Descartes: Meditations 1 and 2

Below is an excellent commentary by Chris Lawrence, who has served as the facilitator of the group's discussions since I stepped down from that role last spring, about this past Monday's selection, Meditations 1 and 2 by the French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes.  --Tom Cohn

"In “Meditations 1 and 2”, despite Descartes’ hyperbolic skepticism, he never questions the existence of God. As part of his exercise in logic, he tries to imagine that God could be an evil genius and might be deliberately trying to deceive him, but he never even once considers a world that lacks a divine creator. From a modern perspective, one has to ask: why? He begins his exercise by questioning EVERYTHING, including his own existence, in order to eliminate anything that could be an illusion and sets out to find the one, objective truth from which to deduce all other truths. That said, why wouldn’t he start with nothingness, at least as a concept? The answer as far as I can see seems to be that he has already found his foundational truth: God. His subsequent thoughts on the subject seem to constitute little more than a search for his own identity; i.e.; who he is as a 16th c. fideist. Descartes wrote at a time when the authority of the Catholic Church was being challenged on all sides by free-thinking men, men who were willing to use the human faculty of reason to question religious dogma. To his credit, Descartes participates in that search for truth, yet ironically, the way in which he “proves” his own existence- and that of God- demonstrates more than anything else not just the persistence of his own faith but the limitations of logic as well. Starting with the irrational, a priori assumption of a divine creator, he reasons that even if God intended to deceive him about his own existence, he still is thinking about his situation: therefore, he exists. “Cogito ergo sum”, arguably the 3 most famous words in the history of philosophy, were written long before psychology had developed as a social science. Accordingly, Descartes can be pardoned for not appreciating the inherent solipsism of his conclusion. On the one hand, he brilliantly places the individual as the ultimate arbiter of any system of truth, but regrettably, he doesn’t seem to appreciate the inherent illogic of basing his one “objective” truth on a subjective realization. This error is compounded in Meditation 3 when he “reasons” that the idea of a Perfect God could not have originated in his own, admittedly imperfect mind, but could have only come from a God who really exists! The obvious flaws in Descartes’ argument seem to stem from an unwillingness to transcend certain, long-held religious convictions, and also, from a misapplication of the principles of logic. His argument for the existence of God is virtually the same argument made by Anselm of Canterbury almost 500 years before; moreover, as a mathematician, he seems more than willing to decide a matter of faith by the logical process of deduction, a fool’s errand at best. Faith, as most of us realize from our lofty position of 21c. knowledge, is essentially the persistence of belief in the absence of proof; in fact, it could be argued that the absence of proof is precisely what gives faith any meaning. Projects like Descartes’, and Aquinas’ before him, that have ignored the inherent differences between faith and reason and that have attempted to subject one to the constraints of the other, have all too often resulted in the tangled arguments of religious scholasticism or worse, religious persecution. Rather than regarding them as competing systems of truth, as is the temptation even today, I think we as human beings would be far better served if instead, we look at them as complementary systems of belief, each providing a needed perspective for the other."

Portrait of Descartes (1596-1650) by Franz Hals

Ruskin and Friedan on Women's Roles

Self-portrait of John Ruskin (1819-1900) 

John Ruskin's essay "Of Queen's Gardens" is based on a lecture he delivered on December 14, 1864 at Manchester (England) Town Hall in aid of St. Andrew's School.  Its companion piece "Of King's Treasuries" was given a week earlier to support the book collection of the public library in Manchester.  Both lectures were written in support of books, reading, education, and right conduct, and they were published together in a book entitled Sesames and Lilies. Charles W. Eliot writes in his introduction to Sesames and Lilies in the American and English Essays volume of the Harvard Classics that Ruskin was "the greatest master of ornate prose in the English language." In the excerpted version of "Of Queen's Gardens" we are reading, Ruskin offers views of the proper role of women in society.

