Week 4: Things to consider

Descartes, Meditations:

•  What reasons might Descartes have for engaging in his project?  Here’s what he writes about this; what do you make of it?: ‘Several years have now elapsed since I first became aware that I had accepted, even from my youth, many false opinions for true, and that consequently what I afterward based on such principles was highly doubtful; and from that time I was convinced of the necessity of undertaking once in my life to rid myself of all the opinions I had adopted, and of commencing anew the work of building from the foundation…’ (1)

•  ‘All that I have, up to this moment, accepted as possessed of the highest truth and certainty, I received either from or through the senses. I observed, however, that these sometimes misled us…’ (1)  Presumably you agree with Descartes that our senses can mislead us?  What are some other examples of this?

•  ‘Physics, Astronomy, Medicine, and all the other sciences that have for their end the consideration of composite objects, are indeed of a doubtful character; but Arithmetic, Geometry, and the other sciences of the same class… contain somewhat that is certain and indubitable: for whether I am awake or dreaming, it remains true that two and three make five, and that a square has but four sides; nor does it seem possible that truths so apparent can ever fall under a suspicion of falsity [or incertitude].’ (2)  Do you agree that there are some things that simply will always be true (or false)?

•  He writes that he is ‘constrained at last to avow that there is nothing of all that I formerly believed to be true of which it is impossible to doubt.’ (3)  If this is true – if we can doubt anything that we believe – why should we even try to find out what is true?  Should we give up looking for ‘truth’?

•  ‘Archimedes, that he might transport the entire globe from the place it occupied to another, demanded only a point that was firm and immovable; so, also, I shall be entitled to entertain the highest expectations, if I am fortunate enough to discover only one thing that is certain and indubitable.’ (5)  Does this seem to follow?  That is, if he’s right about the next point (‘I think, therefore I exist’), then can he build everything on it from there?

•  ‘Doubtless, then, I exist, since I am deceived; and, let him deceive me as he may, he can never bring it about that I am nothing, so long as I shall be conscious that I am something…  this proposition I am, I exist, is necessarily true each time it is expressed by me, or conceived in my mind.’ (6)  What do you think of this argument??

•  What is the wax example (p. 9) supposed to show?

Baudrillard, ‘The Gulf War did not take place’

– comment on any of the following passages:

•  ‘The Iraqis blow up civilian buildings in order to give the impression of a dirty war.  The Americans disguise satellite information to give the impression of a clean war.  Everything in trompe l’oeil [i.e., visual illusion]!’ (62)

•  ‘Saddam Hussein’s decoys still aim to deceive the enemy, whereas the American technological decoy only aims to deceive itself.’ (64)

•  ‘We cannot even say that the Americans defeated Saddam: he defaulted on them’. (66)

•  ‘Information has a profound function of deception.  It matters little what it “informs” us about, its “coverage” of events matters little since it is precisely no more than a cover: its purpose is to produce consensus by flat encephalogram…  And if people

are vaguely aware of being caught up in this appeasement and this disillusionment by images, they swallow the deception and remain fascinated by the evidence of the montage of this war with which we are inoculated everywhere: through the eyes, the senses and in discourse.’ (68)

•  ‘There are ironic balance sheets which help to temper the shock or the bluff of this war.  A simple calculation shows that. of the 500,000 American soldiers involved during the seven months of operations in the Gulf, three times as many would have died from road accidents alone had they stayed in civilian life.*  Should we consider multiplying clean wars in order to reduce the murderous death toll of peacetime?’ (69)

*[As far as I can tell, this is false – according to the statistics I found (subject to internet wrongness), a liberal estimate of deaths for the troops in road accidents would have been something on the order of 80; 148 Americans were ‘battle-related deaths’ alone in the First Gulf War.]

•  ‘deterrence itself:  It only functions well between equal forces.  Ideally, each party should possess the same weapons before agreeing to renounce their use.  It is therefore the dissemination of (atomic) weapons alone which can ensure effective global deterrence and the indefinite suspension of war.  The present politics of non-dissemination plays with fire: there will always be enough madmen to launch an archaic challenge below the level of an atomic riposte – witness Saddam.  Things being as they are, we should place our hopes in the spread of weapons rather than in their (never respected) limitation.’ (69)

•  ‘the ultimate end of politics… is to maintain control of one’s own people by any

means’. (71)

•  ‘Strangely, a war without victims does not seem like a real war but rather… a war even more inhuman because it is without human losses.’ (73)

•  ‘All those journalists who set themselves up as bearers of the universal conscience, all those presenters who set themselves up as strategists, all the while overwhelming us with a flood of useless images.  Emotional blackmail by massacre, fraud’ – we would do well ‘to discuss the threshold of mental tolerance for information.’ (76)