Pinker: More Cartesian than Descartes

Steven Pinker seems to be more Cartesian than Rene Descartes himself. Descartes wants us to believe that God—a perfect being in Descartes' eyes—gave us knowledge; therefore, our mental faculties are determined to be trustworthy (provided we separate what is clear and distinct from what is observed and confused). And through this trustworthy knowledge we may reason and understand the rules of our world, because God has structured our universe the same way He has structured our minds. Descartes believes that we are rational beings; that through reason we may discover and acquire an understanding of the universe ourselves—not through formalized institutions that make claims of truth. Descartes’ claims were indeed revolutionary. Written in a time where the Catholic Church was a source of overwhelming power and authority, Descartes’ claims seemed to usurp some of the Church’s power and reallocate it to us all. However, due to the political climate in which he was writing, and perhaps due to his own beliefs (debatable), Descartes made sure always to underscore his claims with God. This fact grounded his work in a religious context, and protected him from execution by the Catholic Church. This is where Descartes leaves off and Pinker begins. Pinker, instead, argues that we are rational beings and that it is in our genes. We can, through science and reason, discover the truth, and we don’t need God for us to do it. This is what makes Pinker even more Cartesian than Descartes himself: Pinker completes Descartes’ argument, taking it a step further, relying only on our capacity for rational reasoning, explicitly taking God out of the picture. This fact speaks to the complex theoretical system that Descartes created: one that attributes the “truth” to God while simultaneously allowing for an atheist like Pinker to adopt his theory and replace God with reason without contradiction.

Not only does Pinker replace God with reason, he explicitly uses reason to force God out of the picture. After challenging Descartes' ghost in the machine hypothesis with neuroscience, Pinker states, " And we have every reason to believe that when the physiological activity of the brain stops, the person goes out of existence" (The Blank Slate, 4). He goes on to state that people are often sorry to lose God, or at least the values associated with God. Reason trumps all for Pinker, and this is what makes him more Cartesian than Descartes. It must be noted, however, that Pinker's emphatic display of Cartesianism would not be possible if Descartes himself had not framed his theory in such a way as to allow for reason to undercut belief. Had Descartes made God more central to his theory rather than a "first clause" or "an author of order", perhaps then reason would not be--or become-- the quintessential unit of truth.