Practical Enlightenment: Bin Song (part II)

Hallo, this is Dr. Bin Song at Washington College!

Let’s continue to talk of Descartes’s Meditations.

I described in last unit that Descartes’s philosophical Meditations share a similar structure to religious meditation which comprises a two-way practice of descending and re-ascending, or reduction and reunion. Therefore, after making sure the Archimedean point of human knowledge “I think therefore I am” in Meditation II and the Archimedean lever “God exists and He is not a deceiver” in Meditation III, Descartes starts to regain the validity of human knowledge that has been put into radical doubt in Meditation I. The overall thinking process of Meditation IV to VI can be summarized as follows: in Meditation IV, Descartes presents his theory of making good judgment: whenever we correctly use our freewill to judge vividly and clearly perceived ideas, we human beings would not make mistakes. Then, in Meditation V, using this theory, Descartes proves that mathematical knowledge is certain, and in Meditation VI, still using the same theory, Descartes proves the existence of body and the value of sensory perceptions of it. During the process, fundamental issues such as the existence of God and the distinction between mind and body are frequently revisited, and eventually, what Descartes contributed in his six Meditations counts nothing less than a prototype of modern philosophy: he demolishes all previous beliefs inherited from the scholastic past, and constructs something new that seems to provide solid knowledge on three most basic substances of the world: soul, body and God.

Although whether Descartes succeeds to argue in the most rigorous and impeccable way all the claims he intends to make in Meditations is up to debate, his thought on several major themes of Meditation IV-VI is of immense value for us to comprehend the nature of modern philosophy as a whole.

Firstly, Descartes resorts to old scholastic strategies to explain why God, as an omnibenevolent supreme being, allows the human creatures to be able to make mistakes in our cognitive activities of pursuing knowledge. Descartes says that as a creature, humans inherit “non-being” or “nothingness” in their nature, and thus, cannot avoid imperfections; moreover, imperfections of human beings serve the overall perfection of all creations by God. Therefore, there is really no reason for humans to blame God for human imperfections. However, since the overall creation can explain away human imperfections, Descartes asks a further question in Meditation IV that since this is the case, what is the overall purpose of God to put human beings in such a humble position among all his creations? At this juncture, Descartes indicates again the nature of his modern thought, that is, he would utilize pre-modern terms of theological thinking to argue for his modern cases. In other words, Descartes thinks that since God is infinite and humans are finite, there is no way for humans to understand the overall purpose of divine creation. Because of this, the just asked question has no way to get an answer from human intelligence, and as a consequence, there is no basis either to use “teleological” explanation in natural sciences.

We once read Aristotle’s Physics and On the Heavens where Aristotle characterizes “nature” in four connotations: a nature of an object can mean its material, form, efficient cause and purpose. For Aristotle, the cause of “purpose” is the most important since it indicates the overall order of worldly phenomena. However, for Descartes, since the purpose of God’s creation is unfathomable for human beings, nature just means “a fixed order in the sequence of cause and effect which operates upon things in the world.” In other words, Descartes’s understanding of “nature” becomes purely mechanical; the natural world is therefore thoroughly “disenchanted,” and this disenchanted worldview paves the way for the flourishing of modern natural science which is premised upon mechanistic explanation and mathematical reasoning. In this sense, the metaphysics of Descartes really serves as a “root” for his “physics” and other applied sciences, just as they are described in the “tree of philosophy.”

Secondly, although “I think therefore I am” speaks to the essence of “thought” or “thinking” for the substance of “soul” or “mind” in Descartes’s metaphysics, if we read carefully Meditation II and Meditation IV together, we would find such an essence would boil down to an acknowledge of “free will” as the genuine distinction of human beings from other beings. In Descartes’s theory of judgment, he instructs two forms of human freedom. One form is negative, which implies human will can suspend its approval or disapproval to ideas presented by human intelligence, and thus remain “indifferent” to the truth of those presented ideas. One best example of this negative freedom is when humans would simply doubt any piece of human knowledge, and thus, refuse to make any choice among presented ideas. Another form of freedom is a positive one, which implies the will of human beings approves or disapproves strongly the ideas that have been vividly and clearly perceived by human intelligence, and thus, is able to make swift decision regarding a variety issues of human life. For Descartes, the more knowledge humans have, the freer humans can be positively. However, the negative freedom is also fundamental, since it speaks to the fact that humans are not programmed machines, and can hence withhold judgments whenever our will would like to do so. Isn’t the “hyperbolic doubt” used by Descartes’s Mediation I such an example of the application of the negative form of human will? Yes, it is, since “doubting” is the activity of human will when ideas perceived by human intelligence are judged as not vivid or clear. In this sense “I think therefore I am” is actually “I doubt therefore I am,” which is furthermore equal to “I am free therefore I am.” In other words, the Archimedean point upon which all Descartes’s philosophical meditations are based upon is actually the self-affirmation of the freedom of human will, definitely a very strong indicator of the modern nature of Descartes’s thought.

