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COMMENTARY
December 22, 2007
Descartes for breakfast
Given world enough and time, perhaps given a little better education than I had, I should like to sit down and write a long, visceral attack on René Descartes. This is the brilliant French philosopher, mathematician, and poet in prose (1596-1650) who can be, not without justice, presented as the Father of Modern Philosophy, and Instigator of the Scientific Revolution. “Cartesianism” (he signed himself “Renatus Cartesius” in Latin) is not the governing philosophy of the modern world. For if it had been, it would have been overthrown, long ago. Rather it is, for better or usually worse, the point of departure for modern thinking in the sciences, including ultimately the social sciences, which include every form of politics.“Ideas have consequences,” we have all heard. Also, one idea follows from another. Descartes did not so much invent the modern outlook, as locate an Archimedean point, from which the thinking of the modern world would deviate from the thinking of the Middle Ages. The prestige of Descartes is founded in his mathematical genius. He was the inventor of the Cartesian coordinate system; the founder of analytic geometry, and thus the precursor of calculus and analysis. These achievements can never be taken away. But it is as author of the simple phrase, “cogito ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am) that he smiles from the billboard of history. Like Einstein's simple formula of mass-energy equivalence, “E=mc2” -- it is something everyone knows, and hardly anyone understands. The founder of modern science, and the founder of modern scientism, bound together like chemistry and alchemy. Later scientists found a way to split the atom, but it was Descartes before them who found a way to split the body from its soul. It was he who laid the philosophical groundwork for the investigation of nature, considered as pure mechanism, quite apart from questions of final cause. (Yet it was the Englishman, Francis Bacon, who, though no capable scientist himself, not only anticipated this step, but pushed it one step further, by denying that any inquiry into the “spiritual” realm could have any value.) It is thrilling to read Descartes. I can remember my adolescent giddiness when his significance first began to dawn on me, and I felt myself in the presence of an incontestably powerful mind, and for a while, mentally enslaved to it. Here was a sceptic capable of casting doubt even on the proposition that two plus two is four. And a thinker who could then attempt to take the universe to pieces, and re-assemble it before our eyes. He belongs in any pantheon of the finest minds. Descartes was himself a product of mediaeval scholasticism; could only have been a product of it. His was one of several revolts from within the scholastic tradition -- which we associate with Thomas Aquinas, but from which “Thomism” was also a kind of revolt. In that sense, modern thought is a subset of mediaeval thought -- the extension, to an extreme, of one possible path among the many the mediaeval mind conceived. In that sense, our views are narrower than mediaeval views, and the remarkable speed of our advance in science and technology has depended upon that narrowing. Yet what we have discovered, and our way of discovering it, was implicit in mediaeval thinking. So far as our own, modern, progress is concerned, we have maintained a tenuous equilibrium -- our religion separated from our science, our minds separated from our bodies, as it were -- but using common sense to keep a balance between the “rational” and “spiritual” sides of our one nature. We have never quite discarded our belief that there is more to our own existence, than the chance product of the machinery of nature. “Post-modernism” can be defined as the discarding of this tenuous balance; and it can be argued that post-modernism is implicit in modernism itself. The crime of Descartes, was to subtly twist the plainer meanings of scholastic terms, so that the entire edifice of reason could weigh on only one side of our nature, and find no purchase on the other. That, at least, is what I have come to dimly understand, in trying to account for the strangely capsized views I find everywhere today, on questions as various as Darwinian evolution, “global warming,” the welfare state, “political correctness,” the accommodation of Islam, war and peace in the Middle East. In every case I encounter so-called “liberal” minds, willing to consider only one side of an equation. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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