descartes before discourse....

I’ve been taking another look at Descates lately.Full disclosure: As a fellow jesuit-boy I’ve always had a certain sympathy for Descartes. This is not the same as agreement with his thinking. Indeed, long before I ever ventured to read any of his works (all still on the Index of Forbidden Books when I was in college) my mind had been shutered against him by the slashing scholasiticisms of my undergraduate professors. For example: "I think therefore I am is not a syllogism. The proper form would be I think and I am." Good point. One that has helped me approach him with a skepticism which I think he would have appreciated.But the Aristotelian-Thomistic objection to Descartes is on the exact point that made him fearful of the Inquisition. As much as he tried to conceal the fact, he was undermining the groundwork of medieval theology. This helpful accomplishment is not enough to guarantee the continued acceptance of his ideas. Lately he is much criticized for having introduced the separation of mind and body that plagues modern medicine. Yet it is this stand that has been so fruitful of discoveries, especially in the physical treatment of diseases of the mind .My recent interest in him is of a different sort. His prefaces and letters reveal the inquirer as person in a way that looks beyond the modern to whatever it is that we are in process of becoming.In the first part of his Discourse on Method he straightaway says that it is not his intention "to teach the method which each ought to follow for the right conduct of his reason, but solely to describe the way in which I have endeavoured to conduct my own." And so he does. But not before offering the caution that the philosophy of the schools merely "affords the means of discoursing with an appearance of truth on all matters" in a way that "commands the admiration of the more simple."These were not, however, the words of someone eager to dismiss philosophy. Rather he is dissatisfied with its inability to give clear answers. Yet he says that "when I look with the eye of a philosopher at the varied courses and pursuits of mankind at large, I find scarcely one which does not appear vain and useless..." And when he considers that he "derives the highest satisfaction from the progress I conceive myself to have made in the search after truth, and cannot help entertaining, such expectations of the future as to believe if, among the occupations of men as men, there is any one really excellent and important, it is that which I have chosen."There, surely, is a man bitten by the bug. Or, as Plato put it, ignited by the spark. Discovery is the finest pleasure; the deeper the discovery, the more strongly it is felt.I have to be careful here not to enlist Descates in a cause that is not his own. I seize at every inkling that there might be a realm of thought, higher and purer than the everday pursuits of life, that I might enter easily and find safety from all that is tiring or disappointing.Descartes was not a diletante. He sought the benefits which discovery brings to mankind. His investigations contribed much to the development of science.Yet just as Descartes, against his wishes, stirs my hope for a less gritty life, I stumble over a bit of Schopenhauer. Of course our ideas are rooted in experience, he says, but from our efforts to wrest secrets from nature "another faculty of knowledge has appeared in man alone of all earthly creatures, an entirely new consciousness, which...is called reflection. For it is in fact derived from the knowledge of perception, and is a reflected appearance of it. But it has assumed a nature fundamentally different The forms of perception do not affect it, and even the principle of sufficient reason which reigns over all objects has an entirely different aspect with regard to it." And so on.Even Schopenhauer would probably jerk me up short if he could. This other, abstracted, consciousness, he might say, is only a statement of the way humans do business. It is not a place you can go hide. And certainly not without paying the price of admission.This, as Schopenhauer’s translator R.J. Hollingdale points out in a useful introduction to the Essays and Aphorisms, is the ancient problem of the Two Worlds--one of appearances, the other of reality.Again and again in the history of thought people have felt compelled to chose one of the worlds over the other. It is obviously not a choice. But Schopenhauer does remind us of the reality of the mental world.Not that Descartes dismisses this reality. Indeed, says Hollingdale, it is Descartes who ends the medieval tendency to treat thought as "more real" than thing. Descartes asserts thinking substance (soul) and extended substance (matter) as the only two existents in the world of creation. (I paraphrase; you can look it up.)It was probably Descartes’ own exposure to the same metaphysical indoctrination I endured nearly four centuries later that made him suspicious of my type. He tells us on the front end of the Discourse that he was quick to "pass from under the control of [his] instructors." Quicker than I was. He gave up the study of books and instead sought knowledge in himself and in "the great book of the world."In pursuit of this Descartes traveled, experienced life, and learned from the people he met."For it occured to me," he says, "that I should find much more truth in the reasonings of each individual with reference to the affairs in which he is personally interested, and the issue of which must presently punish him if he has judged amiss, than in those conducted by a man of letters in his study, regarding speculative matters that are of no practical moment, and followed by no consequences to himself, farther, perhaps, than that they foster his vanity the better the more remote they are from common sense...."Darn! I had so hoped he was going to give me a free pass into the realm of pure reason. But he pretty well trumps all of my cards. Especially the one in which my flights of fancy nourish my vanity.Not to say I won’t try to deal myself another hand.I am bouyed a little in this resolve by the discovery of a line or two from Montaigne: "We must maintain a place for ourselves alone, a free zone where we can cultivate our liberty and our peace of mind and our solitude.... In solitude, be a world unto yourself."I suspect, though, that the point of making this space is to better deal with the world of people and events outside it. We’ll see.-30-

