René Descartes
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Today is the 427th anniversary of the birth of René Descartes (31 March 1596–11 February 1650), who was born on this date in 1596.
In last year’s post I reviewed some of the familiar passages from Descartes in which he expresses his skepticism regarding historical knowledge, and then I presented Collingwood’s views on Descartes. It is, of course, not at all surprising that a philosopher famous for methodical doubt should have doubted the validity of historical knowledge. Up until the modern period, almost all philosophers would have rejected the very idea that history deals in knowledge, and, by extension, most would have denied that history could ever be a science. Plato’s divided line and the allegory of the cave drove home the idea that the visible world is merely the object of opinion, while knowledge applies only to the intelligible world. And despite the empiricism claimed on behalf of Aristotle, the theory of knowledge in his Posterior Analytics was little different from Plato’s conception of knowledge, although Aristotle does not invoke any of the Platonic metaphysics of the Forms.
We all know that modern philosophy begins with Descrates, but Descartes had his precursors as well. We saw with Franciscus Patricius that Descartes’ skepticism in regard to history was anticipated by at least a generation. Some themes from Patricius seem to have been picked up by Jean Bodin, so it could be said that the kind of skepticism found in Patricius had some influence. Yet Descartes was the turning point. Here is how Paul Schrecker describes the Cartesian epistemological revolution in his paper “Revolution as a Problem in the Philosophy of History”:
“Let us begin with science, and take as an example of a revolution having taken place in its history, the work of Descartes. What is the feature which obliges us to regard it as a veritable revolution in scientific thought? We may for the moment disregard everything in positive knowledge which has been changed through it. It will then be realized that the radical subversion of science caused by the Discourse on Method is not a function of its immediate results, most of which might figure and do figure in some precedent scholastic system. The original and genuinely revolutionary phenomenon is the introduction and use of a new Method whose working has produced a new science.”
The Cartesian project in epistemology was so successful that Descartes effectively cleared the ground of the previous two thousand years of philosophy, making it possible for philosophers to begin anew, and, when philosopher laid new foundations for knowledge, scientists followed, and science, too, could begin anew. And while Descartes’ criticism of history was for some a discouragement, for others it was a call to begin historical knowledge anew, on a newly scientific basis. Thus in the wake of Descartes followed a number of Cartesian historians, which Collingwood identifies as including the Bollandists, who sought a more rationalistic account of saint’s lives.
While Descartes wrote very little about history and historical knowledge, his philosophy was so influential that it became an important part of history. In this way, important philosophical schools of thought can shape history not merely by interpreting history, but my making history. The history of philosophy is woven into the larger story of history; sometimes its influence is indiscernible, while at other times the influence is overwhelming. Here is how Schopenhauer explained the relevance of the history of philosophy to history simpliciter:
“There are two kinds of history; the history of politics and the history of literature and art. The one is the history of the will; the other, that of the intellect. The first is a tale of woe, even of terror: it is a record of agony, struggle, fraud, and horrible murder en masse. The second is everywhere pleasing and serene, like the intellect when left to itself, even though its path be one of error. Its chief branch is the history of philosophy. This is, in fact, its fundamental bass, and the notes of it are heard even in the other kind of history. These deep tones guide the formation of opinion, and opinion rules the world. Hence philosophy, rightly understood, is a material force of the most powerful kind, though very slow in its working. The philosophy of a period is thus the fundamental bass of its history.”
It could then be said that Cartesianism was the “fundamental bass” of the history of the early modern period, so that Cartesianism contributed as much or more to history by making history as compared to interpreting or writing history in Cartesian terms.
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