Episode 2 Ol, Val & Eva doubt away the world and their dreams

Ol, Val and their special guest, Eva, try out Descartes' spiritual exercise of radical doubt - in Meditation 1 - recount some odd dreams and show people how to try this all out at home.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:07

Hello everybody, this is Luna Calling, calling all lovers of knowledge, lovers of open horizons, lovers of rain on granite and ashvelts and stray cigarette butts for the Parisians. I'm Ol.

SPEAKER_04 0:21

And I'm Val.

SPEAKER_02 0:22

We're sitting here together in this basement, and later on we're very excited because we're going to welcome Eva Zacharias. In this episode, we're going to be looking at Descartes' first meditation carrying on from our investigation of his method last week.

SPEAKER_04 0:39

And before we get into that, Olly, Ol, I thought that um perhaps we should do something of a little introduction of ourselves, right? Sure. Do you mind telling me a little bit about yourself?

SPEAKER_02 0:50

Well, my mother's in town at the moment, so I feel like I can tell this anecdote. I was about four years old, I was in the kitchen, and my mother was trying to prepare a meal. And she kept saying, You're in my way, Oliver, you're in my way. And apparently I protested and I said, But where's my way?

SPEAKER_04 1:08

Oh wow, that is a beautiful origin story, right? Well, I think that's something I think that's something that's followed you for quite some time then.

SPEAKER_02 1:16

Exactly. And I think philosophy is like one of the best disciplines for those who are not sure they have a way and who are trying to find their way.

SPEAKER_04 1:24

Well, I suppose that uh is describes my situation a little bit. Having recently completed my PhD um in political philosophy, I am now also trying to find a different way and a different approach to philosophy, having arrived at the end of a long journey that feels like perhaps another commencement of some sorts. But everything has been caught is everything has been cast into doubt for me. So let's get into the text.

SPEAKER_02 1:52

Well, I was gonna say, you know, back in the were you around in the 70s, Val?

SPEAKER_04 1:56

I've heard of the 70s, but uh I was nothing but an idea.

SPEAKER_02 2:00

It was a great decade, a great decade. Well, back in the late 70s, you know, Olivia Newton John and John Travolta, well, they got physical. But today we're gonna get metaphysical.

SPEAKER_03 2:09

Oh.

SPEAKER_02 2:10

Just to prepare for that, Val and I, we've been down all morning by the uh keys on the Seine, dipping our toes in and out of the river, trying to figure out whether we're the same person, the river's the same or not.

SPEAKER_04 2:24

Yeah, whether our toes are actually in the water, are we actually holding hands? I'm not entirely sure. Have you gone for a dip in the Seine all?

SPEAKER_02 2:32

I just have to say it was uh particularly ugly today, the Seine. It was brown, it was turbulent, it was rushing past, it was voluminous, it was bulging, nasty river.

SPEAKER_04 2:42

Well, I feel that you need to get rid of some of your preconceived notions because during the summer I went for a swim in the Seine and it was crystal clear, wonderful. And look, here I am, months later, still largely in good health, I think. I'm not entirely sure.

SPEAKER_02 2:57

So, how many courses of antibiotics was it? So, Descartes, he finally discovers the method that he's going to use. Not the method we talked about last time, but the way he's going to get rid of all of his opinions, all of his preconceived opinions, because he didn't know how to do this back in 1619.

SPEAKER_04 3:17

No, he was still on his journey, he was still doing his long road trip that we spent so much time talking about last week. But now he's discovered a method, he's ready to set up shop and begin seeing what he can uncover through the use of this method, right?

SPEAKER_02 3:35

What what does he want to do this for, Val? I forgot. Like, what's his goal? What's he going for?

SPEAKER_04 3:39

It seems like he just wants to call into doubt, I suppose. Uh uh maybe it's an expression of just his general dissatisfaction. As we were talking about last week, you know, he's gone to this elite college, he's acquired all of this knowledge, and now he's not so sure. He doesn't know what purpose this kind of knowledge actually serves him, right? So one of the things that he's going to begin with is he's going to try and free himself from all of his preconceived opinions, the opinions that he received during the course of his education, right?

SPEAKER_02 4:13

Yeah. And he's not doing you know, it's obvious that he's not just employing this doubt to to become another fence sitter and to say, I don't know. No, he's not like Montaigne. I mean, here we are in Paris, there's a whole series of books we can get that are called What Do I Know? Cassage. That's Montaigne, but that's not Descartes.

SPEAKER_04 4:30

No.

SPEAKER_02 4:30

Because he does know something.

SPEAKER_04 4:32

He does, he does know some things, but to arrive at those things that he knows, first he has to call into doubt all of these other things that he is not entirely certain of, right? You know, as he writes uh in the first meditation, you know, some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them on. I realized that it was necessary once in the course of my life to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations. If I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last.

SPEAKER_02 5:14

Well, there you go, that's his goal, isn't he? He wants to establish something in the sciences that's stable and likely to last. That's what he wants to do. He wants a foundation.

SPEAKER_04 5:23

He wants a foundation for scientific knowledge, something that is certain, true, something that is reliable. Yeah, a new a new base that he wasn't able to find in the course of his education.

SPEAKER_02 5:35

He wants to find bedrock, Val. He's going right down through the foundations, through the pilings. He wants to find granite.

SPEAKER_04 5:42

He's he's drilling down, he's drilling down through, and we'll find out what he actually gets to through the course of these meditations.

SPEAKER_02 5:52

Mentioning drilling, is this an extractivist enterprise, Val?

SPEAKER_04 5:57

Well, given uh given that uh we both uh grew up in Australia, this does seem a lot like our government's relationship to the land, right? It just seems like this extractive kind of relationship, you know, it's all take, take, take, all me, me, me. That's right. I feel like this is this uh kind of bourgeois individualism that we were discussing last week.

SPEAKER_02 6:18

This is not this is not go for gold, no, which we all know as Australians. This is exactly this is dig for gold.

SPEAKER_04 6:22

This is dig for gold, take the gold, don't give any of it back. But however, this is where Descartes, I suppose, is different from you know our our Australian government. He wants to give something back, right? He's he's gone, he's tried to discover this thing, and he's going to give it back to us in the form of this meditation.

SPEAKER_02 6:43

He discovers a non-exclusive good. This is something that can be shared by everybody. I mean, literally, he actually says, you know, for once in philosophy, you actually get the philosopher saying, try this at home.

SPEAKER_04 6:55

Yeah, try this at home. This is something that everyone can do. But I suppose one of the questions that gets raised by this try try at home is what is he trying to. So we know that he's trying to find a foundation for the sciences, but there's something about that dedicatory letter to the Sorbon at the beginning of Meditations on First Philosophy that I found particularly fascinating, right?