Thirdly, one most interesting idea that Descartes contributes to his metaphysics is actually the one he mentions in the last Meditation, and he also didn’t address quite well. While asking himself what is the value of sensory perceptions such as the feelings of pain and pleasure caused by outside objects if most of these perceptions are so confusing and unclear that do not tell the truth of these outside objects, Descartes concludes that these perceptions mainly tell whether these objects are beneficial or harmful to humans, and therefore, speak to the close “union” of mind and body. Otherwise, Descartes continues to muse that, if mind and body are not closely united, then, if something hurts our body, we can just intellectually and abstractly perceive the body is undergoing certain damage without actually feeling the pains. Since we are indeed feeling the pains, this means the relationship between body and mind is different from the one where body is like a machine and mind is like an operator sitting in an air-conditioned control room to monitor the process of body movement. No, since we feel the pains on top of our intellectual perception of the damage of body, Descartes concludes that the real nature of human existence is actually neither body nor mind, but a close union between the two. However, if mind and body have been argued by Descartes in previous Meditations as two completely different substances, each of which has its distinctive nature called “extension” or “thought,” how can they be closely “united” and interact with each other? If we take the aforementioned concept of “free will” into consideration, then the asked question will indicate a further dimension: how can an utterly free human being live a life that is fully embedded in the world of machine-like “bodies” which, as Descartes argues in his concept of “nature,” follow exact mechanical and deterministic laws of causality? Furthermore, if “feelings,” “emotions,” and sensory perceptions are so important for the good human life , doesn’t it do a disservice to ourselves to mention this unique kind of worldly phenomena in the last place of the Meditations, and hence, get a somewhat perfunctory treatment in Descartes’s metaphysics in general?

I hope these last few questions can help to generate reflective thoughts on the nature of Descartes’s thought in particular, and of modern philosophy in general, so that perhaps, whenever you feel somewhat dissatisfied by the way of living of a modern human, you can find some clues or even make some breakthroughs through reading Descartes’s foundational modern thought.

Joshua R. Brown and Alexus McLeod, Transcendence and Non-Naturalism in Early Chinese Thought, Bloomsbury, 2021, 245pp., $115.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781350082533.

Reviewed by Bin Song, Washington College, at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2021.03.01:

To paraphrase Kant’s words on enlightenment, I propound that on the topic of transcendence and non-naturalism in Chinese and comparative philosophy, although we do not have a reckoned book yet, we finally have a book of reckoning.

Joshua R. Brown and Alexus McLeod discern two major reasons why scholars assume there is no robust idea of transcendence, and hence, take naturalism as an inevitable lens for interpreting early Chinese thought: Firstly, some of these scholars would like to find in early Chinese thought something that is different from the West, mainly from Christianity. Secondly, some of them would like to find in early Chinese thought something that looks the same as the West, viz., the same as the scientific and analytic mindset prevalent in Western academia since early modern Europe. Regardless, one common assumption has been taken by these apparently contrasting approaches: All these scholars take what is purported to be the West as a fixed and pre-established standard, and then read early Chinese thought against it. While doing so, they have overlooked other hermeneutical possibilities, firstly, that early Chinese thought may imply more than what comparisons via a set standard can tell. Secondly, the pre-established standard may itself not be adequate to the rich diversity and potentiality of Western thought. Therefore, what Brown and McLeod try to accomplish in this book is to prove there are a number of texts of early Chinese thought (such as the Chunqiu fanlu (CQFL), Xunzi, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Mozi, etc.) which can be interpreted fruitfully by means of a conversation with Western thinkers rich on transcendence and non-naturalism, such as Plotinus, Thomas Aquinas, Pseudo-Dionysius, etc. As a consequence, Brown and McLeod also urge the field of Chinese and comparative philosophy to pass the domination of “whether or not” questions concerning transcendence, and instead to ask more interesting questions such as “what these concepts were like in early China, what roles they played in both particular systems and broader swaths of the intellectual tradition, and in what ways early Chinese understandings of these concepts compare with those of other traditions.” (193)

