DESCARTES PHILOSOPHY IN A EB

Paul Strathern

• Publisher: HarperPress
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780007464968
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: French History

Philosophy for busy people. Read a succinct account of the philosophy of Descartes in just one hour.

Descartes was the first modern philosopher. His scepticism led him to doubt all certainties, until finally he arrived at his famous maxim 'I think therefore I am'. He would also apply his rationalism with great effect in science and mathematics, conceiving a scheme for scientific method and inventing Cartesian co-ordinates in geometry.

Descartes: Philosophy in an Hour a concise, expert account of Descartes' life and philosophical ideas – entertainingly written and easy to understand. Also included are selections from Descartes' work, suggested further reading, and chronologies that place Descartes in the context of the broader scheme of philosophy.

Descartes’s Life and Works

Descartes never did a stroke of useful work in his life. At various times he described himself as a soldier, a mathematician, a thinker, and a gentleman. The last comes closest to describing his attitude toward life as well as his social status. His youthful inclination to a life of leisurely ease soon settled into a routine. He lived on his private income, rose at noon, and traveled when he felt like it. Such was his life – no dramas, no wives, no great public success (or failure). Yet Descartes was indisputably the most original philosopher to appear in the fifteen centuries following the death of Aristotle.

By the time Descartes arrived on the scene the Renaissance had brought a new humanistic outlook to Europe, and the Reformation had ended the hegemony of the Catholic church. Yet it remained for Descartes to launch the modern age of philosophy. From this period on, the primacy of the individual and the analysis of human consciousness became fundamental to philosophy, a focus that has only recently been superseded by the primacy of the dictionary and analysis of its contents.

René Descartes was born March 31, 1596, in the small town of La Haye, in the Creuse Valley thirty miles south of Tours, France. This spot has now been renamed Descartes, and if you visit it you can still see the house where he was born and the twelfth-century church of St. Georges where he was baptized.

René was the fourth child, and his mother was to die in childbirth the following year. His father Joachim was a judge in the High Court of Brittany. This met at Rennes, 140 miles away, which meant that Joachim was at home for less than half the year. He soon remarried, and René was brought up in the house of a grandmother. Here his main attachment was to his nurse, for whom he retained the fondest regard. He was to pay for her upkeep until the day she died.

Descartes spent a solitary childhood, accentuated by his sickly nature, and he quickly learned to do without company. From his early years he is known to have been introspective and reserved: a wan-faced child with thick curly black hair and large shadow-ringed eyes, wandering through the orchard in his black coat and knee breeches, a black wide-brimmed hat on his head and a long woolen scarf wound round his neck.

At the age of ten he was sent as a boarder to the Jesuit College that had recently opened in La Flèche. This school was intended for the education of the local gentry, who before this had often dispensed with such matters in favor of hunting, hawking, and halfhearted home homiletics. The rector of the college was a friend of the Descartes family, so the frail young René was given a room of his own and allowed to get up when he pleased. As with most who are permitted such a privilege, this meant that Descartes rose around noon, a habit he strictly adhered to for the rest of his life. While the other pupils were being browbeaten by vicious and conceited Jesuits versed in the intricacies of Scholasticism, the intelligent young Descartes was thus able to absorb his learning in a more relaxed atmosphere, rising in time for luncheon followed by the riding, fencing, and flute-playing lessons that occupied the afternoon. By the time he came to leave, it was apparent that Descartes had learned far more than anyone else in the school, and his health appears to have completely recovered (apart from a lingering hypochondria, which he carefully nursed throughout his remarkably healthy life).

Yet despite carrying off all the prizes, Descartes retained a deep ambivalence toward his education. It seemed to him to be largely rubbish: rehashed Aristotle encrusted with centuries of interpretations; the stifling theology of Aquinas which had answers for everything but answered nothing; a morass of metaphysics. Nothing he learned appeared to have any certainty whatsoever, apart from mathematics. And in a life devoid of the certainties of home, family, and meaningful social contact, Descartes craved certainty in the only realm in which he felt at home: the intellect. He left school disappointed. Like Socrates before him, he was convinced he knew nothing. Even mathematics was only capable of providing impersonal certainty. The only other certainty he knew was God.

When Descartes left La Flèche at eighteen, his father sent him to study law at the University of Poitiers. Joachim Descartes intended René to take up a respected position in the legal profession, just as his elder brother had done. In those days such positions were filled largely by nepotism, a system that succeeded in producing approximately the same percentage of ludicrous and inadequate judges as today. But after spending two years studying the law, Descartes decided he had had enough of it. By this time he had come into possession of a number of small rural properties inherited from his mother. These gave him a modest income, enough to live as he pleased. So he decided to set off for Paris ‘to pursue his thoughts’. Judge Joachim was not pleased – the Descarteses were gentlemen and weren’t expected to spend their time thinking. But there was nothing he could do about it: his son was now a free man.

After two years Descartes tired of his well-heeled bachelor existence in Paris. Despite devoting himself to a wide range of studies and composing a number of rather dilettantish treatises, he was becoming more and more involved in the social life of the capital, which he found utterly tedious. He withdrew to a quiet address in the Faubourg St. Germain, where no one went visiting, and lived in seclusion while pursuing his thoughts in peace.

This was to be Descartes’s favored way of life throughout the rest of his years. Yet after settling down for a few months, he suddenly bolted. He seems to have been driven by two finely balanced obsessions: solitude and travel. Never having felt close to his fellow men, he had no wish to live in their company. And never having had a real home, he felt no desire to create one for himself. He was forever restless and solitary.

This makes Descartes’s next move seem all the more extraordinary: he decided to join the army. In 1618 he went to Holland and signed on as an unpaid officer in the army of the Prince of Orange. The prince’s Protestant army was preparing to defend the United Provinces of the Netherlands against the Catholic Spanish, who sought to retake their former colony. What the Dutch made of this aloof Catholic gentleman with no military experience, who professed to have done a bit of fencing and riding at school, is difficult to judge. At the time Descartes spoke no Dutch and stuck resolutely to his routine of rising at noon. Perhaps they just didn’t notice him as he sat in his tent composing a treatise on music or some such. (Nowadays he would presumably be accused of being a spy; but in those days the military appear to have correctly gauged the importance of spies and were willing to sign on any recruits, regardless of nationality, allegiance, or even willingness to participate in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Descartes’s Life and Works
• Afterword
• Further Information
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher