The Cartesian Pit
Rene Descartes' "Discourse on Method" and Chuck Klosterman's "But What if We're Wrong?"
We’ve all heard of “infectious” thoughts. Nagging thoughts, which burrow themselves deep in our psyche, making subtle changes until one day we find ourselves voicing an opinion that we never consciously chose. Typically, the word “infectious” brings to mind something bad, something diseased. Perhaps it evokes visions of political horrors that exploit the vulnerabilities of group thought, or the worst of mob mentality, coercing people to commit atrocities based on the promise of social cohesion. But “infections” are not always this blatant, or this harmful. Without some level of contagion, new ways of thinking cannot be adopted at all. We would not be able to form societies or even small social groups without some transmission of thought, and we certainly can’t maintain and grow these things if we are not willing to put some trust in other peoples’ good faith and expertise. These so-called infectious ideas make up the majority of our thought—they’re ubiquitous, and can take any form. Hate is infectious, but so is laughter.
When considered this way, the concept of an “infectious” idea ceases to have much meaning at all. We’re all teeming with infection. Any idea which we haven’t deduced logically exclusively from our own minds and experiences can be considered infectious. Any new insight from a teacher or friend implants itself in us like a parasite and guides us, often without proving its merit. Many of these ideas are constructive. Modern agriculture, modern medicine, would not be possible without centuries of taking prior experts’ discoveries for truth and building on them, creating new, more advanced discoveries which could not possibly be deduced from solitary logic and experimentation within a single lifetime. For better or for worse, we need to take some things for granted in order to progress. Without trust in authority comes stagnation, and, perhaps because we’ve been infected with a positive conception of progress, we as a species do not take kindly to stagnation. It goes against our nature. Furthermore, because we have come so far already, both technologically and socially, we’ve created a world in which it’s impossible to live without taking some things for granted. If we cannot adhere at least partially to group consensus, we cannot hold a job and make a living for ourselves, and, since this non-adherence makes a person socially repulsive, it’s unlikely that we’d be able to mooch off of others. Thus, through centuries of communication, a situation has emerged in which some contagion is necessary for survival.
The problem with this is that societies inevitably reach a point where this group consensus exceeds its usefulness, and overrides objective truth. When people regularly rely on authority instead of logic to form their opinions, they fall out of the habit of being discerning with their beliefs, and their thought processes exist basically on autopilot. Innovative ideas—ones that are not derived from communication, but logic and observation—are often reflexively laughed at and rejected, because how can something be true if other people do not already believe it? New and powerful truths can become lost to the cacophony of group orthodoxy, and the very phenomenon which allowed society to progress can work against itself and cause it to stagnate.
This is an issue which became an obsession of many thinkers throughout history. Rene Descartes famously undertook the maddening challenge of rejecting each of his beliefs, and reconstructing his entire belief system based only on what could be deduced logically. It was an experiment of sorts, to see if anything would remain after his dubious beliefs were wiped away. Any belief which could be subject to any kind of doubt was to be ousted:
“For a long time I had remarked that it is sometimes requisite in common life to follow opinions which one knows to be most uncertain, exactly as though they were indisputable… But because in this case I wished to give myself entirely to the search after Truth, I thought it was necessary for me to take an apparently opposite course, and to reject as absolutely false everything as to which I could imagine the least ground of doubt, in order to see if afterwards there remained anything in my belief that was entirely certain. Thus, because our senses sometimes deceive us, I wished to suppose that nothing is just as they cause it to imagine it to be; and because there are men who deceive themselves in their reasoning and fall into paralogisms, even concerning the simplest matters of geometry, and judging that I was as subject to error as was any other, I rejected as false all the reasons formerly accepted by me as demonstrations. And since all the same thoughts and conceptions which we have while awake may also come to us in sleep, without any of them being at that time true, I resolved to assume that everything that ever entered into my mind was no more true than the illusions of my dreams.”1
He would believe nothing based on faith. He would believe none of the conclusions of others without a stringent analysis of his own (and would subject his own analysis to this same doubt, as he was just as capable of error as anyone else). He would not believe his senses; what he saw, smelled, and heard in his dreams seemed just as “real” as his waking life, proving that his perceptions could not always be trusted. Plus, how could anyone be certain that waking life was not its own elaborate dream-life hallucination? In “Discourse on Method,” this passage is immediately followed by his most famous declaration: “Cogito, ergo sum.” “I think, therefore I am.” (Or, in its original French, “Je pense, donc je suis.”) The only thing that Descartes could know for certain was that he existed, because if he did not, he would not be conscious (whatever “consciousness” is), pondering these nagging questions.
