Nietzsche in a Nutshell

Friedrich Nietzsche is one of those sexy philosophers that young people love to quote--and is one of the trendiest philosophers of late.

Nietzsche was a writer and a poet and used his artistic skill and literary style to persuasively craft his philosophical message. Ideas marketed well spread faster and more broadly. Hence, even if you've never read a lick of Nietzsche, you have most probably heard of him and his famous phrase: God is dead. Or a friend in college might have bought you a copy of Beyond Good and Evil with the intention of enlightening you. I actually like it when people do that--it means they care.

I've learned that when the Germans do it right, they really do it right (Pieper, Ratzinger, etc.). When Germans do it wrong, they really do it wrong. (Luther, Kant, Marx, etc.)

Dear Freddie is another rebellious ex-Lutheran "PK" (Pastor's Kid). I went to a "Lutheran" university and encountered lots of "ex-PKs" who lost their faith...at a Lutheran school. Many of them might not have lost their faith had they gone to a public university I believe.

Nietzsche did not merely lose his faith--he adopted materialism, atheism, nihilism, and had a deep hatred for Christianity. What a meanie!

Actually, if one disbelieves the Christian proposal, it makes sense to hate it. Either Jesus Christ is the Son of God or he is a liar and a lunatic. It's one or the other.

Nietzsche chose the latter, that belief in God's existence is a lie. God lives only in the human mind as the most pervasive of lies. He explains the "God delusion" away through psychological and historical explanations. (I guess he didn't have time to take on St. Thomas Aquinas' philosophical proofs for God's existence!)

Psychologically speaking, Nietzsche believed that man "invented" God out of fear and laziness. He believed that man is afraid of his greatness and/or he is too lazy to live up to his greatness. Thus, man "invents" God (who is really his alter ego) in order to be lazy and "ask for things" he wants or for the things he wants to happen in his life. God as Santa Clause if you will. Praying then, is the lazy man's way of asking God for things instead of "being a man" and making it happen for himself.

God Is Dead.

Nietzsche's phrase "God is dead," is his gripping way of saying "Welcome to adulthood." Basically, man needs to end this false attachment to God (this idea that just coincidentally won't go away...), and be unafraid to conquer himself and the world without God.

Interestingly, the Christian Faith also repeatedly preaches to man to fear not. Scripture is filled with exhortations to not be afraid. John Paul II began his pontificate with the memorable words, "Be not afraid."

Nietzsche's phrase "God is dead," is an affirmation of his adoption of nihilism. (Nihil comes from the Latin word meaning nothing.)For Nietzsche there is no meaning to life, no after life, and there is nothing beyond the material world. There is nothing but the world of sense, of "stuff." There is no truth, no law, and no ideals and ideas.

Man is now God.

The phrase "God is dead," therefore has more to do with man than God. According to Nietzsche, man can now be free of this fictional, "tyrannical" God. It has been said that "God is dead," is the single most important event in the course of Western culture. Perhaps. Regardless, modernity is suffering the consequences of Nietzsche's thought.

Nietzsche emphasized the will over the intellect. He believed that man must choose to confess that God is dead. Man must choose "this truth." This is a very different approach than say, a man coming to not choose truth (how can truth be chosen?), but to discover truth. For him, man's liberation comes from choosing "God is dead." However, once the choice is made, man must live up to this new found freedom. (I want to ask Nietzsche how he can believe in freedom, since freedom is not something material.)

Nietzsche's thought becomes interesting in his insight that many atheists still believe. Isn't that the truth? There are so many people today who claim to be atheists but who live like believers. Nietzsche is critical of these people and claims they are not really free. He notices that man actually wants to believe in something. (I wonder why...)

I guess God isn't really dead--he keeps coming up--especially from atheists. For example, the American Humanist Association has all sorts of anti-God propaganda. During Christmas time, they have a button you can sport that says "O Come Let Us Ignore Him." How can you let me ignore him? You keep bringing him up! It is telling to me that the method by which they propose to ignore God is by wearing a button about ignoring him. Someone who actually does not believe in God does not wear buttons about his non-existence. As I say over and over again, "If you don't believe in God, why do you keep bringing him up?"

