Descartes said: "I have always held that the two questions of God and the soul are the main ones that should be argued on philosophical grounds rather than on theological grounds." For, though faith alone is sufficient for religious believers like us to convince us that there is a God, and that the human soul does not die with the body, we will certainly not be able to convince those who do not believe in any religion, or even in any morality, without first proving these two things with natural reasons. ......I've written everything I can say about this in this collection. ......I would go further and say that I don't think there is any better way to find a better argument in human capacity. ”
Title of the article——
The true founder of modern Western philosophy
Original debut).
The rationalist philosopher René Descartes was born in 1596 in Touraine, France. From the age of eight to sixteen, he studied at the most famous school in Europe at what time, in La Flèche, in the department of Anjou, in western France, in the city of La Flèche, founded by King Henry IV and run by the Jesuits, where he studied classical languages for the first five years and mathematics, physics and philosophy for the last three years. In 1612 he entered the University of Poitiers, where he graduated in law in 1616. He left France in 1618, ostensibly to spend his military career in the Netherlands, Germany, and Austria, but there is no evidence that he actually spent his life thereDuring this time, he only mingled with mathematicians. In 1622 he returned to France, in 1623 to Italy for family matters, and in 1625 to Paris. In 1628, he settled in the Netherlands. In 1649, Descartes, already famous, was invited to Stockholm to be a philosophy teacher to Queen Christina of Sweden. Unable to adapt to the life of the Swedish court and unable to withstand the cold of the north, he spent five months in Stockholm before dying on February 11, 1650, at the age of 54.
In 1637 and 1641, Descartes published "On Method" and "The First Philosophical Meditations" - two purely philosophical treatises, which are Descartes' most important philosophical works, and the latter treatise, The First Philosophical Meditations, is the representative work of Descartes' philosophy and is also recognized as the foundation work of modern Western philosophy.
In 1644, Descartes published the Principles of Philosophy. This work is a summary of all his philosophical thoughts, and his physics section is particularly rich. It is a pity that only part of the English translation of this work has been selected, and the Chinese translation is based on the English translation, and many important contents are not known to many people in China. Descartes' last work, On the Passion of the Soul, was published in 1649 and dealt with psychological problems, particularly the relationship between body and mind.
Descartes, like Bacon, hated scholasticism. He was a math genius. Mathematics is the only subject that satisfies him, because its proof is conclusive, so it should serve as a model for other subjects. He did not attach much importance to pure mathematics. He focuses on the mathematical method rather than its results, and hopes to generalize the mathematical method to other disciplines. In his view, the uniqueness of the mathematical method lies in the fact that it is a careful reasoning based on the simplest ideas;All scientific researchers should start from the simplest and most reliable ideas, and synthesize the simpler ideas in a progressive way, that is, advance to the more complex ideas through deduction.
Descartes admired Bacon's The New Tools, but he believed in a reliable starting point. He argues that empirical reasoning from highly complex objects is prone to error, and deduction is infallible as long as it is used with ordinary intellect, and that the first problem of all natural knowledge is the discovery of the simplest and most reliable idea or principle.
In order to explore the correct way to use the rational light of nature to obtain true knowledge, Descartes began writing Refractive Optics, Meteorology, and Geometry in 1635, which he completed in December 1636. At the urging of the publisher, he hastily wrote a preface, and after much deliberation, entitled the book "On the Method of Finding Truth in the Proper Use of His Reason, Together with Refractal Optics, Meteorology, and Geometry, as Experiments in This Method"—the Geometry of which deals with analytic geometry that ushered in a new era of mathematics. Due to the length of the book, the abbreviation "Talking about Methods" was published in 1637 as a preface to the three **. This preface is the first work of Descartes, which is not long and has a great influence, and is also recognized as the manifesto of modern philosophy.
In the preface to "On Method", Descartes focuses on his ideas. The preface is divided into six parts: the first part is his views on the various disciplines, mainly referring to language, allegory, history, eloquence, poetry, mathematics, proverbs, theology, philosophy, jurisprudence, and medicineThe second part is the main rules of the method he seeks;The third part is the code of conduct that he has drawn from this methodThe fourth part is the reason he uses to prove the existence of God and the existence of the human soulThe fifth part is a series of physics problems that he has studiedFinally, what he thought he had to do to go one step further in the study of nature, and what prompted him to write this book. According to Descartes, the reason used in the fourth part to prove the existence of God and the existence of the human soul, that is, "I think, therefore I am," is the basis of his metaphysics and the "first principle" of his First Philosophical Meditations.