I celebrate that, because of their sophisticated analyses of so many early Chinese texts, Brown and McLeod have accomplished their goal. One good example of this is how they argue the transcendence of the Dao in perhaps still the most well-known ancient Chinese cosmology to the West, viz., Laozi’s Dao De Jing. The text is frequently taken by scholars such as Roger Ames and Francois Jullien as the evidence par excellence that classical Chinese thought lacks the Western idea of hierarchical transcendence, since the Dao is interpreted by these scholars as a hidden force which unfolds within a single plane of being. In comparison, the Western conception of transcendence normally implies a supreme being on a superior plane of being which contrasts with the inferior ones.[1] However, Brown and McLeod argue: “Concepts of transcendence are meant to capture the idea that there are different orders of existence, some of which are outside of or in important ways not subject to the states and conditions of the orders of existence and the rest of the sensible world are subject to.” (185) They also believe that there are good reasons for interpreting Laozi’s Dao as indicating such a different order of existence. For instance, Dao is described by the initial chapter of Dao De Jing as “constant” (常), and therefore, although the Dao is surely a principle immanent to the process of growth and decay of worldly phenomena, we need to admit that “the process of growth and decay is not itself subject to the process of growth and decay.” (151) By the same token, the change of world phenomena is conceptualized by the Dao De Jing as being caused by the interaction between the yin and yang aspects of the Dao. However, yin and yang are “how Dao maintains the generation of the phenomenal world, but the process does not work in reverse.” (152) In other words, as causing the yin-yang change of the phenomenal world, the Dao itself cannot be changed by yin and yang in the same way things in the world are changed. All these analyses by Brown and McLeod demonstrate that Laozi’s Dao indicates significant traits of transcendence, even if these traits may not belong to the hierarchical, contrastive type of transcendence against which Ames and Jullien read Laozi.

Although the goal of the book has been accomplished, not all of the concrete interpretations of selected early Chinese texts are convincing. This is mainly because the five key concepts of the framework employed by Brown and McLeod for the interpretations — naturalism, non-naturalism, contrastive transcendence, non-contrastive transcendence, and non-transcendence — are either not clearly defined, or while being clearly defined, not consistently applied in the course of interpretation. For instance, after investigating the ambiguous connotations of “naturalism” in contemporary philosophical scholarship, Brown and McLeod conclude by treating “naturalism” more as an affiliation claim than as a marker of a substantive philosophical position, and hence define “naturalism” as “a commitment to standing with the sciences, to adopting views and constructing systems that are respectable from the point of view of the physical sciences and their practitioners, or at least do not directly oppose them.” (22) In tandem with this treatment of naturalism, they also define “contrastive transcendence” via a quote of Kathryn Tanner’s theological work: In contrastive theories of transcendence, “divinity and the rest of the world taken as whole are viewed as logical contraries within a single spectrum: this forces an a priori separation of the two.” (35) A non-contrastive transcendence of the divinity would underlie the entire spectrum of all beings in the world, and thus would imply that “divine involvement with the world need be neither partial, nor mediate, nor simply formative: if divinity is not characterized by contrast with any sort of being, it may be the immediate source of being of every sort.” (36) In other words, a contrastive transcendence characterizes ultimate reality as a supreme being which stands alongside worldly beings and imposes an imperial order of existence upon the de facto existence of those beings. However, a non-contrastive transcendence explains the origin of the being of the world. While being itself is ultimately unknowable and ineffable, such a ground of being does not dictate what the world is apart from the existing empirical order of the world. Instead, the empirical order of the world would be the only means by which humans can know such an ultimate ground.

