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

0:00 Dylan: I forgot to mention, I forgot that this was true, that the Discourse on Method is his first book published.

0:07 Mark: Yeah, I think we should do some drilling into the text, maybe spend as long as we want on part four, which is his condensation of what later turns up as the meditations, and then go back to some of the details of the ethics that he agrees with. And then if we accomplish those two things, we can just see what else people want to pull out. Sound okay?

0:27 Seth: Yeah, that sounds good. Can I just interject one thing though? Before you were talking about him traveling the world and doing this, We've missed out. He didn't share. He might have journaled, but he did not publish or share. Hopefully it's somewhere in Descartes writings, his notes from his nine years of roaming the world. We missed out on an amazing travelogue that I think in thinking about Herodotus or Thucydides, might have vastly enriched our experience of a time frame. And also I think would have shed a little more light on this treatise really as wisdom literature almost or history, as much as it is about philosophy and knowledge.

1:06 Wes: Let me give a quote on that. Are These paragraph numberings, Dylan. Yep, because it seems like there's multiple paragraphs of them. But anyway, this is nine. That is why, as soon as age permitted me to emerge from the supervision of my teachers, I completely abandoned the study of letters and resolving to search for no knowledge other than the word what could be found within myself, or else in the great book of the world. I spent the rest of my youth traveling, seeing courts and armies, mingling with peoples of diverse temperaments and circumstances, gathering various experiences, testing myself in the encounters that fortune offered me, and everywhere engaging in such reflection upon the things that presented themselves that I was able to derive some profit from them.

And then after that. For it seemed to me that I could find much more truth in the reasonings that each person makes concerning matters that are important to him and whose outcome ought to cost him dearly later on if he has judged badly than in those reasonings engaged in by a man of letters in his study, which touch on speculations that produce no effect and are of no other consequence to him, except perhaps that the more they are removed from common sense, the more pride he will take in them, for he will have to employ that much more wit and ingenuity in attempting to render them plausible.

And then eventually he talks about going and deciding to be isolated and doing that in a city, I forget where, and managing to.

2:28 Dylan: Isn't it the part two, he went to Germany.

2:30 Wes: Yeah, this is in actually very. End of part three, the very last sentence, he says so. And it is exactly eight years ago that this desire made me resolve to take my leave of all those places where I might have acquaintances and to retire here to a country where the long duration of the war. War has led to the establishment of such well ordered discipline that the armies quartered here seem to serve only to make one enjoy the fruits of peace with even greater security. And where in the midst of the crowd of a great and very busy people who are more concerned with their own affairs than they are curious about those of others, I have been able, without lacking any of the amenities to be found in the most bustling cities, to live as solitary and as withdrawn a life as I could in the remotest desert, Descartes can write a long sentence. Let's give that to him.

3:17 Seth: Yeah, no, he's a beautiful writer. But before we go and get into the tedious details of the meditation, the argument of the meditations, I mean, let's take a moment and respect the fact that so granted whatever privileges he had that enabled him to live the life he did he studied. He saw a limitation to what studies could provide him. And so he became a man of the world, a man of experience. He spent a decade traveling the world, different cultures, fighting. He joined the army, he, he was in wars. He went to see what the world was like. And at the end of a certain tenure of that, he said, okay, I'm going to retire to solitude and reflect upon those experiences.

And so he had the academic scholastic aspect, he had the actual lived experience, and now he's going to sit back and reflect upon them. I'm not saying that this is something that everybody should or could aspire to, but he is awfully pre possessed for a 30 something at this time. Right. Or at that time when he made the decision. I'm sure he left the school in his 20s and spent about a decade. It's awfully impressive for somebody to try to go see the world after having tried to learn something in books and then to retire in solitude and reflect and write.

Very unusual guy and very impressive, aside from the specific accomplishments in geometry and mathematics or what have you, Just the way he lived his life is unique and interesting.

4:52 Mark: Yeah, it would be fun to track down some of his letters about the travels and things because I really like to humanize him. And I think this text gets closer because you come out of the rules thinking this is a guy, even if he were traveling cross country, he wants to live as if he were in a remote desert and he's going to look just at the little thing that he can see really clearly in front of him and he's never going to get beyond thinking of things very calmly and literally. But no, it seems, you know, in the fact that he has this ethics section, even though he says it's provisional and he did all this traveling and the description there of trying to see how different people deal with what's most important to them, like, it makes him seem like a much more generally humanistic thinker, that he might have commentary on all this stuff at the same time.

I then look at what he says in book six here. Trying to think what the master would say about some new problem is for mediocre minds. I guess we can't extrapolate or speculate.

5:51 Wes: Wait, what's the context of that?

5:53 Mark: Part six. He's talking in general about how he will work with other people and how people will take up his legacy and things like that. And so we trying to take his philosophy of science basically and apply that more rigorously than he sets out in here to problems of ethics or politics or What? You know, as interesting as it would be to talk to the guy about that. And obviously Spinoza in a Cartesian platform had a lot to say in those areas, but Descartes just should probably leave him at what he actually said. Part four.

6:24 Seth: Part four.

6:27 Mark: Dylan, what's your translation there on beginning of Part four?

6:31 Dylan: I do not know whether I should tell you about the first meditations that I made there, for they are so metaphysical and so uncommon that they will perhaps not be to everyone's taste. Nevertheless, I find myself in some manner compelled to speak of them in order that it may be judged whether the foundations that I have laid are sufficiently firm. I noticed for a long time that as regard to morals, it is sometimes necessary to follow opinions that one knows to be quite uncertain, just as if they were indubitable, as has been said above. But since I now desire to devote myself solely to the quest for truth, I thought it necessary that I do the very opposite and that I reject as absolutely false everything in which I could imagine the least doubt in order to see whether afterwards there do not remain something among my beliefs that was entirely indubitable.

So, because our senses sometimes deceive us, I chose to suppose that there was nothing that was such as they make us imagine it. And because there are men who make mistakes in reasoning even about the simplest matters in geometry and commit fallacies, judging that I was as subject to error as anyone else, I rejected as false all the reasonings that I had formerly taken as demonstrations. And finally, considering that all the same thoughts that we have while awake can come to us also while we are sleeping, while there being any that are then true, I resolve to feign that all the things that ever entered my mind were not more true than the illusions of my dreams.

But immediately after I noticed that while I thus chose to think that everything was false, it was necessarily true that I, who was thinking this was something. And I observed that this truth, I think, therefore I am, was so firm and so assured that all the most extravagant suppositions of the skeptics were incapable of shaking it. I judged that I could accept it without scruple as the first principle of the philosophy that I was seeking. Speaking.

8:21 Mark: Yeah, my translation is very similar to that, but when it gets to that key sentence is I am thinking, therefore I exist. Oh, God, that's just not as snappy. That's probably more literal.

8:32 Wes: That's obnoxious. Yeah. Some analytic philosophy scholar who.

8:36 Seth: Yeah.

8:38 Wes: Oh, man.

8:40 Seth: Let's sidetrack for a minute to have Wes explain Why analytic philosophers are terrible translators.

8:46 Wes: No, it's a bad. I shouldn't have said analytic. But it's some scholar who I'm sure thinks lots and lots of things follow from a translation. But just the idea that you're going to take something famous like that and.

8:59 Mark: Well, it's not, I think in general, it's. I am thinking right now. It's examining, for I exist. That's more precise than am, because.

9:08 Wes: Yeah, exactly.

9:09 Mark: That's how the analytic philosophers talk.

9:11 Wes: All right, leave out the analytics part. I'm not against analytic philosophers. I'm against all philosophers poking the bear.

9:19 Seth: Poking the bear is so fun.

9:21 Mark: A Heideggerian translator. Let's see.

9:24 Seth: I will say this. The translations mirror themselves close enough that it's not worth having a dispute about it.

9:29 Dylan: It's the kind of thing, just because it's such a famous way of saying it that it might warrant a footnote to talk about ways of interpreting progressive verbs and non progressive verbs and stuff like that. But it reeks of just a absurdly nerdy fetish about making it.

9:47 Mark: What do you think we're doing right now? This seems like an absurdly nerdy fetish.

9:53 Wes: Well, now I'm wondering how he put this in French, because the Latin is cogito ergo sum, which isn't. I am thinking necessarily, that is the simple present.

10:02 Seth: I think the phrase originally appeared in French as Je pense, donc je suis in his Discourse on Method.

10:11 Wes: So that could be the simple present je pense. It's not present progressive.

10:16 Seth: Right?

10:16 Mark: It's not. Yeah.

10:17 Wes: I don't know.

10:18 Mark: I don't want to read my translation then.

10:20 Seth: And the next partially examined grammar.

10:23 Mark: Next I examined it. So I'll keep reading this translation. See if you hate it. Next I examined attentively what I was. I saw that while I could pretend that I had no body and that there was no world and no place for me to be in, I could not, for all that, pretend that I did not exist. I saw, on the contrary, that from the mere fact that I thought of doubting the truth of other things, it followed quite evidently and certainly that I existed. Whereas if I had merely ceased thinking, even if everything else I had ever imagined had been true, I should have had no reason to believe that I existed.

From this I knew I was a substance whose whole essence or nature is simply to think, and which does not require any place or depend on any material thing in order to exist. That's terrible reasoning. But accordingly, this I that is the soul by which I am what I am is entirely distinct from the body, and indeed is easier to know than the body, and would not fail to be whatever it is, even if the body did not exist.

11:16 Dylan: So you're less impressed with his reasoning for his dualism.

11:19 Wes: He's much more specific in the Meditations. Right. And it's a separate step. Right. The I exist. And he'll say, all right, I'm not saying that. The. When I say I exist, I'm not prejudicing that towards it being substance. But then I goes on, and he gives a separate argument to say my existence is existence as a substance.

11:40 Mark: So do you think he's referring here to an argument which he's not actually laying out, which would be very in keeping with the style of this whole work?

11:47 Wes: Had he already written the Meditations and not published it?

11:50 Mark: I don't think so, no.

11:52 Dylan: The Meditations, were they published the Meditations in 1641.

11:56 Mark: 1641. This is 1637, and in the intro I was seeing that. But the discourse maybe represents where he was at by 1633. So I don't really know what that means in terms of when he actually wrote this.

12:08 Dylan: Yeah, 1633 was when he finished Le Monde.

12:10 Seth: But he tells us, living here amidst this great mass of busy people who are more concerned with their own affairs than curious about those of others, I've been able to lead a life as solitary and withdrawn as if I were in their most remote desert. I do not know whether I should tell you of the first Meditations that I had there, or. For they are perhaps too metaphysical and uncommon for everyone's taste. Descartes settled in Holland in 1629, even

12:38 Mark: though he didn't write the meditations published until 1641, presumably before he even put pen to paper. Even though the text of the Meditation sounds like. Let me just sit down and think about this for the first time. Like, no, he'd been obsessively thinking about this for years and years.

12:54 Seth: It sounds like he has the Meditations when he's living that solitary life. Maybe he writes them down later, but he's summarizing what is essentially the Meditations here.

13:05 Mark: Yep, the Meditations that he had, rather than the Meditations that he wrote. So there's nothing else we can really pull out in terms of an argument for this separate. I don't know. I feel like it's. Maybe unless we had read secondary sources or gone back to the Meditations, we should not dwell more on what looks like just blatantly fallacious reasoning. No, he's summing up reasoning that happened elsewhere.

13:27 Wes: We did talk about this quite a bit in our episode. I haven't re listened to it. You know, we can refer listeners back to episode two if you want to hear us have a fuller discussion of this.

13:37 Mark: Much more spirited, youthful.

13:40 Wes: That's right.

13:41 Mark: Dylan was so young. He was a fetus. He wasn't even on the podcast. Who wants to read the next? Wes, what's your translation of after the third paragraph there?

13:51 Wes: How much of this are we reading? Where?

13:53 Mark: I don't know. The whole thing is only five pages, but you know, it seems like, okay, why not?

14:00 Wes: After this I considered in general what is needed for a proposition to be true and certain. For since I had just found one of them that I knew to be such, I thought I ought also to know in what this certitude consists. I might just paraphrase here. And having noticed that there is nothing at all in this, I think therefore I am. That assures me that I am speaking the truth. Except that I see very clearly that in order to think it is necessary to exist. I judge that I could take as a general rule that the things we can see very clearly and distinctly are all true, but that there is merely some difficulty in properly discerning which are those that we distinctly conceive.

14:39 Dylan: There's the rub.

14:41 Wes: Yeah,

14:44 Mark: that seems like he does think that that's an argument. Here's an example of one thing that is as certain as anything could be. And so why don't we just define certainty as to be this kind of thing? Yeah, obviously in the Rules he came up with basically the same clear and distinct perceptions yielding truth based on considering mathematics. So there are lots of ways into this same insight.