This all appears in his work “Discourse on Method,” or, more long-windedly, “Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences.” The essay chronicles this internal quest of his, and seems to have been written to offer guidance (and a word of caution) to others who may wish to do the same thing. These guidelines were expanded upon in “Rules for the Direction of the Mind”, written nine years earlier than “Discourse on Method” but not published until 1701, 51 years after Descartes’ Death. Clearly, for Descartes, this intense scrutiny of belief was a lifelong mission, not merely an interesting thought. In this essay, I examine two translations of the text: one from a book called Descartes Selections, published in 1927 and edited by Ralph Eaton, and one translated by Laurence J. Lafleur in 1960. The latter incorporated both the French and Latin editions of the text in its translation, which is important because the Latin edition was published later than the original French, and contains a few additions to the text from Descartes that were not in the original. Lafleur’s translation incorporates these Latin additions. For example, it translates the “I think, therefore I am” line as “I think, therefore I am, [or exist].” This adds some clarification to a notoriously vague statement.
Intensely questioning every belief is not the type of lifestyle for the average modern person, even the average modern person who reads Descartes for fun. Impractical, unanswerable questions about the nature of existence are frivolous when confined by the minutiae of daily life. The impracticality of this method of thinking was not lost on Descartes, who makes it clear in the text that he does not recommend it for most people:
“The simple resolve to strip oneself of all opinions and beliefs formerly received is not to be regarded as an example that each man should follow, and the world may be said to be mainly composed of two classes of minds neither of which could prudently adopt it. There are those who, believing themselves to be cleverer than they are, cannot restrain themselves from being precipitate in judgment and have not sufficient patience to arrange their thoughts in proper order; hence, once a man of this description had taken the liberty of doubting the principles he formerly accepted, and had deviated from the beaten track, he would never be able to maintain the path which must be followed to reach the appointed end more quickly, and he would hence remain wandering astray all through his life. Secondly, there are those who having reason or modesty enough to judge that they are less capable of distinguishing truth from falsehood than some others from whom instructions might be obtained, are right in contenting themselves with following the opinions of these others rather than in searching better ones for themselves.”2
Descartes’ judgment of humanity may be a bit too harsh by today’s standards, as he essentially condemned the majority of society to be either too arrogant or too stupid to follow his method. However, his warning of the possibility of “wandering astray” is justified, as it is almost inevitable for people who attempt to emulate his thinking to become trapped inside the “rabbit hole” that they’ve fallen into, completely unable to discern truth from fiction in a sufficient way to conduct their lives.
It is easy for this type of thinking to become an obsession; one you become aware of the fragility of your beliefs, doubts start popping up everywhere, even in situations where blissful ignorance is preferable. Descartes himself took precautions against the potential destructiveness of overreaching doubt. He outlined four “moral rules” that he adhered to himself when conducting his method, the first of which being that he would always follow the religion and customs of his society. His own worldview was still under construction, and thus undoubtedly imperfect, so it was wiser for him to follow the opinions of others publicly than to subject himself to the potential harm of his own hypotheses being wrong. This is a necessary evil for all who dabble in this type of analytic thinking. The potential for existential dread is too great when no belief is sacred—when everything that once gave your life structure and meaning is outed as potentially false—and once you descend this Cartesian pit of despair, you can only emerge on the other side of it. Once you do, if you do, you do so better, more internally fulfilled, but you are also changed.
