It is both right and proper to begin with Descartes because he spent his life fighting against the restrictions imposed by the Aristotelians on the freedom of thought. Descartes believed that the Classical worldview that Petrarch and Boccaccio had hoped to recreate had turned out to be closed and narrow, and he rebelled against his teachers as so many young men would in the following centuries. He was a good but not obedient student, which his teachers misunderstood as stupidity and punished with chastisements at which he could only laugh. In some respects he was a very modern man. Other Frenchmen followed his example, and some Englishmen as well. I will let them speak for themselves in what follows. An important thing about all of them is that they did their best work in the seventeenth century, which is one of the most fruitful since—well, since the world began.
RENÉ DESCARTES
1596–1650
Discourse on the Method of Rightly
Conducting the Reason
René Descartes (his name in Latin was Renatus Cartesius, hence the adjective “Cartesian”) was born in La Haye, France, in 1596. He received a good Jesuit education and was the kind of student that teachers both love and dread. He was a brilliant pupil who understood everything quickly. He asked challenging questions. But he was also surly and rebellious, and he seemed to doubt everything his teachers believed. His questions seemed to shake the foundations of the learning they were trying to instill in their brilliant pupil, and this was a fearful thing—for what if he were right?
When he was twenty, Descartes took his degree in law. Two years later joined the army of the Prince of Orange in Holland. Up to this point his career was uneventful, at least outwardly. Inwardly the young man was fomenting an intellectual revolution based on his perennial questioning.
Descartes was not alone in this. Francis Bacon, in England, had felt the same grave doubts, as had Galileo in Italy. But no one doubted more systematically than young Descartes and as a consequence no one did more to bring down the ancient edifice of learning that had stood for more than a thousand years.
Descartes described the reasons for his doubts, and the extent of them, in the Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason of 1637. Once you begin to doubt systematically, he says, the questions become: Where do you stop? Do you ever stop? Is there anything that cannot be doubted, that is undoubtedly true? Yes, one thing: the doubter himself exists, else he could not doubt or, as Descartes put it in a famous phrase, cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”). Once this is established it is possible to start afresh, on solid ground, and to build up a new structure of knowledge, different from the old, and having the character, as Descartes asserts, of indubitable certainty.
Descartes called the method “geometrical.” You lay down the minimum number of assumptions and then, using them as building blocks, patiently build up a new edifice that will stand the test of time and of doubt. But the geometrical method, for Descartes, was not just a matter of taking careful logical steps. It also involved taking the smallest steps possible, because small steps are safer than big ones. And each small step, each element in the solution of the problem, ought to have the kind of certainty that numbers have. In the world of numbers, clear and distinct ideas are possible: 2 + 2 = 4, there is no doubt about that. In the process of developing this line of thinking Descartes invented analytical geometry, whereby a one-to-one relationship is established between the infinite points of the plane and (pairs of) the infinite numbers from minus infinity to plus infinity. The invention of analytical geometry is one of the milestones in the history of thought, and Descartes deserves much credit for it.
Essentially, the geometrical method, as Descartes described it in the Discourse on Method, consists in first reducing any problem to geometrical form (a system of axioms and propositions) and then making a further reduction to numbers as in analytical geometry. This works very well for problems in physics, but Descartes wanted to apply his method to everything—to philosophy as well as physics, to ethics as well as astronomy. He did not live to discover that the method works better in some fields than others—for example, the physical sciences, and that there are other fields, for example, philosophy, ethics, even history, where it does not work as well or not at all. He did live to see his method adopted by many young and vigorous thinkers who began to feel, as he may have felt himself, that those fields in which the method does work were more important to study and develop, and those in which it did not work should be relegated to second-class status and perhaps be ignored altogether.
Unfortunately, that prejudice persists to this day, and it may be called the characteristic disease of modern thought. True, science has made fantastic progress in the three hundred and fifty years since Descartes wrote his Discourse, and our world would be vastly different, and much more uncomfortable, if he had not discovered his method. But other realms of knowledge have languished in the bright glare of those sciences that can be mathematicized. Science, we have even come to think, is what can be mathematicized, and what cannot be mathematicized must be called something else—“humanities,” say. But “science” means knowledge, and thus what we are really saying is that we can know about the sciences that are mathematical—and that deal mostly with material things—but only have opinions about nonmathematical, spiritual things. And as we all know, one man’s opinion is as good as another’s.
What is even worse, we then take the further step of declaring that because we know mathematically about material things, they are more important than spiritual things. (Alternatively, we try to use mathematics in realms where it is does not really apply—in ethics, for example; see Spinoza.) As a result, our whole knowledge structure is skewed toward the material and away from the spiritual.
The knowledge structure that Descartes had doubted and then attacked, and that he helped to bring down, had been skewed the other way and this was not good either. What is needed is still another knowledge structure that discards neither Cartesian, scientific, mathematically based knowledge nor the kind of knowledge that is obtainable by other methods in other fields—by intuition, experience, or common sense. In the best of worlds both kinds of knowledge would be honored equally.
For the moment, we have what we have, and what we have is Cartesianism up to our eyebrows. Thus I cannot think of any book that is more useful to read, if you want to understand the intellectual world we live in, than Descartes’ Method. Read it, and ask yourself whether it too can be doubted. Is there a hole in Descartes’s argument? Does he go off the track partway to his goal? How would you put him back? And if you did that, would it change the goal?
JEAN DE LA FONTAINE
1621–1695
Fabliaux
The literature of France, taken altogether, is not surpassed by that of any other European nation. Yet France lacks what several other nations possess, a single preeminent poet. This lack is made up for by a number of poets of the second rank—a very high second rank, after all. La Fontaine is one of these very good poets who just miss being great.