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1 Descartes and the Rise of Modern Philosophy
Modern philosophy emerged in Europe during the early seventeenth century, and it profoundly changed Western ways of thinking. RenƩ Descartes, who set much of the agenda for this new and enormously influential stage of intellectual history, aimed to break decisively with what he saw as unreliable and unproductive traditions. He sought a new and empowering path to genuine knowledge and well-being; in the process he transformed the way we think about the universe, ourselves, nature, God, knowledge, and philosophy itself.
Descartesā philosophy embodies the central, modern idea that each person can discover which beliefs are true, and what actions are right, without imposition of outside authority. But his individualism is especially radical. He pursues truth in the solitude of his own thinking, using extreme doubt as a vital tool. He explains his methodology:
I do not know whether I should tell you of the first meditations that I had ā¦ for they are perhaps too metaphysical and uncommon for everyoneās taste. And yet, to make it possible to judge whether the foundations I have chosen are firm enough, I am in a way obliged to speak of them. For a long time I had observed ā¦ that in practical life it is sometimes necessary to act upon opinions which one knows to be quite uncertain just as if they were indubitable. But since I now wished to devote myself solely to the search for truth, I thought it necessary to do the very opposite and reject as if absolutely false everything in which I could imagine the least doubt, in order to see if I was left believing anything that was entirely indubitable. Thus ā¦ I resolved to pretend that all the things that ever entered my mind were no more true than the illusions of my dreams. But immediately I noticed that while I was trying thus to think everything false, it was necessary that I, who was thinking this, was something. And observing that this truth āI am thinking, therefore I existā was so firm and sure that all the most extravagant suppositions of the skeptics were incapable of shaking it, I decided that I could accept it without scruple as the first principle of the philosophy I was seeking.
(Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, (1984ā91),
hereafter abbreviated CSM I 126ā7)
Why did Descartes adopt this radical procedure? And how did it spur the two centuries of transformation that came to be known as modern philosophy? In this chapter I will motivate Descartesā project and isolate key features of modern philosophy in contrast with earlier traditions. I will then use a stage-by-stage discussion of the exquisitely developed Meditations, enriched by several of Descartesā other writings to assist your understanding and evaluation, not only to trace his method and system, but to highlight the landmarks that evoke the defining reactions of later moderns, and very many philosophers still. I will alert you when I treat some key phases of Descartesā philosophy more precisely or deeply. And Iāll end with a rich set of questions to prompt further reflection, and a carefully selected, annotated bibliography to guide further research. This first chapter and the final chapter on Kant are quite the longest of the book, because both are intended as more painstaking models for approaching important thinkers with sympathy and layered levels of depth. Given the overriding educational function of the book, I cannot replicate fully this pattern in the other five chapters, though it pains me not to. Also this chapter must carefully prepare us for the rest of our exciting journey.
1.1 Background to Descartesā Meditations
Descartes gives a simple, autobiographical reason for why he was compelled to action. In his first published work, Discourse on Method, he recounts his deep disenchantment with school-books and the book of the world, which led him to study the book of his own soul. After years of voracious study at the new but well regarded Jesuit College of La FlĆØche, Descartes was frustrated with two thousand years of inquiry. Scholars disagreed on virtually every important issue, yet lacked a procedure for resolving their disagreements. There was even a long-standing dispute over how to conduct inquiry itself. This dispute was most heated in the battle between faith and reason.
After the Roman Empire collapsed in AD 476, the Catholic Church oversaw all formal education in Europe for nearly a thousand years. A dominant question during this millennium concerned the proper relation between natural reason and revelation, a relation that underlies, and potentially threatens, the very nature and existence of philosophy. Some insisted that God sent revelations into the world as a substitute for all other knowledge. So philosophy, the champion of reason, is unnecessary and, since sometimes at odds with revelation, harmful. Others tried to combine religious truth with philosophy, treating philosophical wisdom as rational understanding of faith. On this view, revelation is the essential data of philosophy; unbelievers have nothing important to understand. This approach took different forms, depending on how rational understanding was conceived. So, for example, St Augustine, who inaugurated this tradition in the early fifth century, offered a Platonic understanding of Christian revelation, since for him philosophy was largely the body of ideas from Plato, as revised by the Roman philosopher Plotinus (Aristotleās works were largely unknown in Europe at the time). St Augustineās faith-before-reason outlook was restated in different form seven centuries later by St Anselm, for whom logic was the model for proper understanding, and who therefore aimed to translate Christian beliefs into a series of logical demonstrations. And later, when mathematics and experimental science became the models of understanding, articles of faith were examined through math and science.
A different sort of combination of faith and reason urged seeking to know God in every possible way, and maintained that different types of minds take different approaches to the same truth. So, for example, followers of AverroĆ«s held that simple believers respond to imagination and emotion more than reason; theologians respond to reason, yet settle for probable answers because they fit with what they already believe; and philosophers insist on rational demonstration, and should be open to any probative source, including the so-called āpagan philosophyā of Greek thought. But some AverroĆ«an doctrine, such as the denial of creation in time and personal immortality, contradicts Christian faith. This caused some convinced by AverroĆ«s to lose faith. But others retained both faith and philosophy by strictly separating them, treating faith and reason as two insulated ways of relating to the world.
