Chapter 58 Chapter 9 Descartes

Rene Descartes (1596-1650) is usually regarded as the founder of modern philosophy, and I think he is right.He was the first man endowed with high philosophical abilities, whose views were profoundly affected by the new physics and astronomy.Of course, he also retained many things in scholastic philosophy, but he did not accept the foundation laid by his predecessors, but started from scratch, trying to create a complete philosophical system.It was something not seen since Aristotle, and it was a sign of the new self-confidence brought about by the progress of science.His works exude a freshness that cannot be found in the works of any philosophical masters from Plato to that time.All philosophers, from Plato to Descartes, were teachers, with the sense of professional superiority inherent in the profession.Descartes did not write philosophy as a teacher, but as a discoverer and inquirer, eager to communicate what he had learned.The style of his articles is easy and not pedantic, not for students to read, but for people who understand the truth in ordinary life.And, it's an exceptionally good writing style.

It is very fortunate for modern philosophy that the pioneers of modern philosophy have such an admirable sense of literature.Until Kant, his successors on the Continent and in England maintained his non-professional qualifications, and some of them retained some of his stylistic expertise. Descartes' father was a member of the local council of Brittany and owned a considerable estate.Descartes, who had inherited at the death of his father, sold his estates and invested the money for an income of six or seven thousand francs a year.From 1604 to 1612 he was educated at the Jesuit school at Love Rise, which gave him a much stronger foundation in modern mathematics than what seemed to be attainable at most universities at the time. In 1612 he went to Paris, feeling that the social life in Paris was boring, so he retreated to a secluded place in the suburb of Saint-Germain, where he studied geometry.But friends spied on him, and he enlisted in the Dutch army (1617) to ensure fuller tranquility.Since nothing happened in Holland at that time, he seems to have enjoyed two years of undisturbed contemplation.But the Thirty Years' War came along and he joined the Bavarian Army (1619).It was in Bavaria during the winter between 1619 and 1620 that he had the kind of experience he describes in his DisA cours de la Me; thode.Because of the bitter cold, he got into a stove in the morning and stayed in it all day in meditation; according to his own account, when he came out, his philosophy was half completed.But we don't have to be too literal to understand this.Socrates used to meditate all day long in the snow, but Descartes' mind only worked when he was warm.

He ended his combat life in 1621; after visiting Italy, he settled in Paris in 1625.But friends wanted to visit him before he got up (he seldom got out of bed before noon), so in 1628 he joined the army that was besieging the Yuguenot fortress of La Rochelle.When this episode ended, he decided to live in Holland, presumably to escape the danger of persecution.Descartes was a coward, a ecclesiastical Catholic, but he was also guilty of Galileo's heresy.Some think he overheard Galileo's first (secret) conviction, which took place in 1616.Be it so or not, he was determined not to publish the great work he had been working on, Le Monde, on the grounds that it contained two heresies: the rotation of the earth and the infinity of the universe. (The book was never published in its entirety, only fragments of it were published posthumously.)

He lived in Holland for twenty years (1629-49), except for a few short visits to France and a visit to England, all for business purposes.In the seventeenth century the Netherlands was the only country with freedom of thought, and its importance cannot be overemphasized. Hobbes had to take his book to be published in Holland; Locke took refuge in Holland during the most dangerous five-year reactionary period in England before 1688; Belle (the author of the Dictionary) also lived in Holland by necessity; I am afraid that any other country will not allow him to engage in writing. I said just now that Descartes was a coward and a coward, but it may be more gentle and fair to say that he wished to be out of trouble so that he could do his research in peace.He always flattered the clergy, and especially the Jesuits, not only when he was under their control, but also after he moved to Holland.His psychology is inscrutable, but it always seems to me that he was a devout Catholic who, for his own sake and for the Church itself, was willing to make the Church less hostile to modern science than it appeared in Galileo's case.There are those who think that his orthodoxy is a mere expedient; but, though it is a possible view, I do not think it the most reliable.

Even in Holland he was not immune to annoying attacks, not from the Church of Rome, but from the bigots of Protestantism.It was said that his opinions would lead to atheism, and he would have been persecuted had it not been for the intervention of the French ambassador and the Duke of Orange.Since this attack failed, a few years later the University of Dayton authorities launched another less direct attack, which banned all references to Descartes regardless of praise or criticism.Once again the Duke of Orange meddled and told the University of Leighton to be ignorant.This shows how the church benefits the Protestant state because the church is subordinate to the state and because the non-international church is relatively weak.

