RESOURCES FOR CONSTRUCTING THEOLOGIES: WESTERN PHILOSOPHY

DESCARTES’ LIFE AND TEACHING

Submitted To, Submitted By,

Rev. Dr. John Philip A Philo Jacob Varughese,
BD III
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Introduction
"Commonsense is the best distributed commodity in the world, for every man is
convinced he is well supplied with it" – Rene Descartes
Rena Descartes (1596-1650) is usually considered the founder of modern philosophy. He is the first
man of high philosophic capacity whose outlook is profoundly affected by the new physics and
astronomy. He retained much of scholasticism and did not accept foundations laid by predecessors,
but endeavoured to construct a complete new philosophy. This had not happened since Aristotle, and
was a sign of the new self-confidence that resulted from the progress of science. There was freshness
about his work that was not to be found in any eminent previous philosopher since Plato. All the
intermediate philosophers were teachers, with the professional superiority belonging to that
avocation. Descartes wrote, not as a teacher, but as a discoverer and explorer, anxious to
communicate what he has found. His style was easy and unpedantic, addressed to intelligent men of
the world rather than to pupils. It was, moreover, an extraordinarily excellent style. It is very
fortunate for modern philosophy that the pioneer had such admirable literary sense. His successors,
both on the Continent and in England, until Kant, retained his unprofessional character, and several
of them retained something of his stylistic merit.1
When the Church's authority over thought was finally loosened, many people came to believe that
knowledge of the world could be gained by the use of reason alone. In philosophy, this development
is known as Rationalism. It was launched by Descartes, after whom the outstanding figures in
rationalist philosophy were Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Descartes and Leibniz
were among the most gifted of all mathematicians, and for them mathematics seemed to provide the
ideal model for truly reliable knowledge. They believed that if the methods by which mathematicians
such as themselves were making new discoveries and acquiring new knowledge could be applied to
human attempts to understand the world, the world could be fully explained. 2 Although philosophy
rarely alters its direction and mood with radical suddenness, there are times when its new concerns
and emphases clearly separate it from its immediate past. Such was the case with seventeenth century
Continental Rationalism whose founder was Rene Descartes and whose new program initiated what
is called Modern Philosophy. In a sense, much of what continental rationalists set out to do had
already been attempted by the medieval philosophers and by Beacon and Hobbes. But Descartes,
Spinoza and Leibniz fashioned a new ideal for philosophy. Influenced by the progress and success
of science and mathematics, their new program was an attempt to philosophy with the exactness of
mathematics. They set out to formulate clear rational principles that could be organized into a system

1
Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1945), 557.
2
Bryan Magee, The Story of Philosophy: The Essential Guide to the History of Western Philosophy (New York: DK
Publishing, Inc., 1998 ), 83

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of truths from which accurate information about the world could be deduced. Their emphasis was in
the rational capacity of the human mind. Although, they did not reject the claims of religion, they did
consider philosophical reasoning something independent of supernatural revelation.3
Descartes’ Early Life
“I was struck by the large number of falsehoods I had accepted as
true in my childhood” - Descartes
Rene Descartes was born in France in 1596 in a village which is now called La-Haye-Descartes. He
received an excellent education at the hands of the Jesuits, an education which included philosophy
and mathematics; then he took a degree in law at the University of Poitiers, his home town. As a
brilliant student he perceived that many of the arguments put forward by the various authorities he
was studying were invalid, and often he did not know what to believe. For a time he was a soldier in
the army of Maximilian of Bavaria. After travelling widely throughout Europe, he decided, in 1628,
to settle down in Holland. His travels taught him that the world of human beings was even more
varied and mutually contradictory than the world of books. For roughly the twenty years between
1629 and 1649, he produced original work of the highest quality. In philosophy his outstanding
works were two: Discourse on Method, published in 1637 (was written not in academic Latin, but in
good plain French, so that it could be understood, as he put it, ‘even by women’) and Meditations,
published in 1641. His principal works also included Principles of Philosophy (1644) and The
Passions of the Soul (1649). In 1649, Queen Christina of Sweden invited him to Stockholm to tutor
her in philosophy. In the bitter Swedish winter he contracted pneumonia, and died in 1650. He
remained a Catholic throughout his life; but he chose to spend most of his adult life in Protestant
Holland. He was a man of the world, a gentleman of leisure living on his fortune; he never lectured
in a university and commonly wrote for the general reader.
While serving in the Emperor’s army, Descartes acquired a conviction of his mission as a
philosopher. On a winter’s day in 1619 he conceived the idea of undertaking, single-handed, a
reform of human learning that would display all disciplines as branches of a single wonderful
science. When he went to sleep, full of ardour for his project, he had three dreams that he regarded as
prophetic signs of divine vocation. In pursuit of his goal Descartes was an innovator in many
disciplines. Nowadays it is his philosophical works which are most read: in his own time his
reputation rested as much on his mathematical and scientific works. He was the founder of analytical
geometry, and the Cartesian co-ordinates which enable arithmetical and geometrical methods to be
combined derive their name from his Latin surname, Cartesius.4
Though he honoured theology, he concluded that its “relevant truths……are quite above our
intelligence” and that if one were to be successful in thinking about them, “it was necessary to have
some extraordinary assistance from above and to be more than a mere man.” He did not want to deny
these truths, for he apparently remained a pious Catholic to the end, but he did not find in theology a
method by which these truths could be arrived at solely through the powers of human reason. Nor
was the philosophy he learned at college any more helpful in this regard, for “no single thing is to be
found in it which is not subject of dispute, and in consequence which s not dubious..” His quest for
certainty led Descartes to turn from his books to that “great book of the world”, where he met “men

