Ep. 231: Descartes’s “Discourse” on Wisdom and Certainty (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 231 is something like, how can we know things with certainty? And we read Rene Descartes Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences, from 1637. This is Mark Linsenmayer, not actually pulling my own house down, but merely repainting the garage in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:26 Seth: This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas.

0:29 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, nourished on letters since my childhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:34 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey sitting in a hot bread oven in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:39 Mark: Me think most nourishing letter is C.

0:43 Seth: Don't even do Cookie Monster impressions right now. You have no idea how much Cookie Monster I'm getting in my life right now.

0:51 Mark: Ah, well, this was probably a nice break for that. This nice, clear, sensible writing here. So when we decided to do Rules for direction of the Mind, I think it was between that and discourse. And Dylan said, well, if we're only going to do one, we should do discourse. But I really by that point wanted to do rules. So I said, okay, we'll do both. Dylan, do you want to justify? Because I felt like rules was way better than this. I don't know. I have some things to say, but I felt like rules was very nourishing compared to this.

1:24 Dylan: So you want me to be apologist right from the beginning? Mark, that's where we're going to.

1:27 Mark: No. Why is this a text that our listeners should worry about?

1:31 Dylan: Besides the pro forma fact that it is by itself incredibly influential and the introduction of at least one landmark text of inquiry and mathematics that changed the world, and the fact that it, I think, includes the outline on morality that is sort of gestured to in the Rules.

1:55 Mark: Here's all the great stuff you'll find in the Discourses. There's some Stoic ethics. There's a long thing on the heart that you will skip over. There's a lot of text about why he didn't publish this other book called the World because he was scared of what happened to Galileo.

2:11 Dylan: He summarizes the Method and he does some of it through autobiography about why he's doing this, which I think the autobiography, the account of that is in fact quite interesting, about how he would get to the part of his justification for the Method, particularly in terms of what I've said in the Rules, a kind of political statement about the Role of reason and the role of independence with respect to authority. He gives a very concise summary of the first four rules from the rules of the direction of the mind and

2:41 Mark: a summary of the meditations. That wasn't done. That was four years later.

2:45 Dylan: Yeah, that's what I was going to say. You get a little taste of the meditations in it in part four.

2:49 Mark: Seth and Wes, had you read this before? Is this a required St. John's thing, Wes?

2:53 Wes: Yeah, I think it was, but it's been since then that I read it.

2:58 Seth: I definitely read it before, but I didn't know that I had read it before. I can't recall when, if it was in undergraduate or graduate school. But when I read the first sentence of part one, it suddenly flooded back to me because this is one of my favorite lines. I know that's terrible that I have a favorite line from a text I can't remember, from a philosopher. I didn't realize. But no, as I started to read it, it was like memorable that I had read it many years ago and it imprinted on my brain.

3:26 Wes: It's a very Cartesian thing to say. Imprinted on my brain.

3:29 Seth: Yeah. Well, I'll claim that that was intentional, Wes, but I can't validate that.

3:34 Wes: Say you were nourished on something at some point.

3:39 Mark: Dylan had recommended the Robert Stoothoff Cambridge University Press one from the Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Is that what everybody's using here or.

3:48 Dylan: Yes, I read a different version that I hadn't read before by Richard Kennington.

3:53 Wes: I'm using Adam and Tannery, 1965.

3:57 Dylan: There are paragraph numbers in both the Cottingham. I have it in the Kennington. I don't know if it's in your edition, Wes.

4:05 Seth: Is the original in Latin or French?

4:07 Dylan: Original is in French.

4:09 Seth: Okay. Our translations should not differ that much.

4:12 Dylan: That's true. I mean, he talks about this in the discourse that he wrote in French

4:16 Mark: on purpose because he's not a snob.

4:18 Wes: Well, he wants people to help him. That's why. Help him do all those experiments that he can't do himself.

4:24 Dylan: Yep. It's part of the public uprising that is the rise of science.

