Descartes's Self-Marketing

I've decided I don't believe in Descartes' presentation. In less kind language: he was a phony.

He marketed as someone who went through a skeptical dark night of the soul, took seriously arguments about the malevolent demon and dreams, thought himself out to the other aside of such arguments, (by finding God), and so was able to provide us with a distinctive view of the world.

The dark-night-of-the-soul stuff has so come to dominate the collective imagination that it overshadows the distinct view of the world that Descartes eventually offered. What he offered was this:

1. There are three substances: God, mind, and matter. We need God chiefly as the guarantor of our knowledge about matter: "we" are manifestation of mind.

2. How does mind interact with matter? Descartes left that as a mystery -- but he minimized the extent of the mystery a bit by telling us that other animals are mindless: the issue only arises for humans.

2. Matter is in essence the same as space -- there are no vacuums.

3. There is no action at a distance -- all action in the material world is a matter of stuff pushing other stuff around.

4. The clarity and distinctness of ideas is an secure emblem of their truth.

5. The clearest and most distinct ideas, and thus the most surely true, are the mathematical ones.

Personally, I believe that Descartes believed in all of this without any dark night of skepticism, and that all the "cogito" stuff was self-dramatizing fiction.

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