René Descartes is frequently distinguished as the father of modern philosophy, a designation argued for both by his break from the dominant scholastic - Aristotelian philosophy of his time and by his development and promotion of emerging mechanistic sciences (Skirry, n.d.). Like numerous geniuses, he had a variety of interests and delved into different fields, including mathematics, geometry, ethics, philosophy, and even art (Sánchez, 2018). Corresponding to Sánchez (2018), his primary value lay in confronting scholastic philosophy, which was riddled with prejudices.
Currently, there is controversy surrounding the accuracy of his propositions (Sánchez, 2018). Some authors point to an extreme coincidence between Descartes' hypotheses and the work of Gómez Pereira, a 16th-century Spanish humanist. Similarly, the theses surrounding Descartes' method are notably similar to those of Francisco Sánchez, known as "The Skeptic." Due to these and other coincidences with the works of Augustine of Hippo and Avicenna, he was accused of plagiarism. The controversy persists to this day, and there is sufficient evidence to suggest that some of his works are quite similar to those of his predecessors. However, in accordance with Sánchez (2018), the French philosopher also made some contributions that can be considered entirely authentic.
Biography
Descartes was born on March 31, 1596, in his maternal grandmother's house in La Haye, a region of Touraine, France (Hatfield, 2018). The city of La Haye, located 47 kilometers south of Tours, was later renamed Descartes in his honor (Hatfield, 2018). His father was Joachim Descartes, a jurist at the Brittany Court of Justice (Guerri, n.d.). His mother, Jeanne Brochard, was the daughter of the lieutenant general of Poitiers. Descartes was their third child. However, a year after Descartes' birth, his mother and her fourth child died during childbirth. His father worked six months a year at the Court of Justice in Rennes, about 300 km from home. As a result, he grew up with his grandmother and great-uncle. When he was four years old, his father remarried and began to live permanently in Rennes. However, according to Guerri (n.d.), there was always an emotional bond between René and his father.
From birth, Descartes experienced health problems and had a persistent cough (Guerri, n.d.). Local doctors thought he would not survive infancy. However, his father hired a nurse to care for him. When he grew up, he rewarded his nurse with a permanent pension in gratitude for saving his life (Guerri, n.d.). In 1607, despite his poor health, he entered the Royal Henry - Le - Grand Jesuit College in La Flèche, where he studied mathematics and physics, including the works of Galileo Galilei (Cajal, 2020). At that time, according to Guerri (n.d.), Galileo had not yet published his best works, which overturned Aristotle's physics.
After graduating in 1614, he studied for two years at the University of Poitiers, obtaining a bachelor's and a licentiate in Canon and Civil Law, according to his father's wishes for him to become a jurist (Cajal, 2020). However, he never practiced law or entered government service, which such training would have made possible (Hatfield, 2018). Instead, according to Hatfield (2018), he became a soldier, moving to Breda in 1618 to support Protestant Prince Maurice against the Catholic parts of the Netherlands, which were controlled by Spain.
From 1620 to 1628, he toured Europe, spending time in Bohemia, Hungary, Germany, the Netherlands, and France (Cajal, 2020). He also spent time in Paris, where he came into contact with Marin Mersenne, an important contact who kept him connected to the scientific world for several years. From Paris, he traveled through Switzerland to Italy, where he stayed in Venice and Rome. He then returned to France, renewing his friendship with Mersenne and Mydorge and meeting Girard Desargues. According to Cajal (2020), his residence in Paris became a meeting point for philosophers and mathematicians.
In 1628, tired of the hustle and bustle of Paris, he decided to settle in a place where he could work in solitude (Cajal, 2020). He thought long and hard before selecting a country that suited his nature and ultimately decided to move to the Netherlands. Shortly after settling there, he began working on his first major work of physics, "Le Monde" or "Traité de la Lumière." By 1633, this work was almost finished when he heard the news that Galileo Galilei had been sentenced to house arrest. Consequently, according to Cajal (2020), he decided not to risk publishing the work and eventually chose to release it only partially after his death.
René Descartes was pressured by his friends to publish his ideas; however, he was adamant about not divulging "Le Monde" and instead wrote a treatise on science titled "Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison et chercher la vérité dans les sciences" (Cajal, 2020). This work explains what Descartes considers a more satisfactory tool for acquiring knowledge than Aristotle's logic. According to Descartes, only mathematics are true; therefore, everything must be based on mathematics. In line with Cajal (2020), in the three essays accompanying the Discourse, he illustrated his method of using reason to seek truth in the sciences.
