Plato & Descartes & the Senses

It is no more possible to exclusively follow one's senses and find the truth than it is possible to exclusively follow one's reason and find the truth. Both Plato and Descartes are trying to falsely isolate the stuff of the senses from the stuff of the reasoning mind. It cannot be done.

The mind and the senses are joined forevermore and cannot be torn asunder. Obviously, it is nice for philosophers to think that the senses and the mind can be so easily separated. They are, after all, trying to make sense out of a world---within and without---that very often does not make much sense at all. It is, therefore, not surprising to find philosophers either focusing exclusively on the senses or the reasoning mind in creating their philosophic systems.

It is simply too complicated to try to unravel the complex and often contradictory threads of the mind and the senses. Philosophers such as Descartes and Plato favor the mind over the senses, and they propose that we can know reality by using the reasoning mind and distrusting the senses except to the degree that the mind is able to separate reasonable sense perception from illusion, dream, hallucination, etc.

Again, to this observer, the mind has little---if anything--in it that does not come originally from the senses. I am not, however, against reason, by any means. In fact, I would argue that the reasoning mind is crucial for interpreting the material observed by the senses. The argument here is simply that it is unrealisti

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o and Descartes gradually open the door of inquiry to include more and more of the stuff of the senses in their philosophy, but it seems that as they do so they betray their original and pure principles. They are trying to lay a pure foundation of reason in order to assess the trustfulness or deceit of the senses, but it seems to me that from the beginning their prejudice favoring the mind and against the senses is a self-deceiving prejudice. After all, the entire philosophy of Plato is to discover the Good, the Just, the Beautiful, and he says (or has Socrates say) that we cannot trust the senses because the senses have told us nothing about the Good, the Just or the Beautiful---because those things are invisible. However, why should we trust the mind to tell us the truth about these things? How do we know, in fact, if these things exist at all (as Descartes suggests---before rejecting the suggestion)? How do we know that the mind is not the creation of an evil force whose purpose is to deceive us into believing that such things as Good exist, in order to use us or abuse us in some diabolical game? I myself do not believe that such is the case. I am not arguing for the exclusion of the mind from philosophy any moire than

Category: Philosophy - P