TLDR version: the pivotal philosopher René Descartes left a long legacy that misdirected most subsequent philosophy, from Locke and Hume down through Kant’s transcendental turn and after. We were saddled with epistemological problems that resisted solution on their own terms, hence the drift into collective subjectivism by some schools and the positivistic rejection of systematic philosophy altogether by others. Our purpose here is to examine what happens should we refuse to follow Descartes’s insistance on the cogito as the only suitable foundation for knowledge or view ourselves as “thinking things,” autonomous rational entities who are invariably isolated homunculi. Instead we look to our legacy as problem solvers and members of communities. The ideas of learning and knowledge as reliable interaction–reliabilism–tells us that we can trust our senses and our reason much of the time, unless a problem arises that tells us otherwise. Systems thinking, finally, illuminates how the world is put together, rather than leaving it an ultimately mysterious Ding-an-Sich, the Kantian legacy of the unsolved Cartesian interaction problem. Nor need we view ourselves as hopelessly atomized and tribalized.

Outline:

The Cartesian Legacy Generally. The Immediate Cartesian Legacy: Locke through Hume. Kant’s Transcendental Turn: A Long-Term Cartesian Legacy. The Scientific (Third Stage) Intellect. Homo Economicus. Collective Subjectivism. Sartre’s Existentialism: Being-in-Itself and Its Nausea. Faux Individualism (Egoism). Can We Break the Spell of Cartesianism? Systems Thinking Again.

The Cartesian Legacy Generally.

Cartesianism is more than a mere methodology and ontology; I hold that in one form or another (often not obviously so) latent Cartesian thought has underwritten the mainstream of most subsequent Western philosophy, some so-called social science, and influential trends in education such as identity politics.

Descartes was one of the five (possibly six) pivotal thinkers in the history of Western philosophy. Before him were Aristotle and Aquinas. After him came Kant and Nietzsche. Some would position Hegel in between Kant and Nietzsche.

Descartes’s writings shifted the emphasis of the Western tradition from metaphysics to epistemology. Afterwards the tradition fragmented as the problems Cartesianism moved to front and center resisted solution on their own terms. Small wonder positivists of more recent times tried to remove many of these problems by describing them as “pseudo-problems” steeped in linguistic confusions. Most modern philosophers, I hold, and many scientists influenced by them, remained latent Cartesians even if rejecting explicitly Cartesian notions such as mind-body duality.

In my previous piece I examined the reasoning that led to the infamous cogito: “I think; therefore, I am” (leaving aside that Descartes’s Meditations don’t contain this exact phrase). I found it wanting. It is conceivable that the cogito was unnecessary. Subsequent philosophy would have taken an entirely different and probably healthier course.

In this essay I’ll spend more time on the Cartesian legacy, beginning with its characterization of the mind as a “thinking thing” (Descartes did use this phrase) and his ontological argument for the existence of God.

The former was an autonomous entity — denuded of experience, family influence, past education, cultural tradition, religiosity, etc.: all those things that contribute to what we’ve come to think of as incorporated in one way or another into oneself.

What was left is (1) inherently rational, i.e., able to determine what is certain (can’t be coherently denied) and infer propositions from previous propositions; (2) autonomous, in the sense that it depends on no human authority to ground its doing so, or to take its reasoning in any particular direction; and (3) ontologically isolated in that it has yet to prove that any other beings exist besides itself. Even after such proof, it remains isolated in a lived-world sense as it cannot experience any other Cartesian “thinking thing” or mind.  

What does this entity know immediately? That it has ideas and can reason.

Among its ideas is that of a perfect God, the God of the Christian faith. Or so Descartes tells us.

A “thinking thing” is fallible and imperfect by its nature; but the object of this particular idea, if it has a separate existence, is infallible: perfect in all respects. The object of this idea is God, after all. So, Descartes reasons, he couldn’t have just invented this idea. Nor could it have come from fallible society. Fallible and imperfect “thinking things” cannot give rise to a thought the independent instantiation of which is infallible and perfect. The nonexistence of this particular object of thought would be a ghastly imperfection, moreover. This is a contradiction. Hence the object instantiated by this idea must exist, and God must exist to have implanted the idea of Himself in his mind.

