Great Minds

René Descartes is considered the ‘Father of Modern Philosophy’. He was born in 1596 in a north-western French town called La Haye, which has since been renamed ‘Descartes’ in his honour. Descartes’ mother, Jeanne, died when he was still young. His father, a member of the Parliament of Brittany at Rennes, could not care for Descartes. He was raised instead by his grandparents. Descartes attended a Jesuit college where he studied Latin and Ancient Greek, classical poetry, philosophy and mathematics. Education in philosophy in the early 1600s meant a particular focus on the work of Aristotle.

Alongside Plato and Hegel, Descartes is considered a key philosopher in the intellectual history of the West. Like the other two, Descartes enacted a paradigm shift, a period, according to Thomas Kuhn, where one way of thinking is replaced by another. Indeed, nothing remained the same after he published Meditations on First Philosophy in 1641 and Principles of Philosophy in 1644. Up until then, Aristotelian philosophy had prevailed within European academia for centuries. But Descartes would go on to upend centuries-old Aristotelian theories and provide a new foundation for future philosophical inquiries. His aim was, in his words, “to destroy the principles of Aristotle” for good.

Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas taught that sense perception is the bedrock of our learning. There is no distinction between what is out there and what our minds perceive. This view suggests that scientific conclusions can be drawn from sensory experience based on absolute certainty of sense perception. But Descartes disagreed. If sense perception is the bedrock of our learning, then our imagination is not free. Instead, it is limited to and predicated upon things outside. He questioned if material reality, empirical data, or, say, a fact can truly communicate the full truth. What if things are not what they appear to be? What if one is mistaken in their perception of reality, as Descartes claimed he had been many times? He contends that we cannot take our experience as a reliable guide to how things truly are. He casts doubt on sense experience as a reliable measure for understanding reality.

Since Descartes can't trust and accept the ruling ideas about reality, he is determined to doubt everything. He uses doubt as a methodological tool to overcome all his doubts, stating that “Doubt is the origin of wisdom.” He taught that fidelity to truth is impossible until we learn to doubt: “If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.” Descartes doubts all things as deeply and as far as possible, including his existence. He mistrusts his senses. He supposes that an evil deceiver could easily render false propositions he is inclined to believe. Since everything seems to be doubtful, can he be certain of anything?

He can be. Descartes claimed that one thing he can be certain of, even under the conditions of doubt, is that if we are doubting, then we are thinking, and if we are thinking, then we must, without a shadow of doubt, exist. Descartes expressed his solution by saying: “cogito ergo sum” or “I think therefore I am”. From this, he concluded that our rational faculty guarantees at least one piece of true knowledge without any doubt: the perfect certainty of our existence. He favours rational faculty, including introspection and reflection, over sense-perception. For Descartes, truth neither derives from sensory information nor depends upon the reality of an external world but can only be accessible through our mind which he also called the soul or reason.