René Descartes, (born March 31, 1596, La Haye, Touraine, France—died
February 11, 1650, Stockholm, Sweden) French philosopher mathematician, and
scientist. Because he was one of the first to abandon scholastic
Aristotelianism, because he formulated the first modern version of mind-body
dualism, from which stems the mind-body problem, and because he promoted the
development of a new science grounded in observation and experiment, he has
been called the father of modern philosophy. Applying an original system of
methodical doubt, he dismissed apparent knowledge derived from authority, the
senses, and reason and erected new epistemic foundations on the basis of the
intuition that, when he is thinking, he exists; this he expressed in the dictum
“I think, therefore I am” (best known in its Latin formulation, “Cogito, ergo
sum,” though originally written in French, “Je pense, donc je suis”). He
developed a metaphysical dualism that distinguishes radically between mind, the
essence of which is thinking, and matter, the essence of which is extension in
three dimensions. Descartes’s metaphysics is rationalist, based on the
postulation of innate ideas of mind, matter, and God, but his physics and
physiology, based on sensory experience, are mechanistic and empiricist.
Early life and
education
Although Descartes’s birthplace, La Haye (now Descartes), France, is in
Touraine, his family connections lie south, across the Creuse River in Poitou,
where his father, Joachim, owned farms and houses in Châtellerault and
Poitiers. Because Joachim was a councillor in the Parlement of Brittany in
Rennes, Descartes inherited a modest rank of nobility. Descartes’s mother died
when he was one year old. His father remarried in Rennes, leaving him in La
Haye to be raised first by his maternal grandmother and then by his great-uncle
in Châtellerault. Although the Descartes family was Roman Catholic, the Poitou
region was controlled by the Protestant Huguenots, and Châtellerault, a
Protestant stronghold, was the site of negotiations over the Edict of Nantes
(1598), which gave Protestants freedom of worship in France following the
intermittent Wars of Religion between Protestant and Catholic forces in France.
Descartes returned to Poitou regularly until 1628.
In 1606, Descartes was sent to the Jesuit college at La Flèche,
established in 1604 by Henry IV (reigned 1589–1610). At La Flèche, 1,200 young
men were trained for careers in military engineering, the judiciary, and
government administration. In addition to classical studies, science,
mathematics, and metaphysics—Aristotle was taught from scholastic
commentaries—they studied acting, music, poetry, dancing, riding, and fencing.
In 1610 Descartes participated in an imposing ceremony in which the heart of
Henry IV, whose assassination that year had destroyed the hope of religious tolerance
in France and Germany, was placed in the cathedral at La Flèche.
In 1614, Descartes went to Poitiers, where he took a law degree in 1616.
At this time, Huguenot Poitiers was in virtual revolt against the young King
Louis XIII (reigned 1610–43). Descartes’s father probably expected him to enter
Parlement, but the minimum age for doing so was 27, and Descartes was only 20.
In 1618 he went to Breda in the Netherlands, where he spent 15 months as an
informal student of mathematics and military architecture in the peacetime army
of the Protestant stadholder, Prince Maurice (ruled 1585–1625). In Breda,
Descartes was encouraged in his studies of science and mathematics by the
physicist Isaac Beeckman (1588–1637), for whom he wrote the Compendium of Music
(written 1618, published 1650), his first surviving work.
Descartes spent the period 1619 to 1628 traveling in northern and
southern Europe, where, as he later explained, he studied “the book of the
world.” While in Bohemia in 1619, he invented analytic geometry, a method of
solving geometric problems algebraically and algebraic problems geometrically.
He also devised a universal method of deductive reasoning, based on
mathematics, that is applicable to all the sciences. This method, which he
later formulated in Discourse on Method (1637) and Rules for the Direction of
the Mind (written by 1628 but not published until 1701), consists of four
rules: (1) accept nothing as true that is not self-evident, (2) divide problems
into their simplest parts, (3) solve problems by proceeding from simple to
complex, and (4) recheck the reasoning. These rules are a direct application of
mathematical procedures. In addition, Descartes insisted that all key notions
and the limits of each problem must be clearly defined.
