Hello Everyone! So I was sorting through my stuff and I found this short (and slighly informal) essay that I did for a class two years ago. It was better than I ever remember it being, so I have decided to post it here! It is comparing the movie "The Waking Life" to the Basic Philosophy of Rene Descartes. If you have not seen "The Waking Life," I highly recommend it, as it is very clever and it just blew my mind! Anyways without further ado, here is the essay!
Rene Descartes: Time to Wake up!
In the movie the Waking life, the question of reality is the main focus. The movie also poses the question of whether or not we are in a dream. That is the point that I will focus on.
Many philosophers have pondered the question of reality. One of the philosophers that asked himself that question was Rene Descartes. When Descartes was trying to find a solid base for his philosophical thought, he realized that reality might not be what it appears to be. He realized that this could all just be a dream and that none of this could be real. He then related back to the story of the Chuang-tzu dreaming he was a butterfly. The Chuang-tzu thought that maybe he was not a Chuang-tzu dreaming of being a butterfly but the other way around! Descartes then concluded that we could not trust our senses because they could be showing us something imaginary, which is typical rationalist behavior. In the movie, it states that we have a constant perspective in both our dreams and the waking life. However, to Descartes this would have meant nothing. On the contrary, the movie takes an existential point of view and says that nothing in our world is nothing because everything is something.
So now Descartes is totally in denial, thinking that we are just in a dream and nothing is real and he can’t trust anything. The movie states that all humans are drawn toward chaos and dread but the media exaggerates the tragedies and makes us passively accept them. In Descartes’ lifetime, there was not much media because they only just invented the printing press. Because of this, humans were more drawn to chaos and dread. So even thought he did not like to think in this way, Descartes was just an ordinary person who was drawn to chaos and dread as well. But this doesn’t help Descartes one bit because he needs to find something reliable to base his theories on.
So then, when Descartes was in the depths of despair, thinking all was nothing, he realized that he had one thing. He could think, and because he was thinking he existed! Hence, the saying, “I think therefore I am.” Which is much more comforting to Descartes then the slogan of the waking life “Dream = Destiny”.
“God’s Guarantee” is Descartes way of saying that whatever we perceive with reason also corresponds to reality. Therefore, he probably would not like the idea of combining our rational abilities with our infinite dreaming abilities because then reality might be a dream.
Descartes agreed with the movie finally when he says that when we dream it feels like we are experiencing reality.
Descartes also agrees with the movie when it goes on to say that time is just a matter of repeating instants. However, this is they yet again go off into different directions. The movie clearly states that time is just an illusion. Time is just one instant and in that one instant, we are asked if we want to carry on into eternity. Life is us constantly saying no and death is us finally saying yes. Descartes would not have agreed because he thinks that God constantly recreates humans and that time is just the measurement of this recreation. This is similar to the theory posed in the movie about us just being a reoccurring dream character.
One Character in the movie brought up the point that we cannot live life and examine it at the same time. This would probably be the reason why Descartes spent half of his day in bed thinking.
Therefore, Rene Descartes had many different views and he was the founder of modern philosophy. Nevertheless, the movie the waking life really made me think and think in different ways than before. It explores new ideas and not all of the ideas I fully follow, or agree with but it really ties together everything that we have learned. As for the question of reality, well all we can really do is question it as all the great philosophers have because it really is an unanswerable question.
