Leonardo, Descartes, Max Weber (Routledge Revivals)

Three Essays

Karl Jaspers, Jaspers Karl

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317832690
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

First published in 1965, this collection of three essays by influential German philosopher Karl Jaspers deals with the response of the philosophical mind to the world of reality, with the search for truth. In Leonardo, this search is shown in the thinking and the works of a supreme artist whose means of apperception are the senses.

The essay on Max Weber commemorates a man Jaspers knew personally and ardently admired.

The main essay in the collection is an exhaustive, three part study of Descartes: analysing Descartes' new philosophical operation, Descartes' Method, and the position of his philosophy within the wider historical context of philosophical thought.

Descartes and Philosophy

Introduction

THE fame of Descartes is uncontested; his influence has been enormous, and the study of his principal works is still indispensable to anyone who wishes to philosophize. Thus there is no need to demonstrate his historical greatness, especially as German philosophers, since Hegel and Schelling, have looked upon him as the beginning and source of modern philosophy.

We know Descartes’s irreplaceable discoveries in mathematics. We know his extraordinary achievement in renewing the form of thought; anyone who comes to Descartes after reading the philosophers of the Renaissance feels that he has suddenly emerged into clearer air; the thought is pregnant, each sentence is undeviatingly in its right place; the superfluous and incidental are disregarded; the development is resolute and conscious of its aim; the reader feels that he has been taken in hand.

We see the great style of his disciplined life, his courage and nobility and practical wisdom; we note how he withdrew into solitude, and went to a foreign country for the peace and quiet he required for meditation; how he devoted his life entirely to the task in which he believed, the renewal of all knowledge.

Nevertheless, it is not an easy matter to go beyond such a general characterization of the man, his work, and his influence, to show more clearly and definitely wherein the philosophical greatness of Descartes resides. This greatness has been called into doubt. The literature on Descartes includes so-called exposures, purporting to unmask him as a hypocrite who did not say what he thought, as a coward whose fear and mistrust led him to hide his true colors; as a man who, for all his intolerable pride, was jealous of other men’s achievements, who schemed and plotted to ensure his fame; as a revolutionary who wished to destroy the whole existing order. We hold with none of these judgments. But with all our admiration for his historical greatness, we are among those who doubt whether his philosophy, either in content or in method, constitutes an eternal embodiment of philosophical truth. For when it is asked: In what sense can we make this philosophy our own?—we come to see, behind the rational clarity of the surface, an extraordinarily complex philosophical operation, which seems to by-pass the truth whenever it tackles a crucial problem. If we go on to observe how Descartes’s thinking developed in other minds, we are also led to wonder whether, by virtue of his greatness, he may not, in addition to kindling the philosophizing of all those who followed in his footsteps, have led it astray through his method as well as the content of his thinking. Because he dealt with matters essential to the modern era, he was able to influence the greatest minds; but since, by his way of approaching it, he missed or even perverted the meaning of what was true in his discovery, he became a danger to all those who fell under his spell. It seems quite possible that philosophy was corrupted by the tendencies whose fountainhead and foremost representative was Descartes, and that the depth of truth reached since Descartes has been achieved more in spite of Descartes than because of him.

Opposition to Descartes—which has been continuous from his lifetime until today—has sprung from very diverse and even mutually exclusive motives. Thus the mere fact of being against Descartes means nothing—it is the nature of the opposition that matters. The more opposition to Descartes is based on critical understanding, the more it gains in truth. Anyone who ventures to disclose the seeds of untruth in the source of truth, must at the same time keep in mind that original truth without which historical greatness would be incomprehensible.

Our analysis derives its sequence from the following consideration: Descartes is famous for having tried, through method, to raise philosophy to the rank of a science coinciding with science as a whole. His method is related to his equally famous fundamental operation, by which he sought to make certainty spring from universal doubt.

These two elements—the problem of method and the problem of the origin—merge into a whole in his philosophy, but this whole was formed from two originally different sources. In his search for method, Descartes seems to take the same path as what was then modern science. The fundamental operation which, while providing the foundation for certainty, develops the principles of all being, is, on the contrary, rooted in the age-old philosophical tradition. In this new form philosophy strove to create a foundation not only for modern science, but for man’s life as a whole.

In the first part of this essay we shall analyze the “fundamental operation” and in the second the “method.” On the basis of insights which, we believe, develop from these analyses, we shall, in the third part, extend our inquiry to the character of the philosophy as a whole and its position in the history of philosophy.¹

¹ This essay was written at the suggestion of the Revue philosophique (Paris). It first appeared in French translation in the special Descartes issue of that review (1937) on the occasion of the tercentenary of the appearance of the Discours de la méthode.

I

The fundamental operation

1. How it was Effected

Let us briefly recapitulate the steps taken by Descartes:

1. Dissatisfied—he said in substance—by the instability of human opinions, by the doubt that has been cast upon every philosophical assertion made until now, and by disputations which thus far have not yielded a single secure result, I shall aim for real and enduring certainty.