                                                                                      

Betty Friedan (1921-2006)

Betty Friedan was an American journalist who in 1963 published The Feminine Mystique based on extensive research she had conducted including questionnaires submitted to 200 members of her Smith College class and many other studies. Friedan created a concept she summarized as follows:

"There was a strange discrepancy between the reality of our lives as women and the image to which we were trying to conform, the image that I came to call the feminine mystique. I wondered if other women faced this schizophrenic split."

Friedan has been subsequently criticized for representing a middle-class suburban point of view, but her book stands as an important influence on the development of modern-day feminism.

Hawthorne and Bernard on Human Experimentation

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1813-1878)

This month's two selections are "Rappaccini's Daughter," by the great though, as most would agree, enigmatic American author Nathaniel Hawthorne, and "Vivisection," by French physiologist Claude Bernard. Both pieces concern the use of humans in medical experimentation, although the Hawthorne story is fictional and Bernard's piece is from his book An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine. The New York Public Library Companion to Literature calls "Rappaccini's Daughter" one of Hawthorne's "greatest studies of monomania," defined as a single-minded pursuit of an end. A question for Monday: What is Dr. Rappaccini monomanical about?

George Eliot vs. Oscar Wilde on Art

Next Monday we will compare two pieces with distinct positions on what constitutes good art.  They are a chapter from George Eliot's novel Adam Bede (published in 1859, but set in 1799), "In Which the Story Pauses a Little," and Oscar Wilde's dialogue, "The Decay of Lying." (published in 1889).

Eliot interrupts

George Eliot (1819-1880)

Adam Bede with a reflection on aesthetics as spoken by the novel's narrator.  The reader of this chapter doesn't need to know the details of this novel about a humble young carpenter seeking to establish himself and find love in the English village of Hayslope in order to understand Eliot's arguments.  As she writes:

"All honor and reverence to the divine beauty of form!  Let us cultivate it to the utmost in men, women, and children -- in our gardens and in our houses. But let us love that other beauty too, which lies in no secret of proportion, but in the secret of deep human sympathy." [Emphasis added]

"The Decay of Lying" takes the form of a dialogue between two men named for Wilde's sons, Cyril and Vivian. Vivian's position is summed up by its concluding paragraph:

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

"At twilight nature becomes a wonderfully suggestive effect, and is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets."  A wonderful Wildean epigram.  Is it ironic?  To discuss on Monday.

"An Arundel Tomb" by Philip Larkin and "Love Is Not a Pie," by Amy Bloom

Effigies believed to be of Richard FitzAlan, 10th Earl of Arundel (d.1376) and his second wife, Eleanor of Lancaster (d.1372).  They are now located in Chichester Cathedral, and are the inspiration for Philip Larkin's poem "An Arundel Tomb."  A lion lies at the feet of the Earl, a dog at his wife's.

Characters in Daniel Fuchs's "The Golden West"

 

Tonight the second installment of our discussions of selections from "Counterparts" takes place, and the selections are "Facing West from California's Shores," by Walt Whitman and "The Golden West" by Daniel Fuchs.

 As a reader's aid, here's a list of characters in Fuchs's story:

Curtis Spogel: owns a chain of movie houses in Northern California, host of the party

Julie Vencie: movie producer (he/him), partner in Veeandkay productions

Edith: Curtis's wife and sister to Julie Vencie

David: a guest at the party

Mrs. Vencie: Julie's mother

Boris Kittershoy: Julie's partner in Veeandkay

Daisy: Boris's wife

Imogene: Julie's wife

Lissak brothers:  potential white knights to save a Veeandkay movie in production

Ronnie Fitts: another independent producer

Mrs. Aston: A guest at the party

The setting: Spogel's house on Angelo Drive in Beverly Hills

"The Stages of Life." by Carl Jung

C. G. Jung (1875-1961)

Our selection this coming Monday is "The Stages" of Life," by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung.  Originally published under the title "Die seelischen Probleme der menslichen Alterstufssen," ("Mental Problems of People's Ages") on March 14 and 16, 1930 in the Swiss newspaper Neue Zurcher Zeitung, the essay was revised and rewritten for a professional audience, and then republished as "Die Lebenswende" ("Life's Turns") in 1931. The translation we are reading is based on this version.