Descartes and rationalism

Rationalism, in its purest sense, is a belief that all knowledge comes to us through our intellect and
our powers of reason. We cannot trust knowledge that comes to us through our senses, because our
senses are unreliable. Rationalism can be traced back as far as the Greek philosophers, with its
founding fathers arguably Socrates (who never wrote anything down) and his pupil Plato (who did).
They believed that our senses only allow us to view the physical world, which to them was far less
important than the internal world of thoughts, feeling, and emotions – in other words, our ‘souls’. It is
only by knowing your soul that you can know yourself, but to this you have to go beyond conscious
knowledge.

The figure most associated with rationalism is the French philosopher Rene Descartes. His most
famous phrase was: ‘I think, therefore I am.’ Descartes arrived at this statement by asking himself
the question: ‘What can I be sure of?’ He concluded that he could doubt pretty much everything that
he had ever been told, seen, heard, or learnt. As he put it:

I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything
completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all
in the sciences that was stable and likely to last.

This meant doubting the knowledge provided by the senses. Descartes then set about rebuilding a
view of the world that was based on much surer foundations. He set out this process in his book,
Meditations. Some of the stages of this process are -

1. The first thing we can be sure of is that we exist, because are able to ask ourselves the
question, ‘Do I exist?’

2. Descartes said that he must have had a ‘clear and distinct perception’ of what he was
asserting.’ In other words, whatever is clear and discernible is true.

3. All trustworthy knowledge we have, such as mathematical numbers, and geometrical forms,
are given to us by God. This contrasts to knowledge that is accessed via the senses (such as
colour or scent), which is obscure and confused.

Descartes didn’t say that we should ignore sensory knowledge completely, but he believed we should
analyse it in as scientific a way as possible, by breaking it down to its constituent parts, and using
mathematics to approach it.

For Descartes, imagination was aligned to sense perception, and should therefore only be used for
bodily survival. Knowledge via sense perception is not designed to show us the true nature of the
universe. Instead, we should rely on reason to provide us with certain knowledge.

Locke and empiricism

Empiricism, also, can be traced back to the Greeks. It is based on the idea that people’s minds begin
like a ‘tabula rasa’ (‘blank slate’), on which experience is written, to create an understanding of the
world and how it works. The person who first expressed the idea that the mind was a tabula rasa was
Aristotle, Plato’s pupil.

The more modern philosopher linked to this school of thought is John Locke, one of the most
influential British philosophers who has ever lived. He came across the ideas of Descartes while he
was a student at Oxford, and began to construct a theory of knowledge to rival it.

His Essay Concerning Human Understanding was written in order to ‘search out the bounds between
opinion and knowledge.’ In many ways, this was very ahead of its time – he argued, for example, that
people whose beliefs and faiths differed from the majority should not be attacked or criticised.
Encouraging tolerance was one of his key agendas.

For Locke and his followers (known as ‘empiricists’) our first ideas come to us via the senses.
Knowledge about objects and people is gradually built up as we are exposed to them, and at the same
time our mental powers develop allowing us to gain ‘ideas of reflection.’ We therefore have two
mechanisms to learn about the world – sensation of external things, and mental reflection.

Locke’s definition of knowledge was ‘the perception of the connection and agreement, or
disagreement and repugnancy, of any of our ideas.’ Testing ideas for agreement or disagreement
could be done in a number of ways, depending on the type of knowledge:

1. The most immediate way in which we gain knowledge is intuitive knowledge. This allows us
to agree or disagree with a proposition immediately, for example, statements such as ‘a circle
has no angles’, or, ‘a triangle has four sides.’

2. Demonstrative knowledge requires the help of connecting ideas. We may require this if we
are establishing whether the angles of a triangle add up to two right angles.

3. Sensitive knowledge, deals with experiences and sensations. Sensitive knowledge links our
minds to reality, allowing us to be aware of the food we eat, how hot it is, the colour of the
shoes we are wearing.

Whilst Descartes was deeply concerned with certainty, and whether or not we are being misled about
the nature of reality, Locke spent little time in pondering this question. Instead, he believed we are
‘invincibly conscious’ of reality, and took a very pragmatic approach to reality: knowledge for him
was a tool for the pursuit of happiness. However, he was wary of ‘judgement’, which he believed was
distinct, and weaker, from ‘knowledge’.