Jobless and welcome back to the new Thinkery. I'm David Barr and with me is always says, Ross, come on, Alex, how are you doing, Alex? Very good. What was this, Jamaican?
I don't know. So every few days I switch into a different mode. There's Country Dave where it's just way on Jennings. There's Ross to Dave where it's Bob Marlin today with Chopin Dave, Chopin Dave.
So I was more relaxed, but it really upsets my wife, which is why I do it. And speaking of people I upset, how are you doing, Greg? Doing great. So nice to be with you guys this evening.
Just having a wholesome evening and some wholesome conversation before we log on. Just glad to be here with you guys. I remember when I was in college, you go to dining hall. And every now and then they had for lunch or dinner or whatever, Jamaican beef patties.
And it was just this weird pocket with like this mystery meet with like God knows what, nothing tasted Jamaican about it. It was like the most horrendous thing I've ever eaten. I've since come to love the cuisine of Jamaica. But that was- And the people of course are great.
I mean, we would have nothing negative to say about the island or the people or anything like that. Do you mind? No one would do that. No one would say anything.
No one would do that. That's what I'm going to do. Yeah. Greg.
Go ahead. Let's do- Can you start over? This is on Steam. What are we doing?
Really quick. Speaking of Jamaicans, Ben or Daddy has a famous Jamaican student. Doesn't he always want to do that? Yes.
Yes. But what's his first name? Patrick Gooden. Seriously?
Yeah. How old is he? Howard. Howard is D.C.
For many, many years. He's great. I mean, he's a really nice guy and he's a great scholar too. Wow.
He's a great kind of presentation like tone and rhythm and everything. But sometimes you'll get into like a rhythm and he'll boldly declare things in Greek. I think Greek with it to make. We have to have him on the show.
He's amazing. He's amazing. He's like, this is intense. He's great.
I mean, that's great. Jake, Jake, Jake Cannon's going to hate us. But Ramley on about, I don't even know what we're talking about. What are we talking about tonight?
We're talking about how PEL I know where your mom's lives. I'm coming for. What? I want to go after PEL.
I think that's not constitutionally protected speech. You just want it's satire. If you want, it's the yes. That's funny.
One of the moms of the host of PEL. Oh, no, I can't. We just donate. Oh my god.
The new thing. Alex means he got on a date, Greg. Yeah. Yeah.
I'm in murder. Oh, okay. We can't say that. Okay.
You're the one that's wearing a rent a cop mustache. We're doing day cart. Alex, we read day cart together. Here's a guy at St.
John's. I was really boring. I just didn't get it. And then I read a Kenny tins essay with a discourses method.
It just kind of blew me away. And then I sent it out for preparation. What? Why didn't you send that?
I was preparing this week. Anyway, sorry. We wanted to give you an inferior translation just to see how short of the marks you come up on the podcast. We actually live in this discourse.
So I didn't find her very interesting. That's all. Sorry. The focus publishing.
Wasn't you just say her? I just didn't think. I mean, just, yeah. You know, it's a man's name.
You had a colleague. No, no. Come on. What's his name?
Yeah. Yeah. It's the same thing. What?
I mean, David. We're using the Kennington edition that he wrote with, reco edited with his wife, Pamela Krauss. So I think she's just published posthumously. He prepared a number of translations when he teach the current.
And then after the fact this was published, but it has the feel. The translation has the feel of something that was polished and meant for publication. It has, it has that. It has an introduction by his wife, Pamela Krauss.
And it also has, sorry. They also did with Frame Hunt as well. And then there's also the essay that David mentioned. It's incredible.
Yeah. I sure read that. It's not a reading for anybody wants to understand. Yeah.
And Kennington, we don't need to go too deeply into this. We'll have one of his students and, you know, Valkley's close friend, obviously, and student on the show. But he has an incredibly concise manner of writing. It's like Ben or Daddy, but there's a different kind of style.
He only has one book of essays that he ever published. Right, Alex? Yeah, but again, posthumous, I believe. Okay.
And then when was this? Yeah. And he never finished or he finished his dissertation at the age of 40 or something better than he thought. Oh, it was a story.
We don't want to go too much again. He had a tenure track job at the university without his PhD. Just had like a bachelor's or a pastor's. Wow.