Please note that while Descartes took nothing as truth automatically, he refused to call himself a “skeptic.” When discussing his mission to clear his mind of false beliefs, he writes:
“In this I did not wish to imitate the sceptics, who doubted only for the sake of doubting and intended to remain always irresolute; on the contrary, my whole purpose was to achieve greater certainty and to reject the loose earth and sand in favor of rock and clay.”3
The skeptic, according to Descartes, doubts everything indiscriminately, and is essentially the opposite side of the same “coin” as the thoughtless believer. While the believer accepts everything mindlessly, the skeptic rejects everything mindlessly—leaving truth somewhere in his wake undiscovered. The definition of the word “skepticism” has expanded since Descartes’ time, when it was used exclusively to represent a particular school of philosophy, and many people who call themselves “skeptics” today are in fact discerning believers who engage in a type of Cartesian reasoning. However, it is still important to note that simply rejecting every belief makes a person just as blind as accepting every belief, and is not a proper implementation of Descartes’ method.
The text is full of disclaimers such as this. Descartes states more than once that he does not guarantee that anything he says is correct, and that his Discourse should be regarded as a “history” or “fable,”4 rather than as absolute fact. Please note that in Lafleur’s translation of the text, the words “history” and “fable” were translated as “autobiography” and “story.” The words “story” and “fable” are very similar, (although “fable” arguably has more flair), but “autobiography” is a much more clear translation than “history,” as it makes it absolutely clear that the text is supposed to outline Descartes’ experiences alone, not some universal truth. In fact, Descartes remained steadfastly opposed to being seen as an authority on anything throughout the entire essay. He asserted that: “Those who set about giving precepts must esteem themselves more skillful than those to whom they advance them,”5 and that he “never supposed that [his] mind was above the ordinary.”6 He even admitted that he often envied the intellect of other people, implying that he did not consider himself to be the brightest mind of his generation by any means. However, the text is, at its core, a guidebook on how to use Descartes’ method, implying that he wished it to be followed by the few courageous souls who were up to the challenge. Therefore, while he made sure to highlight his method’s destructive tendencies, and the impossibility of using it to achieve a perfect, objective truth, he still asserted its merit.
And it actually did find its fair share of followers, at least initially. Cartesian thinking became something of a trend following the publication of “Discourse on Method.” It waned afterwards, however, despite the cultural ubiquity of “I think, therefore I am.” Despite its supposed shift towards logic and reason, the world moved away from Descartes. Modern people, who purport to value secularism and respect science, often accept scientific findings just as blindly as people in the seventeenth century accepted the authority of the Church (an example of trusting authority for the sake of advancement, for better or for worse). Remember, though, that the existence of God was one of the only truths that Descartes accepted completely. My understanding of Descartes’ argument for the existence of God is as follows: he knew that he himself existed, because he was able to think. He also knew that he had observed things that were more perfect than himself, and could imagine an entity that was more perfect than himself. If he were the highest and only being in existence, then his own mental limitations would dictate the limitations of the world around him—his own existence would be the closest thing to perfection that he could comprehend. Therefore, something external to him, and more perfect than him, had to exist in order for him to construct his concept of perfection, and this being was God. Some modern philosophers reject this aspect of Descartes’ writing, and theorize that the reason why Descartes adhered so strongly to his belief in God was because the church was very powerful during his time, and rejecting God would amount to treason. Although I personally do not believe it, this theory is plausible, and I suggest applying the Cartesian method to the question of whether or not Descartes believed in God and categorize the issue as unknowable, leaving oneself open to the idea of either possibility being true.
The God issue was not the only difference between Descartes’ thinking and popular modern thought. Mathematics, not science, was the only discipline that Descartes believed to be free from error, perhaps because science is rooted in sensory observation, which Descartes distrusted. He was writing at a time before math and science became linked, of course, and was rejecting the thoughts of alchemists and astrologers, not the theories of modern physicists. But, the essence of his writing was that no assumptions, and no beliefs deduced from assumptions, were to be taken as fact. And since it is necessary for some assumptions to be made in the process of linking the real world with the world of mathematics (the most fundamental being the assumption that the laws of nature always obey the laws of mathematics), Descartes would probably regard modern science with the same doubt as he regarded the science of the Middle Ages. We ignore this fact, though. In an age where quick answers live in our pockets and people tend to get militantly angry when they hear a differing opinion, the notion that everything we take for granted may rest on a few potentially false assumptions may be a bit too unpleasant to swallow. The whole line of thinking is not very attractive. It’s exhausting, a little depressing, and not very fulfilling.
