"Dogmatic Empiricism" pt. 2 - the Pit of Despair

No Exit

So Descartes' method of universal doubt backfires, and how. Rather than the foundation for the new, reliably scientific philosophy, it seems to me the worst of intellectual prisons. It leaves the intellect suspended in a clamorous void: unable to go forward (for fear of building on a lie), unable to return (for who can recreate the innocence before suspicion), and — what is perhaps the worst of all — bombarded with constant noise that it cannot silence.

Like this, only spikier.

A Hibernating Termite

Enter yours truly — a grubby-fisted 19-year-old just finished with his 3rd undergraduate year. I'd been embroiled in my school's "Honors Program" — not so much an honorary award as a Great Books Program. You know the thing I mean: a group of college kids sitting in a circle, most of them desperately intuiting something intelligent to say from the few who actually read the day's text.

Anyway: one of the texts that we read towards the end of my junior year was Descartes' Discourse on Method — i.e., the little book in which he sets out his method of universal doubt. It had no practical effect on me at the time; after all, life was far too busy to stop and think. But it remained in the background, dormant but alive, like a termite niggling away inside a wall.

With one thing and another, I left to spend my summer in a scientific internship at N.I.S.T. in Maryland. And there, with leisure to think (and other changes), the niggling idea came fully and horribly awake.

The Pit of Despair

The idea of universal doubt kept coming back into my thoughts that summer, probably because (try as I might) I could not see any solution to it. In humility I assumed that the defect must lie on my part; that surely a Mind such as Descartes wouldn't have written irrational hogwash; and that, if I wrangled with the idea long enough, it would give up its secret.

But my difficulty wasn't simply with an idea — that is, with what the Post-Modern feels to be "irrelevant". Everybody, I think, has experienced being "out of it": where your Common Sense feels sluggish, where your mind fails to completely make sense of what your senses report, where perceptions seem to swarm and rush past you before you can properly notice them. We deal with this, usually, by rallying ourselves to "deal with it", to leave off introspection and renew our attention to the objects the senses have never stopped telling us about.

Now, the precise moment when universal skepticism became a horrible thing was when it deprived me of any justification for "rallying myself". Suddenly, I could not be sure that there was anything to rally "to". What if this sense of being "out of it" was actually a moment of "seeing through" the smokescreen of sensual make-believe?

"Breakdown"

The consequence of this was immediately apparent: my thought process froze, suspended in hesitation (because unwilling to commit to objects that might not actually exist). Emotionally, "deadness" alternated wildly with a feeling of desperation; whether because I "could not get out" of the suffocating silence of my mind, or because the outside world "would not shut up", I could not say.

I must rush to say that, so far as I know, none of this was visible. Exteriorly, I muddled along normally, by reflex: small-talk with friends, eating meals, watching TV. I am by nature introverted and somewhat reserved, so it was natural for this crisis to manifest itself purely in my inner life. But through all this the "deadness" remained. Work alone gave me some relief, giving me something to think about besides the awful situation I found myself in.

To be continued ...