Dissecting Descartes

As Western society began to abandon religion, religious leaders fought back politically, economically, & intellectually. Rene Descartes represented intellectual opposition to the scientific process.

“God is dead.”

-Friedrich Nietzsche

In The Scientific Enlightenment, a bottom-up method of forming beliefs was developed in which scientists would first admit they don’t know how nature works. Many times that required discarding religious claims of certainty to instead start the scientific investigation with a blank slate. The Baconian Method rooted the scientific pursuit of truth in empiricism, meaning the very foundational brute facts of reality were based on observation, experimentation, and replication. As science began to answer questions like who we are and where we come from without needing to invoke a god, religious faith became less and less relevant. Religious teachings and traditions were intensely challenged and started to be discarded during the scientific enlightenment leading to intense pushback. Religious manipulation of the scientific process occurred in a variety of ways; from authoritarian governments locking people up for challenging church orthodoxy to the funding and popularizing of pseudoscience to mislead the public. That manipulation continues to this day, but one of the first and most well-known beneficiaries was Rene Descartes.

Descartes inverted Francis Bacon’s skepticism of religious certainties to instead argue for a delusional level of distrust for empirical facts. He argued that any belief which we could possibly be deceived about we should discard. He argued we should be so radically skeptical of our life experience as to not ever know if we are dreaming or awake. He argued that we should be extremely skeptical of our own perceptions and sensations, so much so that we cannot be sure if our body is truly our body. His view was that we should never be sure if the rest of the world continues to exist when we do not perceive it so we cannot trust that it is still out there. In his view we cannot be sure that other people have their own thoughts and experiences, so we cannot be sure they really do. Descartes argued that even fundamental facts of nature like 2+2=4 might be a deception because a deceptive God might be tricking us into doing math incorrectly. From his unreasonable application of skepticism, he concluded that the only thing we can be absolutely certain of is our own mental existence. Not as a body-based living thing, but as pure thought detached from the world around us. At that point we can only be sure of one thing; “I think therefore I am.”

“Cogito Ergo Sum”

-Rene Descartes

That line is one of the biggest setbacks in the history of Science and Philosophy. He argued that since our existence as a thing thinking is clear and distinct, its existence is undeniable unlike the rest of our beliefs. In contrast with Bacon, Descartes argued that the most foundational brute facts of reality are actually clear and distinct ideas, not empirical facts gained through observation and experimentation.