Descartes’ Method: Certainty, Cogito, and Modern Philosophy
Context: Descartes’ Discourse on Method, Part IV
This text is the fourth part of the Discourse on Method, published in 1637. This section presents questions as the fundamental starting point, leading to the cogito, and from it, demonstrates the existence of God and external things. It is the central part of a work constituting a fundamental pillar of modern epistemology.
Purpose and Method
The Discourse on Method is not just a treatise but a discourse, an explanation of the method Descartes found to unify all knowledge. This is essential, since for Descartes, the central issue is the critical review of existing knowledge and the imperative to establish a unifying method. He sought to develop, individually, a method that, like mathematics, could provide certain knowledge.
Structure and Other Works
In this work, divided into 6 parts, Descartes also explains:
- His critique of received knowledge
- The rules of his method
- A provisional moral code
- Essays on optics and astronomy
Other important works by Descartes include Rules for the Direction of the Mind (1628) and Meditations on First Philosophy (1641).
Descartes’ Life and Intellectual Journey
Early Life and Education
Descartes was born in La Haye en Touraine in 1596, belonging to a wealthy family. Despite his delicate physical health, he was enthusiastic about study. He attended the Jesuit college of La Flèche, where he studied Latin, poetry, history, theology, physics, metaphysics, and geometry. Despite his good education, he later criticized this knowledge and decided to move to Paris.
Travels and Method Development
In Paris, he led a comfortable life but remained interested in mathematics. He then traveled abroad to ‘learn from the book of the world’. He lived primarily in Holland, cultivating mathematics, and also spent time in other parts of Europe, enlisting briefly in armies as a gentleman volunteer. During his travels, the idea for his method crystallized. Upon returning to Paris, he began applying his method to other fields of knowledge.
Later Life and Legacy
Descartes died in 1650 in Stockholm, where he had gone to instruct Queen Christina of Sweden.
Descartes’ Philosophical Project
Unifying Knowledge via Method
René Descartes’ primary concern was the unification of knowledge. He believed this unification had not yet occurred due to the lack of a proper method. Therefore, he sought a method, modeled on mathematics (which he termed universal mathesis), to achieve certainty in all knowledge. Hence, Descartes is often called the father of modern epistemology.
Epistemology and Metaphysics
With Descartes, as Hegel noted, philosophy shifted away from scholastic theology towards autonomous reason and science, aiming to rebuild the edifice of knowledge on a certain, critical foundation. His goal, as stated in the Discourse on Method, was not simply to replace traditional truths but to confirm them critically. Descartes aimed to prove metaphysical concepts like the soul, the world, and God, not based on scholastic realism, but on a solid foundation derived from Cartesian doubt (which was methodical, preliminary, critical, and hyperbolic). His method simplified traditional logic and algebra, focusing on the deductive model inspired by geometry. However, it proceeds from subjectivism, starting with the self (the cogito).
Rationalism vs. Empiricism
Descartes is a key figure in Rationalism, a 17th-century European philosophical movement opposed to Empiricism.
Characteristics of Rationalism
Rationalism is characterized by:
- Full confidence in reason.
- Belief in innate ideas (making Descartes an idealist in this sense).
- Adoption of a mathematical method.
- A metaphysics centered on the study of substances.
- A mechanistic view of the physical world.
Other contemporary Rationalist thinkers include Leibniz, Spinoza, and Malebranche.
Key Cartesian Concepts
Cartesian Rationalism stands in opposition to empiricism, naive realism, and reliance on authority and tradition. Key Cartesian concepts include moi-même (the self, implying subjectivism and anthropocentrism) and bona mens (good sense or reason, believed to be naturally equal in all humans).
Historical Context of Cartesianism
Cartesianism emerged in a historical context shaped by:
- Political factors: Royal absolutism.
- Religious factors: The Counter-Reformation.
- The Scientific Revolution (building on Renaissance advances): Including heliocentrism (Copernicus), Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, Galileo’s physics (law of falling bodies, telescope), and earlier developments like the discovery of America, printing, and gunpowder.