To assume, as did the ancient and medieval philosophers, that the world was divinely permeated and ordered in a manner directly accessible to the human mind, leading the mind directly to God’s hidden purposes, was to bar the mind from insight into nature’s actual forms. Only by recognizing the distinction between God and his creation, and between God’s mind and man’s, could man achieve real progress in science. Thus Bacon expressed the spirit of the Reformation and of Ockham. A “natural theology,” as in classical Scholasticism, must be relinquished as a contradiction in terms, a falsifying miscegenation of matters of faith with matters of nature. Each realm had its own laws and its own appropriate method. Theology pertained to the realm of faith, but the realm of nature must be approached by a natural science unhampered by irrelevant assumptions derived from the religious imagination. Kept rightly separate, both theology and science could better flourish, and man could better serve his Creator through understanding the earthly kingdom’s true natural causes—thereby gaining power over it as God intended.
Because all the previous systems of philosophy from the Greeks onward lacked a rigorously critical sense-based empiricism, because they relied on rational and imaginative constructions unsupported by careful experiment, they were like grandly entertaining theatrical productions, of no genuine relevance to the real world they so elegantly distorted. Emotional needs and traditional styles of thinking constantly impelled man to misperceive nature, to anthropomorphize it, to make it out to be what he wishes rather than what it is. The true philosopher does not attempt to narrow down the world to fit his understanding, but strives to expand his understanding to fit the world. Hence for Bacon, the business of philosophy was first and foremost the fresh examination of particulars. Through the astute use of experiments, the evidence of the senses could be progressively corrected and enhanced to reveal the truths hidden in nature. Thus could take place at last a marriage between the human mind and the natural universe, the fruit of which Bacon foresaw to be a long line of great inventions to relieve the miseries of mankind. In the future of science lay the restoration of learning and of human greatness itself.
With Bacon was evident the modern turning of the tide in philosophy. The nominalism and empiricism of the later Scholastics, and their growing criticism of Aristotle and speculative theology, now found bold and influential expression. It is true that for all his shrewdness, Bacon drastically underestimated the power of mathematics for the development of the new natural science, he failed to grasp the necessity of theoretical conjecture prior to empirical observation, and he altogether missed the significance of the new heliocentric theory. Yet his forceful advocacy of experience as the only legitimate source of true knowledge effectively redirected the European mind toward the empirical world, toward the methodical examination of physical phenomena, and toward the rejection of traditional assumptions—whether theological or metaphysical—when pursuing the advancement of learning. Bacon was neither a systematic philosopher nor a rigorous practicing scientist. He was, rather, a potent intermediary whose rhetorical power and visionary ideal persuaded future generations to fulfill his revolutionary program: the scientific conquest of nature for man’s welfare and God’s glory.
Descartes
If it was Bacon in England who helped inspire the distinctive character, direction, and vigor of the new science, it was Descartes on the Continent who established its philosophical foundation, and in so doing articulated the epochal defining statement of the modern self.
In an age faced with a crumbling world view, with unexpected and disorienting discoveries of every sort, and with the collapse of fundamental institutions and cultural traditions, a skeptical relativism concerning the possibility of certain knowledge was spreading among the European intelligentsia. External authorities could no longer be naively trusted, no matter how venerable, yet there existed no new absolute criterion of truth to replace the old. This growing epistemological uncertainty, already exacerbated by the plethora of competing ancient philosophies bestowed by the Humanists to the Renaissance, received additional stimulus through yet another influx from the Greeks—the recovery of Sextus Empiricus’s classical defense of Skepticism. The French essayist Montaigne was especially sensitive to the new mood, and he in turn gave modern voice to the ancient epistemological doubts. If human belief was determined by cultural custom, if the senses could be deceptive, if the structure of nature did not necessarily match the processes of the mind, if reason’s relativity and fallibility precluded knowledge of God or absolute moral standards, then nothing was certain.
A skeptical crisis in French philosophy had emerged, a crisis that the young Descartes, steeped in the critical rationalism of his Jesuit schooling, experienced acutely. Pressed by the residual confusions of his education, by the contradictions between different philosophical perspectives, and by the lessening relevance of religious revelation for understanding the empirical world, Descartes set out to discover an irrefutable basis for certain knowledge.
To begin by doubting everything was the necessary first step, for he wished to sweep away all the past presumptions now confusing human knowledge and to isolate only those truths he himself could clearly and directly experience as indubitable. Unlike Bacon, however, Descartes was a considerable mathematician, and it was the rigorous methodology characteristic of geometry and arithmetic that alone seemed to promise him the certainty he so fervently sought in philosophical matters. Mathematics began with the statement of simple self-evident first principles, foundational axioms from which further and more complex truths could be deduced according to strict rational method. By applying such precise and painstaking reasoning to all questions of philosophy, and by accepting as true only those ideas that presented themselves to his reason as clear, distinct, and free from internal contradiction, Descartes established his means for the attainment of absolute certainty. Disciplined critical rationality would overcome the untrustworthy information about the world given by the senses or the imagination. Using such a method, Descartes would be the new Aristotle, and found a new science that would usher man into a new era of practical knowledge, wisdom, and well-being.