Unfortunately, Descartes, through Shaniyu, the French ambassador in Stockholm, began a correspondence with Queen Kristina of Sweden; Waste of great man's time. He sent her a treatise on love, a subject he had until then somewhat neglected.He also sent her a work on the Passions of the Soul, which he had written for the Princess Elizabeth, daughter of the Elector of the Palatine.For both works, the queen asked Descartes to come to her court in person; he finally agreed, and she sent a warship to fetch him (September 1649).It turned out that she wanted to listen to his lectures every day, but she couldn't find time for it except at five o'clock in the morning.In the cold of a Scandinavian winter, such unaccustomed mornings are not the best thing for a weak constitution.In addition, Shaniyu fell seriously ill again, so Descartes went to take care of him.The ambassador recovered, but Descartes fell ill and died in February 1650.

Descartes never married, but he had an illegitimate daughter who died at the age of five. He said this was the greatest sorrow in his life.He is always well-dressed and wears a sword.Descartes was not a hardworking person. He worked very short hours and read very little.When he went to Holland, he did not take many books with him, but among the books he took with him were the Bible and the works of Thomas Aquinas.Descartes' work appears to have been done in short periods of intense concentration; but perhaps he pretended to work less than he actually did in order to maintain the appearance of a gentlemanly amateur philosopher, for otherwise his achievements would seem to hard to believe.

Descartes was a philosopher, mathematician, and scientist.In philosophy and mathematics, his work is extremely important; in science, although his achievements are commendable, they are not as good as some people in his time. His great contribution to geometry was the invention of coordinate geometry, though not quite in its final form.He used the analytical method, which assumes that the problem has been solved and then examines the consequences of this assumption; and he applied algebra to geometry.Both of these things had been done before him; and the former was to be found even among the ancients.His originality lies in the use of a coordinate system, which is to use the distance from a point on a plane to two fixed straight lines to determine the position of this point.Descartes himself did not discover the full power of the method, but his work was sufficient to pave the way for further developments.This was by no means his only contribution to mathematics, but it was the most significant.

The book in which he presented most of his scientific theories was Principiaphilosophiae, published in 1644.But there were other important books: the Essaisphilosophiques (1637) dealt with geometry, but also with optics; among his books was Dela eormation du eoetus.He welcomed Harvey's discoveries about the circulation of the blood, and had always hoped (which he hadn't) to make something important in medicine.Descartes saw human and animal bodies as machines; animals to him were automatons completely governed by the laws of physics, devoid of emotion and consciousness.People are different: people have a soul, which is stored in the pineal gland.Here the soul comes into contact with the "life spirit" through which the soul interacts with the body.

The total amount of movement in the universe is certain, so the soul cannot affect it, but the soul can change the movement direction of life essence, and thus indirectly change the movement direction of other parts of the body. This part of Descartes' theory was discarded by his school—first by his Dutch disciple Geulincx, and later by Malebranche and Spinoza.Physicists have discovered the conservation of momentum. According to the conservation of momentum, in any known direction, the total amount of motion in the whole universe is certain.This means that there would be no such action of mind on matter as Descartes imagined.Assuming that all physical actions are of a colliding nature (as was widely assumed by the Cartesian school), the laws of kinetics are sufficient to determine the motion of matter, leaving no room for any influence of the mind.But this raises a difficulty.My arm moves when I decide to move it, but my will is a mental phenomenon and my arm movement is a physical phenomenon.So, if spirit and matter cannot interact, why does my body act like my spirit dictates it?To this question, Grunkes invented an answer, commonly known as the "two clocks" theory.Suppose you have two clocks, both perfectly accurate; whenever the hands of one clock strike the hour, the other clock strikes the hour, so that if you look at the one clock and hear the sound of the other clock, you will think that the The clock prompts the clock to strike.So it is with spirit and body.Each of them tightened the strings with their own minds, and kept pace with each other.So when I will, even though my will is not actually acting on my body, the laws of pure physics move my arms.

