Episode #028 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

René Descartes is one of these people whose reputation precedes him so much that to just dive right into the episode and start talking about his life—it would be a little bit cavalier for me. He’s one of these names from philosophy that even people that have little to no experience trudging miserably through these philosophical treatises—pretty much everybody has a little bit of an idea of who he was. Most people I’ve directly spoken to typically can identify him correctly as the guy that said, “I think, therefore I am.”

Now, maybe you’re listening to this show. Maybe you downloaded this one episode to try to figure out what that even means. But I’m here to tell you, Descartes is much, much more than just this single sentence that he said famously. He’s often credited as being the father of modern philosophy. And to truly understand why, to truly understand why he’s so influential, I think it’s important to talk about his life and the time period he was living through. This is going to give us some good context.

So, let’s just take that sentence at face value: I think, therefore I am. What is that even saying? What does that even mean? I mean, it sounds like the most painfully obvious statement ever uttered in the history of the world. I mean, to a modern person, they must look at that and say, “How stupid were these people back in the 1600s? It took them thousands of years just to realize that they were actually thinking about stuff?” Well, no, not exactly. I think the best way to begin is to say something that we’ve touched on many times before in this podcast. The world today is very, very different than the world was back then. People during the time of Descartes were lost and very confused. And it’s pretty easy to understand why. Just think about what they’d been through recently.

Things weren’t always this chaotic for these people. They used to know everything. That’s what we got to understand. For a long time, humanity was the smartest guy humanity knew. There were a lot of things that everybody thought they knew for certain, but then that came crashing down in a big way, in multiple different ways. We’ve seen the Protestant Reformation where the implementation of the religion of an entire millennium came crashing down. People were told this stuff was the word of God. The way that the Church did things was endorsed by God. The rituals you performed on behalf of the Church earned you favor with God. For thousands of years, these people were told that this stuff was the infallible truth. And look, it better be, considering that your eternal fate is at stake.

I mean, really, listen, if you believed that an omniscient, omnipotent God laid out a set of behavioral restrictions for you to follow centuries ago in a language that you can’t speak, then you better be pretty certain about what’s expected of you, because it’s not exactly easy to get that guy on the phone and ask for some clarifications on all this stuff. The one path that they saw—the one correct set of behaviors that actually earned you a place in God’s kingdom above instead of etching your name into the charred walls of the damned—these behaviors changed drastically with the Protestant Reformation. And as an average person living at the time, was there anything else you needed to be more sure about than that?

So, just imagine living back then. How terrified would you be? I mean, how can you know for certain that you’re actually going to heaven? What if the way that these people told you was the way to earn your salvation—what if this whole time you’d been doing it all wrong? You’ve thought this whole time that the things that you’re doing are putting you and God on pretty good terms. But what if you’ve been doing it wrong the whole time? What if this is the reason why bad stuff is still happening to you all the time?

And then, once you decide that the Church authority has been misrepresenting this stuff in some way, how can you be confident in what replaces it? How could you ever be confident in that stuff? How do you know that these new rituals and new ways of doing things—how do you know that that stuff is the correct way to earn your spot into the club? Can we ever interpret the words of God, written down by these select few chosen people, and arrive at a system that we know is accurate with complete certainty? Can we? Remember this question.

Now, there were other entire areas of thought that were being called into question at the time. For example, scholasticism—the dialectical method of reasoning and education that was dominant throughout the entire Middle Ages that we talked about. And it was slowly being overthrown by the new humanistic way of looking at things, which really wasn’t that new because it was a harkening back to classical antiquity anyway. People had started to question the role of government in the individual’s life. Was this feudal system that we had used for so long, where a large peasant class lives a symbiotic lifestyle with overlords, was that the best way to do things? Or should we perhaps revolt and try to overthrow this outdated system?

Concepts that were older than the New Testament itself were being shattered. The Ptolemaic model of the universe with the earth at the center and the sun and all of the rest of the celestial bodies around us—it was becoming very clear that it wasn’t true. We had Copernicus come out with On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres. Galileo was working on a mathematical approach to physics. All this stuff was being thrown out the window. For the longest time, humans thought that they were the smartest guy at the party. They thought they had everything figured out.

But much like that guy at the party that thinks he’s the smartest, much like the guy that talks really loud and is completely overconfident and thinks he knows everything, it just takes one person with a marginal amount of critical thinking to ask him the right questions to make him realize that he might not know as much as he first thought. Socrates comes into the party and asks him a question or two, and his voice gets a little softer. And he’s a little less confident. And then he figures out something else is completely wrong, and he gets a little more timid. Well, eventually, humanity became like Michael Cera. The stuff we thought we were so certain about for so long is just garbage. What do we do now?

