First, are you’all interested in hearing about some of the quantitative results I encounter in classes? For example, in Environmental Science, we got a very simple demonstration of why the mean temperature of the earth is what it is. And in Micro, we learned that you cannot ever treat a group as a single individual (as is very often done), but as a result, you can mathematically calculate the number of individual decision-makers in a household from data (for example, households act like they have two decision-makers in Istanbul, but only one in rural Turkey). I can write them up, if you want.

E. V. Daniels’s class on semeiotic anthropology never fails to involve an flood of ideas. For Thursday, we read Descartes’s Meditations, for reasons that weren’t immediately obvious. Below are a couple of the ideas that came out, plus a short argument from my response paper.

E. invited Descartes apparently to attack him, and to compare him to the Greek Skeptics, in whose footsteps Descartes claims to be following. Descartes claims to use doubt to uncover certainty, but that was the opposite of the Skeptics. For them, there were things in the world that were fundamentally unknowable. No matter how much you debate them, you’ll be confronted with a state of isothenia, or equal-plausibility. The solution for a good life (ataraxia or peace of mind) in the face of these doubts was epoche, or the suspension of judgments.

E. likened this to the cultural embrace of incompleteness in southern Asia. He gave several anecdotal examples, each of which I think is interesting in its own way:

• In building houses, you always start on the walls before finishing the last of the foundation, and the roof before finishing the last of the walls.
• In buying lentils, you are expected to argue about the fairness of the scale, and in response you get an extra handful– designed to be unmeasurable.
• At weddings, you would never give an evenly measured gift (like 100 rupees). It is inauspicious. So you give 101 or some such.
• Even for the finest rugs, there will be a mark (a stamp) to blemish them, because it would be conceited to make something that claimed to be perfect.
• One never pays one’s servants fully. Either one leaves a little out or gives a little loan, because to pay them fully would be to close the relationship.

In other words, exactitude is a Western pathology. The East and the ancients recognized that the world is complicated, irrational, and context determines truth.

Descartes’s legacy was to replace this with the scientific method, and the supremacy of number. In Aristotle, the Greeks left the world mysterious by postulating incomprehensibility. It is this mysteriousness that Weber referred to when he said that “asceticism descended like a frost on the life of ‘Merrie old England’.”– the great disenchantment of the world.

My response paper discussed a number of issues, but I thought my rebuttal of the ontological argument for the existence of God was the most interesting. (Which is not to say that there isn’t a God, just that we will always be in a state if isothenia regarding it.)

My objection to Descartes proof of God is not to the ontological argument as such, for if you had an idea of a truly perfect being, then it is entirely plausible that it would only be possible by virtue of its granting it. My objection is that you do not have such an idea, but rather the idea of a very limited being, and that if I were to test the boundaries of this idea, I would find a number of limits, assumptions, and arbitrary characteristics in your “perfect idea”, that you might even object to if I were to try to expand your idea beyond them. Here are two examples of these limits. First, that God is all-knowing, when knowledge is very possibly not an applicable concept for an entity which has no brain. Second, that I, James R., am God Himself, and that I have constructed this moment and manifested myself within it to educate you about the limits of the ontological argument. Even if you are open to these possibilities, I claim that it would take livetimes of work and superhuman intellectual capacities to develop even as perfect an idea of God as to allow another person’s “perfect” idea of it.