Week 33: Three Rationalists
Descartes, Kant, Spinoza. Ted said this would be a challenging week—no kidding. Week 33 of the Immersive Humanities List bled over into another week and offered challenges from every direction. It’s left me wondering about a lot of things, and now I need to build a timeline. My brain has Kant firmly in the 1800s and that won’t be corrected without a visual aid. (Stay tuned for that.)
For this review, I think it’s important to explain first how I approached this week. Then I’ll take a look at each text separately, and I’ll wrap up with a few thoughts that might gather the texts together. I don’t recall a couple of weeks exactly like this so far in the project. I’m hopeful that my approach can help you.
Ted, as I said, warned that this was a doozy of a week. But we’ve had demanding weeks before, and I decided to march forward armed with books and notecards. Descartes (in the Penguin Classics edition) was slow but readable. I took a lot of notes—this was not Candide, that’s for sure. Then I moved to Kant. Unlike Descartes’ almost charming explanations, Kant was dense: I mean, read-sentences-two-or-three-times-with-all-the-definitions-written-out dense.
But I encouraged myself, saying, “Read fast!” My experinece with pushing through, accepting that high points were likely all I’d get, was fine. After all, I ended up loving the Bible and Dante read quickly. But—no dice. I got nowhere. Okay, switch to Spinoza. He’s mathematical. Hey, I’m an engineer. This should work.
It was even worse than Kant!
I looked for Youtube videos or Hillsdale courses. Hillsdale had been good to me with Aristotle; maybe it would me here. I (for reasons still unknown) couldn’t get on Hilssdale’s site, and randomly selected videos on Youtube were only marginally helpful, plus they were chewing up time. Then I came across a very helpful, serendipitous post here on Substack about getting “A YouTube Education” from
. The post mentioned a British series from 1987, “Great Philosophers with Brian Magee.” That was my key. I watched the conversations on Kant and Spinoza, and they were insanely helpful, far exceeding my hopes.First, René Descartes. The entire title of this week’s book is Discourse on the Method for Guiding One’s Reason and Searching for Truth in the Sciences. Written in 1637, he was trying to understand how to incorporate the new ideas being discovered via scientific inquiry with what was already understood in the world. Here’s the problem for me: since I don’t have a background in philosophy, I can’t really say “he was the first to…” or “this marks a shift from….” But I can tell you what I thought about what he said.
The single idea of Descartes that you may have heard of is “I think, therefore I am.” He DID say that, at the later part of the Method. But I want to back up and share a couple of other thoughts of his as well. First, he defines the term “sciences” that is in his title: “reliable knowledge based on first principles.” So that’s our aim, the Truth and how to search for it, in all of our knowledge. He lays out four steps:
Never accept as true something that you don’t know plainly as the truth.
Subdivide a problem as much as necessary.
Begin with the simplest problems and proceed.
Make such comprehensive reviews that nothing is left out.
These are good tools. They feel straightforward, not necessarily easy-to-follow but not tricky, either. One of my favorite things is his observation that this period of inquiry can be unsettling, so it’s best to give yourself some ground rules during that time:
Obey the laws and customs of the people you live with; choose moderation.
Choose your path and stick to it.Even when you doubt, act resolutely.
Change yourself and your desires if you conflict with fortune and the world. The world won’t change for you.
Practical, thoughtful, kind. It’s really what I got from Descartes over the entire text. He’s your brilliant, kind friend who is simply relentlessly curious.
Back to “Cogito ergo sum.” This is in a chapter that, like all of Descartes’ writing, is pretty clear. The directness of the thought, though, seems to surprise even himself! And the truly surprising thing is that he centers his existence on himself, not something outside of himself. That is definitely different from what we’ve read earlier in this project. It might make you think of Hamlet and “To be or not to be…” I did, but then I realized that Hamlet and Descartes are really talking about two different situations. Hamlet takes his own existence as a fact, and just wonders if he’d be better off having never existed at all. Descartes trying to figure out how he even knows he exists in the first place. And he decides it’s because he can wonder about it at all that he knows he must exist.
At any rate, on to Kant.
Immanuel Kant, born in 1724, wrote his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals in 1785. He was a pretty boring guy if you just observed his life: the first true academic philosopher, he rarely left his hometown of Konigsburg, Prussia, and he lived a life so routine that his fellow townspeople set their clocks by him. But apparently his ideas set off shock waves that are still being felt around the world. That’s what Magee and Geoffrey Warnock say in their video, at least!