The rest of Descartes’s argument for an external world (a world of “matter,” material or corporeal substance, external to his existence as a “thinking thing” or mind or incorporeal substance) falls right out. His senses might fail him sometimes; during the process of provisional doubt, they were shown to be fallible and not suited as a foundation for knowledge. But if God is perfect in every respect He is perfectly benign — any deception correctly ascribed to God would mean, again, that God is imperfect: another contradiction. Hence He would not allow someone seeking truth through the senses or through logic to fall into systemic error extensive enough as to be irreparable through the methods of mathematics, geometry, and experimentation that were proving useful in incipient physical science. 

Thus the world of space and time, its two substances, one incorporeal and the other corporeal: “thinking things” such as himself and his fellow humans, also rational agents, and “unthinking objects”: tables, chairs, and … animals. All that isn’t human, but which human beings can use to their advantage (we position pen and paper on tables, sit on chairs, and eat the flesh of animals).

Everything he previously doubted … fully intact!  

This dualism framed the obvious and very familiar problem of how such different substances can interact. Since this problem is so familiar I won’t bother discussing it as Descartes does or review any literature; I will simply turn to what came to seem to me its most important ramification: learning the physical workings of the corporeal world — and then having a storehouse of such knowledge being one of the features of “thinking things” working in knowledge communities — are first a species and then a result of interaction.

If the interaction problem remains unsolved on its own terms, then the fundamental problem of Cartesian epistemology, How is knowledge of an external world possible? remains unsolved on its own terms.

In other words: how does mind as a thinking and intelligent substance come to know matter, an unthinking and extended substance? The two, after all, have only one property in common: they exist in time, moving forward at exactly one second per second!

The Immediate Cartesian Legacy: Locke through Hume.

This set the course for subsequent philosophers, who either became empiricists who struggled to figure out how their minds, as abstract substance which contained ideas, could know anything apart from their own contents, or materialists who saw the Cartesian project as fundamentally illusory but nevertheless privileged the other half of its ontology: abstract material “stuff” or matter. (I’m not as familiar with continental rationalists such as Leibniz and Spinoza except to know that they were pursuing a parallel course struggling with the Cartesian legacy of two substances in their own ways.)

Locke called material substance “a something, I know not what,” if considered independently of its primary qualities (size, shape, texture), secondary qualities (e.g., color, sound) being what the mind adds. Berkeley, after him, tried to kill substance-dualism by arguing against even postulating a mysterious “stuff,” matter, as something ontologically independent of mind. There are, he argued, minds and ideas in minds — with the ideas in God’s mind existing as permanent possibilities for sensation. No more dualism, no more interaction problem!

A generation later, Hume turned the arguments Berkeley had used against matter against the postulate of mind as a substance, something definitive of personal identity, or one’s self. For Hume, all knowledge reduced to impressions or ideas as combinations of impressions. He contended he had no impression of himself apart from the impressions of combinations of such that came through his senses. Since all genuine ideas reduce to impressions or ideas formed from combinations of impressions, we have no idea of a continuous self and hence no knowledge of a self. 

This almost seems like a reductio-ad-absurdum. Did Hume destroy whatever was left of Cartesian dualism?

Not so fast.

The problem of our knowledge of external things and processes remained — something that had not been a problem before Descartes made it one. Hume’s solution was a kind of proto-pragmatism. “Nature has not left to our choice” the decision, e.g., to accept as real (i.e., material) the objects of our experience and to ground our beliefs about their behaviors in such ideas as causality: that future events will resemble past ones. Viewed purely philosophically, as problems of logic and knowledge, such beliefs cannot be substantiated. In what came to be known as inductive arguments from experience, the information in the premises always underdetermines the conclusion (except in trivial cases). But Hume invokes “nature” on numerous occasions, suggesting the latent presupposition of an unexperienced determinacy that weakens his overall position. Viewed as problems of living, moreover, such beliefs remain, because they are, and remain, reliable. Hume was fully aware of this.