In 1641, Descartes published "Meditaciones metafísicas," which demonstrates the existence of God and the immortality of the soul (Cajal, 2020). This work is characterized by the use of methodical doubt, a systematic procedure of rejecting as erroneous all forms of beliefs about which one has been deceived or could have been deceived at some point (Cajal, 2020). In 1635, Descartes' daughter, Francine, was born to Helena Jans and was baptized in the Reformed Church of Deventer (Watson, 2021). Although various commentators often refer to Francine as Descartes' "illegitimate" daughter, her baptism is recorded in a register of legitimate births (Watson, 2021). According to Cajal (2020), he had planned to raise the girl in France; however, she died of fever at the age of 5.
Tired of these struggles, Descartes accepted an invitation from Queen Christina of Sweden in 1649, who urged him to move to Stockholm as her philosophy professor (Fernández & Tamaro, 2004). Despite the intellectual satisfactions Christina provided him, Descartes was not happy in the land of bears, where people's thoughts seemed to metamorphose into ice, like water. According to Fernández & Tamaro (2004), he was accustomed to comforts and found it difficult to rise at four in the morning every day, in darkness and with the winter cold gnawing at his bones, to instruct a queen who no longer had free time due to her multiple commitments.
The death of René Descartes is slightly controversial (Sánchez, 2018). Officially, he died of pneumonia contracted in Stockholm, after being invited by Queen Christina of Sweden to her palace. This has been the historical assumption until German specialist Eike Pies disclosed a new premise in 1980. According to him, Descartes would have been murdered with arsenic. Subsequently, another specialist, Theodor Ebert, corroborated the same hypothesis. According to their research, Descartes was considered little less than a heretic. His rationalist approaches were viewed with suspicion by the Church and by the scholastics. Giving reason a fundamental role in human structure was not well received. Consequently, according to Sánchez (2018), it is believed that the confessor of Queen Christina gave him a poisoned host with arsenic.
Free Will
Descartes "solved" a philosophical problem by reformulating the teachings of Saint Thomas of Aquino (Guerri, n.d.). He approached the importance of free will and asserted that, although the human body largely functions like a machine, the mind belongs to the soul and is not subject to the laws of cause and effect. In correspondence with Guerri (n.d.), this is the ideology of Cartesian dualism, which makes a drastic distinction between the mind and the body.
As a result of his thinking, he proposed the doctrine of interactionism (Guerri, n.d.). According to this doctrine, the body and the mind influence each other in some way (Guerri, n.d.). He suggested that the human being is a union of the mind and the body, two drastically different substances that interact in the pineal gland (Watson, 2021). Therefore, he thought that the pineal gland should be the point of union, as it is the only non-double organ in the brain, and double reports, such as those from two eyes, must have a place to merge (Watson, 2021). According to Guerri (n.d.), this teaching has been incorporated to some extent in the expression "psychosomatic illness," which literally means "illness of the mind and body."
Ultimately, he argued that any idea presented to the mind clearly and distinctly should be true (Guerri, n.d.). The obvious is what is immediately presented to the mind, and the unlike is what is clear and unconditional simultaneously. In correspondence with Guerri (n.d.), Descartes mentioned that the unlike is known by itself and that its evidence is independent of any limiting condition.
Descartes and Rationalism
The skepticism of the sophists, which was countered by Plato's rationalism, found a parallel in the time of Descartes, who presented his rationalism as a response (Regader, n.d.). During these times, humans were placed at the center of the world, and there was a distrust of their own abilities to sustain it. However, Descartes did not admit the skeptics' belief in the incapacity of knowledge or in the weakness of reason. Therefore, he made the decision to systematically question everything until he found something that was so transparently true that it could not be doubted (Regader, n.d.). According to Fernández & Tamaro (2004), his method consists of four precepts: not accepting as true anything unless there is absolute certainty about it; breaking down each problem into its smallest parts; moving from the most understandable to the most complicated; and finally, thoroughly reviewing the protocol to ensure that there are no omissions.
He then discovered that he could doubt the existence of God, the authenticity of sensations, and even the existence of his own body (Regader, n.d.). However, in the face of any doubt, there is something that cannot be doubted: the very doubt itself (Fernández & Tamaro, 2004). In other words, one cannot doubt that one is doubting. Thus, in accordance with Fernández & Tamaro (2004), one arrives at a first absolute and evident certainty that can be recognized as true: one is doubting.
Cognito Ergo Sum
He continued along that path until he encountered an inescapable certainty: his own existence as a self-aware and thinking being (Regader, n.d.). In short, it is impossible to doubt one's own doubt, since one is performing the same action one is questioning (Regader, n.d.). This simply implies that the mere act of thinking, regardless of whether it is true or false, suggests that there must be something involved in such activity, namely, a "self" (Skirry, n.d.). Therefore, "I exist" is an indubitable and absolutely certain belief that serves as an axiom from which other truths can be deduced (Skirry, n.d.). Here, he expressed his first indisputable truth with the famous phrase: "cogito ergo sum," which means "I think, therefore I am" (Regader, n.d.). Thus, according to Fernández & Tamaro (2004), individuals can be sure of their thoughts and their existence.