So, we said, let’s start over. Let’s try to figure everything out again. But this time, let’s try to base our knowledge on something a whole lot more substantive than we did last time. We made a lot of mistakes the first time around. And this problem really is central to the time period. There are all different types of people emerging that have different thoughts on this issue. One of these types of people—like the question that people asked about religious truth that we talked about before—can we know anything for certain? Maybe we can’t. But then, on the other hand, there’s this group of people out there like Francis Bacon that think not only can we arrive at certain knowledge, but that knowledge is the savior of humanity. It’s going to solve all of humanity’s problems. If only we could find a scientific method, we would be living in a utopia. Then there’s other people out there that think, maybe it won’t solve all of humanity’s problems, but it seems possible to find a single method that can unite all the different sciences into one: a single method to arrive at scientific truths, which would obviously speed things up drastically in many departments.

What we see emerging in the scientific approaches of Thomas Hobbes and Francis Bacon, that we’ve talked about in the last couple episodes, is this search. But nobody’s completely satisfied with what’s been found yet. And what emerges from these people that are thinking about this issue is one of the most famous divides in the history of philosophy. And the man that started it, the man that put his stake in the ground for people to oppose initially, was René Descartes. Now, this famous rivalry of thinkers, this famous rivalry poised on different sides of a single issue brought us so many brilliant ideas and so many insights that it’s what we’re going to be talking about for quite a while. I’m talking about the famous divide between the continental rationalists and the British empiricists.

We know what rationalism and empiricism are. Rationalism is the idea that knowledge can be arrived at through the use of reason; and empiricism, which is the idea that knowledge needs to be arrive at through sense experience. These two ways of thinking can be seen as the two premises from which people argued in this age of confusion that they were in to try to arrive at knowledge that’s more trustworthy than what we had before. This famous divide in thinking goes like this, although some people make slight adjustments. The three big British empiricists were John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume. The three big continental rationalists were Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. But there were some other thinkers thrown in there as well, and we’re certainly going to talk about all of them.

Let me just say real quick, some people lump Immanuel Kant into the rationalists. Some people say he was the guy who managed to fuse together the two approaches, so he’s outside of this divide. But it’s safe to say that either way, he really is the climax of this famous divide between the continental rationalists and the British empiricists. And he’s eventually where we’re going, no matter how you see it. But Descartes started it all. The best way to understand where Descartes was coming from is to think of this guy, this guy that throughout their life has been conditioned to have the most extreme oversimplified viewpoints you have ever met. But I’m not talking about Descartes when I say that. I’m talking about who Descartes is responding to in his work.

This guy with the oversimplified viewpoints represents the entire human race. And look, this is the reason I got into philosophy in the first place, this idea. I noticed very early on that I was scared, and so was everybody else around me. And really, who can blame them? There’s no user’s manual for living as a human being on this planet. There’s no community college class that you can take that teaches you the true nature of everything that is. In fact, you can go to school for ten years; you can learn about one subject and study super hard about that one subject for all ten of those years, and at best you’re an expert in one little tiny sliver of this incredibly diverse and complicated world that we live in. And when things are diverse and complicated, they can easily become overwhelming to people. And when things are overwhelming, we try to simplify them as human beings trying to make sense of it all.

Being a young whippersnapper, I knew how stupid I was. I knew that I knew nothing. I looked around me, and I saw that pretty much everybody I had ever met had some sort of black-and-white way of looking at a certain issue that helped make them feel like they were an expert in that field, but really, they were just as confused as I was. They were just willing to mask their uncertainty with complacency. I mean, you see it all the time. “This particular race of people are ruining the world.” “Religion is ruining the world.” “Democrats are ruining the world.” And this is just one form of it. I mean, you ask most people what their most firmly held conviction is about anything—what is the thing that you believe in the most in the entire world? And it doesn’t take many questions for them to see that it might not be as simple as what they’re initially leading on about.

This way of thinking directly applies to this point in history. Francis Bacon has a quote where he said, “Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.” The world that we live in is not black and white. There certainly is black and white in it, but then there are about a million different shades of gray in between black and white where reality always lies. And the last thing I wanted to do as a young adult is fall into this trap simply because it was easy for me to do so. For some reason, I was willing to admit to myself that I was a dumb kid. I was willing to admit to myself that I didn’t know anything.

Well, in this example, Descartes represents this way of thinking, and the conditioned beliefs of humanity during his time period are represented by this over-the-top, extremely oversimplified guy talking really loud at a party somewhere. Just imagine a guy that was born into a really strange household. His parents are good parents. They engage him a lot, and they try to educate him about the world as best they can. But the problem is, they have a really oversimplified, unrealistic view of the world. Through years and years of conditioning, this guy becomes this cocktail of black-and-white views. I mean, you can insert your favorite ones here. He’s a racist. He is a doomsday prepper. Probably believes in some sort of reptilian shape shifters at the head of our government. You can really take your pick of any of these things. Well, once that guy is that far off the rails with these oversimplified views, once that guy has a criterion of truth that’s that easily met, let’s say we had to prescribe some method for him to be brought back to reality. What would he have to do?

