Descartes

by A. C. Grayling

  Consciousness, on the other hand, can at first appear much easier to understand than the relation between mind and body: anyone capable of thinking is after all intimately conscious of being conscious. But consciousness is by far the most perplexing mystery facing philosophy and the neurological sciences. Some philosophers, in the tradition of Descartes, think that it is too hard for human intelligence to understand. Others even claim that there is no such thing as consciousness; we are actually zombies, just very complicated ones. In defiance of these views, enquirers have profited from powerful new investigative tools, especially brain scanning devices, to watch brains at work. One result is a great increase in knowledge of brain function and a refined understanding of the correlation between specific brain areas and specific mental capacities.

  The central problem remains, however, how coloured pictures, evocative smells and sounds arise in the head as if it were an inner cinema-show. One recent theory offered by neurophysiologist Antonio Damasio is that consciousness begins as self-reflexive awareness constituting a primitive level of selfhood, a powerful but vague awareness of being "I." Emotional relations to an evolving self and external objects then construct a model of the world, a feeling of knowing, giving each of us the sense that we are the owner and viewer of a movie-within-the-brain.

  Consciousness has arisen amongst higher mammals, according to these theories, because of its survival advantage—an organism's appropriate use of energy and protection from harm are much enhanced when it is able to place itself in a map of the environment and make plans about the best courses of action in it. Creatures which are merely biological automata, even if highly sensitive to their surroundings, would not be as adaptive as creatures that are genuinely conscious.

  Debate about the mind has resulted in a widespread consensus that mind is part of nature and amenable to investigation by scientific means, but there are still fundamental mysteries about what it is and how it relates to the rest of nature. The next great leap in understanding the mind will doubtless involve a conceptual and scientific revolution of such magnitude that we cannot at present envisage it.

  Descartes himself never arrived at a satisfactory way of dealing with the problem whose deep intractability he had exposed. As shown in the main text, when pressed by Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia to explain how mental and physical phenomena interact, he began by offering a profoundly implausible hypothesis in which the pineal gland somehow serves as the organ constituting the required interface, but he ended by frankly acknowledging that he had no answer.

  If his statement of the problem suggests anything useful, however, it might be that in talking about mental phenomena—hopes, memories, desires, intentions, feelings, and the rest—we employ a language which is wholly different from the language of physical things, and which cannot be translated into it. The example of the physicist and the sociologist describing the football match shows what this thought implies; neither has a vocabulary apt for receiving translations from the other vocabulary; the sociological concepts have no way of accommodating concepts of force, velocity, mass, radiation, and the like— nor vice versa. To try to reduce mental talk to physical talk might similarly be like mixing up the uses of very different objects—trying to fry an egg on a pencil and to draw a picture with a frying-pan, so to speak. On this view concepts of the mental and concepts of the physical are different instruments for different purposes, and trying to explain one wholly in terms of the other is therefore misguided.

  Even if this answer at some level contains a measure of truth, it still does not meet the insistent thought that since brains give rise to—produce, secrete, are responsible for, cause—thoughts and feelings, there must surely be some way of explaining the latter in terms of the former's functionings, or at the very least of explaining systematically how they are related. This remains the goal of enquiry, a project that has only grown more interesting and urgent since Descartes initiated it.

  The third matter inviting comment here is Descartes' claim that if we use our intellectual faculties responsibly and carefully we can reach the truth about things, because we have a guarantee available for the efficacy of such enquiry: namely, the goodness of God. In the Meditations Descartes offered two arguments for the existence of a God, arguments that purported to establish the existence of a God identical with the God of traditional revealed religion, namely, an all-powerful, all-knowing and entirely good God. This is convenient for Descartes' purposes because just such a God is required for the role of epistemological guarantor, especially in virtue of being good. An all-powerful, all-knowing and entirely good God is, in short, a God of all the perfections. Indeed, possession of all the perfections is essential to one of the arguments Descartes offered for his existence; this argument says that if God is a being who possesses all the perfections, then he must necessarily exist, because failure to exist would be an imperfection. Thus God's existence follows directly and necessarily from his nature. And given that some being must be the most perfect being there is, it follows by this same reasoning that this being actually exists. So, says Descartes, God exists.

  Both this argument and its companion in the Meditations are, as are all the arguments for the existence of a deity, spurious; readers may like to examine the literature on this subject for themselves, and to reflect on the summary of the arguments just given, to see why they fail. The point of interest here, though, is Descartes' reliance on such arguments. His successors in the tradition of philosophy did not find themselves able to think as he did about this matter, and he is therefore alone in saying that we can get from the contents of our minds to a world outside our heads because our inferences (if responsibly drawn; he grants that our fallen natures can lead us into error) from the former to the latter can be relied upon courtesy of the divine goodness.