Among all the three mentioned concepts, naturalism has not been clearly defined, although Brown and McLeod may have good reasons not to do so. However, according to the presented conceptual framework, we envision there could be a serious philosophical endeavor to construct a worldview which is both transcendent in a non-contrastive mode and naturalistic in the sense that what the worldview presents is compatible with modern physical sciences. This also means that when we discern robust themes of transcendence in early Chinese texts, we cannot infer ipso facto that they are non-naturalistic. However, the core commitment of a philosophy cannot be both contrastively transcendent and naturalistic at the same time. Unfortunately, I find that Brown and McLeod frequently combine these logically inconsistent concepts to interpret selected early Chinese texts. For instance, while analyzing CQFL, they conclude: “in the cosmology of the CQFL, tian is understood in terms governed by contrastive transcendence but the text concomitantly embraces what are apparently both naturalistic and transcendental aspects of tian.” (81) If Brown and McLeod were correct, the thought of CQFL would be incoherent since it is interpreted by them as advocating both the contrastive transcendence of tian, which impinges on the de facto order of the empirical world, and the naturalism of tian. The conclusion is surely worth debating. Similarly, while analyzing the Xunzi, Brown and McLeod say,

we think it is fair and accurate to interpret the Tianlun as defending some aspects of tian’s transcendence . . . Consequently, far from seeing Xunzi as a poor naturalist, we think it is better to interpret him as a very unique and interesting non-naturalist, whose conception of tian should be placed in conversation with other non-naturalist conceptions of the world and the divine. (113)

Readers would wonder why Xunzi cannot be simultaneously transcendent and naturalistic, since this is a reasonable combination according to the adopted framework.

While remaining sympathetic with their overall goal of the book, in the remaining part of this review I will try to perfect Brown and McLeod’s conceptual framework so as to pave a way for future scholars to more consistently and continually furnish novel and legitimate readings of the addressed early Chinese texts. The aforementioned five concepts can be refined as follows, and such a refinement would surely succumb to further critique.

I agree with Brown and McLeod that naturalism is a name of affiliation which speaks to one’s commitment to the concept of “nature” fashioned by modern physical sciences. However, as indicated by historians and philosophers of science such as Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos, and Geoffrey Lloyd, this name of affiliation also designates a marker of a substantive philosophical position on “nature,” which is predicated on the following two claims: Firstly, there is a set of orders which operates upon the totality of existing realities in the universe, and these orders can be discovered in the form of laws of nature via a bottom-up method of empirical observation and human reasoning. Whether these orders come from a deeper realm of being remains undefined by this concept of nature. Secondly, the set of orders is stable in the sense that these orders remain uninfluenced by unpredictable metaphysical entities, such as souls, spirits and other magical forces which may also exist among the realities of the observed world, and hence the discovered laws of nature are testable, falsifiable, and improvable so that the knowledge of nature can progress on the basis of accumulative human endeavors within scientific communities. Still, whether these unpredictable metaphysical entities exist and whether they come from another realm of being remain unanswered by this concept of nature. In a word, naturalism would refer to a worldview which either affirms or remains compatible with the two conditional claims: the order of the existing world can be discovered empirically via human reason, and the order is recognized as being stable in a certain degree so that derived laws of nature remain debatable. According to this re-definition of “naturalism,” the so-called naturalistic transition detected by Brown and McLeod in early Han texts cannot be assessed as strictly naturalistic, since as admitted by Brown and McLeod (84 and 92), the correlative cosmology of early Han texts enchants the world. Such an enchantment makes the world so full of omens, signs, and mysterious resonances among apparently unrelated things that, as pointed out by Joseph Needham,[2] the theories that are used by early Han thinkers to explain the worldly phenomena, such as the one of yin-yang vital energy and five phases, cannot be seen as laws of nature in the strict sense of modern physical sciences.

Non-naturalism would be a view of nature that denies the validity of either of the two conditional claims which naturalism as defined makes. This explains further why an enchanted worldview of early Han cannot be seen as fully naturalistic, since it complies with part of the first condition of naturalism, but is not compatible with the second.

