Notes on Cartesianism:

John Shotter,

KCCF

Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences, 1637

Minds, not bodies:

‒            We are only a thing that thinks; our bodies are irrelevant to the issue of finding a basis for certain knowledge.

‒            “I am a thing that thinks, that is to say, a thing that doubts, affirms, denies, understands a few things, is ignorant of many things, wills, refrains from willing, and also imagines and senses.”

‒            Thus, “even bodies are not strictly perceived by the senses or by the faculty of imagination but by the intellect alone, and that this perception derives not from their being touched or seen but from their being understood” (1986, p.22).

A (geometric) “method” of inquiry:

‒            The intellectual task: to find a method for the attainment of certain knowledge... foundations for thinking, not for acting.

‒            To be found in those “long chains of reasoning, quite simple and easy, which geometers use to teach their most difficult demonstrations... there can be nothing so distant that one does not reach it eventually, or so hidden that one cannot discover it” (1968, p.41)... i.e., thinking as calculation.

‒            The goal of the Method: “instead of the speculative philosophy taught in the Schools, a practical philosophy can be found by which, knowing the power and the effects of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens and all the other bodies that surround us, as distinctly as we know the various trades of our craftsmen, we might put them in the same way to all the uses for which they are appropriate, and thereby make ourselves, as it were, masters and possessors of nature” (p.78).

A world of separate, mechanically-linked, i.e., cause-and-effect-linked, entities:

‒            The World: “In order to put these truths in a less crude light and to be able to say more freely what I think about them, without being obliged to accept or to refute what are accepted opinions among philosophers and theologians, I resolved to leave all these people to their disputes, and to speak only of what would happen in a new world, if God were to create, somewhere in imaginary space, enough matter to compose it, and if he were to agitate diversely and confusedly the different parts of this matter, so that he created a chaos as disordered as the poets could ever imagine, and afterwards did no more than to lend his usual preserving action to nature, and to let her act according to his established laws” (1968, p.62).

‒            Anything we know, we know only intermediately, through our representations of it.

‒            Inner depictions of outer realities.

‒            We are a disengaged self, linked only externally to our surroundings..

‒            And we act willfully and intellectually, in terms of our inner mental representations – our beliefs, our theories, our pictures, our images, etc.

‒            Thus we only act willfully and planfully, in terms of cognitions, of inferences, interpretations, etc.

‒            We owe our character to ourselves, our genes, etc., not to our relations to others.

‒            While his empiricist opponents might disagree, nothing about the case demands/requires/calls us to shape our actions, or interpretations – our surroundings are neutral – we are in an external relation to them.

‒            No background – no tradition like a Thou (that relates itself to us - Gadamer) – only resources available for our use as we desire.

The role of God (in achieving certainty):

‒            How do we know that we have achieved certainty: He finds within himself certain things “more perfect than myself.”. These “must have been put into me by a being whose nature was truly more perfect than mine... that is to say, in a single word, which was God” (1968, p.55).

‒            Reasoning thus depends on clear and distinct ideas... no structures of feeling, no real but invisible presences.

‒            No agent’s knowledge, i.e., no moment-by-moment, sequentially developed sensuous knowledge of ‘where’ one is ‘in’ an exchange, available only ‘from within’ an ongoing exchange.

‒            An orderly world... working in terms of already existing orders awaiting discovery in our inquiries... no complex mixtures, no interplay between order and disorder... no differences between center and margins.

‒            Essentially a world only of being, a set number of externally related elements, reshuffled into new patterns, but no ‘out of the blue’ creation

‒            No emergence of order, no emergence of subjectivity and objectivity from something more primordial – clear subject/object divisions.

‒            No dynamic – not a world of flowing, mingling, swirling, blending, stranding, etc., activities... activities that might be re-structured ‘from within’ by participants within them.

‒            To be free in the modern sense, is to find one’s basis for one’s judgments within oneself alone.

