Chapter Seven: The Story of Reason
I. Descartes: "I think, therefore I am"
While Bacon, the founder of British empiricism, toiled and ran for an experiment in the snow and ice, Descartes, the founder of continental theory, sat by the warm spring furnace and meditated. This stark contrast precisely outlines the theoretical characteristics and academic styles of empiricism and theory of solipsism: the former builds knowledge on the ground of experience, therefore, pays attention to facts and promotes experimentation; the latter builds the edifice of cognition based on reason, so affirms principles and emphasizes reasoning. So it is natural for us to witness how Bacon bowed down in the experimental field for his convictions; let us see how Mr. Descartes was at ease in his mind and used it to build metaphysical systems. Descartes (Rene M.) Descartes (1596-1650) was born into an aristocratic family in the French provinces. He was weak and sensitive, and this innate temperament gave a deep imprint on his philosophy. His education in the Jesuit school laid the best mathematical foundation he could have at the time, and learned about the main knowledge of the past from classics.
Later, he went to Paris to study law, and although he earned a master's degree, he did not pursue a legal career, and he made a strange decision: to join the army as a soldier. The reason is simple, because the academic and cultural circles are filled with some nonsense of scholastic philosophy, which only mislead people's children, and to obtain true knowledge, they can only go to the big book of the world to find it, and being a soldier can make him travel around the world. Descartes traveled with his army to many parts of the Netherlands and Germany. During his service, his philosophical ideas matured. On a bitterly cold day in the winter of 1691, Descartes hid alone in a hut and sat idly in front of the fire, which roasted warm and lazy. His eyes glanced intently at the stove, and the flickering flames slowly brought him into a trance-like state of sleepiness. This kind of contemplation was commonplace for him. Suddenly, an idea jumped into his mind with unusual clarity: "I think, therefore I am!" He grasped this idea with great excitement, and pushed it forward step by step, connecting the previous scattered conceptual outlines into a rigorous ideological system.
Thus, modern Western philosophy was finally quietly born by this furnace, and This Mr. Descartes, who always wore a long sword, loved to sleep and meditate, was thus revered by Westerners as the father of modern philosophy. Why did Descartes enjoy such an honor? What kind of philosophical doctrine did he create? "Doubt everything" , this is the famous French writer Montaigne (M. Ｅ ． de Montaigne, 1533-1592), a killer who used this trick to negate theology and scholasticism, had a profound impact on future generations. Going back in time, one of the earliest skeptics can be found among the wise men of ancient Greece, who looked at everything and doubted everything. Skepticism, as a method, is an indispensable link in rational thinking, but skeptics go to extremes, mistake methods as goals, and deny all human knowledge from doubt. Although Montaigne was not a wise man, he was powerless to replant the saplings of a new philosophy on the foundations cleared by his methods of doubt. Descartes, like Bacon, was determined to put down the old dead tree of scholastic philosophy and re-establish the rational foundation of a new philosophy on a new foundation.
He took over the method of doubt as an iron broom sweeping away scholastic philosophy and all old knowledge. Doubting everything became his philosophical point of departure and the first step of his scientific method. When he was a child, Descartes immersed himself in the study of various classics, who knew that the more he learned, the more confused he became, and he could not help but wonder: Theology is the study of teaching people to practice ascension to heaven, except for angels and Gods, who has the patience to understand and grasp? What about philosophy? For thousands of years, nothing has been found that is not in the debate, and it has never given any certainty. As for all other disciplines based on philosophy, their reliability is not to mention. He thus reminded us that all our knowledge was instilled in us from the outside before we had learned to think independently with reason, and that the instills received their opinions from others or our predecessors. In this way, the fallacies are gradually accumulated and solidified, thus constituting the so-called knowledge system that we have turned a blind eye to. Perhaps it was the fire that accompanied Descartes into contemplation that unexpectedly inspired him: a monstrous fire must be placed in the edifice of scholastic philosophy and old knowledge, and the flames of doubt must be burned to ashes in order to make room for new learning that has undergone rational reflection.