The thirteenth-century philosopher St Thomas Aquinas introduced a fourth framework for inquiry, in which faith and reason can happily coexist. Faith cannot be endangered by reason because it is a different kind of commitment to a different kind of object. Philosophical assent is based on evidence, while no amount of evidence is sufficient to cause faith, which requires intervention of the will. But we cannot insulate faith from reason by allowing that a rationally necessary conclusion need not be true. True revelation can give everyone the insight they need for eternal salvation, including insight about God, humanity, and human destiny. Some aspects of this insight, like Godās existence and the existence and immortality of the human soul, can be known by reason operating on its own. Other truths, like those of the Trinity, Incarnation or Redemption, are articles of faith, unverifiable by human reason. Yet even here, philosophical reasoning can be used to remove objections to articles of faith. If a philosophical conclusion conflicts with faith, there is something confused about the philosophy.
Many would not embrace Aquinasā conciliatory outlook. In the fourteenth century, important figures such as William of Ockham pressed the view that reason can prove nothing about God; increasingly, revelation was being divorced from reason. And by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries ā the doorsteps to modern philosophy ā there was growing skepticism that philosophy has any relevance to religion. Theologians disagreed among themselves, and there was no way to tell whom to believe. In France, the essayist Michel Montaigne ridiculed philosophical attempts to know anything, and vividly reminded all serious inquirers about one of the deepest and most insistent challenges of the ancient skeptics: the problem of the criterion. By what method or procedure do we choose the best or truest among several conflicting beliefs? And once we choose one of the available criteria, how can we tell if our criterion for choosing is itself valid?
It is tempting to say that a valid procedure or criterion is one that gives true results. But how do we judge which are the true results? If we appeal to our criterion to tell us, our argument is circular, and proves nothing. If we appeal to a second criterion, people who disagree with us will demand that we justify the new criterion. If we then continue to invoke more criteria, the process would repeat itself to infinity, unless unlikely, universal agreement on some later criterion emerges. But unless we appeal to other criteria, our only alternative seems to be foot-stomping, dogmatic reassertion of our belief against all who disagree, mere declaration of principle or statement of faith, no attempted justification. Ultimately, it seems that our views about important and contentious matters always rest on choices or assumptions that can never be fully justified. Montaigne warned that people tend to concoct arguments to support things they already want, and that this rationalization often hardens into intense, arrogant conviction.
Just as there were conditions frustrating the prospects of a sound, anti-authoritarian, individualistic philosophy, other events eased Descartesā efforts. During the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries the Church had become increasingly secularized as it had become deeply involved in promoting the creative arts, and in studying non-religious, classical ideas to reconcile or integrate them with Church doctrines. On the one hand, a more secular Church made room for innovations such as Machiavelliās first purely secular treatise on politics. But even backlash had salutary effects, as when four years later Martin Luther accused Roman Catholicism of being too liberal in doctrine and too secular in operation. In seeking to purify Christianity and to return to its biblical foundations, reformers like Luther stressed that an individual can discover unbiased, objective truth, independent of vested authorities. Independence soon worked against Lutherās intention, when the Bible itself began to be critically examined as a source of objective truth, especially by astronomers and other scientists. Predictably, the tension between faith and reason worsened.
The Catholic Church tried to counteract Protestant gains, but this only energized the individualist spirit of the times. For example, the Church established a superb educational program, headed by the Jesuits, to produce young Catholics who could outsmart heretics and promote the orthodox cause. In France alone, over 200 schools taught Thomism ā the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas ā as refined by the Spanish Jesuit Francisco Suarez. But the Jesuit curriculum also included full exposure to classical Greek and Renaissance materials, and this further opened the minds of students, including Galileo and Descartes.
The conflict between Protestants and Catholics highlighted why the problem of the criterion seems inescapable. Protestants insisted that the Catholic criteria for truth ā which included the Bible, along with the authoritative declarations of the Church ā were flawed: Protestants noted that popes and councils disagreed; they complained that popes had sanctioned activities contrary to Scripture, and so on. Yet from the Catholic point of view, the Protestant criterion of individual conscience was flawed: individuals obviously disagree, and Catholics believed that an authoritative interpreter was needed. Meanwhile, the new scientists relied on observational and mathematical evidence, and they dismissed any view ā Catholic or Protestant ā which said that God had created the earth as the center of the universe.
How can we tell where the truth lies? And if we cannot tell where it lies ā if skepticism is victorious ā then how can we rely on philosophy, religion, or science? The need to assimilate the new sciences, and the need to answer the skeptics, led Descartes to focus on the question of how we can know things. We must first solve this question before we can address questions of what we know. So Descartes set an agenda for the modern period by tackling central questions asked by philosophers throughout history, such as: what is the world like? What am I like? What is Godās nature, and does he exist? What are the relations between God (if he exists), me (and humans generally) and the world? How should I live in light of answers to the previous questions? But he insisted that before one can responsibly broach any of these questions, one must decide by what method, if any, proper inquiry can be conducted. This ground-floor preoccupation with method is especially characteristic of modern philosophy.
So Descartes confronted a situation that motivated rejection of traditional paths to knowledge for a turn to his proposed alternative of rigorous self-examination. But he has much deeper, theoretical reasons also. A further look at his intellectual journey will uncover those reasons. And a road map will help. Descartes provides us much of this road map in the form of a metaphor:
ā¦ the whole of philosophy is like a tree. The roots are metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and the branches emerging from the trunk are all the other sciences, which may be reduced to three principal ones, namely medicine, mechanics, and morals. By āmoralsā I understand the highest and most perfect moral system, which presupposes a complete knowledge of the other sciences and is the ultimate level of wisdom. Now just as it is not the roots or the trunk of a tree from which one gathers the fruit, but only the ends of the branches, so the principal benefit of philosophy depends on those parts of it which can only be learnt last of all.
(CSM I 186)
All the most empowering s...