Skepticism and mathematics thus combined to produce the Cartesian revolution in philosophy. The third term in that revolution, that which was both the impulse behind and the outcome of systematic doubt and self-evident reasoning, was to be the bedrock of all human knowledge: the certainty of individual self-awareness. For in the process of methodically doubting everything, even the apparent reality of the physical world and his own body (which could all be only a dream), Descartes concluded that there was one datum that could not be doubted—the fact of his own doubting. At least the “I” who is conscious of doubting, the thinking subject, exists. At least this much is certain: Cogito, ergo sum—I think, therefore I am. All else can be questioned, but not the irreducible fact of the thinker’s self-awareness. And in recognizing this one certain truth, the mind can perceive that which characterizes certainty itself: Certain knowledge is that which can be clearly and distinctly conceived.
The cogito was thus the first principle and paradigm of all other knowledge, providing both a basis for subsequent deductions and a model for all other self-evident rational intuitions. From the indubitable existence of the doubting subject, which was ipso facto an awareness of imperfection and limitation, Descartes deduced the necessary existence of a perfect infinite being, God. Something cannot proceed from nothing, nor can an effect possess a reality not derived from its cause. The thought of God was of such magnitude and perfection that it self-evidently must have derived from a reality beyond the finite and contingent thinker; hence the certainty of an objective omnipotent God. Only through presupposition of such a God could the reliability of the natural light of human reason, or the objective reality of the phenomenal world, be assured. For if God is God, which is to say a perfect being, then he would not deceive man and the reason that gives man self-evident truths.
Of equal consequence, the cogi
to also revealed an essential hierarchy and division in the world. Rational man knows his own awareness to be certain, and entirely distinct from the external world of material substance, which is epistemologically less certain and perceptible only as object. Thus res cogitans—thinking substance, subjective experience, spirit, consciousness, that which man perceives as within—was understood as fundamentally different and separate from res extensa—extended substance, the objective world, matter, the physical body, plants and animals, stones and stars, the entire physical universe, every-terms—extension, thing that man perceives as outside his mind. Only in man did the two realities come together as mind and body. And both the cognitive capacity of human reason and the objective reality and order of the natural world found their common source in God.
Hence on the one side of Descartes’s dualism, soul is understood as mind, and human awareness as distinctively that of the thinker. The senses are prone to flux and errors, the imagination prey to fantastic distortion, the emotions irrelevant for certain rational comprehension. On the other side of the dualism, and in contrast to the mind, all objects of the external world lack subjective awareness, purpose, or spirit. The physical universe is entirely devoid of human qualities. Rather, as purely material objects, all physical phenomena can in essence be comprehended as machines—much like the lifelike automata and ingenious machines, clocks, mills, and fountains being constructed and enjoyed by seventeenth-century Europeans. God created the universe and defined its mechanical laws, but after that the system moved on its own, the supreme machine constructed by the supreme intelligence.
The universe, therefore, was not a live organism, as Aristotle and the Scholastics supposed, endowed with forms and motivated by teleological purpose. If such preconceptions were set aside and man’s analytic reason alone employed to intuit the simplest, most self-evident description of nature, then it was apparent that the universe was composed of nonvital atomistic matter. Such a substance was best understood in mechanistic terms, reductively analyzed into its simplest parts, and exactly comprehended in terms of those parts’ arrangements and movements: “The laws of Mechanics are identical with those of Nature.” For man to claim to see immanent forms and purposes in nature was to assert a metaphysical impiety, claiming direct access to God’s mind. Yet because the physical world was entirely objective, and solidly and unambiguously material, it was inherently measurable. Therefore man’s most powerful tool for understanding the universe was mathematics, available to the natural light of human reason.
To support his metaphysics and epistemology, Descartes used Galileo’s distinction between primary, measurable properties of objects and secondary, more subjective properties. In seeking to understand the universe, the scientist should not focus on those qualities merely apparent to sense perception, which are liable to subjective misjudgment and human distortion, but should instead attend only to those objective qualities that can be perceived clearly and distinctly and analyzed in quantitative shape, number, duration, specific gravity, relative position. Upon this basis, using experiment and hypothesis, science could proceed. For Descartes, mechanics was a species of a “universal mathematics” by which the physical universe could be fully analyzed and effectively manipulated to serve the health and comfort of mankind. With quantitative mechanics ruling the world, an absolute faith in human reason was justified. Here, then, was the basis for a practical philosophy—not the speculative philosophy of the schools, but one granting man direct understanding of the forces of nature so they could be turned to his own purposes.