From his own existence, Descartes justified the existence of God (Regader, n.d.). This means that truths like "I exist" and "I am a thinking thing," and the principles applied to conclude that God exists, are not clear-cut and are understood differently, so they cannot be absolutely certain (Skirry, n.d.). Therefore, since the premises of the argument for God's existence are not absolutely certain, the conclusion that God exists cannot be certain either. In correspondence with Skirry (n.d.), this is what is known as the "Cartesian circle," because Descartes's reasoning seems to go in a circle in the sense that the existence of God is required for the absolute certainty of the previous truths, yet the absolute certainty of these previous truths is needed to prove the existence of God with absolute certainty.
Universal Mechanism
Descartes enriched Galileo's theory with the principles and conceptions of mechanics, a science that had achieved great success. He was also a pioneer in considering mechanistic principles as universal, applicable to inert substances as well as living matter, microscopic particles, and celestial bodies. In Descartes' mechanistic conception, two substances were identified in human beings: the first being a thinking substance, without extension, whose attribute is reasoning, which he called res cogitans, and the second corresponding to the realm of material and whose attribute is extension, that is, quantitative measurement in three-dimensional space, which was called res extensa. According to Regader, these different substances interacted through the pineal gland, affecting each other mechanically.
The Importance of the Pineal Gland
He established the point of interaction between spirit and body in the pineal gland, which performs a dual function: controlling excessive movements and regulating consciousness. He considered non-human animals as machines, devoid of mind and consciousness and therefore lacking sensitivity. However, he made an exception when it came to human beings. Considering that they are formed by a body and a soul, the body being material and extensive, and the soul being thinking and spiritual, there should be a separation between them. However, in the Cartesian system, this does not occur; rather, the soul and the body communicate with each other, not in a classical way, but in a unique way. The soul is located in the pineal gland in the brain, and from there, it controls the body. According to Fernández & Tamaro, Descartes' solution was not successful, thus the problem of substance communication will be discussed by later philosophers.
Legacy
The breadth of his influence during the 17th century is enduring, including his significant contributions to mathematics and optics, his perspective of a mechanistic physiology, and the model he offered to Newton of a unified celestial and terrestrial physics that assigns a few basic properties to an omnipresent matter, whose movements are governed by a few simple laws. In this sense, according to Hatfield, Descartes' work provides an exemplification of culturally engaged philosophy.
Ultimately, Descartes' legacy is partly based on the problems he proposed or highlighted but did not resolve. However, Cartesian philosophy became a reference point for a large number of thinkers, sometimes to try to solve the contradictions it contained, as rationalist thinkers did, and others, like empiricists, to directly refute them. In summary, it is not an exaggeration to assert that while Descartes did not manage to solve many of the problems he proposed, such problems became central issues in Western philosophy. In this sense, in correspondence with Fernández & Tamaro, modern philosophy can be seen as an approach or a subsequent reaction to Cartesianism.
References
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Fernández, T., & Tamaro, E. (2004). Biografia de René Descartes. Biografiasyvidas.com. Recuperado 11 November 2021, a partir de https://www.biografiasyvidas.com/biografia/d/descartes.htm
Guerri, M. Biografía de DESCARTES, RENÉ (1596-1650). PsicoActiva.com: Psicología, test y ocio Inteligente. Recuperado 10 November 2021, a partir de https://www.psicoactiva.com/biografias/rene-descartes/
Hatfield, G. (2018). René Descartes. Plato.stanford.edu. Recuperado 11 November 2021, a partir de https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes/
Regader, B. Los valiosos aportes de René Descartes a la Psicología. Psicologiaymente.com. Recuperado 10 November 2021, a partir de https://psicologiaymente.com/psicologia/descartes-historia-psicologia
Sánchez, E. (2018). René Descartes: biografía del padre de la filosofía moderna. La Mente es Maravillosa. Recuperado 11 November 2021, a partir de https://lamenteesmaravillosa.com/rene-descartes-biografia-del-padre-de-la-filosofia-moderna/
Skirry, J. Descartes, Rene. Iep.utm.edu. Recuperado 11 November 2021, a partir de https://iep.utm.edu/descarte/
Watson, R. (2021). René Descartes - Meditations. Encyclopedia Britannica. Recuperado 11 November 2021, a partir de https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rene-Descartes/Meditations
