Cartesian Tao anxiety

© Igor Morski

The search for a middle way to the description of consciousness in the enactionist perspective put a dilemma between two extremes which causes the Cartesian anxiety for an absolute ground for the representation: a small island which represents the land of truth ultimately grounded, surrounded by an ocean of darkness and confusion, the home of all the illusions:

Steps to a Middle Way

The Cartesian Anxiety

The nervousness that we feel is rooted in what, following Richard Bernstein, we can call lithe Cartesian anxiety." We mean "anxiety" in a loosely Freudian sense, and we call it "Cartesian" simply because Descartes articulated it rigorously and dramatically in his Meditations. The anxiety is best put as a dilemma: either we have a fixed and stable foundation for knowledge, a point where knowledge starts, is grounded, and rests, or we cannot escape some sort of darkness, chaos, and confusion. Either there is an absolute ground or foundation, or everything falls apart.

There is a marvelous passage from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason that conveys the power of the Cartesian anxiety. Throughout the Critique Kant builds the edifice of his theory of knowledge by arguing that we have a priori or given, innate categories, which are the foundations of knowledge. Toward the end of his discussion of the "Transcendental Analytic" he writes,

We have now not merely explored the territory of pure understanding [the a priori categories] and carefully surveyed every part of it, but have also measured its extent and assigned to everything in it its rightful place. This domain is an island, enclosed by nature itself with unalterable limits. It is the land of truth-an enchanting name!-surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the native home of illusion, where many a fog bank and many a swiftly melting iceberg give the deceptive appearance of farther shores, deluding the adventurous seafarer ever anew with empty hopes, and engaging him in enterprises which he can never abandon and yet is unable to carry to completion.

Here we have the two extremes, the either-or of the Cartesian anxiety: There is the enchanting land of truth where everything is clear and ultimately grounded. But beyond that small island there is the wide and stormy ocean of darkness and confusion, the native home of illusion.

This feeling of anxiety arises from the craving for an absolute ground. When this craving cannot be satisfied, the only other possibility seems to be nihilism or anarchy. The search for a ground can take many forms, but given the basic logic of representationism, the tendency is to search either for an outer ground in the world or an inner ground in the mind. By treating mind and world as opposed subjective and objective poles, the Cartesian anxiety oscillates endlessly between the two in search of a ground.

It is important to realize that this opposition between subject and object is not given and ready-made; it is an idea that belongs to the human history of mind and nature that we mentioned. For example, prior to Descartes, the term idea was used only for the contents of the mind of God; Descartes was one of the first to take this term and apply it to the workings of the human mind. This linguistic and conceptual shift is just one aspect of what Richard Rorty describes as the "invention of the mind as a mirror of nature," an invention that was' the result of patching together heterogeneous images, conceptions, and linguistic usages.

These Cartesian roots become quite obvious when we have reason to doubt the appropriateness of this metaphor of mirroring. As we set out in search of other ways of thinking, the Cartesian anxiety arises to dog us at every step. Yet our contemporary situation is also unique, for we have become increasingly skeptical about the possibility of discerning any ultimate ground. Thus when the anxiety arises today, we seem unable to avoid the turn toward nihilism, for we have not learned to let go of the forms of thinking, behavior, and experience that lead us to desire a ground.

We saw in our previous discussion that cognitive science is not immune from this nihilistic tendency. For example, the link between nihilism and the Cartesian anxiety can be seen very clearly in The Society of Mind when Minsky confronts our inability to find a fully independent world. As he notes, the world is not an object, event, or process inside the world. Indeed the world is more like a background- a setting of and field for all of our experience, but one that cannot be found apart from our structure, behavior, and cognition. For this reason, what we say about the world tells us as much about ourselves as it does about the world.

Minsky's response to this realization is a mixed one, in a way that is similar to his response to the lack of a Self. He writes, "Whatever you purport to say about a thing, you're only expressing your own beliefs. Yet even that gloomy thought suggests an insight. Even if our models of the world cannot yield good answers about the world as a whole, and even though their other answers are frequently wrong, they can tell us something about ourselves." On the one hand, Minsky uses the impossibility of finding a fully independent and pregiven world as an opportunity for developing insight into ourselves. But on the other hand, this insight is based in a feeling of gloominess about our situation. Why should this be?

We have been portraying these ideas through the words of Minsky because he is an outstanding modem cognitive scientist and has actually taken the time to articulate his ideas clearly. But he is not alone. When pressed to discuss this issue, many people would accept that we do not really have knowledge of the world; we have knowledge only of our representations of the world. Yet we seem condemned by our constitution to treat these representations as if they were the world, for our everyday experience feels as if it were of a given and immediate world.

Such a situation does indeed seem gloomy. But notice that such gloominess would make sense only if there were a pregiven, independent world-an outer ground-but one that we could never know. Given such a situation, we would have no choice but to fall back on our inner representations and treat them as if they provided a stable ground.

This mood of gloominess arises, then, from the Cartesian anxiety and its ideal of the mind as a mirror of nature. According to this ideal, knowledge should be of an independent, pregiven world, and this knowledge should be attained in the precision of a representation.

When this ideal cannot be satisfied, we fall back upon ourselves in search of an inner ground. This oscillation is apparent in Minsky's remark that whatever one purports to say is only an expression of one's beliefs. To say that what one thinks is a only a matter of subjective representation is precisely to fall back upon the idea of an inner ground, a solitary Cartesian ego that is walled in by the privacy of its representations. This particular tum is all the more ironic, since Minsky does not believe that there exists a self that could serve as an inner ground in the first place. In the end, then, Minsky's entanglement in the Cartesian anxiety requires not only that we believe in a self that we know cannot be found but also that we believe in a world to which we have no access. And once again, the logic of such a predicament leads inevitably to a condition of nihilism.