Descartes also investigated reports of esoteric knowledge, such as the
claims of the practitioners of theosophy to be able to command nature. Although
disappointed with the followers of the Catalan mystic Ramon Llull
(1232/33–1315/16) and the German alchemist Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von
Nettesheim (1486–1535), he was impressed by the German mathematician Johann
Faulhaber (1580–1635), a member of the mystical society of the Rosicrucians.
Descartes shared a number of Rosicrucian goals and habits. Like the
Rosicrucians, he lived alone and in seclusion, changed his residence often
(during his 22 years in the Netherlands, he lived in 18 different places),
practiced medicine without charge, attempted to increase human longevity, and
took an optimistic view of the capacity of science to improve the human
condition. At the end of his life, he left a chest of personal papers (none of
which has survived) with a Rosicrucian physician—his close friend Corneille van
Hogelande, who handled his affairs in the Netherlands. Despite these
affinities, Descartes rejected the Rosicrucians’ magical and mystical beliefs.
For him, this period was a time of hope for a revolution in science. The
English philosopher Francis Bacon (1561–1626), in Advancement of Learning
(1605), had earlier proposed a new science of observation and experiment to
replace the traditional Aristotelian science, as Descartes himself did later.
In 1622, Descartes moved to Paris. There he gambled, rode, fenced, and
went to the court, concerts, and the theatre. Among his friends were the poets
Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac (1597–1654), who dedicated his Le Socrate chrétien
(1652; “Christian Socrates”) to Descartes, and Théophile de Viau (1590–1626),
who was burned in effigy and imprisoned in 1623 for writing verses mocking
religious themes. Descartes also befriended the mathematician Claude Mydorge
(1585–1647) and Father Marin Mersenne (1588–1648), a man of universal learning
who corresponded with hundreds of scholars, writers, mathematicians, and
scientists and who became Descartes’s main contact with the larger intellectual
world. During this time Descartes regularly hid from his friends to work,
writing treatises, now lost, on fencing and metals. He acquired a considerable
reputation long before he published anything.
At a talk in 1628, Descartes denied the alchemist Chandoux’s claim that
probabilities are as good as certainties in science and demonstrated his own
method for attaining certainty. The Cardinal Pierre de Bérulle (1575–1629)—who
had founded the Oratorian teaching congregation in 1611 as a rival to the
Jesuits—was present at the talk. Many commentators speculate that Bérulle urged
Descartes to write a metaphysics based on the philosophy of St. Augustine as a
replacement for Jesuit teaching. Be that as it may, within weeks Descartes left
for the Netherlands, which was Protestant, and—taking great precautions to
conceal his address—did not return to France for 16 years. Some scholars claim
that Descartes adopted Bérulle as director of his conscience, but this is
unlikely, given Descartes’s background and beliefs (he came from a Huguenot
province, he was not a Catholic enthusiast, he had been accused of being a
Rosicrucian, and he advocated religious tolerance and championed the use of
reason).
Residence in the
Netherlands
Descartes said that he went to the Netherlands to enjoy a greater
liberty than was available anywhere else and to avoid the distractions of Paris
and friends so that he could have the leisure and solitude to think. (He had
inherited enough money and property to live independently.) The Netherlands was
a haven of tolerance, where Descartes could be an original, independent thinker
without fear of being burned at the stake—as was the Italian philosopher
Lucilio Vanini (1585–1619) for proposing natural explanations of miracles—or
being drafted into the armies then prosecuting the Catholic
Counter-Reformation. In France, by contrast, religious intolerance was
mounting. The Jews were expelled in 1615, and the last Protestant stronghold,
La Rochelle, was crushed—with Bérulle’s participation—only weeks before
Descartes’s departure. In 1624 the French Parlement passed a decree forbidding
criticism of Aristotle on pain of death. Although Mersenne and the philosopher
Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) did publish attacks on Aristotle without suffering
persecution (they were, after all, Catholic priests), those judged to be
heretics continued to be burned, and laymen lacked church protection. In
addition, Descartes may have felt jeopardized by his friendship with intellectual
libertines such as Father Claude Picot (d. 1668), a bon vivant known as “the
Atheist Priest,” with whom he entrusted his financial affairs in France.
