Readings #6
Descartes' Maxim for Action
[1] “I shall consider”, [Descartes] writes in the First Meditation, “that the heavens, the earth, colours, figures, sound and all other external things are nought but the illusions and dreams. ... I shall consider myself as having no hands, no eyes, no flesh, no blood, nor any senses, yet falsely believing myself to possess all these things.” (Meditations VII, 22 f.)
[2] No reasonable man, says Descartes, doubts in ordinary life everything I am now going to doubt. (VII, 16, 350 f.) The doubt is only for the seeker of truth. (VI, 31; VII 350.) As a maxim for action Descartes formulates a principle incompatible with the attitude of the doubter: “to be as firm and resolute in my actions as I could be and not to follow less faithfully opinions the most dubious, when my mind was once made up regarding them, than if these had been beyond doubt”. (VI, 24.)1
Descartes’ philosophical quest in his Meditations aimed at setting his knowledge on stable, rational foundations. His negative method for doing so was through subjecting the totality of his beliefs to radical doubt – radical in that any belief that could be doubted was rejected. Any beliefs remaining after this onslaught might serve as foundations upon which knowledge could be reconstituted. If successful, much of what the doubter ordinarily believed about the external world – such as that I have hands and eyes and flesh and blood etc. – would be preserved, now on a stable epistemic footing.
But it might not go like this. If philosophy is worth doing, it must be an adventure, and if it is an adventure, there must be risk of loss to the philosopher, that is, a risk of it all going wrong. Descartes’ Meditations present a paradox: at the same time as offering one of the great adventures in philosophy ([1] above), he undermines the importance of its results, not only by saying that life will go on regardless, but advising that its results should as a matter of principle be ignored (the ‘maxim for action’ in [2] above). As such, the maxim deprives the adventure of its danger, and therefore of its interest; so philosophy, in Descartes’ hands, cannot be courageous, but appears to be an idle thing, failing to interact with the life of which it is a part.
However, the serious reader of the Meditations surely thinks that we should be disoriented by radical doubt, and should object to it becoming mere philosophy. Indeed, it is a puzzle and a problem for those who have had disturbing inner experiences – such as psychedelic, religious or near-death experience – that they can go on living afterwards as if nothing happened. They might lament the fact that the experience can be ignored, that this opening does not somehow change the rest of their life, but stands outside it, as an anomaly or a trauma. What is perhaps surprising here is that Descartes advocates such a dis-integration of thinking and being.
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The ‘maxim for action’ counsels ignoring the results of radical doubt in one’s daily life and actions. This might be understood as nothing more than advice to keep your head above water when engaging in something as arduous as radical doubt.
More interestingly, it might be that Descartes had complete faith in the outcome of this process, because he had complete faith. We can think of the maxim as Descartes’ instruction to himself to stay the course in the light of the fact that God will surely guide him through the doubt and return him to (a transfigured) ordinary life. His thinking mind must however reach this destination using only its rational resources, as if it were unsupported by God’s guidance. We could then see radical doubt as a test of faith, which Descartes indulges in precisely because he has, ironically, no doubts about its success.
This reading has two problems. First, as the radical doubt begins in Meditation I, there may, for all the doubter knows, be no God. God must be established, not assumed, and so He cannot be taken to secure the outcome of radical doubt. This, however, might be a matter of timing: if the maxim were justified through faith before the doubt commenced, it would nonetheless be operative during the period of doubt, even if its justification could no longer be available to the doubter. The second problem is that if this really were a test of faith, why not bet everything on it? A test which allows ordinary life to continue regardless of its results would seem a less serious test than one which would devastate the life of the doubter if it went awry.
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Another way to read Descartes’ maxim is as a harm mitigation policy, put in place in case things go horribly wrong over the course of the Meditations. Descartes would then be saying: if things go right, then ordinary life is redeemed, and if things go wrong, it doesn’t matter, because ordinary life will (and ought to) go on as if there were no philosophy. The aim would be to introduce a practical schism between ordinary life and philosophy such that any possible damage caused by intellectual life to ordinary life would be minimised by undermining the significance of the results of intellectual life. So while the impact of ordinary life on the intellect is limited by the radical doubt of its content, the impact of the results of the doubt on ordinary life is limited by the maxim.