He then finished his degree under Ben or Daddy. And it's a sort of famous story that Ben or Daddy asked him one question. And he's like, well, your question is three parts, each of which has these four subsections. And he went through it.
And by the time he finished the answer, the question of the hour was up. He was incredibly organized and careful. He didn't publish much because he had a very high standard and was very, very careful. Yeah.
Unfortunately, that means that there's a lot of essays that is floating around and stuff that haven't to be never seen the light of day. Oh, really? Yeah. And his dissertation on the meditations, which I'd like to get my hands on at some point, is another gem.
But he is a foremost, he's the best guy to read on Descartes. I mean, he's incredibly thoughtful and on the early moderns, but Descartes, I think, is what is most of his wheelhouse. Maybe, I think he and Stranger took us up with the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the kennington. That's tough.
I've tried to get it. You have to go down to the usual and like read it. All right. Everybody before going further, I think we should take him in to, uh, step aside and think our sponsor, the ancient language Institute.
Now I owe the ancient language Institute and our listeners a deep apology after last week's ad. I got a lot of emails saying, I don't want to learn my languages from some ancient Institute. I want to learn them from a thoroughly modern Institute. This is the 21st century.
I think I must have said something like the ancient language Institute rather than the ancient language Institute because let's be clear, there is nothing ancient about the Institute itself. It's just the languages, the languages. Yeah, they're ancient, right? We got land, ancient Greek, both coin and attic, and we have biblical Hebrew, but the antiquity of the Institute stops there at the languages.
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So if you want to get your ancient language on, go to ancientlanguage.com. And now back to the show. So who was Alex Alex? Yeah.
Sorry. Sorry. No, no, no, no. Search your rifle duty.
Decartes was a lead. Decartes was, uh, I think he's the greatest French philosopher of all time. Come on. Get out of here.
Who could really? Montesquieu? I don't know. Maybe I'm on.
Inspector Clusso? You're going to get into the lawn? Yeah. No.
Really? What about David's favorite Marquis de Sartre? That's true. Right?
I mean, unsung hero. No. We're talking about men of letters, not men of action. So decartes lived from 1596 to 1650.
What do you do? What do you do? Are you reading your notes there? What's happening?
Yeah, of course. Okay. I mean, I'm sorry. Just kidding.
I don't know. 1650. He very early in his life, according to the discourse on method, which is a kind of autobiography, fictitious autobiography, a kind of fabulous autobiography, autobiography autobiography. And, you know, as he's spelling it out, he's reacting to the state of the sciences.
You know, we've talked about bacon on here, similar to bacon. He's reacting to the state of the sciences, seeing that it's sort of shot through with scholastic Aristotelianism and trying to find a firmer foundation to the sciences. He comes up with the basic ideas of his thought. And this is, again, according to the discourse on the method, when he's stopped at the beginning of the 30 years war in 1619 and a little cabin where he snowed in and he has time to think to himself.
So he's 25 when he comes up with his method, which is pretty incredible. And among the things that he accomplishes and parts two or three of the discourse kind of relate those meditations in that, that Kevin, one of the things he accomplishes is the synthesis of algebra and geometry that we all learned today that, you know, in the simplest form we learned with the Cartesian coordinate system, the ability to sort of calculate proportions and solve equations both by looking at graphs visually, but also manipulating variables and numbers. And so solving them side algebraically, right? Each has its strengths.
You can observe larger trends on a graph, but you can plug and play different sort of numbers in algebra. He puts that all together. So not just a brilliant philosopher, but also an extremely talented mathematician, one of the most talented in history. From there, eventually he writes a work called The World.
It's a kind of account of how the world such as we live in it might come to be without God's guidance, save for setting the laws of the universe. He decides after seeing Galileo get all messed up, that he's not going to publish this thing. And instead, he writes the discourse on the method. The discourse on the method.
Who am I? What's that? Who? Galileo?
Galileo Figaro? Oh, Craig. It's his mustache, Alex. It's his name.
It's the entry. But really quick, Alex, this is this massive, like a world historical project that Descartes, you're saying he attempts, but he casts it aside. Is this analogous to what Bacon was up to? It is in a way.
I mean, so he ends up writing in place of the world and in place of another work that he began called the rules, but never finished, right? The rules for the direction of the mind. This work, the full title is discourse on the method. Let me get this right.
