Cogito; Therefore I Can Get Healthy
Originally Posted 16 October 2017
Since I am in a self-discovery/self-exploration mode these days, I can let the reading of one book lead to reading another in an evolving (self-indulgent?) curriculum. I recently reread one of my favorite little books, The Philosopher’s Diet by Washington University philosophy professor Richard Watson. In my little reflection on that book, I pointed out that in his strange little diet book he refers to Descartes on several occasions. That is because Watson is an expert in Descartes. So I walked over to the James Madison Library and checked out one of Watson’s books on Descartes, the 2002 Cogito, Ergo Sum: The Life of Rene Descartes.
Since I often read for answers, not for information, I give myself permission to “read in” books, rather than read books from start to finish. Maybe I will get around to reading the entire book, but mostly I am interested in Watson’s summary of his reaction to Descartes’ thinking, not the chronological development of Descartes philosophy. So I read the mostly personal sections of the book, which were also published separately in The Georgia Review and Kriterion.
I should confess that I come to Descartes with a less than favorable regard. I am a great fan of the 1990 movie MindWalk, based on Fritjof Capra’s book The Turning Point. In addition, I have felt a kinship with George Lakoff’s and Mark Johnson’s Philosophy in the Flesh. These works attack two basic principles of Cartesian thinking (as much as I can understand any of this). But I also come to Descartes with a favorable opinion of Richard Watson. What to do? How do I make my way through this problem?
Watson helps me out a bit by admitting that, for many contemporary folk, Descartes casts a dark shadow. In his introduction, he provides a long paragraph listing currently popular ideas that stand in opposition to Cartesian thought. Religion, holism, communalism, sacralization, deep ecology, environmentalism, animal rights, New Age thought, and more, and more, and more. “And you know what?” Watson says, “All these accusations are true. Descartes is the architect of our modern world of individualistic, materialistic science and technology.”
He gave us mechanistic thinking, which provided scientists a method to study the causal relationships between parts of a whole or system. Everything in this world—the metaphor goes—is just like a mechanical clock, whether it is the nervous system, an internal combustion engine, or teaching effectiveness. If a part breaks, you fix it, and the engine runs smoothly again. Capra critiques this idea by pointing out that one mechanical system exists in relationship to other mechanical systems. By solving a problem for a company in China, one might be creating issues for American consumers, and then by solving that problem, so on and so forth. Think of issues with multiple prescriptions in senior citizens. If the cure doesn’t kill you. . . .
Descartes also gave us the idea that the mind and the body are separate. In noting that we cannot really trust knowledge that comes to us from authorities, from our senses, or from our reasoning, he left us with the idea that our body is just another set of mechanical relationships, and that “Mind” is this separate thing that thinks its way through all these possible bits of “fake news” that flows to it. He would say that we (you and me, individually) are not our bodies; we are our thoughts. However, those of us who fight depression (and thus cloudy thinking) through exercise, know that the mind and the body are not unconnected to each other. Lakoff and Johnson also point out that our very thinking, the metaphors we think with, grows from the fact that we live in bodies. One example: our eyes point in front of us, and we walk, naturally, in one forward direction. Is this why we say the future is ahead of us and the past is behind us? We refer to time as if it were space. An unbodied mind would not think to create that metaphor.
So there are reasons to simply ignore Descartes and live my life. Still, he gives me his famous starting point for understanding myself in the world: “I think; therefore, I am.” Embedded in that statement are two concepts that continue to call my attention. One is “I,” the concept of an individual person, perhaps, a soul, certainly an identity. The second is “belief,” because even if I am thinking, I have to decide to believe that it is me thinking, not God, Satan, or The Matrix providing my thoughts for me. It is this “leaving me out in life alone” part of Descartes that might be what makes sense to me. I have read a few references that state Descartes employed Neostoical ideas in his philosophy. What those are I don’t know yet, but I do know that in the past ten years Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus have been important ingredients in my brain stew.
Holding these thoughts closely today, I use them to reinforce my commitment to developing and maintaining useful, productive habits. I believe that there is an “I” inside this body, and existing with all these thoughts that “I” have. And thus this means that I can choose to have some agency. I don’t have to be a slave to cravings (my body) or to advertisers (my culture). I should be able to name the things that are indifferent to my health and well-being, the things that are harmful, and the things that are helpful.
Already, I am using Descartes analytical processes (and those outlined in the book The Power of Habit) to understand the cycle of cue-routine-reward. For instance, I don’t buy junk food when I go to the grocery (mostly because I am choosing to patronize a health food co-op), and when I pick my teenage son up from school and he wants a soda, I give him the money and he goes into the 7-11 without me. That way I don’t have to experience the cue of all those lovely salty carbs. And contrary to my distrust of pure mechanistic thinking, I am not perfuming my home with aroma therapies to armor my aura against the onslaught of culinary temptations. Not that I am against that, but I think my thinking will be more efficient.
Watson ends his book with an essay looking toward the future. He lays out the conflict between those who still believe that the soul is separate from the body and those who believe that the soul is really just the functioning brain. He calls these the “religious mentalists” and the “atheist materialist scientists.” He predicts that as some point data will become so conclusive that no one will claim that souls/minds exist separate from bodies, and then, wow, there will be a revolution in human thought like we have never seen.
What I have to examine, I guess, is to what extent my belief in the mind/soul is different from the “religious mentalists.” After all, I don’t really think I have soul that will live after me and go either to Heaven or Hell. I am more of the Walt Whitman sensibility—that the energy that is me will return to the source/location of all energy. More important to my way of thinking is the present. I believe I have responsibility toward this bundle of energy/mind stuff/soul that is “I” and its temporary home, my body, because as I live (as an alive body) my energy is contributing to the universal energy. It can be part of the flow that is love and beauty, or it could be part of the flow that is running counter to those energies.
In addition, if we said that “I” am a thinking body, I could live with that. But I have trouble accepting that “I” am merely a body with a set of mechanical responses.*
Onward, I think.
*And I have trouble accepting that, as Barthes and Foucault would have it, “I” am not the author of these words and somehow merely a conduit for cultural impulses.