I know of others only through my powers of reasoning:

‒            Others: “If I look out of the window and see men crossing the square, as I just happen to have done, I normally say that I see the men themselves... Yet do I see any more than hats and coats which could conceal automatons? I judge that they are men. And so something which I thought I was seeing with my eyes is in fact grasped solely by the faculty of judgment which is in my mind” (Descartes, 1968, p.21) .

“Thus, all philosophy is like a tree, whose roots are metaphysics, the trunk physics and the branches which grow out of this trunk are al the other sciences, which are reduced to three principle ones, namely, medicine, mechanics and ethics, by which I understand the highest and most perfect science which, as it presupposes a complete knowledge of the other sciences, is the last degree of wisdom.

              But as it is not from the roots or the trunk of trees that the fruits are picked, but only from the extremities of their branches, so the principle usefulness of philosophy depends of its parts which we can only learn last of all” (1968, pp.183-184)... thus, in Descartes scheme of things, we seem to need to arrive at a completed philosophy before we can go on with the rest of our lives.

Here’s Wittgenstein’s (1979) response to that idea:

“Can only logical analysis explain what we mean by the propositions of ordinary language? Moore is inclined to think so. Are people therefore ignorant of what they mean when they say ‘Today the sky is clearer than yesterday’? Do we have to wait for logical analysis here? What a hellish idea!” (Waismann, 1979, pp. 129-130).

The “modernism” to which Cartesianism gives rise:

‒            There is a real world of fixed and knowable phenomena ‘out there’ independent of human observation.

‒            It ‘works’ in terms of cause and effect processes that are universal and knowable.

‒            Facts about the nature of physical reality exist.

‒            But, they “radically hidden” from everyday view, i.e., they can only ever be discovered indirectly, through the testing of hypotheses ‘about’ or ‘representing’ them.

‒            We cannot have any kind of ‘direct’ contact with our surroundings.

‒            Hence, as humans beings, we can only understand this reality as objective, external observers, not as participants ‘in’ the world.

‒            Language refers to and represents this reality, i.e. it is in a referential-representational relation to it, not a really-responsive relation.

‒            Due to their “radical hiddenness,” these realities need the special skills and devices of ‘experts’ to discover their ‘real’ properties.

‒            Because of this, the history of the growth of knowledge is set out in terms of special ‘land mark’ individuals who, because of their exceptional skills, can be thought of as benefitting humanity at large – the role of ordinary people in collectively developing and culture able to recognize and acknowledge such developments, and thus to train (to ‘grow’ or ‘cultivate’) such individuals in the first place, is ignored.

‒            Because of the ignoring of the historical and culture background necessary for the emergence (the ‘growth’) of such individuals, Cartesian forms of inquiry appear to have limitless potential for ‘uncovering’ the actual nature of physical and biological reality

‒            Such strides in scientific methods and so many discoveries have taken place that, given time, it will be possible to reach a state of near-complete knowledge, and to apply this to the betterment of human life.

‒            These modern knowledges are thus thought of as being ‘deep’ and rather mysterious, and are thus not accessible to the understanding of ordinary people – thus, they should not seek to criticize them when they are insufficiently knowledgeable of their nature.

‒            Just as methods have been developed for discovering the “hidden truths” of the physical and biological world, so these same methods can be used to discover “truths” about the hidden world of human motivation and social dynamics.

‒            In the “social sciences,” distinct disciplines are based on real distinctions between various areas of human life.

‒            At the same time, a common “human nature” can be identified across all cultures.

‒            In the arts, new forms of expression, which often baffle the ordinary person by their apparent strangeness and obscurity, can be understood by ‘experts’.

References:

Descartes, R. (1968) Discourse on Method and Other Writings. Trans. with introduction by F.E. Sutcliffe. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Descartes, R. (1986) Meditations on First Philosophy: with Selections from Objections and Replies. Translated by J.Cottingham, with an introduction by B. Williams. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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