Descartes in 60 Minutes E-Book

Walther Ziegler

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 91

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

The French thinker René Descartes is one of the best-known philosophers in the world. His brief dictum "I think, therefore I am" has become part of all humanity's cultural heritage. Just as Columbus discovered an unknown continent, the so-called "New World", Descartes succeeded in opening up a new dimension of knowledge and altering our view of reality. Prior to Descartes, people in the Christian West believed, for over a thousand years, in the Bible as testimony to God's revealed truth. Then came Descartes with the radical demand that knowledge had from then on to rely on a basis of absolute certainty: "It was always my most earnest desire to learn to distinguish the true from the false". He posed the fundamental question: how does one arrive at sure and certain knowledge? On what can I really rely? On what I see and hear? On thought and logic? Or perhaps on what I have learned from my earliest childhood on? His radical answer runs: on nothing at all! We must doubt absolutely everything! In his famous Meditations on First Philosophy Descartes describes his search for this absolutely certain knowledge. The result he arrives at: I can doubt anything and everything but in the moment of my doubting I cannot doubt that there is an "I" that thinks and doubts: "I think, therefore I am". Is thinking really the human trait that decides everything about us? Is there really nothing in the world except "thinking" within us and thoughtless, soulless bodies outside of us? Is it science's task to subjugate matter, plants and animals and even the human body itself? Descartes does more than just lay the ground for modern science. In a sense, his thought has become our destiny, both for good and for bad. The book appears as part of the well-loved series Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes which has now been translated worldwide into six languages.

Leseprobe

My thanks go to Rudolf Aichner for his tireless critical editing; Silke Ruthenberg for the fine graphics; Lydia Pointvogl, Eva Amberger, Christiane Hüttner, and Dr. Martin Engler for their excellent work as manuscript readers and sub-editors; Prof. Guntram Knapp, who first inspired me with enthusiasm for philosophy; and Angela Schumitz, who handled in the most professional manner, as chief editorial reader, the production of both the German and the English editions of this series of books.

My special thanks go to my translator

Dr Alexander Reynolds.

Himself a philosopher, he not only translated the original German text into English with great care and precision but also, in passages where this was required in order to ensure clear understanding, supplemented this text with certain formulations adapted specifically to the needs of English-language readers.

Contents

Descartes’ Great Discovery

Descartes’ Central Idea

Descartes’ Doubts About Perception. Is What We See, Hear or Smell Real?

Descartes’ Doubts About Our Waking Mind: Is What We Experience Real or Could It Be Only a Dream?

Descartes’ Doubts About Logic: Are We Victims of a “Malicious Demon”?

The One Sure and Certain Truth: “I Think, Therefore I Am”

If Thinking Alone Provides Certainty, Then God Too Must Be Thought of in Logical Terms

The Mind-Body Duality: Res Extensa and Res Cogitans

Of What Use is Descartes’ Discovery to Us Today?

A Short History of the Theory of Knowledge from Descartes to the Present Day

The Success of Cartesian Dualism and Its “Dark Side”: the Body as “Just a Machine”

Is the “Res Cogitans” Immortal?

“I Think, Therefore I Am” – Why This Idea is Still So Relevant

Bibliographical References

Descartes’ Great Discovery

The French thinker René Descartes (1596-1650) is one of the best-known philosophers in the world. His brief but renowned proposition “I think, therefore I am” is still today a compulsory part of every young French boy or girl’s education. But above and beyond France, his ideas have surely become part of all humanity’s cultural heritage. He is seen as the founder of Rationalism and thereby, in a sense, as father of the whole of modern philosophy. He surely deserves this honorific title because what Descartes dared to do, intellectually, was, in his day, something quite revolutionary. He is rightly called “the Columbus of philosophy”. Just as the great seafarer discovered a hitherto unknown continent, the so-called “New World”, Descartes succeeded in opening up a new dimension of knowledge and in changing our whole perspective on the world. Before Descartes, people in the Christian Western world had believed, for well over a millennium, in the words of the prophets, quite especially in Jesus Christ, and in the Bible as written testimony of divine revelation. For all these years, all knowledge about the cosmos, and about inner and outer Nature, had had its source and basis ultimately in religious faith.

Then came Descartes with a radical new demand. Truth, he claimed, ought no longer to consist in the supposed “revealed truth” of prophets and saints but should henceforth be based upon some sure and incontestable knowledge about the experienceable world. Because the theologians of the Middle Ages, Descartes insisted, had held far too many self-contradictory views about what was true or false. Although Descartes had been raised and educated as a good Roman Catholic, at an eminent school and college run by Jesuits, the most loyally orthodox of Christian religious orders, he had begun, so he tells his readers in retrospect, very early on to have doubts about all that he was being taught and learning. The very first, indeed, of his famous Meditations on First Philosophy opens with the words:

But it was not just among the priests and theologians who had given him his education that Descartes discovered „falsehoods” and self-contradictory notions. These he found also among philosophers:

