Descartes

The Project of Pure Enquiry

Bernard Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138132085
• eBook ISBN: 9781317601296
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Descartes has often been called the 'father of modern philosophy'. His attempts to find foundations for knowledge, and to reconcile the existence of the soul with the emerging science of his time, are among the most influential and widely studied in the history of philosophy. This is a classic and challenging introduction to Descartes by one of the most distinguished modern philosophers. Bernard Williams not only analyzes Descartes' project of founding knowledge on certainty, but uncovers the philosophical motives for his search. With acute insight, he demonstrates how Descartes' Meditations are not merely a description but the very enactment of philosophical thought and discovery. Williams covers all of the key areas of Descartes' thought, including God, the will, the possibility of knowledge, and the mind and its place in nature. He also makes profound contributions to the theory of knowledge, metaphysics and philosophy generally.

With a new foreword by John Cottingham.

1

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DESCARTES

René Descartes was born on 31 March 1596 in a small town near Tours, now called la-Haye-Descartes, where the house of his birth can still be seen. His family belonged to the lesser nobility, his father and his elder brother both being magistrates at the High Court of Brittany at Rennes. His mother died in childbirth a year after he was born, and he said that he inherited from her a dry cough and a pale complexion, and for a long time he feared that he would die young. In 1604 he entered the Jesuit college of la Fléche at Anjou, which had been opened only that year. The Rector knew his family, and he was allowed his own room and to get up when he liked. The spirit of the school was intellectually more open than in most. Though Galileo had not then become the centre of controversy he was to become later, it is significant that a poem was declaimed there on 6 June 1611 in celebration of Galileo’s discovery of the moons of Jupiter. Though Descartes, as he said, found little real knowledge in what he was taught except in mathematics, he was well disposed to the Jesuits, and the marked tendency he showed throughout his life to conciliate the Church expressed itself in the case of the Society with signs of genuine respect and gratitude. He left la Flèche in 1614, and took a Baccalauréat and a Licence in law at Poitiers in November 1616.

In 1618, wanting, he says, to see the world of practical affairs, he joined at his own expense an army led by Maurice of Nassau, son of William the Silent. It was a travelling rather than a military undertaking, and he was not involved in action. In 1618–19 he was in friendly association with Isaac Beeckman, eight years older than himself, who was a doctor of medicine from Caen. Descartes said that Beeckman had woken him up to scientific questions, and he dedicated to him a small treatise on music which he completed in 1618. He travelled in Germany. On 10 November 1619 there occurred a significant event, perhaps at Ulm. In a poêle, or stove- heated room, he had some intellectual vision of a mathematical science, and the same night had three dreams, which revealed to him, as he interpreted them, a destiny to create a scientia mirabilis. He made a vow to Our Lady of Loreto to make a pilgrimage to her shrine, which he later did.¹ The exact nature of the daytime intellectual vision is not clear, but he formed in this period aims of clarifying the basic ideas and notation of algebra (Descartes invented the modern notation for powers), and of developing the relations of algebra and geometry, which was to issue in his laying the foundations of analytical geometry; and also the wider project of unifying all sciences of quantity under mathematics (the eventual form of this last project in Descartes’s hands we shall be considering in Chapter 9).

Descartes travelled a good deal in the 1620s. During this period various sceptical views, sometimes associated with radically libertin outlooks, were current. There was a meeting in Paris in the presence of the Papal Nuncio, at which a figure called Chandoux (hanged in 1631 for counterfeiting) lectured against the Aristotelian philosophy. Descartes made a speech in reply, urging that the sciences could be founded only on certainty. Among those present was Pierre de Bérulle, head of the Oratory, who in a conversation afterwards made Descartes promise to devote himself to philosophy.

In 1628–9 he wrote some of a work called Regulae ad direc- tionem Ingenii, Rules for the direction of the Understanding. Conceived on an ambitious plan, this was left unfinished and was published only in 1701. In it, many of Descartes’s basic philosophical concerns are expressed or at least prefigured, and we shall have various occasions to refer to it. In general, it emphasizes the methodological aspects of Descartes’s thought, and offers already the idea of a universal science of quantity, but lays less emphasis on the metaphysical issues which concern him in later works. It also emphasizes less the distinction between the purely intellectual powers of the mind and the corporeal imagination which was to become basic to Descartes’s philosophy, an epistemo- logical correlate to the dualism between the body and the intellectual soul.²