Well, this is the problem Descartes was faced with back in his time. Thinking lazy is what got Europe into trouble in the first place. Europe got so far off the rails with all the things that we thought we knew for certain because it had a criterion of truth that was really shaky. Descartes thought that in order for us to arrive at certain knowledge that was trustworthy enough to base our future knowledge on—the type of knowledge that could transform humanity as we know it—for us to get there, we needed to start over. We needed to establish first principles, things that are absolutely true, so true that they’re self-evident. And then, through reason, we need to arrive at further conclusions.

The way he did this is through a rigorous method of doubt, one only comparable to Pyrrho in ancient Greece. He said, “I must once and for all seriously undertake to rid myself of all the opinions which I had previously accepted, and commence to build anew from the foundation, if I wanted to establish anything firm and lasting in the sciences.” Remember, one group of people that he’s fighting against at the time, one of these groups of people that emerged surrounding this quandary that they were facing, was the radial skeptics, people that thought that there was no way to ever know anything for certain. And to be fair, at the time, nobody knew if there was. In many ways, people still don’t know if there is.

Descartes decided that in order to refute these radical skeptics, that he knew he’d have to stand the test of if he ever wanted to make anything substantive, he had to prove to them that some things can be known for certain and that those things should be known as the first principles that we can then use to reason and find further knowledge with. But he had to be certain. He couldn’t just sit down for a couple hours and jot down a couple dozen things that he knows for certain and then expect the skeptics to just take his word for it. They would ruthlessly tear anything he said apart. If there was any room for doubt, he would fail. And he knew this. He said, “Reason already persuades me that I ought no less carefully withhold my assent from matters which are not entirely certain and indubitable than from those which appear from me manifestly to be false, if I am able to find in each one some reason to doubt, this will suffice to justify my rejecting of the whole.”

The only way Descartes could be certain that his knowledge would hold up to all the radical skeptic scrutiny is if Descartes himself made sure to argue against his own thoughts just as well as the greatest skeptics certainly would eventually. This method of doubting every single thing no matter how seemingly insignificant in order to eventually arrive at first principles that we can base future philosophy on—this is really what he’s best known for. But first, let me explain how Descartes did it, and then we can talk about how it applies to our loud, naïve friend at the party that we’ve been talking about.

Descartes starts by asking the easy questions. We’d probably ask questions like, is this job really the best job for me? Is this spouse of mine really the love of my life? But then Descartes goes deeper into doubt. He starts asking, what is it exactly that I am? And then he goes deeper into doubt. He goes so deep that he questions whether the world around us is actually real. I mean, couldn’t it be fake? He says, haven’t our senses fooled all of us at some point in time? A mirage in the desert; you look at an optical illusion in a children’s book; your eyes play tricks on you. Descartes says that when he’s dreaming, like, when he’s actually in the dream state, I mean, he doesn’t even know that he’s dreaming until long after the fact when he wakes up in his bed, the sheets are sticking to his body, like a cold sweat. How can you know whether you’re dreaming or awake right now? What if this is a dream? What if you’re having a dream about this podcast right now?

Now, what if what you perceive as reality right now is not actually reality? It’s not real at all. Couldn’t that be the case? That’s what Descartes is talking about. This is kind of embarrassing that I’m using this example because it’s so widely used in philosophy, but look, there’s so much ninja philosophy sprinkled around throughout the Matrix trilogy that it becomes a very useful tool when trying to explain these things. Morpheus asks Neo at a certain point in the first movie, “Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?” And Descartes asks, centuries before the Wachowski brothers ever did LSD for the first time, how can we be certain that the world that we perceive is real?

He says, “I see so manifestly that there are no certain indications by which we may clearly distinguish wakefulness from sleep.” So, what Descartes is saying here is that our senses are far too flawed and untrustworthy to ever base true knowledge on. But he also says that, although our senses may be at least always potentially deceiving us, certain things must be true even if we can’t use our senses to accurately measure them—you know, like the things that make up the framework of the universe, things that are always true; things like, 2+2 is 4, and the parallel postulate, other mathematical axioms. We may not be able to use our senses to arrive at truth, but we can use reason to arrive at these constants of the universe, right?

Well, no, then Descartes goes even further. He says that even these things that are seemingly constant might not be true, because after all, there could be an evil entity whose entire existence is dedicated to deceiving him. How do we know that isn’t the case? He says, “I shall then suppose…some evil genius, not less powerful than deceitful, has employed his whole energies in deceiving me; I shall consider that…all external things are but illusions and dreams of which this genius has availed himself, to lay traps for my credulity.”