A view of non-transcendence would affirm that the totality of existing realities in the universe has no origin other than themselves. I also agree with Brown and Alexus’s conceptions of contrastive and non-contrastive transcendence, and would furthermore indicate that this distinction is essentially the same as the one by which Paul Tillich distinguishes God as “a supreme being” from “the ground of being.” Consequently, a view of transcendence would aver that the totality of existing realities in the universe cannot explain the origin of themselves, and thus need another realm of being for such an explanation, regardless of whether this original realm of being is contrastive or not.

According to this refined conceptual framework, we can envision multiple possibilities of combination and be better positioned to interpret varying philosophies. For instance, both naturalism and non-naturalism can be non-transcendent. A non-transcendent naturalism would imply the self-sufficiency of the scientifically perceived world to explain itself, whereas a non-transcendent non-naturalism would present an enchanted world not supervised by a supreme deity, such as the one which may be envisioned by astrology, alchemy or other so-called pseudo-sciences. Furthermore, a naturalism could be non-contrastively transcendent. This would be the case when what a thing is gets explained by the de facto relationship among things, whereas where a thing comes from gets explained by another realm of being which does not impinge upon the empirical order of the existing world. However, naturalism cannot be contrastively transcendent unless the order implied by the divine realm of being remains compatible with the empirical order of the existing world. We cannot find an easy example of such a compatibility particularly in the Abrahamic religions, since the idea of a supreme God normally implies a divine plan which is conceived by God even prior to the existence of the world. Moreover, a non-naturalism could be either non-contrastively transcendent, when an enchanted world is said to derive from an ultimately ineffable God, or contrastively transcendent, when the enchanted world is thought of as being grounded within such a divine origin.

If we employ this refined conceptual framework to interpret early Chinese thought, we’ll garner new insights. For instance, CQFL would present a non-naturalistic view of the enchanted world with a contrastively transcendent Tian, which governs the world providentially. Laozi’s Dao De Jing presents a naturalistic Daoist view of nature with a non-contrastive transcendence, but such a view does not prioritize the role of human beings in realizing the cosmic Dao in the human world. However, the Xici (the Appended Texts of the Classic of Change) presents a naturalistic Ruist (Confucian) view of nature with a non-contrastive transcendence, which does prioritize the role of humanity in realizing the humane manifestation of the cosmic Dao. Moreover, the Xunzi presents a mainly naturalistic Ruist view of nature with a mainly non-transcendent view of Tian, because although Tian is still treated as being the evolutionary origin of existing things in the universe, humans are encouraged by Xunzi to utilize Tian to serve the flourishing of human society and, hence, to strip Tian of its divine depth. The view of Mozi would be both non-naturalistic and contrastively transcendent, since the text advocates both the existence of ghosts and the supreme status of Tian as a providential deity.

I would not claim that the refined framework is the right way to interpret early Chinese thought. However, concurring with Brown and McLeod’s urge to ask more interesting questions of Chinese and comparative philosophy concerning transcendence, I do think we need more refined comparative categories to treat both Western and non-Western thought with more respect, nuances, and novelties.

REFERENCES

Song, Bin (2020). A review of Apophatic Paths from Europe to China: Regions without Borders, by William Franke (State University of New York Press, 2018). Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume 88, Issue 1 (2020): 278-281.
Needham, Joseph (1956). Science and Civilization in China, Vol. II (Cambridge University Press).

[1] For details of Ames’s and Jullien’s interpretations of the Daoist metaphysics in the Dao De Jing, please refer to Song 2020.
[2] Needham 1956: 290.

• I also reviewed this book from the perspective of interreligious studies in the Journal of Interreligious Studies, please click here.

Hallo, this is Dr. Bin Song at Washington College.

As explained in the previous unit of Modern Philosophy, underlying the enterprise of modern philosophy termed by Descartes as the “Tree of Philosophy” is the root of “metaphysics” which addresses the most generic traits of basic substances of the world, viz., soul, body and God. Therefore, to appreciate the title of Rene Descartes as “Father of Modern Philosophy,” we will spend the following two weeks to read the entirety of Descartes’s “Meditations on First Philosophy,” and I hope you can get as much insight as you can from this incredibly rich, and quintessentially “modern” text of philosophy.

