Rene Descartes - Maxims of Provisional Morality (Discourse, pt.3) - Philosophy Core Concepts

Hi, this is Dr. Gregory Sadler. I'm a professor of philosophy and the president and founder of an educational consulting company called Reason.io, where we put philosophy into practice. I've studied and taught philosophy for over 20 years, and I find that many people run into difficulties reading classic philosophical texts. Sometimes it's the way things are said or how the text is structured. But the concepts themselves are not always that complicated, and that's where I come in. To help students and lifelong learners, I've been producing longer lecture videos and posting them to YouTube. Many viewers say they find them useful. What you're currently watching is part of a new series of shorter videos, each of them focused on one core concept from an important philosophical text. I hope you find it useful as well. In part three of his discourse on method, Rene Descartes is going to lay out something that has come to be called the provisional morality, un moral par provision in his French. Another way you could translate this is a temporary ethics, an ethics that you have in place until you can build something on more solid foundations. Why does he do this? He thinks that it's important, as he says, again, using his building metaphor, that just like those people who are rebuilding a house before beginning to rebuild the house, you don't just demolish it and make provision for materials. You also have to have some place to live for the time being. And that's what this provisional morality is providing him with. And he talks in terms of maxims. He says that there's three or four, it actually turns out to be three main maxims. By which he can conduct himself. So what is a maxim? A maxim is a rule that you give to yourself or give to other people. It can usually be expressed in one or two lines. And it tells you what to do or what things are. In this case, these are all doing maxims. This is how I ought to behave. So they're really three sets of maxims. He doesn't condense them down to a single line for each of them. And he gives actually quite a bit of explanation that we're going to look at. So what is the first of these maxims? He says, the first is to obey the laws and customs of my country. And then he adds to that, to adhere to the religion in which God, by his grace, had me instructed from my childhood. And then he adds another third part to it. To govern myself in everything else, according to the most moderate and least extreme opinions, being those commonly received among the wisest of those with whom I should have to live. So this is actually quite a lot. That's almost a short paragraph rather than a one line sentence, right? And notice that he's dividing things into three classes. There's anything that has to do with laws and customs. So there's a social level. Then there is religion, right? Another level, also applying to the group, but applying to individual actions and beliefs and attitudes. And then there's everything else. So let's look at each of these. He says, I'm going to obey the laws and customs of my country. Why? Why not the laws and customs of the Persians or the Chinese? He says, well, I'm living here. So it actually makes sense for me to follow these rules to keep myself out of trouble. He says, there might be just as many wise people among these other people, but I should follow those with whom I have to live. What about religion? He doesn't actually tell you that much about this. And if we look at Descartes' own behavior and his expressed sentiments in other places, this is probably just sort of a concession to the piety of the time. He's not going to do anything that he thinks will scandalize other people. He's going, if he goes to church, for example, he'll get up and say the right thing at the right time. But he's, you know, going to more or less leave that alone. What he devotes the most discussion to is following reasonable opinions. So what does he tell us? He says, here we go. I have to follow the reasonable opinions of those who are the wisest among ourselves because I have to regulate my conduct by that of the people among whom I'm going to live. And for me to know what their opinions really were, I had to take note of what they did rather than said. And he says, I chose only the most moderate among many opinions, which are equally widely received as much as because these are easiest to practice and likely to be the best. So he's saying excesses are usually bad. That seems to be fairly Aristotelian, you know, the notion of the virtuous mean or middle, and it'll at least keep him out of trouble with other people. And he says, in particular, I place in the category of excesses, all personal commitments by which one relinquishes some of one's freedom. Now he doesn't say, I'm never gonna make a promise to anybody. As a matter of fact, he considers that there and says, this is needed for people who otherwise are irresolute, but I'm not going to commit myself too much in any particular, say ideology or cause or commitment of that sort. So what is this going to guarantee for him? It's going to allow him a kind of freedom to maneuver within a society that he has to share with other people. So that's the first maxim. The second maxim, more interesting, be as firm and resolute in actions as possible, right? Following out, he says, even doubtful opinions. Now you might say, well, why would Descartes want to follow opinions that are doubtful? And he gives you a metaphor here. He says, I imitate travelers who finding themselves lost in a forest. They don't want to just wander around in circles, right? Because then you're consuming your time and energy and it's going to become nightfall and you don't actually make it out of the forest. As a matter of fact, if you find yourself in the same place, again, after circling around, you know that you're in trouble, right? So head on a straight line. It doesn't really matter, he's saying, if you know that that's the right way to go. You go straight, you're going to hit something. Sooner or later, you're going to arrive somewhere that you can actually use. Maybe it'll be a river, maybe it'll be a road, maybe it'll be a nest of bears or something like that, but you're bound to hit something. So he says, you should walk as straight as possible in one direction, not alter course for weak reasons, even if it might only have been chance, which led this person to settle on the direction that they chose. He says, what's the result of this? They don't end up precisely where they want to be, but they are going to reach somewhere where they're more likely to be better off than in the middle of a forest. So what is the forest here? It's