Descartes’ Prize of the Indubitable (A Prose Poem)

The indubitable! Oh yes! What a prize that was!...

Or so Descartes thought.

And so one evening, while sitting in his oven,

Descartes journeyed through his un-mapped mind.

Why? To find a firm ground

On which science and philosophy could securely rest.

What was Descartes' inner world like?

A place from which his body was expelled

To the world outside his head.

Descartes didn’t give a shit for the sensory either.

Think here of old Plato 

(Long before the Father of the Modern),

Who also edified the mind in this manner.

Plato didn’t go in for the Abode of Sensation.

It's a place where grubby bodies feast 

Without philosophic care -

Bodies still desiring yet more of the same.

The only sure thing is thought itself -

Descartes' own thoughts or his thinking itself.

As well as his doubting his thinking.

Doubt was the only thing he didn’t doubt.

The thing he needed for all that followed.

This knowledge was an axiomatic point

From which beautiful chains of deduction would flow –

All the way to a proof of God’s very existence.

And then, in time, to that of his body

And the world outside his head.

Plato, again, and before, 

Needed neither body nor sense

To take him to that non-spatiotemporal realm 

He loved too much.

A realm which housed the Form of the Good.

Descartes needed his clear and distinct ideas 
To guarantee themselves...

And to guarantee truth and certainty.

His soul craved for the indubitable.

It would become the axis 

Around which science and philosophy could rotate.

But Descartes didn’t have the right – the Cartesian right! - 

To smuggle in the I to the proceedings.

He nonetheless did so.

He also sneaked in God to legitimise his system

And give him antidotes against unmitigated doubt.

Yes, God the Provider of clear and distinct ideas.

They took Descartes out of his internal prison;

So as to place him, at last, firmly in the external world –

Once forbidden to the doubting subject.

Methodic doubt - hyperbolic doubt - was needed 

To establish, and then guarantee,

The certainties which were later found

Down the deductive line of epistemic inquiry.

To say again: the Cogito told Descartes 

That one only one thing remains after the ravages of doubt - Doubt itself.

Thought or thinking itself.

Thus thought was deemed mind’s essence.

Whereas extension became the essence of matter.

From such scepticism, a new dualism was born.

(Or from dualism, scepticism was born.)

Nothing's more unlike the mind than matter.

As with the ancients, 

Descartes found something of man

Which lifted him above the material world.

Just as the Soul had saved man, 

So the mind – the Cartesian mind - transported him

From nature to a holier place.

A place a thousand thinkers 

Had already deemed to be man’s true abode.

And all guaranteed because man’s essence is thought.

Spinoza’s monist continuum -

Between rock and blasting star; 

Between the virus in the blood; 

And the mind in the head -

Was rendered impossible.

And man was saved again!

Not this time by a feathery Platonism 

Or a cloudy mysticism -

But by a thoroughly modern philosopher.

A philosopher in tune with science and logic.

Someone who clothed himself 
In the individual(ist) nature of man.

A man who could take selves out of the world.

Then, once free, 

Such sundered souls could float on God’s breath.

It all began when, at Renaissance-end,

Philosophers dug up the graves of the Greco-Roman sceptics

(Left in weedy isolation by Christian thinkers).

The neo-sceptics tailored the ancients to a modern mind

Which worked its way on science 

And the world’s very existence.

And because such sceptics had the trump cards

(As they always did and still do),

The only way Descartes shielded himself from their scepticism

Was by embracing a scepticism more hyperbolic than their own.

He created a scepticism so deadly

That not even his sceptical contemporaries could question it.

One that denied the provable existence of the world.

One that claimed that the body’s existence couldn’t be proved.

All this in a hypothetical scenario so loved by the sceptics.

Then it was Descartes’ turn.

He gave birth to a demon who fed us lies about the world.

And upheld the possibility that dreams are all we have.

Endpiece

Much later, Putnam told a very odd tale.

A tail about men being but brains in a vat.

Brains that floated in a liquid nutriment.

Brains which had pseudo-sensations fed to them

Through implanted electrodes.

Brains sold a simulacrum of the world.

This time the dirty deed 

Was done by a mad scientist,

Not by Descartes’ demon.