However, this type of thinking was never mainstream, per se, and Descartes’ beliefs continue to endure. One modern writer who seems to have caught the Cartesian bug is Chuck Klosterman, whose work I am admittedly completely unfamiliar with aside from one thought-provoking book, But What If We’re Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past. I’ve never immediately loved the concept of a book as much as this one. There is nothing more fun than considering the possibility of everything that we think of as unquestionably true being false, even when the possibilities border on ridiculous. The more ridiculous the better, when there’s no possibility of knowing for sure. As the title suggests, Klosterman thinks about the present the way that we think about the past—pondering questions such as which musician will be remembered as the face of rock and roll in future generations, whether the game of football will live on in our increasingly risk-averse culture, whether our conception of science will seem as antiquated to future generations as ancient science seems to us (a question that Descartes would take particular interest in), and whether democracy will always be viewed as the ideal form of government.
The bigger question inherent is all of these is this: what will be remembered, and what will be forgotten? If we look far enough in the future, of course, everything will be forgotten. However, if we restrict our thinking to only a few centuries in the future, there will hopefully be some things that endure. Klosterman’s argument was that those things may not be what we would necessarily expect. Future generations’ mental images of our present world will likely look nothing like what it actually is (which opens up a whole separate proverbial can of worms: what is the point of studying history if we’re so wrong about it?).
We can see this process of forgetting happening before our eyes. Look at the decline of handwriting. What happens when kids stop learning how to hand write in school? It’s coming sooner than we think. Typing is a much more efficient way to write than writing by hand is, so when everyone takes notes exclusively on their computers, which seems to be happening already, handwriting will be taught just as a historical art form, a skill reserved for when they need to sign their name on paper, or jot down a little note on the rare occasion that their phone is not present. What happens when those kids grow up, having only barely learned how to draw the letters of the alphabet, only accustomed to seeing words in typeface, neat and uniform?
If you are a young person in America, you likely don’t know how to read cursive very well. I remember sitting for my SATs and having to write an affirmation that I was not going to cheat on the test. I had to write it completely in cursive, a relic from the past. My knowledge of how to write in cursive was limited to about two months’ training in third grade, so I was, of course, internally freaking out about the fact that the only letters of the cursive alphabet that I knew how to write were the ones in my own name. I wasn’t the only one in the room with this issue. A bunch of people spoke out about it, and the bewildered proctor urged us to just try our best. My affirmation was unintelligible, as I’m sure others’ were as well. Will hand printing become a similar challenge for future generations, once it has reached cursive’s level of obsolescence?
When this happens, what will happen to all of the handwritten documents in the world? People who can’t write cursive also have difficulty reading cursive, which I’m sure will happen with hand printing as well, once people get used to the uniformity of computer typeface. Looking at a sloppy piece of writing and deciphering it is a learned skill (de-cypher, to crack a code). As a kid, I remember remarking in awe at the fact that my teachers could read the messy handwriting of some of my classmates. The reason for this was that the teachers were used to it—they learned to “break the code” out of necessity.
Is there a problem with society’s inevitable shift away from handwriting, or any other similar changes? Sure, it makes historical documents more difficult to read, but how many people are really reading historical documents anyway? Plus, historical texts are doomed to obscurity anyway, simply because the evolution of language makes it so that older literature is harder to read than newer literature. Historians today overcome these hurdles and read old texts that only appear in antiquated languages—it is safe to assume that this will happen with handwritten documents, too. And isn’t it a good thing that our communication technology is advancing so that we have a more uniform way of communicating with one another, without the barriers of poor penmanship obstructing meaning?
Here lies the crux of Klosterman’s point. History is doomed to obfuscation no matter what. It is inherently distorted, because the people studying it are trapped in their present world, where their experience is too far removed from the past to really understand it. Future generations will regard handwriting (any probably our entire language) the way that we regard Egyptian hieroglyphs—a cool relic from a dead, forgotten past. And while we may mourn the fate of this dying art, just as we may mourn the demise of all arts which we have an affection for, it is difficult to make a practical argument for keeping it around past its usefulness.
