Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy (3 page)

For a final example, we can consider a philosophical problem
many people get into when they think about mind and body. Many
people envisage a strict separation between mind, as one thing, and
body, as a different thing. When this seems to be just good common sense, it can begin to infect practice in quite insidious ways.
For instance, it begins to be difficult to see how these two different
things interact. Doctors might then find it almost inevitable that
treatments of physical conditions that address mental or psychological causes will fail. They might find it next to impossible to see
how messing with someone's mind could possibly cause changes
in the complex physical system that is their body. After all, good
science tells us that it takes physical and chemical causes to have
physical and chemical effects. So we might get an a priori, armchair
certainty that one kind of treatment (say, drugs and electric
shocks) has to be `right' and others (such as treating patients humanely, counselling, analysis) are `wrong': unscientific, unsound,
bound to fail. But this certainty is premised not on science but on a false philosophy. A better philosophical conception of the relation
between mind and body changes it. A better conception should enable us to see how there is nothing surprising in the fact of mindbody interaction. It is the most commonplace fact, for instance,
that thinking of some things (mental) can cause people to blush
(physical).Thinking of a future danger can cause all kinds of bodily changes: hearts pound, fists clench, guts constrict. By extrapolation there should be nothing difficult to comprehend about a
mental state such as cheerful optimism affecting a physical state
like the disappearance of spots or even the remission of a cancer. It
becomes a purely empirical fact whether such things happen. The
armchair certainty that they could not happen is itself revealed as
dependent on bad understanding of the structures of thought, or
in other words bad philosophy, and is in that sense unscientific.
And this realization can change medical attitudes and practice for
the better.

So the middle-ground answer reminds us that reflection is continuous with practice, and our practice can go worse or better according to the value of our reflections. A system of thought is
something we live in, just as much as a house, and if our intellectual
house is cramped and confined, we need to know what better
structures are possible.

The low-ground answer merely polishes this point up a bit, not
in connection with nice clean subjects like economics or physics,
but down in the basement where human life is a little less polite.
One of the series of satires etched by the Spanish painter Goya is
entitled 'The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters'. Goya believed
that many of the follies of mankind resulted from the'sleep of rea son. There are always people telling us what we want, how they will
provide it, and what we should believe. Convictions are infectious,
and people can make others convinced of almost anything. We are
typically ready to believe that ourways, ourbeliefs, our religion, our
politics are better than theirs, or that our God-given rights trump
theirs or that our interests require defensive or pre-emptive strikes
against them. In the end, it is ideas for which people kill each other.
It is because of ideas about what the others are like, or who we are,
or what our interests or rights require, that we go to war, or oppress
others with a good conscience, or even sometimes acquiesce in our
own oppression by others. When these beliefs involve the sleep of
reason, critical awakening is the antidote. Reflection enables us to
step back, to see our perspective on a situation as perhaps distorted
or blind, at the very least to see if there is argument for preferring
our ways, or whether it is just subjective. Doing this properly is
doing one more piece of conceptual engineering.

Since there is no telling in advance where it may lead, reflection
can be seen as dangerous. There are always thoughts that stand opposed to it. Many people are discomfited, or even outraged, by
philosophical questions. Some are fearful that their ideas may not
stand up as well as they would like if they start to think about them.
Others may want to stand upon the `politics of identity, or in other
words the kind of identification with a particular tradition, or
group, or national or ethnic identity that invites them to turn their
back on outsiders who question the ways of the group. They will
shrug off criticism: their values are `incommensurable' with the
values of outsiders. They are to be understood only by brothers and
sisters within the circle. People like to retreat to within a thick, comfortable, traditional set of folkways, and not to worry too
much about their structure, or their origins, or even the criticisms
that they may deserve. Reflection opens the avenue to criticism,
and the folkways may not like criticism. In this way, ideologies hecome closed circles, primed to feel outraged by the questioning
mind.

For the last two thousand years the philosophical tradition has
been the enemy of this kind of cosy complacency. It has insisted
that the unexamined life is not worth living. It has insisted on the
power of rational reflection to winnow out bad elements in our
practices, and to replace them with better ones. It has identified
critical self-reflection with freedom, the idea being that only when
we can see ourselves properly can we obtain control over the direction in which we would wish to move. It is only when we can see
our situation steadily and see it whole that we can start to think
what to do about it. Marx said that previous philosophers had
sought to understand the world, whereas the point was to change
it-one of the silliest famous remarks of all time (and absolutely
belied by his own intellectual practice). He would have done better
to add that without understanding the world, you will know little
about how to change it, at least for the better. Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern admit that they cannot play on a pipe but they seek to
manipulate Hamlet. When we act without understanding, the
world is well prepared to echo Hamlet's response: ` 'Sblood, do you
think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?'

