Rene Descartes - The Four Rules of Method (Discourse on Method, pt. 2) - 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. One of the things that's particularly distinctive to Rene Descartes' approach to philosophy, which you see not only in his book, The Discourse on Method, but also in other of his works, is in fact having some sort of method. And advocating that is central to how to do not only philosophy, but how to approach other problems in which you want to make progress. And Descartes lays out a four-step process that he calls the rules of method in section two, or part two rather, of The Discourse on Method. Now this is something that Descartes follows in the rest of his works as well, so it's sort of a lens by which we can get an idea of the Cartesian project. So if you're approaching Descartes for the first time, or if you're approaching him later on and just coming back to this material, it's often useful to make a pun, meditate upon these four rules that Descartes sets out. What I want to do in this video is, first of all, talk about how these fit into his larger ideas, and then go through each one of these, and then talk about how Descartes' work actually follows these steps, and then, if time permits, actually maybe look at a few examples of how you might apply this. So why does Descartes have rules of method? In The Discourse, and he also says things like this in some of his other works, Descartes seems to hold the view that we're all equally rational. We all have the same basic capacities as human beings to carry out reasoning, and like he says, the only reason why we actually differ from one another when it comes to the conclusions of our reasoning is because we start from different starting points, and we conduct our minds differently. We don't always do things in a systematic, careful, methodical way. So his idea is that if, in fact, we were to start with the right starting points, which is really what the first one is about, and even the second one to a certain degree, and then conduct our minds in the right way, if we were to proceed systematically, carefully, according to a right method, we would eventually get to truth, and truth that we could be completely certain about. That's Descartes' big project. He wants to find things that he can be absolutely certain about, convinced about, not put into doubt any further, so that then he can reapply this method. So that's the big picture of why he's doing this. So let's look at these rules one at a time, then. So the first one, except nothing is true that I don't clearly know to be true, and then a little bit later he says, clearly and distinctly. This is a central criteria for Descartes, clear and distinct knowledge of things. Clearly means that, it's very difficult to describe this without going into sort of circular things, clearly means it's very clear to you. Clearly means that you can bring it up before your mind, and you can examine it, not necessarily in terms of pictures, because that would be imagination, but in terms of the concepts or the ideas themselves, and they strike you as being true. It's not just that you feel that they're true. You can give some sort of account for why that is so. Distinctly, you can actually distinguish these ideas that you have apart from other ideas that might actually be similar, close to, confused with them. This is the Cartesian sort of touchstone, the criteria for things, and as you see him going through his works, he says certain things are clear and distinct, and other things turn out not to be clear and distinct, so except nothing is true, except what I can be really sure about, you know. Completely sure, well, you know, when we get to practical applications like this, maybe not completely sure. Maybe then we have to have what Descartes calls moral certainty rather than metaphysical certainty, but this is the standard that we ought to be shooting for. So, that gives us our starting points. Then, when we have a problem, what we want to do is we want to break the problem down into all of its parts, and we want to examine each of those parts independently. So the second one is about dividing each problem into its constituent parts. If we want to understand, say, an automobile, let's understand each part of the automobile before we try putting it all together and then trying to make sense of it. If we want to understand a political process of give and take and compromise, we want to look at each individual agent and each issue that they're interested in and break each one of those down and try to see if we can arrive at clear and distinct knowledge of each one. See if we can be completely sure about each of those before we start proceeding on. So we want to carry out a process of analysis. We want to break things down. That's what analysis means. It's coming from the Greek words, loosing, to break down, you know, there's an intensifier in that case. Now once we've actually broken things down into their parts, their problems, we've distinguished things apart from each other, then we want to work at the problems in a sort of order. What do we want to start with? The simplest parts first, the things that we can probably do the best in achieving some sort of certainty or some sort of knowledge with. And then we want to slowly build our way back upwards. We don't want to be too hasty. The Cartesian way of going at things is to distinguish things apart from each other and then look at each part separately, try to figure it out, then start putting them together. And you know, you could actually say, well, Descartes, you're leaving something out. Sometimes the whole is greater than the parts. Descartes doesn't, in terms of his method, he doesn't worry about that. There's a certain commitment that comes with this that may not be amenable to every sort of problem, but we're only looking at Descartes' own view of this right now. We're not worrying about criticizing it at this point. So we work at each problem in order, starting with the simplest parts, and hopefully we build our way up to understand a complex whole. Then the fourth part is basically keep track of what you're doing. He talks about making complete enumerations or calculations, carrying out a general review. That's a good idea, but what it really boils down to is keep track of what you actually did so that when you want to know what happened and what you understood, you can go back to it and look it up. Or if somebody else, remember we're all supposed to share the same rationality, if somebody else