Wednesday, August 15, 2018

Review of Descartes Discourse on Method




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Rene Descartes was a 17th century writer and philosopher from France. He attended the Jesuit College of La Flèche and graduated in law at the University of Poitiers. Descartes is most famously known for his phrase, “I think therefore I am” or in Latin, “Cogito, ergo sum”. In his book Discourse on the Method for Guiding One’s Reason and Searching for the Truth in the Sciences or simply written Discourse on Method, René Descartes seeks to instruct the reader on how best to seek and find truth through the sciences.
The Discourse on Method itself is rather brief, but within these pages Descartes makes a claim that has shaped the course of modern philosophy and sciences forever.  Descartes main focus is to explain his own personal journey on how he came to understand the best way to use his rational powers. As he himself puts it, “it is not good enough to have a good mind; it is more important to use it well”[i] His method is what is referred to as methodical doubt. In other-words Descartes explains that if one is to find true knowledge they must first do as he did and abandon anything that may be doubtable in anyway. For Descartes method it was imperative to start at an epistemological ground zero.  In regards to preparing himself to lay the foundations of his own philosophical principles he writes: “I had spent a long time preparing myself…by rooting out from my mind all the incorrect views which I had previously accepted”[ii]. By doing this he was able to create his philosophical principles which can be summarized by the following maxims: 1) never accept anything as true unless it is clearly known to be true; 2) subdivide any problems faced into as many parts as possible in order to examine them more closely; 3) start with the most simplest objects and work up towards the most complex and assume order even if none is apparent; 4) make a comprehensive review and explanation so nothing is left out[iii]. With these rules in place Descartes set out to seek and find Truth.
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What is most interesting about this book is that he spends a good amount of space talking about himself and his own personal education. Another interesting aspect which admittedly surprised me was the fact that Descartes in no way used his method to try and disprove or even question the existence of God. He even uses St. Thomas Aquinas’s degrees of goodness to explain the existence and necessity of God. There are some who would use Descartes method as way to disprove the existence of God because of its reliance on methodical doubt, but this was never the intention of the author.  However, Descartes did breakaway from the scholastics of his time by rejecting the idea that substantial forms can act as explanatory principles in physics,  “for instance, the goal of being a swallow is the cause of the swallow’s ability to fly. Hence, on this account, a swallow flies for the sake of being a swallow”[iv]. While the above statement is true about the swallow, it does not give any practical information about the swallow itself or its flight (or whether it is African or European). 
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In his book Method on Discourse, Descartes does not so much set out to prove something, rather he sets up guidelines and gives some examples of how he used them to attain a deeper understanding of the natural world.  Descartes moved away from Aristotelean teleology (a thing does what it does because that is it s nature) and laid the foundation by which the seeds of modern philosophy and the modern sciences could grow and flourish. While this is certainly a good thing, there are those who have taken Descartes ideas and beliefs to the extreme, and as result have caused a great rift between the world of science and the world of faith. After reading Discourse on Method I do not believe that Descartes intentions were to create a rift between religion and science but rather to use science to have a deeper and better understanding of the natural world and perhaps how the order of nature points to a higher metaphysical and transcendental truth.


[i] René Descartes, Discourse on Method, (New York: Penguin Books 1999), 5
[ii] Descartes, 18
[iii] Descartes, 16
[iv] Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, René Descartes, https://www.iep.utm.edu/descarte/

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