What We Learned from Rene Descartes
It’s the birthday of French mathematician, scientist and philosopher, a true badass of Western thought, Rene Descartes, most famous for his line, “I think therefore I am.”
This came at the conclusion of lengthy discussions, both in his Discourse on Method and his Meditations, during which he contemplated the vulnerability of the mind to deception. We cannot rely on our senses to provide us the truth about the world around us, because of optical illusions and the like. Our dreams seem completely real–until we wake up. Nor can we even be sure of the truth of things like arithmetic, which seem to lie on the most solid of grounds. What if there is some evil genius, he suggested, who makes we think that 2 + 2 is 4, when in fact the correct answer is 5? The only real certainty is that the statement “I exist” must be true every time I conceive it, or pronounce it in my mind.
It’s possible that modern-day movies like The Matrix have done some level of damage to Descartes’ main concept here, but I’ve always objected to it on different grounds, i.e., that it’s useless.
We live our lives in the complete absence of certainty about anything of substance, and there’s nothing we can do about that; it’s part of the human condition. Our mental lives consists of a web of probabilities, i.e., some things about which we’re pretty darn sure, some we seriously doubt, and others we deem to be almost (but not quite) impossible. I’m as sure as I can be that I’m looking at my two hands typing this post, and that’s all the certainty available to me or anybody else.
Now, I don’t expect anyone to come along and try to convince me that I don’t have two hands in front of me beating against my laptop, but there are places where this gets interesting, and they lie in places where there is disagreement among sensible people.
One of the things that lives at the core of who I am is that Trump is a terrible person. There are hundreds of points of evidence all around me that seem to build on themselves on a daily basis: his dishonesty, cruelty, selfishness, self-aggrandizement, blame-shifting, and so on. But then I look around me and realize that there are perfectly intelligent people who think he’s (in some cases literally) the Second Coming of Christ.
Though this doesn’t make sense to me, I write it off as one of the examples of uncertainty that is part of what it means to be a human being. There are places that it’s wrong to expect any level of cohesion to the world around me, in fact, it’s part of what I’ve grown to anticipate over the years.
