The human mind is a curious thing. Its nature has been the subject of inquiry throughout philosophical history, spanning millennia. Whether this questioning was based on its capacities, its physical or immaterial make-up, or any other such qualia, humankind has had an innate desire to know and discover, above all else, the very methods and ways through which it can know and discover.
Core to the majority of this inquiry was a strategy and mode of thought known as “logic”, a mode of thought which seemed inherent to the human mind. Through a fundamental set of principles, pieces of information could be synthesized to form a conclusion, which by the very definition of logic, must be true if said principles were true. This system was formalized in Greek tradition, specifically through the work of Aristotle, but similar systems were being developed and formalized all over the world. As logic’s power grew and spread, it began to infect all other disciplines. Suddenly, any truth which did not withstand the withering gaze of logic’s due process was subject to skepticism, such as that practiced by followers of Pyrrhonism, or even flat out refusal.
This rigorous form of reasoning soon birthed a newly formalized mode of thought called “science”, wherein a system is recognized, a hypothesis is made about the specifics of its functionality, the consequents of said hypothesis are deduced, and experiments are run to see if the consequents are violated. Essentially, science became a new, formalized mode of thought for collecting evidentiary data about the world around us and predicting future occurrences based upon past observations. This evidently superior mode of thought became wildly popular both for its inherently elegant reasoning and for its controversial results such as Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. As the scientific revolution spread like wildfire throughout Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, René Descartes came forward with a work entitled Discourse on Method. In this work, he lays out, among many other things including the famous “cogito ergo sum”, what he refers to as the “four rules of the method”. These four rules are not so much another formalization of the rules of logic, but rather a set of precepts on which Descartes believed the application of logical thought should be based. On the whole, the work is a successful one, but it makes a few key errors in its foundational principles that persist throughout and weaken many of its conclusions.
The first of the four rules of the method was essentially to never believe any false premises. As Descartes puts it, “never to accept anything as true that I did not plainly know to be such […] include nothing more in my judgments than what presented itself to my mind so clearly and so distinctly that I had no occasion to call it in doubt.” When a logical argument is constructed in a valid manner, the most common (indeed, likely the only) way to refute the conclusion is to deny the premises. If, as Descartes advises, the premises are accepted only after strenuous analysis and careful thought, then it becomes all the more difficult to arrive at a potentially faulty conclusion.
The second of these rules is “to divide each of the difficulties I would examine into as many parts as possible and as was required in order better to resolve them.” This is less a specific logical stratagem but moreso a general approach to thought. If one can take a large concept and break it down into its component pieces, analyze each of these pieces individually so as to understand them in a fuller capacity, then when the concept is reconstructed it can be more easily understood as a whole.[1]
The third of the rules is to progress naturally through the component pieces of an idea or train of thought, beginning with the simplest and building slowly towards the most complex by means of small steps of logic. In this manner, as with the second step, each small bit of information can be duly processed and understood before moving on to the next, more complex step. This rule also makes sure that one does not have any errors in the ordering of premises or logical steps, as this would make the argument or line of thought hard to follow, both for the thinker and a potential outside observer.
The fourth and final of the rules of method is “everywhere to make enumerations so complete and reviews so general that [one is assured] of having omitted nothing.” This rule attempts to emulate the scientific method in the sense that the process is repeated over and over again through review such that any flaws are revealed and consequently addressed. The hope is that the human mind is capable of spotting errors and omissions that were made the first time through the argument and then correcting them.
Despite the overall quality of these rules and their strength in most instances of thought process, it is here in the fourth rule that the general flaw of the method begins to become apparent. This assumption—that an observer can always find every flaw and omission in the argument—is not entirely accurate. While it certainly is common for one person to be able to see the problems in another’s arguments when the arguer cannot see them, this does not guarantee that every flaw will be exposed, or even that every flaw is apprehensible by the human mind. This oversight runs throughout the four rules: a fundamental inability to conceive of modes of thought which do not follow logical processes and as such are not subject to logical rules.