It's discourse on the method of conducting one's reason well and seeking truth in the sciences. So rules for the direction of mind, conducting one's reason, there's a kind of similarity and purpose. But the rules is a very kind of didactic work. Rule one, here's a comment.
Here's the rule. Here's a commentary. Rule two, et cetera, right? He scraps that project.
He scraps publishing the world and he takes these works and among others sort of, you know, a distillation and he takes it and he puts it into the context of an autobiography, right? So he makes a move towards creating a kind of poetic narrative of his own life, going from what any sort of young person going to academic studies would have learned, going through that process, critiquing it and coming out the other side with a new sort of scientific method and a new project, right? In many ways, if you want to introduce a card to the card's life, you know, fictional qualities aside because it is obviously, in some ways, contrived, sit down and read the discourse on the method. And he's sort of telling you about the steps he went through to get to where he is, right?
And Alex, talk about the concision of the text too. This isn't like Rousseau's confession. This isn't another philosophic autobiography that's hundreds of pages long. This is how many pages 30?
50, 60 pages maybe most 50s. It's pretty short. It was originally published with three other works. I work on optics and work on called the meteors, which is all my sort of things in the air.
It's not just sort of meteors. And then I work on geometry, right? This was a very different from say, Bacon's great installation, right? It's a great installation.
You get the plan, you get the new working on, and then you get, at the end of it was published in the original 1620 edition, a sort of outline for a plan of a natural history with some introductory aphorisms. No experiments. There's a sort of initial example of trying to maybe start an experiment and think about heat, but it's completely prefatory, right? It's not meant.
So whereas Descartes says, hey, here's my method. Here are some things I figured out. Here's how to make the machines and the implements to get it done. I know it's complicated, but you figure it out.
And if you work through it, as people did work through it, you have real sort of tangible proof, right? So the first part, you get this a bit from part five of the discourse on that. They were explains how the heart works, right? He shows you how mechanical reasoning, right?
Thinking of that kind of mathematical fashion can really help you understand, you know, physiological phenomena. And maybe I should say something real quick about the structure of the work, just so that we have a sense of it. The first part is Descartes' assessment of the current state of the sciences when he was young as a student, his critique of the sciences and his praise solely of mathematics, right? That's the only science that gets unequivocal praise, but only really the traction is we haven't made enough use of it, right?
But that's not the science that's the people. Descartes two is on his discovery of the method and three goes with that. He sets up a kind of provisional morality, how he's going to live his life until the method gives him firmer guidance about how to live. He then in part four gives his metaphysics in what is basically a condensed version of a book you come to write or publish four years later in 1641, the meditation is on first philosophy.
It's really it's so he opens that book saying this is an expansion of the fourth part of the discourse on the method. In the fifth, he goes from metaphysics to physics. Once you understand the basic nature of things, you can start thinking about how things operate and behave and move. And then from there, he comes to the present day finally.
And that's part six. And he gives his reasons for writing the work, which is, I think, the place where you get the most it kind of comes around as Greg is signaling with hand motions right now. But it's where you get, I think, the most candid statements as candid as he could be. But the most direct statement about his ambitions, and his sort of political ambitions.
Now, there's stuff early on that kind of feeds into that. I'm not sure I say that's just it, but it's kind of where you get a sense of where he's actually going with all this. So, and what on the seventh part he rests or what? Exactly.
So, the meditation has six parts. There's six meditations, which are actually written as day after day after day, right? Interesting. And it feeds into, this is interesting work on the cards, meditations in particular.
It's a kind of, it was a genre, the meditation literature, often focused on sort of personal transformation in your relationship with God and a kind of sort of idea of 60s of creation fits that. I mean, I see six parts to this. I see six parts to the meditations. I see six parts to great, a Bacon's plant, the great restoration or installation of the sciences.
And obviously, I think there are biblical connotations here. So, you know, you write it to me about association. And honestly, you have six parts to this very loss. But just a quick, a few things are going off and I want to circle back to this later on, but the six part is where, like I haven't taught this, I haven't read it since college until the last couple of days and I've been very busy.
