Skeptics, fake and for real

We're still in the deep freeze here, with classes canceled for a third consecutive day. But we're more fortunate than many, in places like Austin, we still have power and heat and light. So why not think about some old dead French philosophers? Weather is a passing thing (though climate is more persistent), doubt and uncertainty are forever.

LISTEN (recorded Sep. 2020). Tomorrow in CoPhi we'll turn to three French philosophers, Descartes the pretend-skeptic, Montaigne the real one, and Pascal the gambler who wanted desperately to suppress his doubts in deference to the promises of faith.

Rene Descartes "meditated" himself into a conjured and contrived form of doubt, but never really doubted for an instant that the world revealed by the senses--beginning with the senses themselves, and our perception of ourselves as sensate creatures capable of encountering a world--is real enough. What he doubted was not his and our existence as embodied knowers, but the status of that knowledge. For him, if we're not indubitably certain then we know nothing.

C.S. Peirce the fallibilist, as noted in How the World Thinks, said it's an error to pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in real life. That's one of Descartes's errors. His mind-body "ghost in the machine" dualism is another. The worry that life is but a dream is fun to discuss and make movies about (Matrix, Inception etc.) but whether we're dreams or dreamers may, as the Chinese sage said, be a distinction without a practical difference.

Blaise Pascal is best known for his famous Wager and its "What have you got to lose?" premise, but I'm more struck by his statement that the immensity and silence of the night sky terrified him. Fear in general seems to have motivated his approach to theology, specifically fear of eternal damnation. As we said in one of our Zoom sessions yesterday, fear-based thinking and living is ill-advised in politics. Probably in religion too.

Michel du Montaigne's rhetorical/skeptical question was Que sais-je? What do I know? The answer depends on what we want from knowledge. If not Cartesian certainty, but practical guidance tempered by humility and a willingness to revise our beliefs and practices in the light of what we learn, then I think he knew quite a lot. He learned to get back on the horse that throws you, and knew that life should not be lived in fear of dying or anything else.

In Fantasyland Kurt Andersen says Christian religiosity is "the grandest and greatest conspiracy of all" (89), and that Enlightenment skepticism received a religious make-over in America that predisposed the national mind to become an incubator of conspiracy-mindedness. The QAnon nonsense is just the latest incarnation of an old tendency, going back to the Freemasons whose big secret mission, said Ben Franklin, was that they had none.

Wouldn't it be nice if nations and traditions just stopped insisting on exclusive divine sanction for their beliefs?

In How the World Thinks we wonder about Islamic notions of "perfect divine transcendental unity" and their dis-unifying consequences.

Is ordinary experience, day to day, "nothing more than a powerful illusion"? 149 Does anyone ever really act as if they believed that? Is it possible to function effectively and happily with such an attitude? Or in predestination and one's pre-"recorded destiny"? 154 Or in natural disasters that kill innocent people according to "God's will" for which the victims are nonetheless "culpable"? 155

More too on Harry Frankfurt's "bullshit" (162) and Jeremy Bentham's "felicific calculus" and Stephen Hawking's greatly exaggerated reports of the demise of philosophy (167). And a question about reductionism that reminds me of a mantra we met in the Atheism course several years ago: "physics fixes the facts." But not all of them, Baggini says, not if fixing means reducing. There are no car batteries in fundamental physics...