Digesting problems

Metabolism and thought, Descartes again

Most of all, Descartes stresses the importance of the heart, compared to a burning fire that agitates blood and animal spirits to do everything they do. A “fire without light.” The more heat is generated, the more food and stressors can be dissolved so as to serve as nourishment. Of course, there can also be too much heat. The purpose of right living, ‘practical philosophy’, is to continuously kindle the fire in such a way that it keeps burning, and is capable of moving us through whatever it is that afflicts us. If it isn’t actively kept alive, the fire that gives life will slowly die. A man is judged by whether or not he can make good use of what happens to him. And so likewise, a body’s health is judged by the degree to which it can make good use of whatever it encounters. Even the best food in the world will not heal you if you can not use it as nourishment, which is the task of the fire within. But if you do not eat good food that stimulates the digestive system, there won’t be any fire left to begin with, as digestion serves to keep the fire alive.

The fire within warms the blood, and when food enters the body, the blood can warm it to such a degree that it is dissolved into smaller particles that can be absorbed. But if the fire is too weak, the system gets clogged up. It is a question of metabolism. 

The process is akin to Descartes’ views on morality. A man should be able to feel all passions, both those that lead to evil and those that lead to good, but his worth is determined by the degree to which he can digest them and make good use of them. This is one sense of Descartes’ dualism, which is always in the first place a methodical dualism. Two similar processes on two different planes of existence —soul and body. And just as health is to a great degree determined by the bodily fire’s capacity to metabolize the external, so there is a sort of spiritual metabolism, an ability to make good use of one’s surroundings, properly digest new knowledge and experiences, and act with confidence, knowing one can make good use of whatever it is that might happen. Of course, the spiritual and bodily, although from a certain perspective different in kind, can not be separated for Descartes. There is a union. And in many ways, it is because there is a union of soul and body that there can be a dualism. This is the great virtue of dualism if one wishes to entertain it. In all monism, both of the idealist and materialist kind, there is a great collapsing of reality onto one side of the equation. Matter is more important than mind. Or mind is more important than matter. Descartes is not of the either/or kind, he wants to accept all of reality. And at times, the mind or soul has the capacity to overpower the body. Thoughts can heal bodily disease. Here, the soul is more powerful than the body. And the reverse is true at different times. Good nutrition can heal depression. Here, the body is more powerful than the soul or thought. One would make it hard to think both of these possibilities with a materialist or idealist monism, and the same is true with some sort of hybrid monism meant to surpass the materialism/idealism choice. 

Descartes is really one of those who seeks an analysis that goes beyond ‘good and evil’, to use a tainted expression. His practical philosophy is not about doing good and avoiding evil, it is about being able to digest whatever happens to us in an efficient manner. This is good. Spinoza speaks vividly about the ‘bad’ as merely being that which for a certain person cannot be assimilated, as a poison, whereas the good would be like nourishing food that suits the person’s constitution. We cannot imagine this without Descartes’ physiological point of view. No passion is ‘evil’ for Descartes, but what is bad is our inability to control our passions, our inability to digest them. 

The difference between Descartes and later Cartesians is Descartes’ insistence on personal freedom. We are not just the result of impersonal processes. No, Descartes wants to accept all of reality. And so too the very real evidence of people overpowering their physiology through pure will and thought. There is a great humanism here. And the new science, in the hands of Descartes, never served to reduce man’s autonomy, only to strengthen it. Only to give him the means to strengthen it. 

The question is, how do these beings of soul and body, created by an all-knowing God and made to instinctively seek an optimal state of health, fall into disease? Of course, there are external stressors, too much for the organism to bear. But what about other things of a more pernicious and internal nature? What about mental disorders, auto-immune diseases, and so on? How does life turn against itself? 

For Descartes, it always starts with an essentially ‘good’ quality in which one perseveres when it is better not to. A very real and reasonable discontent leads to anger, motivating one to do something about the current situation. But lacking health, lacking energy, the fire being too weak, one cannot properly digest the passion, and it becomes like a cancerous resentment that grows and grows, eating you up from the inside out. Similarly, it is very rational to develop a certain allergic reaction to certain large external stressors, but something is wrong when this healthy defense mechanism starts attacking everything within reach. 