He was also fully aware that “normal” people don’t fret about such things. Does anyone really care about these how-many-angels-can-dance-on-the-head-of-a-pin type logic chopping? There’s our reductio ad absurdum if this is where the Cartesian legacy has brought us.

Kant’s Transcendental Turn: A Long-Term Cartesian Legacy

Kant saw a polycrisis emerging in philosophy, though. He grasped Humean skeptical arguments; he also saw a confrontation on the horizon between the determinist worldview suggested by Newtonian physical science and our sense of ourselves as moral agents which required metaphysical freedom, which now seemed to call for action outside the causal structure of the world science was revealing. He thought these could be answered on philosophical terms, without resorting to appeals to “nature” or some other proto-pragmatic reasoning.

Thus the next major pivot: the transcendental turn.

Here, in the clearest language I think may be possible and remain at all accurate, is the basic idea: all previous philosophy presumed that the ideas in our minds must conform to causal and other structures of the world if we are to say that we have knowledge of the world. This presumption has met with failure. Hence Hume’s skeptical arguments and proto-pragmatic invocations of something called “nature.”

Why not presume, instead, that the world, to be intelligible, must conform to inherent logical or determinate structures of the inherent rationality of the human mind or consciousness, structures Kant would distinguish as forms of intuition (space and time) and categories of the understanding (e.g., causality) which operate a priori: epistemically prior to, required by, the coherence of our experience.   

The world disclosed by experience, so viewed, is empirically real but transcendentally ideal: generated by twelve categories of the understanding which Kant claimed to have deduced as logical necessities. They serve as mediators of experience which is a construction of the forms and the categories. What lies beyond? A Ding-an-Sich (thing-in-itself), about which one could say nothing further — echoing Locke’s “a something, I know not what.”   

Our physical selves — our bodies, our brains — may be causally determined down to the last detail by physical law (the categories ensure that we “see” them in these terms), but our rational will, known from the inside, is transcendentally free. Hence via Pure Reason we retain moral agency in this two-story theory of the human epistemic condition … which clearly retains, cleverly reconfigured, Cartesian substance-dualism. So why is Kant’s transcendental philosophy a long-term legacy of Cartesianism? Because Kant’s rational will is the direct descendant of Descartes’s “thinking thing”: rational, autonomous, separate! The mediation of experience by a transcendental matrix of categories, which generates knowledge, replaces Cartesian interaction — and, ultimately, reconfigures all its problems (starting with: how is any of this possible at all?)!  

Philosophers have heatedly debated exactly what Kant meant. Their conversations became (sometimes heated) fodder for much subsequent discussion, especially in Kant’s native Germany, and in many doctoral dissertations to come. Indeed, close study of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in which he works out the specifics is considered required for mastery of the history of modern philosophy.

Descartes had distinguished thinking mind — later, consciousness — from unthinking matter. This had led philosophers to emphasize epistemology at the expense of metaphysics. The subsequent trajectory had drawn the subject into a skeptical cul-de-sac.

Kant sought to break philosophy out of that cul-de-sac but derived a new dichotomy, one which ratcheted metaphysics down further (another of his important works was Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics). There were phenomena, the empirically real world about which knowledge was possible and in which we act physically responding to causation; then there were noumena — the uncategorized Ding-an-Sich. But in this realm resides our rational intellect and will, and hence our capacities for knowledge, freedom, and moral agency.    

Moving toward a summation of some difficult material: Kant’s the empirical world was a construction of the rational intellect, the mind: the Cartesian “thinking thing.” Who could grasp what lay outside, or what it amounted to, to ask the question. To answer it, you’d have to “step outside” your rational agency and stop being human! (Kant doesn’t try to prove the existence of a God. Quite the contrary.)