4:29 Wes: Yeah, it is really kind of radical when you think about it. All of these ideas that he's. For me, it's always so impressive to read Descartes and to become reacquainted with the fact that so much of our world is the result of what he did. It's not just him, of course, and he's part of something bigger. But He's a big part of it with his geometry and all of the other stuff he's doing here. Just this idea that he embraces during the course of the work, which is that he's going to leave book learning behind and start from scratch in a way which, of course, we see in the Meditations and the Method of Doubt. But it's also a way of getting rid of some of the baggage that the ancients have saddled us with.

5:13 Dylan: I guess he attributes it back to the ancients, but of course, it's the current scholastic authorities.

5:19 Wes: I should have said the scholastics.

5:21 Dylan: Yeah, yeah. That are referring to the ancients as a way of sort of grounding their authority. But of course, that's what the radical uprising is. You come to understand the world yourself, but it's not solipsistic. But it is this idea that you can own your own understanding of the world and be right about it. And in fact. And we'll talk about it, I hope, when we talk about the existence of God section and the dualism of the soul. But also he sort of slips in there that the existence of God is an existence of reason, proof, and that therefore, he sort of slips in there that the very thing that he's talking about, that the clear and distinct nature of the world, that we can come to know the world through ourselves, is something inherent into us and given to us by God. For me, it underlines the way in which the terms of his piety are not completely straightforward.

6:17 Wes: Dylan, as you talk, it occurs to me there's some parallels to Protestantism and to this desire to move beyond authority. But what I found really interesting and surprising was his call to others. Just the whole narrative where it's, I'm going to withdraw for a long time and just think things through. And I'm not going to give a lot of thought to fame or even to publishing and then the discovery. Well, actually, I'm kind of forced to cooperate with people, but this is because this is too big for me. I need help with experiments. And then the fact that he does so much with so little, you know, we get only get little hints of this because he will paraphrase some things.

You know, talking about the circulatory system or talking about his Treatise. Is it Le Monde? Is that what the Treatise was, which he didn't publish, in which he's on about some of the same things that got Galileo in trouble. And he's saying, I'm not saying that, but I'm talking about a different world. But it's conceivable that this world is like that world. Anyway, the way he sidesteps it's really interesting. But just the fact that he can do so much with so little and that you're seeing this come out of philosophy. It's a fascinating transition, this juncture between philosophy and modern science.

7:27 Mark: One of the things he says near the end is something when he's talking about, you know, because this is the introduction to the optics and the geometry

7:33 Wes: and the third one Meteorology.

7:35 Dylan: Right, Meteorology. The optics, the geometry and the meteorology.

7:38 Mark: All right.

7:39 Wes: Oh, and my translation's meteors. So, okay.

7:42 Mark: And he says, you know, when you start reading those things, he's very hesitant throughout this about how other people are going to take his work or whether they're going to abuse it, and whether it would be even helpful for other people to read his work, even though ultimately he publishes this in French. But the reason it's so limited and it's not the full picture of the universe that he was gonna present through this larger work, the world that these three things we're gonna be part of is because of this. What we were just saying about what happened with Galileo.

He's afraid what he might say will end up being heretical. He doesn't wanna be heretical. And he says, you know, if you're gonna read these things, you have to read all the way to the end because the last sentence informs the first. And I take this to kind of maybe be an accurate description of this work. And really everything he does, that this is how he sees his work as systemic, is that. Dylan, you were just saying that it's him arguing for God is an argument for reason. And you could take that as circular.

8:34 Seth: Right.

8:35 Mark: Because he's saying in the Meditations and here, first, if we don't believe in God, then there's no reason to actually think that clear and distinct perceptions really do yield truth.

8:45 Seth: Right.

8:46 Mark: That's the fundamental thing. One of the fundamental things we. He seemed to have settled on in the rules. But what justifies that? Well, nothing really justifies that. It's just the experience that we have. And he uses that experience to then argue for the existence of God, and in turn uses the existence of God to argue for the veridicality of the method. Right. So that looks to be like circular reasoning. But he specifically says in talking about these other parts that we didn't read. This might sound like circular reasoning if I say that the end justifies the beginning, the beginning prepares for the end. But no, it's just all the Parts explain each other.