3
Samuel Enoch Stumpf, Socrates to Sartre - A History of Philosophy (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company), 227.
4
Anthony Kenny, An Illustrated Brief History of Western Philosophy (United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishing, 2006),
207.

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of diverse temperaments and conditions and collected varied experiences.” But he found as much of
difference of opinion among practical men as among philosophers. Descartes broke with the past and
gave philosophy a fresh start. He was determined to discover the basis of intellectual certainty in his
own reason.
Descartes’ Method of Doubt
The French Rationalist Descartes used methodic doubt to reach certain knowledge of self-existence
in the act of thinking, expressed in the indubitable proposition cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore I
am”). He found knowledge from tradition to be dubitable because authorities disagree; empirical
knowledge dubitable because of illusions, hallucinations, and dreams; and mathematical knowledge
dubitable because people make errors in calculating. He proposed an all-powerful, deceiving demon
as a way of invoking universal doubt. Although the demon could deceive men regarding which
sensations and ideas are truly of the world, or could give them sensations and ideas none of which
are of the true world, or could even make them think that there is an external world when there is
none, the demon could not make men think that they exist when they do not.5
Descartes used the method of doubt in order to find an absolutely certain starting point for building
up our knowledge. But what does it mean to be certain? It is being unable to doubt. So, something
that cannot possibly be doubted is certain. Therefore, his strategy was to adopt the Method of Doubt.
This method instructs us to take our beliefs and subject them to doubt. If it is possible to doubt them,
we treat them as false. The point is that we treat them as false until we find a foundation which is
undoubtable, and then we build up everything on that.
Step 1: Doubting the Senses
Step 2: Doubting the Physical World
Step 3: Doubting Mathematics6
From these, he told that the one thing that he cannot doubt is that he doubts he must exist. So, when
he is thinking, he knows he exists and this can’t be doubted. This was the foundation which was
certain to him and on this he tend to build the other doubted things.
Mind-Body Relation
The modern problem of the relationship of mind to body stems from the thought of René Descartes,
who gave dualism its classical formulation. Beginning from his famous dictum cogito, ergo
sum (Latin: “I think, therefore I am”), Descartes developed a theory of mind as an immaterial, non
extended substance that engages in various activities or undergoes various states such as rational
thought, imagining, feeling (sensation), and willing. Matter, or extended substance, conforms to the
laws of physics in mechanistic fashion, with the important exception of the human body, which
Descartes believed is causally affected by the human mind and which causally produces certain
mental events. For example, willing the arm to be raised causes it to be raised, whereas being hit by a
hammer on the finger causes the mind to feel pain. This part of Descartes’s dualistic theory, known

5
The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Methodic doubt". https://www.britannica.com/topic/methodic-doubt (14 September
2021).
6
Richard Brown, “Descartes 1: The Method of Doubt”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncEoWxsnXyc (14
September 2021).

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as interactionism, raises one of the chief problems faced by Descartes and his followers: the question
of how this causal interaction is possible.
According to Descartes mind and body are totally different from each other. Body does not depend
on mind and also mind does not depend on body. One’s nature does not present on other. The
necessary nature of the body is extension and body is passive. But the necessary nature of the mind is
consciousness, active and independent. He believed that mind exerted control over the
brain via the pineal gland: “My view is that this gland is the principal seat of the soul, and the place
in which all our thoughts are formed.” So, according to Descartes’ the interactionism between two
opposite kind of objects can happen indirectly with the help of the pineal or pituitary gland.
His posited relation between mind and body is called Cartesian dualism or substance dualism. He
held that mind was distinct from matter, but could influence matter. How such an interaction could
be exerted remains a contentious issue.
Proof for God’s Existence
Descartes had to prove God’s existence solely in terms of his rational awareness of his own existence
and internal thoughts. He dives into examining the philosophical possibility of God's existence in his
Third Meditation. He breaks this evidence down into two umbrella categories, called proofs,
whose logic is relatively easy to follow.
In the first proof, Descartes argues that, by evidence, he is an imperfect being who has an objective
reality including the notion that perfection exists and therefore has a distinct idea of a perfect being
(God, for example). Further, Descartes realizes that he is less formally real than the objective reality
of perfection and therefore there has to be a perfect being existing formally from whom his innate
idea of a perfect being derives wherein he could have created the ideas of all substances, but not the
one of God.
The second proof then goes on to question who it is then that keeps him — having an idea of a
perfect being — in existence, eliminating the possibility that he himself would be able to do. He
proves this by saying that he would owe it to himself, if he were his own existence maker, to have
given himself all sorts of perfections. The very fact that he is not perfect means he would not bear his
own existence. Similarly, his parents, who are also imperfect beings, could not be the cause of his
existence since they could not have created the idea of perfection within him. That leaves only a
perfect being, God, that would have had to exist to create and be constantly recreating him.
Essentially, Descartes' proofs rely on the belief that by existing, and being born an imperfect being
(but with a soul or spirit), one must, therefore, accept that something of more formal reality than
ourselves must have created us. Basically, because we exist and are able to think ideas, something
must have created us.7
Criticism
It is true that Descartes initiated a new, individualistic, style of philosophizing. Medieval
philosophers had seen themselves as principally engaged in transmitting a corpus of knowledge; in
the course of transmission they might over improvements, but these must remain within the bounds
set by tradition. Renaissance philosophers had seen themselves as rediscovering and republicizing