Nietzsche also said that man should not believe in anything. (Except you should believe his philosophy, of course. His philosophy that ultimately has no meaning, because there is no such thing as meaning.)

Will to Power.

Nietzsche believed that man must ascend to Super-man. He believed that man must overcome himself and become a new man. Nietzsche also believed in the "transvaluation of values." Basically that man must create his own, new values. The old values of the Christian reduce man to the state of a beggar. The traditional Christian values such as humility and patience, for example, are "slave values."

Nietzsche also did not value peace. The perfect state of the world is rather war. Nietzsche explained that for a Christian to have pity on another human being is harmful since that kind of behavior encourages people to be weak. The good is not to help people, but that which heightens the feeling of power in man. (Sounds like tyranny to me.) So if there was a man drowning in the ocean, the truest way to love him would not be to save his life, but to let him die.

It's a good thing for Nietzsche that his mother and sister were not adherents to his philosophy--otherwise, they would have let him die alone in his insanity instead of caring for him until his death in 1900.

My question to Nietzsche would be: Why should I do this? If there is no meaning in life, if suffering is not redemptive, if there is no purpose or goal to which we are moving toward or for which we were created, then what's the point? If nihilism is true, then everything--including Nietzsche's philosophy--is nothing. If he really believes this then why does he even bother discussing it? If nothing but the material is real, then his ideas don't even exist.

If man can choose what is true and man "chooses" to believe in God, why does Nietzsche have a problem with it? If life is but a power-race, why would Nietzsche care? Let him be the Super-man. Wouldn't that make him the most powerful? Isn't that precisely his goal?

Critique.

In Jean-Paul Sartre's play No Exit, he writes, "Hell is other people."

For the nihilist, this must be true. Especially if life is but a power-struggle and a rat-race.

Benedict XVI explains the consequences of Nietzsche's influence in modernity well:

"And the deep darkness and alienation of our times is shown in the fact that we have powers and abilities but do not know what they are for; we have so much knowledge that we are no longer able to believe and see truth; we are no longer able to embrace the totality. Our philosophy is that of Pilate: "What is truth?" If man has no truth, only abilities, he is fundamentally alienated, and "participation" is only empty play-acting in the dark, deluding man with the notion of freedom and hurting him deeply. There is nothing fortuitous about the strident protests against such empty freedom: man, deprived of truth, has been dishonored."

Nietzsche failed to realize that man is not self-created. He was also unreasonable in expounding that man is or even can be entirely self-sufficient. The historical fact that we live in community (whether it be a village, tribe, town, city, state, country, etc.) should be a clue that we were not meant to be alone and that we are not alone in the universe. Further, Nietzsche was unreasonable because he attempted, in his philosophy, to start from scratch, to throw out the past. Truth (somehow!) began with him. But this is untrue. He was born into a history, a culture and a context. He even used faith as an indirect method of knowledge for which the functioning of life would be impossible. Everyone lives like this but many do not realize it. For example, most people have probably never been to Siberia, but they still believe in its existence. People buy bread at the market everyday having faith it will not be poisoned and this is a reasonable thing to do. As Thomas Merton said, "No man is an island."

Nietzsche also greatly misunderstood the Christian Faith. He was raised a Lutheran, which is a corrupted version of the Faith, but even so he did not have a sense of paradox and mystery. Regarding the paradox of the slave versus free man, Benedict XVI responds well, "Christ overturns the worldview of modern times, it is not evolution or the laws of matter or the "universe" who has the last word but a person! If we know this person and he knows us then we are no longer slaves of the universe and its laws, but free!"