In 1629, Descartes went to the
university at Franeker, where he stayed with a Catholic family and wrote the
first draft of his Meditations. He matriculated at the University of Leiden in
1630. In 1631 he visited Denmark with the physician and alchemist Étienne de
Villebressieu, who invented siege engines, a portable bridge, and a two-wheeled
stretcher. The physician Henri Regius (1598–1679), who taught Descartes’s views
at the University of Utrecht in 1639, involved Descartes in a fierce
controversy with the Calvinist theologian Gisbertus Voetius (1589–1676) that
continued for the rest of Descartes’s life. In his Letter to Voetius of 1648,
Descartes made a plea for religious tolerance and the rights of man. Claiming
to write not only for Christians but also for Turks—meaning Muslims,
libertines, infidels, deists, and atheists—he argued that, because Protestants
and Catholics worship the same God, both can hope for heaven. When the
controversy became intense, however, Descartes sought the protection of the
French ambassador and of his friend Constantijn Huygens (1596–1687), secretary
to the stadholder Prince Frederick Henry (ruled 1625–47).
In 1635 Descartes’s daughter Francine was born to Helena Jans and was
baptized in the Reformed Church in Deventer. Although Francine is typically
referred to by commentators as Descartes’s “illegitimate” daughter, her baptism
is recorded in a register for legitimate births. Her death of scarlet fever at
the age of five was the greatest sorrow of Descartes’s life. Referring to her
death, Descartes said that he did not believe that one must refrain from tears
to prove oneself a man.
The World and
Discourse on Method
In 1633, just as he was about to publish The World (1664), Descartes
learned that the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) had been
condemned in Rome for publishing the view that the Earth revolves around the
Sun. Because this Copernican position is central to his cosmology and physics,
Descartes suppressed The World, hoping that eventually the church would retract
its condemnation. Although Descartes feared the church, he also hoped that his
physics would one day replace that of Aristotle in church doctrine and be
taught in Catholic schools.
Descartes’s Discourse on Method (1637) is one of the first important modern
philosophical works not written in Latin. Descartes said that he wrote in
French so that all who had good sense, including women, could read his work and
learn to think for themselves. He believed that everyone could tell true from
false by the natural light of reason. In three essays accompanying the
Discourse, he illustrated his method for utilizing reason in the search for
truth in the sciences: in Dioptrics he derived the law of refraction, in
Meteorology he explained the rainbow, and in Geometry he gave an exposition of
his analytic geometry. He also perfected the system invented by François Viète
for representing known numerical quantities with a, b, c, … , unknowns with x,
y, z, … , and squares, cubes, and other powers with numerical superscripts, as
in x2, x3, … , which made algebraic calculations much easier than they had been
before.
In the Discourse he also provided a provisional moral code (later
presented as final) for use while seeking truth: (1) obey local customs and
laws, (2) make decisions on the best evidence and then stick to them firmly as
though they were certain, (3) change desires rather than the world, and (4)
always seek truth. This code exhibits Descartes’s prudential conservatism,
decisiveness, stoicism, and dedication. The Discourse and other works
illustrate Descartes’s conception of knowledge as being like a tree in its
interconnectedness and in the grounding provided to higher forms of knowledge
by lower or more fundamental ones. Thus, for Descartes, metaphysics corresponds
to the roots of the tree, physics to the trunk, and medicine, mechanics, and
morals to the branches.
Meditations
In 1641 Descartes published the Meditations on First Philosophy, in
Which Is Proved the Existence of God and the Immortality of the Soul. Written
in Latin and dedicated to the Jesuit professors at the Sorbonne in Paris, the
work includes critical responses by several eminent thinkers—collected by
Mersenne from the Jansenist philosopher and theologian Antoine Arnauld
(1612–94), the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), and the Epicurean
atomist Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655)—as well as Descartes’s replies. The second
edition (1642) includes a response by the Jesuit priest Pierre Bourdin
(1595–1653), who Descartes said was a fool. These objections and replies
constitute a landmark of cooperative discussion in philosophy and science at a
time when dogmatism was the rule.