There is, of course, danger in being too far removed from the past. History teaches lessons, and issues warnings. But, if history teaches us anything, it is that progress is inevitable. Language evolves, making old literature a chore to read. Languages die or fall out of popularity, leaving us at the mercy of translations. This process is slowly happening to everything around us, every aspect of our world, and it is only with rare cases such as the death of handwriting that we get a real-time glimpse at this unseen process. And when we see it happening up close, it may make us sad. But for what? Future generations may be rendered unable to read your journal, or the note that you scribbled on a napkin, but were they ever going to read it anyway?
If you are wary of change, as I am, you may find complete reliance on technology terrifying. You may fear the day that the internet crashes for good, and all of the computers shut down, and all of the data that we backed up onto the cloud for safe-keeping is lost forever. There is a permanence to hard copies that is not inherent in digital media. We tend to think the opposite, that the internet is forever. It is fire-proof, waterproof. We can leave our spiral notebook on the subway, lose our library in a flood or a fire, but the contents of our Google Drive can be accessed anywhere. But, these digital records are not permanent either. I do not have to worry about my notebook breaking, or the books on my shelf deleting themselves due to some internal glitch. I don’t have to worry about the publisher of my books deciding that their contents are unsavory, and revising them sneakily without my knowledge. Printed media is vulnerable to the elements, but digital media is subject to destruction from within.
This is an uncomfortable truth, for we tend to like certainty. We cling to the illusion of permanence. It is disheartening to know that as I am writing this, my words are already doomed to obsolescence, either buried deep on a part of the internet that no one has any idea how to access, or lost forever, when whatever replaces the internet takes over and wipes out whatever came before. But while this is an uncomfortable truth, and one that concerns novel technologies, it is a universal phenomenon. How many poets have been lost to time, because they only shared their works with a small group of peers? How many books have gone out of print long before the birth of the internet, for their last remaining copies to be passed on from garage sale to garbage dump? Any promise of preservation is a lie that we tell ourselves. Everything will one day end. The only question is how soon. Descartes, a thinker who has “stood the test of time,” will one day fade into oblivion, despite having stuck around longer than most. Much of his meaning has probably faded already, since most modern readers are reading translations and interpretations that likely pale in comparison to the original Latin or French. Being “immortalized in print” is a friendly fib that makes us feel less afraid.
In But What if We’re Wrong?, Klosterman acknowledged this lonely fate, but confines most of his thoughts to a smaller scale. This is probably for the best, as there isn’t much utility to zooming out, besides to humble us, and remind us of our place in the cosmos. Before obsolescence there will be years and years of remembering and meaning, and it is in those years that our existences have purpose.
With regards to science, Klsoterman was primarily concerned with the idea of a major “paradigm shift” occurring, one which takes a concept that we believe to be absolute fact and crushes it. The example he uses is Isaac Newton’s discovery of gravity. Before Newton, people believed that things fell to the ground because they wanted to be there—objects had will, and acted according to it. Newton introduced the concept of an external force exerting its will on the objects, and it turned the world of physics upside down. This leads us to the question that inspired Klosterman’s book: might another paradigm shift be forthcoming? Klosterman interviewed a variety of scientists, asking which, if any, widely held scientific theories might seem ridiculous to future generations. The responses varied widely. On one end of the spectrum, astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson asserted that we have, through mathematics, achieved a level of scientific certainty that is unprecedented in history, and that while we will certainly add new layers of scientific understanding on top of what we already know, another Newtonian paradigm shift is certainly not coming, at least in the realm of physics. By contrast, another physicist, Brian Greene, theorized that even gravity, the concept that Klosterman held in his book as the bastion of incontrovertible scientific fact, will most likely be understood completely differently in the future, and that our “wrongness” about scientific principles is almost a guarantee. History is on the side of the latter viewpoint. Every incontrovertible fact has changed. We thought the Earth was flat. We thought the Sun revolved around it, and not the other way around. And history has always repeated itself before; who are we to think we’ve somehow “outrun” it now?
