Descartes's Punchy Writing

"I shall nevertheless make an effort and follow anew the same path as that on which I yesterday entered, i.e. I shall proceed by setting aside all that in which the least doubt could be supposed..."

I suspect that one of the reasons that many people don’t like philosophy is that the philosophers that most people read when they’re being introduced to the subject write very poorly. I was recently reading Descartes—one of the first people that any philosophy student is introduced to—and the writing was painful and impenetrable, with long meandering sentences that went on for days. For example:

I shall nevertheless make an effort and follow anew the same path as that on which I yesterday entered, i.e. I shall proceed by setting aside all that in which the least doubt could be supposed to exist, just as if I had discovered that it was absolutely false; and I shall ever follow in this road until I have met with something which is certain, or at least, if I can do nothing else, until I have learned for certain that there is nothing in the world that is certain.

This sentence roughly translates to “I’ve resolved to doubt everything.” And it’s not even the most egregious example—see below, for instance:

For this reason I see clearly that I have as little reason to say, "I shall stimulate my imagination in order to know more distinctly what I am," than if I were to say, "I am now awake, and I perceive somewhat that is real and true: but because I do not yet perceive it distinctly enough, I shall go to sleep of express purpose, so that my dreams may represent the perception with greatest truth and evidence."

Immediately following that sentence is this literary masterpiece:

And, thus, I know for certain that nothing of all that I can understand by means of my imagination belongs to this knowledge which I have of myself, and that it is necessary to recall the mind from this mode of thought with the utmost diligence in order that it may be able to know its own nature with perfect distinctness.

So as not to bore you, I’ll only produce a few more examples:

Am I not that being who now doubts nearly everything, who nevertheless understands certain things, who affirms that one only is true, who denies all the others, who desires to know more, is averse from being deceived, who imagines many things, sometimes indeed despite his will, and who perceives many likewise, as by the intervention of the bodily organs?

Finally:

But what must particularly be observed is that its perception is neither an act of vision, nor of touch, nor of imagination, and has never been such although it may have appeared formerly to be so, but only an intuition13 of the mind, which may be imperfect and confused as it was formerly, or clear and distinct as it is at present, according as my attention is more or less directed to the elements which are found in it, and of which it is composed.

If only Descartes’s writing were as clear as his distinct perceptions were. It’s painful to read. Makes you long for the writing of a guy like Huemer. Even when you disagree, you can quite easily follow what he’s saying, and finish reading a sentence in less time than it takes to run a marathon.

Now, this was a particularly bad translation—this one, for instance, is much better. But if I were a beginning philosophy student, I’d likely be dissuaded from pursuing philosophy by the impossible-to-understand writing. No wonder the stereotype about philosophy students is that they’re pompous—hard to appreciate writing like that without being fairly pompous.

No one would read my writing if I wrote sentences like: I decided to, as was proper and fitting in accordance with both my will and indeed my nature, provide an inquiry concerning—and indeed analyzing in some, albeit not infinite, depth—the writing of Descartes, analyzing numerous bits of his writing including, of course, his seminal and rather influential claim concerning the relation between the mind and body wherein one is not conceived to be the other—neither the mind the body nor, indeed, the reverse, wherein the body is just the mind—but we have some direct access, indeed acquaintance, with the contents of our own mind giving us certain infallible knowledge demonstrating our own existence, testified to us through the clear and infallible medium of direct perception. Only David Bentley Hart gets away with writing like that, and that’s because his writing is generally both perceptive and hilarious, uttering statements like:

Did Gopnik bother to read what he was writing there? I ask only because it is so colossally silly. If my dog were to utter such words, I should be deeply disappointed in my dog’s powers of reasoning. If my salad at lunch were suddenly to deliver itself of such an opinion, my only thought would be “What a very stupid salad.”

We’d do a lot more to get young people interested in philosophy if their first exposure came from someone who writes clearly rather than someone writing 400 years ago trying to win a competition for writing the world’s longest sentence—and succeeding! Philosophy is about thinking clearly and correctly—taking arguments seriously. Making people’s first exposure be through winding, confusing, poorly argued, circuitous historical philosophers is a recipe for disaster!

If we are going to make the introductory philosophy readings be clear and well-written, I have a modest suggestion for the texts that should be read, but tragically modesty prevents me from uttering it.