The Meditations is characterized by Descartes’s use of methodic doubt, a
systematic procedure of rejecting as though false all types of belief in which
one has ever been, or could ever be, deceived. His arguments derive from the
skepticism of the Greek philosopher Sextus Empiricus (fl. 3rd century ce) as
reflected in the work of the essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) and the
Catholic theologian Pierre Charron (1541–1603). Thus, Descartes’s apparent
knowledge based on authority is set aside, because even experts are sometimes
wrong. His beliefs from sensory experience are declared untrustworthy, because
such experience is sometimes misleading, as when a square tower appears round
from a distance. Even his beliefs about the objects in his immediate vicinity
may be mistaken, because, as he notes, he often has dreams about objects that
do not exist, and he has no way of knowing with certainty whether he is
dreaming or awake. Finally, his apparent knowledge of simple and general truths
of reasoning that do not depend on sense experience—such as “2 + 3 = 5” or “a
square has four sides”—is also unreliable, because God could have made him in
such a way that, for example, he goes wrong every time he counts. As a way of
summarizing the universal doubt into which he has fallen, Descartes supposes
that an “evil genius of the utmost power and cunning has employed all his
energies in order to deceive me.”
Although at this stage there is seemingly no belief about which he
cannot entertain doubt, Descartes finds certainty in the intuition that, when
he is thinking—even if he is being deceived—he must exist. In the Discourse,
Descartes expresses this intuition in the dictum “I think, therefore I am”; but
because “therefore” suggests that the intuition is an argument—though it is
not—in the Meditations he says merely, “I think, I am” (“Cogito, sum”). The
cogito is a logically self-evident truth that also gives intuitively certain
knowledge of a particular thing’s existence—that is, one’s self. Nevertheless,
it justifies accepting as certain only the existence of the person who thinks
it. If all one ever knew for certain was that one exists, and if one adhered to
Descartes’s method of doubting all that is uncertain, then one would be reduced
to solipsism, the view that nothing exists but one’s self and thoughts. To
escape solipsism, Descartes argues that all ideas that are as “clear and
distinct” as the cogito must be true, for, if they were not, the cogito also,
as a member of the class of clear and distinct ideas, could be doubted. Since
“I think, I am” cannot be doubted, all clear and distinct ideas must be true.
On the basis of clear and distinct innate ideas, Descartes then
establishes that each mind is a mental substance and each body a part of one
material substance. The mind or soul is immortal, because it is unextended and
cannot be broken into parts, as can extended bodies. Descartes also advances at
least two proofs for the existence of God. The final proof, presented in the
Fifth Meditation, begins with the proposition that Descartes has an innate idea
of God as a perfect being. It concludes that God necessarily exists, because,
if he did not, he would not be perfect. This ontological argument for God’s
existence, introduced by the medieval English logician St. Anselm of Canterbury
(1033/34–1109), is at the heart of Descartes’s rationalism, for it establishes
certain knowledge about an existing thing solely on the basis of reasoning from
innate ideas, with no help from sensory experience. Descartes elsewhere argues
that, because God is perfect, he does not deceive human beings, and therefore,
because God leads us to believe that the material world exists, it does exist.
In this way Descartes claims to establish metaphysical foundations for the
existence of his own mind, of God, and of the material world.
The inherent circularity of Descartes’s reasoning was exposed by
Arnauld, whose objection has come to be known as the Cartesian Circle.
According to Descartes, God’s existence is established by the fact that
Descartes has a clear and distinct idea of God; but the truth of Descartes’s
clear and distinct ideas are guaranteed by the fact that God exists and is not
a deceiver. Thus, in order to show that God exists, Descartes must assume that
God exists.
Physics, physiology,
and morals
Descartes’s general goal was to help human beings master and possess
nature. He provided understanding of the trunk of the tree of knowledge in The
World, Dioptrics, Meteorology, and Geometry, and he established its
metaphysical roots in the Meditations. He then spent the rest of his life
working on the branches of mechanics, medicine, and morals. Mechanics is the
basis of his physiology and medicine, which in turn is the basis of his moral
psychology. Descartes believed that all material bodies, including the human
body, are machines that operate by mechanical principles. In his physiological
studies, he dissected animal bodies to show how their parts move. He argued
that, because animals have no souls, they do not think or feel; thus,
vivisection, which Descartes practiced, is permitted. He also described the
circulation of the blood but came to the erroneous conclusion that heat in the
heart expands the blood, causing its expulsion into the veins. Descartes’s
L’Homme, et un traité de la formation du foetus (Man, and a Treatise on the
Formation of the Foetus) was published in 1664.