While Kant scholars — should any by some chance read this — will say that I’ve greatly oversimplified him — and I have left out nuances in order to keep the discussion manageable — would they disagree with the prognosis that residual Cartesianism had led philosophy to a worldview in which the world’s causal determinacy is product of categorization, something human, something we do as rational agents, not something the world, the Ding-an-Sich, does.

Categorization is human, all-too-human!

What’s happened to the “external world”?

In a sense, it has been “philosophized” into unintelligibility!

The Scientific (Third Stage) Intellect.

To the scientific mind, very little of this makes an ounce of damned sense! Comte’s formulating his Law of Three Stages over in France exemplified the turn away from what the Germans were doing.

Kant was a Second Stage thinker. In a sense, Comte’s Third Stage drew on what he might have seen as a healthier (or at least clearer) side of Kant’s thought: his answer to, “What Is Enlightenment?”

Third Stage thinking — “scientific and positive,” Comte called it — set the German epistemic morass aside and focused on scientific progress and science’s prospects as applying critical thinking and experimental technique to problems of knowledge and societal order. Positivism treated most philosophy as discredited, no less than monarchical and ecclesiastical authority. Enough air-castle building! Let’s just do science! And apply it!

Third Stage thinking thus became the foundation of modern science as it saw itself by the late 1800s and, a fortiori, the industrialism that was in motion: modernity.

Philosophy became “professionalized.” Mathematical logicians such as DeMorgan, Peano, and Frege waded into territory that gave the new “profession” something to do: ponder, for example, how identity statements about “the morning star” and “the evening star” could be empirical discoveries. Thus arose the analytic tradition, which purposefully retreated from the “big questions” and considered this the discipline’s “maturation.” During that century philosophy as a “profession” had moved onto modern university campuses where its influence on other institutions began to diminish. Scientists and industrialists did the real work of building the future; I’m sure they saw it that way.  

But try though they might, they could not eliminate that Cartesian “thinking thing,” that ideally autonomous, rational self Descartes had invented.

Homo Economicus

The next place this entity surfaced was in classical economics, as homo economicus: “economic man.” Who, or what, is homo economicus?

Like Descartes’s earlier entity, he/it is an abstraction denuded of all human characteristics except the three I listed above: capacities for reason and for autonomy; and de facto isolation.

Isn’t that interesting?!  

Classical and neoclassical economic theory saw this entity as the basic unit for their analyses, an acting agent who is consistently rational and narrowly self-interested, a walking-and-breathing utility calculator who pursued his/its subjectively defined ends optimally and exclusively. Homo economicus produces and consumes. Maybe he/it saves and invests. He/it doesn’t do much else. If challenged, the economists would concede that homo economicus is an abstraction used to simplify, and not a literal description of human beings or their behaviors. They are trying to be Third Stage empiricists, and this means managing huge amounts of data.

But does this get results? Can we not suspect that much economic theory does little to illuminate how real, live human beings act, interact, etc., with their interactions including, but not limited to, producing, consuming, saving, investing, etc. Not to mention the fact, for fact it is, that the statistical numbers produced are often misleading. We have, as I’ve noted elsewhere, “two economies,” and most of the numbers draw on one while basically ignoring the other.

We don’t need to wade into those issues here. Our main purpose was to illuminate the long arm of Cartesian influence in the modern world. If we realize that contemporary neoliberalism puts homo economicus on steroids, I think we’ve accomplished this.

Collective Subjectivism.

Much European philosophy remained within some version of the framework set by Kant’s transcendental turn. Since we’re all rational agents — as “thinking [noumenal] things” our logic operates according to the same principles for all — we should all see (i.e., construct) the same empirical [phenomenal] world: a world, incidentally, in which there was at most one race: the human race. It was on this basis of universal reason, after all, that Kant could argue for the categorical imperative as the central feature of his ethical theory. Universal reason applied the same way by all acting agents was a feature of transcendental philosophy that soon fell out of favor.

