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More Descartes
Sent this to my philosophy-class buddies. Some thoughts on Meditation Six:
If I'm reading Descartes right, he categorizes everything (or at least everything except God) into one or another of two substances, the first being the mind of a person, the second being bodies and physical stuff in general. And nothing gets categorized into both. The person/mind is a thinking thing that lacks extension, bodies are extended things but not thinking things. (This would imply that, though the brain is where thinking takes place, the mind not the brain does the actual thinking.) Furthermore, bodies and physical stuff are divisible, whereas the mind - that which thinks - is not.
Descartes seems to believe that mind and body work in concert when it comes to learning to avoid things that produce a sensation of pain and learning to seek things that give a sensation of pleasure. But beyond that, for knowledge of the "external" world, the mind has to get to work and analyze what it has taken in through the senses. (I put "external" in quotation marks because, even though Descarates uses metaphors of inside and outside and of looking out at the world and looking out at thoughts and images in our own mind etc., that doesn't mean that we should use those metaphors.)
Mind and body as two separate substances doesn't really make sense to me, nor does the idea that thoughts emanate from minds rather than brains. But if I really want to understand the guy, I need to figure out how it makes sense to him, and why he wants to divide everything up this way. I have a theory or two on that, but first I'll note that from my point of view there's a whole lot that I can't seem to fit into his two substances, if his basic idea is that one substance thinks but is not extended, while the other substance is extended but doesn't think. ("Extended" I take to mean something like "takes up measurable space," and divisible means "can be divided into components.") The following all seem to me to be nonextended but nonetheless located in, or at least dependent on, a physical world: strength, beauty, celebrity, legal judgments, one person's being smarter than another, one person being faster than another, irony, wealth, gravity as Newtonians conceived it (and of course it doesn't get conceived by Newton* until after Descartes dies), magnetism, social class, odor, the taste of avocados, train whistles, musical octaves, football scores, left and right, racial prejudice, building codes, bank loans. Some of these have a physical range (e.g., how far you can hear a train whistle) but they don't seem extended in the way that Descartes means, nor physically divisible. (How do you divide the sound of a train whistle?) Hard to see how relationships among things, or people engaging in social practices and social interaction or conducting experiments or using three of the five senses (smelling, tasting, hearing), can be fitted into one or the other of his two categories. Which would be mind and which would be matter? I could say, "Well, for these we have physical inputs and we apply the mind to them," but I wouldn't know how to actually divide up any of these and succesfully go, "Well, here's the physical component, which has extension, and here's where the physical leaves off and the mental starts." Maybe one of you can try it on several of the examples I just gave, to succeed where I failed. What's the physical component of wealth and what's the mental? How can you tell the two components apart?
Briefly, my guess - and this is just a guess - is that Descartes is trying to wrestle with the question of how one replaces false inferences and extrapolations with correct ones or in general how one tests one's inferences and extrapolations - not just stuff like, "How do I know the room is really empty?" or "How do I know the actual shape of a distant tower?" (both of which being examples that Descartes gives of things that one can initially be mistaken on) but "How is it that we can decide that the earth actually goes around the sun despite what our senses seem to be telling us about the behavior of physical bodies on earth? How is it that we can decide that an object in motion stays in motion in a straight line despite this never happening on earth?" My answer would be, "You come up with the best inferences and extrapolations you can, the ones that explain the most, and you also seek more information," but my guess - again, emphasize "guess" - is that Descartes thought you had to divide out the mind from the physical world in order to explain how one can do this. Whereas to me that seems drastic and unnecessary. But Descartes belonged to a different time.
*From the little I know about Newton, I believe that he himself was never sure how to conceive of gravity, since, like Galileo and Descartes before him, he had a prejudice against the idea of a force that seemed to act over a distance. This didn't stop him from coming up with laws that described how gravity acted over a distance.
If I'm reading Descartes right, he categorizes everything (or at least everything except God) into one or another of two substances, the first being the mind of a person, the second being bodies and physical stuff in general. And nothing gets categorized into both. The person/mind is a thinking thing that lacks extension, bodies are extended things but not thinking things. (This would imply that, though the brain is where thinking takes place, the mind not the brain does the actual thinking.) Furthermore, bodies and physical stuff are divisible, whereas the mind - that which thinks - is not.
Descartes seems to believe that mind and body work in concert when it comes to learning to avoid things that produce a sensation of pain and learning to seek things that give a sensation of pleasure. But beyond that, for knowledge of the "external" world, the mind has to get to work and analyze what it has taken in through the senses. (I put "external" in quotation marks because, even though Descarates uses metaphors of inside and outside and of looking out at the world and looking out at thoughts and images in our own mind etc., that doesn't mean that we should use those metaphors.)
