10 November 1619

“...I stayed all day shut up alone in a stove-heated room, where I was completely free to converse with myself about my own thoughts.”

10 November 1619 is the date of this most famous of philosophical visions. It gives the scientific Descartes a mystical dimension I’ve always found intriguing. The rationalist moved to think by an irrational dream.

From it comes his analogy of the thinker to an architect, which includes the observation that architecture is best done by a single designer rather than a committee; so too for thinking. It’s a funny idea he’s carrying out: that a single thinker, alone with his/her thoughts, possibly ‘conversing with the ancients’ through reading, but otherwise alone in a stove-heated room, might pursue the truth that way. It runs completely counter to the contemporary preference for collaborators and teamwork. But it’s especially apt for a method of philosophizing from methodological doubt: after all, if you have a collaborator, you’d have to suspend doubt regarding them, which would mean you’ve let all sorts of things into the story.

Oddly, D doesn’t appeal to anything like this to defend the lone-thinker approach. Instead, he appeals to the idea that architects acting alone make more perfect buildings. That’s not what I would have expected him to say, and it’s not at all obvious that it’s true.

“...peoples who have grown gradually from a half-savage to a civilized state, and have made their laws only in so far as they were forced to by the inconvenience of crimes and quarrels, could not be so well governed as those who from the beginning of their society have observed the basic laws laid down by some wise law-giver.”

The architect takes the wild sprawl of a haphazard city and brings order to one bit of it, like the thinker who tames wild reality. The ‘half-savage’ lives in such a place, presumably, and only in fits and starts can they tame their wildness and establish some order. Recall that to ‘civilize’ is to order many discordant elements, a root shared by the word ‘city’, suggesting the project of modern reason is largely a project of taming the ‘savage’ and bringing order as cities bring order.

But then Wittgenstein’s city comes back to mind. W suggests that a language is like a city, cobbled into this shape and that over many generations of speakers, complete with an old quarter, various ethnic quarters, and so on. D’s architect seems at odds with W’s city with its crooked streets and all. But before anyone draws the hasty conclusion that D is about modern, rational order over confusing disorder, remember that D is reporting the contents of his dream, the wild edges of thought and reason. And he’s reporting this as part of a fable. I think he’s being mischievous, and I think he fully realizes it.

“...the sciences...compounded and amassed little by little from the opinions of many different persons, it never comes so close to the truth as the simple reasoning which a man of good sense naturally makes...”

So here’s the risk of overplaying D’s methodical approach to truth. I would think you could wiki out the method, as long as everything was suitably transparent, but it doesn’t sound like D’s theory is a wiki-theory. Perfection and single mind are the model. Hmm. But I still don’t fully believe that that’s his real view. D likes the piecemeal discovery, he likes the gradual accumulation of knowledge, he likes the six-part investigation. I’m still holding out for him to have a notion of partial discovery, and hence partial knowledge—which would serve as the underwriting for partial states of mind.

(And the ‘savage’ is the one thought unable to stitch together the parts, on my interpretation, but in fact becomes a kind of model for what it is to have the parts. I’m way ahead of myself here.)

“...I thought it virtually impossible that our judgements should be as unclouded and firm as they would have been if we had had the full use of our reason...and if we had always been guided by it alone.”

D sharpens the singleton thing: it’s not that there’s a single thinker, but that a single thing guides that thinker (or perhaps all thinkers). I got ahead of myself, thinking of a committee model of inquirers. Really, what D is suggesting is a model for the light of reason, the idea foreshadowed earlier that I puzzled over briefly.

But then I’m confused in a different way. What interferes with the ‘savage’ in his/her reasoning, if the ‘natural light of reason’ is a meta-resource like that? If it’s no one’s property, then ought we not all to simply have access to it?

Okay, so this is the egalitarianism I opened my reading of the Discourse with, fine. But then those ambiguities come right back. Here’s what I said in my post on part 1 para. 1:

ST: “One question I always have when I read Descartes is in the meaning of ‘nature’ and ‘natural’, especially when it comes to ‘reason’. It would seem on a straightforward notion of ‘nature’ that it consists of that which humans did not make; its complement class is thus ‘society’ and ‘technology’—something like that. But then how is reason natural? Whatever else humans do when they make things like societies or technologies, they employ reason, and they do so essentially. If you clarify things by making reason itself a natural (biological) process, something that only in the application to things produces society and technology, that seems a nice fix. But problems will surface for Descartes later in the story, given his view that the mental and the physical have substantially variant properties.”

If there is any difference between the ‘savage’ and the ‘civilized’, what does that difference consist in? It cannot be in the rational endowment of humans, by D’s own reasoning. (That’s good; we like that.) But that means then that either it’s in the access to the natural light of reason (but that’s no one’s property—we can all access that), or else it’s in the distinctly cultural resources of ‘savages’ and ‘civilized’ people (but that runs counter to the naturalness condition: that reason is part of nature, and thus not part of society or technology—it’s about us, not about what we make). If the difference is none of these, then it would seem to collapse.

Of course, in 2008 especially, we want this distinction to collapse. But throughout the modern period of Western thought it was a hugely important idea. Again, D isn’t the chief offender (as we might now put it) but he doesn’t seem bothered enough to put the ‘savagery’ stuff to one side.

Wow, longer post than I thought, lots of questions. I need to figure this out.