15:08 Wes: I mean, I think the thing that he thinks is most the clearest and distinctest thing other than the self and God. Right. Is extension. I think we got at that. Right. In the Rules episode, the I think therefore I am, you have a kind of a transcendental argument. Right. It's similar in form to say, Aristotle's proof, the law of non contradiction. And it's just that if everything that I'm thinking is a delusion or is an error, even the idea of the self, you know, one might say, well, the self is a construction or concoction and I'm deluded about it. But then that delusion, that act of constructing just is the Self, that just becomes the self. So you can always back your way into this assertion. But when you get to things like extension, it seems like we really are doing something different. I'M trying to think out loud whether we can really extend this one sort of certainty to anything else.

16:03 Mark: That's interesting to try to apply what he described in the Rules is that if you think I as a thinking thing, am a simple.

16:10 Seth: Right.

16:11 Mark: That's why he says I'm a substance whose whole essence in nature is simply to think. Because he's applying what he said before that just like you can't know what a simple line, you know, extension itself pictured as a line. When you just picture that you know everything there is to know about it. So I think he thinks that the fact that there is thinking going on. That then the locus of this thinking really is something that's just that simple. It might be in relation to other things. So there might be an underlying substrate, you know, a brain that it's related to in some way.

But as far as knowing the thing itself, the essence of the thing, it is entirely transparent. He's seeing it. That's interesting to imagine what is as complicated as consciousness as a logical simple. In the next paragraph he's going to go on, or very soon, to consider God the same way. To also be a simple thing that we completely understand just by knowing its definition. We know all the essential properties about it.

17:08 Dylan: It's comprehended by our understanding, which is the activity of our mind, not via our senses or our imagination.

17:15 Mark: Let's go on there. Next, reflecting on the fact that I was doubting and that consequently my being was not wholly perfect. For I saw clearly that it is a greater perfection to know than to doubt. It sounds like things like knowing about knowing and knowing about doubting. That those are also things that the understanding can just turnover in your mind and you see all the parts of it. You don't have to understand how to use either of those words just to understand everything about them, or at least to know them to the degree that you can say that knowing is more perfect than doubting. Then I decided to inquire into the source of my ability to think of something more perfect than I was. And I recognized very clearly that this had to come from some nature that was in fact more perfect.

17:56 Wes: Right? So here he gets into one of his proofs of the existence of God. Where to have the idea of God in us. It's still interesting because it's still this causal kind of explanation where he's trying to say that, okay, there's an idea, it must have some source, it must be caused by something. And then setting up this principle that it could only be caused by something more perfect. Or equally perfect. And so if we're going to have an idea of God, only God could cause it.

18:25 Mark: I kind of like the fact that he doesn't use words like transcendental. The reason you'd use that is because, you know, as Kant, when he thought through this, then he thought, oh, causality is something within the world of experience. So if you're talking about what makes the world of experience itself possible, you would not want to say the I causes the thoughts. You'd want to say there's some other relation that is outside of our actual perception. Just like we see that one billiard ball hits the other, we just see that pattern. We don't see the actual motive force that connects the two. We also don't see the motive force between whatever the self is and the thoughts that are coming out. So there's no. Actually I'm not sure that that's the same point, but I was wanted to relate those two, that Descartes is just saying it's just causal. He's not beset by those problems.

19:13 Wes: Yeah, it's an odd argument.

19:14 Dylan: It all relies on this notion of perfection and imperfection and completeness and incompleteness.

19:19 Mark: That's as weird as I find it. Having read the rules makes me feel like I understand it much better why he's saying this. I just thought it was like some bizarre stuff he had inherited from the scholastics.

19:32 Wes: Well, explain it.

19:33 Mark: And that still could be the case. You know, this whole why you would think that something else being more perfect than you in the world would have had to cause your notion of perfection like that seems truly bizarre to a. If you're just thinking about things.

19:47 Wes: But what about the rules helps?

19:50 Mark: Well, just thinking about the discussion of simples, that if you understand a simple, then you understand its relation to other simples. And so yeah, again, there might be something mysterious. You don't have to call it causality, but you might as well, because causality is fundamentally mysterious. All that science reports are patterns. All that thought comes up with is the best it can do in doing science is coming up with patterns of relation. And so having a notion, a conceptual relation between doubting and knowing, for instance, and seeing that knowing is more perfect than doubting, those are just given right there in the definitions.

He's trying to say, that's exactly the same logic I'm using. If you buy that I understand knowing, I understand doubting, I understand therefore that one is more perfect than the other. Therefore the fact that I have a doubting nature, or you know, there's A lack in me, There's a doubt in me. Therefore there must be something greater that I'm referring to that I'm striving for. I mean, this is where I'm feeling like teleology is kind of rearing its ugly head again, because it's not a straightforwardly causal argument.

20:51 Dylan: Is it teleology, or is it a logical argument that if you have a lack, there must be a hole that's greater than that lack? There's a hole with which you're referring to that. Just speaking of a lack means there's an incompleteness, and therefore there's some completeness out there.

21:08 Mark: Yeah, that's what he wants to say.

21:10 Dylan: Yeah. And that seems to come from just your understanding. So he's taking the recognition of a lack as pointing to a greater whole. And that's sort of the sum of this version of proof of the existence of God is that seeing that things are missing something, particularly seeing that I'm missing something, means that something must be greater than me, and. And therefore God exists. The perception of imperfection means that there must be perfection.

21:36 Mark: However, these other things. I'm just reading the next sentence. Regarding the thoughts I have of many other things outside me. The heavens, the earth, light, heat, numerous others. I had no such difficulty in knowing where they came from. I observed nothing in them that seemed to make them superior to me. In other words, his mind could have made up all this other stuff, but it couldn't have made up the thing that's lacking in him. Whereas I feel like the heavens and light and heat, like each of those is a transcendent thing. I don't understand them. Like, that's why I would need to do science to reach out to them. I have no guarantee just by considering those concepts that they could have come from me. That just seems unwarranted as far as, you know. Using his own logic, I tried to

22:17 Seth: walk through the steps of the argument and summarize them. In doing so, it made me appreciate how he used the argument to leap from the individual to the plurality. And that was not something that I guess I appreciated previously when I read the meditation or I had trouble pulling it out. But plurality, meaning us, plurality, meaning more than one thing. So the cogito only provides you with the existence of one thing. I exist. Then he goes through, I am a substance. You have. The clear and distinct conception gets you to truth and certainty. Then you have what Dylan just said, which is, I recognize in myself a lack, or I should say there's present, not a recognition. But there's present in me as a thinking thing. The thought of something perfect.

23:06 Dylan: Is that the same thing? The thought that there's something perfect versus the perception of a lack?

23:11 Seth: The thought that there's something perfect and that perfect thing is not me.