There are academic currents in our own age that run against
these ideas. There are people who question the very notion of
truth, or reason, or the possibility of disinterested reflection. Mostly, they do bad philosophy, often without even knowing that
this is what they are doing: conceptual engineers who cannot draw
a plan, let alone design a structure. We return to see this at various
points in the book, but meanwhile I can promise that this book
stands unashamedly with the tradition and against any modern, or
postmodern, scepticism about the value of reflection.

Goya's full motto for his etching is, `Imagination abandoned by
reason produces impossible monsters: united with her, she is the
mother of the arts and the source of her wonders.' That is how we
should take it to be.

PERHAPS THE MOST unsettling thought many of us have, often
quite early on in childhood, is that the whole world might he a
dream; that the ordinary scenes and objects of everyday life might
be fantasies. The reality we live in may be a virtual reality, spun out
of our own minds, or perhaps injected into our minds by some sinister Other. Of course, such thoughts come, and then go. Most of us
shake them off. But why are we right to do so? How can we know
that the world as we take it to be, is the world as it is? How do we
begin to think about the relation between appearance and reality:
things as we take them to be, as opposed to things as they are?

LOSING THE WORLD

We might say: it all began on io November 1619.

On that date, in the southern German town of Ulm, the French mathematician and philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650) shut
himself away in a room heated by a stove, and had a vision followed
by dreams, which he took to show him his life's work: the unfolding of the one true way to find knowledge. The true path required
sweeping away all that he had previously taken for granted, and
starting from the foundations upwards.

Of course, it didn't, really, begin in 16i9, for Descartes was not
the first. The problems Descartes raised for himself are as old as
human thought. These are problems of the self, and its mortality,
its knowledge, and the nature of the world it inhabits; problems of
reality and illusion. They are all raised in the oldest philosophical
texts we have, the Indian Vedas, stemming from about 1500 iw. The
generation immediately before Descartes had included the great
French essayist Montaigne, whose motto was the title of one of his
great essays: `Que sais-je?'-what do I know?

Nor did Descartes come to his enterprise with a totally innocent
mind: he himself had an intense education in the prevailing
philosophies of the time, at the hands of Jesuit teachers. But by
Descartes's time things were changing. The Polish astronomer
Copernicus had discovered the heliocentric (sun-centred) model
of the solar system. Galileo and others were laying the foundations
of a `mechanical' science of nature. In this picture the only
substances in space would be material, made up of `atoms, and
caused to move only by mechanical forces which science would
eventually discover. Both Copernicus and Galileo fell foul of the
guardians of Catholic orthodoxy, the Inquisition, for this scientific
picture seemed to many people to threaten the place of human
beings in the cosmos. If science tells us all that there is, what becomes of the human soul, human freedom, and our relationship
with God?

Descartes was smart. He invented standard algebraic notation;
and Cartesian coordinates, which enable us to give algebraic equations for geometrical figures, are named after him. He himself was
one of the leaders of the scientific revolution, making fundamental advances not only in mathematics but also in physics, particularly optics. But Descartes was also a pious Catholic. So for him it
was a task of great importance to show how the unfolding scientific
world-vast, cold, inhuman, and mechanical-nevertheless had
room in it for God and freedom, and for the human spirit.

Hence his life's work, culminating in the Meditations, published
in 1641, `in which are demonstrated the existence of God and the
distinction between the human soul and the body, according to
the subtitle. But the subtext is that Descartes also intends to rescue
the modern world view from the charge of atheism and materialism. The scientific world is to be less threatening than was feared. It
is to be made safe for human beings. And the way to make it safe is
to reflect on the foundations of knowledge. So we start with
Descartes because he was the first great philosopher to wrestle with
the implications of the modern scientific world view. Starting with
the medievals or Greeks is often starting so far away from where we
are now that the imaginative effort to think in their shoes is probably too great. Descartes is, comparatively, one of us, or so we may
hope.

There is a danger in paraphrasing a philosopher, particularly
one as terse as Descartes. I am going to present some of the central themes of the Meditations. This is in the spirit of a sportscast showing onlythe`edited high Iights'ofa game. Closer acquaintance
with the text would uncover other highlights; closer acquaintance
with its historical context would uncover yet others. But the highlights will be enough to illuminate most of the central issues of
subsequent philosophy.

THE EVIL DEMON