9:18 Wes: Right. I mean, it's a famous problem, right? The Cartesian circle. In this case, I'm not sure that I see it, since what he's reasoning from is just experience per se, which could be totally delusional. It could be a dream, it could be all an error, and that nothing is required.

9:35 Mark: Well, so that's what's a little frustrating about this, which is made clear by the version that provided. Dylan had a nice introduction. I don't know where that introduction you provided came from. As a separate. I think, at least she said that there are no actual arguments in here, which certainly they are not systematic in the way they are in Rules or in the Meditations. Did you guys feel like that he was summing up things, that we should look elsewhere for the actual argumentation, or that there was actual meat in here of that sort, something you could grapple and argue against?

10:02 Dylan: I'm having a knee jerk reaction against your characterization, but I guess there's something about it that's true. In terms of the argument going along, he's definitely. It's. I'll call it more narrative. I mean, the fact that he presents it in terms of his biography at the beginning and then presents a laying out rather than argument.

10:22 Mark: Well, start us off, Seth, with part one. Read your favorite sentence.

10:26 Seth: My favorite sentence, the thing that reminded me that I had read this before. Good sense is the best distributed thing in the world, for everyone thinks himself so well endowed with it that even those who are hardest to please in everything else do not usually desire more of it than they possess. In this, it is unlikely that everyone is mistaken. It indicates rather that the power of judging well and of distinguishing the true from the false, which is what we properly call good sense or reason, is naturally equal in all men. And consequently that the diversity of our opinions does not arise because some of us are more reasonable than others, but solely because we direct our thoughts along different paths and do not attend to the same things.

11:13 Wes: Do you agree with that, or is that a mocking tone that you were.

11:16 Seth: No, no. I think the first part of it can initially be read both directly or in some sense sarcastically. And you can read the first sentence and think of it as something written by Descartes or something written by H.L. mencken. It's this idea that the one thing that nobody thinks they're bad at, the one thing that nobody thinks they need more of, right, is common sense. The one thing nobody thinks they're bad at is judging or what have you, and that you can look at it that say, well, it's entirely possible that you can be an ironist about it and think that everybody is mistaken.

Or in Descartes more optimistic view, you can think that it's unlikely that everybody is mistaken and take it as the basis for believing in this democratic principle of reason that there is this gift we're given. We find out ultimately it's given to us by God. But basically that all human beings have the capacity for judgment and that that in itself is an emancipatory. It's not just democratic from a political perspective, but it's also emancipatory that you do not have to rely on authorities. You do not necessarily need to be born into a certain caste.

And there's something beautiful and poetic about that sentiment.

12:33 Mark: But the very next sentence, it's not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to apply it well. The greatest souls are capable of the greatest vices as well as the greatest virtues. And those who proceed but very slowly can make greater progress if they always follow the right path and those who hurry and stray from it. So the second part of that sounds like his method. Slowly and carefully. But the greatest souls are capable of the greatest vices as well as the greatest virtues. This is to say that while I just said it seems like everybody thinks they have good sense. Clearly good sense, and one way of taking it would be to move slowly and carefully and not tumble along. But I think he thinks that tumbling along is one of the main ways that people are not attending to the same things and thus being foolish.

13:18 Seth: Yeah.

13:19 Dylan: And in fact, isn't he saying that good sense is not equally distributed, even if the capacity of reason is equally distributed and it's the cultivation of reason that leads to good sense and that is not equally attained?

13:31 Mark: That seems reasonable in the sentence he just says, which we properly call good sense or reason. Like he doesn't distinguish those two things, but I like your distinction.

13:39 Wes: How do we reconcile this with the fact that people are idiots? That's what's really going on.

13:44 Seth: How do we reconcile that people do bad things? If you think of it more along the classical ancient lines, it's not ignorance as it's been characterized before, but basically attention or application.

13:57 Dylan: Wouldn't it be also ignorance to know

13:59 Seth: the good is to do the good?

14:00 Dylan: But at the end of this sentence he says the differences arise from. Because we conduct our thoughts by different ways and do not consider the same things.

14:09 Seth: So that. Well, I think it's worth dwelling on that for a couple minutes just to distinguish whether Is this different from the ancient conception of virtue or is it a twist?

