>> RICHARD RORTY: Descartes and Locke gave us a picture of experience as taking something
taking place within us that was distinct from anything physiological.
>> BRUCE WILSHIRE: Descartes has been for the thinkers that I've spent my life studying
Descartes has been a terrible distraction and dead end road but people are still proceeding
down it.
>> NARRATOR: Descartes was a philosopher and mathematician.
He was born in La Haye, France and lived during the time of the Wars of Religion.
During the Wars of Religion there was a great deal of fighting and suffering and death over
ideas:
Ideas about God and religion.
And Descartes wanted to find certainty in matters of belief.
And he found this certainty in this idea:
I think, therefore I am.
His reasoning was that I could be deceived about anything but not about my own existence,
at least not while I'm being deceived.
And so on this idea he proposed to build a firm foundation for all possible future knowledge.
And this move toward the subjective or the internal for the foundation of knowing is
known as Cartesianism.
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>> VINCENT COLAPIETRO: By Cartesianism I mean an orientation which affirms the primacy of
the "I" or of the self in isolation from others so the starting point is the isolated individual,
the individual who, in his or her isolation, feels a desperate need to connect with others.
And so by Cartesianism I mean the primacy of subjectivity or selfhood and it's basically
the spectator, the "I" as originally solitary and only eventually and, in some respects,
incidentally, social.
>> CRISPIN SARTWELL: One thing I tend to see in philosophers --
this is certainly not always the case but it's certainly sometimes the case --
there's a kind of distance from their own life and experience, or detachment, that is
a little bit disturbing.
It feels to me sometimes a little bit inhuman.
I've had the sensation sometimes that the philosopher is looking at me kind of like
I'm a bug or something like that. You know what I'm saying? Like that things and people
become mere phenomena or merely feed the intellectual machine or are merely examples of general
concepts.
If that happens in a thorough enough way philosophy becomes a disease, sort of. You know, it's
a way of deferring, avoiding experience.
Cartesian dualism or something like that is perfectly conditioned, perfectly suited to,
it's a mere statement of that detachment.
VINCENT COLAPIETRO: If you say certain things such as "the self is primary", "the self is
originally solitary", that commits you substantively to a recognizable philosophical position,
namely Cartesianism.
BRUCE WILSHIRE: Yeah, this is key and the fact that in philosophers that I and others
would call analytic we get various residua of Cartesianism, I think.
Say in Jerry Fodor we get a kind of highly sophisticated Cartesian dualism in which he
can't begin to explain where concepts come from, we just have them and he would eschew
the notion of two substances, but nevertheless it's a version of Cartesianism which I think
is utterly alienating.
It disengages us from actual engagement or, I would rather say, engulfment in the world
around us.
>> VINCENT COLAPIETRO: I think the Cartesian project is animated by the endeavor to equip
oneself to be epistemically omnicompetent.
So one can have all the powers one needs unto oneself within oneself to know the real.
And then by extension this can be pushed to political omnicpetence, or moral omnicompetence,
so the all-competent knower, the all-competent citizen, the all-competent agent.
Part of the drive for this is radical insecurity and so the quest for certainty is in some
sense just the other side of this gnawing of insecurity and uncertainty.
There's a sense in which Cartesianism is the quest for self-sufficiency where the self
in that expression is the solitary self.
And what's crucial here is to reframe most or all of this in terms of the social self.
And what pragmatism does, and it did it earlier than most other movements it seems to me,
is to recognize the irreducible character of the social self, that we are social beings.
>> BRUCE WILSHIRE: Evading, avoiding Descartes' subjectivism and his mind-body dualism requires
a phenomenology, a description of how the world actually grabs us "hot off the griddle
of the world" as William James put it.
It requires a phenomenology.
So the evasion of a Cartesian subjectivism requires an analysis of, if you might say,
our subjectivity in our being gripped by the world in which we are involved, necessarily,
and engaged.
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