Descartes arrived at his famous dictum, ‘I think, therefore I am’, by taking up a position of extreme doubt. He found that he could doubt everything, from the existence of the real world, his own senses and feeling and sensations and intuitions and everything else he could think of, right down to last-man-standing, which were his own thoughts, or, rather, his own thinking.
I cannot help but have my suspicions about this. I mean, when I see a philosopher telling me that the ‘good’ life, the ‘best’ life, is that of a thinker, or philosopher (Socrates), then I think, ‘Well you would say that, wouldn’t you? Then I would go on to re-assess all his work in terms of: this is someone driven by self-interest, someone who will warp and twist the truth and use trickery of every kind in order to make something that serves his own ends. And the same if I see a philosopher designing an ideal society which puts philosophers in charge (Plato).
So what has Descartes done? He has found that the only thing that one can trust, can believe in, is the thing philosophers do: thinking. So I have to doubt Descartes authenticity and intentions and suppose he was just contorting the truth to make it suit himself.
At this point someone might say to me, “Well, if you think their work is flawed, then go and read it, find the flaws, and prove your case.” My reply would be to say, “No. That would be to take the fight onto their territory, and every good commander knows you do not do that.”
People fall for this trick time and time again. I see, e.g. the likes of Richard Dawkins do a TV series (Quite a while ago now) where he is gunning for astrologers, spiritualists and all those ‘alternative’ whatevers. In every argument he simply drew them onto his own territory, science, and they naively followed and duly got shot down.
So, no, one does not argue one’s case by engaging the philosophers on their own territory. One has to find neutral ground.
But to return to Descartes and self-doubt: the biggest problem I have with this sort of self-doubt is that it is asking for trouble. Every time you doubt the evidence of your own senses, every time you doubt your own feelings, intuitions, thoughts, memory, ‘gut’ or whatever, then you loose a bit of yourself, loose a little of your self-confidence. If you were to do what Descartes did, and do it ‘for real’, then you would end up psychotic or worse, and if you maintained the position you would end up mentally disabled and then dead. And what was Descartes’ health like, I wonder?
That last question is not trivial. I rather incline to the view that if you want to know how to live well then you ask someone who looks like they know; i.e. someone who looks healthy and happy and who is living a full and fulfilling life. (Actually, there are problems with ‘looks’ healthy, but I won’t go into that.)
I think that is I was to ask Socrates why he advocated the life of a thinker as the ‘good’ life, he would probably claim moral superiority and justify it using reason and logic – with a bit of sophistry thrown in! He would not talk of personal experience, and would not say, “For ME philosophising is the good life, but for YOU it may be different.”
But to return to Cartesian doubt: to deny your intuition or feelings or sensations or any of the rest is to kill a little bit of yourself each time you do so – quite literally, because intuition and feeling and sensations are as much a part of you as your arms and eyes and digestive system and they will only keep working if you keep using them. For example, if you take to a wheel chair for a while your legs will weaken and begin to wither – this is a problem faced by astronauts who do not need to use their legs in zero gravity. So, to fail to use part of your mind is to disable that part of it.
Then one has to ask, “What is life?” I would answer that it is being alive (i.e. using ALL your senses, feelings, sensations etc) and engaging with the world as fully as possible – which implies that you do not let someone else do your thinking for you or tell you what you should be feeling or what to believe. In the words of a famous Sinatra song:
“For what is a man, what has he got,
If not himself, then he has nought.”
What each of us has is our “self”, and all the rich possibilities of interacting with the world and other people through our feelings and senses and sensations and intuition and all the rest which that self enables.
This brings me to science which, while not advocating quite the same extremes of self-doubt as Descartes, nevertheless teaches us that there is a sort of universal truth such that, whatever you may experience, whatever you may think or feel about things, whatever intuitive insights you might arrive at, unless they accord with science, or pass scientific scrutiny, they are untrustworthy and most likely unsound.
Science, therefore, is a killer, a destroyer of life. It seems to me that science should carry the same sort of health warning as cigarettes: science kills. In other words, I would not deny the INDIVIDUAL their right to participate in science, but they should do so with their eyes open.
Then consider creativity. Creativity comes from taking things that seem totally at odds with each other and finding ways of reconciling them. That is, in the extreme, it comes from identifying with other people who seem totally alien to oneself, who think and feel and perceive the world totally differently from oneself. To find out what the world looks like from where someone else is standing, and why, is a very mind-expanding and enriching experience.
Science goes in the opposite direction. Instead of ‘going abroad’ to learn what it is like to be someone else, it goes abroad to teach others science. The non-scientific are ‘primitive’ or uneducated or deluded and will be dissected and explained away. Thus the scientific mentality is closed-minded and uncreative. Science puts its practitioners in a cage.
It is easy to be impressed by science – scientists work hard to make sure science looks impressive – but, e.g. it is also easy to be impressed by computers, and for the same reason: because scientific hype suggests that computers might eventually match, or even exceed, human capabilities, make up for human ‘weaknesses’. But come from the other direction and point out that computers can be built from beer cans: you can construct switches by running water through beer cans, and all a computer is, essentially, is a stack of millions of switches. The only real difference would be that a computer constructed from beer cans would take up a whole aircraft hangar just to be able to do what a small computer can do, and it would work several orders of magnitude slower.
Really, all you can say about computers is, “aren’t they clever with what they’ve been able to do with a set of switches!” But, good grief, talk about doing things the hard way! (Of course, it’s because they are built from switches that they have a two word language: binary = 1,0 = on, off = open, closed. I mean, how intelligent can something be that has a 2 word language?)
So, for all science, too, looks so impressive, it is all on the surface, and so, lift the lid and you see something quite different.
Then again, having called science a killer because it denies the human faculties of the individual, one can turn things around and say: it humanity is in decline, if it is actually LOSING the use of its faculties, as in succumbing to the likes of autism, then it may be that science is necessary as a way of dealing with the world for those who have already lost their faculties to the extent that they are no longer capable of dealing with the world for themselves.