I think, therefore I am

Saturday July 12, 2008

By Ellis Washington

Rene Descartes portrait by Frans Hals, 1648

I reject as absolutely false everything in which I could imagine the least doubt.

Cogito ergo sum. (I think, therefore I am).

– René Descartes

Today's column continues my review of Dr. Benjamin Wiker's admirable and timely opus, "10 Books that Screwed up the World and 5 Others That Didn't Help." Here, I will do a critique on the very influential French philosopher, René Descartes (1596-1650) and his famous treatise, "Discourse on Method" (1637).

One of my earliest memories of Descartes was more than 20 years ago when I first read that lion of positivism, progressivism and liberal jurisprudence, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who in his famous 1897 essay, "The Path of Law," wrote:

To an imagination of any scope the most far-reaching form of power is not money, it is the command of ideas … [A] hundred years after his death the abstract speculations of Descartes had become a practical force controlling the conduct of men. … [T]he world is governed to-day by Kant [more] than by Bonaparte.

Ten years ago, I used Holmes' prescient quote in my apologetic against Judge Richard A. Posner, a comprehensive law review article I wrote on the history of law titled, "The Inseparability of Law and Morality." In that opus I lamented just how prevalent and entrenched the ideas of Descartes (and other philosophers) have become in American culture and on Western civilization in modern times.

In his chapter on Descartes, "Discourse on Method," which is subtitled, "… of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Searching for Truth in the Sciences," Wiker wrote:

Descartes attacked skepticism, but only by denying reality. He confirmed the idea of the immaterial soul against the pronouncements of the crass materialists of the day, but only by recreating us as insubstantial ghosts trapped in clattering machines. He proved God's existence, but only by making it depend on our thinking Him into existence. By his good intentions – if indeed they really were good –he fathered every flavor of self-congratulatory solipsism, led us to believe we are no different from robots, and made religion a creation of our own ego.

Prior to Descartes' criticism of skepticism, philosophers going back far as Socrates had in one form or another been ultimately concerned with God and/or truth. Descartes attack on skepticism feigned as an apologetic for God, ended up denigrating God; reducing God as an egotistical product of our own imagination, thus shattering the God-paradigm in classical philosophy that existed for millennia.

Descartes' refutation of skepticism was a treatment worse than the illness because he was able to craftily hide his huge ego and present his sophistic arguments as merely a series of suggestions. However, Descartes, like most philosophers and intellectuals, wasn't the least interested in philosophizing in a vacuum or in vain. Philosophers and intellectuals, like modern day demigods, want their ideas to be applied and celebrated throughout the world. Descartes, as the father of modern philosophy, was no different than the ancients or from contemporary philosophers and intellectuals.

In brief, Descartes' method was to doubt everything. Below is a summary of Dr. Wiker's ideas on the philosophy of Descartes and how his ideas have been disseminated in modern society and culture throughout Western civilization:

• Descartes, through the creation of "subjectivism" encouraged imagination to become entirely separated from reality.
  

• Tradition is not a guide to reality because "the very same man with his very own mind, having been brought up from infancy among the French or the Germans becomes different from what he would be had he always lived among the Chinese or among cannibals." "All is shifting sand," said Wiker of Descartes.
  

• Descartes' subjectivism applied to all things including God: "The confusion of true wisdom about God with whatever one happens to think about God." We define God (and everything in the world) by our own thoughts.
  

• Reality is defined by what we think it to be. We are disembodied ghosts trapped in a machine we call a human body. In fact all of nature and existence is merely one type of machine or another.
  

• Descartes' dualism devolved into monism (just machines are left over after the ghosts die). Human life became reduced to mere mechanism.
  

• Descartes singular statement of philosophy is stated in Part IV of his "Discourse": "[D]uring the time I wanted thus to think that everything was false, it was necessary that I, who thought thus, be something. And noticing that this truth – I think, therefore I am [cogito ergo sum] – was so firm and so certain that the most extravagant suppositions of the skeptics were unable to shake it, I judge that I could accept it without scruple as the first principle of the philosophy I was seeking."

