THE JOY OF DESCARTES
I recently completed a re-reading of one of the all time masterworks in world philosophy, that being Rene Descartes' "Meditations on First Philosophy," a most rewarding study in ontology (the study or science of "being"), "first things," reason vs. empiricism, doubt vs. objective reality, etc. On my read, Descartes is one of our best friends in the field of Christian apologetics (though many dislike him - I believe they misunderstand him!) and a giant in the field of ontology (and of course, mathematics, which was his primary discipline).
Descartes is one of those rare philosophers who is able to state such incredibly important concepts in clear, lucid, and rewarding prose, with clear examples and analogies. This is very, very tough to do. So many writers want to churn on and on with their writing and make what should be simple things much more difficult; it is rare that a masterful author comes along to make difficult things much more simple and accessible.
As those of us who have wrestled with so many other philosophers can testify, this is rarely the case. (I think of Alfred North Whitehead's "Process and Reality," one of the most dense works I've ever read; Immanuel Kant as well - though one of the greats, I conjecture that Kant could write a volume as thick as the New York telephone book on why the sky is blue!) "Meditations on First Philosophy" is Descartes' magnum opus (in my view), and a most rewarding and highly recommended read.
He confronts one of the greatest challenges in human thought: how do we make sense of the world around us? How do we separate illusion from objective reality? What is the nature of cause and effect and their collective implications? What about God in all this? What are the implications for humanity in all of this?
Many people malign Descartes because of his mind/body dualism conclusions (prominent in this work, as well). Agree or disagree, this should not disqualify you giving Descartes a fair hearing for where he really shines (in addition to his mathematical ideas) - especially with his ontology. And Descartes may at least have had a fair point about the mind/body dualism thing after all, should one have a sufficiently open mind about this difficult issue.
Whence cometh consciousness, anyway? I dare anyone to try and explain it on materialist terms. MIT Professor of Psychology Steven Pinker ("How the Mind Works") and other (what I call) "orthodox" Darwinists (or perhaps better said today "Materialists"; Darwin had no clue as to a "first cause" and didn't seem to concern himself with it directly) think they can explain it, but they end up contradicting themselves in the end. I never believe anyone who attempts (and always fails, by the way) to disconnect cause and effect, and neither should you. In the end, they are usually just engaging in sophism, and are never convincing. (Neither was Hume back in the day with his critique of cause and effect.) Cause and effect are axiomatic to existence, and, of course, this leads back all the way to the "First Cause," a problem wrestled with and identified all the way back to the Greeks (or any thoughtful person!). Consider Aristotle's concept of the "Prime Mover," for instance.
Moreover, as a (somewhat) fan of Jung and much of the literature written in recent years re: quantum mechanics, a lot of evidence is accumulating that there might just be something concrete to the idea of the "world mind," a "thought" as an energy transference with (sometimes unforeseen) "effects," the mind as being a conduit of a much larger global/universal consciousness, etc. There has been plenty of talk of late about the possibility and feasibility of keeping a brain alive without the body - the so-called "brain in a vat" idea. What if? What if that could be possible, and what constitutes a human being in that scenario? Consciousness? A total human body? What if your consciousness could live on encoded on a computer chip? Who are you, then? Interesting speculation...
Being of RCC Jesuit education, no doubt this factored into some of Descartes' assumptions. But his logic re: the existence of God is compelling. He starts with the idea of doubt; doubting his mind; his vision; etc. Might some sort of "demon" be deceiving him, etc.? Descartes' approach to "first things" and cause/effect were quite logical and in the Aristotelian camp, and for Descartes, he felt he could establish that God was indeed the First Cause. How could it be otherwise? An infinite Being created what we see (you cannot understand anything you now see without realizing that it all had a genesis somewhere; a creation or cause).