Being among the enshrined modern philosophical classics, none of a single word in these Meditations can be overlooked by contemporary readers. However, these Meditations were after all written almost 400 years ago, which would naturally indicate some unfamiliar nature to readers today. One of the difficult reasons to read Descartes’s Meditations is to grasp how Descartes used old, scholastic terms and jargons to express his modern thought. If we gradually peel away these pre-modern layers from the kernel of his thought, we will find the distinctively modern traits of Descartes’s thought in the kernel, and thus, feel immediately connected to it. In the following, I will provide a brief and preliminary explanation of prominent themes of Meditation I-III, and I hope it can facilitate your actual reading of the book.

Firstly, the title of the book “Meditations” is fairly interesting. Starting from Aristotle’s “contemplative life,” running through Marcus Aurelius’s “Meditations” and Augustine’s “Confessions,” the philosophical tradition of the West evolved into Descartes’s “Meditations” to have indicated a rich “meditative” lineage where “meditation” is understood as a systematic reflection upon philosophical problems, and the reflection is aided by a certain kind of focused mental discipline. This richly meditative tradition of the West tends to be overlooked by contemporary readers since the current use of the term “meditation” is easier to be connected to Hindu, Buddhist or other non-Western practices of meditation. However, if we read the entirety of Descartes’s Meditations, we can still find some similarity between this meditation of a philosopher’s with other more religiously oriented ones. To put it briefly, this philosophical meditation also needs a two-way system of descending and ascending, or one of reduction and recovery. In Buddhist Chan meditation, for instance, you need to focus upon your breathing so as to reduce your consciousness to a peaceful and all-encompassing base, and then, employ that purified consciousness to re-contemplate worldly phenomena so as to live a mindful life here and now. Similarly, Descartes uses the method of “doubt” to challenge the validity of every piece of knowledge he acquired before; once he got to the bottom of his doubt, he found one piece of knowledge that he cannot doubt, viz., the existence of the thinking “I”; and then, he would do further contemplation upon all ideas that exist within this thinking “I” so as to check whether any of these ideas can provide certain knowledge of the outside world. I believe every reader, as long as they closely followed each word of Descartes’ Meditations, would also experience such an intense process of purification and reunification of human mind, which makes Descartes’ thought process deeply “practical” and “performative” in the regular sense of doing “meditation.”

Secondly, the method of “doubt” used by Descartes to get to the all-encompassing base consciousness of “I think,” is not a normal one. It is termed as the “hyperbolic doubt” which would consider any piece of human knowledge as completely false as long as it indicates a scintilla of uncertainty and dubitability. Using this hyperbolic doubt in Meditation I, Descartes threw away all pieces of knowledge, which he acquired through sense, imagination, memory and even pure intellect, with only the sheer activity of “I think” remaining as the rock bottom of human consciousness that cannot be thrown away any more. Here, the radical departure of Descartes’s philosophy from the pre-Modern Aristotelian one cannot be more visible: as we explained before, Aristotle’s natural philosophy is based upon the common-sensical observations of worldly phenomena. However, here, Descartes says that humans’ “common-sense” does not make any sense until every piece of it gets radically doubted and thoroughly scrutinized. Since doubting and scrutinizing require the ability of independent and free human thinking more than anything else, we can surely discern a distinctively “modern” sign of Descartes’s philosophy, just as we once characterized Copernicus’s heliocentric astronomy as indicating the same strength of human thinking and thus, as the starting point of modern scientific revolution.

Thirdly, since Descartes does not take “common-sensical” observation as the starting point of the pursuit of human knowledge, the more authentic approach to obtain human knowledge for Descartes is termed as “idealism,” which is distinguished from another very important, later lineage of modern thought, viz., “empiricism.” Descartes’s idealism suggests that in order to obtain human knowledge about anything in the world, we cannot start from a naïve perception of the world which takes the existence of things in it as granted, since the very existence of things in the world has been put into radical doubt in Meditation I. Rather, because the inner world of human subjectivity, which is termed by Descartes as “I think” or pure thinking, is more certain than anything else, we need to search for “ideas” that exist in our mind first, and then, infer whether these “ideas” correspond to realities outside the human mind; in other words, we need to examine whether these “ideas” can inform us of any knowledge about the outside world. Through this idealistic approach of epistemology, Descartes categorizes the origin of human ideas into three groups: ideas can be innate, invented, or affected from outside. Descartes also scrutinizes these ideas one after another regarding their validity of informing knowledge of objects outside human mind. In other words, rather than taking “realities” to be the prior origin of “ideas,” Descartes pays his primary attention to “ideas” in human mind, and then ask whether “ideas” inform humans of “realities.” Since “ideas” are more primary than “realities,” the role of autonomy and human free thinking gets prioritized and glorified during the process, which is surely a re-affirmation of the “modernity” of Descartes’s thought.

