René Descartes
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Today is the 426th anniversary of the birth of René Descartes (31 March 1596–11 February 1650), who was born on this date in 1596.
Descartes was a gentlemen soldier who fought in the Thirty Years’ War, one of the most brutal conflicts in European history, including participating 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 the winter, so he spent a lot of his time thinking. Descartes’ distinctive way of thinking eventually led to the foundation of what we today call 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. Indeed, 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. Thus Descartes was not a philosopher of history, but, like Karl Löwith and Simone Weil, he was, rather, a non-philosopher of history, i.e., he largely denied the legitimacy of history as an intellectual discipline. Since Descartes was so influential in the formation of modern thought and in the scientific revolution, his disdain for history had consequences.
Here is how he described his education, and his dissatisfaction with the curriculum of his day, which we would 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 (which latter Nietzsche identified as the function of what he called monumental history) and 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.”
One wonders 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”).
Regarding the above passage, Collingwood identified the Cartesian objections to history as follows:
“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 did not 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. 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, while others have asserted that it is precisely historical peculiarity that is the substance of history. The contemporary school of microhistory could be said to fill this Cartesian gap of the humble, but even here much is left out of microhistory either as being beneath the notice of the historian, or simply was never recorded and so cannot be integrated into history.
Despite the negative Cartesian appraisal of history, there eventually arose of 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.”
One could make the argument 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.
Further Resources
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Descartes
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rene-Descartes
https://iep.utm.edu/rene-descartes/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes/
https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/descartes1637.pdf
