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DESCARTES

About 1961 I conceived the idea of learning everything.

As part of my effort, I began haunting a local shop, the (Milton, Ontario) Plaza Smoke and Gift.

The Smoke Shop, as everyone called it, was in a new strip plaza, the first in our town of 5,000. It had some paperback racks and some racks containing cheap LPs. (That's Long-Playing records: vinyl discs about 30 cm. in diameter etched on both sides. You played them on a phonograph turntable at 33 1/3 revolutions per minute to get about 15-30 minutes of music or speech per side.)

The thickest, most expensive paperback books in the Smoke Shop were 95 cents. Some were as cheap as 50 cents. LPs were between 99 cents and $4.50. It was here I began my book collection, which now occupies my garage and several rooms of my house. Here I first bought Allen Drury's bestselling novel Advise and Consent, American lawyer Louis Nizer's My Life in Court, Brahms' Symphony #1, Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, and Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited and Bringing it All Back Home.

And it was here, I think, that I bought a book that changed my life: the earth-shattering mauve-covered Bantam paperback Essential Works of Descartes.

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I may not have bought the book there. I may have ordered it by mail order. (My memory isn't reliable anymore.) And I can't be absolutely sure what year it was. But it was about 1963 that I found the Descartes book in the Smoke Shop --

--and plunged into a strange, radical world of ideas . . .

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French soldier and philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) was educated at the Jesuit college of La Flèche in Scholasticism, the aged Roman Catholic orthodoxy of his day. He became a soldier, serving for about three years on the Catholic side in the bloody and fratricidal Thirty Years War (1618-1648) between Catholic and Protestant Christians. (Some would say it was between an imperialistic France and a number of weaker powers.)

Descartes was a born thinker, philosopher, and scientist. The war was a slaughterhouse for Christian Europe. Apparently it caused Descartes to become interested in whether Christianity (and knowledge in general) could be made safe from pernicious errors, disagreement, and doubt. In the words of a biographical notice on biography.com, "While serving in the Bavarian army in 1619, he conceived it to be his task to refound human knowledge on a basis secure from skepticism."

In his book Discourse on the Method for Rightly Conducting One's Reason and Searching for Truth in the Sciences (1637), Descartes told how he had proceeded one winter to reason out the basis of all human knowledge. Snowbound in a room in Ulm, Germany with a stove, having nothing to do, Descartes dared to think as -- so far as I know -- no one had ever dared think before. In the snowbound room Descartes began to question all his beliefs, to reason them out to the bottom.

Believing that, to think correctly, he had to reduce his presuppositions to only those that were clear and distinct, Descartes tried to find the clearest, most distinct ideas among his thoughts. These only, he reasoned, could be the basis upon which he could think his way to the truth.

In this light, Descartes began to reason about his own identity. How did he know anything? How did he know what was true? What could he base his beliefs on? How did he even know that he existed?

If he was relying on the evidence of his senses, how did he know that some devil was not deceiving his senses? How did he know that this devil was not deceiving him even into thinking that he, Descartes, existed?

This was Descartes' breakthrough. He decided that no possible devil could deceive him into thinking that he existed. If Descartes were thinking, that must prove Descartes existed. The very fact he was thinking meant, indeed, that he existed. In summary, he memorably wrote, "I think, therefore I am." ("Je pense, donc je suis.")

This sentence spread across Europe like wildfire. It has burned itself into the brains of many. It became a touchstone for modern individualism and the inspiration for a new kind of European philosophy that lasted more than a century: rationalism -- the attempt to work out the truth of things through reason alone (and not through studying the world).

Descartes' philosophy led inevitably to that of the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), to that of the Danish philosopher Baron Paul Henri d'Holbach, that of the French philosopher Julien Offroy de La Mettrie, and to the French Enlightenment (1700-1789). He certainly influenced Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and the German Idealists. Even his errors were fruitful.

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But back to Descartes' ideas.

Now that, in his own mind, he had found at least one certain truth, namely, that he existed, and had established that "I think, therefore I am" (in Latin, the language of scholars at the time, "Cogito, ergo sum") was true and certain, Descartes felt he could use this proposition for the foundation of his new certain philosophy. On this basis Descartes proceeded to work out to his own satisfaction the existence of God, the soul, and the universe. (In my opinion, he fell into error immediately.) He argues that, in the words of biography.com: "God must exist and cannot be a deceiver; therefore [Descartes'] beliefs based on ordinary sense experience are correct"; that "mind and body are distinct substances"; that this dualism "made possible human freedom and immortality"; that the universe is made of swirling vortices; and that the human soul is connected to the body through the pineal gland.

For a fillip, in the appendices to the Discourse on Method Descartes founded co-ordinate geometry and made contributions to optics (!).

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Some of Descartes' conclusions seem a little outdated or ridiculous to us now. Science has vastly progressed beyond his knowledge. In 1687, a few short decades later, the English natural philosopher Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) established the laws of motion -- some of the most basic mathematical and physical laws of the universe -- and did it without vortices. Beginning in the Enlightenment (1700-1789), scientists and scholars began gradually to disbelieve in the human soul. And if the soul does exist, no one believes anymore it has anything to do with the pineal gland.

For the rest of his life Descartes corresponded with the great minds of Europe, reasoning with them and defending his views. In his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), the most detailed statement of his beliefs, Descartes expanded on his views and rebutted his critics.

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A few concluding remarks about Descartes and his ideas.

First, in the climate of Catholic Europe, Descartes' philosophical approach was unorthodox, original, and dangerous to the max. Though he arrived at orthodox conclusions and remained a lifelong Catholic, Descartes' emphasis on reason and inner certainty was suspect to Catholicism, which emphasized the primacy of faith, the adherence to dogma, and reliance on the Church hierarchy for truth and its interpretation. (That Descartes was so original I have often thought must have been the influence of both the logic of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) and the skepticism of Abelard (1079-1142?).) Descartes did suffer nuisance and harassment from the suspicion and hostility of the Church; he had to be very careful what and where he dared publish; he was at pains to appear orthodox. The Church in the 17th century -- to put it mildly -- did not like independent thought. It had burned Giordano Bruno at the stake in 1600 for believing in a plurality of worlds. It had shown the great Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) the instruments of torture in 1633; he had therefore recanted (publicly, at least) his revolutionary astronomical beliefs. So at one point Descartes moved to Holland, the one semi-free part of Europe, so that he could publish his works and think as he liked.

Second, despite Descartes' radicalism of approach (in the context of the time) he was a Scholastic through and through. Once he had established the "cogito" argument, he proceeded with almost indecent haste to try to establish all the 'truths' that Scholasticism (and orthodox Catholicism) believed.

So what I admire about Descartes is that, despite his Scholastic baggage, he was a truly radical philosopher, perhaps the most fundamental and radical there has been. When I read him back in the very early 1960s I worried for a day whether I existed.

Descartes dared to ask questions that the people of his day were too ignorant, too dogmatic, or too terrified to ask. This took enormous courage, integrity, and wisdom. He survived. In a Europe dominated by the dogmatic and fanatic Roman Catholic church; that took both wisdom and luck. His life showed the power and daring of his mind. His life and his philosophy are the measure of the man, and reveal the enormous power of philosophy.

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Books By and About Descartes

Descartes, René. Essential Works of Descartes.

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Last modified: 9:22 AM 9/7/2002