What does it mean to doubt? For Descartes, it is a rigorous philosophical method. To doubt means: to not merely accept the beliefs systems, the social normativities, the prejudices and the presuppositions with which we are all faced. At the same time, doubt means that we have to reject what we merely see, feel, taste: our perceptions are ultimately to be rejected.
Hence, there is a double rejection contained in doubt: the rejection of forms of knowledge that we acquire from what may be called a social level. The norms that we learn from our parents, the impressions that society places upon us, the demands of the education or the dominant capitalist ideology: all these are ways of existing in the world, ways of understanding the world, that, for Descartes, are to be rejected.
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"Living In Radical Doubt".
Secondly, there is a rejection on the physical or biological level. Whereas the first type of rejection based in radical doubt is founded upon our more human and discursive capabilities, the second type of rejection based in radical doubt is founded upon our basic biological functions, common to all forms of life on the planet, although, of course, in different forms. Radical doubt means that all of our most fundamental and intuitive bodily actions are to be disposed of: the sense that we exist in a distinct physical body, in a particular place at a particular time, confronted and surrounded by particular phenomena.
It is clear why Descartes’ approach can be considered to be a form of radical doubt: both our social and physical or biological sources of knowledge are to be rejected. But for Descartes this has a clear positive upshot: that is to say, that Descartes uses the method of radical doubt so as to clear the way for a type of knowledge that is indisputable, that is metaphysically certain, that no one can undermine as relative or merely the result of a subjective whim, or of accepting the presuppositions of another.
Yet what is clear in this method of Descartes’ radical doubt is that it forces us essentially to think in totally anti-human terms. We all exist in a language, speaking and thinking. This can certainly be called a form of knowledge, or at least, a form of understanding. For Descartes, this is not rigorous enough. All our relationships, all our structures of the social are somehow viewed as not passing the standard of truth. Not only this, but even our physical realities are to be denied as inferior forms of knowledge and understanding.
In this sense, to live in radical doubt simply means to not live as a human being. It means to try to go beyond our own existence and the structures of this existence to achieve a thought or a truth that is not dependent upon our subjectivity.
To live in radical doubt means to reject our forms of subjectivity and intersubjectivity.
Certainly, the big twist in Descartes’ approach is that it ultimately leads to his declaration of the Cogito, Ergo Sum, which is the decisive assertion of subjectivity: I think, therefore I am. My own individual existence is secured following Descartes’ logic by the apodeictic fact that “I think.” To live in radical doubt for Descartes leads to this immutable truth.
Whether this conclusion follows from Descartes’ premise of radical doubt is of course debatable and has been endlessly debated in the literature. But if we isolate the moment of radical doubt, we must understand it as a declaration of the inferiority of our social and biological forms of knowledge. These are not forms of knowledge, but forms of understanding. To live in radical doubt means to live in opposition to accepted measures of human understanding.
Of course, this means a certain problematization of living with the human being. Here, our forms of interactions are destroyed in doubt. It thus becomes impossible to relate to a human being, simply because we reject the validity of the structures of these relations themselves. We reject convention on even the most basic level: for example, sentences are mere linguistic agreements and saying nothing about truth. To live in radical doubt for Descartes means also to live towards an objective truth: to the sense that our human interactions do not possess an objective truth, what becomes radical here is how our basic human comportments are challenged in favor of the higher value to search for ultimate truth.
However, if we look at Descartes’ philosophical project in this way, we see that his version of radical doubt is not a particularly new philosophical idea. Let us consider, for example, Plato, and his myth of the cave. In this myth, Plato describes the fundamental illusion of our human ways of understanding, as he compares these ways of understanding to being bound in a cave, forced to watch shadows on the wall. These shadows are deliberate illusions produced by others: this is a clear metaphor for our social prejudices and presuppositions that structure our society. To leave the cave, as Plato urges is the task of the philosopher, is to simply doubt the validity of these structures and try to achieve a higher form of human knowledge, or rather, a form of knowledge that is not bound to our particular existence as human beings and its relative forms of understanding.
In this regard, there is a clear positive to living in radical doubt; we do not merely accept what is given to us. We challenge it. However, radical doubt means that we challenge our basic human forms of knowledge. In this sense, it is a certain denial of what makes us human. Whether the payoff of attempting to reach an objective knowledge is worth the sacrifice of our human forms of understanding is perhaps here a legitimate ethical question.