There are of course difficulties with this theory.First, it is quite eccentric; second, since the series of physical events is strictly determined by the laws of nature, the series of mental events, parallel to it, must be equally deterministic.If the theory is true, there should be some sort of possible lexicon in which each brain event is translated into a corresponding mental event.An imaginary calculator can calculate brain events according to the laws of kinetics, and then use this "dictionary" to infer the accompanying mental events.Even without a "dictionary," the calculator could deduce what people said and did, since both are bodily movements.It may be difficult to reconcile this view with Christian ethics and the reduction of punishment for crimes. These results were not immediately apparent, however.This statement seems to have two points of wisdom.The first is that since the soul is never under the influence of the body, the theory makes the soul in a sense completely independent of the body.Second, it recognizes the general principle that one entity cannot act on another.There are two entities, mental and physical, so dissimilar that their interaction seems inconceivable.Grinkx's theory denies the reality of interaction, but explains the phenomenon of interaction. In terms of mechanics, Descartes recognized the first law of motion, according to this law, if an object is not affected by an external force, it will move along a straight line with a constant velocity.But there is no action at a distance as mentioned in Newton's theory of universal gravitation later.There is no such thing as a vacuum, and there are no atoms.However, all interactions are of a collisional nature.If our knowledge is really rich enough, we can reduce chemistry and biology to mechanics; the development of germs into animals or plants is a purely mechanical process.Those three souls that Aristotle talks about are unnecessary; only one of the three, the rational soul, exists, and only in human beings. Careful to avoid theological condemnation, Descartes developed a cosmology not dissimilar to that of some philosophers before Plato's time.We know the world was created as it is in Genesis, but it's also interesting to see how it could have come into being, he said.Descartes made a vortex formation theory: there is a huge vortex in the solid space around the sun, driving the planets to revolve.This theory is subtle but subtle, but it cannot explain why planetary orbits are not circular but elliptical.The vortex theory was generally recognized in France, and it was gradually deprived of its status by Newton's theory.Cotes, the editor of the earliest English version of Newton's "Principles", opened the door to atheism by talking about the vortex theory, and Newton's theory required a god to make the planets move in a direction not toward the sun.On this basis, he thought, Newton should be pleased. Now for pure philosophy, Descartes' two most important books.These two books are Methodology (1637) and (Meditations) (1642).There are many overlaps in the two books, so there is no need to talk about them separately. In both books, Descartes begins by illustrating what has always been called "Cartesian doubt."Descartes, in order to get his philosophy firmly grounded, resolved to make himself doubt everything that he could, at any rate, doubt.As he foresees that this process may take some time, he resolves during this period to abstain from his conduct according to the commonly accepted rules; . Descartes starts with doubts about sensations.He said, can I suspect that I'm sitting here by the fire in my dressing gown?Yes, I can doubt; for sometimes I actually sleep naked in bed (before pajamas and even pajamas were invented), yet I dream that I am here.Also, psychopaths tend to hallucinate, so I might be in the same situation. But the dream is like a painter, bringing us a picture of reality, at least in terms of its constituent elements. (You may dream about winged horses, but only because you have seen wings and horses).Corresponding properties in general, including such things as extension, size, and number, are not so easily doubted as beliefs about particular things.Arithmetic and geometry do not deal with individual things, and are therefore more certain than physics and astronomy; this applies even to dream objects, which do not differ in number and extent from real objects.Even with arithmetic and geometry, however, doubts may remain.Maybe every time I try to count the sides of a square or add two and three, God calls me wrong.Perhaps, even in the imagination, it is wrong to ascribe this inhumanity to the gods; but there is no guarantee that a demon, both powerful and cunning, will not use all his cunning and cunning to deceive me.If there is such a devil, maybe everything I see is just an illusion, and the devil uses this illusion as a trap to deceive my credulity. But there is always something I cannot doubt; if I really did not exist, no devil, however cunning, could deceive me.I may not have a body; It's hard to say it's an illusion.But thinking is another matter. "When I want to think of everything as false, the thinking 'I' must be something; I realize that the truth 'I think, therefore I am' is so solid, so certain, that skepticism Unable to disprove it by all the wildest assumptions of the author, I conclude that I can admit it without hesitation as the first principle of the philosophy I seek." This text is at