Mind and body as two separate substances doesn't really make sense to me, nor does the idea that thoughts emanate from minds rather than brains. But if I really want to understand the guy, I need to figure out how it makes sense to him, and why he wants to divide everything up this way. I have a theory or two on that, but first I'll note that from my point of view there's a whole lot that I can't seem to fit into his two substances, if his basic idea is that one substance thinks but is not extended, while the other substance is extended but doesn't think. ("Extended" I take to mean something like "takes up measurable space," and divisible means "can be divided into components.") The following all seem to me to be nonextended but nonetheless located in, or at least dependent on, a physical world: strength, beauty, celebrity, legal judgments, one person's being smarter than another, one person being faster than another, irony, wealth, gravity as Newtonians conceived it (and of course it doesn't get conceived by Newton* until after Descartes dies), magnetism, social class, odor, the taste of avocados, train whistles, musical octaves, football scores, left and right, racial prejudice, building codes, bank loans. Some of these have a physical range (e.g., how far you can hear a train whistle) but they don't seem extended in the way that Descartes means, nor physically divisible. (How do you divide the sound of a train whistle?) Hard to see how relationships among things, or people engaging in social practices and social interaction or conducting experiments or using three of the five senses (smelling, tasting, hearing), can be fitted into one or the other of his two categories. Which would be mind and which would be matter? I could say, "Well, for these we have physical inputs and we apply the mind to them," but I wouldn't know how to actually divide up any of these and succesfully go, "Well, here's the physical component, which has extension, and here's where the physical leaves off and the mental starts." Maybe one of you can try it on several of the examples I just gave, to succeed where I failed. What's the physical component of wealth and what's the mental? How can you tell the two components apart?
Briefly, my guess - and this is just a guess - is that Descartes is trying to wrestle with the question of how one replaces false inferences and extrapolations with correct ones or in general how one tests one's inferences and extrapolations - not just stuff like, "How do I know the room is really empty?" or "How do I know the actual shape of a distant tower?" (both of which being examples that Descartes gives of things that one can initially be mistaken on) but "How is it that we can decide that the earth actually goes around the sun despite what our senses seem to be telling us about the behavior of physical bodies on earth? How is it that we can decide that an object in motion stays in motion in a straight line despite this never happening on earth?" My answer would be, "You come up with the best inferences and extrapolations you can, the ones that explain the most, and you also seek more information," but my guess - again, emphasize "guess" - is that Descartes thought you had to divide out the mind from the physical world in order to explain how one can do this. Whereas to me that seems drastic and unnecessary. But Descartes belonged to a different time.
*From the little I know about Newton, I believe that he himself was never sure how to conceive of gravity, since, like Galileo and Descartes before him, he had a prejudice against the idea of a force that seemed to act over a distance. This didn't stop him from coming up with laws that described how gravity acted over a distance.
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emodatum: when you started readin plato i wz like YAY at last i have studybuddies for plato this will help -- when you got to descartes my crest fell a ton... i did descartes at copllege (at high speed -- i switched into the course late) and really REALLY never got the rhythm of him
i can't think of any canonic thinker who my anti-intellectual prjudice kicks in more ruthlessly for (as in "why bother studying someone so obviously wrong about everything") (when is total hypocrisy on my part, as i am quite happy to "study" plenty of foax who i think are a ton wronger -- i think poor old descartes gets the maximal effect of my swift disenchantment w.philosophy, having eagerly changed course to study it, and finding it wasn't at all what i expected)
(dark komedy fakt: RD was murdered by the queen of sweden! she hired him to teach her -- she was all bluestocking tomboy! -- but haad to slot him in before her early morning horse-riding run, which meant he had to get up at crack of dawn in the freezing sweden winter... he caught a chill and pegged it)
(disclaimer: i have never checked this fact since i first read it -- it may be rubbish)
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xtina!
ivan the terrible was another, tho his stunts were a less fun for bystanders
Re: xtina!
Descartes is something of a drag compared to Plato, though I think that a lot is prejudice on my part, where he's really the one responsible for unleashing the filibuster* that is modern philosophy. And he's not as fun a writer, either, though with a good translation he is a good writer.
But I'm trying to temporarily bracket one of my basic questions/hypotheses here, so that I can go with these guys in their full force and maybe be surprised by them. The hypothesis that I'm temporarily bracketing is that "Platonism" and "Cartesian dualism," if not being straw men in modern philosophy, exactly, are patsies, which is to say that people go on about them because they've got sure-fire arguments against them. And people exaggerate the cultural weight of "Platonism" and "Cartesian dualism" so as to give their counter-arguments significance that the endeavor doesn't deserve.
So my desire at the moment is to try to at least halfway engage these guys on their own terms, from their concerns not ours. Seems to me I did this more successfully with Plato than with Descartes - not that I'd say I understand Plato better than I understand Descartes, but I felt less of a need to take Plato down.
But one thing I'm trying to do is find a Plato that doesn't have much to do with "Platonism" and a Descartes that doesn't have much to do with "Cartesian dualism." The former seems easier than the latter (though my guess is that his math and science wasn't swamped in his dualism).
But is it so obvious that Descartes was wrong? It seems to me he is wrong about a lot of things, but it also seems to me that I had to deploy some pretty sophisticated arguments against him in this lj, arguments that I might not have had available to me if I didn't know something about modern psychology and modern philosophy. Without those arguments, it's pretty easy to get caught up in the question, "How do I know I'm not a brain in a jar?" and whatnot. And if Descartes does seem obviously wrong on some part, and if we follow Kuhn's admonition to look for the absurdities in the text and then try to figure out how these "absurdities" were reasonable to the intelligent man who put them forth, we may discover that the fellow is different and more coherent and more interesting - and less obvious in his wrongness - than we'd realized.
Re: xtina!
Re: xtina!
Yes, it's too bad the course dumped Plato after a month, but that's what happens with introductory courses. We did several weeks of Augustine as well that I haven't yet had an opportunity to post on.
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*it's more like "a better way to think about all this is to start with the understanding that reality is NOTHING LIKE YOU IMAGINE IT TO BE (or likely ever will)"
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Or, if you insist these are not explanations, give an example of something that is an explanation?