7
Andrea Borghini, "René Descartes' Proofs of God's Existence", https://www.thoughtco.com/descartes-3-proofs-of-gods-
existence-2670585 (14 September 2021).

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the lost wisdom of ancient times. It was Descartes who was the first philosopher since Antiquity to
offer himself as a total innovator; as the person who had the privilege of setting out the truth about
man and his universe for the very first time. Where Descartes trod, others followed: Locke, Hume,
and Kant each offered their philosophies as new creations, constructed for the first time on sound
scientific principles. ‘Read my work, and discard my predecessors’ is a constant theme of
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers and writers. With medieval philosophers like Aquinas,
Scotus, and Ockham, a student has to read the texts closely to realize the great degree of innovation
that is going on: the new wine is always decanted so carefully into the old bottles. With Descartes
and his successors, the difficulty is the opposite: one has to look outside the text to realize that much
that is presented as original insight is in fact to be found stated in earlier authors. There is no need to
doubt the sincerity of Descartes’ repeated statements that he owed nothing to his scholastic
predecessors. He was not a plagiarist, but he had no appreciation of how much he had imbibed from
the intellectual atmosphere in which he grew up.
When Descartes tried to doubt everything, the one thing he did not call into question was the
meaning of the words he was using in his solitary meditation. Had he done so, he would have had to
realize that even the words we use in soliloquy derive their meaning from the social community
which is the home of our language, and that therefore it was not, in fact, possible to build up his
philosophy from solitary private ideas. Again, Descartes thought that it was not possible to call into
question propositions that he was taught by natural light-the clear and distinct perceptions that form
the basic building blocks of his system.8
Conclusion
Descartes was a man of extraordinary and versatile genius. His ideas on physiology, physics, and
astronomy were superseded within a century: they enjoyed a much shorter currency than the
Aristotelian system they were designed to replace. But his work in algebra and geometry entered into
the abiding patrimony of mathematics; and his philosophical ideas remain-for better or worse-
enormously influential to the present day. No one can question his claim to rank among the greatest
philosophers of all time.
There is no doubt of the enormous influence Descartes has exercised from his own day to ours. But
his relation to modern philosophy is not that of father to son, nor of architect to palace, nor of
planner to city. Rather, in the history of philosophy his position is like that of the waist of an
hourglass. As the sand in the upper chamber of such a glass reaches its lower chamber only through
the slender passage between the two, so too ideas that had their origin in the Middle Ages have
reached the modern world through a narrow filter: the compressing genius of Descartes. 9
There was an ironic fittingness about the motto which he had chosen for himself as an epitaph:
“No man is harmed by death, save he who, known too well by all the world, has not yet learnt to
know himself.” In these times where humans are behaving without senses, fighting with each other,
where we are not able to understand others feelings… we have to start from ourselves. We have to

8
Anthony Kenny, The Rise of Modern Philosophy – A New History of Western Philosophy Vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 2006), 40.
9
Anthony Kenny, The Rise of Modern Philosophy – A New History of Western Philosophy Vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 2006), 41.

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know ourselves. When we learn to know ourselves, we can treat others with respect and make the
world a better place.

Bibliography
Borghini, Andrea. "René Descartes' Proofs of God's Existence". (18 July 2019).
https://www.thoughtco.com/descartes-3-proofs-of-gods-existence-2670585 (14 September 2021).

Brown, Richard. "Descartes 1: The Method of Doubt". (18 October 2011).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncEoWxsnXyc (14 September 2021).

Encyclopaedia, The Editors of. "Methodic Doubt". (1 November 2013).

https://www.britannica.com/topic/methodic-doubt (14 September 2021).

Kenny, Anthony. An Illustrated Brief History of Western Philosophy. United Kingdom: Blackwell
Publishing, 2006.

—. The Rise of Modern Philosophy - A New History of Western Philosophy Vol. 3 . Oxford:
Clarendon Press,, 2006.

Magee, Bryan. The Story of Philosophy:The Essential Guide to the History of Western Philosophy .
New York: DK Publishing, Inc., 1998.

Russell, Bertrand. The History of Western Philosophy. New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1945.

Stumpf, Samuel Enoch. Socrates to Sartre - A History of Philosophy. New York: McGraw-Hill Book
Company, n.d.

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