SPEAKER_02 7:23

I'm glad you mentioned this, Val. I mean, we are, after all, just down the road from the Sorbonne, and it doesn't have quite the illustrious reputation that it had back then.

SPEAKER_03 7:32

No.

SPEAKER_02 7:32

But he did want to establish his system, he did want to get some authorities behind his new philosophy back then, so he writes this kind of, I have to say, fawning and almost facetious letter.

SPEAKER_04 7:42

A very well, it's interesting that you say facetious because this calls into question once again. What are Descartes' motivations? We were saying last week that he's advancing mast in a particular sense. But what does he actually say in this letter to the Sorbonne? He says, I want to provide a proof of the existence of God. Why does he want to do this? He does this in this very particular way, right? He says there's no point trying to convince the believers of God. They already believe. So we can't build our arguments on this foundation of faith because we already have faith. The people who have faith already believe. I'm not trying to convince them. What I'm trying to do is convince the non-believers of the existence of God, right? So what we need is not faith, but a rational form of argument. He says everyone is endowed with natural reason. We have to appeal to this natural reason, and from this basis, we can convince the non-believers of the existence of God, right?

SPEAKER_02 8:51

But this is a feint as far as I'm concerned. I mean, basically, he says to the doctors of the Sorbonne, look, I can convince the atheists, and indeed, in some of the objections to the meditations, because there's this fantastic series of objections and replies by famous contemporary philosophers of the day that he publishes, and he publishes his defence to, you know, when they critique him. In those, uh, he actually says, Look, um, my proof of the existence of God is going to be so good that nobody will ever dare doubt the existence of God again, which seems to me, well, it seems to me slightly unreal uh unrealistic, no?

SPEAKER_04 9:28

Well, I mean the proof is in the tasting of the pudding. There's still a lot of atheists running around, so I'm not entirely sure if he was successful in his goal.

SPEAKER_02 9:37

Well, I'm I'm not so sure that the God that he comes up with is the same God that people believe in. I mean, I think it's a little bit of a metaphysical God, but we're not quite there yet. We do know he says, I'm gonna prove not only the existence of God in my meditations, but also I'm gonna prove the existence of the soul as something distinct from the body. And if it's distinct from the body, we all know it's what happens to bodies, they die. If the soul is distinct from the body, then it's got a chance of living after the body. Exactly.

SPEAKER_04 10:08

It has a chance of continuing after the finitude of the body has ceased ceased to be. So exactly this famous distinction between mind and body. So he's going to prove not only the existence of God, but that the mind and the body are distinct entities. The mind being immaterial, the body being a material substance. The cause, the source and cause of a great deal of controversy.

SPEAKER_02 10:34

So let's so he's about to start on this on this spiritual exercise, right? Which is you know something all of us can try at home. Where is he? Well, he's in this cozy cottage somewhere in North Holland. He's got a nice fire stoked in front of him, he's wearing a red velvet dressing gown, he's got a glass of Armagnac in one hand, he's got one of those you know, feather pens in the other hand. Was is this where you'd like to be, Val, or would you like to imagine yourself somewhere different?

SPEAKER_04 11:03

If I was going to embark on a philosophical journey of self-discovery, then I mean this is seems like a pretty good setup, but one thing that's uh uh notably absent from uh this setup as opposed to in the discourse is where's the valet?

SPEAKER_02 11:17

Oh, the valet's disappeared.

SPEAKER_04 11:19

The valet's gone.

SPEAKER_02 11:20

But he's not acting, he says, I'm just sitting in a chair. He's got his armagnacs already poured for him.

SPEAKER_04 11:26

Yeah. So he did it himself.

SPEAKER_02 11:28

He's doing it all on his own.

SPEAKER_04 11:31

And where whereabouts is he? This is a this is another one of the other questions, I suppose, that emerges. Where is he he's in Holland somewhere? No one knows.

SPEAKER_02 11:41

There's a lot of speculation. Basically, it just needs to be a cottage. In the end, of course, he ends up absolutely nowhere through this process of doubt, through this spiritual exercise. Like he he literally removes himself from his actual surroundings and erases them completely.

SPEAKER_04 11:57

It's a total rejection of the the outside world, but again, why are all of these details that he's providing us in this little description? You know, I don't need to know the colour of your dressing gown or the material it's made of, or the fact that you've got a glass of Armagnac in your hand. Like what why is he telling us these things?

SPEAKER_02 12:15

Well, I I don't I think to be honest and to be to be fair with with Rene Descartes, uh, I really don't think he actually tells us that. That's just me filling in. You know, there are a few gaps there. I like to fill them in slightly. That's how I see him. Personally, if I'm gonna take this exercise, I'm at the beach.

SPEAKER_04 12:32

So you're using your powers of imagination to to dress Descartes, who That's right, and and what's more, I am going to reject his entire Dutch like surroundings.

SPEAKER_02 12:42

I'm gonna do this exercise, and I'm gonna start off. Let's say I'm at my favourite beach, I'm at Monavale Beach, northern Sydney beaches, I'm on the ocean pool, I'm dangling my feet down into the rush of the waves, there I am, and I'm gonna start this this exercise.

SPEAKER_04 13:00

So, who is this exercise for? Because it seems like you know, to be able to subtract yourself from the world, you know, set up shop in a little cottage, you know, completely removed from everything else, you know, who has the time in this day and age to be able to do to undertake such an exercise, right? Isn't this just a continuation of his, you know, privileged life? He's still probably burning through his inheritance money. Apparently, you know, he still had you know it funded nine years of backpacking in Europe and he's still got a bit left over to set up shop in a cottage. You know, who who has the time to even engage in such an exercise, a spiritual exercise?

SPEAKER_02 13:38

People who read Latin, Val.

SPEAKER_04 13:40

People who read Latin.

SPEAKER_02 13:41

Because this, unlike the discourse on method, this is not written for the vulgar.

SPEAKER_04 13:45

No, right?

SPEAKER_02 13:45

This is slightly dangerous because he's going to, he's actually going to come up with some pretty racy hypotheses, and he's going to be accused twice, not just once, but twice, of atheism and blasphemy because of the racy hypothesis in this first meditation. And so it's it's a dangerous exercise. And he says there are two kinds of people who should not do this, Val.

SPEAKER_03 14:05

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 14:06

Right? And I'm I'm a little bit worried about this. Are you one of these types of people, Val? Are you hasty to judge?

SPEAKER_04 14:14

Not at the moment.

SPEAKER_02 14:16

No, I can see that. I can see that, all right. Now, the other kinds of people who can't do it are those people who, well, they're not that so good at book learning, um, and they feel like following other people around.

