Descartes' Legacy ｜ 3 Ways His Philosophy Shaped Our World

René Descartes is often called the father of modern philosophy. His thinking was the catalyst for a paradigm shift in the way that philosophy worked and by extension science since at this time science was under the umbrella of philosophy and our hard sciences would have been known as natural philosophy at that time. This intellectual revolution is responsible for the world of science and technology that we live in today. It's the shift from the medieval mindset into the modern mindset at which Descartes is like the crest of the wave. Today we're going to be exploring the three aspects of Descartes' thought which are reflections and catalysts within this shifting of the intellectual paradigm in Europe. When Descartes lived and worked in the 16th century the Catholic church was still the dominant power in intellectual matters. The leading philosophy of the day, scholasticism, had evolved out of Europe's early universities which were of course inherently tied in with the church and you can characterize scholasticism by its premises or what it took for granted, what was its starting point and this was two things. This was the canonical works of the church and the works of Aristotle. These things were taken for granted to be truth and the scholastics were arguing back and forth and creating very intricate logical arguments about which one was right and how to reconcile in order to find a coherent formulation of the truth. In this sense you can kind of compare it to Homer I guess. It's this looking backwards, it's the elevation of what's gone before and so they looked to the past, they looked at the ancient traditions as the things that had it right and they were just trying to figure it out. They were just filling in the gaps of these ancient traditions. So there's so much taken for granted within that and it was such a pedestal between them and these thinkers that they were always looking up in admiration at them. But by the time of Descartes we're already seeing that this is starting to change. So before Descartes you had Galileo and Copernicus. You already have the beginning of questioning the nature of reality as it is. You also have the renaissance is happening and the century before you've also had the discovery of the Americas and so Europe is starting to come into its own. Its confidence is starting to rise again. It's coming out of the dark ages and I guess that's where you can see Descartes as the crest of this wave where the intellectual confidence is returning to Europe and instead of relying on the past, instead of looking back to what the ancients knew so well, you see in Descartes the emergence of this trend of self-belief and believing that we can find the knowledge and that's the first aspect of Descartes thinking that's really critical to the shifting into the modern mindset. So the first key move that Descartes made is the shifting of focus away from this truth of the past and finding the truth in the works of these ancient writers and he moves it to certainty. He moves it to the individual's certainty and this is most famously done in the Cogito Ergo Sum or as it was actually originally Je pense dont je suis. I think therefore I am as he originally wrote in French. Because what Descartes does is he comes along and he says okay this is you're just arguing back and forth with these intricate syllogistic arguments and it's getting nowhere so what can we actually be certain of? Let's step back, let's reconsider what's going on and what can we actually be certain of? So Descartes peels it back he says okay let's get down to the base of things and figure out what we can know for sure and that's the the beginning of the meditations. That's when he starts to peel back all the different layers of what he can know and the context of that meditation is Descartes' conception of knowledge as a tree and the roots are metaphysics, the trunk is physics and then all the shoots are the different sciences. So with the meditations he's trying to create the metaphysical basis on which the rest of science can stand and that's where the Cogito is to be understood. So with the Cogito Ergo Sum, I think therefore I am, what Descartes has done is he's begun to doubt even the sensory body. So how he arrives at the Cogito is that he says well I'm sure that I'm by this fire writing but for all I know I could be up in bed dreaming that I'm by this fire so we have to have some kind of scepticism towards the physical body, towards the sensations. And what's radical about this at the time isn't the Cogito Ergo Sum, it isn't the scepticism, it's the shift in emphasis. It's the shift from taking the esteemed authorities for truth and searching for it within yourself and so it's this shift that begins of like Europe finding its intellectual confidence again. It's beginning to ask its own questions, it's beginning to find its feet and to begin to interrogate nature for itself rather than taking for granted what the ancients have said. And so Descartes isn't necessarily denying the truth of the Bible, he's kind of just shifting the emphasis and this is a good way of protecting that initial spark because he's not attacking the church, he's not attacking the tradition and the truth of it, he's just trying to say well how much of it can I be certain of within myself, let's get back to the basics within myself. So it's a shift of focus rather than an attacking of what went before and that allows this nascent kind of flame to gather more momentum and to get more energy. It's kind of a protective thing but that's the first major shift that takes place in Descartes is the shift from esteemed authorities to individual exploration and trusting your individual knowledge. So it's an intellectual confidence. The second big move is related to this and it's related to how he arrived at Cogito because it's idea of well I could be dreaming. It's the scepticism towards sensation. So yes he could be sitting by this fire now but he could also be up in his bed and dreaming that he's by this fire. And so with this scepticism towards the body we also see another critical part of Descartes thinking. So the other major contribution, I suppose the most famous contribution of Descartes would be coordinate geometry. So this is the mathematical thing of bringing algebra into geometry. So if you think of the x and the y axis and using x to mark the position on the x axis going horizontally and the y number to mark the position going vertically. And this bringing of algebra into geometry kind of set the foundation for Newton who was very influenced by Descartes coming along and it's the basis on which calculus and further advanced mathematics was kind of built. So it's another major contribution of Descartes but it also points to this second aspect which is the emphasis on more a priori idealistic kind of truth. So things we can know without experience and so geometry does not rely on the sensation. The Euclidean kind of geometry the line is the distance between two points that's true whether he's in his bed or not. It's something that's just true and we can rely on and we can have some certainty. So he's looking back towards Euclid, he's looking back towards that kind of certainty and he's looking to build that mathematical thing. So this is what the trunk of physics that's built on top of the foundation of metaphysics. This is the confidence of mathematical