Hegel scrapped this notion with his turn to history as philosophically significant (historicism) and, in particular, the difference and eventual conflict between the world of the master (lord) versus that of the slave (bondservant) was its primary driver. Legions of subsequent political-economic philosophers would argue that economic-societal power relations compel different “constructions” of reality, i.e., different realities or lived worlds: the lived world of the oppressed is very different from that of the oppressor. Given that the later dominates, it is his lived world that is taken for reality, imposed on everyone through its vocabulary, etc.

We’re now compelled to think in terms of human groupings, or collectives. It made very little sense to say that the minds of persons qua individual selves “construct reality” in any meaningful way. They acquire their “constructions” from family, from membership in a community (society), from having acquired the language, concepts, habits, practices, rituals, etc., of the dominant group(s). These, a collectively subjective way of seeing and living in the world, become de facto reality.  

If its structures and arrangements are hurting you and your fellows, however — economically, psychologically — your and your fellows’ consciousness might come to sense that something is amiss!

Marx, of course, famously distinguished between dominant bourgeois and repressed proletariat consciousness. The latter he sought to free, believed that the future movement of history would set it free.

Interestingly, Marx was also a materialist, suggesting that materialism had evolved to incorporate the Hegelian historicist element! Obviously it had: dialectical materialism! History as a clash of material forces uniting in a new synthesis! Feudalism had generated capitalism which would generate socialism leading to Communism!

Philosophical feminists, when their excursions into matters epistemic began, distinguished similarly between masculine and feminine consciousness and sought to chart the effects of the dominance of the former over the latter on all social relations, how this resulted in different “worlds” in this broad sense. This added a new dimension to the vocabulary of those claiming the mantle of economic-societal oppression.

Speaking generally, this collective subjectivism had settled across the thinking of those who considered themselves cutting edge as philosophy, especially on the Continent, moved into the twentieth century and began to mix and mingle with similar ideas coming from the social sciences which also looked intently at human groupings (many of the latter’s purveyors had studied Hegel and Marx more than Comte).

Bottom line: our “categories” are no longer deduced logically, as Kant had contended, but acquired from various social and economic relations.

Who acquires them? Are we still Cartesian “thinking things”? Yes, but times have changed, and we’ve all been absorbed into larger abstractions: collectives defined by class, race-ethnicity, gender, perhaps more, in an “intersectional” mix (term coined in the 1990s and now a staple of identity politics). Where is the Cartesian element? In that we now have all these as mediators of experience, mediators of the supposed interaction between collective subjectivity and whatever lies outside of it.  

The epistemic quandary: how do “we” ever get outside our collective experience to “make contact with” something “out there”? This is, perhaps, a brutalist way of asking this. But this brand of philosophy fell into the post-Kantian view (1) that our experience is mediated and (2) that different identities result in different mediating lenses, as our minds acquire their categories from the collective experience of intersecting groups.

Sartre’s Existentialism: Being-in-Itself and Its Nausea.

We’d be remiss if we said nothing about Sartre’s existentialism, since arguably Sartre’s philosophy lies at the end of another of those roads Cartesianism sent us down.

Sartre, like most existentialists, expressed himself better in his novels and plays than he did in his formal philosophical works. Being and Nothingness borders on unreadable (at least to those of us trained in Anglosphere philosophy). Books like Nausea and plays like No Exit have more staying power.

Sartre distinguished being-in-itself from being-for-itself: yet another clear Cartesian distinction reflecting Descartes’s material versus mental substance, the one unconscious and objective, the latter conscious and subjective. Nausea is Sartre’s dramatization of what happens when the for-itself directly confronts the in-itself in the latter’s brute existence stripped of essence (recall that for the existentialist, “existence precedes essence”).

Nausea is the sensation — or metaphysical realization — of experiencing that the objects of our experience (beings-in-themselves, if you will) simply are, and that there is no reason or purpose or justification behind them. Sartre was, of course, an atheist: there is no God to have supplied such. Being-for-itself can supply meanings: invariably contingent, fragile, and wiped away by death’s inevitability. Or just by the realization of their brute presentation in our experience absent transcendent meaning.

