Rene Descartes - Academic Subjects and Foundations of Knowledge - Philosophy Core Concepts

Hi, this is Dr. Gregory Sadler. I'm a professor of philosophy and the president and founder of an educational consulting company called Reason.io, where we put philosophy into practice. I've studied and taught philosophy for over 20 years, and I find that many people run into difficulties reading classic philosophical texts. Sometimes it's the way things are said or how the text is structured, but the concepts themselves are not always that complicated, and that's where I come in. To help students and lifelong learners, I've been producing longer lecture videos and posting them to YouTube. Many viewers say they find them useful. What you're currently watching is part of a new series of shorter videos, each of them focused on one core concept from an important philosophical text. I hope you find it useful as well. In part one of his Discourse on Method, which was a popular work written not just for fellow philosophers and scholars, but for the general public, Rene Descartes begins by narrating a little bit of the history of his own education and studies, and he's got a very important reason for doing this. He's going to be looking at the academic or scholarly subjects that make pretenses to knowledge, to providing us with absolutely sure and certain knowledge, and he's going to be examining whether they really do provide us with solid foundations. And the answer at that point in the work is most of them, in fact, do not, and he wants to tell us why that is the case. So he also tells us another thing that I think is worth keeping in mind, which is that he's not attempting to lay down rules or a procedure for everybody to follow. He's just telling us about his own views and his own experiences and reflections. That's a little bit disingenuous because he does think that people can make a lot of progress by following the method. That's why this is called the Discourse on Method, but he's trying to strip away all of the things that are going to get in our way, and that's why he's engaged in this examination of these academic subjects. So he says, I venture to claim that since my early youth, I had the great good fortune of finding myself taking certain paths that have led me to reflections and maxims from which I fashioned a method. I've added progressively to my knowledge, and he says, I was educated in classical studies from my earliest years, and because I was given to believe that through them one could acquire clear and sure knowledge of everything that one needed in life, I was extremely eager to study and to receive them. So this is a good starting point. Descartes is telling us, listen, I had one of the best educations that you could be provided with in my times, in the Europe of his own time, and if you actually do look at what he did get to study, I think you might be a little bit jealous, thinking about your own elementary and high school and early college experiences. So he's saying, listen, I got to look at education at its best, and I believed in it. I thought that if I just study this stuff, I am going to have something that I can take with me wherever I go in life. I'll be able to apply this. I'm going to have the foundations that I need. Isn't that the promise of most of our educational systems that we see around today? They all tell us that they're giving us foundational skills, the knowledge that we need to succeed, right? So Descartes is actually dealing with a problem that's not only of his own time, but one that's very contemporary as well. So what he's going to do is he carries out a review and says, well, what about this? What about this? He begins by talking about the studies that he began with. He says, here we go. I know that Greek and Latin are taught there, so languages, and are necessary for understanding the writings of the ancients. Isn't it great to be able to read foreign languages? In our own time, we might add something like Mandarin or Arabic or French or pick whatever else you like. If you want to be able to read things in the original, it's really helpful to have those languages. So there is some utility to studying grammar and studying foreign languages. And he says, you know, the fables stimulate the mind through their charm. Memorable deeds recorded in history uplift it. They help form our judgment when read in a discerning way. Reading good books is like engaging in conversation with the most cultivated minds of past centuries who had composed them, or rather taking part in a well-conducted dialogue in which such minds reveal only to us the best of their thoughts. And he goes on and talks about all the other things that he studied. So this, again, is something that I think many of us hear. Now, what about those subjects when he goes to study them? So studying the languages opens up a world for him in which he can read history and fables. And these are supposed to form his judgment so he can understand the world around him, so he can uplift his character. And what does he actually say? He tells us, conversing with those of another age is more or less the same thing as traveling. So that implies that, in a way, we can travel and get some of the same stuff as we would out of histories and fables. He says, it's good to know something of the customs of other people. That helps us judge our own more securely, and it also helps us to not be what we might call ethnocentric, thinking that our own way of doing things is the only right way. He says, on the other hand, when we spend too much time traveling, we end up becoming strangers in our own country. And when we immerse ourselves too deeply in the practices of bygone age, we remain woefully ignorant of those of our own age. So that's a problem right there. That's one thing that shows that studying this stuff maybe is not the most helpful for us. What else? He goes on and he says, fables make us conceive of events as being possible where they are not. So what is he talking about in terms of fables? What we would nowadays call fiction. Could be, you know, actual fables like Aesop's fables, right? Or it could be, you know, these morality stories that we tell. They give us the idea that things could be other than they actually could be. Not just other than they are, but they go beyond the realm of genuine possibility. And Descartes says that's not actually good for us if we're forming our minds. What about history? If we stick to the actual facts. So Descartes says history is a problem too. Why? He says, even if the most faithful accounts of the past neither alter nor exaggerate the importance of things in order to make them more attractive to the reader, which implies that this is what happens most of the time, right? Why is it that civil war history and military history sells so well and social history not quite so well? Because people are fascinated with battles and that sort of thing. But that's not really the norm. Social history and cultural history is probably more important to understanding how we got to where we are. So he says, even if they don't do that, they nearly always leave out the humblest and least illustrious historical circumstances with the result that