FIRST AID ON DESCARTES IN TWO SECTIONS

This represents a first introduction to the philosophy of Descartes which I completed independent of the second introduction which follows. When taken together, I am confident that they will give you a firmer grasp of the philosopher's achievements and importance.

"How do you know?"  "What do I know?"

I

Unable to tolerate uncertainty and adverse to the modern scientific method of induction from probability, Descartes (1596-1650) is nevertheless considered the founder of modern philosophy, being the first "philosopher" whose outlook was profoundly affected by the new physics and astronomy of Copernicus and Galileo. While it is true he ended up accepting much of medieval scholasticism, he started from entirely different principles (Je pense, donc je suis) than the scholastics did, and he endeavoured to construct his philosophy from the ground up. His importance in the history of ideas stems from his articulation of a dualistic notion of being. That is, he expressed in philosophical terms an idea with which all moderns are familiar: the thinking self, the mind, one's very identity is an entity that is separate from the body. The self persists while all the molecules of the body are subject to the forces of physics, are destroyed, and recreated. We have an "I" that endures throughout time, no matter what happens to the body.

This DUALISM was applied to the creation and it was said that the soul is an entity separate from the body, which endures eternally, an idea that was taken up eagerly by the Church as Aristotle's old categories of causation began to seem implausible and moldy. (But note that the scholastic idea that the host is "accidentally" bread but "substantively" Jesus's flesh, is directly out of medieval Aristotelism.)

Descartes' "modern" idea that the individual is composed of a self apart from the incidents of his body requires a modern idea of the individual. Earlier in Europe (and perhaps still so in other parts of the world), one was whatever one was born to be--peasant, cobbler, townsperson, noble, woman--and the notion that one was also an individual apart from one's place in society was incomprehensible (i.e., not a familiar category). It is only the moderns, and perhaps only the post-romantic moderns (i.e. post-Rousseau), who believe that an individual has a self and a "personality" apart from the body and different from the personality of all others.

This is not to say that our ancestors were socially immobile; poor people became rich; and townspeople were able to make their way. But the distinction we make between outward appearance/circumstances and inner self--"I am somebody!" is not a distinction made by earlier cultures. All historical generalizations provoke debate: for qualifications about the modernity of individualism, see for example, Alan Macfarlane The Origins of English Individualism (Cambridge, 1978). Macfarlane dates "individualism" from England, rather than Europe, circa 1400.)

As "modernism" and the idea of the individual developed in the Renaissance, there developed a rejection of categorizations of scholasticism and the Church and State. Descartes expressed this rejection in his notion that mind and body were totally separate--so separate that only God held them together. But Descartes was accepted by the Church because he found that God is an idea universally held, and the soul is a type of the mind. This idea is still found in Church theology where the soul is held to be the "intellectual" mind.

But though most of us think of the self as a unique entity, entirely divorced from the body, a little thought suggests this is not true. Many now concur that the self, the "personality," is limited in its reaches by the physical matter of the brain, by the hormones of one's sexuality, and (more subtly) by the experiences the flesh undergoes. A person born with a small mental capacity (e.g. a brain whose I.Q. is "only" 85), will never become a complex thinker because his brain does not have the ability to think complex thoughts. This is so because his "gray matter," the physical cells of his brain, is limited.

But the Cartesian system answers to our present-day human psychology (one feels separate from one's body) and Church doctrine (the soul is immortal even if the body isn't; and the soul cannot control the body--until God intervenes--because they are of two entirely different substances). Thus, Descartes brought to completion the dualism of mind and matter which began with Plato (but is not in Aristotle) and was developed by Christian theologians. Animals have no mind and are completely made up of material forces. But humans do, and the mind can be studied without reference to matter. This is an almost entirely new idea--that the body does not move the mind--but it is so familiar to moderns that evidence is sometimes ignored which renders it dubious. Descartes, watered down, is immensely popular. Popular usage claims that "The mind is free"; " 'I' didn't mean to do it"; "I was drunk" (and "my body made me do it.") And it is common to believe (unlike our ancestors) that the body does not define the "self." We believe Richard III's humpback does not show his evil character; and black skin does not mean a person is "born" to be a slave.