Nietzsche is ultimately unreasonable because he failed to recognize that in his and in each man's heart is the desire for truth, beauty, goodness, and freedom. This is what man was made for. With Nietzsche and with all these "modern philosophers" it truly does come down to a negativity versus a positivity:

Luigi Giussani tells the story about how a young man without faith was forced by his mother to go to confession to him. During the confession, the young man laughed at him and said, "Listen, all that you are trying so forcefully to tell me is not worth as much as what I am about to tell you. You cannot deny that the true grandeur of man is represented by Dante's Capaneus, that giant chained by God to Hell, yet who cries to God, 'I cannot free myself from these chains because you bind me here. You cannot, however, prevent me from blaspheming you, and so I blaspheme you.' This is the true grandeur of man." Father Giussani answered him, "But isn't it even greater to love the infinite?"

The End.

Christians: We are at least half the reason why there are atheists in the world. We are the ones being apathetic. Instead of disregarding the neighborhood nihilist, engage him by making a different proposal for his life. Nietzsche said some pretty right on things. But as Hilaire Belloc said, "Heresies are maintained by the truths they retain." So think critically, make the distinctions, don't fight to win but fight for clarity. And then (maybe) the Christian proposal will be accepted--then maybe, as Benedict XVI said, "all men will realize the truth that man is not redeemed by science, but by love and that redemption will cause liberation of all, for God wills that all be saved," in other words, that all men be happy.

Happiness: Freud v. St. Thomas (a brief discussion)

Bill Clinton: "What is the meaning of is?"

That's modernity for you.

Despite the diversity of definitions, views, beliefs and opinions on happiness, it is difficult not to argue that the "thing" people wish for the most is to be happy.

In pondering why we have such an unhappy world, the question might be posed, what is happiness?

Sigmund Freud’s (1856-1939) view of happiness follows in the tradition of 18th century Enlightenment empiricism. He accepts John Locke’s view that “the universal human desire for happiness is a desire for maximum pleasure and minimal pain.” Thus, happiness is reduced to something one can metaphorically measure on a scale weighing in the amount of pleasure contrasted with the amount of pain. Freud views human happiness as simply the “satisfaction of instinctual desires." If this view of happiness is true, then humans are reduced to a happiness that can be achieved in animals. Happiness is not, in Freud’s view, and contrasted by the ancients, related in any way to the intellect, but to instinct and to the gratification of one’s passions and appetites.

The highest human appetite in terms of instinct is sexual gratification. Happiness is but the (constant) gratification of sexual impulses. The purpose of reason or human rationality is to limit this impulsive desire by distraction with other pursuits such as art and music. Distraction from fulfilling desired and instinctual sexual gratifications serves to prevent society from becoming violent and destructive.

Freud’s view of happiness then lends itself to the fact that since all our sexual impulses can not and should not be satisfied--for the good of society--then man is doomed to a (sexually) frustrated life and therefore unhappiness. Freud expresses, “Civilization demands the restriction of genital gratification for the sake of a cohesive social existence.” I suppose this is why Freud entitled his work, Civilization and its Discontents. A pretty grim view of life indeed.

Freud is responsible for a lot of modernity's current erred notions of happiness. As with all these modern "philosophers," had he known the "fruit" of his thought, he might have re-evaluated its legitimacy. What would this (ironically!) cultural conservative and moralist have thought about the MTV generation?

Freud's definition of happiness stands in vast contrast with that of St. Thomas Aquinas'(1225-1274). (Surprise, surprise!)

For St. Thomas happiness is not a materialist issue. Happiness is the last end of the human life: the telos, the goal, the whole point. For a Christian who believes that man was created to enjoy eternal happiness with God, salvation equals happiness.

In his Summa Theologica, St. Thomas first poses the question, "Whether man's happiness consists in wealth?" He answers that it is "impossible for man's happiness to consist in wealth." This is because wealth is not sought for the sake of itself, but for a means to some other good. And since happiness is the last end, it can not consist in wealth.