One’s own life is in the same predicament. We’re thrown into the world; there is no reason for us being here beyond the mere causal, biological one that our parents slept together, an egg got fertilized, and our mother gave birth.

There is no “plan” laid out for us. We (beings-for-ourselves, one might say) are therefore “condemned to be free”: Sartre’s phrase. What we do with ourselves is entirely up to us. Any attempt to specify a plan prior to this is bad faith: rationalization, a mental escape. We choose, and any attempt to justify our choices in terms of something outside our free decision is also bad faith (Sartre rejected psychological determinism in all forms as dishonest).

Since we have no essence, only existence, freedom is not something we have; it is what we are. Our consciousness is an unstructured nothingness that projects meanings. Nausea is what we experience when all the projections collapse and the objects of experience are revealed in their raw, meaningless facticity, within which we are absolutely free: free, say, to give money to a poor woman on the sidewalk or to kick her into the street.

I’m not saying Sartre would countenance this last. It is up to us what to make of ourselves, and what we do decides this completely. It is then up to us to take full responsibility for the choice. Every choice we make, moreover, is a choice for all (echoing Kant’s imperative): we are saying, this is what it means to be human. To live authentically means to live with full consciousness of our absolute freedom and our inability to flee responsibility for our choices. Therefore we choose in anguish. Anguish is the emotional realization of our radical freedom, the vertigo of realizing: (1) no essence defines me; (2) so nothing compels me; (3) I alone am responsible for my choice; (4) by my choice I am choosing for all, saying this is what it means to be human.  

But does this last follow? In what sense am I “choosing for all” by my choices given my unique situation? I would argue that by echoing Kant’s imperative, Sartre destroyed his entire philosophy in one fell swoop. By kicking the woman into the street I would be telling anyone watching that I’m probably a psychopath, but that isn’t choosing psychopathy for the world.

Sartre’s is ultimately a ghastly, wholly unpleasant philosophy of life that, if it accomplishes anything, ought to make us question the premises that put us on the road that led to it. Again: “experts” on Sartre would say I’ve oversimplified him, because I’ve done what I had to in order to keep the subject manageable (Sartre would dismiss this remark as in bad faith, of course).

Faux Individualism (Egoism).

A few others followed (an almost certain misreading of) Nietzsche and became what I’ll call faux individualists? They eschewed what they considered as collectivism in all forms and defended the individual qua autonomous rational agent standing alone, in defiance of the world, like Howard Roark of Ayn Rand’s infamous novel The Fountainhead.

Miss Rand gave us ethical egoism, in which the individual ought always to be the primary beneficiary of his actions all the time. This she saw as the foundation of capitalist political economy which she called “the unknown ideal” (wow!). In most respects, the faux individualist repudiates community as fundamentally corrupting and controlling. He demands to do as he pleases, recognizing his own autonomous reason as his only authority.

Miss Rand was no existentialist. For her, to act from reason is our highest ideal, and we, as individuals, ought to be the primary beneficiaries of our actions. Trade in the capitalist marketplace consists of value-for-value exchanges (all value again being subjective).

Why do we call this faux individualism? Because no one has ever lived this way consistently. Anyone who did so would be regarded by his fellow humans as a sociopath. 

At his best, this person strives for what Maslow called self-actualization: the fullest development of one’s innate abilities and the self-validation these bring about, at the pinnacle of his hierarchy of needs. The drawback here, as I suspect Maslow eventually understood, is that less than three percent of the human race ever achieves anything like this, and that might be being generous. What, again, is being self-actualized, though? There is no Cartesian or individualist answer to this, because a Cartesian “thinking thing” cannot generate a true self, which emerges through myriad interactions with others — parents first, then peers and others in one’s vicinity, and then one’s cultural heritage and the beliefs and traditions it supplies. Selves are much more than entities of autonomous rational intellect!