Descartes realized that his vision (any empirical method) might perhaps deceive him (think of a stick put in the water and the light bending the appearance of it; the view of the full moon in the sky, which appears at certain angles/lighting to be much larger than normal, etc.). However, his faculty of reason could "fill in the blanks," so to speak, and he could ascertain the objective reason that the stick was really not bent; the moon was indeed no closer to the earth than it was last night, etc. Though our senses might play tricks on us, our reason could correct them via logical means. God (as author of the First Cause, and consequent causes) therefore, is logical, as the world ultimately could make sense, and WE could figure this all out, assuming we applied ourselves accordingly. How is this possible without a benevolent Deity? Why should ANYTHING make sense, therefore, unless it bear the imprint of a Creator? Moreover, we have the gift (more so than any other created being by any order of magnitude) of being able to comprehend the universe, analyze its mathematical underpinnings, and see where all this led back to (using inductive reasoning). And it led back to the Creator God. God is the author of logic and mathematics (the real "universal language"); not the author of doubt, but of understanding.
In a nutshell, in my view, Descartes was an adherent of "Intelligent Design" before being a member of the intelligent design camp was "cool." (Apologies to Barbara Mandrell.) It should not be too hard to see why a brilliant mathematician could be so, and come to such conclusions. The fact that anything about existence, the Universe, etc. makes perfect sense is astonishing, and the fact that everything about reality has an identifiable mathematical component is even more astonishing. It is not that we cast our "ideas" upon the Universe - the fabric of the Universe is/was always there waiting for our Minds to discover and comprehend it. (There is something to Plato's ideas of the "Forms," after all!)
Though Descartes borrows somewhat from Anselm in his 3rd Meditation (God is "that beyond which nothing greater could be conceived"), Descartes encapsulates millennia of ontological thought right here in his Meditations. Because God "planted" the thoughts of both Him and His creation in our minds (as a first cause), and because there is indeed sense to be made of our existence; therefore, the idea of God "creating humanity in His image" is a very real and true concept (4th Meditation). God has given us logic and reason as gifts therefore: to keep us alive , to bring us into intuitive relationship with Him, and to ultimately help us grow and prosper.
I've never been a fan of the "everything is an illusion" school. Surely there are some things about our lives that are indeed illusory and ephemeral (many of our wants and desires, fantasies, etc.), but the basics of our existence are not. The Universe does make sense (albeit with quantum weirdness), and we have the tools to figure it out - or at the very least slowly uncover what was already there in the first place and make some sense of it. Like Descartes, "We think - therefore we are" (his famous Cogito ergo sum). There is indeed a "reason" for being, for living, and for believing - and for believing that there is much more to Creation than our senses are initially letting on...
TTC
Descartes is one of those rare philosophers who is able to state such incredibly important concepts in clear, lucid, and rewarding prose, with clear examples and analogies. This is very, very tough to do. So many writers want to churn on and on with their writing and make what should be simple things much more difficult; it is rare that a masterful author comes along to make difficult things much more simple and accessible.
As those of us who have wrestled with so many other philosophers can testify, this is rarely the case. (I think of Alfred North Whitehead's "Process and Reality," one of the most dense works I've ever read; Immanuel Kant as well - though one of the greats, I conjecture that Kant could write a volume as thick as the New York telephone book on why the sky is blue!) "Meditations on First Philosophy" is Descartes' magnum opus (in my view), and a most rewarding and highly recommended read.
He confronts one of the greatest challenges in human thought: how do we make sense of the world around us? How do we separate illusion from objective reality? What is the nature of cause and effect and their collective implications? What about God in all this? What are the implications for humanity in all of this?
Many people malign Descartes because of his mind/body dualism conclusions (prominent in this work, as well). Agree or disagree, this should not disqualify you giving Descartes a fair hearing for where he really shines (in addition to his mathematical ideas) - especially with his ontology. And Descartes may at least have had a fair point about the mind/body dualism thing after all, should one have a sufficiently open mind about this difficult issue.
Whence cometh consciousness, anyway? I dare anyone to try and explain it on materialist terms. MIT Professor of Psychology Steven Pinker ("How the Mind Works") and other (what I call) "orthodox" Darwinists (or perhaps better said today "Materialists"; Darwin had no clue as to a "first cause" and didn't seem to concern himself with it directly) think they can explain it, but they end up contradicting themselves in the end. I never believe anyone who attempts (and always fails, by the way) to disconnect cause and effect, and neither should you. In the end, they are usually just engaging in sophism, and are never convincing. (Neither was Hume back in the day with his critique of cause and effect.) Cause and effect are axiomatic to existence, and, of course, this leads back all the way to the "First Cause," a problem wrestled with and identified all the way back to the Greeks (or any thoughtful person!). Consider Aristotle's concept of the "Prime Mover," for instance.
