ON DOUBTING THE DOUBTER

This essay is my reaction to Decsartes' Meditations in Cottingham's translation. Any statements quoted are taken directly from Cottingham's introduction - where they are in quotes.

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Richard Dawkins, one of the most articulate of modern evolutionists, sets us a good example of respect for someone with whom he differs profoundly. He writes (in The Blind Watchmaker) of William Paley, the great exponent of creationism, writing two hundred years ago, "Paley's argument is made with passionate sincerity and is informed by the best biological scholarship of his day, but he is wrong, gloriously and utterly wrong".

I am no Dawkins and Paley was no Descartes but, in a small way, I feel much the same about the mind/body dualism of Decsartes as Dawkins feels about the creationism of Paley - "wrong, gloriously and utterly wrong". This essay is primarily a criticism of that mind/body dualism.

I have read the Meditations of Descartes (and some valuable study material) with care. It is clearly the sort of book that bears reading and many-times re-reading . I have attempted such reading and re-reading so I expect Cartesians to allow me to follow their master's example of relentless doubt in the pursuit of truth.

I accompany Decsartes as far as 'the cogito' (slang for cogito ergo sum which means I think therefore I am). But at his point I think I am in emerging dispute with him. Given the cogito, there are at least two paths to choose from.

One is the path of solipsism (the idea that I, alone, am a real and solely a "thinking thing" and that all else, including perhaps even my own body, may be merely a plausible dream. Descartes, at this point, chickens out of such utter solitude by assuming, but not proving, that there is God who has given him, Descartes, the cogito insight.

This assumption is, strictly speaking, a matter of choice but is, in most cases including that of Descartes, probably a culture-based disposition. If that is so then 'proofs' of the existence of God' are gratuitous. Decsartes is faced with the choice of either entertaining the idea that God has planted the cogito in his mind - his body being redundant - or supposing that he has a body to accommodate the essential "thinking thing" that he perceives himself to have in him.

'God' is of the very essence of Cartesianism - but only because Decsartes makes it so.

Very many philosophers seem to neglect the basic fact that ours is a social species - as inescapably as we are mammals, vertebrates or whatever - and a species of social animal is exactly what we are. This, as I see it, points us to the second path.

That path is to pocket one's solipsistic pride and habituated theism and try to find out what other people think, particularly, of the cogito. Many people would accept the cogito as ultimate truth so perhaps it should be re-worded as 'we think therefore we are' but some would think that Descartes is a nitpicking windbag who should 'get himself a life' - as the modern dismissiveness has it. Some, including me, prefer to criticise Descartes' construction upon the cogito much more politely.

(It is perhaps useful at this point to tell the old story of the philosophy student who said to his tutor - "I could not sleep last night. I was worried by the question of the reality. or otherwise, of my own existence" The tutor replied - "Who cares?" This seems, at first sight, to be a harsh putdown but it could be reassurance - advice to embrace a variation of the cogito - I care therefore I am).

The cogito could be generalised to Pronoun verb therefore pronoun am/are. The pronouns could be first person singular or plural and the verb could be think, care, feel, love, hate, trust suspect, ignore, 'go bananas' - to give but a few examples

Returning to the possibility that there may be real things in being other than the mind of Descartes and that of his assumed God and noting that possibly there were people with whom Descartes evidently could have discussed all this, perhaps the cogito should be re-worked yet again as "We think, but not unanimously, therefore we are".

It seems counterintuitive to admit/assert that there are other minds without accepting that there are bodies with them. (But this would entail Decsartes giving his god a body too). You can't converse meaningfully with others unless they actually exist as minds/bodies empirically sufficiently informed to know that you are conversing with them. Why do I write all this stuff except on the assumptions that readers actually can exist and that I and they have mutually intelligible communication skills dependent upon our using appropriate organs in our bodies - with or without a creating, sustaining deity to underwrite it all? What empirical evidence is there thought can go on apart from matter that thinks?

Once you draw a categorical distinction between mind and body - the one being indisputably real and other being dubitable - then you are faced with a problem of your own making. By what means does a real mind interact with a para-real body? This is the mind/body problem envisaged by Descartes and pursued, often fruitlessly, ever since.

I see no more than mere convenience in distinguishing, categorically, between mind and body. Mind, it seems to me, is simply 'what the brain does' and organisms of increasing complexity have no brains at the amoeba end of the scale and very good brains like you and me and many others at one of the (current) other ends. Evolution may well drift into the formation of beings with brains better than ours by many orders of magnitude (as ours are better than bird brains in many ways). There is little or no empirical evidence that a bodiless mind may emerge at some stage but, note that absence of evidence is not conclusive evidence of absence.

