44: Cartesian Dualism

In this episode, I'm reading a chapter of my book, Unconscious  Correspondences. I considered an episode on Cartesian Dualism, but realized I'd already said everything I needed to say, in a chapter in this book. Rather than repurposing the same content into a new form, why  not just read directly from the book? As Nietzsche tended to do  when introducing his own earlier works, I shall do the same. I will  introduce this essay: "Body and Mind: The Life and Meditations of Rene  Descartes - A Polemic" with, "An attempt at self-criticism". This  essay has its flaws, and belabors the point a bit too stringently at  places. In retrospect, I made some very overgeneralized claims about  academia and modern attitudes towards Descartes that one could easily  challenge. I should also say that these claims derived from personal  experience with my own professors, and the professors of many of my  friends. Descartes was always taught as being "basically a secret  atheist who didn't believe the religious stuff at all and included it  just to please the church." Not only did one of my own professors say  some version of this, I heard this from others, attending different  universities. This always struck me as odd, because the central  premises of his Meditations on First Philosophy are completely derived  from Christian presuppositions, which are simply taken from theology and  put into philosophical language. Thus, I challenged: whether Descartes  was truly a departure from past philosophy (Plato, of course, sets up  figures to raise assertions and Socrates to raise skeptical  objections/doubts); whether Descartes was actually an atheist or a deist  (or whether we could understand him within the assumption he was a  Christian, perhaps a Rosicrucian); whether our own interpretations of  Descartes have to do with our embrace of the "mind as self"  ego-consciousness (thus leading us to be confused and embarrassed by  Descartes' invocation of God as the ultimate certainty). While I wrote  in a way that was somewhat clumsy in my eyes now, and while I may have  spent too much time in a detour talking about the background historical  context in which Descartes emerged, I feel these challenges are raised  in a forceful and meaningful enough way to be useful for people to think  about. https://app.thebookpatch.com/BookStore/unconscious-correspondences/3fe82dc3-d4ac-4d61-81c3-9ce9a7abe483