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-