Finally, and unlike its popular version, Cartesianism is rigidly deterministic (and thus ultimately appealed to the Calvinists). Living organisms, just as much as dead matter, are governed by the laws of physics. There is no longer needed, as in Aristotelian philosophy, a "soul" to explain the movements of animals.

It is generally agreed that Descartes' philosophy was dubious, but he was the source of later, more logical attempts to understand mind, and he popularized the idea (which was the basis of the observations of the new physics and astronomy) that philosophy cannot ground itself on pre-existing stories (the Fall of Adam and Eve) or unexamined first premises (the world was created; God exists; man has free will; the sun goes around the earth); let alone "prove" propositions through these stories (as even Montaigne and Machiavelli do). In short, he is the first "modern" philosopher.

II

From Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford, 1995):

Rene Descartes (1596-1650) is the father of modern philosophy, and one of the greatest of all thinkers . . . Descartes' early work in mathematics and science produced ground-breaking theories, methods, and tools still in use today. . . . Not only were philosophy and science intertwined in Descartes' life; so were philosophy and religion. The Church of Rome found Galileo guilty of heresy in 1633; two decades earlier Copernicus' theories about the universe had been denounced as blasphemous. To avoid such accusations Descartes clothed his views about the relation between God and humanity, and about the nature of the universe in a philosophical garb acceptable for the Church. His most famous project was the exploration of the foundations of human knowledge, starting from the proof of one's own existence offered in the formula Cogito ergo sum, "I am thinking therefore I am." This was not intended as an exercise in philosophical skepticism, but rather to provide Descartes' scientific theories, influenced as they were by Copernicus and Galileo, with metaphysical legitimation.

Gaukroger surveys myths that sprang up around Descartes. Was he, for example, always accompanied by a mechanical life-sized female doll, constructed "to show that animals are only machines and have no souls." Did he name the doll after his illegitimate daughter Francine from whom it could not be distinguished? Descartes and his doll were supposedly inseparable. A sea-captain opened the trunk in which the doll resided while the philosopher was asleep. He dragged the mechanical monstrosity from its box and threw her overboard. Inquiring minds want to know whether she put up a struggle. This is a myth, full of sexual innuendo, circulated by those who believed, during the eighteenth century, that Descartes believed that man was merely a machine.

In Animal Revolution (Oxford, 1989), Richard Ryder claims that Descartes alienated his wife by experimenting on the family dog. This story seems to have been true about another philosopher, Claude Bernard.

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The following observations are primarily prompted by (and taken from) Bernard Williams' entry on Descartes in The Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (New York, 1967) but I have drawn freely on other sources such as Geoffrey Sutton's Science for a Polite Society (Boulder, 1995), Gaukroger's Descartes, and Alexander Koyre's From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore, 1957).

One of the founders of modern thought and among the most original philosophers and mathematicians of any age.  (Williams)

Yet it is often hard to know precisely what Descartes meant or intended in his writings, despite his commitment to "clear and simple ideas." Readers have always disagreed about the implications of his ideas which he restated differently in different places. Descartes' "egocentric" approach has proved deeply influential as a starting point for subsequent philosophers, although his scientific theories suffered from his rationalistic and deductive method. He believed that an intellectual conception of matter cannot be derived from the senses nor represented in images. Descartes was, however, deeply interested in the physical world and examined animal specimens which he acquired in butchers' shops. Unlike Newton, he did not construct a satisfactory explanation of natural phenomena. Yet Descartes' discovery, announced obliquely in his Geometry (1637), how curvilinear--i.e. three-dimensional-- motion could be registered in coordinate geometry, is still commemorated in the phrase "Cartesian coordinates." The conventions of notation that he introduced (a, b, c, for known quantities, x, y, z, for unknown) remain a commonplace of mathematical discourse.

