“Divide each difficulty into as many parts as necessary to solve it”

Honesty above all. What I had in my hands last Sunday afternoon while reading on the balcony of my house was not the ‘Discourse on method’ of Rene Descartesbut ‘Jotadé’a (highly recommended) novel by Santiago Díaz. At a given moment in the story, however, one of its characters quotes one of the French philosopher’s maxims. He does not do so by sticking to literality or with the high epistemological purpose that his author wanted to give him in the 17th century, but there were Descartes’ words with all their burden of common sense:

“Divide each difficulty into as many parts as necessary to solve it”.

In the novel, the protagonist’s father, a troubled police officer, shares this reflection with his son at a time when everything seems to be going uphill for him. It is unlikely that when Descartes he wrote itfour centuries ago, did it thinking about life advice or bestsellers police, but the truth is that it fits into the novel just as well as it does into his philosophical treatise.

Doubting everything

Back in 1637, Descartes asked himself one of those impossible questions that seem condemned to dead ends: How can I be sure of the certainty of what I consider ‘true’? Are we humans doomed surrounded by doubts, without reliable handholds to lean on? How do I know that what I judge ‘real’ is not a deception of my senses, an erroneous idea that I have assumed to be true?

To get out of such epistemological quagmire the philosopher made a curious movement. He used doubt against doubt itself. He assumed that he only had access to his own mind and confirmed the obvious: that he was in doubt. Then he pulled the thread to formulate what is probably his most famous phrase: “Cogito ergo sum”which is usually translated as “I think, therefore I am” or “I am because I think.”

Another way of putting it is that if there is anything undoubtable, it is the act of doubting itself.

In words from Descartes himself:

“Considering that the same thoughts that we have when awake can come to us when we sleep, without there being any true ones in that state, I pretended that all the things that had entered my spirit were no truer than the illusions of my dreams.”

“But I realized that, while I wanted to think in this way that everything is false, it was necessary that I, who thought it, be something. And observing that this truth ‘I think, therefore I am’ was so firm and so certain that the most extravagant assumptions of the skeptics were not capable of undermining it, I judged that I could admit it as the first principle of the philosophy I sought.”

At that point, how to move forward? How to continue collecting valid knowledge? To get out of this new quagmire, Descartes, philosopher, mathematician and physicist, had a bigger idea: he developed the so-called ‘Cartesian method’.

His system encourages us to carry skepticism as our flag and proposes a series of steps that are as valid for working in a laboratory as they are for facing personal problems such as those that concern Jotadé in Díaz’s novel.

What steps are those?

We quote back to Descartes.

“The first consisted of not admitting anything as true without having known with evidence that it was so. That is to say, to avoid haste and to admit nothing more than what presented itself so clearly and distinctly to my mind that I had no reason to doubt it.“.

“The second, to divide each of the difficulties to be examined into as many parts as possible and necessary for its best solution.“.

“The third, in conducting my thoughts in order, starting with the simplest and easiest to know objects, to ascend little by little, gradually, to the knowledge of the most complex and even assuming an order among those that do not precede each other.”

“And the last, to make in everything such complete enumerations and such extensive revisions, that one would be sure of not having omitted anything.“.

Descartes basically encourages relying only on logical analysis or (even worse) relying on authority as an infallible source. What it invites us to do is to resort to observation and experimentation, to cultivate the methodical doubt and be thorough in pursuing knowledge. Its four rules are a valuable guide to develop critical thinking, but its application is not limited there.

This was claimed a few years ago by the writer and professor Shaunta Grimes in an article published in Mediumin which he focuses precisely on the second step of Descartes’ method, the one that encourages us to divide problems.

“The phrase alludes to his method of evaluating the logic of a statement, but its applications are much broader,” clarify Grimes. In his opinion, Descartes also offers a guide for facing problems that seem unsolvable.

The tactic is very simple: think of a problem that worries you. Then think about how you can solve it. Complicated, right? But… What if you cut it apart? The challenge as a whole may seem insurmountable, but it is likely that it is actually a sum of smaller problems. If we can divide it into as many parts as possible, just like a big puzzlewe will surely find a first piece that will no longer seem so complicated.

We exchange a seemingly unsolvable whole for manageable parts.

Grimes illustrates it with an example. Imagine that a friend confesses to you that he is not feeling well. The logical thing would be to ask: “Why?” He may respond that he misses a family member, that he hasn’t played sports for a while, that he hasn’t slept much in recent weeks, or that he feels frustrated at work.

Among these ‘pieces’ there are some that are relatively easy to deal with (if you sleep little you can go to bed earlier), others may not be so easy, but even in those cases they can break down into other minor problems.

For example, why do you feel frustrated at work? Perhaps because you consider that you do not earn enough or because that promotion that you have been dreaming of for years does not come. And why don’t you promote? Maybe because the last time a position was vacant it was assigned to a colleague with more languages, a master’s degree that you do not have or who had previously achieved certain objectives.

There we would have another specific point to pull from.

Descartes himself encourages us to think “with order”starting with “the simplest” to gradually ascend towards more complex goals. It also invites us to be rigorous, go back over what we have done and review the path.

It is scientific method.

It is material for bestsellers of the 21st century.

And it is a valuable guide for facing problems.

Images | Wikipedia and Robert Ruggiero (Unsplash)

In Xataka | 2,000 years ago Epicurus had already understood the secret of pleasure: “Nothing is enough for those who have enough is little.”