The translator to my edition says this book has a “horrifying title,” and the video professors agree that it’s very difficult to find an entry point into Kant’s system because it is so complete. Kant’s goal was to resolve the apparent conflicts between scientific discoveries and fundamental religious convictions. Science said that everything that happens has a cause and that because of that cause and the laws of nature “what happened is the only thing that could have happened.” But if that’s the case, can there be free will? And how would morality fit into a world like that?
Well, Kant decided that duty alone, not emotions, not happiness, is the justification for morality. And so his big idea is called the “Categorical Imperative.” Categorical means that there are no exceptions. Imperative indicates that a demand is placed on us. And so the Categorical Imperative says that, when acting, you must always examine the course of action you want to take in that specific instance, universalize that action—consider it as if it were a universal law that must be followed—and determine if the outcome is desirable. Can you accept the outcomes as universal? If so, go ahead and act. If not, it is an immoral course to take.
Magee said that Kant is “notoriously difficult to understand on the first go-round.” While that made me feel better, I thought his reasons were interesting. First, the philosophy itself is very difficult. But second, the prose is awful. (It’s not just me!) Kant’s writing is very jargon-y, and he wrote a lot of it. Apparently he had his entire body of work framed out and didn’t want to die before he got it all written, so he wrote very fast. And, finally, German was a very young academic language at the time. Most work was being produced in Latin or Franch, so the German syntax and vocabulary for some of this writing simply didn’t exist until Kant wrote it. I wanted to share that in case you struggle with it as much as I did. Now let’s move on to Spinoza.
I opened Benedict de Spinoza’s Ethics (1677) and almost shut it again. It’s written as a mathematician would think, closely following Euclid’s Geometry with its definitions, axioms, and proofs. Spinoza’s day job was as a lens maker, so it isn’t really a surprise that he’d adopt such a form. In his book, Spinoza utilized Descartes’ method to come up with an inquiry into how the world is made.
Briefly, Descartes wanted to preserve the ideas of God, the self, and the material world even as he laid out a method of inquiry. Spinoza said if he were to use this method, he couldn’t worry about what might or might not be preserved. There was no choice: once you acknowledge the method as true, you must follow it and live with the results.
Spinoza’s big idea is that God is not separate from Nature, that they coexist, and that they are therefore the same. And so, if we call the totality of everything “Nature” then there can be nothing supernatural. It does not exist.
One aspect of Spinoza that was a point of discussion for Magee was the idea of free will. Spinoza’s “Euclidean geometry” of ethics seems to rule it out completely. In fact, he says that the “Freedom of Pure Spontaneity” doesn’t exist—you simply don’t know the causes of behavior. But “Human Bondage” does exist when you are induced to act. To free yourself from this bondage, Spinoza thought you should engage the “active” emotions, positive emotions that we might call “pro-active emotions,” and that you should reduce emotions that drive you away from things, emotions like hatred.
And that is all I can share with you about Spinoza.
A huge point that I wouldn’t have known about, but that was discussed by Magee, was that Descartes, Spinoza and Kant are all Continental Rationalists. They thought the world could be deduced by pure reason. This was in marked contrast to Locke and Hume, among others, who were British Empiricists. Empiricists were convinced that observation and experimentation were necessary to determine the nature of everything. Since we only encounter the Rationalists in this reading project, I’ll have to wait to learn more about that. But it certainly does make me wonder about the mindset difference between the English-speaking world and Europe, and for that matter the American and French Revolutions.
One more point about watching these videos: I got terribly bogged down in the reading, not normal for me. As I was considering how much more to fight with the text, I decided that it was far more important to try to end the week(s) with one or two “big ideas” for each of these men, ideas I could carry forward. It’s definitely not the same as reading, but for me, in this case, I genuinely think it was better. Will I go back and read these texts? Probably not. But I likely will finish watching the series.
Music this week was Mozart’s overtures and arias. Of course I love these, and it’s pretty easy to find tons of playlists. I don’t really have any to commend to you this week. And for some reason the art was Japanese art and architecture! Punted. My poor brain was tired.
Back next week for a much shorter book, The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe. I’m so glad to be reading fiction again! As always, I am following Ted Gioia’s list and reading these books.
I would genuinely love to know if you’ve read these texts, and what you thought of them. And you can let me know if you think I totally cheated by watching videos instead!