Nathan Fielder has been called a great many things lately. Some brand him a stark-raving madman. They don’t see how a sane person could produce the things Fielder does. Others see him as a visionary. A creative mind so far ahead of his peers that the bleeding edge of entertainment lies miles behind where he stands. This discussion arises from Fielder’s newest creation: The Rehearsal. The Rehearsal is, by all metrics, an excellent piece of entertainment. and the many who call it “boundary-pushing” are not incorrect. But the key ingredient that makes The Rehearsal such a compelling piece of media lies in the influence of none other than René Descartes.
In the days of yore, the average human person did very little thinking. Most people lived lives that were rather short, very dirty, and not at all enjoyable in almost any way. In fact, this still held true in the 1600s, the Century of Descartes. This period of time is referred to by some as The General Crisis due to just how awful it was to be alive around then. But one man stood against this seemingly insurmountable tide of misery. And that was the petite little Frenchman René Descartes.
Descartes lived in an era where nobody drank water and not one person loved or was loved by their neighbor. In truth, it is surprising that Descartes even survived to adulthood. In his time, it was not uncommon for children to be used as doorstops due to frequent shortages of wood. Miraculously, this one brave French child outwitted the world around him for he had discovered a secret that had been forgotten since the times of those old, toga-clad philosophers of antiquity: the secret of Thought.
Modern Thinkers, themselves the far-removed disciples of Descartes, agree that Thoughts eluded humanity for some time. The general consensus is that, with the advent of such cultural touchstones as dirt-eating and being piss drunk for thirty-eight hours a day, thoughts were simply doomed to obscurity for many centuries.
It is almost certain that his ability to Think was what kept Descartes alive and well. But as Descartes grew older and developed more thinking tendons and ligaments in his skull, he began to realize that not every thought he had was true. Indeed, the knowledge that he accumulated, the thoughts that entered and left his mind at all times, there was no guarantee that even a single one of them was true. For every thought that entered his pretty little head, there was room for that most despicable beast: doubt. It was through this grand revelation that Descartes penned his seminal work, Discourse on Method.
In Discourse on Method, Descartes describes how he uses doubt as a tool to find truth. The rule that he follows in his reasoning is “never to accept anything as true that [he] did not plainly know to be such.” To Descartes, there is no difference between believing a certain falsehood and believing an idea that you can cast any doubt on. The possibility for an idea to be doubted calls into question its veracity. Therefore, he resolves to only rely on “what presented itself to [his] mind so clearly and so distinctly that [he] had no occasion to call it in doubt.” These clear and distinct ideas are ideas that are self-evident and free from any doubt.
So, when in the process of examining ideas that can be doubted, Descartes finds that by relying only on these truths can he make sound judgements on other ideas. Essentially, since his basis for his judgements is without doubt, then the things judged on that basis can be believed without reservation. In this process of searching for truth, Descartes also notes three things that must be distrusted: our senses, beliefs that others teach to us, and our experiences of reality. For our senses, Descartes says to distrust them since they “sometimes deceive us.” We cannot always trust our senses, so we must doubt anything they report to our minds. For beliefs taught by others, Descartes remarks that since “there are men who make mistakes in their reasoning,” he must doubt “all the reasonings [he] had previously taken for demonstrations.” Since it is certain that others sometimes make errors in reasoning, we cannot trust what others have taught us either.
Finally, he also distrusts his experiences of reality since it is possible that “all the things that had ever entered [his] mind were no more true than the illusions of [his] dreams.” It is impossible to distinguish experiences in a dream from experiences in reality. The reality we perceive could be a dream and there would be know way of knowing for sure. So, we must also not trust our experiences of it.
This use of doubt as a tool lead Descartes to present the world with his Great and Most Certainly True Truth. To Descartes, this was: je pense, donc je suis. To some, it is: cogito, ergo sum. But to most of us, the Thinkers of the Modern World, this truth is: I think, therefore I am. And it was all through the use of that most fundamental tool: doubt. Doubt is what Descartes sought to conquer. And, by God, nobody can say that he did not give doubt a right thrashing with that cogito business. Little did Descartes know, as he could only experience his own present time and not ours, that just short of four hundred years later another true Thinker would rise and continue his legacy.
The Rehearsal is, at bottom, the world’s first Cartesian television show. To understand why, well, we will have to do a little thinking! I jest. I will spell it out in words so that you need only read them and absorb the knowledge they are designed to impart. And then you may draw your own conclusions. But even that bit of thinking is optional.
The Rehearsal is a simple concept on its surface. Nathan Fielder presents lucky participants with the opportunity to rehearse a coming situation they know they will find themselves in. Let us take the first episode as our example. In Orange Juice, No Pulp, Fielder finds a man who has been lying to his friends about his educational background for many years. This man wants to come clean to one of his friends, but is uncertain how the encounter will go and what exactly he should say.
Fielder aims to alleviate this man’s suffering. He spends days gathering a multitude of information on the man, his friend, the location that this lie will be revealed in. And in spectacular fashion, he constructs a perfect replica of the bar where the man hopes to confess and hires several actors to play the parts of all parties involved.
Simple. Elegant. Entertaining. But what lies beneath the surface? What is the goal of this “rehearsal?” Nathan Fielder has found the perfect way to help others by ridding their minds of the one things that can tear their thoughts asunder. I am speaking, of course, of doubt. Fielder creates a place where his guests can find all traces of doubt and stamp them out. They can live out any situation any number of times and any number of ways. And by the end of it, when they find themselves in reality, they have no doubts. Their Thinking Organs are gliding smoothly; twisting and writhing in perfect harmony.
The Rehearsal is the newer, shinier, and less French version of Discourse on Method. Fielder presents us with doubt in the same way: as a tool. A thing to be found and trounced to discover the clear and distinct truths that we would not be able to find without its help. And in the end, Fielder’s rehearsals can allow one to truly conquer doubt. Indeed, it appears that Descartes’s “Doubt Method” may have met its match with the “Fielder Method.”
So, dear reader, if you now see someone claiming that Fielder is a madman wreaking havoc on our television screens, just ask yourself this question: “Are they certain about that?”