23:15 Mark: Those two sentences logically imply each other.

23:17 Seth: The lack is within me. So that was the only thing that you said, Dylan, that I took issue with. It's not a lack. It's that I am not perfect. But I have an idea of perfection.

23:27 Dylan: It feels like it's splitting hairs, but I find it easier to understand the notion of a lack because it points in the direction of some hazy idea of a whole that if you want to call it perfection, that's fine, but it relieves me of the baggage of talking about the pinnacle of perfection and just acknowledges that there's something, a larger whole. That's a distinction that makes a difference from my perspective.

23:53 Seth: Let's accept that distinction. From Descartes perspective, the important thing is that if that distinction exists, whether we're talking about a whole or perfection, it's that since you are not whole or you are not perfect, that idea must have come from outside of yourself, namely from the whole or from the perfect thing itself. And then what that does for him is it allows the next two steps, which is there is something that is whole that's not me, or there is something that's perfect that's not me. He names it God. And then you can say, aha. Now I know from my own experience of myself and my own experience of my own thoughts that there are at least two things, me and God.

Once you have that plurality that stepped from solipsism to a plural universe, that's you and God. That opens the door for the rest of the reasoning chain, which gets you for him saying, if anything else exists, it has the same relationship to God that I do. Even though I have clear and distinct ideas of all these things, I can't impart existence upon them. I can't guarantee existence, but God can. Ultimately, then God, it becomes the assurance for your epistemic in the Meditations, it's

25:10 Wes: because he's perfect that he wouldn't deceive us. Right?

25:12 Seth: Right. But here he doesn't. It's not construed that way, definitely.

25:16 Mark: This actually makes me think. In our social construction episodes, Wes kept repeating, there has to be something transcendent. There has to be some data. There has to be something that's before the human mind comes along and constructs it into something. It has to be, he says, for If I existed alone and independently of every other being, so that I had got myself what little of the perfect being I participated in, then for the same reason I could have got for myself everything else I knew I lacked, and thus been myself. Infinite, eternal, immutable, omniscient, omnipotent. In short, I could have had all the perfections which I could observe to be in God. In other words, if solipsism is true, then everything that's in my mind is just. I'm making it up. Well, why wouldn't I just make up the most awesome possible thing?

26:01 Seth: More importantly, even if it wasn't the most awesome possible thing, if solipsism were true, you wouldn't have any framework to compare yourself to anything else. The extent to which you were and what you were would be all that there was. And so to judge yourself as lacking with respect to something else indicates that there's more than you in the world. It's not unconvincing.

26:25 Dylan: He kind of ties it up in the next paragraph, pointing to the clarity of mathematics and the kinds of perception that understanding that comes to mathematics as being the same kind of understanding that one would get to understand the existence of God. So he talks about mathematical truths, and after having taken note that this great certainty that everyone attributes to them mathematical truths is founded only on the fact that they are conceived evidently according to the rule mentioned above, I also took note that there was nothing at all in them that assured me of the existence of their object.

For example, I saw quite well that if we suppose a triangle, it was necessary that its three angles be equal to two right angles. But for all that I saw nothing that assured me that there was any triangle in the world. On the other hand, going back to examine the idea I had of a perfect being, I found that existence was contained in it in the same way as in the idea of a triangle is contained in the equality of its three angles to two right angles, or in the idea of a sphere, the equidistance of all its part from its centre, or even more evidently, consequently it is at least as certain that God, who is this perfect being, is or exists as any demonstration in geometry can be.

The footnote in this edition notes that this is a version of the ontological argument from Anselm, which we considered in a different episode.

27:57 Mark: So I'll just refer people there. I don't want people to think that I think this is a good argument, but I don't want to spend time. We already did this years ago, so I like the way that he does state it so nice and clearly here, Unlike Anselm's version, which is actually much

28:12 Wes: more thorny looking, God is that which nothing greater can exist.

28:15 Seth: How does it go, the chain here, what Dylan just pointed out, what's important is that in essentially the third proposition here, he says clear and distinct conception is the equivalent. It's what gets you to truth and certainty. If you have a clear and distinct conception of something, then you can be assured of its truth, but you cannot be assured of its existence. Ultimately, what he's saying is existence requires God. So your reason can get you to certainty about the truth of something, but it cannot guarantee the existence of something, which seems kind of bizarre.

I mean, think about it. What would it mean to have a clear conception of something that you assured it's truth, but you were unable to verify its existence? I refer that back to his dream argument, the narrative of the dream, where he dismisses the possibility that we could be deceived by dreams simply because dreams are not clear and distinct.

29:18 Mark: Really, I thought he was using dreams to say, look, there's all these things we think in dreams and none of it ends up being true. And so therefore the same could be true of thinking of the sun and the stars and the moon, all those things. The logic is backwards from what he puts in the Meditations, because here it's not till page 130, after the stuff that we've been talking about, that he brings up dreams.

29:41 Dylan: No, he brings up dreams right in the end of this section, the last paragraph of part four. But I thought that he brings them up and leaves the wedge of reason as the distinction that allows you to understand whether it's a dream or not, whether or not we are awake or whether we're asleep. We ought to never let ourselves be persuaded except by the evidence of our reason.

30:00 Wes: It's at 39 that he'll say, yeah, you have to have knowledge of God and the soul first, and then you stop being bothered by the dream problem. But before that, dreams are a real skeptical problem. But once the knowledge of God and the souls has thus made us certain of this rule, it is very easy to know that the dreams we imagine while asleep ought in no way to make us doubt the truth of the thoughts we have while awake. For if it did happen even while asleep, that one had a very distinct idea. As for example, if a geometer found some new demonstration, one's being asleep would not prevent its being true, because reason

30:36 Dylan: would be the continuum. In the case that you dream something and it's true. It would still be true when you were awake, but that's true.

30:47 Mark: So the understanding, the only things of the understanding. It doesn't seem like he's doing here what he did in the fifth meditation, which is, once you have God not being a deceiver, then basic stuff like the existence of the external world is guaranteed. He says earlier on this page, actually it's still less guaranteed. Like you can still have some doubt reasonably about the existence of anything. Whereas the truths of reason, those are going to be true whether you're thinking them in a dream or whether you're thinking them awake. Because all it needs is clear and distinct perception. Clear and distinct understanding. Right. I don't see clear and distinct perception here.

31:22 Wes: Very, he says, very distinct idea. Right?

31:25 Mark: Very distinct idea. That's right.