So, I was struggling to sort of make sense of this so I can fess. I don't know that I understand it well, but the last part, the six part is where, to me, Descartes seems to make clear. Look, anytime an author speaks about persecution for communicating your thoughts, that's when my spidey's throughout, you had to start ting when I started thinking about the science. So, he, so just a couple of things.
One is, like, just to the spidey sense is the heart section, all those numbers that occur in the heart section is very odd. I didn't have time to track it, but I started counting them on anyway. But forget that for a second. Can you tell me two questions for you?
Number one, what is the method? I think you've kind of insinuated it. But number two, you know, to a normal person who's not nearly as what, cynical as I am, who's as suspicious as I am, can you tell me what the method is? And then can you also tell me like, what's the, what's the generally accepted account of what's happening in this book?
Alex, I prefer you keep the method to yourself and shore up that knowledge. And one small point, by the way, he keeps using the word way throughout this text. I noticed, I assume his method is in Greek is right the way on the way or something like this or on the road. And so I wonder if that even that was intentionally trying to, I don't know how the French works out and in any of that.
I saw that as being a part of what he's doing. What he's up to. Yeah, I mean, that last one is interesting. I think when it comes to using method, I think for method has so much connotation for us today.
But the simplest way is right. Like there's method means there's just a right way of proceeding than the simplest. Yeah. Okay.
So I think it's a very, very simple principle. I mean, maybe this is a good place to sort of begin just with what the title refers to, but this is on page of the. 25 of the kennington. Yeah.
25. Yeah. Only except is true. What I know evidently to be so I have to know things clearly and distinctly that's very clear.
It's a very common phrase you get in Descartes. By clear, I think he means in itself, it's clear distinct. He means it's also distinct from other things. You can define it relative to other things.
Second, divide everything up into as many parts as possible. Or as many as would be required to resolve it better. Third, begin from the simplest and easiest to know and assemble it by little two degrees. And importantly, in the way that I just pointed out, even supposing an order among those that have no natural order of coincidence.
And fourth, check your work. It's very simple, right? Like if you're going to read a book carefully, right? Go take a survey of it, right?
Get a sense of what's going on and try to proceed from the smallest parts and work your way up until you understand the whole and then double check your work. Couple of things. So divide it into as many parts as possible and as would be required to resolve it better. So the aim of resolving the problems sometimes means you stop short of breaking things down, right?
Don't go further than it's necessary for your purpose of solving this or that problem. Supposing an order where there might be no natural order, that means setting up an hypothesis, kind of build a theory and move on from there, right? Even if you don't necessarily know the basic solutions and checking your work. In a way, this is just sound thinking, but in a way he's also describing sort of starting at the smallest level and building your theories on the firmest possible foundations.
So Alex, but yeah. You can have one more thing. Sorry, sorry. In addition to that, he bookends this with his discussion of his mathematical innovations, okay?
And I think this is important and this might take a minute, but this is something that Jacob Klein makes a lot of and his book on the history of mathematics. Descartes does something that's pretty consequential in the realm of mathematics. If you apply algebra to the world, which is what mathematical physics does, right? That means whatever it is you're trying to use, start to get to is represented by variable x, right?
And x can be any magnitude. It can be an integer. It can be square root of two or pi. It could be an irrational magnitude that you can't count, right?
But somehow if you can solve this, you've gone at the basic thing, this unit or something like that, that's making it up by representing physical worlds with this variable. Descartes essentially denies that there's any kind of natural unity in the things we experience, that the basic stuff might be below that. To give us sort of simple example, we're all made of atoms. You're made of atoms.
I made of atoms. The chairs made of atoms. In that respect, we're all the same, right? There's a kind of basic stuff.
That's the x out of which we all sort of come. That's a very big deal because all of a sudden, Greg, David, you're no different from a table or a chair, right? That's a denial of the forms of ordinary experiences, specifically the organic forms, right? So the example I like to use to make this a bit more tangible is if Greg and I are brothers, which is unbelievable because he's a thousand years old, if Greg and I are brothers and our parents die and we are left a cow and we each get- Oh, I know where this is going.
We have a cow. Now, our parents like to be better, but they decide to let us say, now I want to eat the cow. I like a steak. Greg, he doesn't want the cow dead for reasons we don't need to go into, but you want that meal.
It's like it makes cheese with a cow. You know? Yeah, you know. And so what happens is the solution to this problem is what?