  Descartes' theistic commitments were almost certainly sincere, and a commitment to the existence of a suitably equipped deity would irresistibly provide solutions to such puzzles as the problem of knowledge and the mind-body problem. And Descartes happily invokes the idea of God to deal with both. But the great difficulty here is that the concept of an omniscient and omnipotent God is over-permissive. By this I mean that if there is such a being in the universe, then anything goes: anything whatever can be explained by its presence and supposed activities, from miracles (one-off reversals of the laws of nature) to all the intractable problems of science and philosophy, simply and quickly solved by saying "God created it," "God knows," "God makes it happen," "God guarantees it," and the like. And this, in effect, means that if one believes that there is an omnipotent deity, one can therefore believe absolutely anything else, for everything else is thereby made possible.

  But such epistemic promiscuity is self-defeating. Karl Popper astutely pointed out that a theory that explains everything thereby explains nothing. For example: to answer the question of how the universe came into existence by saying "God created it" is not in fact to answer the question, but to explain one mystery by appealing to an even greater mystery—exactly like saying that the universe rests on the back of a turtle, and then ignoring the question of what the turtle rests on. (Interestingly, the claims that "God created the universe" and "the universe rests on the back of a turtle" are in exactly the same position from the point of view of their intelligibility, testability and likelihood; there is as much—or more accurately as little—reason to believe one claim as the other. What differentiates them is merely tradition, though both have been believed in the past.) So Descartes' reliance on appeals to the existence of a deity of suitable character (where would his argument be if there were a God, but a wicked one, or even just an unpredictable one of unreliable temper, such as the deity portrayed in the Old Testament?) fails to provide the guarantee he needed, and is one main reason for the ultimate failure of his system.

  One thing that cannot be denied is the pedagogical value of Descartes' philosophy. The ideas it contains are rich and full of suggestion, but they are presented with a clarity an
d simplicity which, although somewhat misleading given the inner complexity of the ideas involved, at least make his writings accessible. He is not alone among important philosophers in that his works can be placed into the hands of beginners, as they typically are; many university courses in philosophy begin with a study of his Meditations, which raises a whole raft of the most central problems in philosophy— the problem of knowledge, fundamental metaphysical ideas of existence and the nature of reality, the question of deity, the nature of mind and its place in the world, and—by implication and example—the way to conduct a philosophical enquiry into the basic principles of things (not for nothing does the Meditations have the full title Meditations on First Philosophy—meaning, the starting point of enquiry).

  In the "Letter from the Author" which begins his Principles of Philosophy, Descartes advised us to read the book "rapidly in its entirety, like a Novel, without the reader forcing his attention too much or stopping at the difficulties which he may encounter in it. And after that, if the reader judges that these matters merit examination, and is curious to know their causes, he can read the book a second time . . ." He did not deny that aspects of the philosophical and scientific ideas he discussed were difficult, but he believed that they were the common possession of all who would make the effort to enquire into them, and he further believed that his way of discussing them—a proceeding informed by his ideas about "method"—would make it possible for anyone who made that effort to grasp them fully. In this he was perhaps too sanguine; but the advantage is the pedagogical one mentioned.

  As a result, Descartes has been read and studied very widely in schools and universities around the world, and has been the sustenance on which generations of scholars and intellectuals have been weaned. Like the thinker whose honorific suggested his own, Thales the "Father of Philosophy" (Descartes' informal honorific, recall, is "Father of Modern Philosophy"), Descartes' importance resides as much in the fact that he philosophised in a certain way as in the content of his thought. He did not rely on scholastic jargon and style, but philosophised from thought rather than authority. To too great an extent contemporary philosophy has slipped back into the bad old way of relying on authority, quoting and commenting on contemporary masters rather than addressing problems directly—a situation rather too like "normal science" in Thomas Kuhn's sense, as adapted to the sphere of professional academic philosophy. So Descartes' example of someone tackling problems head on, thinking afresh, escaping the oppressive weight of tradition and thick tomes, is a good one to set before students.

  Appendix II

  Biographies of Philosophers and Descartes' Biography

  Does a biographer ever need an excuse to write the biography of a person who made a difference to history? Surely not. Does a biographer need to explain his or her conception of what biography is, and what it is for? Surely yes: for in doing so the biographer gives readers an insight into the point of view, the methodology, and the aim of the book in their hands, given that the book—as an attempt to tell the story of a life in its times, with no act of story-telling ever being neutral—carries the impress of the teller's take on things.

  When the subject of the biography is, like Descartes, a person who lived too long ago for many of the informative incidentals of life to have survived, it matters all the more to say something about these questions of approach. Here then is this author's view.

  Biography is a popular genre, and for good reason. It is a form of history, illuminating the general via the particular, and making the past, even the recent past, additionally vivid by casting it in a personal light. Moreover, it satisfies a healthy form of voyeurism, in the form of curiosity about lives made notable by achievement or fate, giving us insights into how they became so and thereby providing us with direct or indirect materials for understanding our own lives—and sometimes for changing them in the light of what we learn in the process.

