In Defense of Descartes

The Importance of Subjectivity

“Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness” - Max Planck

“Cogito ergo sum,” or “I think, therefore I am.” One does not progress very far in the study of philosophy without encountering Descartes’ all too familiar maxim. And in conservative leaning circles such as ours, this maxim is quite often cited as the impetus for generations of lost and confused philosophy. Such conservatives bring a slew of arguments against it, ranging from a simple rejection of its validity to a sophisticated account of how it spawned a generation (they might say degeneration) of philosophical principles and insights which we fondly call “modern philosophy.” In defense of Descartes, I would like to temper such positions with some factual observations, as well as point out a silver lining, so to speak, of his supposed mistakes and their consequences. As always, we welcome and encourage feedback from you, our audience, in the form of likes from the appreciative, comments from the engaged, and even essay responses from the inspired.

First, and most briefly, to say that this maxim is invalid or somehow logically flawed would be to throw out all syllogisms of the form “effect therefore cause.” Anyone who is fine with doing that may stop reading here. Next, Descartes’ reasoning that leads him to this maxim is purely in response to the radical skeptic’s position. In the Meditations, to put it simply, he searches for a statement which is not only self-evident in itself, but self-evident even to the skeptic. He believes he finds such a statement in “cogito ergo sum.” This statement does not singlehandedly support his entire philosophical account; in fact, he can’t seem to even make it through the rest of the Meditations without sneaking in another principle or two to help bring him out of the hole of radical doubt. So, to say that he establishes modern philosophy on the cornerstone of the rationality of the subject (as a principle which underlies all knowledge as the axioms of Euclid underly his geometry) is clearly absurd. As the father of analytic geometry (or as most know it… geometry), Descartes was fully aware of what principles followed from others, and he would be the first to admit that the nearly vacuous “cogito ergo sum,” while a necessary postulate, is insufficient as a basis for all knowledge.

However, the focus by subsequent philosophers on the subjective in response to Descartes’ journey of radical doubt is a charge brought against Descartes for which I see no defense. Nor should he want such a defense! The focus on subjective reality is not a bad thing. The perceptions, thoughts, feelings, emotions of subjects are real and deserve a place in our philosophical account. In fact, as Descartes shows with his experiment, these are what is most real and most immediately known to us; yet the medieval paradigm tended to sideline such things (again, not in itself a bad thing). The strict adherence by conservatives to the medieval paradigm prioritizing the objective, and their violent distaste for the subjective, however, is a problem. If anything, we should be glad that Descartes forced Western philosophy to deal more directly with the challenges of subjective reality. Ignoring the subject in favor of the object results in cold, unyielding, Old-Testament-like rules and regulations, and quickly results in unlivable constraints being placed on the individual in the name of objective excellence. Luckily, we have a template for a solution to this problem which we have grown all too comfortable with. This solution will be the topic of my next post. Here is a preview: Old-Testament-like law is not to be abolished but fulfilled.