Remarkably, for a rationalist, Descartes seems to have derived his philosophical inspiration from a series of dreams he experienced on 10 November, 1619. (Indeed, Einstein took inspiration from dreams.) After exhausting himself on solitary walks, Descartes attained a state of delirium and fell asleep. In his first dream he was oppressed by terrifying phantoms and whirlwinds, and took refuge by a chapel where he was offered a melon by a stranger. In his bed, Descartes turned from his left side (demonic?) to his right. In his next dream he heard thunder and saw sparks. The third dream introduced him to an encyclopaedia or dictionary (which changed shape) and a volume of poems in which he chanced upon the words Quod vitae sectabor iter? (What road in life shall I follow?) A stranger entered and gave him some verses beginning with the words est et non. Descartes saw some copperplate portraits in the book. Man and book disappear. In the dream itself Descartes sees the dictionary as a representation of all the sciences; he believes, however, that

poets are divinely inspired. He wakes and views est et non as a Pythagorean version of the search leading to truth from error.

In his Discourse on Method (1637) Descartes recalls the date but does not discuss the dreams, preferring a more mundane explanation of his "foundations of a marvelous science":

And therefore I thought that since the sciences contained in books--at least those based upon merely probable rather than demonstrative reasoning--are made up and but together bit by bit from the opinions of many different people, it never comes as close to the truth as the simple reasoning which a man of good sense naturally makes whatever he comes across.

It was to truth discovered by simple reasoning that Descartes thereafter dedicated himself, however idiosyncratically he pursued it.

In the Discourse on Method--with which Descartes prefaced the Geometry, the Dioptric, and the Meteors--the philosopher announces four rules for his method:

The first of these was to accept nothing as true which I did not clearly recognize to be so: that is to say, carefully to avoid precipitation and prejudice in judgement, and to accept nothing more than was presented to my mind so clearly and distinctly that I could have no occasion to doubt it.

The second was to divide up each of the difficulties which I examined into as many parts as possible, and as seemed requisite for it to be resolved in the best manner possible.

The third was to carry on my reflections in due order, beginning with the objects that were the most simple to understand, in order to rise little by little, or by degrees, to knowledge of the most complex, assuming an order, even if a fictitious one, among those which do not follow a natural sequence relative to one another.

The last was in all cases to make enumerations so complete and so general that I should be certain of having omitted nothing.

"Taken by themselves," Williams concedes, "these rules are so general, and several of their key terms so vague, that they provide little positive guidance."  The German philosopher Leibniz sneered that Descartes' vaunted rules could be summarized as "Take what you need, and do what you should, and you will get what you want."

Descartes preferred to write in French rather than in the international scholarly language of Latin so that his ideas would circulate more freely and be intelligible to ordinary readers.

Descartes was fascinated (like many of his contemporaries) by the possibility of an ideal language which would register the world perfectly and which would eliminate the sin of lying. Yet he was always alarmed by the possibility of a "demon" who might betray his thinking. God, by contrast, was a deus verax upon whose will "eternal truths" (2+2=4) depend. Upon trying to justify what seemed obvious, Descartes, however, runs into all kinds of philosophical difficulties.

Descartes' drive towards mathesis universalis--the universal certitude that mathematics as a paradigm of knowledge would confer--contrasts oddly with his supposed skepticism. In the Discourse Descartes disclosed what he took as his epistemological bedrock:

I noticed that while I was trying to think everything false, it must needs be that I, who was thinking this, was something. And observing that this truth, I am thinking, therefore I exist [Je pense, donc je suis; Latin version, cogito ergo sum] was so solid and secure that the most extravagant suppositions of the skeptics could not overthrow it, I judged that I need not scruple to accept it as the first principle of [the] philosophy that I was seeking.

Descartes' remarkable blend of epistemological doubt and philosophical/scientific certainty resulted in a series of propositions about mind and matter, the soul and the body, the material world and God, that tantalized (and infuriated) his contemporaries--and took the philosophical (if not the scientific) world by storm. Yet was Descartes merely taking some cues from St. Augustine as many of his correspondents suggested?