Descartes asks, how can I be certain that there isn’t some evil demon assigned to me in my life that spends every second of every day trying to deceive me into believing that the world exists? Kind of like Monsters, Inc. where there’s a monster assigned to every child in the world, how do we know that we don’t have Sulley assigned to our senses, and he spends all day every day trying to convince us that cars exist, that food exists, that other people exist? What if this demon is just pretending to be all of this stuff, tricking us? How can we be certain that that’s not the case?

Descartes says, we can’t. But we can be certain about one thing, that we are thinking. Because even if the demon feeds us a thought that’s intended to be deceptive, we’re still thinking. A deceptive thought is still a thought. So, therefore, we must be thinking things, whatever they are. Descartes then reasons that simply by arriving at the self-evident point that we are thinking, we thereby exist. To him, we have to be in order to be thinking. I think, therefore I am.

Descartes talks a lot about this method of rigorous doubt. He himself says that each individual person shouldn’t apply this method to everything in their life like he did. That would be pointless and impractical. I mean, what possible benefit could we really get from doubting whether a hairdryer really exists. But what he does mention briefly is that this method of doubt is something that we should apply to our critical beliefs. We should hold them up to the most intense skeptical scrutiny because, like us pretending to know that a hairdryer exists based on conditioning, we can be conditioned to believe that other things are the case: things that can cause us harm, things that prevent us from living life fully. We shouldn’t apply this method to all of our beliefs. Look, there are definitely beliefs that we all hold that are very useful. But should we vilify entire groups of people or put needless obstacles in front of us in our personal lives simply because we want the world to be more simple than it actually is?

Let’s go back to our racist friend at the party for a second. He’s got this whole elaborate system of oversimplified beliefs that he’s been conditioned to believe, and now he walks around his life as though they’re the gospel truth. Think of how much more centered, think of how much more based in reality his thoughts would be if he just applied the method of doubt that Descartes outlines. What would really happen if he put his racist viewpoints under a microscope? Well, let’s just analyze this one oversimplified view and how that might help him.

What if this guy was forced to ask himself, is it possible—is it at all possible that this single race of people, this group of people whose ancestors hailed from this small proximity with more or less sunlight than I got—is it possible that they are not the downfall of the human species? Is there even a shadow of doubt there? Is it at all possible that the true cause is actually much more complex? You know, it’s based on historical events; it’s based on trends and forces, government inefficiency—whatever it is. Descartes would say that if there’s even a shadow of doubt possible, that you should throw that belief out and start over again.

And how would a philosopher think about this? Really, just think about how much positive change abolishing that one oversimplification could make in this guy’s life. I mean, I could think of a hundred examples. Now that he isn’t denouncing an entire race of people at every second of the day, he frees up a lot of things that used to be impossible for him. Now that he isn’t denouncing this race of people, he has a lot more people he could potentially be friends with. He would have never considered them his friends before. Just making this one very small change yields many more meaningful relationships in this guy’s life. That’s a positive change, right? What else does this change? Well, now he doesn’t have to walk around in a public place scowling at certain people based on their ethnicity. He doesn’t have to have all those negative, destructive thoughts swarming around in his head all the time. He doesn’t have to see people and go, “Oh, there they go again, walking around the farmer’s market, ruining the world as usual.” Think of how much that benefits him.

One byproduct of this change in his thoughts might be that he feels he has more influence in the world than he initially thought. I mean, if this guy thinks that the world is being brought down by a single race of people, he must also feel a certain amount of helplessness that goes with that. How can he possible nurture the positive growth of the world when simply the presence of these people brings it down in his mind? By thinking that the problems of the world are caused by societal forces, maybe he would feel a sense of empowerment. Maybe he’d feel he could actually make a change if he dedicated his time wisely enough.

And just think about what all the Greek philosophers would say about what he stands to gain just from the intellectual pursuit: the satisfaction, learning about all the different opinions from anthropologists about what the problems are—sociologists, psychologists. And then maybe one day he could arrive at the greatest gift to a mind imaginable: the understanding of truth. Think of all that he stands to gain from it. What criterion of truth is ample enough as a basis to marginalize entire groups of people?

Descartes talks a lot about these conditioned, biased thoughts that we hold. He actually gives a really great metaphor about apples. He says, when you have a barrel of apples and you know that somewhere inside that barrel there’s some bad apples that might spoil the whole bunch, what do you do about that? Well, you can’t just go sifting through the barrel trying to delicately pick out the bad ones, because what if you miss one? That one bad apple could ruin all of the rest of the good ones. Instead, what you should do, Descartes says, is you should dump out all of the apples and start completely over. That way you’re certain that you got all of them. One biased thought arrived at based on conditioning is enough to spoil the entire barrel of thoughts in your mind.

Now, next time on the show, we’re going to go further into Descartes’ life. We’re going to go further into the relationships that shaped his thought and more about how his metaphysics shaped the famous divide between the continental rationalists and the British empiricists.