the heart of Descartes' theory of knowledge and contains the most important points of his philosophy.Most philosophers after Descartes have paid attention to epistemology, which is mainly due to Descartes. "I think, therefore I am" says that spirit is more certain than matter, and (for me) my spirit is more certain than other people's spirit.Hence all philosophy from Descartes has a subjectivist tendency, and a tendency to regard matter as something that can be known (if knowable) only by reasoning from what we know about the mind.Both the idealism of the Continent and the empiricism of England share these two tendencies;In recent years, that school of philosophy known as instrumentalism has been trying to get rid of this subjectivism, but I will leave that aside for the present.With the exception of instrumentalism, most of the formulations of modern philosophy are accepted from Descartes, but they do not accept his answers. The reader will recall that St. Augustine advanced an argument that resembles a "cogito."He did not, however, place much emphasis on this argument, and the problems which he intended to solve by it constituted only a small part of his thoughts.Therefore, Descartes' originality should be recognized, although this is not mainly about creating this argument, but about recognizing its significance. Now that he had gained a solid foundation, Descartes began to rebuild the building of knowledge.The "I" that has been proven to exist is deduced from the fact that I think, so "I" exists when I think, and only when I think.If I stop thinking, there is no evidence of the existence of "I". "I" is a thinking thing, that is, an entity whose whole nature or essence consists in thinking and for which no place or material thing is required for its existence.Therefore, the soul is quite different from the body, and easier to know than the body; Even if there is no body, the soul will be as it is. Descartes then asked himself: Why is the "cogito" so clear?His conclusion was that it was clear only because it was clear.Therefore, he adopted the following principle as a general criterion: Where we can conceive, think, get very clearly, very clearly, everything. All are true.But he also admits that it is often difficult to know what such things are. Descartes uses the term "thinking" in a very wide sense.He said that what is called thinking is this: it doubts, understands, imagines, affirms, denies, wills, imagines, and feels—for the feeling that plays out in dreams is also a kind of thinking function.Since thinking is the essence of the mind, the mind must always be thinking, even in deep sleep. Descartes now moves on to the question of our knowledge of bodies.He used as an example a piece of beeswax taken from a hive.Some things are obvious to the senses: this piece of beeswax smells of honey, smells of flowers, has a certain perceived color, size, shape, is hard and cold, and makes a sound when tapped.But if you put it near a fire, though the wax remains beeswax, these properties are altered; so that it is not the wax itself which the senses perceive just now.Beeswax itself is composed of extension, softness, and mobility, which are not understood by the imagination, but by the spirit.The thing wax is in itself imperceptible, for it is equally contained in all the phenomena which wax manifests to the senses.The perception of beeswax "is not seeing, touching, or imagining, but spiritual insight".I don't see beeswax, just as seeing hats and coats on the street doesn't mean I see people on the street. "I comprehend what I thought I saw with my eyes purely by the judgment that resides in my mind." Sense perception is mixed, and animals have it as well; Its naked truth.I see the beeswax through my senses, and from this I do affirm my own existence, but not the beeswax.Understanding external things is not dependent on the senses, but on the spirit. From there, we turn to various concepts.Descartes said that the most common mistake is to think that your ideas are like things in the outside world. (The term "idea" includes sensory perception, as Cartesian used it).There seem to be three types of ideas: (1) innate ideas, (2) non-inherent ideas that come from the outside world, and (3) self-created ideas.The second class of ideas we assume, of course, to resemble external objects.This is assumed, therefore, partly because "nature" teaches us to think so, and partly because the idea arises without volition (i.e., through the action of the senses); To me, it seems reasonable.But are these two points sufficient reasons?In this case, when I say "taught by nature," I mean nothing more than that I have a certain tendency to believe it, not that I see it in the light of nature.What is seen by natural light cannot be denied, but it is a mere inclination, which may also incline to wrong things.As for the involuntary sense-ideas, there is no justification at all, since dreams, though internal, are not arbitrary.Thus, the reasons for assuming that sense perceptions are external are not convincing. Moreover, the same external object often has two different concepts, such as the sun perceived by the senses and the sun believed by astronomers.The two ideas are not both like the sun, and reason knows that the one that comes directly from experience must be the less like the sun of the two. But all these reasons did not solve the skepticism that doubts the existence of the outside world. This can only be done by first proving