Monty Python did a song about famous philosophers that included the lines:
Réne Descartes was a drunken old fart,
I drink therefore I am!
Now the real truth has been brought to light by that brilliant scholar of the great thinkers of the West, Frédéric Pagès. Monsieur Pagès, better known today for his championing of the thought of the forgotten philosopher, Jean-Baptiste Botul, wrote this book, Descartes et le cannabis: Pourquoi partir en Hollande in 1996. All of France was celebrating the 400th birthday of the man who started modern philosophy, the one who coined its most famous proposition: cogito ergo sum [I think, therefore I am.]
Well, what he should have said is, I think, therefore I know that I am, but that’s a trifle. Of course, how does the I know that it knows, before the I has determined that it knows that it, the I, is? Pretty obscure.
Pagès brings light to this dark murk by applying the Cartesian method to the mystery of why the most French of philosophers lived most of his adult life in Holland. And why did this man change his residence practically every year? The answer: cannabis. Descartes was a dealer and toker. Amsterdam is the place to be for that.
This explains so many things.
Nice. I was recently wondering what effect opium had on 19C philosophy, and how much was it responsible for the late 19C descent into mysticism?
Don’t know. It certainly had an effect on English literature!
I never got around to editing my definitive anthology of opiated 19th century literature that I contemplated in younger days…
I think therefore I have the munchies?
I don’t see this going anywhere.
A most plausible hypothesis. This would certainly explain why he could even think that we can’t tell if we’re dreaming or not. What he should have written is hallucinating.
IK
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