Good sense is the best shared-out thing in the world; for everyone thinks he has such a good supply of it that he doesn’t want more, even if he is extremely hard to please about other things.
Descartes, 1637
I am looking again at Descartes’ Discourse on the Method. Or rather, to give it its full title, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting one’s Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences, and I was surprised to notice so much humour, especially as, in some cases, the humour ironically flips what he’s been accused of insisting. The opening sentence above, for instance, is not someone saying “Good sense is the best shared out-thing in the world” after you’ve read the second part of the sentence, is it? If one were to seize upon the first part of the sentence only, would it not be similar to the way rage-junkies on social media respond to jokes at face value, missing the joke entirely?
Below is a useful essay about humour in Descartes’ writing. Of course, as Corcoran says towards the end, “Humour, indeed, may not account for, nor rectify, the epistemological dilemmas encountered in a philosophy that establishes first principles upon a paradigm of perception that disembodies the act of knowing and seems to condemn the phenomenon of embodied conscious existence – the very ostensible ground of Descartes’ method – to an ‘irrational”, frozen, and insensate paralysis.’” But it does, nevertheless, introduce a sense of humility and joy to the writing, which subtly changes how one might approach Descartes. It’s also interesting to read Carlo Rovelli’s (2023) thoughts on doubt and certainty in Anaximander – see screenshot below.
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Recently, I saw Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. I’ve not seen it in years and barely remembered much. I am so glad to have done so again, especially now as I consider what it means ‘to think’ in light of the presence of large language models today, which is what I tend to be getting at in my work. Lucky’s ‘thinking’ performance‘ towards the end of Act 1 is such a great comment (and terribly funny as well as tragic). Worth re-visiting the text … ‘Qua qua qua qua qua!”
Refs:
Corcoran, P.E. (1972) ‘Descartes’ Method of Humour’, The Dalhousie Review, 52(2), pp. 280-287.
Descartes, R. (2017) Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences. Edited by J. Bennett
Rovelli, C. (2023) Anaximander and the Nature of Science. London: Penguin Books.
Edited 12 Jan 25 to add a link to Lucky’s speech and fix minor typos