Only other people can force us to doubt the beliefs we hold dear. Descartes’s philosophical journey shows us why.
This personal reflection is part of a series called The Big Ideas, in which writers respond to a single question: What do we believe?
In fractious times like these, people tend to converge on skeptical mantras: “Keep an open mind,” we say. “Adopt a critical distance.” “Question received opinions.” Even sharply polarized interlocutors can sing the praises of skepticism and doubt in unison.
But how does doubt work, exactly?
The 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes is famous for having transformed doubt into a method for directing the mind, for questioning the self. What’s less well-known is that when he tried to use his own method, he ran into a serious stumbling block.
Descartes begins his journey into doubt by reflecting on his past errors: He is disturbed by the discovery that so many of the views he had uncritically absorbed over the course of his childhood had turned out to be wrong. What if the remainder of his views were wrong, too?
Descartes decides that the safest route, as he writes in his “Meditations on First Philosophy,” published in 1641, is to commit to “the general demolition of my opinions,” with the aim of rebuilding his mind on a firm foundation. So one day, sitting alone in his room, he sets himself to doubting everything he thinks is true.
But he finds that he can’t do it. He writes: “My habitual opinions keep coming back, and, despite my wishes, they capture my belief, which is as it were bound over to them as a result of long occupation and the law of custom.” Doubting something you believe is not, Descartes discovered, something you can straightforwardly do.
Try it yourself and you’ll realize it’s harder than it seems. Choose a widely agreed-upon factual belief — like Berlin is a city in Germany, or two plus two equals four. Or pick one of your own steadfast political beliefs — like all people deserve access to health care, or gun control is an encroachment on personal freedom. Or pick a belief you’re already uncertain about, though in that case your doubting would be tasked with generating more uncertainty than you already feel. Once you’ve picked your belief, go ahead, flip the switch. Start doubting.
I’ve tried it many times: Nothing happens. I tell myself, “I’m going to doubt this thing I believe!” “I’m suspending my judgment!” “From now on, I’m not going to assume this is true!” But my pronouncements have the character of the speeches we make to ourselves in our dreams, when we try to convince ourselves that we aren’t actually dreaming.
Maybe you think you’re different. Maybe you’ve flipped the switch just now and are persuaded that you’re successfully doubting something you once believed in.
Well, just wait a bit. Sooner or later, you’ll find yourself pointing to Berlin on a map, or checking whether you received the correct change from the cashier, or getting worked up over an op-ed about health care or gun control.
And when that happens — when you exhibit all the telltale signs of belief, behaving exactly as you did before you supposedly flipped the switch — you’ll come to the same realization Descartes did: Your so-called doubting was all an act. You were just pretending.
Faced with this problem at the time, Descartes, rather charmingly, decides to double down on the act. In “Meditations” he writes: “I think it will be a good plan to turn my will in completely the opposite direction and deceive myself, by pretending for a time that these former opinions are utterly false and imaginary.” Descartes forces himself to imagine that a “malicious demon” is in control of his mind and that all the most basic truths he’s long known about himself and the world are merely delusions wrought by this evil creature. “I shall consider myself as not having hands or eyes, or flesh, or blood or senses,” he writes, “but as falsely believing that I have all these things.”
Once again, it doesn’t work. At a crucial moment, the pretense cracks open, and Descartes lapses back into his old ways. A piece of wax in his room attracts his attention and he starts to describe it: “It has just been taken from the honeycomb; it has not yet quite lost the taste of the honey; it retains some of the scent of the flowers from which it was gathered.” “If you rap it with your knuckle,” he continues, “it makes a sound.”
Strictly speaking, Descartes’s “method” would have required him to doubt not only the existence of the wax, but the hands holding it and the nose smelling it. But Descartes finds that he can’t stop thinking that what he senses is, in fact, really there.
Which gets at an essential truth: Ultimately, none of us can decide not to believe what seems true to us, any more than we can decide what wax smells like.
Descartes tells the story of his intellectual development twice. The version in “Meditations” is justly preferred by philosophers for its greater depth of argumentation. But the version in his “Discourse on Method,” published in 1637, contains an important admission about some of the sources of those arguments:
“I took the decision that, as far as the rest of my opinions were concerned, I could freely undertake to rid myself of them. And seeing that I expected to be better able to complete this task in the company of others than by remaining shut any longer in the stove-heated room in which I had had all these thoughts, I set out on my travels again before winter was over.”
Thinking you’re right about something isn’t a sign of arrogance — it’s a sign of thinking. Changing your own mind isn’t your job; it’s the job of other people, of those who disagree with you. That’s because, unlike you, other people are free and able to think you’re wrong. Likewise, it’s ultimately your responsibility to change other people’s minds.
In polarized times, we’re inclined to fabricate excuses for not being one another’s intellectual keepers in this way. One of these excuses is the conceit that the people who disagree with us could pull themselves up by their own epistemic bootstraps if only they were more humble, more open-minded, more willing to detach themselves from their views. We want to send people to their stove-heated rooms with a hefty prescription of doubt: “Don’t come out until you’ve flipped the switch!”
But there is no such switch. And before we blame the myth that there is one — the myth of epistemic self-sufficiency — on Descartes, we should note that there’s more than enough blame to go around: While we may have drawn many important lessons from Descartes’s method of doubt, we’ve drawn precious few from his practice of it.
Agnes Callard is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. She writes a column on public philosophy for The Point.
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