There had been, then, so argued Descartes, not one single proposition in the whole of philosophy, from ancient times up to Descartes’ own day, which had really stood the test of time. Lacking throughout, in other words, had been anything like a sure and incontestable knowledge. It was precisely the challenge of acquiring such a knowledge that Descartes now planned to take up. He planned the far from modest undertaking of creating once and for all a sure and certain body of truths, a starting point for genuine knowledge whose validity no one would be able to contest. In his own words, he set out to find that often-evoked “Archimedean point” from which it will prove possible for us to comprehend, assess and govern all the other things that make up our world and our universe:

Descartes embarked on a quest, then, for that which is certain and unshakeable. He himself judged this to be the noblest and most important task a philosopher could undertake. Once a firm and true ground and foundation for human knowledge had been found, everything else would follow naturally and spontaneously from this:

Like many of the great philosophers of his day Descartes was a man skilled in a whole range of arts and sciences. Besides being a philosopher, he was also a pioneering mathematician and researcher in the natural sciences. Thus, many of us may remember from our school geometry lessons the so-called “Cartesian coordinate system” with its horizontal x- and vertical y-axis. But for Descartes the first and most fundamental thing that geometry, and indeed all the other individual “exact sciences” such as arithmetic and physics, needed and required was a firm basis for claims to knowledge. He poses, then, first and foremost the basic question: how does one arrive at certain knowledge? On what can I really rely: on what I see, hear and feel? On my reasoning and on logic itself? Or perhaps on what has been taught me from earliest childhood on? Descartes’ radical answer to these questions runs: I can rely on nothing at all! I must begin by putting absolutely everything into question:

At this point Descartes did something quite unusual. In order indeed to “demolish everything” in the way of likely “falsehoods” that he had learned in his childhood and youth and to “start again right from the foundations”, he withdrew, for a whole week, to a remote location and began to meditate. Hence the title of his principal work, which was to make him famous all over Europe: Meditations on First Philosophy. In this book, published in 1641, Descartes records step by step, as if in a personal journal, all the considerations that came to his mind in his search for a reliable criterion of truth. The book consists of no less than six successive “meditations” marking the stations on his way to the acquisition of an absolutely certain knowledge. Today, indeed, we tend to associate the word “meditation” mostly with those techniques of mental concentration derived from the Far East which help us to guide our attention and perception in such a way as to achieve an inner liberation from our involvement in the stress and strain of daily life. It was through meditation of this type, engaged in under a fig tree in the open air, that the Buddha, for example, arrived at his experience of “nirvana”. But what Descartes means by “meditation” is something rather closer to the original sense of the Latin word meditatio: namely, “the finding of a centre or a middle”. The “centre or middle” that Descartes wants to find out in his own meditations is not “the meaning of life” but rather that deepest and most inescapable knowledge upon which all other knowledge must be built:

In sharp contrast to the Buddha, indeed, Descartes’s meditations were not conducted in the open air and in the cross-legged posture of the yogi but rather seated in a bourgeois armchair set in front of a comfortable fireplace. In a way much like the Buddha, however, he began his meditations by attempting to free himself, there in the remote dwelling that he had retreated to, from all attachments and prejudices that he had brought along with him from the wider and more agitated world. This taking leave, indeed, and distancing of himself from all those learned beliefs and convictions which he had formerly held to be true had the result, as he confesses, of tipping him into a state of deep disorientation:

The highly personal and emotional language and imagery used in this passage is a clear indication in itself that, with Descartes, a new intellectual era has begun. He describes his key philosophical notion, and the path by which he has arrived at it, no longer in the cold intellectual language of the “philosophers of the schools” but rather in the literary style of an autobiographical novel or, as we have said, a personal diary or journal. This is as much a novelty as is his decision, in 1647, to publish the Meditations also in a French-language version, since in Descartes’ lifetime it was still the general practice to publish philosophical works in Latin and in Latin alone. The readers such books were aimed at had been, up to this point, the Latin-speaking cultural elite and no one else. But Descartes expressly declares his intention of trying to alter this:

Descartes’ expectation was not disappointed. His Meditations on First Philosophy made him famous in his own lifetime and went down in history, indeed, as an epoch-making work which still engages thinkers and writers even today. Descartes takes us, through the six short chapters making up this book, into the fascinating world of his own search for truth, so that we ourselves feel that we are being drawn into Descartes’ “whirlpool” of analytical pondering over all those of aspects of our daily life and experience which are perhaps, at bottom, no more than imagination and illusion. In order to attain to some final certainty, Descartes argues, we need a radically new method – the method of systematic doubt:

Thus, Descartes undertakes to doubt even what we see with our own eyes. Because this too may be an optical illusion or will o’ the wisp. Even if we feel absolutely certain that we have perceived something correctly and accurately, the thing perceived could still prove not to be real. Because what assures us, for example, that we are not dreaming when we perceive and affirm in this way? Is there really anything, asks Descartes, that it is absolutely impossible to doubt? The answer which he eventually found to this question has become one of the most famous propositions in our modern culture:

Descartes’ reasoning here ran as follows: I can doubt and call into question absolutely everything that I see and perceive around me, with the sole exception of the fact that, in this very moment when I am doubting and calling into question, I myself, the doubter and questioner, am alive to do so. If I doubt, then this means that I myself exist: a fact which remains unaltered regardless of whether I am in error, asleep,