Universal skepticism is the first important principle in Descartes' methodology, the purpose of which is to exclude all errors such as arbitrariness, prejudice and superstition before searching for certain and reliable knowledge, so as to identify true knowledge in a clear and clear state of mind. This leads to the four rules for determining the reliability of knowledge after doubt: (1) never accept anything but ideas which cannot be doubted at all; (2) divide any problem under examination into the smallest parts according to the need to solve the problem; (3) ideas must follow the order from simple to complex, even if there is no order in itself, and should assume that there is an order; (4) all situations are enumerated as completely as possible, and always thoroughly examined to ensure that there is no legacy. It was descartes who applied algebra to geometry using these rules that created the emerging discipline of analytic geometry. He wanted to abstract this method of deduction, which worked well in mathematics, into a universally valid method for solving problems in the fields of philosophy, physics, anatomy, and astronomy. General skepticism and the four definitive provisions mentioned above are two main parts of the Cartesian methodology, which is intended to sweep away prejudices and superstitions, and the rules aim to determine the criteria and procedures for reliable knowledge.
The key to this approach is the rational intuition to seek clear and understand principles and deductive reasoning, and "clear understanding" is the only criterion for reliable knowledge that Descartes emphasized, and it is also a general rule that philosophical research must follow. The so-called "clear understanding" means that whether ideas, judgments and knowledge are clear and orderly in the mind and thinking, unmistakable, and not contradictory, and have nothing to do with concrete empirical proof. When Descartes looked at everything in this way, it led to systematic skepticism. What is clear and unquestionable? The stove in front of me is obviously not, because my senses may deceive me, I don't know if it is a dream; maybe the math is true, but maybe God or the devil is playing tricks on me and leading me astray; the sword on my body may be fake, and the nose that rests on the face chamber is afraid that it will melt away in a moment, and even whether I myself am really standing on this earth, everything that is told to me by sensory experience, is questionable. However, while I doubt everything, there is one thing that is indisputable, and that is the mental activity of "I am doubting."
If even this has to be doubted, then there is no doubt in the world, and isn't that contradictory? This is the famous "Descartes Doubt", from which the first principle of Cartesian philosophy is derived: "I think, therefore I am". I'm thinking, even if I'm thinking I'm dreaming, I'm being teased, I'm out of body, whatever I think, thinking about itself is unmistakable. Descartes believed that this was the most reliable truth from which all other principles could be deduced. In this way, Descartes, through the method of critical skepticism, found the first unquestionable thing: "I". This "me" is not the "me" of the body, but the "me" of the thinker, the independent and self-existing spiritual entity, the mind, the essence of which is the mind. In fact, this "I" is the subject as the knower, that is, the self-consciousness of the person corresponding to the object of the object. Descartes's separation of the self from the object world and his use of this subject as the starting point of philosophy and cognition in opposition to the object is of great significance to the modern epistemology with epistemological themes, and it is no wonder that people do not hesitate to regard Descartes as the father of modern philosophy. Then Descartes deduced God from the first principles.
Since "I" will doubt, it proves that "I" is incomplete, because doubt means insufficient understanding, that is, incompleteness. But "I" clearly feel in my heart that there is an omniscient, all-powerful, and infinitely perfect conception of God, where does it come from? It is never possible to arise from an incomplete "me" (i.e., the mind), so the idea of God must come from a complete entity outside of the "me"—God. Therefore, God must exist. Thus, God became the second unquestionable entity that Descartes proved and introduced. This proof is really just a copy of the ontological proof of the medieval realist Antheron. Then, with the help of God, Descartes further deduced the existence of the material world. Since the cognitive power of "me" is given by God, it will never deceive me; as long as the idea of "me" is clearly understood, it must be true and reliable; because "I" is clearly and clearly aware of the idea of external material objects, so material objects must exist. Now we have three entities that make up everything in the world: God, matter, and mind, all of which Descartes derived from universal doubt, with clear and unambiguous principles.
In this way, Descartes explained the existence of the world through rational speculation and logical deduction, starting from the epistemological idea of the subject self, and gradually constituted his metaphysical world. But there was a split in the world system from the start. According to Descartes, matter and mind are independent and parallel to each other, and neither determines whom. This leads first of all to an insoluble theoretical dilemma: how to explain the fact that the mind and the body are in harmony? For example, why does the brain want to eat, but the body doesn't run to play football? When a person is full of anger, it is impossible to speak sweetly? In order to solve the problem of mind-body coordination, Descartes racked his brains and came up with a solution: the soul is located in the "pineal gland" of the brain, and when it is shaken by external objects, the inherent perception of the soul appears and makes the body have an adaptive response. This actually acknowledges that the soul has a certain connection with the body and becomes contradictory. Later, Descartes' followers devised a more elaborate theory, the "two-clock parallelism": the mind and the body, like two clocks that are as accurate as the time of walking, are tightly wound by God, each walking independently and parallelly. But people naturally ask, "Why did God, so omnipotent, come up with such a clumsy thing, rather than merging the two into one?" Did God deliberately trick people into doing this? In any case, Descartes could not solve the set of spiritual and material dualism he proposed, so he had to move out of God to mediate the contradiction between the two and fill the gap between mind and body.