  The popularity of biography has increased further since biographers allowed themselves frankness about their subjects' intimacies. That is a good thing: life unfolds more behind closed curtains than on public platforms, so to achieve a living sense of human history biographers have to draw those curtains aside. What they satisfy in readers by doing so is something more exigent than mere prurience or curiosity: it is the need to be more richly informed about the one thing we all have to do all the time—live from day to day with our dreams and failures, sometimes with the danger of success, but always with other people and the unforgiving passage of time.

  The natural subjects of biographies are people whose lives are characterised by, for example, glamour in society, the excitement of events on battlefields or unexplored frontiers, the tenure of national or international power, or the shadows of mystery—espionage, say, or murder. It comes as a surprise therefore to find that in recent years there has been an explosion in the number of biographies of philosophers; people who, on the whole, seem to live unglamorous lives of retirement and reflection, whose victories were not won with flashing swords among enemies, or magnificent oratory on legislature floors, but in the silence of the mind. Quite a few thinkers have been hanged or burned for their views, with the added interest of a little torture thrown in beforehand, but this seems to be thin pickings as the stuff of a good read, given that what briefly involved them in such activity was nothing more than long years of study, followed by moving a scratchy pen across parchment—reading about which, one would think, is about as gripping as watching grass grow. What therefore explains the burgeoning interest in philosophical biographies?

  Given that publishing houses are not charitable institutions, and that a biography of Spinoza or Wittgenstein is required to bring in its profit, it must mean that, for a large enough number of people, a story of the growth and flowering of ideas is as interesting as a cavalry charge into the cannon's mouth. And so it can prove. One main reason can be inferred from what George Bernard Shaw said of his own life: "Now I have had no heroic adventures. Things have not happened to me; on the contrary it is I who have happened to them; and all my happenings have taken the form of books. Read them, and you have my whole story; the rest is only breakfast, lunch and dinner."

  The idea that things do not happen to philosophers as much as philosophers happen to things is captured in Isaiah Berlin's remark that the philosopher sitting in his study today can change the history of the world fifty years hence. He had in mind the likes of John Locke, whose writings were quoted verbatim and at length in the documents of the American and French revolutions, and Karl Marx, whose thought was bent to the use of revolutionaries putatively as idealistic but far less enlightened. But he could equally have cited any of the figures whose ideas altered the complexion of thought in their own time or afterwards—particularly among them Descartes—because ideas are the fuel of the machines of history, and in the form of ideologies, beliefs, sciences, political and social theories, commitments and ideals, they are the human factor (droughts and plagues have their part too) that lie behind the events that drive historical change. This remains true even when the proximate human causes of historical movement seem to be the usual pairing of cupidity and stupidity—because to be greedy for something is to believe it desirable, and to fail to understand something is in effect to be in competition with the ungrasped idea: and so the claim holds.

  But this is not all that is of interest in a philosopher's life. With exceptions, most philosophers were not hermetically sealed from their times, which means that they were influenced by them, reacted to them, knew and interacted with some or all of the other best minds in them, and observed them in ways that are peculiarly interesting because of the sharpness and depth of their vision. Moreover, in many cases they were actively engaged in them. Descartes saw military service in the Wars of Religion, and was present at the Battle of the White Mountain outside Prague; and he may, as has been suggested in the body of the text here, have played even more of a part than this, as a spy or agent. Wittgenstein was also a soldier; he served on the
eastern and southern fronts in the First World War, and was imprisoned in Monte Casino at its end, carrying the manuscript of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in his knapsack. In this Descartes and Wittgenstein followed the example of Socrates, who was a hoplite—a heavily armed infantryman—in the Athenian army at the battle of Potidiae. Spinoza's family were refugees from religious persecution, and Locke fled the England of James II to the political sanctuary of the Netherlands, where he helped bury the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings. Bertrand Russell went to prison for his pacifist activism in the First World War, and again half a century later for his opposition to nuclear weapons. Martin Heidegger was a Nazi, and Jean-Paul Sartre a Communist; Louis Althusser went mad and strangled his wife, Friedrich Nietzsche went mad and his sister strangled his works into a shape congenial for Nazism. Madness, the fear of madness, genius, dedication, passion (not a few great philosophers were great philanderers too), and conflict with their times, mark many philosophical lives.

  Even for more peaceably circumstanced philosophers, the externals of their lives are engaging and informative. David Hume earned his sobriquet of "le bon David" in the salons of Paris, where his wit (in both old and new senses) was greatly appreciated; and his failure to secure a Chair at the University of Edinburgh remains a reproach to that city. Immanuel Kant—the one philosopher of modern times to share the stature of Plato or Aristotle—scarcely stirred from his home city of Konigsbeg in East Prussia; but given that he was an atheist in a city wracked by religious strife, in which the Pietist community from which he sprang played a leading part, there is supreme interest in the delicate and risky path he followed by remaining there. In part it explains why, in a way reminiscent of Hume whom he admired, he succeeded in getting a secure academic post only in middle age. (Kant's theological scepticism— despite his official views about the need for concepts of God, freedom of the will, and immortality of the soul, to give general point to morality—is nicely discussed in the biography by Manfred Kuehn.)