Existentialism for People in a Hurry

I think, therefore I am.

I’ve never been very good at pondering over my existence.

When it comes to being in deep thought, I always find myself avoidant of it. During the Canadian quarantine (6~ most), I found myself constantly bored and upset with my life. I generally make an active effort to avoid thinking about existential questions, for the most part because I can’t answer them.

“No one can.” , or at least that’s what I thought.

The fact that simple and very rational questions had the influence to change my entire view on existence just scared the shit out of me. But, then again, maybe it was supposed to.

After spending a hot minute pondering over life after death and the meaning of existence, I turned to google to help me out. As a philosophy junkie, my automatic response was finding answers or theories that could provide me some solace.

That’s when I found Rene Descartes.

You’ve likely heard of the guy, maybe even the Billie Eilish hit named after his most famous quote “I think, therefore I am.” Reading through his work was tedious, but it paid off by motivating me. After all, if nothing in life matters, then all that matters is what you do.

This article is going to be focused around the main takeaways I could draw from Descartes + some (more) personal anecdotes to accommodate the nuances of the complex ideas suggested.

Cartesian Dualism

Background

René Descartes is generally considered the father of modern philosophy. He was the first major figure in the philosophical movement known as rationalism, a method of understanding the world based on the use of reason as the means to attain knowledge.

Philosophy

In the philosophy of mind, dualism is the theory that the mental and the physical — or mind and body or mind and brain — are, in some sense, radically different kinds of thing

Dualism, simply put, is the belief that something is composed of two fundamentally different components, and it was around long before Descartes put pen to page. Cartesian Dualism deals specifically with the dual existence of man.

Descartes believed that a man consisted of

• Matter: The physical stuff that walks, talks, and plays the accordion.
• Mind: The nonphysical substance (sometimes equated with the soul) that thinks, doubts, and remembers

Descartes believed in a mechanistic view of the material world — that matter goes about its business and follows its own laws, except when it is interfered with by the mind. Man’s mind, then, simply “pulls the levers” of the body to do its bidding. Exactly how the nonphysical mind interacts with the physical body is a point of contention. Descartes believed that the pineal gland in the brain was the locus of interaction between the mind and body because he believed that this gland was the only part of the brain that wasn’t a duplicate.

It’s important to remember that, for Descartes, the brain and the mind are not the same thing. The brain serves, in part, as a connection between the mind and the body, but because it is a physical, changeable thing, it is not the actual mind.

A person’s mind is whole and indivisible, whereas their body can be changed.

You can cut your hair, remove your appendix, or even lose a limb, but that loss in no way reduces your mind.

Descartes also believed that man was the only dualistic creature. He placed animals in the realm of the purely physical, mechanistic world, acting purely on instinct and on the laws of nature. You might’ve heard people compare the “mind, body and spirit” before, and this is where it comes from.

Descartes was led to his dualistic theories in part from his most famous philosophical endeavor — to place into doubt all that could be doubted in the hope of arriving at a basic, undeniable truth. That resulted in his famous Cogito ergo sum — I think, therefore I am.

Descartes could doubt the existence of the physical world and that even his own body actually existed, but he could not doubt the idea that his mind existed because doubting is a thought process. The very act of doubting one’s existence proves that one actually exists; otherwise, who is doing the doubting?

Through his process of doubting, he recognized that, regardless of what the changeable physical world was really like, his mind was still whole and unchanged, and therefore somehow separate from that physical world.

In a nutshell, he proves that regardless of whether you are destined for something or you create your own independent path, the truth remains that you exist.

Essentially, Descartes used logical frameworks and first-principles thinking to rationalize the idea of existence and answer one of humanities biggest questions, without resorting to the need for religious justification.

Summary

• Descartes was the father of Modern Philosophy
• He used logical frameworks to prove that we indeed exist
• He believed in the idea of a seperate Body + Mind
• “I think, therefore I am”