Concerning learning, Descartes says it is essential to wonder at new experiences. This desire to wonder is what drives you to learn new things, a most virtuous desire. But, the experience of wondering at something new (an experience, a fact, a theory, anything) impresses itself with much more force than the mere contemplation of something with which one is already familiar. This is so because the organism is not yet used to this ‘new’ thing. It excites the nerves more intensely, and activates the passions. It is like ingesting a food for which one lacks the enzymes to digest it, it doesn’t get absorbed as easily, and the body has to expend more energy to assimilate it. This is not to say that ‘wonder’ accords with a negative experience. Far from it, in wonder, the nerves get excited in a pleasurable way, nature’s way of telling you it is good to learn new things? And because of this, one can get ‘addicted’ to the experience of wonder. One will start to seek out wonder for wonder’s sake, and one will even start questioning things which are perfectly obvious. Descartes’ favourite example: philosophers who come to question even the existence of themselves. This process is at the root of all types of disease for Descartes, and so there is something of an ‘anti-philosopher’ in him, in the sense that he is critical of this philosophical attitude often associated with Socrates —endless questioning. Only a physiological addiction to what is new and different from oneself, the organism wanting to flee from itself? A problem of indigestion, having to spend countless hours of dialectic on the most insignificant facts? Now, to be sure, Descartes is said to have written a text on Socrates, praising the man. But, when we take Socrates as an exaggerated model for a certain type of philosopher, the ‘gadfly’, Descartes is certainly an anti-philosopher.

Back when I went to university, first I went to some of these introductory classes at a few different universities to see where I wanted to go. In one of them, I was welcomed with a lecture on some completely general topic like ‘the meaning of life’, your typical pop-philosophy stuff. It was horrible, and it really represented the worst that philosophy can be, a bunch of children or drunks wondering about the meaning of life and so on. You know these types, sometimes strangers at a bar, and they come to you with these completely general supposedly “philosophical” questions: ‘What do you think the meaning of life is?’ ‘Do you believe in God?’ ‘Do you think plants have consciousness?’, ‘Do you think aliens exist?’, ‘What is happiness?’, and so on. Disgusting types. And this is the worst of what Socrates can represent. These are also the types of questions analytic philosophers like to obsess over. What you have with Descartes is a critique of this all too broad and general questioning for questioning’s sake. These people, they don’t care for your answer, or for solving the question, they care about the high they get from annoying people with their questions. And every question is permitted, as long as it can annoy you. And what you have with Descartes is the message that not all questions or problems are worth asking or even entertaining, you have to ask the right questions and posit the right problems. And some questions are perfectly interesting, but entirely out of order at certain moments of life or in certain social situations. 

“So, anyways, for Descartes philosophy is about digestion and metabolism, controlled by the heart, which is like a pump and a fire. You need to eat, walk, and get big to kindle the fire. He’s a proto-Nietzschean really. You have to take tobacco to realize dualism is true and become a beast of prey. But Nietzsche was straight edge so he didn’t believe in the soul. Do you know how to decalcify your pineal gland? You could lose some weight.”

I think also that Descartes knew really well that there is a price to pay for thinking and questioning to any serious degree. When we ask deep questions and strain ourselves for an answer, the organism has to put in an effort, and this takes it out of its natural state of restful energy. And the more you strain, the more you can get bogged down. In some cases, disease can even follow. Remember what Descartes said, if you are getting too confused or you feel too stressed by all this philosophy or whatever it might be, go outside, walk, feel the sun, listen to the birds. This is the reasoning behind Descartes’ entire project. He wants clear and distinct truths which are so evident that we don’t have to waste time on all these questions anymore. And so we can finally be free from this stress and start acting on what we know. But, of course, in order to think clearly, we need energy. 

He saw all these philosophers and theologians, spending their days inside on dialectic and books, exhausted, dysgenic types, completely bogged down by all their questions, spiritually constipated. They’d do better going for a walk and having a good night’s sleep, giving their organism some rest and nutrition, and so when they come back to philosophy they’ll do so with more health and think more clearly. 

Some questions are completely stupid, and only an unhealthy organism could ask them. This is Descartes’ idea. “Do I really exist?” Well, you do, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to ask the question. And, why do you even need reasons to prove to yourself that you exist? Don’t you just feel yourself existing? Perhaps one can only ask this question because one’s physiology is so messed up that you have become so disconnected from your body and your sense of self. Go for a walk. Stupid questions, much more important than stupid answers. The latter generally stem from a lack of knowledge, which just means you haven’t read or seen enough. Who cares. A stupid question one poses… it means something much more serious, you as a unity of mind and body are incapable of judging what it is that is worthy to spend one’s time on, what is valuable to question, what is self-evident, and so on. It is a much more personal thing. We give answers on the basis of what we have learned, our asking of questions seems to be much more an activity stemming from ourselves.  

