Abstract

How does one do philosophy? What does it involve? Let us consider the most famous image ofphilosophising in the Western canon. It is a self-image, offered to us by Descartes. For Descartes, doingphilosophy involves a high degree of both solitude and introspection. He writes in 1637 that, sinceemigrating from his native France to Holland, "I have been able to lead a life as solitary and withdrawn asif I were in the most remote desert …" [1] After withdrawing from society, Descartes attempts to distancehimself from his own younger self, the credulous child who had, he tells us, accepted a "large number offalsehoods" as true.[2] Sitting alone by the fire in his dressing-gown, he asks himself: Of what can I becertain? The reality of fire, dressing-gown and embodiment itself disappear down the plughole of hisreductivist cogitations, and at last he replies: "[T]hat absolutely nothing else belongs to my nature oressence except that I am a thinking thing."[3] After which he reluctantly consents to put his body anddressing-gown back on, insisting all the while that they are completely detachable from "this puzzling'I'."[4] Cartesian philosophising, then, is an extreme form of doing battle with illusion; it is aboutsubtracting everything that's even the least bit suspect in order to get to the truth, that evasive littlekernel of certainty around which we can build a life, if and when we are brave enough toengage with the world again