In 1628 Descartes went to Holland, where he lived, with brief interruptions, until 1649. The atmosphere in Holland in the early seventeenth century was comparatively liberal: the Dutch publishers Elzevier, for instance, were able to publish works of Galileo in the 1630s. It was chosen for its liberty by a number of thinkers, including some Frenchmen. One objected to the weather (‘four months of winter and eight months of cold’), but Descartes preferred its climate to that of Italy. He had a number of intellectual friends. Despite his desire for a quiet life, he was involved in some academic and religious disputes, unpleasant and at one point rather threatening; in particular one between Gisbert Voet of Utrecht and Regius (Henri de Roy), professor of medicine, who pronounced himself a Cartesian, but whose teachings later attracted Descartes’s criticism. One of the few details of Descartes’s purely personal life which is known is that he had an illegitimate daughter, baptized 7 August 1635, whose name was Francine; her mother was called Hélène, and Descartes told Clerselier (IV 660) that the child was conceived in Amsterdam on 15 October 1634. His daughter died at Amersfort on 7 September 1640, and Descartes is said to have found this the heaviest blow of his life.

In March 1629, the phenomenon of parhelia, sun-haloes, was observed at Rome, and Descartes was asked his opinion of this. He formed the conception of a treatise on meteorological questions, and, more generally, on physics: it was to be called Le Traité du Monde, Treatise on the Universe. Shortly before it was to be published, in 1633, Descartes heard of the condemnation of Galileo by the Inquisition for teaching the movement of the earth, and he suppressed his Treatise. He was to incorporate some of its material in later works, and the Treatise itself partly survives in the form of two works, the Treatise on Light and the Treatise on Man, which were not published until after his death. Some material which linked these two parts is missing, and a third treatise, on the soul, which is promised in the Treatise on Man, has never been found and was perhaps never written.

The fear of being censured by the Church undoubtedly had some distorting effect on Descartes’s thought (we shall encounter effects of this in Chapter 9), through personal fear of criticism, and also from a desire to have his works adopted officially as manuals of instruction. (For his attitude at the time of suppressing the Treatise, see his letter to Mersenne of April 1634: I 270–73, K 25–7.) ‘It is not my temperament to set sail against the wind,’ he wrote to Pollot in 1644 (IV 73), and this was true. It was later said by the Catholic writer Bossuet, hardly himself a radical figure, that Descartes was too worried about being condemned by the Church.³ That his precautions were extreme is perhaps suggested by the fact that Mersenne was able to persist in strongly pro-Galilean statements, in the less favourable atmosphere of Paris.

The suppression of the Treatise led Descartes, however, to produce a different and in several respects more unusual work. It consisted of three essays; they are presented in the order in which they were written. The first is the Dioptric, dealing with problems of refraction and related matters, and including a formulation of what is now called Snell’s Law, though Descartes appears to have discovered it independently of Snell. The second treatise is the Meteors, and the third, the Geometry, which lays the foundations of what is now known as analytical geometry. The set of essays is prefaced by a remarkable work, the Discourse on the Method.⁴ The whole book was written in French, Descartes hoping, as did Galileo, by writing in the vernacular to reach over the heads of pedants and monks to the growing population of lay persons of good sense, free from academic and theological prejudice, with whom his reasonings might strike home. The style is very lucid and elegant, and has always been admired as a model of the expression of abstract thought in French. Descartes wrote to a Jesuit (I 560, K 46) that it was so written that even women should be able to understand it,⁵ and he told Mersenne that he had called it a Discourse, rather than a Treatise, on the Method, because his aim was not to teach, but only to talk about it (I 349).

The Discourse also remarkably expressed Descartes’s individuality. It was already a contrast with the practice of some geometers that he presented the Geometry in his own name – many preferred to offer their discoveries as additions to the works of the ancients, Viète appearing as the ‘French Apollonius’, Snell as the ‘Dutch Apollonius’ and so forth. But far beyond this, the Discourse offers an account of Descartes’s enquiries and his attitude to them in a genuinely autobiographical form. Montaigne had of course displayed an amused and searching interest in himself, but in virtue of that spirit itself had been distant and ironically reserved about philosophy or systematic speculation. The Discourse, on the other hand, displays its author not so much as an object of human interest to himself or others, but rather as an example – though a genuinely existing, particular, example – of the mind being rationally directed to the systematic discovery of truth.