This is really the plague of today, and of all days, stupid questions, stupid problems. And, perhaps more importantly, stupid questions pushed through your throat by education and media, expecting you to parrot the same questions over and over again, and spend your days until retirement looking for an answer. If you think philosophy is free from this, think again. Many people today in philosophy are obsessed with ‘environmental philosophy’, which is really just a contemporary invention —students applying their education in the history of philosophy to Al Gore-type climate hysteria. Don’t get me wrong, I like nature. But there is no philosophy of nature today, only a hysteric philosophy of “climate.” As a result, people scour the history of philosophy looking for thinkers that can be fit into their project to save the planet. “Nietzsche said something about the earth! See he wants more personal carbon taxes!”, “Spinoza said God = Nature! See he wants you to stop eating meat!” There are problems pushed by government, media, and those who control both, and academia is really just this factory for training young people to think about solutions to the problems given to society as a whole. Seldom do people question if the problems are even sound to begin with. Are there not more important problems? But so long as we are thinking about an answer to global warming, we can look away from the food supply being poisoned as a result of this very same climate hysteria. So long as we are worrying about how to get everyone vaccinated, we won’t have time to ask if vaccination is even good or how it is that we’re so weak in the first place. I admit, it is a terrible cliché, “the questions you ask are more important than the answers you give.” But it is true, and just as an individual’s life is marked more by the questions and problems that obsess him, so a society is marked by what it takes as its fundamental problems. Questions and problems guide thought and action, they give it direction. As Kant clearly saw when he characterized the Ideas of reason as problems of reason. Who shapes thought today? This is why it is so powerful to look for ideas and inspiration in different periods of history. Reading the Greeks is not just interesting because we see different answers to ‘universal problems of philosophy’, because of Plato’s conception of the soul, or because of Aristotle’s logic, but because we see thinkers with different ideals, different goals, driven on by different problems. In all, because we see different lives.  

What you see today is perhaps just a certain type of laziness. Schoolteacher gives us a predetermined set of questions, and all we have to do is find the answer. Never caring to grow up, we take this same attitude into maturity, and we are so used to questions being given to us, we expect questions and problems to be given to us by experts and media and what have you. Our task is merely to provide a little contribution to these ‘universal problems of humanity’, and we’ll feel good about ourselves, we’ll get a pat on the back and a pay-check, and we can go home again and watch tv to be reminded of the gravity of these great problems of climate and racism and what have you. Be it the mind-body problem, public health, climate, or anything else, it’s the same story; problems are given to you, good = giving an answer, bad = questioning the problem.

Now, of course, it is reasonable to trust on authority to give us insight into the real problems most worthy of thought and effort. Aristotle says dialectics, which deals with problems, generally starts with looking at endoxa: established opinions by wise men of the tradition which have stood the test of time. All previous philosophers struggled with the problem of ‘being’, and so this problem is probably worthy of our efforts. But, when the problems given to you are so self-evidently stupid, something else is going on than a healthy impulse to follow in the footsteps of greater men. Who is thinking about ‘Being’ today in a way that isn’t superficial and of an entirely secondary nature, who is thinking about justice or the Good?

It takes a certain type of energy to take on problems of significance. Descartes says that the physiologically disturbed organism can never come to think about the self or God in any true way, it can’t, for physiologically its energy will be focused on whatever blockades that might be troubling it, and ‘mentally’, it’ll be disturbed by whatever ‘new and interesting’ fact it encounters today. A problem of indigestion that drains you of your energy, and leaves no meaningful surplus to think about anything higher. After all, doing so would be entirely irrational and out of order, there are more pressing concerns, a disease to be treated. How to realize self-thinking thought, when the body is begging you to take care of it? So, Descartes says, go for a walk, take some rest, and first get the fire inside your heart burning again. Burn away the debris, and all you need to know will come to you naturally. What Descartes seeks most of all is this condition of mind and body where the individual is no longer stressed by all sorts of problems and stressors afflicting it, and can achieve a state of restful energy, confident it knows everything it needs to know to think clearly and act efficiently. From here, enjoying a surplus of energy, the person can truly judge. Not on the basis of false problems that merely seem significant because they have the force of being ‘new’, drilled in through the media’s administration of fear. And not on the basis of arbitrary digestive troubles clouding us with all sorts of fermenting passions. From here, we can truly judge as to what it is that is most worth thinking about. And we can truly judge as to what it is that is most important to do and create. Man can start taking steps towards becoming a co-creator, no longer bogged down by external problems that afflict him, but creating his own problems, choosing his own projects, actually creating. This is Descartes’ ambition, which in many ways resembles Spinoza’s conversion of the soul from the first to the third kind of knowledge. And it is, in form at least, entirely similar to the Platonic view; heal the soul by undoing the excessive connections to matter, and from there, ‘descend’ back again to create a better world in accordance with Ideas. Heal, and then heal. Contemplation and accumulation of energy, Descartes’ meditation, and Elizabeth’s walk in which the union of soul and body is strengthened. And, the creation of a world —“science.”