JOHN COTTINGHAM ON DESCARTES 1

[Music] well Descartes was born in 1596 and he lived in a period of great philosophical excitement a period of change when he was growing up Galileo turned his telescope on Venus and Jupiter and started to gather the evidence that would really sink the old earth-centered view of the cosmos Descartes was very interested in science he was in some ways what we'd now call a scientist and a lot of his early work was on physics and on mechanics and he was a great mathematician in fact he's in some ways best known for his work on mathematics but he was also very interested in metaphysics and in indeed in God he was brought up by the Jesuits he was a devout Catholic and remained so or his life and he was interested in metaphysics partly because he wanted foundations for science he wanted a reliable basis on which physics and the other Sciences could be built and he saw that foundation as depending in part on God but he reaches that in a rather interesting and unusual way as I said he lived in the time of intellectual ferment when a lot was being doubted a lot of things that he'd been taught as absolutely rock-solid were beginning to be shaken and he ended up in his philosophy using that doubt using the method of doubt not as an end in itself he wasn't a skeptic he wasn't one of those philosophers who says that nothing is certain on the contrary he's very committed to a project of certainty but he uses doubt to clear away the rubble that's one of the metaphors he uses clear away the rubble so you can start afresh from something really reliable and so as an exercise he begins by doubting even the five senses sight hearing touch taste smell we think of the senses is our basic root to knowledge but Descartes was struck by the fact that they can often mislead us one example the son looks roughly the same size as the moon but actually mathematical reasoning and careful observation shows its enormous ly bigger so he says we shouldn't rely uncritically on what the senses tell us he then starts to push the doubt even further doubts even the existence of the external world tables chairs the floor the ceiling even the planet Earth might be a dream might be some kind of figment of imagination or might be something beamed into my mind by a malicious demon bent on deceiving me that's the extremity of the doubt and then having reached that extreme of doubt he reasons that one thing is absolutely certain he the doubter must exist he must be there in some sense in order to entertain doubts at all in order to think in order to meditate and so in his famous work the discourse on the method written in French in 1637 he reaches this famous pronouncement is your past dog sure sweet I'm thinking therefore I exist so even if I doubt I'm thinking I'm still thinking and also doubt so I must exist and that later is expressed in Latin translations of the disc as cogito ergo sum probably the best-known pronouncement in philosophy I'm thinking therefore I exist in the meditations which is really I think his philosophical masterpiece he doesn't use that exact formulation but he arrives at something pretty similar he says I am I exist this is certain as often as it's put forward by me or entertained in my mind now that's fine as far as it goes but when one thinks about it it's a very private subjective starting point he I know I exist but what about science what about physics what about all the things Descartes was really interested in he needs to get out from himself back to the world and the way he does that is via God God has an absolutely crucial place in Descartes philosophy philosophy so although he's rightly thought of I think as the father of modern philosophy he developed a mathematical physics which in some ways was the inspiration for much later science nonetheless he's also very much an inheritor of the Christian medieval tradition which saw God as the center Center everything center of reality and the source of the possibility of knowledge so as I say in order to develop a reliable system of science of mathematical early based science that would his goal he needs to have secure foundations for knowledge he reasons that knowing he exists gives him a kind of route to God in fact he put this in his early work the rules for the direction of the mind as the phrase some ago day assess I am therefore God is rather less well-known than the famous cogito ergo so I'm thinking therefore I exist but actually just as important he finds himself knowing himself knowing that he exists but immediately conscious of how limited his knowledge of our own finitude of our weakness of our imperfection that's part of what it is to be human and certainly even from a starting point where I know nothing but me but my own thoughts I immediately know that as much I don't know much I don't understand so I'm conscious of my own furniture my weakness but I'm also conscious that I have this idea of the infinite of something infinitely powerful infinitely beyond anything I can fully grasp so there's a kind of confrontation between the finite mind and the sense of something beyond something infinite and Descartes reasons that he couldn't have constructed this idea of infinity from his own resources and therefore it must have been placed in his mind by God by the infinite being this is sometimes called the trademark argument that God placed the idea of himself in my mind to be like the mark the trademark that the craftsman stamps on his work now that enables him to conclude that he's not alone that God exists that God created him and conserves him preserves him every moment of his existence having got that far he can now see his way forward to a reliable system of knowledge it's not that he can just suddenly trust that everything he says must be true God isn't that benevolent we know we often go astray but what he can trust is that in principle his mind must be a reliable instrument God wouldn't have created him with a fundamentally defective instrument and so if he uses the mind carefully very carefully makes takes great care only to assert what he can prove what he can establish by what he calls clear and distinct reasoning or clear and distinct ideas then he has some chance of success and the main paradigm of clarity and distinctness for Descartes is mathematics two plus three equals five one example he gives if you think about that it's so clear and transparent that as long as I focus on it it can't be wrong it's as it were got its own guarantee of truth within it it's as certain as I'm thinking therefore I exist so mathematics provided I proceed carefully step by step methodically and provided I don't jump in and rationally assert things I don't really know with that kind of clarity mathematics can be the key to a whole system of of knowledge and in his mammoth textbook the principles of philosophy published in Latin in 1644 he develops just that a whole system of physics which explains really the whole cosmos stars planets the earth plants trees rocks meteors you name it everything in terms of particles and the particles aren't mysterious they don't have any spooky or occult properties they just have size shape motion this I think one considers the beginning of modern science we have the quantifiable world the world which can be measured speed calculated and everything however complex where it's a table a chair or a horse or dog star it can be explained for Descartes if only we have accurate enough descriptions of the particles or corpuscles as he calls them that makes it up so the whole universe is a corpuscular universe if you like made by God in accordance with mathematical principles and we human beings in virtue of our mathematical insights have a sort of where a kind of mirror of of the reality so created and a very imperfect and limited mirror as I mentioned earlier they cut stresses the finite you'd the limited nature of the human mind but nonetheless as far as it goes if we use it carefully and