When one inspects the foundation of logical thought, doubting all of its claims in much the same manner as Descartes’ line of thought which lead him to “cogito ergo sum”, he or she is left with one major foundational assumption on which logic is based: that logic is a functional system. The rules on which logic are based have no inherent, provable truth value to them, and as such are doubtable premises. This structure on which logic is built essentially boils down to a system of circular reasoning, providing its own definitions and set of tools with which it suggest one observe its validity; i.e., logic is a valid system only by the rules of logic. While I do not personally believe that it is beneficiary or even “right” to doubt the validity of logic, it is important to note the possibility of its short comings, which Descartes fails to do. Descartes seems to have his own reasoning for this absence of doubt, but again, he arrives at this certainty through a logical train of thought, which again dodges the issue entirely (indeed, it seems to be a logical fallacy on the order of petito principia, not to mention his specific use of argumentum ad populum).
This circular reasoning system is an important concept to recognize as inherent in every mode of thought—science, logic, and faith—and as such, not a destructively negative condition, but one that should always be remembered. Science, the mode of thought which makes predictions based upon models crafted from previous experiences, is only used because when it has been used in the past (previous experiences), its predictions have been correct. As such, the scientific method is a scientific model. The reasoning of faith, belief in that which cannot be arrived at through logic or science, is circular in much the same ways: in the end, there is no foundational proof for its validity, but there are a few fundamental precepts on which it is placed.
When one does not accept the circular nature of reasoning systems, and instead tries to fit the entirety of truth under one lens, under one mode of thought, then errors are quick to arise. This is especially evident in Descartes’ attempts to logically prove the existence of God. God, above all else, has classically been a concept taken as an article of faith, and for good reason: the task of proving through logic a being which is all-powerful, prior to time, and immaterial is a difficult one indeed. Great philosophers throughout history, however, have tried, with varying degrees of success, to fit God into the lens with which they are most comfortable: philosophy and logical thought.
For these reasons, Descartes’ specific arguments for God fail from the outset, but they are also relatively weak even within the history of logical proofs of God. They even violate a few of Descartes’ own Four Rules of Method. From the outset in his first gesture towards a proof of God, he makes a number of assumptions which would clearly violate the first rule: that “things we conceive very clearly and very distinctly are all true”, that “it is a greater perfection to know than to doubt”, and that being able to imagine something more perfect than one’s self is proof of something more perfect than one’s self. Each of these is refutable after quick deliberation, despite the fourth rule that each process should be thoroughly reviewed for errors such as these. What, for instance, if those things which we believe to see “very clearly” are indeed not at all true, and that notion of seeing them clearly is a false perception, one of the very false perceptions he doubted to arrive at “cogito ergo sum”? There seems to be no evidence or reasoning behind this belief other than personal faith. The following point, that it is greater to know than to doubt, seems to be slightly more reasonable, but still could be questioned on a number of levels. The final premise of his proof, that imagination proves existence, is immediately questionable. His decision “to search for the source from which I had learned to think of something more perfect than I was, and I plainly knew that this had to be from some nature that was in fact more perfect” assumes that for an idea to be present in one’s head, it must have a reasonable source, is flawed on many many levels. Human beings are eminently capable of envisioning things which do not exist and have no root in the reality around us, and this ability does not at all prove the existence of unicorns or martians.
As such, Descartes’ Discourse on Method is a flawed logical and philosophical work, but is still, despite my critiques, largely successful in its aims. Indeed, although it fails to acknowledge modes of thought other than logic, it defines the philosophical lens very effectively and reasonably. His proof of “cogito ergo sum” is also profoundly famous for good reason—it is an essentially perfect logical proof of existence above all else, from which a vast majority of western thought has arisen. Once the Discourse on Method is taken in this lighter context—as a high quality work of logic, but a work which does not in any way disprove the other modes of thought—its imperfections can be glossed over and that which remains is quite solid, or, as Descartes puts it, one can “cast aside the shifting earth and sand in order to find rock or clay”.
[1] Although the rebuttal to this point will not be discussed at length in this paper, it should be noted that this rule fails to recognize the possibility of some points which cannot be broken into component pieces, points which become more complex when broken up, or points in which the “whole is greater than the sum of its parts”
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