Class 2: Descartes: Introduction, Discourse on Method (1637)

Class 2: Descartes: Introduction, The Meditations is one of the great works of philo- Discourse on Method (1637) sophy, a seminal treatise for subsequent philosophers. In its compact form, it raises most of the problems that Rene Descartes was born in 1596 at La Haye, in they will need to address: skepticism, the existence Touraine, France. He became one of the central and nature of the self, the existence of God, the intellectual figures of the seventeenth century, possibility of error, the nature of truth, including the making major contributions to metaphysics, natural truth of mathematics, the essence and existence of philosophy, and mathematics. Descartes was edu- bodies, and so on. The great Cartesian commentator cated at the Jesuit College of La Fleche (in Anjou) Martial Gueroult described the Meditations as a from about 1607 to about 1615; he received a master’s diptych, a work of art in two panels. He saw the first degree in law from Poitier in 1616. The next year he three Meditations as the first panel, ruled by the went to the Netherlands and joined the army of Prince darkness of the principle of universal deception, with Maurice of Nassau; at Breda he made the a battle being fought against it by the truth of the acquaintance of Isaac Beeckman, who introduced him existence of the self—a point of light—a narrow but to a “physico-mathematical” way of doing natural piercing exception to the principle of doubt, philosophy. When traveling in Germany, he had a culminating with the defeat of the principle and the series of dreams (on November 10, 1619) about the victory of the exception. The second panel is then unity of science; his first major philosophical project, ruled by the blinding light of God’s absolute the Rules for the Direction of the Mind, which he veracity—that is, the principle of universal truth— composed (ca. 1618-28) but did not finish, was and fought against by the existence of error, a narrow devoted to that theme. Instead, Descartes turned his point of darkness and seeming exception to that thoughts to physical and astronomical topics and principle, puncturing the light of universal veracity in worked on The World or Treatise on Light; unfortu- the same way that the existence of the self punctured nately, he suppressed the publication of this treatise the darkness of universal deception. However, here when he learned of Galileo’s condemnation in 1633. the battle culminates with the victory of the principle, His first printed work was the Discourse on Method the triumph of light over darkness. Gueroult saw the (1637) to which he appended the less controversial Cartesian movement as unified in that its perspectives scientific essays, Dioptrics, Meteors, and Geometry. are complementary from beginning to end: to the A few years later, he expanded Part IV of the hypothesis of the evil genius, which plays a role of Discourse into Meditations on First Philosophy, segregation, elimination, and purification in the first which he published with sets of objections and replies three Meditations, corresponds the dogma of divine (1641). In 1644, Descartes further revised his philoso- veracity, which is a heuristic principle, an organ of phy into textbook form and disseminated it with his reintegration, and a rule of discipline in the last three physics as Principles of Philosophy. Although he Meditations. Thus, Gueroult thought of the spent most of his adult life in seclusion in the Meditations as a single block of certainty, in which Netherlands, in 1649, he went to Sweden at the everything is so arranged that nothing can be taken invitation of Queen Christina, but he did not last the away without the whole thing’s dissolving. winter, dying in Stockholm in 1650.1 But beyond the tight composition of the Medi- tations and its closely woven fabric, one might ask 1 Descartes’ philosophical works, most of his mathe- University of Minnesota Press, 1984-85), 2 vols.; Marjorie matical and scientific treatises, and much of his corres- Grene, Descartes (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998); John pondence are available in English translation. References Cottingham, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Descartes to Descartes’ works are to the standard edition by Charles (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). For the Adam and Paul Tannery, Oeuvres de Descartes (2nd ed., relation between Descartes’ philosophy and his physics, Paris: Vrin, 1964-74); references to this edition are abbre- see Daniel Garber, Descartes’s Metaphysical Physics viated as AT volume, page. See also Margaret Wilson, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). To situate Descartes (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978}; Descartes among his contemporaries, see Roger Ariew, Edwin M. Curley, Descartes against the Skeptics (Cam- John Cottingham, and Tom Sorell, eds. and trans., bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978); Martial