31:27 Wes: If you're doing a proof of some mathematical theorem in a dream and it all really does make sense, it is all very distinct, then it's not something that could be false out in the real world. It's almost like saying if we were to take something more obvious, it's not like we in a dream we can violate the law of non contradiction. We can do all kinds of crazy stuff. You know, one thing follows another that doesn't really follow. Everything switches around. You know, I'm at one moment it's one person and the next moment it's another. All kinds of illogical, irrational stuff. But it doesn't give us the capacity to fully think a contradiction. Nothing could do that.

32:08 Seth: Well, it doesn't even have to be a contradiction.

32:10 Wes: I know, I'm just saying, I'm trying to give a much more obvious example that is still relevant.

32:15 Seth: Okay, well, what he says is surely in a dream we can distinctly imagine a lion's head on a goat's body without having to conclude from this that a chimera exists in the world. My point is that he appeals to God as the guarantor of the existence of a variety of things, of the external world of God. Sort of in a weird way, recursive way, guarantees his own existence by virtue of the idea of God in my head and so on. But what does this do for the power of reason? Reason is what gets you to clear and distinct ideas which bring you to truth and certainty about the world.

You decompose all the complex problems into solvable little chunks. You start with whatever, but ultimately all that knowledge that you're trying to build up through this method is only guaranteed, it's only ratified by the existence of God, because you have no guarantee that anything about which you're seeking certainty and applying your reason actually exists unless God exists, unless God is perfect, et cetera, et cetera.

33:30 Wes: We get the self before we get God. We need certainty in the self. Right?

33:35 Dylan: We get to God through the self. Right.

33:37 Wes: So the bedrock is the cogito. And then.

33:40 Seth: Yeah, but he says quite clearly that clear and distinct ideas cannot guarantee existence, only God can.

33:47 Wes: I don't think it's the clearness and distinctness of the cogito that makes it work. He just uses that as a kind of prototype for clearness and distinctness, because it is. But it's stronger than being clear and distinct. It's a self contradiction to say that. I think without there being an eye.

34:04 Mark: I'm going to say that he's actually using the I as the example. Remember his special use of induction in the rules? So induction is not, as it is for Hume or any modern person talking about it, that we see a bunch of swans and then we conclude provisionally that all swans are white, but we might see another one later. That's not. And we'd have to change our mind. He sees induction as a form of deduction. You see a representative case, like you're looking at something in geometry and you see that the Pythagorean theorem holds of right triangles.

It's not that you have to then see more of them to conclude that. It's just that you see one representative case and therefore can make some. Really, the conclusion is not just about right triangles, but it's about geometry more generally. And so the same thing is going here. There's a lot. That's why I was saying there are a lot of key examples that you could use to found this claim that if I get a clear and distinct idea of something, then that thing has to be true. You could use it. Geometry, you could use the self. There's a number of things and there's something about the character of those things that makes them stand in for other similar cases.

35:14 Wes: So the cogito is like a schema for other clear and distinct ideas. In the same way that if you drew a triangle in the sand in order to do a proof on it, it wouldn't just hold for that triangle, it would hold for everything of that type or something like that. When we do geometric proofs on paper, we're dealing with schemas because we know if I prove something about a right triangle on paper, it's not just about that right triangle, it's about right triangles in general.

35:39 Dylan: In fact, it's not even about that right triangle on that piece of paper. Because it's not true of that in the same way that is in mathematics, right?

35:47 Wes: Yeah, because it's not perfectly right.

35:50 Dylan: It's not a perfect triangle.

35:52 Mark: Well, and I want to say, like when Socrates had the slave boy in the meno do that little bit of geometry, the point wasn't to prove actually anything about triangles, it was to prove something about epistemology. Right. Isn't that kind of what we're getting at here, that, you know, these things about mathematics and these things about epistemology are actually part of the same system? Did I just blow your mind or is that just.

36:14 Seth: I lost the thread of what you were trying to make then.

36:17 Dylan: I didn't think the Meno was that exercise with the slave boy was about epistemology, but it was about the capability of learning.

36:25 Seth: Right.

36:26 Wes: It's where we get recollection. So in which case there are these inherent a priori ideas that we draw on so that our knowledge of such things is not actually a posteriori. It doesn't come in through via the empirical world. So I think it is epistemological. Right.

36:45 Mark: He's making the slave boy do the demonstration, not actually to show anything about geometry, but to show something about the slave boy and about the slave boy's way of thinking. And that's exactly what's going on here, is that I'm generalizing not just I think therefore I am, therefore when other people think therefore they are, or something like that. But, oh, I pinpointed something that seems so clearly and distinctly to me that that must be the way that knowledge works.

37:10 Wes: I compare the feeling that I got with that to future experiences of things and say, is it like that? Does it have that cogito level of certitude?

37:20 Dylan: And don't you think, in a way, at the end of part four, he's saying, look, math is so certain for something like the numbers of degrees in a triangle and those kinds of relationships, that that recognition is like recognizing that God exists. To me, I would go even further, that he invokes God all these times, but I feel like that's not for him the most profound recognition. It's the perfection of something in the world outside that he has access to, to through his understanding that really is embodied in mathematics. That God is like a stand in there, not of pure mathematics, but in the sense of like number theory or something, but in a world that is connected and logical and reasonable, that exists outside of ourselves, but that we have access to, exists That's God.

And then from there you get the laws of the world that are accessible to us, the intelligibility of the world, that perfection just goes straight to God. The way we talk about it, it's for good reason. And he uses this language that it feels like it's derived from God. But reading this again made me feel like, you know what, it's actually sort of the other way around. You know, he's doing an existence proof for God here, but it's really because a lot more things are certain and that he just becomes a stand in for God. He's not atheistic in that way, it's just that that's not the part that's the most accessible and maybe even the most profound for him.

38:53 Mark: Well, I found myself thinking earlier, the way that Seth was interpreting some of this talk of God, that it really does prefigure the difficulties that Spinoza ran into, trying to be a good Cartesian and trying to come up with a notion of God that would be consistent with that. That if you say that, you know, it's only because we lack that we then can kind of distinguish this thing from that thing. And, and that if you really were God, if all the things came from you, if there was nothing transcendent of you, it's not just that you'd be the most awesome, it seems like it would be an indistinguishable mishmash.

So that what God does can't actually be thinking at all in the way that we think of it. Because thinking for us is a matter of discerning, using distinctly human traits that separate one thing from another. Whereas God not having that lack. This is certainly not the way Descartes went.

39:47 Wes: This is interesting. You know, Mark, you were talking about data before, comparing this to needing data, which is really all about needing some sort of mind independent reality, which in no way depends on us. So it has that kind of godlike autonomy so that the buck stops there and we can't do without that.