Finally, another significant aspect of Descartes’s Meditations is his theology, viz., his reflection on the existence of God and the role of the idea of God in regaining the validity of human knowledge that he has radically doubted prior to the conclusion of “I think; therefore I am.” For Descartes, it is a crucial step for the aforementioned epistemological approach of idealism to know that God is the creator of “I,” and more importantly, God is so good that He would not make “I” commit mistakes even on ideas which “I” can perceive vividly and clearly. Only after making sure the ultimate kindness of God, viz., “God is not a deceiver” in Descartes’s own words, Descartes thinks that we can believe our “natural tendency” to think of certain ideas in our mind, such as those mathematical ideas and sensory perceptions, as corresponding to realities outside of human mind. Be this as it may, our wondering is that: is God really an absolutely necessary idea to Descartes’s system? Or as some scholars intend to argue, is Descartes’s meandering thinking on God just a sign of Descartes’s “political shrewdness” since he did not want his writings and his person to undergo the same destiny of Galileo Galilei under the censorship of the Church? I would be very interested in hearing your thought on these questions.

In a word, in Meditation I-III, Descartes finds the undoubtable foundation of human knowledge, “I think therefore I am,” via a radical method of hyperbolic doubt, and then, after proving the existence of a kind God, he intends to re-ascend from the all-encompassing base consciousness of “I think,” and regain human knowledge via the approach of idealism. Please do read the Meditations word-by-word, and my summary here by no means captures the full glory of this quintessentially modern writing at the dawn of modern philosophy.

Hallo, This is Dr. Bin Song at Washington College.    

In 1644, Descartes published his Principles of Philosophy, and intended to promote it as a textbook of philosophy to be adopted by universities of Europe at that time. Descartes knew that this was deliberately to challenge the dominant role of Aristotelianism in the European academia. After all, the replacing of one textbook with another means a great deal. Although whether Descartes succeeded to promote his textbook in the institutional level is another story, he is indeed universally acclaimed by later historians as the father of modern philosophy.

Before Descartes, we discussed Aristotle, Copernicus, and Galileo in this second section of “modern scientific revolution” at the course of “Modern Philosophy.” We find that although Copernicus and Galileo laid out a very robust refutation against key points of Aristotle’s natural philosophy, none of these scientists’ thought is comprehensive enough to address the established Aristotelianism as a whole. As we have discussed, the philosophical system of Aristotle was so comprehensive as to be able to include everything that humans could know in his time. Therefore, to challenge the official status of Aristotelianism, Descartes’s philosophy must also be no less comprehensive. Descartes likened his comprehensive version of philosophy to a tree:

“Thus the whole of philosophy is like a tree. The roots are metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and the branches emerging from the trunk are all the other sciences, which may be reduced to three principal ones, namely medicine, mechanics and morals. By ‘morals’ I understand the highest and most perfect moral system, which presupposes a complete knowledge of the other sciences and is the ultimate level of wisdom.” (Principles, 9B:14)

Put in the background of the entire corpus of Descartes’s works, why Descartes thinks of philosophy as such would be more comprehensible. Metaphysics studies the most generic traits of things in the universe which exist under three major categories: soul, body and God. Physics studies the “body” part of the universe, and furnishes the laws of nature which explain the movement of varying bodies in the world. Medicine and Mechanics are two branches of applied physics, which are about how to cure human diseases and how to design technologies to alleviate human labor, two crucial areas pertaining to the convenience and sustainability of mundane human life. The “morals,” or the ethics is about what humans should do in varying situations, and according to Descartes, this is the highest branch of human knowledge since it needs all sorts of other knowledge in order to deliver the right ethical decisions.