In order to attain it, I shall first carry doubt to the extreme. If with plausible reason I have doubted everything that I ever regarded as certain, and if I then find a certainty that is secure against all modes of doubt, this certainty must be the foundation of all further knowledge that is accessible to us.

I can doubt the existence of the things outside me and the existence of my body; I can go so far as to doubt mathematical truths, even if these are compelling as such; for an evil genius might have created me and so organized me that for all my subjective certainty I might still be deluded; if that were so, I should be defenseless and might even fail to recognize the most evident truth. Then I should be unable to know any truth; I might, to be sure, defend myself against the demon by resolutely refusing to accept any statement involving a doubt. Does this mean that I can no longer accept any statement?

2. In taking the decision to doubt and radically to withhold my judgment, I observe that even if all grounds for doubt are justified, one thing remains certain: as long as I think, even if I am mistaken in supposing my thought to be compelling, I am certain that I myself exist (cogito ergo sum): of this certainty I can no longer doubt. If an evil spirit, who was my creator, deceived me in everything else, he could not deceive me in regard to the fact that I, even while allowing myself to be deceived, nevertheless know that I am.

3. Once I have gained a basis in indubitable certainty, how shall I go on?

In the process of attaining this certainty, I also learn what is requisite for certainty in any matter, namely: to conceive clearly and distinctly. But I formerly believed that I conceived many things clearly and distinctly and yet fell into doubt, suspecting that even in clarity and distinctness a demon might be giving me an illusion of truth. Thus a universal rule, such as: everything must be true that I conceive as clearly and distinctly as the cogito ergo sum—will be valid only if I can convince myself beyond any doubt that I was not created by a demon of deception. The next step must lead to this certainty.

Now I see not only that I did not create myself, but also that consciousness of my existence is inseparably bound up in me with the idea of infinity, which is the standard by which I measure my finiteness. In other words: I find within myself the idea of an infinite and perfect being, that is, the idea of God. In order to understand this idea, which was given me with my existence, I must clarify a fundamental insight in terms of a rational idea, which I call a proof of God’s existence. I proceed as follows: I cannot have produced the idea of God any more than I can have brought forth my own existence. This I know on the strength of an axiom which is given to me by natural insight, namely, that there must be as much reality in a cause as in its effect. But since there is finiteness and imperfection in me, which I am enabled to appraise by the standard of my idea of the infinite and perfect, this idea of the infinite cannot have its source in me, who am finite, but can only come from God Himself. Therefore God is, and He is an infinite and perfect being. In knowing that I am, I know at the same time—even if everything else is illusion—that I am not alone in the world. “We must of necessity conclude from the fact alone that I exist, or that the idea of a Being supremely perfect—that is, of God—is in me, that the proof of God’s existence is grounded on the highest evidence” (Oeuvres complètes, ed. Adam et Tannery—referred to in the following as A.T.—VII, 51).

But this being cannot be evil, for evil is imperfection. He must be good in every way and therefore cannot deceive. Thus through what follows inevitably from the cogito ergo sum, I can rely, also in every other realm of my knowledge, on the clarity and distinctness which in the cogito ergo sum were able to withstand even a possible demon.

4. After clear and distinct knowledge has thus, on the two foundations of the cogito ergo sum and the certainty of God's existence, been proved to be reliable and beyond doubt, most of the truths I had previously doubted are restored at one stroke, in particular, the mathematical truths and the existence of corporeal things outside me, in so far as these are clearly and distinctly recognized, that is, in so far as they have quantity, extension, form, position, and motion.

Descartes sums up this whole development in the statement of Eudoxus in the dialogue Recherche de la vérité: “For it is really from this universal doubt, which is like a fixed and unchangeable point, that I have resolved to derive the knowledge of God, of yourself, and of all that the world contains” (A.T. X, 515).

2. Critique of this Certainty

The most evident purpose of this operation is to provide an indubitable certainty, valid for every thinking being. In inquiring to what degree this certainty is achieved, we shall have to ask: to what does this certainty refer? what does doubt mean in this operation? and, is there a way to further development from the ground of certainty thus acquired?

1. To what does the first certainty refer? As Descartes himself expressly states, the cogito ergo sum is not an inference; for an inference would presuppose other truths from which the sum followed, whereas this thought itself is represented as the origin. We interpret Descartes: The ergo is employed only as an analogy to the syllogism, in order to bring out the fact that this is not an immediate, perceived certainty, but a fundamental reflexive certainty, a self-certainty. I become aware, in reference to myself, that I think, that I am. Here we have the unity of a unique act of thought, which in thought refers back to itself and becomes aware of this relation as something existing in itself. Any attempt to state this adequately raises insuperable difficulties. Since cogito ergo sum suggests an inference, but Descartes rejects the notion of an inference, we might attempt to change the wording. We might say: cogito, sum, but then we should merely have two unconnected words. We might say: cogitans sum (if I think, I am); then, however, we should have a relation of consequence, the possession of being resulting from the fact of thinking, but this relation would be almost empty and, moreover, it would be stated in a definite form implying temporal existence; besides, the emphasis would be solely on the sum, whereas the cogito is of equal importance; the origin of the idea would not be appropriately rendered. Accordingly we shall use Descartes’s formula cogito ergo sum in the following, even though its syllogistic form lends itself to misunderstanding.