thinking outside the sandbox....

A spectre is haunting the Eurocentric mind--the spectre of philosophy.Okay, this is not a manifesto, ‘tis a puzzlement. And a rather minor one at that.This came to me while reading (or trying to read) Schopenhauer. Not to say that any of this is his fault. Just that I got conscious of how much his preoccupation with whether we know the world or merely our idea of it, is a byproduct of the university curriculum.This is no bad thing, and certainly no surprise. Indeed, where else would we want philosophy but in the midst of all other activities of the mind. Though, perhaps, that leaves it a bit more in the midst of the training of the mind rather than of the mind’s mature exercise.Are you sensing a problem yet? Probably not.Let’s try it this way. Education not only trains our minds, it defines our identities. So too does the lack of education. In effect philosophy becomes an adornment of the professional class. Just as the miseducation of girls for wifehood once included a bit of music or painting, so the training of technocrats is embellished with a few higher thoughts. These can be trotted out to meet the occasion. At its best this embodies what William James meant by "the social value of the college-bred."Again, I’m not arguing against this (though perhaps sneering just a bit). After all, inquiry is naturally rooted in inquiry. And it is necessary that particular inquiry be leavened by dreams of universal understanding.I just wonder why this has to be the only model.I wonder if there’s an alternative. Could the life of the mind happen on the shop floor or on the threshing floor or in the aisles of a big-box discount outlet? Would different questions get asked? Would different choices get made?I don’t raise this possibility out of a desire that the world be a nastier place. Invariably us speculative folk have some sort of betterment project up our sleeves. Plato used to natter on about better govenment coming at the hands of philosopher kings. He discovered early the hazzards of trying to graft highmindeness onto tyrants. His experience has been confirmed down through the ages. In recent centuries, with the emergence of mass society, we are more inclined to put our trust in philosopher-citizens.This strategy seem to have been working, though it is possible to wonder whether we have time to wait for its further evolution. (No, I’m not advocating more drastic means of social control, just being a bit wistful about our prospects for pulling out of the current nosedive.)So that this train of thought will appear to be on some track or other, I raise this question: Is there a way for the inqusitive life to become other than the hobgoblin of the terminally educated?(Full disclosure: I wouldn’t play this game if it ran on X-Box. I’m only in for the buzz of superiority I get from it even when practiced as a private vice.)Nietzsche shrewdly pointed out that philosophy is only as good as the culture it arises from. Philosophy does not give rise to culture; it expresses culture. That insight did not prevent him from trying to badger the Germans into raising their culture to that of the "tragic age of the Greeks." To the extent he succeeded it was only to give the Germans their own tragic age.If I have a point (never mind an answer to my question) it is this. Philosophy as we know it is a creature of the university. So long as this is so we have not much hope that it’s practice will do more than affirm the worst tendencies in our society as well as the best. We imagine that education is the key to progress, yet it’s influence is limited by the fact, as Marx put it, that "the educator himself must be educated."The education of the educator comes from society itself. If the educator is to change it must come under the tutelege of the people.(Allow me to share your disappointment in this little excursion. Editorial writers complain when a piece of their work merely "marches uphill and marches back down again" without doing battle. I have failed to even locate the hill, let alone climb it.)-30-