14:21 Wes: What I think he's talking about here is we can be reasonable, but we also reason in highly motivated ways. Right? And we have all kinds of irrational stuff that tugs at any chain of reasoning that we're engaged in. Our vanity, our prejudices. And of course there's a lot of people are really, really bad actually at reasoning. That's just a fact, because I think a lot about how we do that politically with the kinds of bad reasoning that you see all the time politically. And people who are really, really intelligent, but the way they're thinking is highly motivated.

And so they can get into all sorts of fancy, sophisticated errors. But I think the way a lot of people would talk about this today is in terms of cognitive biases and confirmation bias. There's a ton of them. But in a very general level, we don't just have reason, but we have eros and passionate side and that shapes our thinking substantially. So that may be what he means here. We go down different paths.

15:23 Mark: I like you're bringing in this modern stuff, you know, the science war stuff that we were just talking about, because he's claiming in this, that by making this distinction between moving slowly and carefully and using the common sense that all of us have, the reason that all of us have cultivating that, that we can achieve agreement, that we can be just objectively right about basic things. And it's just those people who are sort of pretentious and fly ahead of what correct reason, slow deliberation would inform us all as a group. That's when disagreements appear. So he is claiming not that everybody biased by things, but just people who let themselves be carried away by this or that are being biased. And we all have the capacity this common sense to strip away all that deceptive stuff and get to something common and true.

16:14 Seth: I'm not sure he would subscribe to a consensus model, though. That's one of the things. If we throw back to the discussion around Boyle and Hobbes, his method is not a consensus method. In fact, it's kind of the antithesis of that. It's a social method in the sense that the individual takes on the responsibility for thinking through things themselves, but without accepting uncritically things from authority. But I would imagine that it's discursive. So seeing the results of other people's rational inquiry and experimentation is part of the entire process. There's a validation that goes on.

16:56 Dylan: There's the part that Mark emphasized, which is that our reason engaged in properly and solely will get us to certainty and truth, because the chain of reasoning will remain clear and distinct along the way. But I would add to it that he does embrace a fair bit of discovery and speculation, speculation that should always be grounded in being as certain as you can thinking it through. But he admits to being able to be wrong and in fact embraces a kind of significant pragmatism, particularly in morality, but also in terms of his approach to science, that you could end up finding out that you're wrong about something, and that's because you got closer to the truth.

17:42 Wes: The important thing is the form of explanation. Right. So he gives his explanation of blood, how it circulates and it involves heat. Right. It's weird. You read this and someone who's trying to be very, very meticulous and very careful, and there's lots, of course, lots of other things which aren't right. But the main thing is, it's just that, as he very directly points out at different parts, that what's important is the idea that you can give these material. And he thinks mechanical everything could be reduced to mechanics. But these material explanations of things that are fully causal, there's no magic, there's no appeal to something outside of this world. And if you knew all the causes, all of these material causes, you would know what the thing was and understand it and have knowledge of it. And that's a very radical move away from Scholasticism.

18:32 Mark: No reference to teleology, right?

18:34 Wes: Yeah.

18:35 Mark: Mechanism over teleology. Yeah.

18:37 Seth: Is that the distinction? Is that the move away from Scholasticism?

18:40 Wes: Yeah, I think that's part of it. I mean, the other part is the insight, as we saw in Rules for the Direction of the Mind. And I mentioned Lucretius as well, this idea that we can talk about things, we can explain things quantitatively in ways where there's qualitative diversity. Right. We could talk about color in terms of just spatio temporal particles, let's say. And the spatiotemporality explains color. And we don't need to say, hey, it's red because it's got little red homunculi, and that's what makes it red. That's part of the form of explanation as well. And I think we could say lots of other things about that.

19:17 Mark: I don't know enough about his actual scientific explanations to say whether it is completely devoid of teleology. For instance, our relation towards excellence and just God's relation toward everything in the world, you know, he's not a deist. Where God hit The first domino, and then everything ran like clockwork. He's more like Spinoza, who I'm sure was taking it from Descartes that God's essence is supporting every link of the chain. And that seems to break, you know, once you get to the metaphysical level, then that seems to break the purely mechanistic, you don't need that.

