Descartes (1596-1650), the Depressing Dualist (part 2)

Part 6 of a series on 'Science and Philosophy'. Cartesian Philosophy is so 'Rational', it is irrational. A persistent and malevolent influence on philosophy and science. Scientism.

The Deductive claim of Rationalism

“Accordingly, seeing that our senses sometimes deceive us, I was willing to suppose that there existed nothing really such as they presented to us….whilst I thus wished to think that all was false….I observed that this truth, I think, hence I am, was so certain and of such evidence, that no ground of doubt, however extravagant, would be alleged by the sceptics capable of shaking it….accept it as the first principle of the philosophy…”  (Descartes, ‘Discourse on the Method of reasoning well and Seeking Truth in the Sciences", Part IV 1637).

Introduction

In part one, we looked at the maths and cosmology of Descartes.  Given his Copernicanism, Descartes could not map the Earth onto a Euclidean reference grid and locate it within the universe.  Though his contributions to graphing geometry and mathematics were powerful and long-lasting, he could not apply his geometrical reference grid model to cosmology.  Descartes’ astronomical theory quickly lost out to the absolute reference design of Newton (Commins, Linscott, 1947). 

Descartes most vital influence was in philosophy, particularly his principle of ‘dualism’.  By dualism Descartes meant the difference between the body which he viewed as a material-mechanical machine and consciousness, which found its expression in reasoned thinking and in our soul, both of which verified the truth of God. 

Doubting the Doubters

If you read Saint Augustine’s (d.430) ‘Immortality of the Soul’, you will find many precursors to what Descartes proposes. Augustine discusses the separation of the mind from the body, the immanence of the soul, and how reason operates and why reason proves that both God and the soul exist. I would guess that Descartes had studied both Augustine and St. Thomas Acquinas (who expounds on Aristotle, physics and reason). One can see a great similarity between the ‘Immortality of the Soul’ and Descartes’ famous Discourse on The Method (1637).

None of the above is taught of course.

For nearly 400 years Western systems have inducted young minds that Cartesian philosophy is both original and centres on scepticism or ‘doubting everything’.  This is a very simplistic and incorrect interpretation (more below).  Diogenes, Socrates, Plato, Augustine and Boethius, and indeed almost any man who has been alive, were also ‘sceptical rationalists’. None of Descartes’ supposed ‘rationality’ is novel, but everyone is taught that until Descartes popped up, no one had ever philosophically assessed ‘reason’, matter or the mind (Sorell, 1987). 

This is silly.

In his seminal work Discourse on The Method (1637), Descartes does affirm based on his Platonic assumptions, that our innate reason and 5 senses may well deceive us.  This insight was not new. History is littered with sceptical philosophies which long pre-date Descartes. With the power of the printing press, Descartes was able to resuscitate and distribute Platonic doubts. Maybe a human can never have a real knowledge of nature.  Perhaps all sensory perception and natural objects are Plato’s shadows, dreams, or incorrect images.  We live in our minds so natural truth cannot exist. Though Descartes confirms that doubting reality is reasonable, he rejects most of this Platonic nominalism in section IV of his Discourse (Gaukroger, 1995).  

None of this, however, was new.

Deductive Doubts

To overcome doubts about natural objects, and properly understand reality, Descartes anticipates modern models by proposing a mathematical-deductive methodology.  A generation earlier, Francis Bacon (1561-1626) had advocated for an inductive-experimental approach.  Start with specific observations, perform experiments, understand the results and carry on from the specific, to the general (Smith, 2003), adjured Bacon.

Descartes started from the other end.  Observe a general phenomenon, and use mathematics not experimentation, to apply logic and rigour to explain the phenomenon, employing ever finer gradations of deductive insight.  Deductive mathematical logic should eventually explain the specific (Commins, Linscott).  No need for experiments.

This approach using deductive mathematics and models has been extremely deleterious.  It has provided various philosophers including Einstein, with the philosophical rationale to deploy mathematics in lieu of Baconian experimentation.  Maths now represents an interpretation of reality.  No proof is needed.  This is where ‘modern science’ is now situated – in the 17^th century with Descartes.

Cogito ergo Deus

Descartes famous statement cogito ergo sum, which is centred on reason and thinking, is not the foundation of his philosophy.  In Descartes’ dualism, or his 2 basic spheres of philosophical rationalisation, one sphere has been almost completely ignored.  As a Catholic, Descartes used his cognition or rationality to prove the existence of God and the soul.  Descartes averred that he could think, because he existed, and that existence emanated from the perfection of God and that because he can think, God exists and he can see reality:

“I see very clearly that in order to think it is necessary to exist, I concluded that I might take, as a general rule, the principle, that all things which we very clearly and distinctly conceive are true…” (Descartes, Discourse, Part IV, 1637).

