Descartes: Method, Doubt, Cogito, and Impact on Modern Thought
The mechanistic conception of nature and of science as a useful skill to master makes Descartes a pioneer of modern technology. Along with Francis Bacon, he has a conception of science, theoretical but fundamentally practical, conceived as a tool for the domain of nature. In this sense, science becomes art, or science-technology pairing is conceived as a unit. Descartes is also one of the fathers of modern technology and the concept of instrumental reason.
Briefly, we can target these issues to develop a reflection on Descartes today:
The Method
Scientific topical because it is designed to develop a particular science without application of a method. If we classify the sciences into natural sciences and human sciences, one can distinguish two types of method: the experimental or hypothetical-deductive for natural sciences and the comprehensive method for the human sciences. In the realm of philosophy, this includes the use of the genealogical method by Nietzsche and Gadamer’s hermeneutical method. I personally would consider the importance of using a method or planned activities to succeed in the end we propose (passing the examination, for example).
The Methodological Doubt
I would highlight the value of Descartes by daring to question knowledge and challenge the authority of the Church. This attitude of doubt and suspicion is very current, the so-called “masters of suspicion”: Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, challenged modern thought, just inaugurated by Descartes. Personally, Cartesian philosophy encourages us to seek the truth and question all prejudices, to trust our common sense rather than on preconceived ideas, and to think freely.
The Cogito
As we saw at the time, modern neurophysiology insists on “Descartes’ Error” (A. Damasio), which is not to recognize the influence of the physical on the mental. Modern psychology recognizes the interdependence of the physical and mental. It also emphasizes the influence of affect and emotions in our rational thinking. Currently, it states that reason needs the complement of emotion so that our thoughts are projected positively in the world we live in. Thus, there is an intelligent management of emotions as emotional reasoning. It is the “concept of emotional intelligence” that breaks with the Cartesian anthropological scheme.
The Criterion of Certainty
The empiricist criterion of certainty seems to be closer to the common sense of everyday life. Nobody lives thinking that the information it receives from the environment through the senses can be false; this assumption would be absurd and an obstacle to daily life. However, it is true that, reflecting in depth, we find evidence that reality can be different from how we perceive it. Then, when looking for a solid foundation for our beliefs, we must not naively assimilate preconceived ideas about how the world we “see” is. Here we resume the debate on essence and appearance that we saw in Plato.
The Existence of God
Descartes reflected in this text a typically medieval philosophical theme which has now become obsolete. It is clear that today it is considered that religion is a matter of personal belief, and that the existence of God is unprovable. This does not make belief in God irrational or absurd, since the existence of God can be justified from the practical justification for a moral code that gives meaning to the lives of many individuals. Recently, the U.S. has accelerated in the doctrine of “intelligent design”, according to which evolution is best understood if we admit the existence of an intelligent creator to mark the end of the process. This theory is flatly rejected by scientists. In any case, we can remember the words of Einstein: “God does not play dice” when criticizing probabilistic quantum physics. Believing in God is a vital option of personal importance and worthy of respect, but the atheist or agnostic is not going to be convinced by a rational demonstration of the existence of God.
1. Background
The historical context of Descartes corresponds to that described in the work of The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. Descartes (1596-1650) is a seventeenth-century philosopher. The historical context in which the Discourse on Method was written is the French Golden Age. Politically, France, like the other major European nations at the time, is organized as an absolute monarchy, which will reach its peak under Louis XIV and the identification between the monarch and the state. The seventeenth century is 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 cause major clashes between them. Much of Descartes’s life coincides with the 30-year war between the Catholic and Protestant German Empire. In fact, the second chapter of the Discourse on Method is located in Germany, where he claims that Descartes himself had been moved by the “desire to know about wars.” From the socioeconomic standpoint, the seventeenth century saw a strong development of the bourgeoisie linked to mercantile capitalism, helped in turn by the expansion of maritime trade and colonial.
2. Cultural Context
It is an age whose overall tone is pessimistic. In this pessimism contributes greatly to the theological confrontation between Catholics and Protestants that we have spoken of before and in which Descartes participated. Another interesting cultural trait of this era is the invention and development of printing. This invention allows, among other things, that the field of culture go beyond church circles (monasteries, cathedrals) becoming accessible to people outside the Religion. In 1643, the Council of the University of Utrecht condemned Descartes for atheism, then he was accused of Pelagianism, and after his death, some of his major works were condemned by the Church.
3. Philosophical Context
Descartes’s life coincides with the end of the Renaissance. From a philosophical standpoint, we can say that some time ago, God was no longer the center of philosophical concern as in the Middle Ages. Man becomes the main object of philosophy and, especially, issues related to knowledge. This is the area in which Descartes is considered the founder and chief representative of rationalism. This current references modern science (Galileo, Bacon, Kepler) and the mathematical modeling method. Moreover, as the name suggests, they give reason, theoretical knowledge, a radical importance, accepting the innateness of the essential principles of knowledge and sensory knowledge contempt as a reliable source. Leibniz, Spinoza, and Descartes himself, of course, are the main representatives of Rationalism. Descartes formulated a theory about the physical world (extended substance) called mechanism that attempts to explain the world as a great machine and will be the forerunner of the materialistic later as La Mettrie in his Man a Machine. Historically, Rationalism finds opposition in the British empiricism of Locke and Hume. They, and especially Hume, represent the radical opposition to the current founding Cartesian philosophy that rejects the existence of innate ideas and puts on sensory information, and raise the limit of human knowledge.
