origins of modern philosophy lie in: • The proliferation of scientific advances. • The loss of central authority by the Roman Catholic church. • The decline of a stable social order as a result of that loss of authority. • The mind of René Descartes.

4. René Descartes • René Descartes (1596-1650) was born into an old and respected family in the French province of Touraine. • After completing his studies as the Jesuit college at La Flèche, he earned degrees in law at the University of Poitiers. • On November 10, 1619, he had a revelation in which he “discovered the foundations of a wonderful new science.” • He believed he had been divinely encouraged to establish a universal method of reasoning, based on mathematical principles, which would guarantee the absolutely certain truth of its results.

5. The Solitary Intellect • Solitary and secretive, Descartes preferred to avoid the distractions and commotion of city life and social involvements. • He lived alone most of his life, and during a twenty-year period lived in twenty different houses. • Living this way, he was able to study philosophy, geometry, physics, optics, circulation, and other topics. • In September 1649, he became a tutor for the Queen of Sweden. • But the weather and his lifestyle got the best of him, and he died of pneumonia on February 11, 1650 at age fifty-three.

6. Rationalism • Rationalismis an epistemological position in which reason is said to be the primary source of all knowledge, superior to the senses. • In general, rationalists believe that abstract reasoning can produce undeniable, absolutely certain truths about nature, existence, and the whole of reality. • These truths are called a priori, or innate, ideas – because they are discovered independently of experience, without empirical observation or experimentation. • Descartes stands not only as the “father of modern philosophy,” but as the original archetype of the modern rationalist.

7. Against Disordered Thinking • Of great importance to Descartes was understanding an accurate method for how to think about philosophy. • Descartes cautions that “in a too absorbed study” of the works of earlier thinkers, we become “infected with their errors, guard against them as we may.” • Therefore, Descartes feels that philosophical inquiry requires a method in order to avoid errors.

8. Discourse on Method • Descartes develops the Discourse on Method, in which he spells out rules aimed at attaining certain knowledge. • For example, “One we have chosen a subject to study, we should confine ourselves to what we can clearly intuit and deduce with certainty for ourselves.” • For when we accept views solely on the weight of the authority or prestige of those who hold them, we become non-rational at best. • We should order our thinking and, instead of becoming memorizers, become thinkers ourselves.

9. The Method of Doubt • Descartes proposed to use the new spirit of scientific inquiry and mathematical rigor to reexamine…everything! • Anything that did not rest solely on “the clear light of natural reason,” was suspect. • In his effort to provide an absolutely certain foundation for philosophy, he discovered methodic doubt – that is, doubting until something is found which cannot be doubted. • Whatever remained would be absolutely certain.

10. Standard of Truth • Descartes proposed that only those things we can accept as “clear and distinct” should be accepted as true. • “Clear” he defined as “that which is present and apparent to an attentive mind.” • “Distinct” he defined as “that which is so precise and different from all other objects that it contains within itself nothing but what is clear.” • What he has in mind are examples from geometry and mathematics, which he felt should serve as the standard of truth.

11. Innate Ideas • A priori knowledge: knowledge that is known “prior” to or independently of sense experience. • A posteriori knowledge: knowledge that is known “after” or dependent upon sense experience. • To Descartes, we can know some things are a priori because they are innate (that is, they have been implanted in our minds by God). • Descartes gives as an example the idea of a triangle.

12. The Cartesian Genesis • The method of doubting Descartes proposes is spelled out in his Meditations, which he begins by asking himself what he can be skeptical about. • The begins by mentioning all the things he has learned through his senses – in effect, everything around him. • He then considers the thought that perhaps he is just dreaming, even though things seem real enough to him (after all, dreams can sometimes seem that way). • Then he pushes his doubt even further, by wondering how he could ever tell whether the world really is as he perceives it, or if God is actually an “evil genius” who is deceiving him.

