René Descartes: Biography of This French Philosopher

René Descartes has been one of the great thinkers in history His influence on Western thought and philosophy is undeniable, especially if we take into account his famous work “The Discourse on Method.”

He was very ahead of his time, a time when Galileo Galilei, a contemporary of his, was being censored by religious elites, making Cartesian philosophy initially difficult to even be published.

Next we will see the life and work of this philosopher through a biography of René Descartes in addition to understanding his philosophical thought in more detail.

Biography of René Descartes

Mathematician, physicist and, better known as a philosopher, René Descartes has been a multifaceted character. Below we will see his biography.

Early life

René Descartes was born in La Haye, France, on March 31, 1596 His mother died when he was barely 13 months old, and his father, busy with his work in the parliament of Brittany, barely had time for young Descartes, so his education fell into the hands of his maternal grandmother.

Little Rene He was educated at a Jesuit school in La Flèche, between the years 1604 and 1612, which at that time was one of the most famous Jesuit institutions in Europe. This center was of great importance for his intellectual development.

There he learned several things, although he focused on teaching traditional liberal education, theology and how to be a good gentleman. Years later, Descartes would be critical of the education he received in such a center. At La Flèche, Descartes obtained his bachelor’s degree and would later travel to Potiers to graduate in law.

In 1616, when he was barely 22 years old, He left for the Netherlands to serve in the ranks of the Mauritius of Nassau army, Protestant prince in the Thirty Years’ War. Later, he would join the ranks of Maximilian I of Bavaria, who was Catholic. This may seem paradoxical, given that Catholics and Protestants were at odds in such a contest. Descartes would recognize that he had joined different armies to see new countries and understand the reality of each side.

During the winter of 1619, Descartes was stranded in a small village on the Upper Danube, near Ulm. He remained isolated from any social relationship, next to a stove and with no other company than his own thoughts. While there, the foundations that would establish his philosophical system would be revealed to him: the mathematical method and the more than famous Cartesian principle, “I think, therefore I am”

During the night of November 10 to 11, 1619, victim of feverish excitement, Descartes would have three dreams in which the form of his method would be revealed to him, and his vocation to dedicate his life to philosophy and science.

End of military life

Renouncing military life, Descartes took the opportunity to travel through German and Dutch lands, returning to France in 1622. He would spend a season in Italy, between 1623 and 1625, and then return to France settling in Paris and making contact with the most notable scientists of the time.

In 1628 he returned to Holland, a country in which science was advancing by leaps and bounds thanks to the fact that there was relative freedom of thought and science enjoyed good popularity, residing in the Netherlands for 21 years. For the first five years he would dedicate himself to elaborating his own system of the world, what he understood to be the human being and how our soul was encapsulated in our body.

In 1633 the writing of Treatise on light, a broad text in which he talked about metaphysics and physics. However, he decided not to publish it, given the terrible condemnation of Galileo Galilei. Descartes in that work he defended Copernican heliocentrism In the end the work would be published posthumously.

In 1637 his famous “Discourse on Method” would appear, presented as a prologue to three scientific essays. The book would gain widespread popularity and many educated readers would dare to send letters to its author to discuss what they thought or possible errors in the Cartesian method.

In the speech, Descartes proposed a methodical doubt, with which all the knowledge of the time had to be questioned It is not that it was a skeptical doubt, since it was oriented towards the search for principles on which to base knowledge, and not the simple criticism of all current knowledge.

He proposed the Cartesian method for all sciences and disciplines, and it consists of breaking down the most complex problems into simpler parts, until their most basic elements are detected, simple ideas that can be presented as obvious reasons. Then he would relate these same ideas to understand the more complex postulates that they were constituting.

In his mechanistic physics he explained that extension was the main property of material bodies, a postulate set out in his Metaphysical meditations of 1641. In this work he attempted to demonstrate the existence of God and his perfection, in addition to the immortality of the soul, already noted in the fourth part of the Discourse of the method. As his popularity grew, criticism and threats of religious persecution became dark shadows hanging over René Descartes.

Flight to Sweden and end of his life

Tired of struggles, criticism and threats coming from ecclesiastical authorities and academics, both French and Dutch, Descartes, in 1649, He accepted the invitation of Queen Christina of Sweden, who invited him to reside in Stockholm as her tutor of philosophy

This was no coincidence. Descartes and the monarch had maintained an intense correspondence. But although René Descartes enjoyed the company of Christina of Sweden, a cultured queen, the country he led was not so pleasant to him. He even described it as a land of bears, where men’s thoughts freeze, along with the water.