In Talking Method, Descartes seeks a reliable starting point for knowledge by all possible doubts, that is, in the hope of finding something free from any suspicion. Finally, he discovers that what is unquestionable is doubt itself. It is impossible for him to doubt his suspicions. Doubt is thinking, and thinking means thinking, so "I think, therefore I am". The secret of this ultimate certainty lies in the clarity and clarity of the belief, which is the ultimate intuition that cannot be doubted. This means that everything that is understood with clarity and clarity must be considered true, as are the deductions that proceed from them, and that one of those ultimate intuitions that can be believed to be true is the universal principle of cause and effect.
With the help of this principle, Descartes advances from his own existence as a thinking entity, and his belief that God is a perfect entity infinitely superior to himself, to the existence of God as a sufficient cause for the existence of this thinking being. Contrary to the usual procedure of deducing the existence of God from the existence of this world, Descartes deduces the existence of this world from the existence of God.
In 1641, Descartes published the First Philosophical Meditations, in which he elaborated on his basic philosophical idea of using the unquestionable certainty of "I think, therefore I am" as the fulcrum of his logical levers to support the system of true natural knowledge. Before the publication of this work, Descartes sent the manuscript to the famous philosophers of the time, asking for criticism, and then collating the collected opinions, writing a reply one by one, and adding them to the book as an appendix.
Descartes doubted Bacon's empiricism, and it was in his doubts about everything "derived from or through the senses" that he began his philosophical enterprise of "contemplation and knowing". But the purpose of Descartes' skepticism was not to deny Bacon's empirical induction, but to seek justification for the question of God and the human soul. According to Descartes, the question of God and the human soul is the foundation of the first philosophy, and thus "the two questions of God and the soul are the main issues that should be argued on philosophical grounds rather than theological grounds." Descartes said: "The main reason why many unbelieving people do not want to believe that there is a God, that the human soul is distinct from the body, is that they say that no one has yet been able to prove these two questions." He found some of the best and stronger reasons for these two questions, which were written in the First Philosophical Meditations.
The First Philosophical Meditation Collection consists of six meditations, six sets of refutations, and six groups of defenses. Contemplation, in Descartes' view, is that there is no better way to find a better argument by human power;The rebuttal, as Descartes called it, is that it is difficult for anyone else to come up with a more important rebuttal that is not involved;Defence, i.e., Descartes' reply to the rebuttal – At the end of the defence, Descartes asserts that these very learned rebutters do not point out any errors and fallacies in their contemplative arguments. Both at the time and in the present day, the six meditations are undoubtedly the most important part of reading.
The first meditation tells us that as long as we find no basis in science other than those which have been available until now, then we have reason to doubt everything in general, especially of a material nature. The second meditation tells us that the spirit, in its own freedom, assumes that all things do not exist if it has the slightest doubt about the existence of them, but must not think that it does not exist itself. In the third contemplation, Descartes felt that he had explained in considerable detail the main arguments for God's existence. The fourth meditation proves that everything that we grasp very clearly and distinctly is true;It also explains where the reasons for error and falsehood lieThis must be known, partly to confirm those truths that have come before, and partly to better understand those truths that have come to come. The fifth contemplation, in addition to explaining objectivity in the general sense, argues for the existence of God on new grounds. The sixth contemplation separates the intellectual activity from the imaginative activity and describes the signs of this distinction.
These six meditations, which we read today, are mainly based on doubting everything as the starting point, centering on the main line of "the right way to know the truth does not lie in action but only in contemplation and understanding", ** thinking and existence, "concept and object", "individual and God", "reason and will", "soul and body" and other five aspects.