19:53 Wes: But he says in this text, though, that. He says, I'm not saying this, I'm just saying it's not inconceivable it's this way because he doesn't want to get in trouble. But basically, you don't need God to have created the world the way it is, or created man, human beings the way they are. You could just start with basic matter and then the laws of nature, and it could all develop from there. That's what he says explicitly in this text. So, yeah, you could give a mechanistic causal explanation of all of that stuff. And he wants to say, there's nothing really sacrilegious about that.

It's not a big deal whether God just puts all the stuff there and then the laws and lets it take care of itself, or if he is more of an interventionist. And then he says, you know, God does have a sustaining role, but his sustaining role comes in through the laws of nature. I don't remember Spinoza well enough, but I suspect they're probably very similar in that sense. There is a metaphysical layer to this as well, but it kind of supports the scientific way of thinking.

20:49 Dylan: The paragraph is, in Part 5, paragraph 45, he says, Nevertheless, I do not want to infer from all these things that this world has been created in the manner that I proposed. For it is indeed more probable that God has made it from the beginning, such as it was to be. But it is certain, and it is an opinion commonly received among the theologians, that the action by which he now conserves it is entirely the same as that by which he created it, so that although he had not given it at the beginning any other form than chaos, provided that, having established the laws of nature, he lent to it his assent to act as it customarily does.

We can believe without doing injury to the miracle of creation, that by that means alone all the things that are purely material could have rendered themselves in time, such as we see them at present. And their nature is much easier to conceive when. When we see them begin to grow little by little in this way, than when we only consider them as fully complete.

21:49 Wes: I thought of this, Dylan, did you hear about this big Simulation they did that took a year. And all these processors about the universe. It involves a visualization of galaxy formation. Oh. And so yeah, I immediately thought of that in the sense of the sort of. Yeah, the chaotic matter subject to the laws of nature sort of forming itself into something orderly.

22:11 Dylan: And that in fact he makes the leap that that is way easier to understand. Starting from chaos plus some laws and getting where we're at is way easier to understand than animals showing up on the earth. He's right about that.

22:25 Mark: I did listen to our episode two on Descartes meditations. And Wes, at the time you were very. A little dismissive of Descartes religiosity, that he was just doing what he had to to be published, you know, in the political environment that he was. But really. And this is, this seems to be what you're saying now, you don't need that part. I mean that maybe it is just window dressing. Whereas I'm kind of taking a little more at his word, I think, and am looking for opportunities. For instance. You know, even if you think what science gives us is descriptive laws of nature which are all causal, there's still something fundamentally inexplicable about causality that gives room for like when one billiard ball hits another and the second one moves.

Why does that happen? Well, because God makes it happen. It's just if God makes all the causes happen, if God is the thing that knits together all the little pieces of the universe, then God is not specially coming in and doing the miracles. God is just all over the place. And so from a scientific point of view, you don't need to worry about it. Like you don't bring up God specially in this kind of explanation, but not this kind of explanation. There are no, as he said at the end of rules, there are no. Maybe this was in here. There are no particularly occult special sorts of causality that would need more divine intervention than others.

23:48 Wes: You know, this goes back to our existence of God episode. There has to be some sort of necessary being in the sense that the causal chain comes to an end and you have something that you can't explain causally. It's just absurd or irrational at bottom. Right. That could be the most fundamental particle which can't be explained in terms of any other components. It just is what it is. Or it could be the universe itself might be the necessary being. And you're not looking for. An atheist might make that argument. You're not looking for a God, a creator beyond that, but it also might be God himself. So you might appeal to that as the unmoved mover. And you could insert that in to account for Mark, as you put it, the mysterious nature of causality.

24:28 Dylan: There's a deep parallel here, I think, with the way he talks about morality and the pragmatic attitude he has. Pragmatic and arguably sort of conservative attitude he has towards it. That it basically. I don't really. I'm not really sure about the answers to all these things, about what I ought to do, but I'm going to have a provisional morality. He's going to obey the rules and customs. He's going to be firm and resolute in his actions, except he's going to be pragmatic about that. He's going to have a kind of stoicism about his ability to influence things. And he's going to sort of make a kind of balance between not being a skeptic in the sense of completely doubting things all the time.

