Is he for real?

 

 

The search for truth is supposed to be the philosopher’s domain, but in actual fact philosophy is merely a way of making conversation about what truth might be. As Lord Russell used to put it: "The real question is: Is there anything we can think of which, by the mere fact that we can think of it, is shown to exist outside of our thought? If yes is the right answer, there is a bridge from pure thought to things, if not, not.” (Bertrand Russell, 1872-1970). So to say that I exist because I think could be such affirmation of my existence by mere thinking. It may also very well be the only instance where this is possible and it can only be established by the thinker himself. His wife, tossing the thinker’s smelly socks into the washer, will go by different criteria.

This may still leave us with an insurmountable problem. Before Rene Decartes (1596-1650) came to announce his "In dubito, in cogito, ergo sum," he considered the possibility that his thoughts could be the dream in the mind of a demon. If so, how are we to tell the difference whether we or the demon is thinking? “Existence” is a tricky subject. Grammar, logic and syntax know of no difference between a lion and a unicorn; they only know of the order of words and how words relate to each other. Whether unicorns are real is to be decided in a different court.

 This did lead Descartes to make a valid ontological observation: "I perceived that there was nothing at all in these demonstrations which could assure me of the existence of their object: for example, supposing a triangle to be given, I distinctly perceived that its three angles were necessarily equal to two right angles, but I did not on that account perceive anything which could assure me that any triangle existed."

In other words, there is necessity in the geometric features of a Euclidian triangle, but its actual existence is a matter of contingency.

Arcane as this seems, in the 16^th century, this sort of thing could get you into serious trouble. It was the age of thumbscrews and auto-da-fes. In Germany Lutherans the Catholics got ready to keep killing each other for the next thirty years, it was still customary to burn witches and heretics, and not just if you had the bad luck of falling into the clutches of the inquisition. Protestants made sure the custom had a future. The last woman to burn on charges of witchcraft was Anna Geoldi on June 17, 1782, in Glaris, Switzerland, a protestant country. And it was a protestant, the “reformer” Calvin, who ordered the arrest and prosecution of a refugee from the inquisition, the physician and theologian Michael Servetus (September 29, 1511-October 27,1553), who was the first European to describe the pulmonary circulation. Calvin acted with the serenity of a man who is certain that he can’t do any wrong: Luther, Melanchthon and the Swiss reformers they all had ganged up behind Calvin to support the decision; a rare moment of unity. And all this, because in the theological section of his works Servetus had the temerity to revive the non-trinitarian theology of the presbyter Arius. Suddenly even Rome would remember that on this their protestant adversaries held common ground with Catholicism. Descartes had every reason to navigate with caution if he ventured into such tricky questions as the existence of God.

So in the very next paragraph he proceeded like this: "Examining the idea of a Perfect Being, I found that the existence of such Being was comprised in the idea in the same way as the equality of three angles to two right angles is comprised in the idea of a triangle. Consequently it is at least as certain as any demonstration of geometry can be, that God, who is this Perfect Being, exists."

It seems he fooled nobody. The finest minds of the period had been his correspondents, they looked right through the ruse and among themselves considered him an atheist.  

© - 10/8/2007 - by michael sympson,

750 words, all rights reserved