I see no empirical reason for supposing that thought is independent of (appropriately complex) matter that thinks. There is no 'mind/body problem' for anyone other than those who have a yen to compartmentalise a priori and then struggle, empirically, to find a passage between the compartments they have, gratuitously, invented. I suggest that but for his living body Descartes could not have had a brain to perceive 'the cogito' - either a priori or by divine input. In any case he cannot discuss anything with other people other than by asserting that we communicate via our bodily organs and senses therefore we are mental/bodily beings.

There is a useful distinction between what are commonly called material (bodily) things and spiritual (mental) things. That distinction can be expressed more clearly as between things that are tradable and things that are not. You can buy works of art but you cannot buy artistic appreciation or artistic creativity; you can buy health care but you cannot buy a sense of well being ....... other examples of this empirical distinction can be listed very easily.

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Let us now enlarge upon the Cartesian view of the existence of 'God'. It starts, in the earliest meditation, as pure assumption but Descartes evidently thinks that a reasonable ground for theistic belief has to be identified. He selects the ontological argument - which Thomas Aquinas, no less, viewed unfavourably and which is discredited widely. (The contemporary Church favours the First Cause theory).

The ontological argument for the existence of (any) god(s) is accepted in the Meditation Number Five. This argument (in my words) is that there has to be an entity than which nothing greater exists. That entity can properly be called various things ..... God, The Supreme Being, the Creator and Sustainer of All Else, The Ground of Our Being, The Wholly Other .... etc etc. Postulating that entity, we may ask whether it exists or does not exist. But existence is greater than non-existence; therefore God (under any name) must exist.

It seems obvious to the modern mind that this is simply word-play - particularly playing on the undefined word 'great'. It appears that Thomas Aquinas thought this too; his vote was for the First Cause idea (which Decsartes does not mention is his Meditation Five and which we need not discuss in an attempted assessment of his mind/body dualism).

Empirically one can as well say that there is nothing greater than the universe itself - ergo the universe has to exist - which we know, empirically, to exist anyway.

The ontological trap amounts to saying that entities can be defined into existence or, as Descartes says, "everything of which I am clearly aware is true".

Of course the cry will be heard "Out of context" but I suggest that it would need a whale of context to swallow the 'truth' of this piece of Cartesian assertion. A little thought experiment will perhaps make things clearer.

I say "Elephant" and I have clear awareness of this entity therefore, according to "everything of which I am clearly aware is true", elephant(s) exist and, what is more, the fact that you can form a clear awareness of 'elephant' when I utter the word shows both how truly extant such a beast is and how efficacious is our language as a means of communication between us.

Now let me say "Yellow elephant with purple spots on its left side". I have, according to "everything of which I am clearly aware is true", certain knowledge that such a beast exists. And what is more, you, knowing the meaning of "Yellow elephant with purple spots on its left side", will be equally sure of the 'truth' that such a beast exists.

Of course, obviously, the ordinary elephant is known to both of us empirically but not because of some fragment of Cartesian epistemology. Equally, but subject to the caveat that absence of evidence is not conclusive evidence of absence, we can be confident, empirically, that there is, in nature, no yellow elephant with purple spots on its left side. (Of course some super-con artist might paint an existing elephant purple with yellow spots so 'that the Cartesian epistemology may be vindicated'. Rather like 'so the prophesy may be fulfilled but let's talk about Prophesy some other time!).

Sooner or later philosophers resort to analogy and most analogies are minefields. Paley built up a picture of the living world by considering a watch (which may have been discarded because it did not work - but Paley neglects that possibility). Descartes says repeatedly that the inability of God's Essence to be real without God's Existence is like supposing that a mountain can exist without a valley.

Both legs of this analogy can be questioned. It is not self-evident that God's Essence (whatever that may mean) is indissolubly linked to His Existence. It is simply that the god Decsartes has invented, or more likely inherited from antecedent cultural norms, is held to be like that. Something wrong here, I suspect.

You can actually have a mountain without a valley - a single mountain in the middle of an otherwise flat island. And you really need two mountains to make a valley of the lower ground between them.

Analogy is the last resort of the unsure explainer.

God cannot be a deceiver is a favourite notion of Decsartes. This is pure assumption and goes against other pure assumptions - that God can do anything. and that God is wholly just.

One reading of the famous Bible story is that God deceived Job by visiting troubles upon him - making him think that God is not as good as we are asked to believe or, alternatively, that Job 'deserves it' - either way, testing Job's faith. Then there are the 'creationists' who assert that God has 'planted' evidence for evolution to deceive us into giving up our faith in the literal truth of Genesis. As one wit put it "there are actually people who believe in dinosaur bones but not in dinosaurs".

We can go on and on.

It is fair to say that Descartes was the 'father of modern philosophy' - particularly in the practice of relentless doubt rather than obeisance to authority. It is analogously true that Bleriot was the father of modern aviation. But we now have better ways of flying across the English Channel than to resort to one of Bleriot's contraptions.

But perhaps it remains true that analogy is the last resort of the unsure explainer - such as E.S.

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