Welcome to the Cartesian Club!

Rene Descartes (1596-1650), French philosopher, was well known in his time as a natural scientist, but is often remembered today for his contributions to mathematics and philosophy. He is specially known for a certain method for arriving at truth.

Descartes prescribed a method of reasoning that began with simple premises, which are then built up by a series of inferences to arrive at more complex truths. Anyone armed with this method could arrive at truth faster and more certainly than the most intelligent who sought truth haphazardly.

My take on Descartes is that his method allows us to infer a lot with very little. I freely put this as the "art and science of judging a book by its cover".

Now I exaggerate: one can't really claim to read a book by not reading it. But the point is that much can be inferred from simple truths.

Thus, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Newton arrived at the theory of gravitation from contemplating a falling apple, and Einstein the theory of relativity from a thought experiment involving a dude in an elevator holding a flashlight that produced a stream of light that he assumed had a constant speed at all times. Thus also have men have set out on the path to greatness from nothing more than a contemplation of some footprints in the snow. The road to greatness is often long, and uncompromisingly disciplined, but most of all, filled with adventure.

I marvel at such simplicity.

Descartes, however, is just the head of a group of five sources of insights that together best describe my philosophy in life. The other four are:

1) Melinda S. Meade (Medical Geography as Human Ecology), who suggested that health was the result of interactions between the three dimensions of population, environment and culture--demography and biology, habitat and geography, behavior and traditions. William McNeill (Plagues and Peoples), Bryan Sykes (The Seven Daughters of Eve), and other "big picture" thinkers echo the same idea when they urge that biology significantly enriches, and sometimes radically alters, the conclusions we make from a study of the social sciences.

2) My uncle, Lubin Nepomuceno, a very successful corporate executive of a big multinational, who believed that to succeed in corporate life you must think that "you work for your boss, not your company".

3) Pope Benedict VI (Spe Salvi) who taught that lasting hope is not hope in "some thing", such as wealth or knowledge, which always grows stale, but in Some One. My cousin Jeannie Hizon Myron, who's more adventurous than myself and is an example of just this kind of hope, once wrote me: "If God brings you to it, He'll bring you through it."

4) My beloved teacher, the late Prof. Concepcion Dadufalza (1922-2004), whose mastery of the English language was matched only by her wisdom, and who taught me that "Boredom is a Choice." Prof. Dadufalza's legacy agrees with what another icon of mine, Jacques Barzun (The House of Intellect), once wrote: that the state of the mother tongue is an index of our control over our destiny.

Five insights. One adventurous life.

Welcome to the Club!