In 1641 Descartes agreed with Andreas Colvius, one of those correspondents, that the cogito could be found in Augustine:

I find that it is employed to prove the certitude of our being, and further to show that there is some image of the Trinity in us . . . in place of the use that I made of it in order to show that this I, which thinks, is an immaterial substance, which has nothing corporeal about it.

Indeed Descartes was encouraged in his philosophical explorations by Cardinal Berulle, a Father from the Oratorian order which was deeply influenced by St. Augustine.

In thinking about God (and in trying to reconcile God with the cogito) Descartes was deeply influenced by the scholastic approaches of medieval philosophers (who followed Aristotle, a figure whom Descartes endeavored to supplant). In this regard, Descartes was old-fashioned. He knew, however, that he would be suspected of atheism and chose to live in tolerant, Protestant Holland rather than in Catholic France. Descartes avoided theological debate and aligned himself with Catholicism, but his ideas were particularly popular with Calvinists. Whether Descartes was (or was not) an atheist is still debated. Certainly the "verbal difficulties" (his term) which he himself acknowledged facing when proving the existence of God represent one of the murkiest regions of his philosophy.

Certainly Descartes' division of the world into mind (or soul) and the res extensa of matter in mechanical motion attracted suspicion. It also led to all kinds of philosophical conundrums. How can an immaterial mind operate on a material body? Descartes argued that man, uniquely, has a pineal gland in the brain that transmits messages from mind to body. In fact, other animals also have this gland, as Descartes did not know. For him, animals were merely another kind of a machine--a proposition that attracted much philosophical hostility and literary merriment. Animals may not have souls but only an oddball philosopher could think that they were machines, devoid of feeling, like clocks or automata! It was suspected, probably wrongly, that Descartes believed that people are also machines. (This was argued by eighteenth century French atheists like La Mettrie and d'Holbach.)

Descartes' basic question is "What do I know?" but he only used skepticism as a way of addressing that question. He was not, finally, a skeptic but employed skepticism as an instrument of analysis. He needed to believe in God as the answer to where he himself came from. Descartes knew that he had not existed from all eternity, but he could not believe that he had merely been created by his parents. They too would have had the idea of God implanted in them, so we return ultimately to the creative power of God.

Descartes symbolizes the philosophical tensions of the seventeenth century. On the one hand, normal experience reveals the place of contingency and limitation. On the other, many philosophers came to see the powers of the rational mind as virtually limitless.

Descartes' rationalism tempted him into some odd views of the real world. He had an excessively geometrical view of matter. He did not believe in atoms (although he used atomistic forms of explanation). The world was a plenum not a void. Descartes' "Tree of Knowledge" was rooted in metaphysics rather than empiricism. A "will-to-power" impelled Descartes to explain everything.

To explain stability in the cosmological world Descartes contrived the theory of vortices which surround fixed stars, limit each other, and prevent each other from spreading and dissolving under the influence of centrifugal force. If vortices were limited in number and therefore in extension, first the outermost ones and then all the others would be dispersed and dissipated. The word that Descartes used for his celestial "whirlpools"--tourbillons--was the same word that he had used to describe the first of his famous dreams of 1619: "I dreamed I was caught by a whirlwind which tried to push me over." Cartesian cosmology, though fanciful, remained influential in France. The Dutch scientist Christian Huygens dismissed Descartes' theories as "ce roman de la physique," that is, as no better than a fantasy. Newton's cosmology, by contrast, represented a conjunction of abstract thought and painstaking observation.

The full titles of Descartes' Meditations suggests the scope and complexity of the problems with which he was grappling: Meditations on First Philosophy, in which the Existence of God and the Real Distinction between Mind and Body are Demonstrated (Paris, 1641) and Meditations on First Philosophy, in which the Existence of God and the Immortality of the Soul are Demonstrated (Amsterdam, 1642).

Descartes was a highly controversial figure in his own time and the meaning and implications of his rationalism were as vigorously debated then as they are now.