SPEAKER_04 14:27

Okay, so he's he's he's um he's calling into question a bit of the universalism of of this method, I suppose. You know, it's a method of doubt that's just or it's a method that's not for everyone, right? Those who are too quick to judge and those who aren't particularly smart. Again, this is, you know, he's relying very heavily on his kind of um his up uh on his education and his upbringing, right?

SPEAKER_02 14:52

He is, um, and he's also, I mean, to be fair, his targets, there are those people he's addressing this exercise to, these people who can try it at home. But what's also equally important is who he's directing this entire exercise against. So basically, he's going to call his various categories of opinion into doubts, all right? And each time he does that, he's targeting a school of philosophy that says you can have certain knowledge, you can have true knowledge that's based, for example, on the evidence of the senses. Because that's what Aristotle says. Way before the empiricists, Aristotle says any idea that you have in your mind, first of all, it was found at the level of perception in your senses, and Descartes' going to have a big problem with that. So his target are all those scholastic philosophers who base themselves on Aristotle and who think that you can actually arrive at certain knowledge on the basis of sense perception.

SPEAKER_04 15:49

Yes, and so this was this is one of the things that makes uh the letter to the Sorbonne so interesting because, as you said, as in as you described it, it's this very fawning letter to the institution that he's going to be critiquing, right?

SPEAKER_02 16:04

Well, that's that's that's that's the absurd thing. I mean, what kind of doctor of the Sorbonne will read this letter and go, okay, fine. Yeah you're about to demolish the grounds for my entire faculty of philosophy and theology. Um, sure, I'll teach your new philosophy. Why not?

SPEAKER_04 16:17

Yeah, great. Let's bring it in. Let's bring in the thing that's going to undermine the very foundations that this institution is built upon.

SPEAKER_02 16:24

It's cheeky, Val. It's very cheeky.

SPEAKER_04 16:26

He's being very, very cheeky, right? But so one of the things that I suppose we need to look at again, and as we discussed last week, was this provisional morality that he that he brings in during the discourse. Because again, it seems very odd that he call he's he's gonna be challenging all of his preconceived opinions, his preconceived ideas, and yet he still has a more or less repetition of the Aristotelian kind of golden meme, you know, it's all in moderation, don't be too extreme. I'm going to follow the rules of the of the middle ground, the center of our society, in order to be able to conduct these meditations.

SPEAKER_02 17:14

Well, he doesn't want to draw attention to himself, and it is true, as you put it, you know, Val, he's trying to separate the theoretical order from the practical order. He warns us, he says, you can try this at home, but keep in mind this is just a theoretical exercise. This is not supposed to affect how you think about your everyday life and how you act.

SPEAKER_04 17:34

Yeah, because he's seen what uh where doubt will lead you, you know, when you think back to the the ancient school of the skeptics back in ancient Greece. It's too much doubt is a bad thing, right? You can't call absolutely everything in into doubt, you know.

SPEAKER_02 17:49

Well, you can. You just have to have a bunch of disciples that are going to stop you when you're about to walk off a cliff.

SPEAKER_04 17:54

Yeah, well, that's very convenient. So yeah, so it's this it's so are you trying to tell me trying to tell me that his provisional morality is his own disciples stopping him from going off the cliff?

SPEAKER_02 18:06

No, that would if he was a proper Pyrrhonian ancient skeptic, then you would apply the skepticism, right? You're you're you're doubting the capacity of the human faculty of knowledge to have true knowledge of existence, to actually arrive at uh a true awareness of what reality is. The ancient skeptics they carried that all the way, they didn't make a division in between theory and practice, they applied because they were like authentic Valve. Yeah, they carried it all the way, and so they didn't believe in things like gravity and cliffs and and banal things like that. And so they had to have disciples to stop them from falling off cliffs.

SPEAKER_04 18:42

I feel like that's that's the cheap way out. You have to have the disciples who do believe in the things that you yourself are denying exist, right?

SPEAKER_02 18:50

Hence the necessity for a valet, yeah. Again, disciple valet, same thing. He's got a different name.

SPEAKER_04 18:55

But the valet's not here this time, right?

SPEAKER_02 18:58

Well, here he is on his own. Let's let's let's get into it, Val. Let's start off. So, back in 1619, he says, I know I need to get rid of all of my opinions. I've got this rubbish swirling around in my head, it's all contradictory because all these different authority figures have been feeding their opinions into me. I couldn't stop them. I need to, I need to clean house, I need to get rid of them, but I don't know how. And then here we are, sometime after 1629, he discovers how to do this, right? And before 1637, because that's when he publishes the discourse on method, where he summarises the meditations. And this is it. He says, to quote the great Rene, reason now leads me to think that I should hold back my assent from opinions which are not completely certain and indubitable, just as carefully as I do from those which are patently false. So, for the purpose of rejecting all my opinions, it will be enough if I find in each of them at least some reason for doubt. And to do this, I will not need to run through them all individually, which would be an endless task. Once the foundations of a building, the buildings again, right? Again. Once the foundations of a building are undermined, anything built on them collapses of its own accord. So I will go straight for the basic principles on which all my former beliefs rested.

SPEAKER_04 20:16

And these basic principles, would you would you say they they are the kind of the senses, right? Or they're they're the Aristotelian kind of empiric empiricist worldview, right?

SPEAKER_02 20:28

It's basically I think its basic principles are, I mean, there there are successive waves of doubt. There are like three, depends how you divide them up. There are three or four waves of doubt, and each of them wipes out a certain class of objects, and each of them wipes out a certain kind of knowledge. So one principle behind knowledge is if I think I've got certain knowledge from sense perception of things in my surroundings, then that kind of knowledge is fine, right? Another principle is um if I've got very simple notions like straight lines and points and and shape and quantity, and if my knowledge claims are just based on those simple notions, then that knowledge is certain. That's another principle for a certain kind of knowledge that you find in arithmetic or geometry or maths. These are the kinds of basic principles he's talking about. But basically, what I want to stop on right now is just how high has he put this bar about it.

SPEAKER_04 21:28

I mean, it's extremely high, you know. It's easy. This is incredibly we can edit it. Um, I mean yeah, that's the bar is it. It's like if there's even just the slightest bit of doubt, then then you have to get rid of it, right?

SPEAKER_02 22:05

Yeah, he's saying even if even like for whole classes of opinions, if he can find the most remotest reason to call them into doubt, then he's gonna reject that entire category of opinions. And so the only thing he's happy with is absolute certainty.