25:06 Wes: Except methodologically.

25:08 Dylan: Yes, except methodologically. And I think that that provisionality that he has about morality is exactly the way he approaches his science. Yeah.

25:18 Wes: We should talk about his stoicism at

25:20 Dylan: some point in terms of the actual facts of the matter. He's very strong and convinced about the power of reason to make the world shine brightly before his own eyes.

25:32 Seth: But not without a lot of hard work.

25:34 Dylan: Yes. And following a process that is, I'll call it, in some ways, open. Right. Again, I point back to that first paragraph that you pointed to, Seth, that at some level, whatever conclusions you make, somebody else has to be able to see it. And I think that's what you see in little bits and pieces, the example he gives out of the world regarding the circulation of the blood. We probably won't go into it in detail, but that would be the example of something like an argument that Mark was asking about. And it's not an argument philosophically. It's a demonstration of the method, about the way in which you would present a description or articulation of how something works in the world. A better example, ultimately, would be like something out of geometry or dioptrics.

26:17 Mark: You said the ethics was provisional. I think we should make that context clear. So the first three parts of the six parts here. The first one, he's talking this. We are just right at the beginning of it. It's a meditation. It's pretty short on education and just, you know, his own experience. He's determined that he thinks better if he, you know, he didn't find his schooling all that useful in terms of he sort of learned everything that was thrown at him. He's a great student. But he found in part two here that he wants to pull down his own house to rebuild it, right?

Not believe anything that was just been told to him, but use only his own fundamental intuitions, his own reason to build up a set of beliefs that he can then live with and feel very confident about. And then part three is, well, while I'm ripping my house down, I still have to have a way to act. I can't just. I don't believe in anything. Ah, so it's my provisional code of conduct. While I'm ripping my house down, I'm going to be very conservative, I'm going to be stoic. I'm going to obey the laws and customs of my country. I'm going to change myself rather than changing the world.

All this kind of stuff that we've heard about through the ancients, all this

27:27 Wes: comes out of ancient skepticism and Sextus Empiricus, who he's influenced by.

27:32 Mark: And then part four was basically the Meditations, but he doesn't then return to ethics, strangely, you know, the rest of it. Part five has this thing about the heart we were just talking about.

27:41 Dylan: It's explicitly a summary of the book that he's saying that he's not going to publish the world.

27:46 Mark: Yes. And six is sort of just a long commentary on why he's not publishing that book and sort of what he's trying to do as a thinker and how much he thinks other people could help him with versus what he's going to leave to be published after his death? That's the longest. And you can tell me whether you found that the least interesting. I actually took quite a few notes on that part, so I. There was still some meat in there. So does he feel like he just hasn't discovered enough to actually build a morality from scratch so that this provisional morality ends up just being what he ends up staying with for his whole life and what he thinks the end point will be?

Or is it more like the Meditations, where, well, I'll put aside my belief in the external world, but after the Meditations, I get everything back. And so I believe in God and I believe in the external world. I believe in science. Maybe the same thing goes with morality that he's saying. I'm just going to do these provisionally because they seem reasonable, they seem cautious. But then after he does his method, you know, maybe I'm just filling in the blanks here. Well, okay, those things that I took Provisionally, I think I was pretty smart to do that.

I think that was as good as anybody can possibly do.

28:50 Wes: Yeah, he doesn't publish. There's nothing big on that. Descartes does with ethics. Right.

28:55 Dylan: I kind of want to say, I don't know that I'd go as far as he thinks, well, this is the best anyone can do. It's not an optimization problem. My gut feeling, if you stack up the amount of stuff he wrote about the world and math and physics is way taller than his metaphysics book. Just the number of words and the amount of hours he spent. And if you read the end of this book, you know the next thing he was going to write was writing at the end of his life was on the passions of the soul. And he's utterly captivated by the possibility of medicine solving problems to improve human life. I think that he just thinks provisional morality is fine. He's just not nearly as interested in it as solving other kinds of problems in the world.