Moreover, as a (somewhat) fan of Jung and much of the literature written in recent years re: quantum mechanics, a lot of evidence is accumulating that there might just be something concrete to the idea of the "world mind," a "thought" as an energy transference with (sometimes unforeseen) "effects," the mind as being a conduit of a much larger global/universal consciousness, etc. There has been plenty of talk of late about the possibility and feasibility of keeping a brain alive without the body - the so-called "brain in a vat" idea. What if? What if that could be possible, and what constitutes a human being in that scenario? Consciousness? A total human body? What if your consciousness could live on encoded on a computer chip? Who are you, then? Interesting speculation...
Being of RCC Jesuit education, no doubt this factored into some of Descartes' assumptions. But his logic re: the existence of God is compelling. He starts with the idea of doubt; doubting his mind; his vision; etc. Might some sort of "demon" be deceiving him, etc.? Descartes' approach to "first things" and cause/effect were quite logical and in the Aristotelian camp, and for Descartes, he felt he could establish that God was indeed the First Cause. How could it be otherwise? An infinite Being created what we see (you cannot understand anything you now see without realizing that it all had a genesis somewhere; a creation or cause).
Descartes realized that his vision (any empirical method) might perhaps deceive him (think of a stick put in the water and the light bending the appearance of it; the view of the full moon in the sky, which appears at certain angles/lighting to be much larger than normal, etc.). However, his faculty of reason could "fill in the blanks," so to speak, and he could ascertain the objective reason that the stick was really not bent; the moon was indeed no closer to the earth than it was last night, etc. Though our senses might play tricks on us, our reason could correct them via logical means. God (as author of the First Cause, and consequent causes) therefore, is logical, as the world ultimately could make sense, and WE could figure this all out, assuming we applied ourselves accordingly. How is this possible without a benevolent Deity? Why should ANYTHING make sense, therefore, unless it bear the imprint of a Creator? Moreover, we have the gift (more so than any other created being by any order of magnitude) of being able to comprehend the universe, analyze its mathematical underpinnings, and see where all this led back to (using inductive reasoning). And it led back to the Creator God. God is the author of logic and mathematics (the real "universal language"); not the author of doubt, but of understanding.
In a nutshell, in my view, Descartes was an adherent of "Intelligent Design" before being a member of the intelligent design camp was "cool." (Apologies to Barbara Mandrell.) It should not be too hard to see why a brilliant mathematician could be so, and come to such conclusions. The fact that anything about existence, the Universe, etc. makes perfect sense is astonishing, and the fact that everything about reality has an identifiable mathematical component is even more astonishing. It is not that we cast our "ideas" upon the Universe - the fabric of the Universe is/was always there waiting for our Minds to discover and comprehend it. (There is something to Plato's ideas of the "Forms," after all!)
Though Descartes borrows somewhat from Anselm in his 3rd Meditation (God is "that beyond which nothing greater could be conceived"), Descartes encapsulates millennia of ontological thought right here in his Meditations. Because God "planted" the thoughts of both Him and His creation in our minds (as a first cause), and because there is indeed sense to be made of our existence; therefore, the idea of God "creating humanity in His image" is a very real and true concept (4th Meditation). God has given us logic and reason as gifts therefore: to keep us alive , to bring us into intuitive relationship with Him, and to ultimately help us grow and prosper.
I've never been a fan of the "everything is an illusion" school. Surely there are some things about our lives that are indeed illusory and ephemeral (many of our wants and desires, fantasies, etc.), but the basics of our existence are not. The Universe does make sense (albeit with quantum weirdness), and we have the tools to figure it out - or at the very least slowly uncover what was already there in the first place and make some sense of it. Like Descartes, "We think - therefore we are" (his famous Cogito ergo sum). There is indeed a "reason" for being, for living, and for believing - and for believing that there is much more to Creation than our senses are initially letting on...
TTC
posted by thoughtful conservative at 8:33 PM
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