He also poses the questions, "Whether man's happiness consists in honors? Or glory? Or fame? Or power? Or health?" For the sake of contrasting him with Freud's definition of happiness, St. Thomas' question, "Whether man's happiness consists in pleasure?" is a relevant one.

St. Thomas answers in the negative and quotes Boethius, "Any one that chooses to look back on his past excesses, will perceive that pleasures have a sad ending: and if they can render a man happy, there is no reason why we should not say that the very beasts are happy too."

It is interesting that Freud admits that if man were happy (having his sexual appetite constantly gratified), it would cause destruction to civilization. He would agree with St. Thomas on this point. However, instead of looking at this concrete fact and changing his definition of happiness toward a more truthful positivity, he relegates man to a life of necessary unhappiness for the sake of the common good. Since Freud is a materialist and denies the spiritual in man, he would disagree with St. Thomas and Boethius and affirm that humans are no different than "the very beasts."

St. Thomas would reject Freud's view of happiness because it concerns only one part of man: the bodily. However, man is one composite consisting of body and soul. He expresses, "Now good pertaining to the body, and apprehended by sense, cannot be man's perfect good. For since the rational soul excels the capacity of corporeal matter...(it) has a certain infinity in regard to the body...consequently it is evident that good which is fitting to the body, and which causes bodily delight through being apprehended by sense, is not man's perfect good, but is quite a trifle as compared with the good of the soul. Therefore bodily pleasure is neither happiness itself, nor a proper accident of happiness."

What is happiness?

Both Freud and St. Thomas would agree that in this life, men strive after happiness but that perfect happiness can not be attained by man. That is where the similarity in their notions of happiness ends.

St. Thomas writes, "Man is not perfectly happy so long as something remains for him to desire and seek." Freud rejected faith and religion and would not have accepted St. Thomas' understanding that "the happiness of man is realized in union with the Uncreated Good, which is God."

Mortimer Adler makes an important distinction regarding the current confusion regarding happiness. Happiness is being confused with contentment, as the fulfillment of needs. He explains that both the bad and good man can have their needs fulfilled. But no one would say that the miser who has his needs satisfied is happy. Happiness must be understood as St. Thomas explains as the final end--the quality of a morally good (virtuous) life. Properly speaking then, one can not say he has had a happy life, until the end of his life.

In reflecting about the contrasted understandings of happiness in Freud and St. Thomas, it comes down to a positivity versus a negativity in life. Pleasure, as being happiness, is utterly reductionistic and is inconsiderate of the totality of man's being and existence.

Happiness for St. Thomas is a positive thing to be achieved, for Freud it is a negative thing which can not be attained. For St. Thomas, happiness enriches man and thus civilization, for Freud happiness ruins man and does violence to civilization. For St. Thomas, it is to be lived and embraced, for Freud it is to be suppressed for the common good. For St. Thomas the happier the man, the happier the world, for Freud the happier the man, the unhappier the world.

How will it be known if St. Thomas's understanding of happiness is true? Well, for one thing, experience should verify it. This leads to flourishing of the human person--as Father Giussani might say.

Descartes' Bucket of Worms: Hume and Friends

You are majoring in WHAT?!

It seems most people believe philosophy is unimportant. It's impractical and has little relevance for real life.

The recognition that philosophy has practical consequences is illuminated when one considers the reality that science and technology can be used to either restore life or to destroy it. The post-modern world we live in determines, for example, not only what movies will be made but even what types of movies we are interested in. It influences the arts, culture, and politics. Who determines it? Who is the 'they' of "you know what they say?" It's the philosophical ideas that are put forth among the populace and that stick, whether good or bad.

A prominent theory of knowledge with roots in the 17-18th century that pervades modern thought and application is empiricism.

Empiricism was a reaction against the French rationalism begun by the Father of Modern Philosophy, Rene Descartes. Rationalism posited that the ideas in our mind are the objects of our thought instead of the actual objects itself. The problem is that ideas are not our objects of thought but that by which we apprehend the true objects of our thought: the world out there. In other words, reality is out there not in here-inside my head-as Descartes would have you believe.