We cut the cow in half, right? Now the problem is it's a dead cow. Greg is fine with that, but a dead cow is just- You don't even know why. This is very certain.
Jesus. Why would he lie about it doesn't make any sense? Sorry. It's a cow can't give you milk for cheese for whatever.
Right. It's not like you call it. It doesn't love you. Right.
And that's what happens when you treat organic things as unit. Right. The solution to that is, well, you know, what do we get? We get each get half of a cow.
Right. That's what happens when you divide X by two or you get at the sort of X that solves this equation. That's pretty consequential of the move that he does. So the idea of the move.
Yeah, the move. The consequences of- John, I see he's a fan of the divided count too. Are you saying this is criticism of his way of sort of atomizing everything? Well, yeah, when you atomize things, you deny the unity's- Which is what he's doing.
Yeah. Now, it's a very powerful move. I mean, this is not the first to do a bacon does it pretty explicitly in part two of the new organ. But it's a pretty consequential move that has great consequences for how we treat one another.
Right. When you think of how we scientifically manage human life animals, etc. Right. When we think about genetic engineering, right, how we could create whole two species, possibly.
When you really spell that out, you realize that this attempt to go beneath the forms of experience and get to the basic stuff can end up having a kind of violence to the things that we tend to think just are, right? They have a kind of permanence, right? So the method is deeply radical in its attempt to dig beneath these sort of basic stuff and get to the building blocks and from there to be able to control nature. So Alex, what indications do you pick up in this text or related or some of his other works that this was the intent that he understood the radicalness and the consequences of his project?
That people read the discourses in a certain way and then went off the reservation without any of the safeguards. So what was this fairly intentional on Descartes part? I mean, I think it's intentional for sure. I think he understood that this is what you had to do, right?
There's only so much you can do when you approach a being as what it is in just your ordinary experience, right? If you really want to control, so take for example the rose. The rose is the product of centuries of crossbreeding to bring it to this beautiful form, right? Certainly with all fruits, similarly with all sorts of attempts to cultivate things into a form that's more beautiful and more useful to human beings, right?
If you can get beneath that and just manipulate the DNA, you can make a GMO products that are just going to be off the charts different, right? That's the difference. Is centuries or do you want to just experiment and it takes you a couple of weeks to do this sort of stuff? You can go even further with, you know, designer of 80s and things like that.
It's conceivable maybe one day you can just kind of write up a script of DNA, stick it in the video, hatch it and see what the hell comes. What kind of freakin creature you've made and this horrific thing comes out and just is kill me or whatever and that's your sort of products. But that's what happens when you start playing with the building blocks of nature. This is implicit in what Descartes is doing to just sort of drive this point home and the meditation so you compare all of the world to wax, right?
Nothing is as it seems. Its properties are fleeting like wax. If you melt it, its shape changes, its color changes, its smell, it's different. But if all the world's wax, that means I can make it into anything I want, right?
And that's I think the key sort of, the conceit that Descartes has here. It sounds an awful Alex. Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, well, two things. First, the key to this though is experimentation. Is that right? That's what I gleaned at the end.
That's a big part of the method experimenting. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
I'll try and spit it out. This isn't necessarily my view. But I mean, look, he says, let's see if I can find the page. He says that there's all kind of benefits to doing it this way.
I'm not going to find the page quickly, but there's, look, it'll make life more comfortable. We'll make great advances in medicine. We'll enjoy greater the fruits of the earth if we do this. And he even insinuates if I could find the passage quickly, it would help.
Here it is. It's on page 49. So this is, if you follow his method, his plan, he says, this is desirable not only for the invention of an infinity of artifices that would enable us to enjoy without any pain, the fruits of the earth and all the goods to be found there. So like he just said, better bananas, better cows, better whatever.
But also in principle, for the conservation of health, without which is without doubt the primary good and the foundation of all other goods of this life. I sort of take an implicit, I take an implicit ability to be following bacon here and sort of pointing out the possibility that medicine actually might be somewhat limitless. We could be spared an infinity of diseases, he says, perhaps even the infeasement of old age, which he's meant to think he's deaf. Yeah, he's on the same page as bacon.
Like we can figure out, like we just follow this method. We can conquer death. Let me push back on it. The crutcher's mathematician, he must know that it is impossible to traverse an infinity.
