What Descartes really meant

In everyday life, arguing from facts means skewing everyone else’s sense of reality. A statistic can be true and still mean nothing to anyone. I can look at a number and not feel there is a problem, while other people carry real anxiety about things we have no clean way to measure.

To me the point of a society is that everyone lives well. And for people to live well, their feelings have to sit far enough on the good side that they still want to keep living there. Which means a society aiming that way has to rethink what it stands on, since facts alone will not hold it up.

So I take Descartes as the ground to think from. He looks for one thing a person can verify on their own and lands on the fact that they think, then stops there, for reasons of his own time. Follow the same track a bit further and you get to feeling. Where it lands is my own reading, and I would not ask anyone to take it as more than that. That the track was worth following further seems good for everyone. Thought is already shaped by language, so what you can think is bounded by the words you have. Feeling is biological and sits under that.

There is a second reason to put feeling underneath, separate from the first one. Nothing starts thinking on its own. What drives a line of thought is always a feeling, either a reaction to something outside you or the sense that something is missing and deserves more scrutiny than it is getting. Doubt itself works that way, which means the move that produced the cogito was already made of the thing it left out.

The obvious objection is that a feeling is hard to communicate, which makes it useless as a common ground. I would turn that around. If the language cannot carry the feeling, the language is what needs fixing, not the feeling. The person who feels it is the one who notices the gap, and that is enough to know the gap exists. Building better words for it is work we can actually do.

So this is not just an epistemic remark. It is where I would put the base of morality. When we argue about something, we take everyone’s feelings into account, fully, and we look for solutions to the causes of those feelings rather than to the symptoms.

Run that forward and you get a goal of least harm. As few negative feelings as possible for everyone, even if nobody gets the positive side in full. Make everyone equally unhappy, except I would swap happy for not sad. You can see it in the products that work, the ones where people actually voted with their wallets. Nobody buys the product that is perfect for them, they buy the one that solves their problem to the point of being boring, because a product that strongly pleases some people puts others off.

And really we are rebuilding Descartes from first principles, which is the funny part. A three hundred year old text that clearly had more road ahead of it, and at the first contradiction everyone agreed to go a different way instead. Nobody has looked at it since. So here we are redoing it from zero, and writing today’s ideas up with a straight face as though something clever just happened.

Apparently everything in this society gets lost, even the things we keep. But that is for another time.