Descartes led philosophy on its current modern route (a painful detour...). The point of departure for attaining knowledge is no longer understood as imposed by the object, but is first determined and then imposed on the object.

Father Giussani explains the error like this, "Water is H20. To reach this conclusion, I do not solve a mathematical problem."

Empiricism recognized this error in rationalism. (Plus, the rationalists were French while empiricism began in England; they are always trying to one-up each other!) Empiricists rejected the abstract method of the rationalists. However, they went the opposite extreme. Instead of being too abstract like the rationalists, they became too concrete.

Empiricism rejects any claim to knowledge that is not grounded in the concrete or material. It posits that all knowledge is empirical or sense-experiential. The only way to know things is through sense-perception. The logical consequence of this belief is the denial of the intellect and anything that is intangible. Since the foundation of all knowledge is sensation, there is no such thing as universals (such as happiness and justice) or natures and essences (such as the human mind/soul).

John Locke (17th Century Brit) went as far as to say that "maybe thought belongs to bodies." Locke was attempting to answer the critical questions, "What is it we know?" and "How do we know?"

Locke proposed that the mind is like a blank sheet of paper (the famous phrase in Latin "tabula rasa"). This means that we have no innate ideas and the foundation for all knowledge is sensation.

The shortcoming of this is realized in his statement, "We know what things are, but not why they are." However, if you claim to know what things are, you are claiming to know their natures or essences. This is a contradiction because Locke denies an intellect which is how we can abstract from our particular experiences to know the universals.

On the contrary! Experience shows us that if I can recognize one frog (the slimy, ugly, green creatures), I can recognize all frogs. Case-in-point: we know essences!

On the other hand...

David Hume's (18th-Century Scot) thought can be credited as the epitome of the skeptical empiricist movement. He suggested that we can only know things as phenomenons or as they appear to us in sensation. We can not really know them as such, in the totality of their being. This is tantamount to saying that we can only know our experience, not necessarily the object we are trying to know. This results in the belief that knowledge is subjective to the "knower's" (sense) experience.

Hume also denied principles of causation or cause and effect. He claimed that what is believed to be cause and effect is just the imagination linking separate ideas without any real connection or basis. Ideas truly have their origin in sense impressions. Another way to explain this is that impressions are the empirical origins of ideas. Ideas that are true and certain can be traced back to their distinct impressions.

The problem with Hume is that he proposes a theory of knowledge ("All knowledge is founded in sense-experience.") which is a philosophical belief, not an empirical one. To claim that things can only be known scientifically is not scientifically provable! To posit such a pre-supposition is a pretty big leap for someone to make who said that philosophy is sophistry and illusion! Following this line of reasoning, his theory of knowledge is equally sophistry and illusion!

Here's the crux of the problem with Locke and Hume: Knowledge is not about our ideas! It is about reality. The problem with his sense-phenomenalism is that the basis for knowledge is understood as to be found within the self instead of in the connection with the real. Also, knowledge itself is not an empirical object. It's not material! This is why empiricism's theory of knowledge is a contradiction and really can not, in a strict sense, be considered true philosophy.

Ironically, in denying the intellect or any spiritual reality it does not even allow for science to be done since it is science’s aim to identify universals and organize them into categories (species, kinds, etc.) and make generalizations regarding behavior. As a result, empiricism bases knowledge in a psychological description of what is sensed disregarding metaphysics as the basis of the nature of knowledge.

You can’t do philosophy or science with an empiricist worldview!

Influence in our day…

Scientism: The scientific method is the only legitimate method for answering ALL the questions. In a sense, empiricists are materialists. All reality is reduced to matter and everything can be explained in those terms.

Error exposed: The question, "Does my girlfriend love me?," can not be answered through a scientific experiment. In fact, the most real things in life: love, justice, happiness, goodness, beauty and art have nothing to do with science.

