Me First and the Way of Ideas

A friend of mine (who has a nice, virile voice) recently asked me to sum up "modern philosophy" for him. Something like an avalanche of heterogeneous mind boulders came tumbling down upon me when I first began pondering what a summary of modern philosophy should include. Next, I was overcome by the impulse to run for cover and pretend that such a question was never asked of me. But slowly the challenge took root in my subconscious and burgeoned as a duel-bulbed bit of philosophical flora (that is, phlora).

My friend's name is Jey.

What grew up in my mind was no doubt stunted and woefully pathetic in comparison with the sort of phlora that would have blossomed in a more arable intellectual garden. Nevertheless, this was what arose from my aridity.

I think the following statement from Descartes' first meditation is quite illuminating: "So today I have expressly rid my mind of all worries and arranged for myself a clear stretch of free time. I am here quite alone, and at last I will devote myself sincerely and without reservation to the general demolition of my opinions." (my emphasis)

Tradition, testimony, any communal source of knowledge: All of it is not to be trusted. If I am to make any progress toward knowledge (and most importantly) certainty, then I must chuck everything I have come to believe through sources outside myself and begin anew from the solid foundation that is ME.

Of course, Descartes was only one of the moderns, and he was a rationalist. The empiricists believed experience was the only (or at least the primary) fodder to which reason is applied. But the same Cartesian doubts about the reliability of sense experience plagued at least some of the empiricists (Berkeley and Hume, to be sure).

It was no accident, therefore, that the modern project led to such anti-commonsense positions as Berkeleyan idealism, Humean skepticism, and Kantian transcendental idealism...and maybe postmodernism (which might more accurately be called hyper-modernism).

In the midst of all this self-centered muck arose Thomas Reid, the great Scottish defender of common sense. He went after "the way of ideas," which he thought lie at the root of all this counterintuitive malarkey. As I understand it, the way of ideas is essentially the view that in between us and the world are ideas or sense impressions--representations, one hopes, of things-in-themselves. There is no getting beyond them or outside them. They are the things we experience. (And for all the doubting that Hume did, I don't think he ever questioned this doctrine of mediation.) Reid, on the other hand, tried to defend a sort of direct realism. His goal was to get rid of this odd veil between mind and world and thereby to restore a commonsense view of the world. He thought that the absurd implications of the way of ideas amounted to a reductio against the view. He says, "A traveller of good judgment may mistake his way, and be unawares led into a wrong track; and while the road is fair before him, he may go on without suspicion and be followed by others; but when it ends in a coal-pit, it requires no great judgment to know that he hath gone wrong, nor perhaps to find out what misled him." The way of ideas, Reid thought, led straight into a filthy morass of skepticism and/or idealism.

In short, I think two things are most distinctive of modern philosophy. One is the turn to the individual as the primary and best source of knowledge. The other is the Way of Ideas, which when combined with Cartesian individualism leads to skepticism. There are probably more key ideas that mark modernity, but this is my best shot.