Descartes: Historical, Cultural, and Philosophical Context
Historical Context
The historical context of Descartes’s life coincides with the end of the Renaissance, which brought humanism and the scientific revolution. It corresponds to that described in the book The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. Politically, France was organized as an absolute monarchy, which would reach its peak with Louis XIV and the identification between the monarch and the state. The seventeenth century was also a period of crisis in Europe: the consolidation of modern states, their imperialist desires, and the struggle for hegemony between France, Spain, Holland, and England caused major clashes between them. Much of the life of Descartes aligns with the Thirty Years’ War between Catholic and Protestant states of the German Empire.
The seventeenth century saw a major development of the bourgeoisie linked to mercantile capitalism, favoring the expansion of maritime trade and colonial ventures. In this context, Europe became a conquering force, opening up to new continents.
Cultural Context: The Baroque Era
The Baroque period set a generally pessimistic tone. The brightest minds were directed towards non-religious subjects such as literature, science, and mathematics. The development of printing caused a real revolution in culture. This invention allowed culture to go beyond church circles, making it accessible to people outside the religion. Hence, Latin began to be used less as the cultural language, and many books were published in national languages.
Due to the condemnation of Galileo, Descartes was afraid that some of his ideas could be similarly judged and decided not to publish his Treatise on the World. He later published some of his scientific work, Dioptrics, Meteors, and Geometry, preceded by a methodological introduction, Discourse on Method. It is probably the fear of censorship that made this work published anonymously, noting that his intentions were not to reform other than their own knowledge. The board of the University of Utrecht condemned Descartes for atheism, then accused him of Pelagianism, and after his death, one of his major works was condemned by the Church.
Philosophical Context: The Rise of Modern Philosophy
Modern philosophy emerges in opposition to medieval theology, which had totally dominated intellectual thought. Modern philosophy, by claiming the autonomy of reason against faith, became closely connected with modern science and focused primarily on the problem of knowledge and finding a reliable way to ensure its attainment. Modern philosophers are the ideological proponents of the scientific revolution, initiated by the Copernican shifts, culminating in the late seventeenth century with Newton.
The seventeenth century could also be defined as the century of modern philosophical method. It is Descartes who inaugurated modernity with the publication of the Discourse on Method, obtaining a mathematical model to impose logic in philosophy. He also became the first representative of rationalism (a modern philosophical current that developed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on the European continent). Rationalism holds that our knowledge is constructed deductively from certain innate ideas that the subject has in his mind without being derived from experience.
The universe of modern physics is a quantitative universe constituted by quantity expressed in mathematical language. In modern science, everything that cannot be measured is considered subjective, considering only relevant primary qualities, i.e., everything that can be mathematized. In the rationalist belief, what is known of things has not been extracted from them from observation but, in fact, has been placed on them by the subject that already had the knowledge a priori.
Rationalists are also mathematicians. Mathematics is a purely rational science that provides certainty and whose truths are necessary. Their ideal of knowledge is provided by science, and, in the same way that in this, the rationalists think that, from first truths, all knowledge must be deduced. Rationalism is related to empiricism. Empiricism argues that all our knowledge comes from sensory experience and, as everything in it comes from this, the reason cannot know anything that is beyond it, so that sensory experience is also the limit of our knowledge.