Ever heard of the name Rene Descartes? If so, then you clearly were less deprived than I was until about ten minutes ago. If not, drop everything and hop on wikipedia and look him up, because he is a glorious philosopher.
Or keep reading and discover what limited knowledge I've discovered about him via the officially only interesting reading I've had so far in my Anthro 101 class.
Rene Descartes, 1596 to 1650, after extensive schooling came to the conclusion that everything he was taught throughout the course of his life should be inherently distrusted. He was taught what was commonly accepted as true by everyone at that time... But never given any proof or real reason to believe that any of them were right whatsoever, much like modern schooling. He had no evidence or reason to believe that anything he know about the world was in any way trustable, so, he made the logical conclusion of being skeptical about EVERYTHING that he had ever been taught, and started all preconceived assumptions and knowledge over, from scratch.
That's right, after spending all of his life up until that point learning what other people had discovered, he up and said, "I have no reason to believe that any of you are in any way correct whatsoever, thus I'm starting over. Good day." And then he burnt their books.
Well, I don't know if he actually did that, but I know that I'd have considered it.
After spending a lot of time dwelling on the slippery slope that he couldn't trust his senses, and therefore couldn't trust anything at all that he had learned about the modern world or perhaps ever would learn, and that he couldn't trust the learning of anyone else's senses either, he came ro a remarkable conclusion...
"Holy spit, I'm Thinking
."
It may sound simple, but it was an enormous breakthrough. The only thing that Descartes could be sure of was what was in his own head; his thoughts, his feelings, and the mere fact that he could do something as meta as contemplating the act of contemplation going on
in his own head.
Now, I'm going to take a brief tangent.
One of my most favorite series of books in known existence is the
Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind. I found the series a difficult but rewarding read, in part because the main character felt like a well-defined ideology embodied in a sexy magic-slinging, sword-swinging, child-saving genius, rather than a
human being. However, my perceived purpose of this literary action was a success; I learned a lot about Goodkind's view of human nature, the world, existence in general, and Truth. And I liked the vast majority of it.
Here's something important of note; there is a vast difference between truth and Truth. A truth is something that have reason to believe is correct, not false, in harmony with the actualities of the universe, blah blah blah. I like ice cream. That's a truth. Cookies and cream ice cream is my favorite flavor. That
was a truth... but now it isn't. Now it's salted caramel. Lowercase "truth" is finite and flexible, alterable, and just as fuzzy as our general perception of the world in general. Truth, however, is absolute. Eternal. Hopefully indisputable. It is the mother of all independent variables, and regardless of how anything else changes according to our perceptions, Truth remains the same, a pillar of existence.
Or, as Goodkind explained it, "What is
is. And upon this Truth all other truth is built."
Gad, that's a beautiful statement. Truth (uppercase) simply
is. It is
defining. It
exists. And while our skewed perceptions can build anything we want to on top of this bedrock foundation, what we build constantly changes and is occasionally is swept away. But the bedrock remains firm.
Back to Descartes. He couldn't trust his perception. He knew that the world was surrounding him with truths, half-truths, and lies which he could never know if he managed to decipher or just leave more tangled. But he did know this Truth; he was thinking. He was aware of his head's innards.
Now, all of Descartes works have been hyper-boiled down into a simple statement that he never actually said; I think, therefore I am. I have reason to believe this a Truth of the universe. Of course, as Descartes understood, my perceptions of reality vary so vastly from what might actually
be that I can't be sure if anything around me is real (makes me think of the Matrix; but on another tangent, think of any time that you just felt surreal, as if you were walking through a dream, but you knew you were awake. Or a time where you had a dream so vivid that you thought it was an actual event for a period of time. Can you trust your viewing of the world? Even though your perceptions of what
is and
isn't at those moments of time are in deep question, the fact that you can still
think and be
aware are a fundamental Truth, I think), but I can be sure that I can
think. (A note on the confusion of this particular paragraph [for which I apologize; this post won't be edited at this point in time]; Descartes did conclude that he may never be able to know the "True Value" of his thoughts, because he still couldn't be sure of anything. But one thing that he could always be sure of was the simple Truth that he was
thinking.)
Now, further assertions on Descartes part have been as a general whole rejected by most modern thinkers. For example, Descartes suggested a complete separation between one human's mind and another's, one human's mind and his/her body, and one human's mind and the world. It has been proven (although that proof came through our flawed perception of the world) that humans influence each other's thoughts, our situation in life influences our thoughts, and that we all have subconscious desires and beliefs that we are unaware of. This, depending on the opinion, creates holes in this absolute separation, or else a complete lack of any separation, resulting in every human mind swimming in an endless soup of constant change and no self. The suggestion that we are not us, but just clay eternally molded by happenstance and placement, and perhaps not even the clay that builds us is our own.
In this, I cannot say that Descartes was entirely accurate. But, like other ancient freaks, he had various cores right. Humans are not clay. While some are stronger than others, everyone has an inner Identity (I like to call it a spirit, but different cultures will define it differently) that defines who they are. As our layers of perception build and distort our view into our own selves, or as we simply grow and evolve, change takes place. But we still have a core beneath all the aesthetics that is pure
us.
Additionally, Descartes argued that we can never be wrong about the content of our own minds. Meaning, while what we think might be wrong or inaccurate, we cannot deny what is and isn't in our minds, at the bare minimum. Well, to a degree this is proven false with the understanding of the human subconscious, but perhaps we can always be aware of our conscious mind, and slowly gain an understanding of our unconscious. Perhaps. I don't have an enormous amount to say on this one, in part because of points brought up earlier.
Finally, and perhaps most scarily, Descartes argues: if we couldn't be certain of our own thoughts, we would have no foundation upon which to build our knowledge of the world.
Imagine how scary this would be. Not being able to trust your own thoughts. Not being able to trust
anything, even the existence or form of the deepest, most private recesses of our conscious. We;d be nothing more than animals. After all, if you can't even trust the thought
I am thinking, then what are humans beyond animals?
Perhaps (probably) I'm oversimplifying things or abusing logical fallacies here. Towards the end, to a degree I wasn't even making sense of any of this myself, but this is a brain dump. It also doesn't help that it's very late and I need some sleep.
But I just want to leave with some questions.
What can you trust?
Can human beings trust our perception of the world around us?
Can we trust anything?
What can we trust if we can't trust our own mind?
That's enough for me tonight, I've wandered from the realm of regular rambling to less-than-sane rambling to full-blown "asking questions like some wise man" insanity.
EDIT: Some specification on Descartes theory: his skepticism of everything came from the fact that very little if anything can be known with absolute certainty. There is always reason to doubt, especially given that many things humans have taken as gospel over the course of history have been disproven, and then we all feel so silly looking back at it all. The world isn't flat... what fools. But, as Descarte noted, the only thing we can be absolutely sure of: we can
think.
Unless you're one of those theorists that believe the subconscious portion of our brain literally controls our every action, and that the conscious portion of our brain is just a fabrication. Then we really can't be sure of anything.
Or maybe we are and aren't aware of it.