SPEAKER_04 22:24

So exactly, I mean the the how how high is this bar is exactly the fact that even the the smallest bit of doubt that he could find will is reason enough for him to be able to throw out the entire class, entire categories of thought, right? I don't know about you all, but I have doubts about more or less everything. So it seems like he's gonna throw absolutely everything out.

SPEAKER_02 22:49

Well, that's a good question, Val. What does your universe consist of? Because I what I also think what I like about this exercise is that it's a kind of a diagnostic of the shape and the consistency and the type of your universe. Because if you feel you're lost at sea after just the first wave of doubts, one has to ask, what is your relationship to arithmetic and geometry?

SPEAKER_04 23:10

Well, I mean, I can tell you all that in absence of geometry and arithmetic, my relationship to the universe is one that I acquire through my sense perceptions. Those are I that's how I relate to the world, and that's how I understand it. It's through all of my different senses. But we're riding the first wave of doubt, right? Descartes' gonna throw all of this away. He says, Whatever I have up until now accepted as most true, I have acquired either from the senses or through the senses. But from time to time I have found that the senses deceive, and it is prudent never to trust completely those who have deceived us even once. The senses occasionally deceive us with respect to objects which are very small or in the distance. So again, this this is an extremely high bar. You know, I don't know about you, old, but my senses deceive me all the time.

SPEAKER_02 24:06

Well, I need new glasses at the moment, so it's not occasionally that my eyesight deceives me with regard to objects in the distance, it's just about all the time.

SPEAKER_04 24:14

Yeah. It's a constant state of the my body is failing me in all in all of these different different ways, you know. I've constantly mistaken objects in the distance. You know, the other famous example, of course, is when you put a stick in the water, it appears as bent. But we all know that, you know, extracting the stick from the water, it's still relatively straight.

SPEAKER_02 24:37

I mistake people in the distance as well.

SPEAKER_04 24:39

Oh, all the time. You know, you think, you know, particularly when you're traveling, I'm not sure if you've ever had this very kind of strange experience, but you find basically copies of people that you knew from back home walking around in the streets.

SPEAKER_02 24:54

Well, I've I've seen certain people and I thought they were straight, stuck them in the water, or they turned out to be bents. So here he is, he's saying, if I get it wrong every now and then with my with my senses with regard to like distant objects or small objects, then I can't trust any knowledge it's that comes from the senses with regard to distant objects, right? Because I pretty often get it wrong, and so that whole category of knowledge is uncertain and it's not what he's looking for.

SPEAKER_04 25:28

But again, this is this calls into question this the practicality of the the knowledge that he is trying to to get to, right? Like we rely on our senses all the time. You know, if you think about you know, trying to land a fighter jet pilot on an aircraft. Sorry, trying to try not to fighter jet pilot.

SPEAKER_01 25:53

Forget the pilot.

SPEAKER_04 25:54

Yep, okay.

SPEAKER_01 25:55

Um the fighter jet.

SPEAKER_04 25:57

Yep, okay. So uh where are we up to? The okay. That's okay, we can just keep it rolling. Yeah. Okay. So we're riding the first wave of doubt. So we've got him okay, so so basically we've got him sitting in the cottage. He's called everything into doubt. There's no more red gown, there's no more there's no more army. All of the things that your imagination produced, uh oh, we can't ever, we can't think about these things anymore.

SPEAKER_02 26:31

Well, hang on, I think you're you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater a little bit early there, because I think what he's thrown out, what's what he's wiped out of existence is the world outside the cottage. It's the distant world. I think I think objects that are close to him, he still believes in them.

SPEAKER_04 26:46

So he's still relatively certain that you know there there's a stove, you know, there's a nice little wood fire, you know, there's more his he's got his pajamas, you know.

SPEAKER_02 26:56

All those things that the that Michael Foucault got excited about in his in his argument with Jackie Derrida, yeah, right? My paper, this fire, my pen. Yeah. In fact, his entire article, Foucault's article, was entitled My Paper, This Fire, This Pen. Bugger off, Jackie Derrida, you're all wrong. How dare you question my philosophy, right? In that article, he obsesses on these on these objects, these everyday objects, that at this stage, at least, right, his knowledge has not yet been swept away by doubt. He still thinks, yeah, I'm pretty sure I'm sitting here, this is my body, this is my dressing gown.

SPEAKER_04 27:31

Yeah, this is more or less what I have to work with, but we're gonna keep going, right? Because we're still riding this first wave. Now we're on to the second wave of doubt, right?

SPEAKER_02 27:42

Well, he says, he says, you know, I did, you know, I think that I'm pretty certain about these close objects, but he has this beautiful objection, and this is what we call the argument from dreams. Now, now, Rene Descartes, he's quite original, but he did not make up this argument from dreams. In fact, this has been around for a while, this one. He says, as if I were not a man who sleeps at night and regularly has all the same experiences I while asleep, as madmen do when awake. Indeed, sometimes even more improbable ones. How often asleep at night am I convinced of just such familiar events that I am here in my dressing gown sitting by the fire when in fact I am lying undressed in bed?

SPEAKER_04 28:25

He doesn't wear pajamas.

SPEAKER_02 28:27

Well, what kind I mean, what kind of dreams does this guy have? Val? He dreams he dreams of just doing philosophy next to a fire.

SPEAKER_04 28:36

That sounds well, that's a beautiful dream to have. Well, I mean, speaking of dreams, I wanted to share one dream that I had last night that was particularly vivid and one that I think uh perhaps was caused by this very podcast recording it. So last night I was dreaming that I'd been employed by a Parisian cafe, and it was my first day, I got the job, I walked in, and they put me straight to work. I started speaking French to the clientele, and all of their responses were completely in gibberish. And I recall very distinctly within this dream like, no, I speak French, I'm speaking French in this particular moment. Why is it that none no one is understanding me? And why or why are they responding to me in absolute gibberish?

SPEAKER_02 29:28

Well, Val, all I can say is that I dreamt last night that I was doing an internship. Oh, and for some reason I choose chosen to do an internship with the Ukraine army. Oh I thought that'd be a good idea. Okay, yeah, just go for my you know, my little stage, my little um work experience with the Ukrainian army, and much to my dismay, I was sitting inside the tank, but I bleeding well got captured.

SPEAKER_03 29:51

Oh.

SPEAKER_02 29:52

They completely outnumbered us with their machine guns, their infantry, and their tanks. We had no chance, Val, no chance whatsoever. I was slight- I must say, I was slightly ticked off with my superiors. I thought, here I am, I'm just doing an internship. I've been put into an unfortunate situation.

SPEAKER_04 30:07

And isn't it tragic, old, that we both dreamt of labour?