Cambridge Texts in Context: Descartes’s Meditations Gueroult, Descartes’s Philosophy Interpreted According (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). to the Order o( Reasons, trans. Roger Ariew (Minneapolis: 7 about the purpose of the work, what it was intended the Meditations is embedded together with a method to do. Here one can point to the integration of the of philosophizing and a few scientific treatises as argument of the Meditations into a larger framework samples of the method. Thus, the context of the as the foundation of the new sciences. As Descartes Meditations is the same as Francis Bacon’s and said to his close correspondent Marin Mersenne, “I Galileo Galilei’s, except that Descartes does not may tell you, between ourselves, that these six champion induction, and although he advances the Meditations contain all the foundations of my corpuscularian or mechanical philosophy to the extent physics. But please do not tell people, for that might that he reduces physical objects to matter in motion, make it harder for supporters of Aristotle to approve he makes it clear that he does not accept the reality of of them. I hope that readers will gradually get used to atoms as ultimate indivisible constituents of matter. my principles, and recognize their truth, before they The Meditations solicited many objections, from notice that they destroy the principles of Aristotle” Thomas Hobbes, Antoine Arnauld, Pierre Gassendi, (January 18, 1641). The Meditations attempts a and others, which were published with the work, to complete intellectual revolution: the replacement of others from G. W. Leibniz, Blaise Pascal, Baruch Aristotelian philosophy with a new philosophy in Spinoza, and John Locke. Indeed, it would not be an order to replace Aristotelian science with a new exaggeration to say that all of modem philosophy science. For a seventeenth–century Aristotelian, a constitutes reactions to and criticisms of Descartes’ body is matter informed by substantial and accidental Meditations. forms, and change is explained by the gain or loss of such forms: in mutation by the acquisition of a substantial form, and in what Aristotelians would call Rene Descartes, Discourse on the Method for true motion (that is, augmentation and diminution, Conducting One’s Reason Well and for alteration, or local motion) by the successive Seeking the Truth of the Sciences2 acquisition of places or of qualitative or quantitative forms. The mechanist program consisted of doing [Author’s Preface] away with qualitative forms and reducing all changes to something mathematically quantifiable: matter in If this discourse seems too long to be read at one time motion. As Descartes said in The World, not only the it may be divided into six parts. In the first part, you four qualities called heat, cold, moistness, and will find various considerations concerning the dryness, “but also all the others (and even all the sciences; in the second part, the chief rules of the forms of inanimate bodies) can be explained without method which the author has sought; in the third part, the need of supposing for that purpose anything in some of the rules of morality which he has derived their matter other than the motion, size, shape, and from this method; m the fourth part, the arguments by arrangement of its parts” (The World, Ch. 5). which he proves the existence of God and of the Accordingly, Descartes does not need substantial human soul, which are the foundations of his forms and does not explain mutation as change of metaphysics; in the fifth part, the order of the form, whether substantial or accidenttal. He finds no questions in physics that he has investigated, and forms other than the ones he has described particularly the explanation of the movement of the quantitatively. For Descartes, the only motion is local heart and of other difficulties that pertain to medicine, motion; hence he states, “The philosophers also as well as the difference between our soul and that of suppose several motions that they think can be beasts; and in the final part, what things the author accomplished without any body changing place… As believes are required in order to advance further in for me, I know of none except the one which is easiest the investigation of nature than the author has done, to conceive…. the motion by which bodies pass from and what reasons have made him write. one place to another” (The World, Ch. 7). Part I One can glimpse the mechanist project in the Good sense is the best distributed thing in the world, Discourse on Method, in which an earlier version of for everyone thinks himself to be so well endowed 2 Translated from the French by Donald Cress in Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1980). 8 with it that even those who are the most difficult to men, there is one that is solidly good and important, I please in everything else are not at all wont to desire dare to believe that it is the one I have chosen.

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