thinking and this is really where early science the snowball starts to roll. When Newton comes along with gravity and him and Leibniz come up with calculus and then the ball just starts rolling in terms of what we can discover, what we can test, what we can experiment with. So this shift of seeing the importance of these kinds of truths, the mathematical geometrical kind of truth and this is a way of investigating reality and you can see how that basis of physics then sets the ground for everything that comes after for the harder sciences, for chemistry, for biology and for all the other sciences that have come later. It's that initial thing of what we can know, what we can measure, what we can drill down on and that's a very important shift that happens in Descartes and it's coming out of his being steeped in a mathematical geometrical kind of thinking. So that's the second major shift with Descartes there is the shift to looking for truth not in sensation, not in the outside world as it appears to us but looking underneath, looking for the skeleton of reality and looking into the mathematics and geometry and building out from that. So that's a major shift and you see how that's led into the modern rationalistic mind view and in Paris at the time there was these automatons and these were a real inspiration for Descartes and you can see the beginnings of seeing a mechanistic universe at work and that happens with Descartes' followers because of the deterministic trend that's kind of there in Descartes and gets fleshed out by some of his followers. So this is kind of the grounding of the modern rationalistic mindset. It's coming back to So this is what's informing Descartes and you can see the influence this had on Newton in his approach to natural philosophy and you can also see it in Spinoza. Spinoza's ethics is laid out like a geometrical work. It's very much like Euclid's work and you can see Spinoza was so influenced by Descartes and it's just coming all out of that tradition. So you can see this influence of Cartesian thinking and this rationalistic turn that happens with Descartes. The third major thing that happens in Descartes is the focus on causation or the shift in focus on causation and this is connected in with the mind-body problem that he laid out and which is such a major problem even still in modern philosophy. So what Descartes says is that the mind and the body are of two completely different substances and it's questionable as to whether they have any influence over each other. So the body is extended in space while the mind is immaterial and this leads into this theory of parallelism that well you see he begins to question why does my mind feel sad when my body is hungry and what's fully fleshed out in his followers then is that they're just running on parallel lines but they don't influence each other at all. So the mind and body are two completely separate things and this kind of leads into a bit of a deterministic worldview and it can be problematic in that sense. But what happens with this separation between mind and body is separation between types of cause. So the type of causation that was very popular among the scholastic school of philosophy was final causation and the difference between final causation and efficient causation which is cause and effect as we think of it is if you think of driving a nail into a table, final causation would say it's the intention of the carpenter that's driving that nail home. So it's the goal, the telos, the end towards which that activity is driven that is the cause. So how does a person get to the shop in final causation? They end up there because they wanted to go there. So it's the intentional kind of realm there and it's the goal towards which their activity is aiming. So the effect is that they end up in the shop because that they wanted to go to the shop. Whereas if you look at efficient causation that's the force of the hammer coming down on the nail driving the nail into it. It's the force in the arm that moves the hammer that drives the nail into the table. So it's this mechanistic kind of causation. So if you're thinking about okay how did you get to the shop? You walked and that means the movement of the muscles, the contraction and the expansion of different muscles. And what Descartes does with the mind-body problem is he separates final causation off into the realm of mind and efficient causation into the realm of body. And this is a brilliant move in the sense if you think about it because it doesn't just eliminate final causation. It keeps that pre-existing tradition there but it isolates it to the mental sphere and then we can focus on efficient causation over here in the realm of the body. You can see how that sets up everything for the scientific method for the method of testing and finding the results because that doesn't really work with final causation. You're looking at the thing towards which it's aiming rather than examining the mechanical, the workings of the physical realm. And so with Descartes again with the mind-body problem you get that split and you get that clearing the ground for the scientific methods to really flourish. And efficient causation is really so critical to a scientific modern world view that you can see the importance of that. So these are the three game changers in Descartes' thought and Descartes isn't the architect of modernity. It's not like none of this would have happened without Descartes but he is as a kind of father of modern philosophy, the father of modern science in many ways through Newton and Leibniz. He's like the crest of a wave. He's the pivot point where you can see like Parmenides in the pre-Socratic tradition. You can see how it was different before and after. Now there's all these trends coming in with Descartes. You can see the renaissance happening. You can see the rise of and the beginning of astronomy. So all the trends are already beginning but in Descartes they kind of crystallize and we see that paradigm shift really happening in its naked form there. You can see a before and after. So these three aspects are so critical to the modern mindset. The first, the shift from relying on authorities to investigating for ourselves. So that's obviously critical in the beginning of any kind of scientific tradition. And then you have the rationalistic turn which set the foundations for science because you begin to focus on what you can absolutely know and science has built up on top of that, has been built up on the foundations of certainty laid in by the early scientists. And thirdly there's the shift from final causation to efficient causation and that move from seeing a telos, seeing an end goal, which again you can see being connected in with a kind of a religious mindset, seeing everything as having a design, to moving to thinking about the cause and effect and looking at things more mechanistically. And so these are three turns that are critical to the modern mindset. We see them happening in Descartes as part of this Cartesian revolution, as part of this paradigm shift from the medieval mindset into the modern mindset. That's everything that I wanted to explore on today's episode of The Living Philosophy. If you've enjoyed it please subscribe if you haven't already and I'd love to hear from you down in the comments if you have any thoughts, input or feedback and otherwise I shall see you next time. Thank you for watching.