accurate an accurate mirror now perhaps I should go on to say something I think quite interesting and unusual about Descartes system you might think from what I've said so far that it's a very unified system with mathematics as the sort of template and that's quite correct he did have this vision of a great unified organic system of knowledge he compared knowledge to a tree with physics the trunk and then the various branches which included mechanics medicine he was very interested in medicine and physiology morals but he thought there was a part of reality that couldn't be included in this mathematical extended quantifiable world and that was consciousness the mind thought thinking he reasoned is radically different from anything you can measure it's not a series of particles it doesn't have length it's not divisible in the way in which any physical object is and so he ended up with what sometimes called dualism Descartes dualism or Cartesian dualism Cartesian being the the adjective meaning pertaining to Descartes from the Latin version of his name Curtis so Cartesian dualism says that there are two radically different kinds of reality there is extension whatever could be measured and described in terms of size shape motion so that's the whole physical universe and then there is consciousness thought understanding willing those sorts of phenomena which perhaps we don't understand perfectly even now but one thing we do know is that we all or have them we all experience them directly and we know according to Descartes that they're quite different from anything measurable in the physical in physical terms we know them from the inside and perhaps it's worth saying that this view of thought is separable from matter is in some ways counterintuitive perhaps especially for us now because in de cartes day everyone accepted the idea of a soul an immaterial non-physical soul as indeed many people still do but an awful lot more people now think that thought is somehow a brain process it's band up with our physical nature so it's somewhat counterintuitive somewhat odd odds with our ordinary ways of thinking to suppose that you could still think and will and be conscious without any physical body a Descartes does believe that he says in the discourse on the method this is his earlier French work published a few years before the meditations that this me sumwa that this this I by which I am what I am would could continue to exist even without the body would continue to be what it is even where there no physical reality at all and it's quite an interesting question could you survive without the body if a 10-ton weight came and smashed your body at this moment or mine could could we still carry on thinking well no skills had no chance because you might think oh well that's the religious views thinking of the next world but I think that quite explains it because the Christian Creed talks of the resurrection of the body doesn't mention the survival of a Cartesian style immaterial self so it's problematic whether the motivation is principally religious I think he genuinely thought when he reflected on the nature of consciousness that there was nothing about it that savers of physics of matter of particles interacting there one of his a great subsequent philosopher Leibniz who's also known as a rationalist I'll say a bit more about that later at this time rather in the spirit of Descartes imagined an experiment supposing the brain was blown up in size expand inside so you could walk inside it go in silent like a factory what would you see well you'd see all the parts of the factory cogs and wheels mechanisms we'd nowadays say electrical impulses passed by neurons and neural pathways but Leibniz said you wouldn't see thought that's something different that is some kind of awareness which seems something of a different category from levers pushing and pulling each other or electrical sparks flashing or whatever of course maybe those physical processes were somehow responsible for thought but that something Descartes was doubtful about in fact he said it couldn't really be the case and one thing he points to which which i think is again quite interesting even in a modern context where science obviously has moved on is that the capacity for thought and for language he links the two very closely together is pretty much infinite it's every day you can create and understand new sentences which you may never have heard before it's not like a dog barking or a blackbird singing stimulus response stimulus response on the contrary it's genuinely innovative and creative and so that again I think suggested to Descartes that we're dealing here with something quite different from the physical mechanistic order of reality so it's a view I think very congenial to to traditional religion because it suggests that there's something really very special about human existence that quite unlike the other animals we this capacity for thought for language for creativity which puts us really gives us a kind of special status now I perhaps ought to just say one more thing about this this whole business of thought versus body or physics although they can't believe that as a thinking being I'm not to be identified with my body I'm this conscious immaterial conscious substance he still of course was quite well aware in fact he underlined that our lives are very closely connected with the working of the body if someone were to cut my hand off or try to cut it off I would immediately feel I was being hurt so it's not as if I'm a sort of pure angelic creature I'm somehow in some mysterious way very intimately intermingled mixed up with the body was how he phrased it now how does that work well just let's this connects with something Descartes discussed in in letters and reply to correspondence let's just think of an angel inhabiting a body perhaps a somewhat weird thought experiment but imagine if an angel was just using a human body it would if you like be a pure spirit and it would just happen to be controlling a body now if you imagine someone cutting off the hand of an angel it might as it were notice that its body would be damaged as his body was being damaged notice it intellectually and perhaps say what a nuisance I'll have to get another body or something else but a human being is not like that we feel pain we have sensations so we consciousness our consciousness not just a matter of intellect or of thinking and willing it's also a matter of these very vivid sensations pain hunger first and this sensory part of our conscious experience is for Descartes the signature of our embodiment it shows we're not just angels making use of bodies we're not just like a pilot sailing a ship or in a ship or a sailor a sailor and a ship but that this again is his is his metaphor or his simile but that we're somehow very bound up with the body so he actually went as far as saying that the mind and the body form a substantial union they're kind of united together how exactly that can be how an immaterial mental substance can somehow be united with a physical mechanical structure than the muscles the nerves of the body is perhaps somewhat mysterious but perhaps it can't be proved philosophically it just has to be known by experience one of descartes correspondence was Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia who wrote him a series of letters with some very intelligent questions on the relationship between mind and body and really he said well there's some things which can't really be understood by a metaphysical reasoning of my philosophy but had to be known by experience so we all know by experience that we are intermingled with the body we are united with it and so we've got to rely on that you

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Keywords: JOHN, COTTINGHAM, ON, DESCARTES

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Length: 24min 57sec (1497 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 22 2012