Thus human reason establishes first its own existence, out of experiential necessity, then God’s existence, out of logical necessity, and thence the God-guaranteed reality of the objective world and its rational order. Descartes enthroned human reason as the supreme authority in matters of knowledge, capable of distinguishing certain metaphysical truth and of achieving certain scientific understanding of the material world. Infallibility, once ascribed only to Holy Scripture or the supreme pontiff, was now transferred to human reason itself. In effect, Descartes unintentionally began a theological Copernican revolution, for his mode of reasoning suggested that God’s existence was established by human reason and not vice versa. Although the self-evident certainty of God’s existence was guaranteed by God’s benevolent veracity in creating a reliable human reason, that conclusion could be affirmed only on the basis of the clear-and-distinct-idea criterion, in which authority was fundamentally rooted in a judgment by the individual human intellect. In the ultimate religious question, not divine revelation but the natural light of human reason had the final say. Until Descartes, revealed truth had maintained an objective authority outside of human judgment, but now its validity began to be subject to affirmation by human reason. The metaphysical independence that Luther had demanded within the parameters of the Christian religion, Descartes now intimated more universally. For whereas Luther’s foundational certainty was his faith in God’s saving grace as revealed in the Bible, Descartes’s foundational certainty was his faith in the procedural clarities of mathematical reasoning applied to the indubitability of the thinking self.
Moreover, by his assertion of the essential dichotomy between thinking substance and extended substance, Descartes helped emancipate the material world from its long association with religious belief, freeing science to develop its analysis of that world in terms uncontaminated by spiritual or human qualities and unconstrained by theological dogma. Both the human mind and the natural world now stood autonomously as never before, separated from God and from each other.
Here, then, was the prototypical declaration of the modern self, established as a fully separate, self-defining entity, for whom its own rational self-awareness was absolutely primary—doubting everything except itself, setting itself in opposition not only to traditional authorities but to the world, as subject against object, as a thinking, observing, measuring, manipulating being, fully distinct from an objective God and an external nature. The fruit of the dualism between rational subject and material world was science, including science’s capacity for rendering certain knowledge of that world and for making man “master and possessor of nature.” In Descartes’s vision, science, progress, reason, epistemological certainty, and human identity were all inextricably connected with each other and with the conception of an objective, mechanistic universe; and upon this synthesis was founded the paradigmatic character of the modern mind.
Thus Bacon and Descartes—prophets of a scientific civilization, rebels against an ignorant past, and zealous students of nature—proclaimed the twin epistemological bases of the modern mind. In their respective manifestos of empiricism and rationalism, the long-growing significance of the natural world and the human reason, initiated by the Greeks and recovered by the Scholastics, achieved definitive modern expression. Upon this dual foundation, philosophy proceeded and science triumphed: It was not accidental to Newton’s accomplishment that he had systematically employed a practical synthesis of Bacon’s inductive empiricism and Descartes’s deductive mathematical rationalism, thereby bringing to fruition the scientific method first forged by Galileo.
After Newton, science reigned as the authoritative definer of the universe, and philosophy defined itself in relation to science—predominantly supportive, occasionally critical and provocative, sometimes independent and concerned with different areas, but ultimately not in a position to gainsay the cosmological discoveries and conclusions of empirical science, which now increasingly ruled the Western world view. Newton’s achievement in effect established both the modern understanding of the physical universe—as mechanistic, mathematically ordered, concretely material, devoid of human or spiritual properties, and not especially Christian in structure—and the modern understanding of man, whose rational intelligence had comprehended the world’s natural order, and who was thus a noble being not by virtue of being the central focus of a divine plan as revealed in Scripture, but because by his own reason he had grasped natu
re’s underlying logic and thereby achieved dominion over its forces.
The new philosophy did not just mirror the new sense of human empowerment. Its significance as a philosophy, and the cause of its great impact on the Western mind, lay especially in its scientific and then technological corroboration. As never before, a way of thinking produced spectacularly tangible results. Within such a potent framework, progress appeared inevitable. Mankind’s happy destiny at last seemed assured, and patently as a result of its own rational powers and concrete achievements. It was now evident that the quest for human fulfillment would be propelled by increasingly sophisticated analysis and manipulation of the natural world, and by systematic efforts to extend man’s intellectual and existential independence in every realm—physical, social, political, religious, scientific, metaphysical. Proper education of the human mind in a well-designed environment would bring forth rational individuals, capable of understanding the world and themselves, able to act in the most intelligent fashion for the good of the whole. With the mind cleared of traditional prejudices and superstitions, man could grasp the self-evident truth and thus establish for himself a rational world within which all could flourish. The dream of human freedom and fulfillment in this world could now be realized. Mankind had at last reached an enlightened age.
Passion of the Western Mind Page 36