René Descartes was born in March 1596 in La Haye. At an early age, René entered college as an intern at the Look, an institution newly founded by the favor of Henry IV for the formation of a nobility as a weapon in the fight against the Protestant Huguenots. Once he left the school, he decided to join the troops of Maurice of Nassau in the Thirty Years War in order to see the world and strengthen his character. Perhaps, that war was an event caused by the diversity of changing times.
Empiricism is known as a philosophical current that develops between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries whose rationalism and parallel top representatives are natives of the British Isles (hence sometimes also called this current with the name of British empiricism). Common characteristics of this current philosophical rationalists: the being of things is given in consciousness. All that the intellect knows directly are the ideas. Therefore, both built their philosophical systems current in the consciousness and from consciousness. They have ideas as the core of knowledge. Both are mounted on a prior theory of knowledge. Part of an intimate relationship between philosophy and science. Considered as a fundamental problem of scientific method. Points of disagreement: For the rationalists, we can only have certainty about what the intellect constructs itself, regardless of experience, since experience produces confusing ideas. For empiricism, however, only those ideas that are received passively by experience are valid. Rationalists believe in innate ideas: some fundamental concepts that the mind itself develops from which other knowledge can be inferred. However, some empiricists such as Locke argued that the understanding is, at the birth of the individual, a blank slate (tabula rasa) on which nothing is written. In general, it goes against the principles of empiricists to assume that understanding itself can build concepts, regardless of experience. Empiricists and rationalists believe that intuition is the proper way to access knowledge, denying validity to the abstract knowledge of the Scholastics. However, unlike the latter, the first intuitions are based on empirical rather than intellectual. This means that their starting point is not mere concepts, but the images, i.e., the traces left by the feeling in the mind. The empiricist model of knowledge stands as the so-called empirical sciences, primarily physics, and within this, mechanics, which buys these days, mainly at the hands of Newton, a major development. Rationalists give precedence to mathematics over physics as a model for knowledge. By denying the existence of innate ideas, the empiricist view is that all knowledge has to go from experience to its principles (or laws). So, precedence is given to the inductive analytical approach over deductive synthesis. Let’s look at Locke’s criticism of the idea of substance and Humean objections to the Cartesian proof of the existence of God, self, and world.
According to Locke, the idea of substance is a complex idea that comes from the combination, by the understanding, of qualities or simple ideas. Take any substance, such as a rose. What do we perceive? We perceive a certain color, a volume, shape, size, pleasant odor, soft hand feel, etc. In short, a set of simple sensations. But is this really the Rose? All of us, Locke thinks, are inclined to say no. The color, odor, figure, etc., is not the rose, it is the color of the rose, the smell of the rose, and so on. What, then, is the rose, apart from these sensible qualities? Because what we perceive is only the color, smell, etc., we must confess we do not know what the rose is, we assume that under these qualities there is something mysterious that serves as a support. The substance, the support of the qualities, is, according to Locke, unknowable. The consequence of Locke’s empiricism is that we do not know the being of things, we know only what experience shows, that is, a set of sensible qualities. Experience is thus the origin and also the limit of our knowledge.
Hume makes a fierce critique of the notion of cause or necessary connection and concludes that we cannot get metaphysical certainty relying on this notion. As we have never had a direct impression of “necessary connection,” much less certainty can we get from its application. Due to the accumulated experience and the belief that nature always operates uniformly, we conclude (unfounded) that the same will always happen, but it does not have to be like that. (Although we have seen two million times that A causes B, we cannot ensure that the occurrence of one of two million is to produce B; we have never had a direct impression of the supposed necessary connection, we’ve only seen A and B happen). With this criterion, Hume casts down Cartesian proofs of the existence of the world, God, and the ego or thinking substance:
- World or external reality: The existence of bodies as a distinct reality and exterior to impressions or feelings to justify a causal inference: extra-mental reality is the cause of our impressions. However, this inference is invalid, according to Hume, since no one goes to another impression, but from impressions to a purported reality that is beyond them and of which we do not have, therefore, any impression or experience whatsoever. The belief in the existence of a different bodily reality from our impressions is therefore unjustifiable, appealing to the idea of cause.
- Existence of God: Descartes had used the principle of causation to support the contention of the existence of God. God was the cause of the idea of infinity that I possess innately. According to Hume, this inference is also unjustified for the same reason, because there is no impression of another, but our impressions of God, which is not subject to any impression.
- The ego or thinking substance: The existence of a substance other than the cognoscente of his actions had been considered undoubted by Descartes. But Hume believes that we do not have any impression of self or thinking substance. There is no self or substance other than impressions and ideas, as the subject of a series of mental acts.