But then he returned to the arms of theology. Dependence on God, for Descartes, was not only out of theory, but also based on psychological needs. The timid and cautious Descartes, after retiring from the army, returned to Paris for only two years to live, found that the suffocating atmosphere of the country was not suitable for his ideas, and moved to the more liberal Netherlands, where he lived for 21 years. He wrote an important work of physics in which He completely abandoned God and adopted copernican doctrine to discuss the material world in a mechanistic materialist way. However, when he learned that Galileo Galileo had been secretly tried by the Holy See in 1616, it seemed that Bruno was burned alive again, and finally decided to hide the manuscript without revealing it. Thus, he exalted God, perhaps in order to escape persecution, he had to put on a protective theological cloak. Moreover, his God is based on epistemology, from the self, by reason, and as a necessary conceptual basis and ultimate principle of his rational epistemology, it is also a theoretical need, it seems to be the limit of the thinking that man can no longer speak, the empty box in which man pushes all the unknowns.
Of course, we do not have to defend Descartes' theism, because at the time, just as we believe today that man has ancestors, belief in God was a perfectly natural thing, and an extreme atheist thinker like Hobbes was unique, and the great physicist Newton, in his mechanistic universe, reverently revered God as the "first mover." Both Bacon and Locke were devout believers and believers in dual truth. Descartes' idea that mind and matter are separate entities reinforced the dualism sparked by the Greek philosopher Plato. This rationalized metaphysics is not the same as the scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages. Scholasticism sees reason as an appendage to faith, using reason to prove God, thereby establishing a theological worldview. Descartes turned all this upside down, completely demolishing the old buildings of scholastic philosophy with rational skepticism, and then deducing the whole world and its God from the thinker's subject, the rational self-consciousness. Such a method of rational metaphysics has profoundly influenced modern philosophy. In epistemology, Descartes also implemented his principle of rational first. Descartes, who came to the conclusion that "I think, therefore I am, I am" by the fire, brought a pot of beeswax and was amazed at it. The feeling tells me that it has a specific taste, smell, color and form, it is crisp and hard and easy to fiddle with.
But when I roast it with fire, it immediately melts and flows, and then condenses into a very different shape than it just did. But I know that although it's unrecognizable, it's still the original piece of beeswax. Why? The feeling has told me that it has changed long ago, and I have decided that it has not changed at all, so it is not the feeling that led me to make this confirmation, but only my mind. In other words, it is my reason that knows the essence of beeswax. So I was able to eliminate the distractions of my feelings and stick to the right understanding. From this example, Descartes derived his rationalist epistemology. In contrast to empiricism, Descartes recognized, felt that experience could not understand the truth of things, and often deceived people, and thus had no reliability. Only rational knowledge is reliable, and through rational intuition and deductive reasoning, people can obtain true and reliable knowledge. The human mind is born with some self-evident and clear "conception of talent", such as geometric axioms such as "two straight lines on a plane do not intersect and must be parallel", mathematical principles such as "the whole is greater than the part", the logical law of "A is not non-A", and the concept of God. People discover these innate ideas through rational intuition rather than sensory experience, and make them the premise and starting point for deductive reasoning, deduce all true and reliable knowledge from them, and build the whole knowledge edifice.