29:37 Wes: Yeah, he decided to do science and he is very impressed with stoicism. You know, all the stuff about not worrying about being famous and sort of resisting, you know. He even says it takes a lot of meditation to resist that frame of mind where he's worried about status and money and things like that, and just to be anonymous and although he also does say, actually he did kind of become famous anyway, even though he didn't try, which is one of the reasons why he's publishing. But it seems to be more a matter of just what he was interested in.

30:11 Mark: Do you take him at his word with this modesty? I feel like he's sort of protesting too much about this, going back to the near the beginning of Part one. For my part, I've never presumed my mind to be in any way more perfect than that of the ordinary man. Indeed, I've often wished to have as quick a wit, or as sharp or distinct an imagination or as prompt a memory as some others. This is his modesty.

30:33 Wes: It's hard to imagine a French intellectual actually being this modest. Sorry.

30:42 Seth: No, it's so true. So true.

30:44 Wes: That's part of what I think. Why it seems so insincere.

30:48 Mark: Right. It's just so thickly laid throughout the entire essay of this is just the thing that I'm working on, and I hope it could be of use to somebody else. But I guess it's my duty as a human being to publish at least some of it. I mean, I'm disinclined to write books by my natural laziness. And so the being scared of what happened to Galileo, it provided an excuse for me not to put out my full treatise. But I have to put out this much because people expect it of me now. And I'm not going to work too hard to get a fame and a huge, great reputation, but I don't want to have a bad reputation.

I don't want people think, since they've been talking to me personally, that I've been working on this whole thing and that it never came to anything, or that I was lying to them the whole time. It's just an interesting psychological picture throughout this whole thing. I see it as, no, he actually does think he's the smartest person on the planet, but he recognizes that's an obnoxious thing to think, and so he's struggling with his ego throughout. That's the way I read it.

31:41 Wes: Yeah, I think that he probably does think he's the smartest person on the planet, and he is. But also he knows it's not good for him to think that way. And he tries, he's really trying very hard to tamp that down.

31:55 Seth: Ah, that must be very difficult to know that you're the smartest person on Earth and know that.

32:01 Wes: To think that it's not easy to be Descartes.

32:04 Seth: No, I can't imagine that it was. There's an aspect of this, it came to me while I was reading it, that made me think less of a philosophical treatise in the way we typically think of them as so much as something more like Montaigne's essays or Pascal's Pensées. You know, he's very clear about saying that this is my own account of my own experience that I'm sharing with people, just so they can see what my journey was. And if it helps them, great. And if they can share with me something where they see that I'm in error or whatever, that would make me happy, you know, that I'm just trying to improve myself by sharing my experience with other people.

And so it reads much more like Montaigne's essays than it does like the Meditations on First Philosophy. It's narrative, it's autobiographical, it's full of rhetorical flourishes that I find really, you know, he talks about building the house. He's trying to paint a picture using the metaphor of some kind of an edifice, that he's trying to tear down this edifice of knowledge while simultaneously maintaining some kind of integrity and ability, pragmatism or practicality in the world, and then rebuilding that edifice from scratch. It's really beautifully written and it's a rhetorical masterwork, I should say, of using metaphors to explain what the process is.

But it's not, strictly speaking, a step by step premise, you know, scholastic or even quasi scholastic argument that we expect from Descartes.

33:44 Mark: He says it's a discourse, not a treatise. A treatise would have to lay out the reasoning. This is just a discourse, it's an introduction. He's talking about the reasoning, he's not giving us the reasoning for reasons that you've. Somebody had said that. He's demonstrating it through the discussion of the blood and through these essays that we didn't read, the optics and etc.

34:02 Dylan: It's not my intention here to teach the method that each should follow to conduct his reason well, but only to show in what fashion I have tried to conduct my own. Those who take it upon themselves to give precepts must regard themselves as more capable than those to whom the they give them. And if they fail in the least thing, they are blameable. But since I offer this writing only as a history, or if you prefer, a fable in which among other examples that can be imitated, there will perhaps be found also many others that it will not be right to follow, I hope that it will be useful to some without bringing harm to anyone and that everyone will be grateful for my frankness.

