René Descartes and Non-Philosophies of History
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Sunday 31 March 2024 is the 428th anniversary of the birth of René Descartes (31 March 1596–11 February 1650), who was born in La Haye en Touraine, in central France, on this date in 1596. The town where he was born has since been re-named in honor of Descartes.
It’s difficult to say where to begin with Descartes because of his pervasive influence, so I will start with his war service. Descartes was a gentlemen soldier who fought in the Thirty Years’ War, one of the most brutal conflicts in European history. He participated in the Battle of White Mountain (Bílá hora is the name of White Mountain in Czech, where the battlefield is located), which was a decisive victory for Imperial Catholic forces. While on campaign he had spare time, especially in winter quarters, so he spent a lot of his time thinking things over. Probably Descartes’ best known book, Meditations on First Philosophy, is a dramatic re-telling of a series of meditations in which he engaged on successive days while in winter quarters.
Descartes’ distinctive way of thinking eventually led to the foundation of what we today call modern philosophy. Sometimes Descartes is even called the father of modern philosophy. Descartes started with epistemology — the problem of how we know what we know — and this concern with epistemology has been one of the threads running through philosophy since the time of Descartes. Because of his contributions to philosophy, we are always conscious of Descartes when we do epistemology or metaphysics, but for the more humanistic branches of philosophy Descartes’ influence has been much less pronounced.
In his Discourse on Method (the full title of which is Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences, or Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison, et chercher la vérité dans les sciences in the original French) Descartes, in quasi-manifesto fashion, more-or-less renounces history and, by logical extension, the humanistic historical sciences that rely on the tradition of historiography renounced by Descartes.
Descartes belongs to a class of thinkers whom I have called non-philosophers of history. These non-philosophers of history discuss history, or at least mention it, but maintain either that a philosophy of history is impossible, or false, or pointless. Those who I would identify as non-philosophers of history include, along with Descartes, Karl Löwith, who thought the whole tradition of philosophy of history was disguised eschatology, Simone Weil, who preferred eternity to history (though it was an eternity with Platonistic characteristics), and Jacob Burckhardt, who didn’t say that philosophy of history is impossible, but he kept a studied distance from it, even as his friend, Nietzsche, was making his case for the advantages and disadvantages of history.
Descartes largely denied the legitimacy of history as an intellectual discipline, and he doesn’t even address the possibility of a philosophy of history. In my episode on Philosophy of History before Augustine I argued that a philosophy of history can be reconstructed for a philosopher who did not take the trouble to write a philosophy of history. Further, this philosophy of history, whether written or unwritten, could then be applied to history as the principles for a distinctive kind of history — again, whether or not it was so applied during the author’s life — since I also argued in Philosophy of History before Augustine, following Hayden White, that all history has philosophical presuppositions.
If all history has philosophical presuppositions, that is to say, if a history presupposes a philosophy, and is, to some extent, constructed on the basis of a philosophy, whether or not this philosophy is made explicit, then any philosophy that can be made relevant to the problems of history can be used as the basis for history. With Descartes this argument runs into a serious challenge, but not necessarily an insuperable challenge. Can we construct a philosophy of history for a philosopher who denies the legitimacy of history?
To show how this challenge can be met, we have to first consider Descartes’ critique of history, which is found in his Discourse on Method, as part of his account of his education. Descartes described his dissatisfaction with the curriculum of his day, and this dissatisfaction with history and tradition we might today identify as a source of the modernity of his thought:
“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 acquire them. But as soon as I had finished my course of study, at which time it is usual to be admitted to the ranks of the well educated, I completely changed my opinion, for I found myself bogged down in so many doubts and errors, that it seemed to me that having set out to become learned, I had derived no benefit from my studies, other than that of progressively revealing to myself how ignorant I was.”
A little further along he acknowledges some practical benefits of his classical education, that fables stimulate the mind and memorable deeds can uplift the spirit (something that Nietzsche would later identify as the function of what he called monumental history) and history can aid in forming our judgment:
“I did not, however, cease to hold the school curriculum in esteem. I know that the Greek and Latin that are taught there are necessary for understanding the writings of the ancients; that fables stimulate the mind through their charm; that the memorable deeds recorded in histories uplift it, and they help form our judgement when read in a discerning way; that reading good books is like engaging in conversation with the most cultivated minds of past centuries who had composed them…”
And a little further along yet Descartes delivers the locus classicus of the failure of history as an intellectual discipline:
“But I then decided that I had devoted enough time both to the study of languages and to the reading of the books, histories, and fables of the classical world. For conversing with those of another age is more or less the same thing as travelling. It is good to know something of the customs of different peoples in order to be able to judge our own more securely, and to prevent ourselves from thinking that everything not in accordance with our own customs is ridiculous and irrational, as those who have see nothing of the world are in the habit of doing. On the other hand, when we spend too much time travelling, we end up becoming strangers in our own country; and when we immerse ourselves too deeply in the practices of bygone ages, we usually remain woefully ignorant of the practices of our own time. Moreover, fables make us conceive of events as being possible where they are not; and even if the most faithful of accounts of the past neither alter nor exaggerate the importance of things in order to make them more attractive to the reader, 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, and that those who base their behaviour on the examples they draw from such accounts are likely to try to match the feats of knights of old in tales of chivalry and set themselves targets beyond their powers.”
