I think therefore I am?

It's not enough.

Descartes’ famous phrase first appears in his Discourse on the Method (1637).

His foray into radical doubt led him to consider what he could really be certain was true. In the end, for him, thinking was the thing. Even if his thinking was wrong, it was still evidence of his own existence - his own reality. Even if some evil demon is deceiving him, and his senses are inventing a world that isn’t real, well, he must exist in order to be deceived , and he must be able to think about this probability, so thinking equals existence.

My adoptive mother used to look at me and complain ‘the devil led us to the wrong crib.’ That Satan had been to Manchester, purpose of visit to deceive Mrs Winterson, is somewhere in the theatre of cosmic jokes. But at least it meant we mattered. We were worth deceiving.

I was thinking about Descartes today because I am just back from a writers’ festival in Palma, Spain, and just heading to another festival in Sydney, Australia. The connection? Book festivals are billed as celebrations of the mind. It’s not sausages, or beer, or county music, or motorbikes. People come together to hear writers and to think about things.

But the more I do them, the more sure I am that people take their minds along as the entry ticket to their hearts. Are we always seeking a deeper knowledge than mind alone can offer?

Art is good at that - building bridges between thinking and feeling.

The feeling-tone matters. That we can laugh, cry, reflect. It’s more than a good story. It’s more than ideas. It’s the human need to live whole - just sometimes, not to be head versus heart, not to be thinking without feeling - which is anyway impossible, and yet still offered up as ‘objective’.

Human beings are not thinking machines. Cartesian dualism is based on the idea of ‘res cogitans’ (thinking thing) and ‘res extensa’ (the physical and material world, including animals, and women, yes sorry, girls).

Descartes believed that the mind is exclusive and particular, unlike everything else there is, and certainly not to be confused with the body or with feeling. He was a strange man. He built a life-size wind-up automaton of his dead daughter, and took it with him when he travelled. He did not believe that animals felt pain when ill-treated or tortured. He mistrusted his senses so much that in his enquiry into what he could absolutely ‘know’, it did not occur to him that he could know whether or not he loved. Whether or not he was loved.

That’s sad, but what is interesting is how enthusiastically his mind/body split world was embraced by Western intellectuals. Mind over matter is the foundation thinking of the Enlightenment. The body, sex, women, feeling, happiness, pleasure, the natural world, all become suspect - all to be tamed and managed. Empires are built on schooling ‘savages’ and ‘primitives’. People who are like ‘children’. Religion, with its emphasis on the soul, its function as a spiritual directive, pointing us to what is ‘real’, reinforces the body/mind split. It’s incredibly hard for humans to get the balance right. We are animals who are made of meat. Meat! At the same time, we have incredible minds. We want the mind to be in control. I think therefore I am sounds great. But it is empty.

I don’t believe that human life is easily satisfied with materiality alone. Religion is right to say that there is more - much more. But then we get mired in fights between sky-gods - the horrible wars between Islam, Christianity, Judaism, that get us nowhere but dead. I am glad the new Pope is calling for an end to war, but that will never happen while humans insist that their god - whichever one it is - is justifying the war, and is on their side. There is nothing rational or cool-mind about religious belief. It’s not an intellectual position. It’s faith. Which is is why many secular people can say, with reason, that religion is a big problem in our world. Yet, the human impulse towards a religious viewpoint is part of the human impulse away from materiality - the world of stuff - in a traditional sense, because ‘stuff’ is deceiving. That is, it can’t deliver what it says on the tin. Humans are not satisfied. We can’t help looking for meaning, for purpose, for transcendence. It’s easy for religion to hi-jack our search for meaning and turn it into a rules-based morality-play that is about policing the body or the family or whatever version of the Earthly Paradise is in vogue.

That gets us nowhere either. Where do we turn?

We are not Think=Am. We are not God=Am. We are not Stuff=Am. The body/mind split makes us miserable. Secularism doesn’t solve it. Religion tries to resolve it, but so often fails.

And so I keep coming back to love because I don’t know where else to go.

What if Descartes had said I love therefore I am?

We’re told, aren’t we, that God is Love. That’s a big statement. Not God is Thought. Not God is Power . Not God is Revenge. You don’t have to believe in any sky-god to wonder about a statement that size, and its implications. Humans invented religion and all religions claim to be religions of love. So, if love is the highest value, then maybe that is the only place to go to find either meaning or certainty.

And I don’t mean romantic love in total. That’s not enough.

I mean love as a response to life.

So, today, planting out the kale and spinach, and getting the garden ready for my absence, and thinking about the weird determination of literary festivals to keep going, even when the world is turning upside down, I was thinking about what it is to be moved, to want to feel, to open our hearts as well as our minds, and to be in a space full of strangers who don’t mind being strangers, and who come there to feel less separated.

To be human is to be hybrid. To be human is a hard job even before we start. It’s a job of reconciliation. To think. To feel. And when those things are at odds, to have the courage to try to work with it.

I keep on writing because for me it’s the surest way to connect my head and my heart.

Maybe I will see some of you on my travels over the next few weeks - perhaps in Sydney or Melbourne. I will be at the Hay Festival on Sunday June 1st. It’s connection. As EM Forster said in Howard’s End. Only Connect.

I think I’d rather have that on my T shirt than I Think Therefore I Am.

Meanwhile, if you haven’t read Damasio on Descartes, have a look. It’s what many of us instinctively know, with added science. There is no split.

Never trust a man with a wind-up child.