SPEAKER_02 30:10

Well, here we are. We cannot distinguish in between waking life and being asleep. And at this very moment, I'd like to welcome, we'd like to welcome Ava. Welcome, Ava.

SPEAKER_00 30:21

Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 30:23

Ava has appeared in the midst of our dreams, or perhaps in our waking life, we're not sure, uh, ready to ready to tackle this text. So he's doubted away his dressing gown. He's doubted away the fire.

SPEAKER_04 30:39

He's doubted away more or less every single thing about the external world, everything that comes to us through our sense perceptions.

SPEAKER_02 30:49

So where is he? Like what what what's what's his world consist of right now? Like what's his experience?

SPEAKER_04 30:55

Well, we don't we don't we don't know yet. He hasn't he hasn't begun telling us what the world is without the senses. What is it supposed to what is it comprised of?

SPEAKER_02 31:05

Well I'll tell you what, Val, were you around in the nineties?

SPEAKER_04 31:08

I was around in the nineties. That was one decade finally that I I did I did make my appearance.

SPEAKER_02 31:14

And we and were you and were you uh old enough to go to the cinema back then?

SPEAKER_04 31:18

Against my will, yes, I was taken to the cinema.

SPEAKER_02 31:20

Well, this reminds me very much of a particular film that came out, if I'm not mistaken, in 1997, called The Matrix.

SPEAKER_04 31:28

I have heard of The Matrix.

SPEAKER_02 31:30

Now a little known fact, right, is that The Matrix is actually Sydney.

SPEAKER_04 31:37

How do you figure that one?

SPEAKER_02 31:39

They filmed it, they filmed it, they decided back then there was a studio that were built in Sydney, and they sort thought, what is the most nondescript Western city we can possibly find to actually represent the Matrix, and they chose Sydney.

SPEAKER_04 31:53

Well, isn't this exactly you know what we were talking about last week about how nondescript uh or how we were talking about the the architecture and the architect of a particular city, and the well-ordered city is created by one architect. If there is an example of a city created by multiple architects that is a sprawling absolute mess, it is Sydney.

SPEAKER_02 32:15

Well, here we are, we're in the matrix, which by the way is Sydney, right? That's what it is, it's a world of illusion, right? He can't base any knowledge on it. So basically, for him, he says any type of knowledge that is based on close physical things like biology, anything you do by using a microscope, um, geology, even chemistry back then as well, all of that, he's thrown that all out because it's all based again on sense knowledge, and after all, we could be dreamy.

SPEAKER_04 32:47

Have you seen The Matrix, Eva?

SPEAKER_00 32:50

Yes, I have seen The Matrix. No, I've seen a better film called Solaris.

SPEAKER_02 32:56

Ah, yes, with the planet that looks like a brain.

SPEAKER_00 32:59

Yes. And you'll meet the love of your life, but she's not real.

SPEAKER_02 33:04

Ah, and this is not the one with George Clooney in it.

SPEAKER_00 33:07

No, no, this is a Russian film.

SPEAKER_02 33:09

The Tarkovsky version.

SPEAKER_00 33:11

Although George Clooney, he has become French recently, he's not yet become Russian.

SPEAKER_02 33:15

Right. Another step on the pathway, yeah. Um well he needs to be taken hostage by Russian tanks, just like I was in my dream last night. So he says, at this point, he says, nonetheless, and this is like, so he he's had this second wave of doubt, right? He's he's wiped out geology, chemistry, uh, biology, all these forms of knowledge that are based on knowledge of sense objects. And and he says, well, hang on. The visions that I'm having, that I'm having during my sleep, they're like paintings which must have been fashioned in the likeness of things that are real. And hence that at least these general kinds of things, eyes, head, hands, and the body as a whole, because he dreams that he has these, right? He says, at least these things are not imaginary, but they are real and they exist.

SPEAKER_04 34:07

Yes, because this is the point where he begins talking about exactly the composite images, right? Even though we may dream of all of these fantastical beasts like chimeras and things like that, and painters in the real world may represent these kind of composite images, nevertheless, they do have a referent in the real world. You know, a chimera is still a composition of two actually existing animals, you know, like a painting still has to use colour reference to things in the real world, right?

SPEAKER_02 34:40

I think he's like, for me, he's like a drowning man, like grabbing onto a raft or something. He's trying to grab onto something just to give him a bit of solidity at this moment.

SPEAKER_04 34:49

Well, I suppose while we're on the topic of dreams, we should perhaps use an example from one of the most famous dreams in the history of psychoanalysis from Freud's interpretations of dreams, the Father Can't You See, I'm burning.

SPEAKER_02 35:04

Terrible dream, Val, a terrible dream. This is really the worst kind of dream you want to have as a father.

SPEAKER_04 35:09

Absolutely. So a father has lost his son, and he's sitting by his side in the room, kind of mourning, and he drifts off to sleep and he begins dreaming. And within this dream, his son approaches him and says to him, he says, Father, can't you see I am burning? And suddenly the father jolts awake and he sees that a candle has fallen over in the room and has set fire to where the son's body is, right?

SPEAKER_02 35:43

Yeah, so the the sheets are burning, the cover is burning, there is a distinct singed odour in the air.

SPEAKER_04 35:51

So you see, really, in one of these moments, there's a something of a breakdown between the world of dreams and the real external world that's in operation here, right?

SPEAKER_02 35:59

Because, like many of us, this particular father, this unfortunate father, dreams of waking up, but he's not a he's not awake.

SPEAKER_04 36:06

No.

SPEAKER_02 36:07

So you take this dream, right? Let's say that Descartes he he he's had this dream himself, right? And he has unfortunately uh a dead child on his hands sooner or later as well, his daughter. Terrible story, right? And there are images in it, right? And he says, Look, even though this entire dream might be completely false, I can't base any knowledge upon it. Nevertheless, the bed, there is such a thing as a bed, there are such such things as children, there is such a thing as a candle, there is such a thing as a fire, there is such a thing as the the odour of smoke and of fire. So these things, at least, these general things exist, right?

SPEAKER_03 36:44

Right.

SPEAKER_02 36:45

And so he suddenly finds himself in this world that is made up of general kinds of things, right? So it's it's a bit like the matrix you're in a city, any city, you're surrounded by people, commuters, any commuters, right? There's a woman in a red dress, right? By the way, that's Martin Place.

SPEAKER_04 37:05

Oh, is it? The the famous scene where the woman in the red dress walks by and um Amorpheus says, you know, look again, turn around. Yep.

SPEAKER_02 37:14

Yeah, he gets distracted neo. But anyway, like any woman in a red dress, they're just universal, so that's where Descartes exists, and then he decomposes things even further.