40:06 Mark: But so would God have that? If God doesn't have anything transcendent of God, then thought is not possible. God thinking is not possible. Let me say that right, because that's what thinking is for human beings. What we understand, what we clearly and distinctly understand the word thinking to be is sort of this, according to Descartes schema, something that follows from a lack, right? The fact that I'm focusing on this particular finite thing or whatever, because I think if you actually asked Descartes this, he'd probably say, oh no, God has the most powerful faculties of clearly and distinctly distinguishing things.

That's how he can support every single link in every causal chain that's going on and make sure everything follows. It's not that God is a wash of nothing. God is in fact has the ultimate mental capabilities. I just, I don't think that I understand that anymore. I think he should have this notion that God is a simple. In which case God, as we pointed out in our existence of God episode couldn't be. Or the New Atheist episode. I think that's Dawkins response is that how could something be ultimately simple in the way Descartes wants it to be, but also very complex and supporting all these different individual things?

41:23 Dylan: That's a Parmenides problem.

41:24 Wes: Yeah, I was just thinking that actually. Hasn't he ever heard of participation?

41:31 Seth: There we go, paragraph 39 at the end of part four. He says, but if we did not know that everything real and true within us comes from a perfect and infinite being, then however clear and distinct our ideas were, we would have no reason to be sure that they had the perfection of being true. Now that last part, they had the perfection of being true. I feel like he's saying in other places have the perfection of actually existing. That's the piece that I'm getting stuck on here in discourse is that the only thing that guarantees existence is God.

But the question is whether existence and truth. What's the relationship between existence and truth? Because it seems to me that we as just mere human beings can do the appropriate mathematical or geometrical gyrations to come up with truths about the perfect circle or the perfect right triangle, knowing that they don't exist, knowing that they can't exist, they never will exist. So I'm a little confused about what the relationship is between existence and truth. But it's clear that from Descartes perspective, the only thing that can guarantee existence, the only way that you can be sure that there's an outside world.

I mean, this is much more clear in the Meditations. The only way you can be sure that there's wax on the table, melting in front of you and all that stuff is because God guarantees it. It has nothing to do with your perception.

43:05 Dylan: It doesn't. But I still am brought back to the end of this section where we get back the direction that our reason points us back in that direction. You call this the Cartesian circle? Is that what that is?

43:17 Mark: The thing I was describing by that was that reason grounds God. But then God is the only thing that grounds reason.

43:24 Wes: The Cartesian circle is just that to rely on clear and distinct perceptions, you need to assume that God is a non deceiver, but his proofs of God's existence ultimately rely on clear and distinct perceptions is the critique.

43:37 Dylan: Okay, this is slightly different, but I see how it's related.

43:40 Mark: No, I think that's exactly what I was just saying. But I don't think that in this text. I think maybe he was closing the circle and getting existence out of the fifth meditation, you know, by the time he got to the meditations, and it's not in here the way he leaves it here, which is we can be absolutely certain about things that are understanding grasps because those are clear and distinct ideas, but we can never be absolutely certain about the empirical existence of any particular thing in the external world. Maybe we can be sure that there is an external world in general, but any particular thing is open to scientific challenge. And I think that's the way it should be. They should be open to skeptical scientific challenge so that we can continue doing empirical scientific work and improve our knowledge more and more and not be dogmatically insisting on some particular physical theory.

44:28 Dylan: And this is why he has to get a bunch of people to do work for him.

44:34 Mark: Yeah, because that's exactly what sort of gives rationalist science a bad name is you say, I can just look at the concepts involved and I can determine that this is the way the world actually is. And that just sounds totally absurd. That sounds like armchair bullshit. So I see in this text, as in the rules, that's not what he's arguing.

44:53 Dylan: That's exactly right. And that's important, I think, to articulate. One of the things I like about reading this book is how recognizable it is not to scientism. You can see how you can get scientism out of it. Right in the kind of dogmatic science. But that's not what's being presented here at all. What's being presented here is a science that aims towards certainty, believes in certainty, that's accessible but is suffused with doubt, and is recognizably pragmatic as well as speculative. And that's why you have this method, a way of talking about how things are true in the world, to formulate that. And part of that's the mechanical account of the world. Part of that is being able to talk about things in terms of extensions. Part of it's being able to mathematize it. But it's not, as Mark put it, not armchair. Oh, I thought about it really hard. And therefore it's true.

45:51 Mark: Well, and if we accept this idea that the things that we're sure about, the things that let you sleep at night, according to Descartes, are the things of the understanding. You know, being sure that God exists and that he has a certain relation to you, that's kind of all you need for your spiritual house to be in order and that your soul does not die with the body. All that stuff he thinks he can know absolutely indubitably. But the stuff about science like that is we try different things and we kind of have to live in a state of uncertainty in, you know, relative certainty.

The theory has passed all the experiments so far, but it could be falsified in some future. And I wanted to use this as a transition to get us back to part three, to conclude by talking about ethics, because maybe this is where we are all the time with ethics, is that we're not absolutely sure. Maybe we can be absolutely sure about sort of abstract ethical laws. Maybe if he had thought of the categorical imperative. That's actually Kant trying to do in ethics what Descartes was doing in geometry. But as far as Descartes is actually concerned, ethical principles are like any other empirical principles.

You think that, you know, by being chaste and modest and all this stuff, things are going to work out and that's the wisest way to be. But it's kind of uncertain in the same way that, well, substantiated physical theories are slightly uncertain. What do you guys think of that comparison?

47:17 Wes: Yeah, I think that's good. I mean, I think in our practical lives, I think it can be a little difficult to think about philosophically because we're so used to ethical dilemmas or really metaethics, you know, how we're going to ground the truth of ethical claims. But really the way ethical stuff shows up in people's lives as very, very difficult practical decisions about what they want. For instance, it could be a huge ethical dilemma whether or not to continue dating someone. You can be in a state of ambivalence, a state of doubt. You may need to collect more data, you may do more science before you come to a conclusion. The conclusion is defeasible. It might end up in a divorce if you're married. All that sort of stuff. I think real, like in the real world, real world ethical stuff looks like that.

48:09 Mark: I think I, in the abstract, years before I actually got married, felt like we should just be honest and have kind of defeasible wedding vows. But when you get to the date, Kim loved that.

48:20 Wes: Right. Did you get yelled at, I'm sure

48:27 Mark: I never even brought it up. Are there a couple quotes from part three that folks had said they wanted to talk a little more specifically about his Stoic ethics?

