René Descartes

From Philosopedia

Descartes, René (1596—1650)

Scientists today do not defend dualism, a concept associated with Descartes—the French scientist and philosopher.

Dualism holds that consciousness has some kind of a different source from the material we have inside our heads. In the words of A. J. Ayer,

• Descartes has few contemporary disciples. Not many philosophers of whatever persuasion believe that we are spiritual substances.

However, Descartes has interested religionists and philosophers for four centuries with his views including mind and matter’s being different substances. “If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things,” Descartes wrote. Because he was charged with being an atheist and threatened with execution by the church, he failed to finish many works which he had started.

Generally described as the founder of modern philosophy, and originator of “I think, therefore I am,” he considered himself a convinced Catholic.

Church officials, however, thought he was too critical. Unlike contemporary naturalists, he was a dualist, like Plato. Descartes’ Discourse on Method (1637) is his most widely read book. All his philosophic works were prohibited by the Vatican in 1663. In 1720, the Vatican added his Meditationes de prima philosophia (1641), and Descartes was forced to flee his country “parce qu’il y fait trop chaud pour lui.” He burned his Traite du Monde (Treatise on the World) lest he should incur the fate of Galileo.

During the French Revolution, Pierre Sylvain Maréchal cited Descartes as being only a “possible” atheist, one who denied final causes.

John M. Robertson offers a possible explanation, that Descartes “all through his life anxiously sought to propitiate the Church; and his scientific as well as his philosophic work was hampered in consequence.”

Stephen Gaukroger, in Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (1996), develops the thesis that the Church’s 1633 condemnation of Galileo split Descartes’s thinking in two ways: first, he looked outward when young, with the hope that he could explain how the world functioned, why, for example, rainbows are multi-colored, why meteors fly, why blood moves through the veins; but second, he looked inward when older, trying to ascertain certainty and what it is that constitutes selfhood. Gaukroger discusses why Descartes, the pioneer of modern philosophy and science, did not imitate Galileo and challenge the Church. Why, he speculates, did Descartes not speak out against ecclesiastical doctrine while living in a safe Dutch Protestant environment? Gaukroger makes the point that atheism in 1625 had a negative connotation, that atheists of that day might be accused of holding that God’s existence cannot be demonstrated through reason; that some atheists subscribed to determinism; and that God’s omnipotence by being tied in with the finite world necessarily had to be limited. “Not one among these atheists, and certainly not Descartes,” noted Harvard’s Peter Galison, “pressed for a materialist and godless world.” Galison is favorably impressed by Gaukroger’s thesis, finding that “it is a never-ending source of astonishment that Descartes can still be so absolutely strange and so absolutely familiar. There is the Descartes who argued that magnetism be best understood as tiny screws whirling through space, or who insisted that the lowly pineal gland was the seat of the mind, or who posited a universe of whirlpools set in motion by an unknowable God; and there is the Descartes whose notions of certainty, of mind against matter, and of human subjectivity are as familiar as the face in the mirror.”

Paul Edwards, in Immortality (1992), confirms that Descartes believed in God as well as in human survival after death.

(See entry for E. O. Wilson.)

(See and hear Russell Short, author in 2008 of Descartes' Bones, A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason tell how the skull and the rest of Descartes's body were separated, why the body was dug up in Sweden and reburied in France, and other of his findings.)

{CE; CL; ER; EU, Richard H. Popkin and Aram Vartarian; Paul Galison, “Mr. Cogito,” The New Republic, 13 May 1996; ILP; JMR; JMRH; PA; PUT}