Moral Relativism/Atheism: Hume’s individualism (another obvious problem in our day)—that we can know our experience but not the thing experienced—has led to such ridiculous statements such as “I create my own reality,” that you hear a lot these days. This has further led (as I mentioned a long, painful detour…) to atheism. Hume believed in God but relegated His existence to a feeling: “We can't know there is a God, but feel there is one. We can't really know what's good or bad but can feel them.” This is a pretty weak argument (especially when there are so many better ones out there that Thomas Aquinas provided centuries earlier!) and had these men known the moral consequences of their philosophical errors they would have been more careful to avoid them I presume.

Error exposed: In college, my friend Mark and I always used to challenge the relativists by asking them, “So you don’t believe in moral absolutes, huh? Do you believe that absolutely?"

Moral/Ethical dilemmas: If the only reality is the physical reality than a human being (the word “person” no longer applies) is on the same level as a chicken. We are both equally a collection of matter. You might be laughing but there are some people (PETA?) who actually believe this.

Error exposed: Humans are different than animals in kind, not degree. Denying a human soul is to put me at the same level as a chicken.

Mortimer Adler explains well the uniquely human mind/body function, “The action of the brain is only a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the functioning of the human mind and for the operations of conceptual thought. We do not think with our brains, even though we cannot think without them.”

Regarding certainty…

To those who argue that empiricism or scientism is the only method of knowledge that offers certainty, Giussani says, “Let us note that man can err using scientific, philosophical, or mathematical methods. In the same way, he can misjudge human behavior. This does not detract from the fact that certainties may be reached by the scientific method and in the same way, through the 'method' of 'moral' knowledge."

Adler says, “But many of the conceptual constructs that we employ in scientific and in philosophical thought concerns objects such as black holes and quarks in physics, and God, spirits, and souls in metaphysics. These are objects about which it is of fundamental importance to ask the about their existence in reality.”

Giussani emphasizes the unreasonable and reductionistic nature of much of modern philosophy when he expresses, "Reason, then, is the ability to become aware of reality as it enters the human horizon. It follows different methods in order to know certain values or types of truth. Precisely because reason examines the object according to adequate motives, it develops different paths, depending upon the object."

The method must be determined by the object!

The Father of Modern Philosophy

Do you ever wonder why the study of philosophy got a bad reputation? Or why it came to be viewed as something that has nothing to do with life?

Well, I blame the Father of Modern Philosophy and devout Catholic (darn it!) Rene Descartes. Descartes can be likened to the nice guy who had good intentions who really screwed things up. We can thank him for the bad philosophy that was to follow from David Hume, Immanuel Kant, etc.

Descartes was a brilliant mind and mathematician but he should have stayed in the mathematics department and left philosophy alone to Aristotle and St. Thomas who had it right in the first place. Unfortunately, Descartes was taught corrupted teachings of the Angelic Doctor through manuals instead of reading his works directly. (How does that make you feel about all the most likely corrupted textbooks we were taught from? We learn about people's thoughts by other people's thoughts about them...we need to return to a classical educational model...but that's another story for another blog..)

So here was where Descartes went right in philosophy: he sought to prove God's existence and the immortality of the soul. He is correct that God exists and that the soul is, indeed, immortal.

He wanted to do the Church a favor by proving these truths in an age of skepticism post-the division of Christendom in the 16th Century. However, he did not do the Church a favor in the end and actually did quite a bit of damage by embracing the skepticism in order to prove the skeptic wrong. He, in fact, made the skeptics more skeptical. He also contributed to the dualistic notion of the soul and body that many embrace today in attempting to define the human person. Some believe as Plato and Descartes did that we are essentially a soul. Plato believed that the body was even a kind of prison for the soul. However, the human person is uniquely body and soul and both as a composite are what comprise a human being.

So how did he open this can of worms? By attempting to rebuild the foundations of philosophy--a pretty big job for one person. Especially when you had the minds of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas previously. But where Aristotle erred in scientific matters, Descartes erred in philosophical ones.