Here, we will only give a brief overview of the "I think, therefore I am" that runs through it and its related discourse to prove the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, because the two problems that Descartes wanted to prove were also the problems that Kant's philosophical revolution wanted to "eliminate" - Kant believed that believing in the existence of God and the immortality of the soul would not help us to acquire knowledge, because they only had moral and religious values, so one of the main tasks of Kant's philosophical revolution was to combine them with "freedom of will" and completely "expelled" metaphysical epistemology.
Descartes said, "Up to the present time everything that I have received as the truest and most reliable thing I have received from or through the senses." However, I sometimes feel that these senses are deceiving;For the sake of prudence, we should never fully trust what has deceived us. "Physics, astronomy, medicine, and all other sciences that study complex things are dubious and unreliable;Arithmetic, geometry, and other sciences of this nature, since they deal with nothing more than very simple and very general things, and do not think much about whether they exist in nature, and therefore contain something definite. Thus, Descartes made "everything that we understand very clearly and distinctly is true" as a general principle of his understanding.
Descartes said that I can doubt the existence of everything, but I must not doubt my own existence, that the proposition "I exist" must be true, because I am only a thinking thing—so Descartes called "I think, therefore I am" his "first philosophy", that is, the "first principle" of "metaphysics", and also regarded as the "first principle" that proves the problem of God and the soul.
Descartes said that if I did not have in my mind an idea that was more complete than my being, how could I possibly recognize my doubts and my hopes. For my nature is finite and cannot comprehend infinite;It is sufficient for me to grasp this truth well, and to conclude that all that which I have grasped clearly, of which I know what perfection I know, and perhaps innumerable others which I do not know, exist in God in form or preeminence, so that my idea of God may be the trust, clearest, and most intelligible of all the ideas in my heart. The whole effect of the argument for the existence of God here is that I realize that if God really didn't exist, my nature could not be what it is—and it is this God that I have in my heart all this noble fullness that He has.
According to Descartes, "I think, therefore I am" also proves that my essence lies in the fact that I am a thinking thing, or that I am an entity, and that the whole essence or nature of this entity is the soul. Although there is indeed a body, with which I am very closely attached, I am my soul, that is to say, the thing that makes me who I am, is completely and truly distinct from my body: the soul is a thing that can think without extension, and the body is a thing that has extension but cannot think—the fundamental difference between the soul and the body is that the soul is a completely indivisible entity, i.e., an indestructible entity, while the body is always a divisible and indestructible extension— In short, the soul and the body are "dually separated."
Descartes concludes his meditations by reminding us that, in spite of God's supreme goodness, man's natural nature is a combination of soul and body, and that it is sometimes impossible not to be hypocritical and deceitful, so we must admit that it is possible for life to make mistakes in those individual things from time to time, that is, we must admit that there are flaws and weaknesses in our natural nature.
Philosophers believe that Descartes put forward two important philosophical propositions in the First Philosophical Meditations: one is that philosophy must doubt everything, that is, abandon all assumptions;The second is that philosophy is the direct confirmation of thinking, that is, "I think, therefore I am";These two propositions put forward by Descartes opened a completely new direction for modern philosophy to a certain extent.
According to Hegel, "from Descartes onwards, philosophy has at once transferred to a completely different scope, to a completely different point of view, that is, to the realm of subjectivity, to the definite." What religion assumes is discarded, and people seek only proof, not content. This is infinite abstract subjectivity;The absolute content is missing. ”
In Russell's view: "Most of the philosophers after Descartes have focused on epistemology, and this is mainly due to Descartes. 'I think, therefore I am' says that the spirit is more true than the material, and (for me) my spirit is more certain than the spirit of others. Thus, all philosophies from Descartes are subjectivist and tend to regard matter as something that can only be known (if known) by reasoning from what we know about spirit. Both of these tendencies existed in continental European idealism and British empiricism;The former is proud of this, and the latter regrets it. ”
There is no doubt that modern Western philosophers agree that Descartes is the true founder of modern Western philosophy, and that it was from him that modern philosophy began, and that philosophy began abstract thinking—he was a heroic figure who completely started from scratch and took the lead in rebuilding the foundations of philosophy, which has only now returned to the basis of thinking after a thousand years of wandering in the Middle Ages. Therefore, The First Philosophical Meditations is also regarded as the foundation work of modern Western philosophy.
end——