Unfortunately, what I’ll call (following Richard David Hames) industrial economism, the primary legacy of Enlightened modernity and the liberal tradition that began with figures such as Locke down through Mill, has made of us millions upon millions of autonomous homo economici. This tradition sees us primarily as traders — producers and consumers — and otherwise casts us adrift. Arguably there has never been more abundance in the world. Most of us, even the less well off, live considerably better lives, with more creature comforts, than even royalty could have imagined centuries past.

But we have a sense of being cut off from one another. We struggle to find meaningful work amidst the smorgasbord of supposed opportunities industrial economism offers. Myriad factors drive us apart, ranging from the (often economically-caused) deterioration of families to the rise of bureaucratic corporate structures that extract productivity from human beings and then spit them out when they cease to be profitable. Arguably, and paradoxically, we’ve never been more connected through technology but never lonelier as persons. Huge percentages of men in particular complain of having no close friends in a world in which the ability to trust others has fallen precipitously. One can always retreat into the apartment he can barely afford and contemplate his existence as a “thinking thing” and a homo economicus. If he’s not too busy trying to line up his next gig.

How do we break the spell of the Cartesian legacy?

Can We Break the Spell of Cartesianism?

We have to wrap up this lengthy and hopefully not too cumbersome adventure in ideas. It is important again: we have, as a people, as a species, as a natural kind (as always, whichever term you want) solved a wide variety of problems using a wide variety of methods, often picking and choosing opportunistically, in an ongoing quest for what solves problems. We are inherently problem solvers. We solve problems all of the time, some for ourselves and some for others. Although sometimes we end up having created a lot of new problems.

What explains this?

I think what explains it is that the original Cartesianism that took us down the road to homo economicus, collective subjectivism, existentialism, faux individualism, etc., is wrong. Derivatives of this philosophy, such as materialism and industrial economism, are therefore also wrong.

As noted in my last essay, Cartesian reasoning to its foundation (the cogito) is ambiguous and probably resulted in something unnecessary. Conceivably, Descartes could have recognized the unintelligibility of doubting logical principles such as noncontradiction or statements of mathematics or geometry, and this would have given his position continuity with all that came before it going back to Plato and Aristotle (and, perhaps, to God as a starting point instead of one stage of a deductive argument).

In this case, there are no “thinking things” or other abstractions. There is no “autonomous rational intellect” denuded of the rest of what makes us human: a biological nature with whatever advantages this creates or constraints it imposes; family and upbringing, all the varying attachments and connections this involves; language with its primary purpose as communication of information; culture which provides an inheritance of traditions, practices accepted and expected; one’s need for meaning, valuable activity, and validation ultimate satisfied by our sense of connection to states of affairs and ultimately a Being greater than ourselves.

Nor, in this view, is there an “interaction problem” or a “problem of the existence of the external world.” Knowledge conceived outside of Cartesianism might look to how we’ve reliably solved problems through specific actions or methods and looked to those, seeing knowledge as consisting of consistently reliable problem-solutions instead of representations of, or confrontations with, something radically outside our consciousness and accessible only through mediation of some kind.

C.S. Peirce, founder of American pragmatism, warned against doubt as an end in itself, as an intellectual exercise, as opposed to doubting because one has a positive reason for it, e.g., having made an observation or gotten a result that violates expectations or fails to solve a problem. In the absence of such, do I have any legitimate, earthshaking, positive reasons for doubting that my senses usually afford me reliable (if incomplete) knowledge about my immediate surroundings, and that therefore I know, in any reasonable sense of this term, that I can trust their operation? Do I have any legitimate, earthshaking, positive reasons for doubting that my reason is sufficient to correct those occasions, which do happen, when I misjudged something that came to me through my senses?

Such a progression could reconstruct a philosophy that is both realist and pragmatist, a philosophy for living and not just abstracting.

Systems Thinking Again.

Early in the twentieth century (and even before) a number of intrepid scholars began to think in systems. They came to see the world as comprised of interacting and interdependent hierarchies of systems, with each of us as systems participating in larger systems (families, places of employment and economies, governments and governmental agencies) and comprised of systems (body systems such as immune and digestive, organs, tissues, cells, molecules comprising them, atoms, subatomic particles, etc.). Other systems include the ecosystem and planetary system as a whole, the solar system, the Milky Way Galaxy, and so on.