In 1644 Descartes published Principles of Philosophy, a compilation of
his physics and metaphysics. He dedicated this work to Princess Elizabeth
(1618–79), daughter of Elizabeth Stuart, titular queen of Bohemia, in
correspondence with whom he developed his moral philosophy. According to
Descartes, a human being is a union of mind and body, two radically dissimilar
substances that interact in the pineal gland. He reasoned that the pineal gland
must be the uniting point because it is the only nondouble organ in the brain,
and double reports, as from two eyes, must have one place to merge. He argued
that each action on a person’s sense organs causes subtle matter to move
through tubular nerves to the pineal gland, causing it to vibrate
distinctively. These vibrations give rise to emotions and passions and also
cause the body to act. Bodily action is thus the final outcome of a reflex arc
that begins with external stimuli—as, for example, when a soldier sees the
enemy, feels fear, and flees. The mind cannot change bodily reactions
directly—for example, it cannot will the body to fight—but by altering mental
attitudes, it can change the pineal vibrations from those that cause fear and
fleeing to those that cause courage and fighting.
Descartes argued further that human beings can be conditioned by
experience to have specific emotional responses. Descartes himself, for
example, had been conditioned to be attracted to cross-eyed women because he
had loved a cross-eyed playmate as a child. When he remembered this fact, however,
he was able to rid himself of his passion. This insight is the basis of
Descartes’s defense of free will and of the mind’s ability to control the body.
Despite such arguments, in his Passions of the Soul (1649), which he dedicated
to Queen Christina of Sweden (reigned 1644–54), Descartes holds that most
bodily actions are determined by external material causes.
Descartes’s morality is anti-Jansenist and anti-Calvinist in that he
maintains that the grace that is necessary for salvation can be earned and that
human beings are virtuous and able to achieve salvation when they do their best
to find and act upon the truth. His optimism about the ability of human reason
and will to find truth and reach salvation contrasts starkly with the pessimism
of the Jansenist apologist and mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623–62), who
believed that salvation comes only as a gift of God’s grace. Descartes was
correctly accused of holding the view of Jacobus Arminius (1560–1609), an
anti-Calvinist Dutch theologian, that salvation depends on free will and good
works rather than on grace. Descartes also held that, unless people believe in
God and immortality, they will see no reason to be moral.
Free will, according to Descartes, is the sign of God in human nature,
and human beings can be praised or blamed according to their use of it. People
are good, he believed, only to the extent that they act freely for the good of
others; such generosity is the highest virtue. Descartes was Epicurean in his
assertion that human passions are good in themselves. He was an extreme moral
optimist in his belief that understanding of the good is automatically followed
by a desire to do the good. Moreover, because passions are “willings” according
to Descartes, to want something is the same as to will it. Descartes was also
stoic, however, in his admonition that, rather than change the world, human
beings should control their passions.
Although Descartes wrote no political philosophy, he approved of the
admonition of Seneca (c. 4 bce–65 ce) to acquiesce in the common order of
things. He rejected the recommendation of Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) to
lie to one’s friends, because friendship is sacred and life’s greatest joy.
Human beings cannot exist alone but must be parts of social groups, such as
nations and families, and it is better to do good for the group than for
oneself.
Descartes had been a puny child with a weak chest and was not expected
to live. He therefore watched his health carefully, becoming a virtual
vegetarian. In 1639 he bragged that he had not been sick for 19 years and that
he expected to live to 100. He told Princess Elizabeth to think of life as a
comedy; bad thoughts cause bad dreams and bodily disorders. Because there is
always more good than evil in life, he said, one can always be content, no
matter how bad things seem. Elizabeth, inextricably involved in messy court and
family affairs, was not consoled.
In his later years Descartes said that he had once hoped to learn to
prolong life to a century or more, but he then saw that, to achieve that goal,
the work of many generations would be required; he himself had not even learned
to prevent a fever. Thus, he said, instead of continuing to hope for long life,
he had found an easier way, namely to love life and not to fear death. It is
easy, he claimed, for a true philosopher to die tranquilly.