SPEAKER_04 37:25

And where does he get to in this process of decomposition? So he started with these general kinds of things, but then he wants to keep going? He wants to keep is he getting out the drill again?

SPEAKER_02 37:36

Well, he's going deeper because he starts, he says, Okay, I've got heads, I've got hands, but what in the end is a head if it's not a kind of an oval? It's a certain size, there's a disposition of colours, and so anything that's composite in itself could be artificial and false and just a figment of the imagination. So, really, like the most solid elements that I've got in this dream world are just lines, shapes, figures, colours, and numbers.

SPEAKER_04 38:07

So this is where he's really breaking things down back to this these kind of geometric kind of elements, right? Because again, all the ideas that we have about what is ahead, what are hands, they can be further broken down into these kind of things like yeah, quantity, the size of your head. Right? They can keep being broken down until you get to these more basic elements.

SPEAKER_02 38:32

So, like as you were saying, Val, like this is a perfect illustration of uh his method, in that he's decomposed things into simpler natures, and he's just thrown out the sciences of all composite things, so we can chuck physics, we can chuck astronomy, we can chuck medicine uh out, and what we've got now is we've just got the sciences of quantity left. Geometry, arithmetic. Arithmetic.

SPEAKER_04 39:00

Right, so he's gotten yeah, so again, and this is part of his quest to ground what a science is. He's has a particular idea of what science is, right? What kind of knowledge we can base this on, because you can't use the external senses, right? We can doubt those at one limited in in in this kind of way, we can doubt the senses. We need to find a way of grounding scientific inquiry via this method of a kind of epistemological reduction, right?

SPEAKER_02 39:32

But it's not just I mean, it's not just epistemological val. I mean, this is the beautiful thing about this exercise, is that he's carrying out this inquiry into different types of knowledge, he finds them to be faulty, he finds them to be just merely probable, and so he throws them out, and at the same time, he's carrying out, you know, I'm gonna use a fancy word here, an ontological journey.

SPEAKER_04 39:54

Oh, alright. Well, what what is what is that? We've had too many journeys at this point. There's one journey across Europe, there's one journey through what can be known. What is an ontological, what is that? What kind of journey are we on now?

SPEAKER_02 40:06

It's it's a journey through different realms of existence. He's basically he's he it's a journey that goes down deeper and deeper and deeper. And there's actually uh another French chappie called uh Tristan Garcia who decided to call this a catabasis, right? The old idea of the journey into hell, right? He takes it and he puts all these different philosophers' theories of existence and being in order and says, I'm gonna go from the nicest everyday world ontology, like Aristotle's, and I'm gonna descend deeper and deeper and deeper through like Plato's world of universals down into the most nondescript, universal, flat, abstract kind of world of existence, right? That's what Garcia does, and I think like another Frenchman, another French chappy, Rene René Descartes here, he's doing the same thing. So now, where has he ended up? He's ended up in a world in which he doesn't even have like heads and hands and eyes and bodies. All he's got are circles, straight lines. I think he might have a few colours, not sure on that one. He's got numbers, so he's in an extremely reduced universe here, Val.

SPEAKER_04 41:12

So basically, all that he's done, this just sounds like a philosopher's kind of fan fantasy, right?

SPEAKER_02 41:17

But it's not, this is a terrible thing. I mean, one of our listeners, one of our listeners, God bless him, said, Can you stop talking about all these French blokes all the time, right? Now, we haven't finished with Renee, so we're gonna be with him for a while. Sorry about that. But can I put out this your your your your mate was very it was fair enough that he objected to all these French people because this is not just a philosophical fantasy, this is the French education system. Because right now, right now, my son, right, is getting caught on the horns of a dilemma. He's basically being told there's a reduction, we don't care that you're getting great marks in English, great marks in Spanish, great marks in art, great marks in music, fantastic marks in sport. None of that matters. We're gonna stick you doing a technological baccalaureate, right? Basically the baccalaureate if you want to become a tradee, if you can't pull your socks up in physics, in maths, and in French. They say all your other marks that don't matter, unless you've got high marks in the sciences of quantity, because we're French, we think basically you're a you're a dumkof, you know, you're an idiot. Like you might as well not be here.

SPEAKER_04 42:21

So this is this is the French philosopher's fan fantasy, right? The only large the only knowledge that matters is the world of little shapes and forms, everything else, you know, all the practical skills, all the messiness of life, all of its contingencies, all of the different ways in which we can be in this world doesn't count for anything unless you're good at the science of quantities.

SPEAKER_02 42:44

Specifically, and here again I think it's fair enough that we blame Descartes. When you're 14 or 15 years old and you're at the end of junior high school in France, what are you taught? What are you expected to get up to date with and manipulate and be at ease with? Algebra. Who invented algebra? Who invented functions? It's our bloke again, René Descartes, right?

SPEAKER_04 43:06

Descartes back again.

SPEAKER_02 43:08

Here he is, right? So this is this is methodical doubt. He's gone through, he's now living in a world just of numbers, lines, shapes, and that's it. How can he go any further? What's left to doubt?

SPEAKER_00 43:23

You're looking at me.

SPEAKER_02 43:25

Would you not want to doubt anything more?

SPEAKER_00 43:27

I just I just recovered from your attack on algebra.

SPEAKER_02 43:30

Well, I feel like algebra's been attacking me for quite a long time because I've had to learn maths all over again.

SPEAKER_00 43:36

I think I think maths is very important. It's perhaps the single most important thing you can learn in school. And even if you don't use it afterwards, you still get an appreciation for mathematics and how it governs the natural world.

SPEAKER_02 43:50

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 43:51

But do you you're it's uh to to start over with that sentence. You need Descartes wants to find a Single uh innate truth. And the the idea that one plus one equals two and so on is a truth that you receive from what you are taught in school. It's not innate.

SPEAKER_02 44:11

Ah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 44:13

And so it's possible that perhaps one plus one equals forty, or doesn't equal anything at all, or there are no numbers, and it's not useful to to to think like this in real life. He goes on later to say, like, this is a thought experiment. You need to work with probable doubt in your day-to-day life. It's more stupid to think that something which is probably true is false than it is to just think that it's true even if it's not completely perfectly true.

SPEAKER_02 44:42

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 44:43

But for the sake of the thought experiment, we will need to run the idea that mathematics is an illusion and is a delusion, rather, uh, and perhaps I'm being deceived. But then who is deceiving me? Well, it cannot be God, because my idea of God is something which is perfect, uh, and which is not sinful. Of course, deception would be a sin, would not trick me. So let's, for the sake of the argument, to prevent my house being burned down by the church and me being burned by the stake. For the sake of the argument, we're gonna run the evil demon.