To see this, suppose that one enters into the doubt and does not emerge from it. What is left is a timeless and spaceless thinker who thinks the Cogito. This thinker is unable to rely on the truth of any belief about the world, and so, to understate the case, has some problems. Perhaps because we now read philosophy as a historical curiosity, it can seem strange to think it could have real costs. But if one seriously enters into radical doubt, one might well “feel like someone who is suddenly dropped into a deep whirlpool that tumbles him around so that he can neither stand on the bottom nor swim to the top.” (Meditation II.) Through radical doubt, the self becomes dangerous to itself, inviting into the mind various suspicions, nightmares of humans replaced by machines “whose motions might be determined by springs”, evil demons etc. If this self-attack could not be withstood, or if there were no route through it, then we would fear its consequences for ourselves: solitude, madness, nihilism etc.2
We might even think of Camus’ only one really serious philosophical problem as lying here at the heart of the Meditations.3 As the thinking subject becomes everything to itself, and the external world recedes, the subject – this spaceless, timeless I – wants everything to stop, and to annihilate itself. It is, on this reading, Descartes’ perceptive understanding of where his philosophical adventure might end up, that leads him to propose his maxim as a harm mitigation measure.
His maxim then encourages us to think that the results of philosophy don’t matter to ordinary life; that they are relevant, if at all, only in a separate sphere. We can see the purpose of attempting such a separation from two perspectives.
(a) From the perspective of ordinary life, preventing any philosophical results and disturbances from seeping into it, and treating them as idle and without consequence, serves to limit the costs to life of doing philosophy. This requires a psychic split, or at least a psychic one-way valve: while life can still bodily affect the radical doubt – you will, even if you doubt your experience, still get tired and need to sleep, or hungry and need to eat –, the maxim aims to prevent what happens over the course of the doubt from affecting ordinary life of action.
(b) But this separation, which from the side of ordinary life can be seen as preserving it, can also be seen from the side of the intellect as facilitating the continuation of philosophy. From the intellectual side, the lack of consequence for ordinary life does not undermine the value of philosophy but is a condition of serious philosophy. Ordinary life would then continue for the sake of intellectual life. It would be, from the standpoint of the intellectual side, as if it were being taken care of completely.4
Descartes’ maxim then seems to require, acknowledge or encourage a psychic split in the life of a person between a thinking and doubting intellectual self, and an ordinary life of action. It is unclear to me if this is best understood in terms of a split in the self – between an intellectual and non-intellectual self – or a split in the life of the person, or simply of their activity, intellectual and non-intellectual. It is also unclear to me from what side this separation is built: whether it is ordinary life, which wants to defend itself against the results of philosophy so it can go on unhindered by them, or whether it is philosophy which wants to be sustained by ordinary life, or whether it is built collaboratively.
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There are several problems with this approach to the maxim, which might be seen as problems which flow from Descartes’ fundamental distinction between the mental and the corporeal.
(1) The very fact that Descartes took his maxim to be needed at all, suggests that he believed that thought and life – mind and body – are naturally bound together in a form of interaction in which what goes on in one sphere matters to what goes on in the other.
However, you might wonder whether a maxim for action is needed at all, given that nature usually sorts things out. We don’t not eat because of our dreams or nightmares. The surviving human societies are those which continue acting in the world regardless of what happens in their inner world. Hume, finding himself in the “most deplorable condition imaginable” through excess philosophical reflection, famously wrote, in his Treatise of Human Nature:
Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours’ amusement, I woud return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain’d, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.
Serious philosophical reflection is, in the end, unsustainable for long periods, Hume seems to be saying. Perhaps Descartes didn’t have the same belief in nature or capacity for diversions as Hume, and so saw the maxim as needed for the doubter to get on with their lives as if there were no doubts about it at all and irrespective of the results of philosophical inquiry.