this state of doubt that Descartes is in, worried about the fact that he's got this great education that doesn't seem to provide him yet with any certainty about what's real, what's true, and how he ought to live. So he's going to just stick with something and he's gonna be firm and resolute about it. He's going to follow it out, even if there are doubts about those sorts of things. So he says, we must often act in life without a delay. It's a very certain truth that when it's not in our power to determine what the truest opinions are, we should follow those most likely to be true. And even though we see no more probability in some rather than others, we have to pick one of them. We have to commit ourselves one way and then follow that out. And if you do that, you're actually acting in an experimental manner and maybe you'll find something out along the way that that's quite useful. His third maxim, which he's deriving most experts think, and in large part from Stoic ethics, is to master himself rather than fortune. That's the first part of it. To change his desires rather than attempting to change the world and to realize that only certain things are within our power, namely our thoughts. So we need to talk about each of these in turn, right? He says that I need to master myself rather than fortune. What is fortune? Fortune is this chance events that happen within the world. Getting a promotion at work, getting fired, that's a matter of fortune. Other people, other factors control that. And if you're going to try to master fortune, even if you are successful for a certain amount of time, there's this metaphor of the wheel. It's always going to turn and you're probably going to lose out on whatever it is that you got. So for the moment you're good looking, well, all it takes is an accident or aging or something else to come along and change that. You're rich right now, well, all that money can go away. That property can be destroyed in an earthquake or the government can come in and take it or locusts can come in and eat your fields. We can go on and on and on. You've got a wonderful spouse, he or she can die, right? You've got great children, maybe they'll go crazy and act in terrible ways that bring shame upon your family. So master yourself rather than trying to master fortune. That means that you actually have to spend some time trying to figure out, well, who are you? What kind of thing are you? How do you work? What would it mean to be a better you? And that's where we get to the second part, changing desires rather than trying to change the order of the world. So he tells us this, our will is naturally inclined to desire only those things which our intellect represents to it as possible in some way. So if we apply a certain kind of mental discipline to ourselves, we can bring ourselves to desire less and certainly not to desire the things that are going to get us in trouble. What is in our control? Our thoughts according to Descartes. Now this covers a wide range because we have a tendency to think that thoughts are just like cognitive propositions or something along those lines or imaginations. That indeed is part of the range of thought. Willing is a kind of thinking for Descartes. Sensing is a kind of thinking. Your emotions are actually types of thoughts for Descartes. Now he's not saying that you actually do have total control over your emotional reactions or the sense perceptions that you're having, but we do have control over whether we imagine those things, the ways in which we think about things, how we conduct our thoughts, whether we think about things that we ought to think about or we just put off thinking about them. All of those are more or less within our power. So he goes on and he says, if we represent, by our intellect, something as possible, it's certain that if we consider all external goods as being equally beyond our power, we're not gonna feel regret at failing to obtain those which seem to be our birthright when deprived of them through no fault of our own. When fortune hits us, we're not gonna be so upset because we say, well, you know, easy come, easy go. Those are external things. I don't actually have control over them. It was silly for me to desire them or to desire to hold onto them forever as if that's actually possible. If I represent things to myself accurately, then according to Descartes, I'm not going to be beset by those types of desires. And he says, now, of course, this requires, you know, a habit and as he calls it here, long practice and reiterated periods of meditation to make oneself used to seeing things from that angle. It's not something that you think, boom, and now you realize it and everything falls into place. It may feel like that when you first hear it, but you have to keep thinking this. You have to keep reminding yourself of that. And that is something that Descartes probably did in fact take from the Stoics. Now, I'd mentioned at the beginning that Descartes said, well, there's three or maybe four different maxims that I need to look at. And he says, in conclusion, he says, finally, as a conclusion to this moral code, this moral, I decided to review the various occupations men have in this life. This is not really a maxim. This is kind of a summary. This is what the following these things is going to allow him to do. And a little bit later in that paragraph, he will talk about the three foregoing maxims. So what is he actually trying to do with his fourth thing? That could be framed as a maxim. What are occupations? So we think of occupations just in terms of work, like I'm going to go apply for an office job, or I'll work in a restaurant, or I'll be a nurse and take care of people at home or in the hospital. Well, occupation is really how you run your life and work is a major part of that. So Descartes says, I wanted to review the different occupations that people have in this life in order to select the best one. Without passing judgment on others, I came to the view, he says, that I, I Descartes, could do no better than to continue in the one in which I found myself to devote my life to the cultivation of my reason and make such progress as I could in knowledge of the truth, following the method, the method described in part two that I had prescribed for myself. So you could see another maxim there. I should follow out this practice of being a working philosopher, philosopher in a very broad and general sense, applying the method, the four rules that I derived earlier, all of those form a sort of coherent way of living that could in fact be replaced. It won't really be replaced for the most part, but could be replaced if his investigations revealed something better for him. So that is Descartes' provisional morality.