SPEAKER_02 45:15

Here we are at the evil demon.

SPEAKER_04 45:17

Here we are. Historic historicizing Descartes as well.

SPEAKER_02 45:21

Yeah, well, this is the dangerous hypothesis. This is the one that um he very narrowly got escaped from accusations of blasphemy with this one.

SPEAKER_00 45:29

Well, he really does blaspheme later on. He says uh God is just a word, and what I want understand by the word God is this idea of perfect substance, but he never says name. And I noticed that because I have an argument about uh his conception of God.

SPEAKER_04 45:46

Right. And what is this argument?

SPEAKER_00 45:48

I think his proof of God is self-evident. To me, it's something that is true, but you don't see me running to the church and falling to my knees and crossing myself and so on.

SPEAKER_04 45:59

But that's what he wants you to do in the beginning of the the the in the in his letter to the Sorbonne. This is what exactly what he wants you to do. He wants you to believe, he wants you to go, go to church, become a believer in in God. Are you trying to tell me?

SPEAKER_00 46:12

Bro was just trying to get a job, come on. He was trying to get support from his colleagues and so on. He was hiding in a cottage in the middle of nowhere. He's trying to get some correspondence.

SPEAKER_02 46:22

This word God, what's it what's it for then? If it's not a name, it's just a word.

SPEAKER_00 46:27

What he just what he wants to describe is actually a perfect substance. A substance which not only has numerous perfect qualities, but all of these qualities are necessarily inseparable from one another. And you can imagine such a substance to exist even if you cannot fully grasp it with your imagination. And if you grant that this perfect substance exists, this perfect unity exists, you can call it God. You can understand it by God. He uses the word God because it's easy to understand for his audience for escaping persecution. You know, he didn't want to go like go out like Galileo.

SPEAKER_02 47:04

So this sounds a little bit like a kind of a little bit like Spinoza's absolute substance. Like it's like a big thing.

SPEAKER_00 47:12

When you mention that name, when you mention that name, I'm gonna walk out of this room.

SPEAKER_04 47:16

But then the bad thing, they're both they're both perfect gods, aren't they?

SPEAKER_00 47:20

If they're just uh if they're just the same concept, then you know the bastard delusional father of Spinoza is not a household name for a reason. If he had said something which was more perfect and more correct than Descartes, he would have surpassed Descartes. But instead we have Descartes, he is the father of modern philosophy, of modern science. From him we have all mass, the scientific method. There's really nobody that has ever eclipsed him. You can argue for Hegel, but Hegel would not even exist without Descartes. You can argue for Nietzsche. Nietzsche was just a brat.

SPEAKER_02 47:50

Well, let's let's go back to I'll I'll grant you that, and of course, Spinoza um trod in Descartes' footsteps very much and started out his entire career just being a proselytiser for Descartes.

SPEAKER_04 48:02

A commenter. A commenter on Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 48:04

Just saying this is what I think is going on. But let's go back to this this um this idea of this evil demon. So as far as I can make it out, he does flirt with the idea of a deceiving God in the first meditation. He says, I've heard I had this kind of opinion that I inherited from from various priests when I was at school, that there is this kind of omnipotent God. If God is omnipotence, given that sometimes I make mistakes when I do maths, right? Maybe it's the case that all the time when I'm doing maths, this God who's so powerful could bring it about that I'm making a mistake, and one plus one does not equal two. Right? And then and then he says, uh, so I've just doubted away the truths of mathematics.

SPEAKER_04 48:54

But the truth of mathematics doesn't depend on our our mistakes. We make mistakes in mathematics all the time, right? I made the very embarrassing mistake in front of class just yesterday, where I said the angle uh the angles uh on the inside of a triangle add up to 190. I was wrong.

SPEAKER_00 49:11

But it's all about judgment. You made a poor judgment. Your judgment was incorrect because we have to establish something which is in the so-called external world, which is fully graspable by the mind and understood immediately in the so-called natural light as true, which is a clear and distinct idea. Clearly at that moment you did not have a clear and extinct, clear and distinct idea of triangle or whatever.

SPEAKER_02 49:35

I think your unconscious was at work there.

SPEAKER_04 49:37

Uh there was a hundred I I wanted I wanted a a more open triangle, you know.

SPEAKER_02 49:43

190, that means something.

SPEAKER_04 49:45

We'll have to do a little bit of uh digging. Yeah, a bit more dream analysis of of that one.

SPEAKER_02 49:52

So, as far as I can work it out, because I mean I have to say, Eva, the the evil demon hypothesis, this really is the most fascinating thing in the whole of the first meditation for me. Um, what what is it that this evil demon does?

SPEAKER_00 50:07

He deceives you. What do you mean? Well, he I th I thought we just discussed this.

SPEAKER_04 50:13

Well, he deceives you in the place of okay, so we have this idea of God as omnipotent, as you know, a kind of sovereign good if you want, or or a benevolent kind of God, right? God cannot be the cause of my deceptions, right? And if we go back to discourse on the method, you know, originally when Descartes is calling into question all of his senses, he's considering that the mistakes that he makes are the result of his own imperfections. That he, yes, he is an imperfect being, therefore the cause of my uh of my doubts, of my inability to perceive the external world are an external sorry, uh an internal cause, right? I am mistaken because there are I I am imperfect. Now he's considering the argument from the opposite direction, right? He goes, okay, maybe God is the source of all of my confusion, all of my doubts, etc. etc. But that can't be the case because God is good, right? God is God wouldn't do that to me. So now we have this evil genie? Demon? Why is there so much debate around this translation of why is it an evil demon?

SPEAKER_02 51:24

Well, I think it's a little bit like uh Socrates' demon sitting on his shoulder telling him when he was at whenever he was doing something wrong. But I think that I mean I have to say this is a deeply, deeply paranoid fantasy on his part. I mean, you have this hostile entity, and all this hostile entity can be bothered doing all the time is to deceive young Rene such that Rene is wrong about every single mathematical statement he ever comes up with.

SPEAKER_04 51:51

Yeah, doesn't this demon or this genie have something better to do at its time, right?

SPEAKER_02 51:56

He has one function and one function alone.

SPEAKER_04 51:58

Yeah. So you're trying to say that perhaps this genie is just uh maybe one of Rene's own um delusions, his own his own kind of uh paranoia, you know, it's a reflection of his own mental state, you know. There's something outside of me causing me to not understand something about the why doesn't he just take responsibility for his own mistakes?