Conceivably, “it’s systems all the way up and systems all the way down”!

Knowledge so conceived is interactive and reliabilist: not purely empirical, purely rational, nor representational nor confrontational: it is not established through “pure reason” as rationalists thought nor does it come “through the senses” as empiricists thought. Both are confrontational theories of knowledge presupposing a fundamental ontological separation — another dichotomy — between knower and known. It doesn’t see absolute proof as a condition for knowing; and its concept of objectivity will be flexible: taking into consideration all that is relevant within the knower’s (or the community of knowers) scope of awareness, something which changes over time as circumstances change.

One final consideration I’d like to mention. What of those philosophers, and a few scientists, who have argued compellingly that the sensory array and nervous systems of animal species, ourselves included, create for its members an irreducible sensorium or quality space, e.g., Nagel’s ingenious “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” This paper, and a few others like it (I recall one that explored how cats’ visual sense is keyed more to horizontal than vertical motion because they are hunters, and hunting prey on the ground is in their biological hardwiring; also one with the colorful title “What Does the Frog’s Eye Tell the Frog’s Brain?”) sent me down a quasi-Kantian rabbit trail it took me several years to return from.

The non-Kantian (and non-Cartesian) answer — which would take a separate essay to flesh out properly, as might be the case with this entire section (!) — is to think of species-specific sensory arrays as akin to windows instead of barriers of mediation. Windows show us specific ranges of things without showing us everything. My office window looks west, and shows me the world outside in that direction. To see the view from the other side of my building, I have to cross the hall, enter the opposite apartment, and look out the window over there. Windows looking in different directions provide different and incomplete perspectives, and obviously this doesn’t mean that what they show us is unreal.

Picking up a thread from the last section and taking it further: when I look at my work table I see it as a table. Nothing inclines me to doubt the validity of what my eyes are showing me. My knowledge base tells me that the table is made up of molecules which in turn are made up of atom, etc. I don’t see molecules and atoms and atomic nuclei, of course. So my vision of the table is also incomplete. But that doesn’t falsify my visual sense or permit me to infer that what I see is a “construction of categories,” except perhaps in the trivial sense that if I don’t know what a table is, I’ll only see it as an object. What I see in front of me is still a table. (Somewhere in here is the solution to Eddington’s “two tables” conundrum.)

Sensory arrays of different species viewed this way allow populations whose array is working properly to experience different cross-sections of reality in species-specific fashion. The fact that no species experiences the whole of reality, whatever that might amount to, does not mean that what is experienced isn’t real, that it is a “construction of consciousness” in some sense. The fact that “our” experienced sensorium is different from that of bats, or cats, or frogs — perhaps because different senses are emphasized — need not compel us to say things like, “different species inhabit different worlds.” All species on planet Earth inhabit the same world. They just experience it differently because their sensory arrays and brains are structured to process it in different ways. What matters is that a species’ important problems (of, e.g., obtaining food, navigating around objects, avoiding predators, etc.) are solved.

There is, obviously, a need for far more elucidation of the theory of knowledge implied here, as consistently successful problem solving through interaction than can be supplied in 6,000-or-so words. I would never claim to have the final word on the subjects addressed here. Suffice it to say, thinking in terms supplied in these final two sections might be our best way out of Cartesianism and the dilemmas it has saddled philosophy with down through the centuries since Descartes thought he could use “pure reason” and arrive at “apodictic certainty” about his identity as a “thinking thing,” and then reconstruct a world that — amazingly — ends up looking the same as everything his process of doubt led him to set aside. (Nobody told him that certainty is a psychological and not an epistemological category: “I am utterly certain that p” can be true and p be false. Example: I can be certain as I can be that it will rain later today, and it not rain.)

What we have here, however lacking in completeness, might start to guide us back to a philosophy that provides us guidelines for living as well as knowing, and does so without losing sight of the Big Questions.