Right. Right. So that's the aim, absolutely. And even...
So it's like calculus or something like this. It's asymptotic. Yeah. Very long.
But yeah. There's great benefits here, right? Obviously curing diseases, right? But what's the way to really cure yourself?
Just give yourself a new body, right? Put your consciousness on a computer. And so it's no accident that in the car you get this notion of the mind completely separate from the body, right? This sort of pure thinking thing as he puts it, right?
If you really want to talk about manipulating the world, don't just start at like bananas and stuff. Start with yourself. Heal your body, fix your body, get a new body, right? That would be...
We've talked about Frankenstein before. There's something very cartesian about Frankenstein, right? Putting the spark of life or of mind into flesh and creating something even greater than human right? Listen, for you young people, this might sound like this sounds...
David says awful. It's gonna be my age, old McBrayer, old man McBrayer's age. I'm gonna tell you what, this sounds pretty appealing to me. Get a new body, put myself into.
Yeah, but you remember Greg, your favorite book, The Shrudelbugs or whatever, and Jonathan Swift? No, yeah, right. Oh, they end up. It's terrible.
So Alex, what? Safeguards. Are there any safeguards that Descartes puts in place? Or is it just he opens this up and for Good or ill, it's...
Yeah. Does he have any prudence about what's coming? What he unleashes? Yeah, so I think maybe here it's good to point out some of the more esoteric points that was going on.
Right now, even just sort of thinking through, I think, some of the implications of the method that are easy to see, I think, from our perspective, you know, hundreds of years after. And what you just laid out in Alex, and I apologize, Greg, I know that your hand is up, is what you presented over the course of the past few minutes, a traditional interpretation of this text? Well, I don't know how traditional is that. I don't know the scholarship on the card, but certainly I think it's not...
It's not controversial. I mean, maybe some people would say, oh, he didn't envision all that. Oh, that's fine, though. That's...
There's an anecdote. There's an anecdote about the Voguely told me once that apparently Descartes was on a ship one day, and he would be out at dinner with his dates, and they would be dancing and stuff. But then they were like, where is his date sleeping? Descartes in a cabin, just room for one person, where they go into Descartes' room, they open up a chest and it turns out she's a robot.
And so they cast her out at the ship. Now, this is obviously fictitious, right? There's not even technology today to make her last to see, like, actually with me. But this was, this was...
I don't know. I think kind of... Yeah, yes, aren't so bad with that, I guess. But this was meant to be a kind of critique of Descartes as this is what happens to human life, right?
I was actually quite serious. There are very serious attempts to make sort of humanoid companions that are robots. I don't know if you can follow the news. Scott Yeener once pointed this out at the top.
He gave where I used to be a professor. It's kind of scary and jarring. But the three buildings are all really awful. It's all like, well...
Yeah, but I mean, compared to 20 years ago, what's it going to be another 20, 30 years? Exactly. But before you get into the more esoteric council, what's going on, there's some parts that maybe a straight forward account. Like, there's a...
And this is on Method, which is all about science and experimentation. There's a pretty long... One of the whole sections that even strikes me as being principally about morality. And then there's a section two maybe.
And then there's this really long account of how... We haven't even talked about his sort of skepticism, right? He begins from not... He's going to doubt everything.
But then he somehow arrives, I believe, in God. So this is the morality in the God bit. I get the heart, I get the medicine, I get the geometry. I'm not real clear on what's happening here in the realm of morality and in the realm of the divine.
Yeah, in many ways, his morality is looked at as kind of... This is one place where I think the scholarship really misses it. It looked at as stoic, right? I won't change the world.
I don't change my opinions. It certainly sounds stoic at first blush. Yes. But then he says, but I'm only going to do that because I want to really control the world, right?
So I'm not going to rush to that, right? I'll wait till the Method brings me there. The morality is just to be clear, provisional, right? The morality is not meant to be how he'll live his life around it.
He's going to follow the customs of his country, right? He's going to continue in his life and all that sort of stuff. But it's meant to eventually be replaced with a more scientific life. Okay?
Now let me ask... That sounds like he's covering his back because of how radical... If you spell out the skepticism, it doesn't seem like a lot of room for... The divine.