There is a point in reading this because you will learn how to approach knowledge and truth in your own life! I promise you philosophy done RIGHT is helpful!

Here's what happened: Descartes like math so much because the conclusions one gets in math are certain and self-evident: 2+2=4 You can't argue with that, right?

However, math is REALLY abstract, especially geometry. Descartes actually discovered algebraic geometry. (Thanks a lot, I hate high school because of you...just kidding...I did have fun poking my friend Jasmin's back in class.) Math does not deal with actual things, matter, etc. You can "do" math in a classroom, never using anything tangible, in your head, etc.

Descartes liked the certainty and decided to apply the mathematical model of abstraction to rebuild philosophy and to come to the knowledge of truth with that method. So instead of looking at the things of the world (how do I learn about an orange? Well, I find one and examine it!), he relies on his ideas. That is where he begins: in his mind.

He first begins by doubting everything, even his own existence. He comes to the conclusion that he does, in fact, exist because he is thinking and if you can think, you exist. This is where we get his famous, "Cogito ergo sum;" I think therefore I am.

Um, DUH. Aristotle said that it is foolish to seek a reason for what evidence shows to be fact.

He goes on to demonstrate the existence of God and says that he has this idea of a perfect, infinite being so therefore there must be a God. The error here is that just because I have an idea of God, does not make Him real. This was essentially the weak argument St. Anselm put forth positing that God is the "the being greater than which cannot be thought," allowing him to conclude that an existing "greatest" is greater than a non-existing "greatest," therefore God must exist. Well, I have an idea of a purple unicorn right now but that doesn't prove diddly-squat. (Sorry, Anselm.)

Descartes didn't really prove the existence of God. He goes on to "prove" the existence of the external world (which really should have been his starting, not ending point) by saying that if such a perfect being as God existed than he would not allow for this mass deception of my sense perception and therefore I and the world must exist.

This abstract method of Descartes is one of the idealist. The idealist claims to prove God's existence from his idea of God. This is contrasted with realism which seeks to look at what's in front of our faces and traces the effect back to the cause which is God. The idealist believes reality is in his ideas, the realist asks the question, "What is this in front of me? How did it get there?"

St. Augustine said, "I inquire in order to know something, not to think it."

Descartes method of knowledge, a method of doubt, is unreasonable and contrary to what is obviously in front of him: the world. He ends with the world, but in order to gain knowledge and discover truth, it is more convincing for the world to be the starting point.

The mistake Descartes made was that he chose the method and then tried to make the object conform to the method. Instead, one should look to the object to determine the method. What works for math ("mathematicism") will not work for all sciences. The human person is body and soul as a composite and so a completely abstract method will simply not work. Descartes denied sense skepticism which is self-refuting and contradictory because, as my professor puts it, "you only know sense error through sense truth, it can't be all error."

I agree with Aristotle it is foolish to prove what is evident and the existence of the world is clearly evident unless you are a madman where you have lost everything but your reason. (G.K. Chesterton)

Luigi Giussani says, "Realism requires a certain method for observing and coming to know an object, and this method must not be imagined, thought of or organized and created by the subject (ahem, Descartes!): it must be imposed by the object.

Why do I care? I care because by imposing the method he made our ideas superior to the object itself. Descartes made our ideas the object of knowledge instead of the means of knowing the actual object itself. Thought and reality are not identical. Reality should be the starting point. Thought is about reality, not reality itself.

I end thanking Father Giussani who really helped me understand all of this. Descartes just confused me. (He confused a lot of people and he is blamed for the increasing skepticism that modernity is, dualism, denial of the mind and athiesm.)

Giussani says in his book The Religious Sense, regarding our age of ideologies,

"Instead of learning from reality in all its aspects and building on it, man seeks to manipulate reality according to the coherent schemes fabricated by the intellect; 'thus the triumph of ideologies ratifies the defeat of civilization.'" (Alexis Carrel in his Reflections on Life)