SPEAKER_02 52:17

This is very strange. I mean, you know, whenever you know, when I read this, like my first question, and and and I know other people have had this question, is at the end of this meditation, suddenly he's got a deceiving God, right? And and and that god deceives you as to the truths of mathematics, then he forgets that hypothesis, and then suddenly he's got an evil demon. Deceiving God, evil demon? Are they the same thing? Are they different? And the odd thing is, is all of the English-speaking commentators say, nah, nah, it's the same, the same thing. Whereas some of the Frenchies actually say, minds, these are actually different. Right? They have different functions, different things are going on here. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 52:55

Well, look, I'm gonna have to side with the French on this one. They are two distinct things, right? Because it's the the deceiving God just doesn't exist whatsoever, right? Because God is God is a is good, right?

SPEAKER_00 53:08

God has to be the source of truth.

SPEAKER_04 53:10

Yes, God has to be the source of truth.

SPEAKER_00 53:12

And he cannot deceive you if he's the source of truth.

SPEAKER_04 53:14

Exactly. So the idea of a deceiving God is one that doesn't exist, whereas we can have an idea of a deceiving genius or a deceiving demon, right? That that can still be a I I feel like they are two distinct things, uh both external causes, but to say that the deceiving God or and the evil demon are the same thing, I'm not buying it.

SPEAKER_02 53:37

Look, I'm I'm gonna grant Eva her her absolute, indistinct, perfect, maximum entity that just happens to be referred to by the word God. You can have that, right? But here he is, in order to sustain this this metaphysical level of doubt, where he's even calling into doubt um mathematics, he's had to pop something into existence. I mean, this is the paradox. He wants to live in this reduced world in which he can't believe in anything, not even numbers, right? And in order to do that, he's just happened to pop this agent into existence, and he doesn't just have a maximum entity referred to by the word God, he's now got this demon just lurking around.

SPEAKER_04 54:18

He's got a very vivid imagination, this Descartes.

SPEAKER_02 54:20

Well, it's another fever dream, I can tell you that.

SPEAKER_04 54:23

Well, you know, look, in my opinion, I reckon he's pulled a fast one, which is why I will still always side with Spinoza against Descartes. He's got an idea, his idea of perfect and God, it all hinges on the fact that God is good. God is good, and we're gonna get to this in later meditations, but the whole edifice is constructed around the idea of there's a good God.

SPEAKER_00 54:47

Now hold on for just a second. In the beginning of this text, Descartes uses the metaphor of the tree to explain how uh the sciences receive knowledge from one another, and the roots of the tree are metaphysics, the trunk of the tree is physics, and the branches of the tree are the other sciences, one of them being the moral sciences. He explicitly says this. So the idea of good and bad must actually follow at the very tip from physics and metaphysics. So we're starting here at the base, at the roots, the tips of the roots, looking for good and evil, you cannot find it here. You can find truth and uh deception.

SPEAKER_02 55:28

That's right, you're putting you're putting the cart in front of the horse, Val.

SPEAKER_04 55:31

I'm putting the day cart in front of the horse.

SPEAKER_02 55:33

Just leave it alone, please. But basically, uh I think Eva's completely right. Like, we can't get to morality yet.

SPEAKER_04 55:41

Let me ask you a question though. Is truth good or evil?

SPEAKER_02 55:47

Well, the demon who is responsible for falsehood or for an oscillation between truth and falsehood, because we don't know what's true and what's false. That demon is evil.

SPEAKER_04 55:57

That demon is evil. So falsehood is evil. And truth is good.

SPEAKER_02 56:03

That's a real stickler of a question.

SPEAKER_04 56:05

And so there is a there's an ontological distinction happening in the idea. There's an idea that God is good and evil demon is bad. God is the source of truth, evil demon, source of falsity, true and false. He's making a moral claim here.

SPEAKER_02 56:21

I'm gonna have to stop you right there because Descartes' great progenitor, his great ancestor Saint Augustine, had a good long wrestle with this one, Augustine of Hippo, right, the Tunisian, he had a big wrestle with this one because what you're coming up with right there spontaneously is the Manichaean heresy. You basically wanted to make an ontological divide in between good and evil. And if I hadn't stopped you right there, Val, no doubt you're about to say that matter is evil and the light and ideas are good.

SPEAKER_04 56:49

I'm just taking Descartes at his word. I'm just trying to understand what he's trying he what he's telling me. If there is an ontological division at work, it's the fault of Descartes and perhaps you know Augustine before him. But you know, I'm just trying to call it like I see it, and I'm getting the impression that he's he's making some choice he's making some theological choices about what side to put good and what side to put evil on, but you know, I think if you lived back in the days, you would be very, very careful what side you put evil on as well. Again, with all this historicizing. It's historicizing a Descartes to try and defend him. So it seems like he is for all of his pretensions of radical doubt and claiming that he's going to toss out all of this old knowledge. At the end of the day, he's just trying to cover his ass, isn't he? He's just saying, I don't want to get burnt at the stake, uh so I'm gonna make concessions in my system.

SPEAKER_02 57:40

Well, to defend Rene yet again, at least he's opening up these questions. This whole question about whether doubt or falsehood is actually evil and whether there's goodness, goodness to be held in true ideas, that's something that's gonna have an enormous career after him. He's opened the question up, he hasn't given us any quick and easy answers to that. Uh we're left with this with this gaping question.

SPEAKER_04 58:05

So credit where credit's true. So he's again, he's he's driving this doubt. He's we're left with this open question. He's causing us to doubt in the very process of what he's putting before us.

SPEAKER_02 58:17

We're left in a very uncomfortable place, I must say, at the end of Meditation One. He's got nothing left. He's got no maths, he's got no lines, no numbers, no quantity, no size, no figures, no colours, nothing.

SPEAKER_04 58:29

All he's got is a monkey on his back, telling him that everything is wrong.

SPEAKER_00 58:34

Thank you so much to Valentin and Oliver for inviting me to take part in your podcast. I really appreciate being here.

SPEAKER_02 58:41

You're welcome. It was a real pleasure to have you on, and we hope to see you again.

SPEAKER_04 58:44

Oh, that was an absolute pleasure. And I mean that's pretty good timing because um for all of this intellectual doubt, my body is trying to tell me something that my mind is not is refusing to register, and that's I'm a bit hungry.

SPEAKER_02 58:57

Yeah, well, I'm looking forward to lunch as well. So, next episode, episode three, we'll be looking at meditation two.

SPEAKER_04 59:04

Yeah. And maybe even meditation three to come. We'll see. We'll see.

SPEAKER_02 59:09

That's when we that's when we get into the famous proof of the existence of God.

SPEAKER_04 59:12

Because all we're left with at the moment is an evil demon on our shoulder, and we need to do something about him.

SPEAKER_02 59:18

See you next time.

SPEAKER_04 59:19

See you later.