wants to go back to it, they can go through each one of these steps themselves. They can see that, you know, well, these are the premises that we started with, these are the starting points, these are the principles, these are the elements that we broke things down into, here's how we put the elements together, we synthesized them after we fully understood them. They can follow through the process. That's something Descartes thinks is very important. It's also important so that if you screw something up, you can go back and you can check your work. You can figure out, hey, what part did I not put together right? Maybe it was accepting something that you were kind of hazy about, that you didn't really have clear knowledge of, as being true. Maybe it was some background assumption you didn't even realize you were making as an assumption. Again, that would be accepting something that you didn't have good grounds to accept. Perhaps it could be that you didn't divide things up as fully as you needed to. Or perhaps when you were dividing, you actually divided too far. You broke things down that didn't need to be broken down because they weren't actually problematic. It could be that when you were putting things together, you didn't do it right. For instance, when I was a kid, I used to take things apart an awful lot and I could tell I was not going to be a mechanic because I would always have spare parts left over. We called them spare parts, meaning parts that actually belonged to the thing that I had broken down and then put back together that I didn't put back in the right place. Well, if I had actually kept track of what I was doing, then, you know, follow this Cartesian process, I would be able to go back and say, aha, this fits in here. Unfortunately, when it comes down to it, personally, I'm not a very good person for following the instructions. I'd rather just throw it together. So does Descartes apply this and only this in the course of his works? No, there's more going on to Descartes' project than just this. But this is sort of the general outline of what he's up to. And you know, he is really about clear and distinct knowledge. He is really about distinguishing, dividing, and then trying to solve each thing separately. So when, for example, you see him saying the body is something completely different than mind, you know, one is extended, one is not extended, one is simple, the other is complex, what he's doing is he's taking a problem, the problem of what a human being is, breaking it down into its constituent parts, breaking the body further down into its constituent parts, and then trying to analyze them on that basis and then put them back together. He always had some difficulty in explaining just exactly how the mind and the body did interact, but that's a whole different topic. Making the complete enumerations in general review, that's what you see Descartes actually doing in the Discourse on Method, in the Meditations, and in his other works, like, you know, the Principles, which are much less read by beginners in philosophy, but more by Descartes scholars. So Descartes is applying all of this in his philosophy. You know, for example, when he is engaging in hyperbolic doubt, something that I'll shoot another video on, that's really stressing, accepting nothing is true that he doesn't know to be true, and he's also breaking things down, and he's saying, well, I can doubt this, and I can doubt this, and I can doubt this, and I can doubt this, but I can't doubt this. He's able to do that because he's made good distinctions. Then when he starts putting things back together again, which is what he does, which is what his project really is, it's not just doubting everything, his project is putting everything back together, the human being, the mind, the self, you know, the mind and the body together, the world, other beings, other human beings, God, all these things, he's trying to put them all back together in some sort of coherent scheme. That's what's going on in 3 and 4 in his work. Now, let's say that you actually wanted to apply this very rigorously in your own life, and you didn't want to just use Descartes' examples, what might you do? Well, you could think about mechanical problems. You want to solve something being broken, right? You then go to this step right away, try to figure out, well, of course, you don't want to, you know, just accept hazy knowledge or non-knowledge about what is the conditions, you actually want to look at things, but you want to isolate the problem, and then engage in some sort of diagnostic, right? Once you've done that, you can work at figuring out how to put the things back together and make it run. Descartes seems to think that we could do this in just about anything, mechanics is very similar, he thinks, to medicine, which is very similar to the way morality ought to work, his classic three M's. If we want to think about social problems, a Cartesian would actually focus on society as being an aggregate of individuals, which then enter into complexes with each other, perhaps, you know, groups, families, relationships, things like that, and you would want to look at each individual separately, and then want to look at how they come together, and you would want to be as clear as possible at each step, you wouldn't want to just only look at a group and generalize about people, individuals, on the basis of that group, you would want to look at each individual separately, as a unit. Again, you would want to carry out general reviews of things, you would want to keep track of what it is that you're doing, so hopefully this gives you a good grounding in what Descartes' four rules of method are that he talks about in the Discourse, and now you have some idea about how you might apply these, how these fit in with Descartes' project, and what in fact each of these four rules are, so just to sum up, accept nothing is true that you don't know clearly to be true, you're looking for clear and distinct knowledge, divide each problem up into its elements, its constituent parts, carry out a process of analysis, work at the problems that you've got in an order, starting with the simplest things, building your way up to more and more complex holes, complex unities, and understanding those on the basis of their constituent parts, finally, make complete enumerations, keep complete reports, make sure you didn't leave anything out, do a quick check of your own work, review your processes, and make sure that you could explain it to somebody else.