What is the apotheosis of Descartes' ideas particularly upon Western civilization? Wiker remarks: "Even if such a method doesn't lead to insanity it certainly leads to narcissism, the morbid condition of believing that I sit in god-like judgment of everything else but nothing stands in judgment of me."

As Descartes said in Part I one of his "Method" that even among "the most excellent minds who have ever lived … there is nothing about which there is not some dispute" in philosophy, "and thus nothing that is not doubtful." On this point, Wiker says of Descartes, "Where there is disagreement, there is doubt, and where is doubt, throw it out."

If philosophers from Socrates to Einstein viewed the accumulation of knowledge as a precious reservoir to be preserved for posterity, Descartes ridiculed knowledge (and tradition) as garbage to be discarded upon the ash heap of history. In America during the turbulent 1960s the Hippies' philosophies, "Don't trust anyone over 30," "Go with the flow," "Don't be judgmental," "Create your own reality," were all an obeisance to the nihilistic skepticism of Descartes 250 years before Nietzsche.

Wiker attacks Descartes' singular statement of faith, cogito ergo sum and turns it on its head: "So we should say, 'I am, therefore I can think,' rather than, 'I think, therefore I am." The common sense point is this: reality exists before our thinking, so that our thinking depends on reality … First, our thinking depends on the reality of our own existence. If we don't exist, we cannot think. Second, our thinking correctly depends on our properly conforming our minds to what really exists."

In the end, Descartes, like many narcissists, so-called "intellectuals," academics and scholars, doubted everything but his own method. Descartes deified subjectivism (perception is reality) and made it alone the standard of truth. Therefore, I think Descartes stole our humanity and reduced all civilization to an accidental conglomeration of cogs, springs, pistons, nuts, bolts, wheels – nothing more than machinery. Man was merely a ghost trapped inside this dreadful machine we call a human body. This was a precursor to Darwin's evolution theory that would come to us more than 200 years later.

In Part V of his "Discourse," Descartes, as the father of modern dualism, contradicted the Judeo-Christian understanding of man – body, soul, spirit contained in a body and viewed man "[as] two entirely different and independent entities, a ghostly soul banging around in a ghastly machine. The result of Descartes' dualism according to Wiker is that humans have become "a walking philosophical bipolar disorder."

What are the consequences of Descartes ideas upon society, culture and civilization in modern times? Wiker cites some grim policies that are directly related to the subjectivist philosophy of Descartes:

Harvest fetal embryos to prolong your life and destroy whatever you don't need just like according to a 2005 report in the British newspaper the Observer in post-Soviet Ukraine poor pregnant women were being paid about $180 for their fetuses which abortion clinics then sold them for about $9,000. The tissue was being used for beauty treatments.

This is the legacy of that Italian philosopher Machiavelli who separated morality from politics (I'll speak on him next week). This is also the legacy of French philosopher Descartes who devolved human life to a mere mechanism and who taught us that God is not real and we can do whatever we want without fear of Judgment Day.

It was inevitable that the skepticism of Descartes would betray itself when skepticism questioned whether skepticism was a valid perspective at all. I'm convinced it was the diabolical and illogical ideas like those propagated by Descartes (skepticism, metaphysical subjectivism, dualism) that caused that great Roman orator and statesman Cicero to lament: "There is nothing so absurd that it can't be said by a philosopher."

Ellis Washington, former editor at The Michigan Law Review and law clerk at The Rutherford Institute, is a graduate of John Marshall Law School and a lecturer and freelance writer on constitutional law, legal history, political philosophy and critical race theory. He has written over a dozen law review articles and several books, including "The Inseparability of Law and Morality: The Constitution, Natural Law and the Rule of Law" (2002), "Beyond the Veil: Essays in the Dialectical Style of Socrates" and He has just completed the manuscript to his latest book, "The Nuremberg Trials: Last Tragedy of the Holocaust" (2007).

Washington's latest book, "The Nuremberg Trials: Last Tragedy of the Holocaust," can be pre-ordered by calling 800-462-6420, promotion code "UPREPUB."

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