Absolutely. Well, we'll get to the divine layer because it's not very different. It's not traditional property. Absolutely.
It's kind of lip service. It's how it's passed, right? As traditional, even when you're doing something quite radical. On the other hand, I think it's meant to be a metaphor for his transformation and also for the transformation of Europe around him in the world, right?
Early in Part II, in Part II and III are his meditations in the winter cabin that he draws attention to the 30 years war, right? He draws attention to the coronation of the king in 1619, but he says the wars are still going on. He's published in 1637, 20 years into the 30 years war. Keep in mind he's circulating this.
Young people who are maybe thinking about what direction do I want to take in sizes are reading this. They will have grown up knowing only holy wars, right? Only Christians killing fellow Christians, right? And for some reason, while he's sitting in his cabin, he thinks, oh, isn't it funny how when you take something that's made by a number of people, it's kind of crappy?
It's not really that good. But when one person designs it, it's great. That's I think an indication. Now, Descartes denies.
He has to be humble. So he denies being a transformative figure, right? Yeah. I think that's what he's saying is, look, I'm giving you a new method.
You want to help your fellow Christians. And this becomes explicit when he's talking about medicine and what Greg quoted earlier. You want to help your fellow man? Don't go to the battlefield and kill fellow Christians.
Kill them, solve their diseases. To quote from from bacon, right? Cultivate truth and share. Be charitable.
Be charitable through scientific discovery. And in that point, I think what Descartes is suggesting is that he anticipates that this sort of disenfranchised Christian philanthropy as a result of sort of sectarian and fighting in Christianity, this can be replaced with a new sort of scientific ethic, a sort of transformative scientific figure. I just want a question for you. So where does the concern for one's fellow man come from in Descartes?
And this is what struck me as odd because I don't get it. I get it from the Christian point of view. I'm obviously right. You have a duty to love your fellow man.
But why does Descartes care? I mean, there's the question of why. I mean, this might be get back to David's question about putting guardrails on a method, making sure that it's essentially sort of beneficial to human beings and not sort of doesn't have this sort of deleterious effect. I think the sixth part is where he gives this indication.
I mean, you're right, Greg, to just say, like, wait, why should I? Right? If I'm replacing Christianity, why should I do this? And I don't think Descartes really treats that directly.
He speaks on the one hand of the law that obliges us. It's on page 49 at the top. The law that obliges us to procure so much as we can, the general good of all men doesn't tell you where that law comes from. But we know, right?
There. Hobbes. I think it's just a little later just to add to this. On page 51 towards the top, he says, I would oblige all those who desire in general the good of men.
That is to say, all those who are in fact virtuous and do not falsely seem so to communicate to me the experience they've already made, as well as to help Mr. Shubo's everything. So there's a law he's invoking, an idea of virtue. They're plainly Christian, but they're not founded in loving man for God's sake.
It's, I see and hear glimmers of a kind of secular humanism. He does have an idea of God, but his idea of God does not extend further than he allows me to apply mathematics to the natural world. That's the place where he won't deceive you. Everywhere else he could.
Right? So this is not a philanthropic God. He's philanthropic and that he allows natural science to occur. Right?
Reli. I guess I'm just like, is it glory this driving him? Because I mean, he even says further down on page 51, or you just reading from not only do you have to care about your fellow man now, you need to also extend your care beyond the present time. Like you should be worried about future human beings.
This is like a greatly expanding cherry almost. But it's not clear. Like I'm sorry, I don't want to believe it. I don't have a good answer, but I just it's not clear to me where the concern for one fellow man comes.
Not that there's anything wrong with it. I'm just I just don't see the grounding. I like people just find their nice, nice, nice. Hey, folks at home, we know that you enjoy podcasts, right?
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So from ancient languages to in-depth studies of re thinkers, Daven Hall is a refounding of the ancient university university for the digital frontier. And now back to the show. I mean, you're right. It's not giving for a foundation.
His theology does not support it, right? Yeah, that's sort of, I guess that's where I was going in. I mean, that's why I tend to look at this almost, again, he has a concept of God, but it's the God that makes sure that miracles don't happen. So you can tune natural science, very perverse revision of Christian theology.
But when it comes to the ethics, right, or the political sort of principles, they're just sort of Christian principles, but not given that sort of firm theological foundation. Should we talk about theology? Does this the part? I have a question for sure.