There are obvious echoes of Cervantes’ Don Quixote in this passage, and perhaps also an intimation of what was to come in Ranke; I have to wonder if Leopold von Ranke had Descartes’ claim that, “what remains does not appear as it really was” in mind when he asserted that this it was precisely the task of history to tell what it had really been like (“wie es eigentlich gewesen”). Aside from this, Descartes presents serious challenges to the possibility of scientifically legitimate knowledge of the past. Let’s break it down. Collingwood identified four principal Cartesian objections to history as formulated in what I just quoted:
“Descartes here makes four points which it is well to distinguish: (1) Historical escapism: the historian is a traveller who by living away from home becomes a stranger to his own age. (2) Historical pyrrhonism: historical narratives are not trustworthy accounts of the past. (3) Anti-utilitarian idea of history: untrustworthy narratives cannot really assist us to understand what is possible and thus to act effectively in the present. (4) History as fantasy-building: the way in which historians, even at best, distort the past is by making it appear more splendid than it really was.”
Collingwood didn’t distinguish the exclusion of the humble and the trivial as one of the four anti-historical points Descartes made in this passage, but I think that this deserves attention, so we can take this as a fifth Cartesian objection to history. Many historians have held that the humble context of life, indeed all that is merely peculiar to the individual, is not properly a part of history at all, since history is properly concerned with social groups, while others have asserted that it is precisely historical peculiarity that is the substance of history.
In a recent episode on Robert Heilbroner I talked about the triumph of social history, and we can understand this turn to social history as a response to the Cartesian criticism of the historians of his time being preoccupied with what Nietzsche called monumental history. Social history seeks to recount exactly what Descartes called “the humblest and least illustrious historical circumstances,” though I will observe that social history does this ironically on the basis of general principles (rather than on the basis of particular records), since the historical particularity of individuals’ lives has been lost for all except the elites, whose doings have long been recounted in traditional history. Social history draws from archaeology, which reconstructs the material culture of ordinary life, historical sociology, which seeks to reconstruct the social milieu of past societies, anthropology, which seeks to understand human beings, in addition to many other disciplines, to reconstruct the lives of the least illustrious members of society. We have to approach social history indirectly in this way because it is rare for any written sources to record the circumstances of the common people.
The contemporary school of micro-history, which employs the slogan big questions in small places, also could be said to fill this Cartesian gap of the humble and the non-noteworthy, but even here much is left out of micro-history either as being beneath the notice of the historian, or simply because it was never recorded and so is incapable of being integrated into history. Collingwood posited an a priori historical imagination that fills in the gaps of that which we know had to have happened, but which was never recorded, and the ordinary human activities that fill a day could be filled by this a priori historical imagination, but to what level of detail? Do we want to account for the loss of every strand of hair? How “micro” do we want our micro-history to be? Do we want to extend micro-history until it becomes small questions in small places?
Since Descartes was so influential in the formation of modern thought and in the scientific revolution, his disdain for history had consequences. And despite the negative Cartesian appraisal of history, or maybe because of it, eventually there appeared Cartesian school of historiography, as identified by Collingwood:
“…Descartes’s scepticism by no means discouraged the historians. Rather they behaved as if they had taken it as a challenge, an invitation to go away and work out their own methods for themselves, satisfying themselves that critical history was possible, and then come back to the philosophers with a new world of knowledge in their hands. During the latter half of the seventeenth century a new school of historical thought arose which, in spite of the paradox contained in the phrase, might be called Cartesian historiography, somewhat as the classical French drama of the same period has been called a school of Cartesian poetry. I call it Cartesian historiography because it was based, like the Cartesian philosophy, on systematic scepticism and thoroughgoing recognition of critical principles. The main idea of this new school was that the testimony of written authorities must not be accepted without submitting it to a process of criticism based on at least three rules of method: (1) Descartes’s own implicit rule, that no authority must induce us to believe what we know cannot have happened; (2) the rule that different authorities must be confronted with each other and harmonized; (3) the rule that written authorities must be checked by the use of non-literary evidence. History thus conceived was still based on written authorities, or what Bacon would have called memory; but historians were now learning to treat their authorities in a thoroughly critical spirit.”
This is, of course, the rudiments of the method followed history today; Cartesian history in Collingwood’s sense is simply what history has become. And, as I discussed earlier, social history and micro-history have filled in some of the gaps that Descartes noted, though not all of them. We also could argue that the Cartesian disdain for history, and the subsequent neglect of history during the scientific revolution, was an important cause of the failure of historians to adopt a rigorous scientific method and thus to transform this discipline as the natural sciences were transformed by the scientific method.
There are, then, two ways we can interpret the Cartesian legacy for history. On the one hand, we can argue with Collingwood, that the Cartesian spirit infused history and contributed to the modern methods of source criticism, making skepticism the norm. On the other hand, we could argue that the Cartesian rejection of history prevented history from becoming scientific, and so accounts, at least in part, for the contemporary unscientific character of history. I think that both of these are true.
Since Cartesian thought was foundational for the scientific revolution, Cartesian attitudes to scholarship became influential even where these attitudes were not recognized as being Cartesian. Today, we are all Cartesians insofar as we have inherited the thought of the scientific revolution, and we continue to revolutionize our scientific knowledge to the present day. At the same time, the Cartesian neglect of history unquestionably directed the bulk of the scientific efforts of the scientific revolution into physics, cosmology, optics, and other areas on which Descartes had something to say. In a counterfactual world in which Descartes was interested in history, and he wrote a Cartesian treatise on history, a Cartesian philosophy of history, the stature of history as a discipline, and its place within the scientific revolution, would have been radically altered. I don’t think it is overly speculative to argue, in the event of a counterfactual Cartesian philosophy of history, that both science and history would be different today.