34:39 Seth: Thanks, Descartes.

34:40 Mark: I think it's very useful to read this alongside Bacon, because in Bacon we kind of didn't expect philosophy like we knew, kind of like Darwin, you know, it's going to be a lot of observations, it's going to be a lot of science, it's going to be a lot of setting out methods and if he has a few sentences sprinkled here and there that like, oh, that's overtly philosophical, he's getting a little metaphysical there, then we're grateful. Whereas because Descartes has been presented to us as this founding father of philosophy, then you know, the little bit that we get dished up of him, we get the Meditations and there's a little bit more in here that's not in the Meditations, or this sort of is used to complement the Meditations.

Of course, I wasn't aware of the rules and how systematic and rich that is, but if we just recalibrate our expectations of how actually philosophical, how metaphysical Descartes is going to be and think that his heart is much more like you were saying, Dylan, in a Bacon like person. I mean, I agree that this particular essay, Seth is like Montaigne or something, but Descartes not like Montaigne, because Montaigne wrote a crapload of those essays. Whereas, like, I think this is the only one right, from Descartes that reads. I mean, the Meditations actually also reads a little more like this than like a systematic treatise.

35:57 Dylan: But he structures it like an autobiography.

35:59 Wes: Right.

36:00 Seth: There's something to that form, obviously, that these guys connected to. He could have written a traditional scholastic treatise. Descartes could have written, like Spinoza, but he didn't. And it's not just because he was French.

36:14 Mark: So I guess one of his best known works is this. What's it called? Objections and Replies. I actually don't see it in this particular.

36:22 Dylan: He engaged in a whole bunch of responses regarding. I think it was.

36:25 Wes: Yeah, the Meditations includes tons of back and forth.

36:29 Mark: Yeah, I just. I was just trying to remember what the actual formal name for that, you know, sub work that comes after the Meditations. But it's funny that he did all that because here in book six, he's like, I don't know if I need to get other people involved in my philosophy. I've almost never encountered a critic of my views who did not seem to be either less rigorous or less impartial than myself. Nor have I ever observed that any previously unknown truth has been discovered by means of the disputations. Maybe that's it. Disputations and responses or something.

Practice in the schools. For so long as each side strives for victory, more effort is put into establishing plausibility than in weighing reasons for and against. And those who have long been good advocates do not necessarily go on to make better judges. So this is very much just like what he said in the Rules about Aristotelian logic in general, that it's good for rhetorically, for sort of proving something that you've already decided. But in terms of actually figuring out truth, some sort of argument back and forth is not at all helpful. But at the same time, I think even later in this work, he's like, you know, as we were saying, if you find anything wrong in my work, it'll do me a favor for you to point it out.

So he's inviting, even though he has this very arrogant sounding thing like, yeah, none of the other critics have ever been helpful to me, but maybe you will be.

37:39 Wes: I mean, he's pointing to a real problem with an inquiry, right, which is that we talked in the beginning about the equal distribution of reason, but the fact that people are also irrational. And there's a sort of gravitational force that's exerted on that ability that leads them in different directions. And one of them is just their interactions with other people and the need for. If you're arguing in the schools and you're trying to make a name for yourself, or if you're professor these days and you're trying to make a name for yourself or a writer, that sort of thing begins to interfere.

And then your sense of being ally to a political party or to some group. Our relationships with people exert enormous pressure on our reasoning. And so that's one reason to do what Descartes did, which is to go be alone for a long time. And also not to publish, not to tweet, not to get in squabbles with people or get in circumstances where you're afraid of getting canceled, like Galileo if you do the wrong thing.

38:41 Mark: That cancel culture of the Middle Ages

38:44 Wes: and on the other hand of early modernity. On the other hand, you need people in cooperation to increase, you know, what he discovers. Ultimately, you know, he needs help with his experiments. He can't do it all alone. He's not just going to be able to reinvent the world from himself. It's going to have to be a collaborative effort with humanity. So it's kind of a dilemma. You need people for inquiry. You can't live with them, but you. But you can't live without them.

39:16 Mark: Paradox.