Is there a, any indication that he cares about a certain kind of regime type under which this kind of science can flourish? Not that I see. I mean, I think it's popular, right? He says I'm writing in French to reach to every single person.
So he's trying to appeal to anybody. And I think he writes his other book in Latin, right? Yeah, because it's written for the schools, because it's more of a, it's more of a covering your ass, I'm talking about it that way. But here he's trying to just, he's like, look, I just want to talk to people who can learn.
And this got translated into Latin seven years later, or Descartes guidance, right? So it was eventually made so that other people could read it. I guess the problem or the question I have is there's this inter-seen warfare happening in Europe. What would stop a despot from, I don't know, just employing Descartes' method to his own whim?
I think it's the amount of labor involved. I think that's my, I think one of the things that I, I critical of bacon obviously thinks that this could be just a handful of people, according to the New Atlantis. Descartes says, this is really on the bottom of 50 right before I was reading. He says, I'm now at the point where it seems to me, I see well enough what approach must be taken to make most of those that can serve this purpose.
But I also see that they are such kind and so many a number that neither my hands nor my income, even if I had a thousand times more than I do with suffice for them all. Now, we should think back to the sectarian war, right? There's not a diversity of mine. There's one mine.
And you become Descartes' hands, you become Descartes' wallet, and you fulfill this project. So this is the new unifying, you know, project that's going behind it. But the sheer number of problems that are involved certainly require a sort of, right? Now I think one thing you're noticing that I think is right is that there's something politically undetermined.
It relies too much on charity, right? One way in which Descartes differs here from Locke is that Descartes' principle virtue is generosity, right, when he talks about this. Just freely give your discoveries. For Locke, that's going above and beyond what's ordinary, what's expected of you.
With Locke, he understands if you marry this sort of natural science with something like free market economics, you've got a very powerful combination. And so he makes knowledge proprietary. I'm not going to give you the knowledge, but hey, you can buy my new device that I've invented, right? And you can benefit from that.
And with the money that I make, I can go invest in it, I can do whatever I want, right? That sort of hybrid of modern science and sort of classical liberal economics, I think ends up being an incredibly powerful combination because it takes so many people and because the motivations are essentially selfish. I don't want to die, right? I want to live comfortably and easily.
And so Descartes, I think about this as his overly optimistic, right? And Machiavelli would say, this is just an imaginary principality, right? This is not going to work. You need something.
You need something a bit more cutthroat so that this is more psychologically unified, you could say, right? So one thing we should probably talk about, I mean, I've been sort of anxious to talk about is the theology here. So to speak, we haven't stressed enough, maybe his radical skepticism in his autobiography. He sort of begins, he says, by sort of doubting everything, it's doubtable or something like this.
But I'll just mention it a little bit more quickly and passing the norm. One of my questions, you mentioned this isn't like other autobiographies that we read. This sounds a lot to me like August, all these rescue were from error, where it's similar in length. They're both very short.
And they both get troubled by things in the world and sort of lapsed into over-found skepticism. And in August all these days, it seems like it's sort of regret, where it seems more intentional on Descartes' part. He's very intentional about it. That's the way to make some progress here is to start doubting everything.
So he's doubting everything. And one of the things, including all the receipts, he's gotten about things. But one of the things he's able to reconstruct, obviously the first thing he did to reconstruct is that he exists. We probably shouldn't do an episode without mentioning his most famous line in this book.
I think therefore I am. But then somehow he starts building the things that he is certain of and one of the things that he becomes, but he tells us that he's certain of, is that God exists. that God is a certain character and that God has certain qualities. And I got to tell you, I found this in completely untrussusive.
I just found it from the first. What's that? You're not the first. Okay.
I mean, like, you know, and of course, little and prayer things, anytime I can find something this seemingly silly in a book that surely Descartes knows that this sounds bad. I just have a few small points on this. We didn't mention that. Can I just, can I just, just, back up that point?
Just, just, just give me some information. Let's just give a support there. Here, because of that, people ask him to write the meditations. He writes the meditations, people object.
He replies the objections. The meditation public with published with the objections and replies, the objections and replies are like five, six times the length of the meditation itself all have to do with the proof of God. So you're 100% right. There's something fishier.