what remains does not appear as it really was. So the promise of history is to give us the past as it really was, as it really happened, to paraphrase one historian about the ideal of history. But Descartes is saying you never really get how things truly were. And so he says those who base their behavior on the examples they draw from such accounts, and here he makes a reference to, you know, the Don Quixote, right? They're likely to match the feats of knight of old and tales of chivalry and set themselves targets beyond their powers. So if we're relying on history and fables, not a good foundation for working out what we have to do with our lives. What about the other things? He talks about oratory and poetry. Oratory is public speaking, you know, giving addresses. And he says, these are less the fruits of study and more something that derives from the gifts of the mind. You just have a poetic sense or you have an ability to reach an audience. He might be wrong about that. Maybe we can improve those things with studies. He actually says something here, which seems a little unlikely. Those who reason most powerfully and are the most successful at ordering their thoughts to make them clear and intelligible will always be able to persuade others of what they have to say, even if they speak in the thickest of accents and have never learned any rhetoric. But be that as it may, Descartes is saying these are not a solid foundation for knowledge either. What about theology? Descartes is writing in a time when religion is, you know, not just still there, but there's incredible controversies going on. He actually participated in the wars of religion taking place in Germany. And, you know, remember those having taken place in France. So he talks about theology. Theology is the study of the divine, right? And Descartes says, oh, this is a wonderful, wonderful discipline. He says, I revered our theology and hoped as much as anyone to reach heaven. But I also learned that heaven was just as open to the ignorant as it was to the learned. So you don't actually need theology to get into heaven. You can just practice whatever it is that they're supposed to teach. But the key thing is that if we wanted to study theology, he says it requires some sort of divine assistance. It's not something that you can learn just on your own by observing the world or using reason. Instead, you require divine grace. And there's no way you can make that happen. Either it happens or it doesn't. So theology is not going to provide us with a solid foundation either. So what could provide us with a foundation? Descartes here in part one considers two things that are going to become, or two disciplines rather, that are going to become very, very important in his work. Let's start with mathematics. So he says, you know, I studied mathematics. And there he's actually understating a little bit. He made some pretty important contributions to mathematics. He develops, you know, for example, Cartesian coordinates, if you've ever heard of those. He understands the relationship between arithmetic and geometry, two disciplines that had often not been brought together. He solves many important problems. And he says, I didn't see at the time exactly what mathematics could be used for. I saw other people applying it to the mechanical arts, using it to, say, calculate, you know, ballistics for cannons. Or thinking about, you know, the beginnings of industrial production. All those sorts of matters. Descartes says, what really attracted me to mathematics, and this is absolutely key, is the certainty and the incontrovertible nature of its proofs. When you prove something mathematically, people can say, oh, I reject it, but that's because they're wrong. If you've actually proven it, then it's proven. And nobody can actually assail it and say, no, no, I think, you know, historical circumstances have changed, and now we have to change the mathematics. No, that's one of the things that's really great about math, is that it is certain in that respect, and that if anybody wants to argue against it, it's that person's problem and not the problem of the discipline. So mathematics can, in fact, provide solid foundations for at least some knowledge. Knowledge that involves, say, number, or processes of change that can be charted out through number. So that's something that Descartes thinks is really important, and put that in your back pocket. He also talks about philosophy, and in the paragraph about mathematics, he talks about the pagan philosophers. He says, I compared the moral works of ancient pagan philosophers to splendid and magnificent palaces built on nothing more than sand and mud. So again, we see this theme of foundations. What's he criticizing them for? He says, they exalt virtues, make them seem more worthy of esteem than anything on earth, but they don't give sufficient indication of how to learn about them. And what they call by such a fine name is in some cases just bad behavior. So the ancient philosophers, when it comes to moral philosophy, they don't provide us with anything like the certainty that mathematics would provide us, even if it appears to us at the time that they do. When he turns to talking about philosophy in general, he tells us that it is the fruit of the best minds. When we think about this dialogue of centuries, we can go back and examine what Aristotle had to say, what Cicero had to say, what Boethius had to say. We can bring anybody we like into it, and we can converse with them. But Descartes is telling us, unfortunately, there's nothing that they agree upon that somebody in the history of philosophy doesn't have a counter theory about. So he frames it like this. He says, I realized that there's nothing in it that is not disputed and consequently is not subject to doubt. So here's the thing. If we look at what is the nature of the universe, or what is substance, or how should we behave, or what are the virtues, Descartes is saying, if there is a variety of different viewpoints on this, then we can actually doubt whether any of those viewpoints are correct. What we want is something more like mathematics, these solid foundations. It gets worse. Because philosophy tends to be used by all the other disciplines, whether it's theology, or history, or oratory, whatever you want, it provides principles to them. Because philosophy at the time of Descartes is doubtable, it's subject to being called into question, all those other things that are built on philosophy as a foundation are likewise able to be called into question. So he says, as for the other disciplines, insofar as they borrow their principles from philosophy, I concluded nothing solid could have been built on such shaky foundations. So this is a problem. What do we have that's left standing? Philosophy should be providing foundations to everything, but it hasn't been brought to the point where it actually can. Mathematics has been sort of underutilized in terms of its capacity to provide foundations. None of this other stuff that he's studied is going to be of any help to him. So where is he going to go? That is the question that part one of the discourse is going to open up for us, leading into the other parts.