Of course, Descartes did not regard all ideas as gifted. He divided ideas into three categories: the first is the foreign ideas obtained by the senses from external objects, which are not reliable; the second is the artificial ideas, such as mermaids and pegasus; the third is the concept of talent, which is the most reliable. Just as his metaphysics has a dualistic opposition between matter and spirit, epistemologically Descartes encounters the question of how rational knowledge fits into the existence of experience, and how knowledge derived from the idea of talent can be applied to the empirical world. Here, again, he had to turn to God: God, on the one hand, established the laws in nature, and on the other hand imprinted their concepts on the human heart, and when we knew them, we also understood the laws of nature. Again, this is the tone of parallelism, the view that the natural (empirical) series and the rational series are parallel and coincide. This is an inevitable theoretical end of dualism, from which a taste of authoritarianism is revealed. For one naturally asks: Why do two unrelated fields go in step and converge with each other? Descartes could only answer arbitrarily: "That's what God is going to do!" From skepticism to arbitrariness, this is the course of thought that Descartes philosophy has taken.
When everything is doubted and denied, there is only a blank space left in front of the eyes, and then anything that can be established in this blank area can only be done by a kind of arbitrariness. Descartes did just that: from the general doubt to "I think, therefore I am," the "I" as the thinker is something that exists independently of any conditions, not even the brain and body that take on the activity of thinking. Isn't that arbitrary enough? At the same time, the one-sided denial of sensory experience and the arbitrary exaggeration of rational understanding also plunge Descartes into a kind of transcendental arbitrariness. It is undeniable that Descartes required people to rely on rational and independent thinking, to be aware of the limitations of perceptual cognition, and to advocate rational deduction in order to obtain universally necessary knowledge, which played a role in opposing the beliefism and obscurantism promoted by scholastic philosophy, and to the development of scientific culture at that time, especially to the development of mathematics and deductive logic. On the other hand, just as English empiricism inherited the medieval tradition of nominalism, highlighting individual reality, denying general objective reality, and emphasizing the fundamental role of sensory experience in cognition, the theory of solipsism initiated by Descartes is also inextricably linked to realism. Theory of reason despises the individuality of sensory experience, and instead emphasizes the general universality grasped by reason, thinking that through rational intuition and rational deduction, it is possible to obtain a general and inevitable understanding of the world.
Reason is the only and supreme meaning of reason, and the rational supremacy advocated by Descartes can be said to be a double-edged sword, which is used on the one hand to cut down the obscurantist superstitions of scholastic philosophy, and on the other hand, to resist the empirical supremacy of experience. Contrary to the relatively pessimistic epistemology of empiricism, the theory of solipsism shows extreme optimism about human knowledge, and it seems that as long as one strives to discover the "concept of talent" in one's own heart, one can ascend to the heavens in one step and embark on the broad road to the ultimate truth. This blind optimism contrasts with the idea of solipsism and always follows it. Several of Descartes' important works, Such as Methodological Discussion, Metaphysical Meditations, and Philosophical Principles, were published during his settlement in the Netherlands. These works made Descartes famous at home and abroad, and also alarmed Queen Christina of Sweden, a Renaissance monarch who invited Descartes to give a lecture in Sweden. Curiously, the French philosopher, who was accustomed to doubting everything, did not have any doubts about the effects of the mission, nor did he have the slightest concern about whether his weakened body would be able to withstand the cold of Northern Europe, so he gladly agreed and set foot in Stockholm.
Unexpectedly, the Queen of Sweden was so energetic that she insisted that Descartes teach philosophy to her and her ministers at 5 a.m. every day. This is a difficult time for us, the free and loose philosophers. Like many brilliant philosophers, Descartes was accustomed to sleeping lazily, and when he went up three rods every day and the sun was shining on his ass, he still lay in bed and did not wake up for excessive nightly speculation. But the king had to get up from the bed in a hurry, hastily got up from the bed, hastily freshened up, and could not forget to put on the long sword that was inseparable, rubbing his fishy sleeping eyes, and hurried to the glorious palace of the golden wall, along the way the north wind whistled and the cold was compelling. When he saw the queen's disapproving face, he realized that he was late again! Is it because the clock in his head is different from the clock in his body, or is it because the clock in his bedroom is inconsistent with the clock in the palace, and he is repeatedly late? Descartes shrugged helplessly. However, the clock in his body could not keep up with the hurried clock in his soul, and the cold of the Nordic slaughter aggravated this physical and mental disorder. Within half a year, the philosopher fell ill and became a guest of heaven. This brings to mind a contrast related to the beginning of this section: Bacon, the founder of empiricism, also died in the cold, but he died for experimentation; descartes, the initiator of the theory, died because his contemplation was interrupted. Could it be that there is also a hint of an ending that God has already arranged? We don't know that.
P177