What Descartes means is that the complexity of his entire mind-body and soul existence, allowed him to think, perceive, reason and affirm for example, that God must also exist.  His full realisation might have been: ‘I am a complex creature, with the ability to think, which confirms that God is the creator of my complexity, therefore I am’. 

As with Saint Augustine, in Descartes’ view, cognition was a defining attribute of being human, as opposed to being a ‘brute’.  But so too was the soul.  As with our mind, our soul is affiliated with our body, but it is separate, living on after death.  As he writes in the Discourse, these facts are truly the key postulates of his philosophical view.

“But after the knowledge of God and of the soul has rendered us certain of this rule (I think therefore I am), we can easily understand that the truth of the thoughts we experience when awake, ought not in the slightest degree to be called in question….” (Discourse, part IV).

Descartes is not doubting reality, nor God.

The basis of Cartesian philosophy is rationality which confirms a belief in God and the soul.  This is Descartes’ core principle. He was using reason to confirm his faith and the exceptional nature of mankind.

We see this in his Passions de l'âme (Passions of the Soul, 1649), where Descartes expounded the view that unlike a human, an animal was an automaton lacking both sensation and self-awareness, and that only man was endowed with a soul (Commins, Linscott).  This was too extreme for many of his contemporaries who objected that he had taken mechanical determinism too far.  But his point is made.  Descartes has a very religious and cognitive philosophy about life and existence.  This is never discussed (Gaukroger, 1995).

Mechanics

The Discourse has been distorted by mechanical interpretations for almost 400 years.  Descartes was not merely stating that we are machines.  He was saying that to be rational we must appreciate our minds, our souls and their interaction with our material body, all based on the truism of God. 

The materialist-distortion is found in two parts: 

1.  That we should doubt reality (Descartes implicitly rejects this though his disciples emphasise this); and

2. All material bodies are machines (Descartes promotes this but in the context of a God inspired universe).

The mechanisation of material existence is indeed proposed by Descartes.  He does believe the body is separated from the mind and soul.  Yet materialists have taken this philosophy and built theories (evolution, genetics), models (cosmology, physics) and mathematics to support the belief that entities can self-create, self-repair, self-manage, self-improve and self-exist ex-nihilo or de-novo, without God, without divine intelligence (Sorell, 1982). 

Given the broad religiosity of Descartes, this is not what he would support.  God and the soul have been eradicated from Cartesian philosophy by materialist and determinist philosophers (Rodis-Lewis, 1992).  This has led to very destructive constructs in the philosophies which inform science and have deranged our worldviews.

Distortions and Impact

We can list the philosophical implications from the application of Cartesian philosophy (Wiker, 2008; Gaukroger, 1995). 

1.      Solipsism:  I sit in God-like judgement of everything and must determine if any object is ‘real’ (hyper-rationality and egotism),

2.      Subjectivism:  This God-like attitude leads to hyper-individualism and subjectivism with the attitude that every person has their own ‘truth’, and traditions and historical experiences should be ignored as irrelevant,

3.      Rationalism:  ‘Thinking’ and the use of my reason, is the only path to truth, and to understand our natural world, all other senses and experiences are to be rejected,

4.      Materialism: Holistic complexity is ignored, material bodies operate through simple mechanisation and the material can only be divined by ‘reason’,

5.     Atheism: God’s existence depends on Descartes’ ‘thinking’ which is not a proof of anything (see Anselm and Aquinas with his 5 proofs). Given we can’t prove that God exists using deductive logic, we must assume that God does not exist (this reverses Descartes postulates for God’s existence using his own logic),

6.     Fatalism: There is no purpose or meaning to your life. You are just a pre-determinedly programmed material-machine. Die already.

Ironically, if we apply Cartesian ‘logic’ to his own philosophy, we must conclude that Descartes’ entire methodology is nonsense. 

No Truth?

If everything is ‘false’ and to be questioned, that would include Descartes’ deductive mathematics, or any inferences from the same.  If ‘rationality’ is dependent upon each person’s interpretation of an ‘object’, no objective truth exists including Descartes’ own thoughts. If reality is subjective, no confirmed general rationality can possibly exist. If there are no standards for ‘reason’, reason itself is nominalist and becomes irrelevant when assessing the natural world. An unvirtuous circle.

Consider Descartes’ claim that material bodies are just machines.  Descartes never ‘proved’ his body was a machine.  He only deduced that the heart was like a pump and therefore the rest of his body must operate mechanically.  He never followed his own recipe and provided deductive mathematical logic to support that claim (Gaukroger, 1995).  How did the heart self-form? What came first ‘rationally’ speaking - blood, glucose, veins, or the heart?

