René Descartes: Life, Philosophy, and the Rationalist Shift
Descartes’ Early Life and Education
René Descartes was born in March 1596 in La Haye. At an early age, René entered college as an intern at La Flèche, a newly founded institution established with the help of Henry IV to form a nobility as a weapon against the Protestant Huguenots. Once he left school, he decided to join the troops of Maurice of Nassau in the Thirty Years’ War to see the world and strengthen his character.
The Turbulent 17th Century Context
This war was perhaps an event caused by the diverse and changing times. The seventeenth century is known as the century of ‘the crisis of European identity’. Factors contributing to this crisis include:
- The fragmentation of Christianity into various denominations
- Continual wars
- Periodic famines
- Rising antagonism between nobles and burghers, and between nobles and peasants
The instability of the Baroque movement is reflected in architecture, church altarpieces, and paintings. With the growth of cities, a progressive rationalization of social life emerged. Centralized monarchical absolutism in politics presented itself as the guarantee of order and uniformity against fragmentation and particularism. Cities consumed more than they produced, forcing a rationalization of agriculture and production, which led to the rise of currency movement.
Scientific Revolution and Philosophical Conflict
This century was characterized by great excitement in science, particularly in physics, astronomy, and medicine. At the University of the Sorbonne, Aristotelians and Counter-Reformation theologians remained zealous in opposing anything that could contradict traditional doctrine. For Aristotelianism, all knowledge certainly started from sensory data, but the understanding was capable of abstracting the essence from them, which could then serve as a universal principle for discovering new truths. Nominalism had dismissed the theory of abstraction as fanciful and useless. Francis Bacon advocated the method of induction, rising from specific data to more general principles, to interpret nature. Meanwhile, Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo Galilei believed that the senses alone could not reveal the workings of nature, arguing it was governed by mathematical laws.
The Rise of Rationalism
From the Renaissance emerged a new position for humanity in the world and a different way of viewing reality. Anthropocentrism gave priority to what is most universal in humans: rationality. Descartes opened a new era in philosophy, known as ‘Rationalism‘. Certain characteristics are common to the systems of Rationalist philosophers like:
- Descartes
- Malebranche
- Spinoza
- Leibniz
Challenging Reality: Descartes’ New Approach
Previously, philosophers had thought about the world from within the world itself, seeing thought as part of mundane reality. Therefore, knowledge was based on realism: common sense suggested we know things as they are, and our ideas are transcripts of the things themselves. But this continuity was broken by Ockham’s razor, leading philosophy towards a loss of the immediate reality of the world. New scientific discoveries further shattered the evidence of common sense. Galileo’s advocacy for Heliocentrism not only fostered distrust in sensory perception but also necessitated a revision of the concept of knowledge and prompted questions about the nature of reality.
God, Faith, and the Mechanical Universe
Heliocentrism placed humanity in a mechanical universe devoid of angels moving celestial spheres or a divine First Mover. God seemed to disappear from the cosmos, becoming inaccessible to reason operating solely from the sensory world, especially after the critiques of Nominalism. God, in His absolute transcendence, was conceived as an omnipotent free will capable of changing natural and moral laws, leaving humanity feeling segregated and infinitely distant from this transcendent God, both philosophically and religiously. Only faith could bridge this gap, as reason was deemed exclusively human.
Descartes’ Major Works and Final Years
At age 45, Descartes wrote the Metaphysical Meditations, later accompanied by the Objections and Responses, the result of an intense exchange among scientists and philosophers. In these works, he presented a full picture of the struggle between new scientific knowledge and the authority of inherited knowledge. Previously, he had written Rules for the Direction of the Spirit (unpublished during his lifetime), Treatise on the World (also unpublished), and the Discourse on Method. Following the Meditations, he engaged in extensive correspondence on moral and philosophical issues. He published his Principles of Philosophy in Utrecht. Due to animosity in the city, which led to his writings being prohibited, he moved to Stockholm after being invited by Queen Christina of Sweden to be her philosophy tutor. He died there at the age of 54.