(2) The risk mitigation interpretation seems too easy. Surely you cannot have it both ways: win if things go well, and win if they don’t. Dividing life from philosophy deprives philosophy of any bite, redemptive or otherwise; if there can be no real loss, then there can be no real gain either. Things cannot not matter only if they go wrong: either they matter or they don’t, and if they don’t, then it doesn’t matter if they go right either. Were Descartes’ maxim understood as a harm mitigation measure, the point of radical doubt, which was to set knowledge on a stable foundation, would also be undermined – for this wouldn’t matter either.
To pursue philosophy and then to disavow its results appears to be a form of bad faith, self-deception or compartmentalisation, and none of these is to be desired.
(3) Suppose the maxim is implementable, and that the spheres of intellectual and ordinary life can, in some sense, be separated. While Descartes hopes this division is merely temporary and practical – helping prevent or mitigate the psychological and metaphysical ruptures which he fears might disturb the life of the doubter – it could have the unintended consequence of itself generating psychic disintegration and loss of contact with reality.
On this view, ordinary life from the perspective of intellectual life is downgraded and separated from its source of meaning which is intellectual life (the life not sustained by thought would be unexamined), and conversely, from the point of view of ordinary life, the intellectual life is downgraded and separated from its source of meaning in ordinary life (the life not sustained by the living body in a world of others would be unlived). On this view, you cannot devalue philosophy without devaluing life, and likewise, you cannot devalue life without devaluing philosophy, for each is only significant together with the other.
The same point can be put this way. Philosophy, in Descartes’ quest, concerns meaning – the question of what I am and the nature of reality. So he is saying that whatever we think about the meaning of life, our lives can, and should, for the period of radical doubt, go on as if the doubt made no difference. And this seems to imply that the meaning of my life is unnecessary to the continuation of my life and what happens in it. Thinking and being have come apart, despite the fact that it was the point of the Cogito to unite them; for in it, thought can determine that something exists, viz. the thinker.
But if life doesn’t need thought/philosophy to go on, it still needs it for it to have significance. Can we envisage what it would be for life to go on without significance? Jonathan Lear, in Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, investigated a kind of bare existence which he believed could occasion cultural devastation of the sort the Crow nation suffered. Lear quotes its last great chief, Plenty Coups, in an interview he gave to the ethnographer Linderman:
“But when the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened. There was little singing anywhere. Besides,” he added sorrowfully, “you know that part of my life as well as I do. You saw what happened to us when the buffalo went away.”
This nothing happened might also be a way of characterising the situation of someone who cannot escape radical doubt, and who separates philosophy from life in accordance with Descartes’ maxim. Their life goes on, but in a thinned out way, without the significance it might have been given from thought and philosophy, and, conversely, their thinking mind is cut off, through doubt, from the significance that might be derived from being in the world.
From Konrad Marc-Wogau’s Philosophical Essays (1967).
This is, I take it, our situation, for most contemporary readers of the Meditations are rarely persuaded by anything beyond Meditation II, specifically, we are not persuaded by the proof for the existence of God and the ensuing redemption of the external world. (Possibly, we aren’t open to being persuaded of God by any argument, perhaps because we have denied Him, being convinced, for other reasons or none, that He does not exist – or perhaps we simply aren’t interested any longer.) And so we are left in radical doubt. But of course when we put the book down, we put it out of our minds – so enacting the kind of splitting Descartes recommends by his maxim for action.
It is an interesting question what it means to take philosophy or a philosophical question seriously, and looking at our response to the Meditations is one way of thinking of this question. It seems to me that seriousness is something courageous, and so involves facing risk, taking on commitments, being prepared to make sacrifices etc – the ways we measure seriousness in any endeavour.
We can think of this as a marriage: in which there is an essential dependence of the intellectual part on the practical part, and in which the practical part takes care of the material conditions of the intellectual part. In this marriage, either the intellectual part is downgraded from the point of view of the practical part, or the practical part is downgraded from the point of view of the intellectual part, or each part just go about their own business. Further, there might be exchange between the parts in various ways: the intellectual part shares its results with the practical part, but not vice versa; or the practical part shares its life with the intellectual part, but not vice versa; or they each share themselves with the other.