Also note that while “paradigm shifts” such as this seem earth-shatteringly massive in retrospect, they are actually rather subtle. Gravity, heliocentrism, and any other scientific paradigm shifts that occurred in the past weren’t exactly on the forefront of peoples’ minds most of the time, and despite these abstract changes in thinking, daily life basically resumed as usual. Information also moved a lot more slowly back then, and many of these changes were resisted by voices of authority, meaning that when these new discoveries were made, common people did not hear about them for a while. We may ask the question of whether today, with the Internet, such a discovery might reach all of humanity more quickly. And it might. But even if it did, all of us might not believe it, and in any case the topics in question are so abstract that once the shock wore off, everyone would resume their lives virtually unchanged (albeit with a bit more existential dread than before).
Klosterman seems to believe that much of what we consider to be fact will seem ridiculous to future generations (implying that human consciousness has always lived virtually in the dark, and always will), but he wisely refuses to make any assertions as to which scientific theories he believes will be proven false. Although I’m sure he has a few predictions, he is right to keep them to himself. Once you take a position on something, you risk being wrong, and once you are wrong, people are quick to discredit you. This is a pitfall that Descartes falls victim to, despite how hard he tried to avoid it. He doesn’t assert many facts as certain in “Discourse on Method,'“ but most of the declaratory statements that he does make may be called into question today. For example, he stated that humans are superior to animals because we possess reason, while animals do not. This is an idea that Klosterman discusses in But What if We’re Wrong? He imagines a world in which humans no longer consider themselves to be the dominant species, either because they realize that other animals (such as dolphins or octopuses) are just as mentally capable, or because a new barometer, such as emotional intelligence, becomes more important to us than intellectual intelligence when determining “superiority.” This is a compelling idea that Descartes never considered. It was unthinkable in his time for there to exist types of intelligence that humans could not see. But the very fact that Klsoterman was able to consider a new measure of intelligence proves that Descartes’ statement is not incontrovertible fact. This is not Descartes’ only erroneous statement. Some people today also aren’t totally convinced about the existence of God, and any devout atheist can spout at least five arguments against the logical necessity of a God off the top of their head.
How, in a book outlining the way to avoid false beliefs, did he get so much wrong? Of course, his errors can be argued to be simply unknowable—“superiority” is an abstract, inherently subjective concept, and we are completely incapable of proving or disproving the existence of a God—but remember, Descartes was searching for absolute, incontrovertible truth. If any kind of doubt can be cast on a declaratory statement that appears in “Discourse on Method,” it is as good as false.
Can one only be truly free from error by concluding that nothing is knowable, and ending their analysis at that? This seems like “zooming out too far,” seeing the big picture but missing all of the meaning.
In the final chapter of his book, Klosterman details a conversation that he had with an acquaintance, in which she remarked that his way of thinking (questioning everything) was “terrifying.” He reflexively responded that he did not really think like that—but then he considered the question a little more deeply. Obviously, he does not outwardly reject all ideas that may possibly be wrong, at the expense of his sane functioning in society. Neither did Descartes. One of the rules that Descartes followed was that while conducting his analysis, he would be sure to align himself with the beliefs of his society. However, the seeds of doubt were still there in his mind, just as they are in Klosterman’s. And, as Descartes warned, those doubts could be terrifying, maddening even, once you realize how far they can reach.
Why bother thinking about these things, then? Isn’t it easier to be like Klosterman’s acquaintance, content with a comfortable version of reality in which “right” and “wrong” are easily discernible? Descartes gives us an answer. Regarding his “search for truth,” he writes:
[A]lthough from the philosophers’ viewpoint almost all the activities of men appear to me as vain and useless, yet I conceive such hopes for the future that if some single one of the occupations of men, as men, should be truly good and important, I dare to believe that it is the one I have chosen.”7
In a frightening universe in which one can view its totality abstractly and see only meaninglessness, Descartes conduced his stringent search for truth simply because he had a hunch that it was the right thing to do. It was good, important work. His God-given purpose, if you will. We can all learn a lot from this type of conviction.
“Discourse on Method.” Eaton, 29.
Eaton, 13-14.
Lafleur, 22.
Eaton, 4
Id.
Lafleur, 4.
Id.