In reality no human operates in such a dichotomous or dualist manner.  Humans are holistic, emotional, fragile, unpredictable, and full of the immaterial, not to mention a physiological complexity which is simply not understood.  Ignoring this reality means that at its core Cartesian philosophy is just a mixture of confusion. Descartes’ philosophy is just a mishmash of the Platonic, Pythagorean, Medieval and so-called ‘Rationalist’ views (Ariew, 1992).  He attempts to synthesise too much.

How about this?

We think because we can interpret the world around us through our senses and inbuilt logic. We base our ‘thinking’ in large measure on real experiential data, norms, standards, culture, attitudes, faiths, beliefs, emotions, love, what our family and society trust and what our traditions value. Without our physical bodies there is no brain and no mind. Cognition is obviously important, but so are many other factors which make us human.

Bottom Line

Descartes’ dualist delusion has been philosophically distorted and abridged by those seeking to deterministically mechanise natural science and our natural world.  It is one of the great and unfortunate distortions in philosophical history.  His inaccurate and confused philosophy in which the material is mechanical and cognition the only recourse to understanding reality and naturalism, has led to a rejection of inductive proof and reality.

It is not an exagerration to state that Cartesian philosophy is one of the most destructive constructs in Western history, and has led to modern Procrustean Scientism.

Regarding ‘science’, one deleterious impact is on philosophy and ideas. 

We see this in the incoherent philosophies of Kant, Comte, Nietzsche and Marx, which emanate from the misapplication of Cartesian ‘doubts’, deduction and related ‘determinism’.  It is a straight line from these distorted interpretations of Cartesian ideas to Materialism, and concepts around a ‘mechanical’ universe, which informs long-age cosmology, quantum mechanics, evolution, DNA, social or Marxist determinism, and other unproven and untrue theories. 

As well, subjectivism and nominalism inform the unwary that reality is optional, or that you are God and can decide what truth is for you.  Objective reality is shattered. A woman is a now man for example. Or maths is racist.

A second pernicious influence on ‘science’ is the application of Cartesian deductive mathematics.

This is a top-down apriori (assumptions based) approach, which has led to the erection of complex mathematics and now computer models, as the arbiters of reality.  As long as the equations balance and can describe the ‘phenomena’, they must be true.  We now live in the fantasy worlds including but not limited to evolution, ‘Climate change’, Relativity, ‘viruses’, and multi-verses, where mechanically experimental inductive proof is no longer necessary. 

Instead of challenging such incorrect outputs and dynamics and disproving them, philosophers and ‘scientists’ have happily embraced them.  They deployed truncated Cartesian logic as they attempted to de-divine the natural world and explain the complexity of existence with the crudity of deductive, materialist models. 

In summary Descartes’ attempt to synthesise faith and reason failed.  His faith was disregarded and his arguments for ‘reason’ altered to become a monstrous doctrine of unreason which is now the basis of much of philosophy and ‘science’.  Cartesian philosophy, in its deformed interpretation, has been a violent assault against common sense and reality.

All hail.

In the next post, we will discuss the excitable, intellectual peripatetic, the English farm-boy Newton.

Sources and reading:

Descartes, René, Die Prinzipien der Philosophie, ed. A. Buchenau, Philosophische Bibliothek, Vol. 28 1992

Descartes, René, ‘Discourse on the Method of reasoning well and Seeking Truth in the Sciences", Part IV 1637)

Commins, S. Linscott R., Man and the Universe: The Philosophers of Science, 1947 pp 159-216.

Ariew, Roger, 1992, “Descartes and Scholasticism: the intellectual background to Descartes’ thought,” in The Cambridge Companion to Descartes, edited by John Cottingham, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 58–90.

Gaukroger, Stephen, 1995, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Rodis-Lewis, Genevieve, 1992, “Descartes’ life and the development of his philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Descartes, edited by John Cottingham, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 21–57.

Smith, Kurt, 2003, “Was Descartes’s Physics Mathematical?” History of Philosophy Quarterly, 20 (3): 245–256.

Sorell, Tom, 1987, Descartes, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wiker, B. 2008, 10 Books that screwed up the World, Regnery Publishing.

==Series

Introduction: Science as an output of Philosophy

Part One: Science as Philosophy or Scientism

Part Two: Copernice the Confused (1473-1543). Copernicanism is Philosophy not ‘Science’.

Part Three: Kepler the Conniver (1571-1630). Philosophical choice over scientific veracity.

Part Four: Kepler the Conniver (part 2). Maths which could prove other models.

Part Five: Descartes the Dualist and his maths and cosmology (part 1)