48:38 Wes: I had mentioned it because I think what the discourse on method is known for is this first three principles, never accepting anything that doesn't plainly know to be true, and dividing things up into parts and going from the simplest and on upwards. But the ethical stuff in part three is really about the state of mind you need to be in to do successful inquiry, I think. So let's look at the. What's the first maxim? Here he says he has a provisional code of morals. Three or four maxims. The first is to obey the laws and the customs of my country, even though he knows, and this is, like I said, this is all standard stuff from the ancient skeptics, the Pyrrhonians and Sextus Empiricus.

And that's another recently discovered text that had a huge influence on the modern world through people like Descartes. And then the second principle is. Or the second maxim is to be resolute in my actions as I could, and to follow the most doubtful opinions once I decided on them with no less constancy than if they had been very well assured. And then he moves on to the more Stoic sounding stuff. My third maxim was always to try to conquer myself rather than fortune, and to change my desires rather than the order of the world, and generally to accustom myself to believing that there is nothing that is completely within our power except our thoughts.

So that after we have done our best regarding the things external to us, everything that is lacking for us to succeed is, from our point of view, absolutely impossible. And this alone seemed to me sufficient to prevent me in the future from desiring anything but what I was to acquire and thus to make me contented. I thought he more directly tied this to trying to figure out if I've just made the connection or if he more directly made the connection. But he talks a lot about wanting to avoid worrying about glory and fame. And basically my point is, when it comes to wanting to be someone who, say, a truth seeker, there's a real ethical dilemma about living your life in a way that prevents the sorts of distractions that are going to make it impossible for you to do that, that are going to corrupt that part of your life.

Like being on Twitter. Sorry to bring that up again, because I think about this with respect to myself. That's why I bring it up. So if you're living too much in the moment and too much in current political controversies, for instance, or too much in, say, a career where status is very important to you, even if you're a philosophy professor, that can create all sorts of circumstances in which a sort of plain, very honest, very sincere interest in the truth is compromised. So I think stoicism serves this, having a much better relationship to that task.

51:31 Dylan: He doesn't use the word stoicism in this section, but I wrote Stoicism twice in the side of it. One sentence that sort of embodied it for me is in the middle. He says, for since our will naturally tends to desire only those things that our understanding represents to it in some manner as possible, it is certain that if we consider all the goods outside of us is equally removed from our power, we will have no more regrets at lacking those that seem to be due to our birth, when we are deprived of them through no fault of our own, than we have at not possessing the kingdoms of China or Mexico. And that by making a virtue of necessity, as the saying goes, we shall no more desire to be healthy if we are sick, or to be free if we are in prison. Sounds a little optimistic, especially the last two pieces, like the way stoicism does, but it sounds just like Stoicism.

52:20 Mark: And having read Zarathustra fairly recently still, I always want to add at the end of a sentence like that, and he blinks, you know, as a way of sort of a. That's what she said, you know, of Nietzsche, that it gets all creepy. We'll do what's in our power and then we'll be totally satisfied once we recognize what's not in our power. And he blinks like, just sounds like it's very optimistic.

52:45 Dylan: Let's say that it is, but there could be some blinking going on, but that doesn't mean that there isn't something pointed in the right direction, that there isn't some piece of sincerity about it.

52:56 Wes: Right?

52:57 Dylan: So, I mean, that's also true in Nietzsche, right?

52:59 Mark: Reading this in context, I like it better if we are giving that humanistic interpretation of Descartes, that he's not certain about everything. We have discovered happiness. And they blink like that's what Nietzsche was making fun of was these, like, utilitarians that think we have discovered happiness. We are absolutely sure. Well, I don't know if you could tell a difference in the way Descartes would ask, because he's just said, even if I'm not totally sure of something, I'm going to act as if I am sure of It. Because that's what you have to do to be like, you know, have integrity and.

53:31 Seth: Yeah, well, the next sentence that Dylan didn't read says, but I admit that it takes long practice and repeated meditation to become accustomed to seeing everything in this light, which is not a statement about the way things are. It's a statement about the way that you deign to receive them. And this is part of his provisional moral code. He says, I'm going to give up believing in anything that I think that I know. But if I do that, I would be completely at sea. So I need to accept certain things provisionally, all right? Laws and customs of my country.

I'm going to just act as if anything that I still hang on to is true so that I act with conviction. And he says, I'm going to try to just get control of the thing of myself, because I can't control the things that are outside of me. And then the final one which comes after this is I'm going to look at all the things I could be or do in this life, and I'm going to choose the one that I think is best guess which one he chooses. So this is stoicism.

54:41 Wes: Well, it's skepticism and stoicism.

54:44 Seth: Both are provisional choices for him while he works through his method.

54:48 Mark: I'm very impressed that he doesn't talk more about politics and ethics, because the thing that is terminally ambiguous as far as Descartes thought, as we uncovered in the rules, and then here is what constitutes a simple. So, for instance, at the end of that part four, he says, we can distinctly imagine a lion's head on a goat's body without having to conclude from that that a chimera exists in the world. Okay, so is there a reason why he just said distinctly and not clearly and distinctly? Because that's the kind of thing like, yes, I can imagine that.

But if I were to clearly, like, if those were simples, then there would be no hidden parts. Like, the reason a lion's head can't go in a goat's body is because the pipes don't line up right. There's all this stuff, apart from like putting the skin of a lion's head on top of a goat's head, that you could do that you could make a lion mask for the goat. But to actually hook the heads together involves all these parts that you don't see. And that just shows that a lion's head is not a simple, a goat's body is not a simple. They're complicated physiological things.

So what about ethical concepts? There seem to be a lot of philosophers following basically Cartesian methods that are just like, oh, pleasure is a simple. And I can see that we pursue pleasure and pain is a. You know. And these are even going back to the ancients. It's not just people following Descartes, but like this is a line that given Descartes attachment to the ancients, he could have easily picked up on and made some sort of geometrical sounding claims about ethical concepts. And the fact that he resists doing that, I think is to his credit because they are not simples.

And it makes me wonder if anything is a simple. But we'd have to go further into his geometry or something to make any more sense of that than we have. I feel like we dwelt on that a long time in our the last chunk of our Rules episode, and I can't say anything better about it here. Any other sort of final thoughts to put this to bed? I feel better about it now that we talked about it than I did coming in.

56:50 Seth: I'm glad we made you feel better. We talk a lot over the history of this. What are we, 11 years now? 10 years. Podcast about great writers versus poor writers and how the ability to write distinguishes philosophers. Descartes, regardless of what translation you look at, is a great writer. And it's not just the writing, it's the intention and the motive and the project underneath it. It's easy to criticize him for his privilege and doing the things that he did. But I want to get back to this idea that this is a confessional. It's egotistically driven, but it's a confessional where he's saying, I made choices in my life to do certain things because I thought this is the way I would get to my desired outcome, which was certainty about my knowledge of the world.