The sophistication of this way of presenting philosophy is much further developed in his masterpiece, the Meditations on First Philosophy, the first edition of which was published in 1641. In this work, the ‘I’ of the writer is not so much the historical Descartes as it is any reflective person working their way through this series of arguments. The Meditations are not a description but an enactment of philosophical thought, following what Descartes regarded as the only illuminating way of presenting philosophy, the order of discovery: an order of discovery, however, which is not just arbitrarily individual, but idealized, the fundamental route by which human thought should move from everyday experience to greater philosophical insight. The extreme skill with which Descartes realizes this scheme, and the subtlety with which the work is organized (something which emerges more and more on repeated readings), make the Meditations one of the most original achievements of philosophical literature.

It was, unlike the book of 1637, written in Latin, though it was soon translated into French.⁶ It was published together with six (in the second edition, seven) sets of Objections from various writers, and Descartes’s Replies. These documents, some more than others, shed valuable light on Descartes’s views. The First set, from Caterus, a priest in Holland, Descartes collected himself: the aim was to impress the Sorbonne, particularly through the Jesuit Gibieuf. He then sent the Meditations themselves and the first set of Objections and Replies to Mersenne, with instructions to collect other objections – instructions which Mersenne characteristically exceeded. The Second Objections came from various theologians, and include some of Mersenne’s own. The Third are from the English philosopher Hobbes; this was not Descartes’s idea, an association with the heretic and materialist Hobbes being unlikely to help with the Sorbonne. Fortunately for Descartes, Hobbes was hostile. Unfortunately for us, the resulting exchange does not illustrate much, except truculent misunderstanding on Hobbes’s part and impatience on Descartes’s. Far superior, indeed best of all, as Descartes himself thought, was the exchange (the Fourth) with Antoine Arnauld, then only twenty-nine, the Jansenist priest whose famous book De la Fréquente Communion (1643) led to a long quarrel with the Jesuits, as a result of which Arnauld was in retreat, even in hiding, for twenty-five years. Mersenne went beyond his instructions for a second time in inviting comments from Pierre Gassendi, a prolix atomist writer, who had been annoyed at not having been mentioned in the Dioptric, and also from the mathematician Fermat, with whom there had already been controversy. Fermat kept quiet, perhaps for fear of renewing the quarrel, but Gassendi offered Objections (the Fifth) at great length, and later responded to Descartes’s Replies (which take a rather laboriously sarcastic tone) with a yet vaster work, the Instances. Descartes was eventually reconciled with Gassendi, perhaps on his visit to France in 1647; it may also have been then that there was a dinner for Descartes, Gassendi and Hobbes given by Descartes’s correspondent William Cavendish, Marquis of Newcastle (who in 1638 was made tutor to the future Charles II of England).

The Sixth set of Objections was from various geometers, philosophers and theologians of Mersenne’s circle. In the second edition of the Meditations (1642) all these were joined by a Seventh set by Bourdin, a professor at the Jesuit College in Paris. Despite Descartes’s general disposition to be agreeable to Jesuits, these Objections obviously (and justifiably) annoyed him, though they did elicit one or two useful clarifications about the Method of Doubt. The tone and content of Bourdin’s reply so upset him that he wrote, and had published with the Meditations, a letter to another Jesuit, Dinet, who had been his instructor at la Flèche; in this letter (VII 563 ff., HR2 347 ff.) he also cited what he had suffered at the hands of the Protestants in Holland.

Further in his attempt to establish his philosophy as official Catholic teaching, he produced in 1644 a work in the form of a textbook, divided into books and articles, the Principia Philosophiae, the Principles. Three of its four books are largely concerned with what would now be called scientific rather than philosophical matters. He had said to Huyghens (31 January 1642: III 523, K 131) that his suppressed treatise would have already appeared, but he had been ‘teaching it to speak L...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Foreword to the Routledge Classics Edition
• Preface
• Books and References
• 1 Descartes
• 2 The Project
• 3 Cogito and Sum
• 4 The Real Distinction
• 5 God
• 6 Error and the Will
• 7 Knowledge is Possible
• 8 Physical Objects
• 9 Science and Experiment
• 10 Mind and its Place in Nature
• Appendix 1 Epistemological Concepts
• Appendix 2 What the Pure Enquirer Knows
• Appendix 3 Dreaming
• Index