Introduction to Rene Descartes

Greetings and welcome everyone. I'm Dr. Chris L. Firestone and this is the Firestone Files. Over the past few months, we've been on quite a journey together, meeting the Fire Stones and celebrating the life of Charlie Kirk. And now, as we enter December, we embark on something new. A special series I'm calling Decart December. All through this month, borrowing any festive detour, we will turn our attention to one of the most significant figures in Western thought, Renee Deart. Across five episodes, I'll guide you on an intellectual journey through Ra Renee Deart's famous meditations on first philosophy. These lectures include an introduction, meditations 1 and 2, meditations 3 and 4, meditations 5 and six, and a conclusion.

So, I invite you to grab a notebook and a copy of the meditations if you have one, your favorite mug filled with your favorite drink, and settle in with me through December as we walk with Decart through doubt, discovery, and deep reflection. This is Decart December. I am Dr. Chris L. Firestone, and this is the Firestone Files. Enjoy.

Hi, I'm Dr. Chris Firestone, professor of philosophy and this is a series of lectures on the philosophy of Renee Deart. Renee Deart is arguably considered one of the most famous philosophers of all time and certainly is among those most famous philosophers of the modern period. He initiates a turn a massive turn really in philosophy from metaphysics's first philosophy to epistemology is first philosophy. So you could look at Deart's philosophy and we're going to do that here in a series of five lectures as kind of the focal point for a massive transition from metaphysics to epistemology. Um so we're going to have five lectures.

This first introductory lecture is going to look at the preliminaries leading up to that massive shift that we find in uh Decart's meditations on first philosophy. uh and then the next uh three lectures we'll zero in on the superructure and the details of uh the meditations themselves and then we'll have a concluding lecture trying to wrap up all that we've learned about the philosophy of Deart. Well, one of the contextual things I think we must know is that philosophy had this very lengthy period of metaphysics as being first philosophy.

This of course started with the Greeks. The first summitive uh philosophers of the Greek period were Plato and Aristotle. And that really defines the western intellectual tradition along with the emergence of Christianity as the sort of formative features guiding the western intellectual tradition for oh nearly 2,000 years. Um Plato of course had argued that ideas were fundamentally real. You can destroy all physical appearances of things but you can't destroy the idea that gave rise to them in the first place. This is true of tables for example. There's a million different kinds of table. I could show you picture after picture of table but you can't destroy the idea of tableness.

You could destroy all the examples of table in the world, but table as an idea would still exist in the universal realm of forms. And so that idealism, the idea the that the notion that ideas are fundamentally real uh was Plato's conception and became a very important feature of many Christian traditions in the west.

After that uh Aristotle of course famously argued that ideas must be uh wedded if you will to matter form and matter is fundamentally real and and comprises what he called substance and so Aristotle's called a realist that the idea by itself has a kind of primordial reality but doesn't point to a universal realm of forms rather it points to the need to be formulated in matter matter to be a substance. And so we have Plato's idealism where there's a universal realm of forms or ideas and we have Aristotle's realism says no ideas need to be put into matter.

And so we have these two analogies that emerged from the Greek period that of the cave where we are all caught in a cave believing that the world as it appears to us is ultimately real.

Um but when we break the chains through contemplation we realize that the universal realm of forms the the world of ideas itself is the only thing that goes unchanged everything else is uh is something le it's a shadow something lesser than that fundamental reality and Aristotle's analogy is one more of a craftsman who must take an idea and put that idea into matter as a craftsman might take a a lump of clay and make it into a a great statue of some sort or maybe a block of marble and carve into that some form and then you will have reality.

So these two features of the western intellectual tradition, idealism and realism, worked their way through the Christian tradition in the church fathers culminating in Augustine. uh thinkers like Anelm and Aquinus all the way through the middle ages all the way to William William of aam until we get to the emergence of conu of science scientific discovery astronomy work of studies on the human anatomy biology blood and those sorts of things that are beginning to show signs of of of the natural sciences being a kind of trustworthy superior sort of knowledge and this of course gives rise to skepticism uh during the early part of the modern period.

And Deart being a good Catholic philosopher is troubled by these things as he thinks every religious adherent should be troubled by them. That science is somehow showing itself to have a great pragmatic utility. And yet philosophy continues to struggle between idealism and realism. Metaphysics is first philosophy. systems of thought that had carried a great amount of weight but were waning in their authority. as as as free thinkers began to question whether or not these sometimes contradictory systems could in fact ground science and mathematics in the things that we were beginning to discover about nature.

And Deart is of course worried about that. He's worried about the fundamental tenants of the Christian faith and the inability of philosophers to ground almost anything in in philosophical reasoning. Um and so the skeptics are beginning to rise and Decart is concerned and um he sets about to put philosophy prop it back up. Now in order to do that of course he is um going to call for the fall of the old way of doing philosophy of metaphysics his first philosophy and in its tra and and that means tradition and authority are out. Free thinking critical thinking mathematical thinking are in.

And so one way to think of what Decard is up to in the early part of the meditations is what I call the intellectual equivalent of the nuclear bomb. He's going to try to wipe out all past systems and start a fresh on firm foundations, things that are indubitable. um we're going to see that when we get to meditation one and the transition to meditation two I think now replaces um authority as our fundamental way forward. It used to be with say Thomas Aquinus he would always cite the great philosophers particularly uh um Aristotle in answering philosophical questions.