13. The Doubting Self • After calling everything he perceives into doubt, Descartes wonders whether he can call his own existence into doubt as well. But he finds that this is impossible. • For in order for him to doubt himself, he must go through the process of doubting (which, for Descartes, is a process of thinking). • This means he’s found something certain: himself as a thinking thing (or a mind). • The famous Latin sentence, “Cogito, ergo sum,” literally means “I think, therefore I am.” • In other words – I can’t doubt my existence, since I have to be the thing doubting if doubting is being done.

14. The Cogito • This is good news for Descartes: discovering at least one thing that cannot be doubted provides him with the beginnings of a sure foundation. • For the cogito is a thinking thing, a mind, with all of the innate ideas that make a mind a mind, which make a mind like Descartes’ – or yours – capable of rational thought. • And one of the innate ideas that Descartes has is of God, an infinitely perfect being.

15. The Innate Idea of God • At this point, there are two things whose existence Descartes is assured of: himself as a thinking thing and his innate idea of God. • But even if he cannot doubt the existence of his own mind, he knows he is not responsible for its existence. • He also knows he is not responsible for the existence of his innate idea of an infinitely perfect being, since he is a finite, imperfect being. • That suggests that the source of both Descartes’ mind and its innate idea of an infinitely perfect being is God. That is, that God actually exists.

16. Descartes’ Ontological Argument • Descartes turns back to the Middle Ages for his argument concerning God’s existence. The idea is essentially: the idea Descartes has is of a perfect being, but unless that being actually exists, it is not perfect (i.e., perfection entails existence). • This is an ontological argument, an attempt to prove the existence of God by referring either to the meaning of the word God or to the purportedly unique quality of the concept of God. In other words, the argument may be “true by definition.” • The purest form of the ontological argument first occurs in the writings of St. Anselm (1033-1109).

17. Reconstructing the World • Once Descartes is assured of the his own existence and that of God’s, everything else falls into place. • The world is roughly as he perceives it, since God cannot be an evil genius and be the infinitely perfect being Descartes has in mind. • Also, the mind and the body are two distinct things, since that is the way Descartes perceives them as being, and he now knows he is not being deceived about such things. • He is a mind thinking about the physical objects he perceives all around him, and can now be certain that science is getting the world roughly right (only roughly, since our senses are finite). Errors are due to our will to know running ahead of our good, but imperfect, abilities.

18. Cartesian Dualism • This leaves us with a problem, though: if the mind and body are different in kind, how do they communicate? • How do you get ideas (from extended non-thinking things), and how do you (a non-extended thinking thing) tell your body to act on them once you have them? • This is the result of Descartes’ philosophical dualism – the position that existence is divided into two completely distinct kinds of things.

19. The Mind-Body Problem • Descartes was a devout Catholic, and well aware of the challenge to religion posed by the reemergence of materialism in modern science. • Other philosophers, notably Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), were arguing that everything is composed of matter and can be explained by physical laws. • This is a form of monism – the belief that everything consists of only one, ultimate, unique substance, in this case, matter. • For a monist like Hobbes, thinking is merely a complex form of behavior, and the body a fleshy machine. The so-called “mind” can be reduced to the functioning of the brain.

20. From Cosmos to Machine • According to the feminist philosopher Susan Bordo, “Cartesian Modernity is inherently linked to the repression of nature and women.” • For Bordo, the problem is that objectivity, rather than meaning, became the chief philosophical issue. • The masculinization of science thus leads to an alienation from nature, the repression of women and a de-emphasis on the family.

21. Discussion Questions • Descartes says that “it were far better never to think of investigating the truth at all, than to do so without a method.” Why was he so troubled by disorganized thinking and blind curiosity? • What do you think he might say to us about basing our opinions regarding global warming, creationism versus evolution, and other controversial issues on what we “learn” from movies, TV, the Internet, politicians, and professors? • What methods do you use to choose among competing “experts” and positions?

22. Rationalism Innate ideas Coherence theory of truth Methodic Doubt A priori knowledge A posteriori knowledge Cogito, ergo sum Ontological Argument Materialism Behaviorism Mechanism Reductionism Dualism Monism Pluralism al-Ghazali (1058-1111) Susan Bordo (b.1947) Rene Descartes 1596-1650) Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) St. Anselm (1033-1109) Chapter Review:Key Concepts and Thinkers