I want to replace the word knowledge with wisdom and just say, in a lot of respects, I feel like this is a wisdom text. And he's saying something to the effect of, this is my path that I took to wisdom. I'm sharing it with you. You can take it or leave it, but there will be principles in it, hopefully that will be of use and of meaning to you and a value. And it's written in such a way that it's easily. He doesn't put any barriers in the way of being able to internalize and accept that. And I really like it. I really like that. I really enjoyed it.

Except for part five about the blood. I read it. I might have skimmed a little Bit. I'm sure there's something in there for scholars of Descartes, but not for casual readers of Descartes like me. So.

58:37 Mark: So that's the part, you know, we had a comparable part like that in Bacon where he had his thing about heat. And that seemed really hard to get through. But then like, no, this is actually the illustration of how it actually works. I feel like maybe you heard Dylan say stuff earlier in this conversation that positive about that section about the circulatory system. Maybe this was Wes. Sorry. One of you seemed to like that as being like that is actually a part that you really have to pay attention to because the proof is in the pudding. Then that's the pudding. So Seth and I skimmed the pudding.

59:11 Dylan: I think that's true. I think that if you spend some time going through section five, paying attention to how he goes through his argument and the way it links up together, there are little things like he credits Harvey, who, you know, published on the movement of the Heart and the blood regarding significantly informed his discussion of circulation. He talks about the need for the use of experiments in this case of Harvey's, for showing how circulation is working. He is developing a mechanical account for how this is happening and consistently referring to them in that way. That's what you would get out of it. And there are parts of it that will say, don't accord with the way in which we make account. There are better accounts now, but that's what you would pay attention to.

1:00:01 Wes: It's the form of the explanation that counts.

1:00:04 Dylan: Yep. I think the same thing is true of the geometry. Like, if you go read the geometry, anybody who's done geometry will sort of recognize it, but they'll immediately become very confused about, you know, well, where's the Cartesian coordinate system? Exactly. Because the Cartesian coordinate system is not at right angles in his presentation. It's at an arbitrary opening angle.

1:00:29 Seth: But isn't it named after him?

1:00:31 Dylan: It is, but the Cartesian coordinate system doesn't have to be at right angles. It just turns out that all of them are equal to one another. There's lots of things that are convenient if you make them at right angles. But his is utterly generic. But what you get out of it in looking at it is him spending a lot of time with this notion of unity and the numbering of the line. And you get little pieces in there about how he's thinking about ordering the equations. And I'll call it the mechanics of the thinking that's going on. So that's the way the argument is Working.

It's a kind of causality argument, like, you know, this and this and this are the case. And pointing to some empirical proof here and there, pointing to some logical proof here and there. And all along the way, you need to be able to see it for yourself. In fact, there's a great. I know we didn't read it, but I went back and looked at it anyway, and there's.

1:01:25 Mark: In the geometry.

1:01:26 Dylan: In the geometry, I'm just going to read a sentence that's completely. It's in the first book, and he's gone through his first proof, and he says, you know, he's gone through a whole bunch of explanations. He says, but I shall not stop to explain this in more detail because I should deprive you of the pleasure of mastering it yourself, as well as of the advantage of training your mind by working over it, which is, in my opinion, the principal benefit to be derived from this science, because I find nothing here so difficult that it cannot be worked out by anyone at all familiar with ordinary geometry and with algebra, and who will consider carefully all that is set forth in this treatise.

On the one hand, you feel like there's maybe some humble bragging going on there, but I think he thinks that it's really true. He's not telling you that because he thinks, oh, you'll never be able to do this. Sure, he probably thinks it's hard. That's pretty awesome that he did it. But he also thinks that it's true that anybody could, you know, that it's perfectly accessible to everybody. It's perfectly accessible in general.

1:02:22 Mark: I'm just wanting to have my daughter already finished geometry, but I want her to go in and do on a test and draw the X and the Y axis at a weird skew so that all the. So that it's not cubes that make up the. But it's little diamonds or something like that.

1:02:37 Wes: And then if they try to correct her, she can say, well, actually, it doesn't appear at right angles.

1:02:48 Dylan: Yep, cool.

1:02:50 Mark: Well, let's be done with Descartes forever.

1:02:53 Wes: No, we're gonna read the Passions on the passions and all that other stuff.

1:02:57 Mark: Oh, not anytime soon. Next time we're going to move to something quite different. Some of Simone de Beauvoir's the Second Sex. It's a monumental book. We're at least reading the introduction and we'll figure out if we're going to read any beyond that. But it's 600 pages. We're not going to read even a substantial percentage of it.

1:03:16 Seth: Oh, My God, Mark. How can four men read a book written by a woman about feminists? Is it possible we'll have a woman join us?

1:03:26 Mark: That is the plan. But until she actually appears with us, I'm not going to promise anything.

1:03:33 Seth: Well, I don't know if we can speak. Perhaps we should schweigen.

1:03:37 Mark: Well, before we schweigen, I. E. Be silent because Seth is quoting Wittgenstein. Our closing song is by Joe Lewis Walker. It's called My Real Fantasy. Joe is a blues legend. He's played with B.B. king, Ron Wood. He was even jamming with Hendrix, Hooker, Monk. I was very pleased to be able to talk to him on Nakedly Examined Music, episode 110. Find it@nakedlyexaminemusic.com Good night, everybody.

1:04:03 Dylan: Good night.

1:04:03 Seth: Good night.

1:04:04 Wes: Good night.

1:04:15 Unknown speaker: And I want to tell you something that you won't believe I've got a deep dark secret baby that I can't

1:04:31 Mark: conceal

1:04:34 Unknown speaker: I can reach out and touch you Girl you feel so for real because you baby are my real fantasy. And I just can't wait for night time to come Lord, I feel so good Cause I, I won't be alone. I can smell your perfume. There's it smell so sweet to me because you baby, are my real fantasy. And over and over and over and over I tell myself you're not for real. And home and over, over, over and over. My friends tell me that you're just a dream. But when I'm alone I miss you and I know you miss me. It's you baby, are my real fantasy. Sam. They say I should quit dreaming but they don't know how you make me feel when I'm alone I miss you and I know you miss me And I want to tell you something that you won't believe.

I've got a deep dark secret that I just can't conceal I can smell your perfume girl you know, you know it smells so for real. Cause you baby are my real. I said that you are my real. I said you are my real fantasy.