Rules for the mind

If I say “Descartes”, many people will say “Cogito ergo sum” or “I think so I am”, and that’s it. Even if they can explain what was meant with this sentence and why it was important, I think that most who are not philosophers, and maybe also many who are, don’t know that Descartes contributed to many different fields of philosophy and science. So, if it wouldn’t have been William Harvey who discovered the blood circulation, it might have been Descartes who had already made much progress in his research. He invented also analytic geometry.

Some of Descartes’s ideas are weird from the current point of view, and I assume that also already in his days they were. For instance, he thought that animals have no feelings, since they have no souls. They are not different from machines. So if you give a dog a kick and it screams, this screaming is merely a sound and not an expression of pain. Therefore vivisection was not a problem for Descartes.

If you think that philosophy is obscure, maybe you have read Hegel and Kant, but you haven’t read Descartes. Descartes is one of the most clearly writing philosophers who ever lived. His maxim was: Everything can be said in a clear and distinct way, say in plain words that everybody can understand. Otherwise it’s nonsense. He didn’t use this only as a rule of thumb but he wrote even a book with methodological rules for clear and distinct philosophical and scientific reasoning: The Rules for the Direction of the Mind. It contains 21 rules with extensive explanations. It’s a pity that he didn’t finish the book, but nevertheless it is worth reading. His explanations are as interesting as the rules themselves are and they contain also a criticism on the way many people reason. The rules are not only useful for philosophers, scholars and scientists, but for everybody who is arguing. So keep these rules also in your mind when you listen to a politician. (If enough British had done so, maybe they would never have voted for the Brexit). Take for example this quote from the explanation to Rule IX:

“It is a common human weakness to consider most beautiful what is difficult. Most people think that they know nothing when they see a very transparent and simple cause of something. Yet they admire grandiloquent and far-fetched argumentations by philosophers, even though they are usually based on foundations that nobody ever fully has understood. ... [I want to stress that] knowledge, how hidden it is, must not be deduced from important and obscure things but only from what is easy and general.”

Descartes is right, but how often does what is difficult seems more important to us than what is simple? And not only words can mislead us, but also the pose of the speaker often does, as Descartes explains in his comment on Rule XII:

“The self-confident allow themselves to put forward their conjectures as true proves; in cases they absolutely know nothing about they think to see obscure truths, as through a fog. They are also not afraid to present them and to connect their concepts then with certain terms. With the help of these terms they are in the habit to talk and to reason about many things that in fact neither they nor their listeners understand.” The modest, so Descartes continues, keep silent and let finding the truth to others, because they think that they themselves are not competent enough and they belief what the self-confident say.

Have I to add anything? Isn’t this what we everywhere see around us? But even if we have the right attitude and are honest and open, language can block mutual understanding and prevent to express what we mean. For for one a word means this and for another that and as Descartes says in his explanation to Rule XIII (a bit adapted and generalized by me) : “Questions about words happen so often that almost all controversies between philosophers would disappear, if they always agreed about the meaning of the words.”

There is a joke that says that there are two philosophical main laws:

The First Law of Philosophy: For every philosopher, there exists an equal and opposite philosopher.

The Second Law of Philosophy: They are both wrong.

Alas, often this seems true, for most philosophers didn’t read Descartes’s Rules and don’t use it as a guide. If they would, they would know that they “ought to give the whole of [their] attention to the most insignificant and most easily mastered facts, and remain a long time in contemplation of them until [they] are accustomed to behold the truth clearly and distinctly.” (Descartes’s Rule IX)