Descartes begins his Meditations by noting the worry that he may have many undetected false opinions, and that these falsities might cause his scientific proceedings to be built on unfirm foundations. In fact, we reject Ivan Karamazov’s view that if God didn’t exist, then everything would be permitted because this assumes that the only reason for being good is that Someone above is watching, and if we’re bad will punish us. We should never accept our lot in life because contentment makes us lose heart and retire from the battle. Modern philosophy is then an attempt at reorienting ourselves to living in a new mental, emotional, and psychological landscape, with everything we had ever known, felt safe with, and were certain about suddenly gone and having to make our own way forward, alone. Individualism can also be understood as a reaction to dogmatism and authority. The natural response to this worry is to appeal to something like the uniformity of nature (the view that things tend to operate the same way at different times across all of nature). In 1972, I was asked to give an appreciative talk on modern philosophy at our high school’s Arts and Humanities Festival. When can my position, role, image, or “best interests” take over my life? The German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was one of the intellectual powerhouses of his day, not only developing a highly systematic philosophy, but also making pioneering developments in nearly every academic discipline (he invented a form of calculus simultaneously with Newton). For if on the Last Day this person found himself before the Judgment Seat of the Almighty, the Lord would simply look into his heart and, seeing his sincerity, beckon him into Heaven, for the Lord wouldn’t be the Lord if he weren’t more open-minded than this poor erring creature who had only followed his conscience and thought he was doing right! This world would be an unbearable nightmare if, after so much suffering and struggle to lead a good life, everything ended in the grave! Other properties (termed 'secondary qualities'), such as colors and sounds, merely reduce to the capacity of objects to produce ideas of colors and sounds in us via their primary qualities. In brief, Descartes saw no way that such a pure, non-sensory idea of something unlike anything else in our experience could have its source in anything less than God. The make sure that he would not someday be subject to a similar reproach, Descartes conceived of a simple yet powerful method for 'cleaning out' his beliefs: he would find the possible grounds for doubt he could, use those grounds to dissuade himself of as many beliefs as possible, and then only re-form beliefs that survived the most stringent examinations. Unlike Descartes or Spinoza, Leibniz did not believe that it is possible for us to attain perfect certainly about the existence of the external world or the reliability of our senses. The riddle of life would not come pre-interpreted for them to save them the trouble of becoming adults, but would be born afresh in each of them to find their own meaning as thinking, searching, and inquisitive beings. But the irony of it was that Nietzsche’s contemporaries hadn’t yet realized what had happened or what it portended for religious belief. Living life deeply, intensely, and reflectively is all that matters; experiencing as much of this life as we can, since the secret of life resides in the moment; loving this life no matter what happens; facing it head-on, not running from it, not sugar-coating it, but affirming it in all its confusion and turmoil, the good and the bad, embracing its mystery wherever it leads. If this little exercise starts to change your sensibility, you’re beginning to understand modern philosophy.

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