I was in high school when I first heard Descartes’ famous axiom I think, therefore I am. I remember laughing at the absurdity of it.
Of course, the reason I thought it was absurd was because I did not understand it. If I had understood it, I would not have laughed. I might not have agreed (I still don’t agree with it), but I would have appreciated it.
Descartes represented the very beginning of modern philosophy, and he was trying to do something novel for that time. He was intent on finding a way to determine truth solely deduced from absolutes or so-called universals.
“I think, therefore I am” was the anchoring statement that Descartes considered absolute and a launching point for proving many other things, including the existence of God. While he ultimately failed in that quest, he ended up helping to launch the modernist era, which was marked by a long-running war between faith and reason.
Let us do a bit of historical setup. Descartes, a devout Catholic, was heavily influenced by Catholic Scholasticism. Scholasticism was a rigorous coherence-based theological and philosophical system that looked to past writings (primarily the Christian Bible and Aristotle) and ancient traditions for truth propositions and then attempted to deduce further truth propositions from them.
In the 16th century, the Reformation began, partly as a reaction against Scholasticism, as early Protestants pushed for a return to more Augustinian theology. Soon after, Descartes would come on the scene, and while he was not a Reformer, he most certainly was also reacting to Scholasticism in his writing. Like the Reformers and key scientists/mathematicians of the time, he would help drastically change the world by helping to topple Scholasticism, and with it, Catholicism’s chokehold on society and culture. (This was a most welcome development for which we should all be grateful.)
The actual philosophy of Descartes was soon rejected. In fact, many philosophers have since pointed out the problem with Descartes’ anchoring statement. As it turns out, “I think, therefore I am” fails to achieve what Descartes hoped for because it erroneously assumes (rather than proves) a relationship between thinking and existence. This error would lead to a whole system of dubious conclusions about this unproven relationship.
In spite of some significant problems, there is much to appreciate about Descartes, and while his arguments are largely discarded today as invalid, he made a big contribution to modern thought. To explain one reason why that is true, I want to go back to the topic of the last post: coherence.
As you recall, coherence is a way of discerning truth in which statements are compared to an existing body of statements accepted as true. If the new statement is compatible with this body of statements, it is accepted as true. If not, it is discarded as untrue.
Coherence is fatally flawed in that it simply cannot be used to prove any truth. No truth. Ever.
At best, it can provide pragmatic frameworks to live by, and also can be used to predict the future with reasonable certainty. But you cannot get absolute truth from coherence.
In fact, let me go a step further. When you stop to think about it, coherence is nothing more than circular reasoning. One accepts things as true only because of something else that they believe to be true. There is never a connection to something solid outside of what one believes.
If you reduce coherence toward its lowest level, you would come up with this: I believe in X because I believe in Y which agrees with X. If you do a bit of algebra reduction, coherence gets even worse: I believe in X because I believe in X.
Now, let me return to Descartes and Catholic Scholasticism for a moment. Premodernism in general and Scholasticism in particular were dominated by Christian-faith-based coherence. Descartes was going to war against this thinking. Consequently, to this day, he is considered an enemy of Christianity even though he would not have seen himself that way at all.
His approach involved trying to deduce truth solely from absolute proven facts, or as we called it in the last post, CTF (correspondence to fact). His general strategy was to try to prove statements based solely on previously proven statements with the long-term goal of identifying a significant body of proven truth.
That Descartes failed in that task is sobering. That no one since has done any better is even more sobering. As it turns out, real CTF is hard. Quite possibly, it is just impossible in a lot of cases. Maybe all cases…
I am not giving excuses for the rampant coherence thinking we see today. As I am going to get into soon, premodern coherence was vastly superior to today’s wasteland of conspiracy theories and other incredibly undisciplined thinking. I have very little patience for the sloppiness I often hear that passes for thinking.
But I do get what is happening. The more you try to dig into what you believe, the more doubt tends to creep in. Today’s truth crisis is simply the postmodern realization that what is generally accepted as modernist truth is based on presuppositions that cannot be proven true themselves. It was not just Descartes, a key founder of modernism, who would end up failing in this regard. Modernism as a whole was simply not able to ever completely fix the same nagging problems.
At present, CTF and coherence are the only two ways to determine truth that we have. Unfortunately, as we have now seen, both have problems. CTF is concrete but virtually impossible, while coherence is much easier but does not prove anything.
That is the uncomfortable reality that we all face whether we understand it or not. If that sounds bleak, it is because it is bleak.
That is why I am not a dogmatist by nature and why I tend to look at dogmatists very suspiciously. Saying something forcefully does not make it true.
As someone wise said, “those that know all the answers do not even know the questions.” Show me a dogmatic person and I will show you a person who has not spent enough time thinking.
Now, that brings us to the uncomfortable crossroads: do we choose to determine truth by impossible CTF or erratic coherence?
I suspect that most modern thinkers would agree that the only workable answer to this unsolvable problem is some sort of pragmatic coherence-based compromise. I would love to choose a CTF-based compromise but CTF is too rigid for compromise. You are either using CTF or you are not. So, it has to be a coherence compromise.
In other words, we have to choose to base our truth determinations on an unproven foundation. The foundation we choose has to be as solid as possible, understanding that it is not perfect.
As an illustration of what I mean, I recently toured the NYC 911 Memorial. Part of the museum is in the foundation of the Twin Towers. I was fascinated by just how massive that foundation was. Almost every contingency was covered, including an underground seawall to keep the Hudson Bay away from the building.
Granted, that foundation could have been safer. It could have involved even more concrete and even deeper footers. Engineers made pragmatic decisions that balanced safety with cost.
But while the foundation could have been made safer, the reality is that a perfectly safe foundation was impossible. No foundation ever constructed on earth is 100% safe because, in the end, every foundation is ultimately connected to and dependent on something non-foundational (usually dirt). Consequently, there is always a disaster big enough to cause a foundation to fail.
Think of coherence the same way. Coherence can never truly prove anything because no matter how developed its system is, it is inevitably based on something non-foundational and hence unproven.
However, that is not to say that all coherence is created equal. Some coherence systems have a weak foundation, but some have a quite respectable foundation. The latter may not be perfect, but they still are pragmatically functional. A society can survive with such systems.
That brings me to a simple maxim: if CTF is not possible and coherence is our only viable way to determine truth, we have an obligation to pick our coherence systems carefully.
Because this post is already long, I am going to stop here. In a future post, I am going to discuss just how we go about identifying and choosing the best coherence systems. This is a pragmatic exercise in that we will be looking for systems that work rather than ones that we can guarantee are truthful. As I have already discussed, guaranteed truthfulness is not a legitimate possibility.