In the Scandinavian country Descartes He had to get up at four in the morning, in complete darkness and with the winter cold eating away at his bones, to give philosophy classes to the queen, because the monarch only had that hour free due to her royal obligations. This would surely be what ended his life, given that she died on February 11, 1650 due to pneumonia, having only been in Sweden for five months.

Descartes’ philosophy

Rene Descartes He is considered the promoter of modern rationalist philosophy, one of the first philosophical currents after the end of the Middle Ages. Its approach aims to resolve philosophical and scientific problems through knowledge that guarantees the certainty of the same postulates.

In its Discourse of the method In 1637 he stated that he intended to develop a doctrine that was based entirely on new principles, breaking with the philosophical teachings that he had received as a student at La Flèche. He was convinced that reality responded, completely, to a rational order He intended to create a method that would allow the entire field of knowledge to be reached with the same security provided by the exact sciences, such as geometry and arithmetic.

His method is composed of four procedures:

To complete the first step, it is proposed methodical doubt, that is, questioning all acquired or inherited knowledge All knowledge has a part that can be criticized, but at the same time there is a part that is impossible to question, and this is the very action of doubting.

That is, we doubt reality, we doubt knowledge, but what we cannot doubt is that we are doubting. In this way we arrive at an absolute and obvious certainty: we doubt. Doubt is a thought, with which we are doing the action of thinking You cannot think without existing, therefore, the fact of thinking, doubting and performing other cognitive actions implies the indisputable existence of the thinking self. This is where his famous phrase arises, “cogito, ergo sum”, this is the maxim “I think, therefore I am”.

It is based on this simple phrase, although with absolute certainty, that Descartes raises his entire philosophy. You cannot trust the existence of things, because, even if we see or touch them, how are we sure that they are not deceiving us? How are we sure that our senses give us truthful information?

On the other hand, thought is not a material thing, but rather contains ideas of things, representations of reality. What arises from here is whether our thinking contains any idea or representation that can be perceived with the same clarity and distinction, which he considers two criteria of certainty, with which we perceive reality.

Types of ideas

Descartes reviews all the knowledge that he had previously discarded at the beginning of his philosophical search. Upon reconsidering them, he sees that the mental representations of our way of seeing reality can be included in three categories:

Innate ideas are already found, as their name indicates, in us at the moment of birth. They are ideas like beauty or justice. It is not something that is found in the external world, they are abstract aspects.

Adventitious ideas would be those that come from external things, such as the representation of what a horse, a table or a building is. They are the result of our experience, obtaining them through the senses. The problem is that, since our senses can fail, we cannot be certain that the adventitious ideas we have are true. Perhaps reality is nothing more than a mere illusion.

Lastly there are fictitious ideas which, as their name suggests, are those representations of things that do not exist, such as monsters in mythology, unicorns or any other. They are invented ideas, creativity. These fictitious ideas are the result of the addition or combination of other ideas that would be adventitious.

Our existence and that of God

When examining innate ideas, which are not given to us through the senses since they have no external representation, we find a rather paradoxical fact. Human beings are not perfect, since we die and have our weaknesses, but we can conceive ideas of perfection like that of God, an infinite, eternal and immutable being.

The idea of ​​God, something perfect, cannot arise from a finite and imperfect individual, it has to come from before, through the action of another being, from God himself. The fact that we believe in the existence of God as a perfect being while we are imperfect is the demonstration that God exists, because if not he was the one who put his idea of ​​perfection in our imperfect minds, who was it?

About the substance

Descartes defines the concept of substance, understood as that which exists in such a way that it only needs itself to exist Substances manifest themselves through modes and attributes. Attributes are essential properties that reveal the determination of the substance, that is, those qualities without which a substance would cease to be that substance. Modes are not properties, but merely accidental, situations or temporal aspects.

The attribute of bodies is extension, since if they lack it they cease to be bodies. All other properties, such as its shape, color, location and movement, are only modes, that is, relatively temporary phenomena.

The attribute of the spirit is thought, since the spirit always has that property Therefore, there is a thinking substance, called “res cogitans”, but this is not a body, since it lacks extension, and its attribute is thought. Then there is a substance that is composed of physical bodies, called “res Extensa”, whose attribute would be extension, understood as three-dimensionality. Both substances are irreducible to each other and totally separated and this conception of these two substances is what is called Cartesian dualism.

The human being is composed of a body, that is, res extenso, and a soul, res cogitans But this clashes with the idea that these two substances are totally separate. In the case of the human being, the soul resides in the pineal gland, directing the body. This is how our res cogitans and our res extensive establish contact, with the soul being the one that exerts influence on the body.