Final years and
heritage
In 1644, 1647, and 1648, after 16 years in the Netherlands, Descartes
returned to France for brief visits on financial business and to oversee the
translation into French of the Principles, the Meditations, and the Objections
and Replies. (The translators were, respectively, Picot, Charles d’Albert, duke
de Luynes, and Claude Clerselier.) In 1647 he also met with Gassendi and
Hobbes, and he suggested to Pascal the famous experiment of taking a barometer
up Mount Puy-de-Dôme to determine the influence of the weight of the air. Picot
returned with Descartes to the Netherlands for the winter of 1647–48. During
Descartes’s final stay in Paris in 1648, the French nobility revolted against
the crown in a series of wars known as the Fronde. Descartes left precipitously
on August 17, 1648, only days before the death of his old friend Mersenne.
Clerselier’s brother-in-law, Hector Pierre Chanut, who was French
resident in Sweden and later ambassador, helped to procure a pension for
Descartes from Louis XIV, though it was never paid. Later, Chanut engineered an
invitation for Descartes to the court of Queen Christina, who by the close of
the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) had become one of the most important and
powerful monarchs in Europe. Descartes went reluctantly, arriving early in
October 1649. He may have gone because he needed patronage; the Fronde seemed
to have destroyed his chances in Paris, and the Calvinist theologians were
harassing him in the Netherlands.
In Sweden—where, Descartes said, in winter men’s thoughts freeze like
the water—the 22-year-old Christina perversely made the 53-year-old Descartes
rise before 5:00 am to give her philosophy lessons, even though she knew of his
habit of lying in bed until 11 o’clock in the morning. She also is said to have
ordered him to write the verses of a ballet, The Birth of Peace (1649), to
celebrate her role in the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’
War. The verses in fact were not written by Descartes, though he did write the
statutes for a Swedish Academy of Arts and Sciences. While delivering these
statutes to the queen at 5:00 am on February 1, 1650, he caught a chill, and he
soon developed pneumonia. He died in Stockholm on February 11. Many pious last
words have been attributed to him, but the most trustworthy report is that of
his German valet, who said that Descartes was in a coma and died without saying
anything at all.
Descartes’s papers came into the possession of Claude Clerselier, a
pious Catholic, who began the process of turning Descartes into a saint by
cutting, adding to, and selectively publishing his letters. This cosmetic work
culminated in 1691 in the massive biography by Father Adrien Baillet, who was
at work on a 17-volume Lives of the Saints. Even during Descartes’s lifetime
there were questions about whether he was a Catholic apologist, primarily
concerned with supporting Christian doctrine, or an atheist, concerned only
with protecting himself with pious sentiments while establishing a
deterministic, mechanistic, and materialistic physics.
These questions remain difficult to answer, not least because all the
papers, letters, and manuscripts available to Clerselier and Baillet are now lost.
In 1667 the Roman Catholic church made its own decision by putting Descartes’s
works on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Latin: “Index of Prohibited Books”)
on the very day his bones were ceremoniously placed in Sainte-Geneviève-du-Mont
in Paris. During his lifetime, Protestant ministers in the Netherlands called
Descartes a Jesuit and a papist—which is to say an atheist. He retorted that
they were intolerant, ignorant bigots. Up to about 1930, a majority of
scholars, many of whom were religious, believed that Descartes’s major concerns
were metaphysical and religious. By the late 20th century, however, numerous
commentators had come to believe that Descartes was a Catholic in the same way
he was a Frenchman and a royalist—that is, by birth and by convention.
Descartes himself said that good sense is destroyed when one thinks too
much of God. He once told a German protégée, Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–78),
who was known as a painter and a poet, that she was wasting her intellect
studying Hebrew and theology. He also was perfectly aware of—though he tried to
conceal—the atheistic potential of his materialist physics and physiology.
Descartes seemed indifferent to the emotional depths of religion. Whereas
Pascal trembled when he looked into the infinite universe and perceived the
puniness and misery of man, Descartes exulted in the power of human reason to
understand the cosmos and to promote happiness, and he rejected the view that
human beings are essentially miserable and sinful. He held that it is impertinent
to pray to God to change it.
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