the existence of God. Some of Descartes' proofs of the existence of God are not very original, and generally speaking, they all come from scholastic philosophy.These prove that Leibniz described it better, so I want to omit it for now and discuss it when I talk about Leibniz. Now that the existence of God has been proved, the rest of the matter goes unimpeded.Because God is good, he does not act like the deceitful demon that Descartes imagined as a reason for doubt.Now, since God has given me such a strong inclination to believe that bodies exist, would he not deceive if they did not; so they exist.Not only that, but God must have given me the ability to correct my mistakes.I use this ability in applying the principle that what is clear and distinct is true. I can therefore understand mathematics; and I can understand physics if I remember that I must know the truth about bodies by the mind alone, not by the mind and the body. The constructive part of Descartes' epistemology is far less interesting than the previous destructive part.The constructive part makes use of all sorts of scholastic maxims like "an effect can never be more perfect than its cause," something that somehow escapes initial critical scrutiny.Although these maxims are indeed less self-evident than man's own existence, they are admitted without giving any reason, while their own existence is proved for a while with much fanfare.The writings of Plato, St. Augustine, and St. Thomas contain most of the affirmations. The method of "critical skepticism" is very important in philosophy, although Descartes himself applied it only half-heartedly.Logically, it is clear that doubt has to stop somewhere for this approach to produce positive results.If both logical and empirical knowledge are to be had, there must be two doubtful stops: unquestionable facts and unquestionable principles of reasoning.Descartes' undoubted fact is his own thinking, using the word "thinking" in the widest sense. "Cogito" is his original premise. The word "I" here does not make sense; he should describe the original premise in the form of "thinking exists". Although the word "I" is grammatically convenient, it does not express known things.When he goes on to say "I am a thinking thing", he is already uncritically applying the category tools handed down from scholastic philosophy.Nowhere does he prove that thinking requires a thinker, and there is no reason to believe this except in a grammatical sense.However, the decision not to regard external objects but to regard thinking as the original empirical certainty is very important and has a profound influence on all subsequent philosophies. Descartes' philosophy is also important on two other points.First, it completes, or very nearly completes, the dualism of spirit and matter that started with Plato and developed through Christian philosophy mainly for religious reasons.That marvelous business in the pineal gland was abandoned by the disciples of Descartes, and left alone; the Cartesian system proposed two parallel and independent worlds, the spiritual and the material, and the study of one of them could be done without involving another.It is a novel idea that the mind does not move the body; in explicit form it comes from Grinkles, but implicitly it comes from Descartes. With this idea, it can be said that the body does not drive the spirit, which is an advantage.There have been many discussions in the book about why the spirit feels "sad" when the body feels thirsty.The correct answer of Cartesianism is: the body and the spirit are like two clocks, whenever one clock indicates "thirst", the other clock indicates "sadness".From a religious point of view, however, this theory has a serious disadvantage; and this turns to the second feature of Cartesian philosophy which I mentioned above. Cartesian philosophy is strictly deterministic in all theories about the material world.Living organisms are governed by the laws of physics in exactly the same way as dead things; there is no longer an "entelechy" or soul needed to explain the growth of organisms and the movement of animals, as in Aristotelian philosophy.Descartes himself only admitted one small exception: the human soul can change the direction of movement of life essence though it cannot change the amount of movement of life essence through the action of will.But this was contrary to the spirit of his system and proved to be in conflict with the laws of mechanics, so it was discarded.It follows that all motions of matter are determined by the laws of physics, and by virtue of parallels, mental events must be equally definite.This made the Cartesian problem of free will difficult.And those who pay more attention to Descartes' science than his epistemology, it is not difficult to extend the theory that animals are automatons: why not do the same for humans, make this system a consistent materialism, and simplify the system?In the eighteenth century, this step was actually taken. Descartes has a wavering duality: on the one hand, what he learned from the science of the time, and on the other, the scholastic philosophy taught to him by the Love Rise School.This duality led him into contradictions, but it also gave him a richness of thought beyond the reach of any perfectly logical philosopher.Justification might make him the founder of a mere school of new scholasticism, but paradoxically it makes him the source of two important and divergent schools of philosophy.