René Descartes | Using Cartesian Philosophy to Foster your Mental Health

“A mangled ball of yarn sits, anxious, in my mind. Longing to unravel, and stealing precious time. I grasp the fraying ends and try to knit a quilt. But the yarn runs out too soon, and leaves me unfulfilled. It keeps my mind preoccupied. It keeps me from my day. It keeps on calling out to me. Sticks in my mind like clay.

A heightened sense of fear. An elevated state Keeps me focused on my mission. Waking early, sleeping late. The ball of yarn still stays with me. It bounces 'round my head. It follows me to work each day. It follows me to bed. I have no time for distractions. I've got no time to spare. I want to change the world so much I'm very nearly there.

I don’t want to get rid of it. It keeps me on my toes. I just want to diminish it. To spare me of my woes.”

This is a poem one of my fellow class mates from middle school wrote about the stresses of his past. While he doesn't go into the stresses themselves, using the analogy of struggling to untie a mangled ball of yarn to represent the hardships of understanding the accumulation of stressful thoughts is something I found quite relatable. I've always found it difficult to deal with the influx of anxious thoughts and feelings I experience during busy periods of my day-to-day life, and I've been on the lookout for a method I could use to help myself identify the root causes of the negative thoughts I have. This journey has led me to the French philosopher René Descartes and his Method of Doubt.

Descartes' Method of Doubt

Descartes was considered one of the biggest skeptics in the modern philosophical era, and why he's known so much for his doubtful and devil's-advocate-like teachings is due to his addiction of understanding a very crucial matter of existence: do we even exist?

Phrased better, he wanted to know if there was any aspect of his life he could prove to be undoubtedly real and absolute. He explained in his first book, Meditations on First Philosophy, how many of the beliefs he had prior to the book's release were proven to be incorrect. He wanted to build a knowledge base of facts and opinions that were certain and not subject to error, but he lacked a logical approach to do this.

He tediously questioned every object, sensation, and thought that came to him, wondering if their existence could be proven. “Is this really a chair I am sitting on?” he would ask himself, “Or is my body just being fed the sensations that I would experience if I were actually sitting on a chair?”. Hours were spent lying in bed, pondering the meanings of things he would see and experience on a daily basis, trying to reason out a method for deducing whether or not their existence could be proven real.

And a logical method he reasoned out! He titled it the Method of Doubt, and simply put, his line of thinking was if something could be subject to doubt with primitive reasoning, then it must be deduced as false. He quotes in Discourse on Method,

“The first was never to accept anything for true which I did not clearly know to be such.”

While conversing with fellow French philosopher Pierre Gassendi, Descartes used a simple analogy to describe his Method of Doubt: He asked Gassendi to think of a basket of apples, with the contents being both fresh and rotten. It is crucial that the rotten apples are removed because their contamination can spread to the other apples as well, ruining the whole bunch. He proposed how the only way to remove them is to empty all the apples out of the bag, inspect each of them one by one, and either throw out or place them back into the basket depending on their condition. Extrapolating from this, Descartes stated how if the apples are instead replaced with a basket of one's own perceptions, the process is still quite similar. Empty your mind of all beliefs, both the good and the bad. Inspect each one of them, using the doubt-based approach mentioned before, to check the validity of their existence, keeping only the one's that are undoubtedly true.

Gassendi questioned that if the rot of an apple can contaminate another apple, how can one's beliefs possibly ruin the others? Descartes explained how the falseness of one belief can affect the validity of all other beliefs. Hence, it was necessary to get rid of all of them entirely.

More specifically, here's his thought process when developing the method:

Applying the Method of Doubt in our Personal Lives

The poem mentioned previously provides quite a relatable image of dealing with stress and anxiety. It refers to a "mangled ball of yarn" that "sits, anxious" in one's mind, representing how stresses can accumulate into a large messy collection of fearful and anxious thoughts and feelings in one's mind. These thoughts and feelings are "longing to unravel" (i.e. wanting to go away) and they steal "precious time".

Stress clouds your thinking and allows for more anxious thoughts to build up. As they accumulate, it becomes more and more difficult to understand the reasoning behind your unsettledness, and many tend to fall into a wormhole of fear and confusion as a result. How many times have you felt worked up or in a bad mood and you just don't know why?

From experience, it's very overwhelming to try to comprehend this accumulation of stressful thoughts face on. The best (and only) way to understand the why behind these negative emotions is to clear your mind of all thoughts, both the good and the bad, examine each of them, and block out the ones that cause pain or suffering. This process sounds quite familiar...

By modifying Descartes' method of doubt for your personal use, you have the freedom to understand the root cause behind any thought or perception you experience, resulting in clarity, the production of next steps to take, and peace of mind.

Descartes described his method as “the dialogue of one's inner Skeptic and their Common Sense when discussing the meaning and nature of knowledge”. This is practically just a twist on a devil's advocate approach to coming to a conclusion about a thought: We have two entities, Common Sense and the Skeptic. Common Sense states beliefs using primitive knowledge and reasoning while the Skeptic's role is to subject those statements to doubt. Here's a dumbed down cartesian example of what a conversation between the two would look like:

Common Sense

Sense perception is reliable. If I see a tree in front of me, I know it's a tree, if I touch a hot stove, I know it will burn. What is untrue about this?

Skeptic

Yes, but perception of distant vague objects may feed you false information. If I dip my finger in a cup of water, it will look as if it is distorted. One might perceive the same weather temperature to be hot or cold depending on the time of year. Sense perception is susceptible to errors.

Common Sense

That may be true for objects under those conditions, but it is nearly impossible to perceive close-up objects as something other than what they actually are. If I'm holding a ball right under my eyes, I will have firm knowledge/understanding that it is a ball.

Etcetera etcetera. The point here is that by using a basic reasoning-contradiction-style approach like the Method of Doubt uses to break down thoughts and beliefs, one can use this tool to help themselves understand the root cause behind their stressful thoughts and emotions, allowing them to create an detailed action plan to improve their mental health.

So that's René Descartes! This is just a hint of the mind-bending teachings the French philosopher has to offer. And not only did he focus his efforts into developing principles that would completely revolutionize modern philosophy, but his mathematical and scientific achievements cannot go ignored either!

If you like these articles, stay tuned because over the next few months I'll be publishing a bunch more about a variety of philosophers. Until then, stay smart!

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