To recognize thought in myself as being is to attain overwhelming certainty concerning the indispensable medium of all being that is being for me. But such certainty does not know what it possesses, for it can have no definite content.

Thus the cogito ergo sum as such cannot be doubted. But both its power and its weakness reside in the fact that its meaning remains utterly indeterminate and for that reason cannot be clearly apprehended. I am supposed to be certain of my existence as a thinking being. But in order to attain clarity concerning this certainty, we must find out what thought is, what the I is, and what the being of this I is.

What is thought in Descartes? Let us consider, without reference to explicit statements of Descartes’s, what he may have meant by thought: it is the unique action which in acting knows itself, which consequently has immediate certainty of itself through its relation to itself. Because the object of certainty is here at the same time its subject, subject and object coincide; they are one and the same thing, which is neither subject nor object and at the same time both subject and object. This is what Descartes seems to mean when he expresses his full confidence in the fundamental certainty of the cogito ergo sum as the foundation of objective reality. But thought, which Descartes may originally have conceived in this way, becomes something more definite as soon as he begins to examine it more closely. If he takes pure thought to be self-sufficient, it becomes an emptiness that can never be filled; if he describes thought in greater detail, he is led to a psychological phenomenology. Both of the following extreme interpretations of thought are possible on the basis of his work:

Either: It has the character of divine thought (a conception that goes back to the ancients) which is and has all Being in itself, because in the process of thinking it creates what is thought. But human thought finds in itself only the punctual emptiness of the “I think” without the being that gives it content; for human thought requires something other, the object that is given to it and confronts it, without which it would vanish into the void of self-thinking.

Or: The thinking that has immediate certainty of itself is not the identity of a self-certain one, but is split into two things, namely, that within me which thinks, and that which this thinking as thinking knows. But then the certainty is no longer immediate; it relates to something other, which must, in order to be thought, have existed previously. This seems to be what Descartes means when he calls that which has absolute self-certainty in the cogito ergo sum a “thinking thing, which doubts, understands, affirms, negates, wills and does not will, and which also has imagination and sensation” (A.T. VII, 28). This means that the thought which is certain of itself has the same scope as consciousness. But then everything that my consciousness is is real in the same sense as the “I am.” Then thought becomes consciousness and the being of thought is the being of consciousness as a whole, or the being of everything that is dealt with in a phenomenology of consciousness or in a psychology that analyzes and describes consciousness. If thought is conceived of as the totality of the acts and states of consciousness, my original certainty is replaced by an aggregate of highly uncertain insights.

Consequently—as we pursue our inquiry into the definite meaning of thought in Descartes—the certainty refers either to the punctual emptiness of self-thinking or to the reality of consciousness with all its innumerable vacillations. Whether we define thought in one or the other sense, the original certainty on which everything was supposed to rest vanishes.

What is the I in Descartes? Descartes, it is true, says that the statement ego sum ego existo is indivisible; but when he calls this ego a res cogitans as distinguished from a res extensa, he fails precisely to ask what distinguishes the I from the being of any other res non extensa, that is, from all mere consciousness, whatever form it may assume. The being of the I never became a philosophical question for him. In fact, because he reduced the self-certainty of the existence that thinks itself to an infinitesimal point that thinks itself, or denatured it by introducing psychological elements, the existence of the I, conceived of as an objectively existing thing like any other object of thought, remained outside the field of his investigations.

Because the cogito ergo sum expresses the I’s discovery of its own reality, the philosophy of Descartes became in a later day the starting point for the philosophizing which, since Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, has investigated the riddle of the I. But before that, it led to subjectivist philosophies which soon took on a psychological character.

What is being in Descartes? Descartes’s certainty relates to the being of the cogito. His propositions are not meant as formal truths; they are meant to express a thinking rational being’s certainty of its own existence. But he does not question the meaning of being in his cogito ergo sum. He takes being for granted, and soon it becomes for him the mere presence of the cogito. In order to show what is lacking, let us compare Descartes’s statement with ideas pointing in the same direction in Augustine, Kant, and Schelling:

In Augustine the cogito ergo sum is a function of my all-embracing need to gain certainty concerning the inner significance of Being, which is a mirror of the Trinity and speaks to me and through me in existence, life, knowledge, and love.¹ By reducing this thought to a general idea, useful as the starting point of a chain of reasoning, Descartes makes it into a c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Leonardo as Philosopher
• Descartes and Philosophy
• Max Weber as Politician, Scientist, Philosopher