Among all these parts of philosophy, we’ll focus upon “metaphysics” in the following weeks, where we’ll scrutinize Descartes’s famous argument for “I think therefore I am” and how he built his metaphysical system addressing the substances of soul, God and body. However, when Descartes presented his tree of philosophy in an intended textbook, his thought was in a relatively mature stage. The tree didn’t include much information about how he got to the root of his philosophy, viz., that dualistic metaphysics of soul and body, in the first hand. In order to understand how he got there and prepare our study of his metaphysics, we therefore need to trace his philosophical career back to a much earlier stage.

Before Descartes turned into his metaphysical thought in 1628, he was a very successful mathematician and physicist. Seen from the perspective of the on-going scientific revolution, the greatest contribution Descartes made as a scientist is surely his invention of analytic geometry, which unifies algebra and geometry, and hence, paves the way for the birth of calculus in Newton’s and Leibniz’s thought.

There are two major points we need to grasp in the ground-breaking work of the Geometry of Descartes.

Firstly, the unification of algebra and geometry leads to the full digitization of the objective natural world, which is unimaginable before Descartes. The crucial step for Descartes to achieve this is to illustrate that all major algebraic operations in Descartes’s time, including addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and the square root, can correspond to a certain segment of a line, and hence, there is no reason to limit human imagination of a magnitude within three dimensions. Instead, a simple line segment can express a magnitude of any dimension, and once discovering the way how to express geometrical figures using algebraic means, the capacity of measuring and calculating natural movement in reality will be exponentially increased. If any one wonders where the idea of the digitization of the entire world in the movie of “Matrix” originally comes from, let’s ask Descartes.

Secondly, to resolve complex geometrical problems in his time, Descartes indicates an unusually high awareness towards the underlying “method” for the desired solutions. For instance, to resolve a geometrical problem, Descartes would firstly assign a letter to each of the known and unknown magnitudes. Then, he would write down as many equations as he can find to express the varying relationships between these unknown and known magnitudes. In the following, he would try to reduce the complex level of these equations so as to find a way to express the unknown from the known. Finally, once he found the answer of the unknown, Descartes would furthermore deduce complex relationships among magnitudes from the newly discovered simple ones. In the work of the Geometry, we can find many concrete examples about how Descartes described and applied this “method.” And the application of this method is so successful that Descartes furthermore thought he should use it to resolve all questions humans can ask, including those most abstruse and abstract ones in metaphysics.

Therefore, in 1637, Descartes published his “Discourse on the Method,” and generalized his “method” in four points:

“The first was never to accept anything as true if I didn’t have evident knowledge of its truth: that is, carefully to avoid jumping to conclusions and preserving old opinions, and to include in my judgements only what presented itself to my mind so vividly and so clearly that I had no basis of calling it in question. The second was to divide each of the difficulties I examine into as many parts as possible and as might be required in order to resolve them better. The third was to direct my thoughts in an orderly manner, by starting with the simplest and most easily known objects in order to move up gradually to the knowledge of the most complex, and by stipulating some order even among objects that have no natural order of precedence. The last was to make all my enumerations so complete, and my reviews so comprehensive, that I could be sure that I hadn’t overlooked anything.” (pp. 9, Discourse on the Method, trans. Jonathan Bennett 2017.)

The four rules are quite self-explanatory, and they can all be understood against the practice Descartes conducted in his analytical geometry. In other words, in any pursuit of human knowledge, Descartes believes we should aim for evident knowledge, which should be as vivid and clear as the one of math. Then, we would find all available chunks of information relevant to the solution of puzzles, put them into order, and then, reduce the complex ones to the simple ones, and address the simples ones first with a final synthesis to move from the simple to the complex. Since the aforementioned tree of philosophy is just a result of Descartes’s application of his method which ultimately derives from math, we can safely conclude that although metaphysics is seen as a root of the tree, the real soil to grow the entire tree of philosophy of Descartes is actually his mathematics. So, whoever said that nobody unfamiliar with math cannot learn philosophy? I hope you find some historical predecessor to Descartes’s thought here.

So, how would Descartes employ this “method” so as to create the dualistic metaphysics of “mind” vs “body” as the foundation of modern thought? That will be the question we will tackle for our following learning of modern philosophy. In general, Descartes’s thought is rigorous, methodic, systematic and creative, indeed a rare talent of philosophy, the learning of which can almost be guaranteed to bring a transformation of our own thought.