That is no longer going to be the case in the 17th century. They're not going to quote the old philosophers anymore. In fact, they're going to dismiss them full stop and look to establish epistemology as first philosophy to ask these fundamental questions. What is indubitably true about the nature of the world and my uh my access to it? So, Deart's an interesting figure. He is going to initiate a massive shift. One that we are still we're living in a cartisian age or you know if if you get to all the way to postmodernism some postmodernists understand themselves as postcartisians. Decart is that much influence over the modern period.

Um so this is uh this is I think some important uh things to know. So what's animating Decart's thought? One is mathematics and science. He is a mathematician and a scientist. But he wants to get to those philosophical foundations which he takes to be so important to the establishment of the veracity of mathematics and science. He's also a man of faith. He's a good Catholic. He believes in the central tenants of the Christian faith, but he thinks that they are under threat. And they're under threat not necessarily because they can't be defended experientially. They're under threat because of their situated empirical nature. You see, if I don't have access to the word, if I don't have access to the tradition, if I'm just a common man, how am I going to be convinced by proitizing or or some other um kind of testimony?

No. Decar wants to use natural reason in order to convince the common person that uh central features of the religious life are in fact true. These include the existence of God, the existence of the soul, uh immortality and so forth. And Deart doesn't think you can just claim those things and give empirical arguments for them. In fact, um, empirical arguments, you know, Wayne because what do we see more than anything else except death and decay? No. If you're going to get at those things for decar, you're going to have to do it with mathematical reasoning. You're going to have to do it with injubitable premises that lead to an unelectable conclusions and so forth.

And that is going to be his attempt to start a search a search for the perfect new philosophical methodology that can put this ship which is beginning to list back upright again. And that's uh that seems to be a big part of what Decart is all about. So there's this obsession with Decart for knowledge obsession to backfill the metaphysical assumptions that have proven themselves to be contradictory and so forth and to put philosophy on right footing. Now he is not alone. There are other thinkers during this period who recognize some of the same things. Francis Bacon being one of them. They are kindred spirits. One in in Britain, the other in France.

um looking at trying to establish this perfect methodology. Bacon is doing it through empirical methodologies, what he calls idols of the mind that cloud empirical science and so forth that he's trying to get rid of to establish a new methodology. and he's along with Thomas Hobbes will lead to a philosophical uh uh uh position that we would that has hence been called um uh empiricism. An empiricist wants to say that sense perception is that original foundation for knowledge. Everything else is built on sense perception. And this is what we get in thinkers like Bacon and Hobbes. On the other side of the English channel of course is Renee Deart and Rene Renee Deart is a rationalist.

He believes that empirical observation and scientific study are foundational in a sense but along with them is this thing he calls a priori knowledge. That is knowledge that is prior to experience. Apoststeriori knowledge is what the empiricists built this epistemic revolution on. But the rationalists built it on a posteriori knowledge and a priori knowledge. And a priori knowledge is knowledge that is quickened percolating out of the very nature of reason itself.

So in this revolution that Deart will initiate, the material world also has an immaterial component. But if you look at it the way Decart does, it is actually something uh something much more like the opposite that is there is this immaterial thing that we can come to know for certain that testifies to the veracity of the material world and that's the kind of flow of the argument that Decart will make in the meditations that once we understand that the mental world is the one that we know most immediately and the extended mental world, the physical world is something we come to know just as strongly but subsequently in his methodological uh argumentation.

So it's an interesting juxiposition between the empiricists bacon hobbs lock lach and the rationalists deart spinosa linets and so forth and that of course is going to work its way all the way to the famous philosopher Emanuel Kant who in another lecture I I talk about this trajectory okay now let's focus in a little bit here on reneart and the turn to his meditations on first philos philosophy. What have we established? First of all, epistemology is first philosophy. The question, what can I know? What can I be certain of? In order to really crystallize that and to be sure he's on to something, he will begin with a method of doubt.

This is what we find in meditation one. In meditation two, he establishes the kito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. uh and that's going to be his starting point for certainty. In uh meditation three, he's going to give his first argument for the existence of God. This allows him in meditation four to turn to reason and the veracity of reason um is really the heart of the meditations. In meditation five, he will argue a kind of second argument for the existence of God based upon the property of extension. And in meditation six, he gets to the mind and body nature of the human person, establishing what has hence been called the mind body problem.

And one of the things I'm going to argue in these short lectures is that the easiest way to understand Deart's philosophy is thinking of it as one might think of an hourglass shaped argument. The method of doubt established in meditation one, the existence of the self as a mental substance in meditation two. In meditation three, the existence of God. Then the question of reason and the establishment of reason as the standard of truth. Then the existence of God as an extended mental substance in meditation five. And from there you get the existence of the external world and uh thus the human being as an extended mental substance called the body.

So you have this shape this hourglass shaped structure of the meditations where you have the self as a mental thing God reason God again and the self again as a mind and a body. And so you have this parallel superructure in the meditations that's really important to recognize. In the very center of that hourglass shaped structure is the question of whether or not reason is reliable. Rather famously Deart is going to argue that uh there are no noetic effects of sin. That is reason itself is untainted by the fall. Even though he's a Christian, Catholic, Christian thinker, reason itself is untainted by the fall.

It's the will that's unruly. The passions that get ahead of us that cause the intellect to go astray. But if we if we if we have some discipline, if we just pull back for a moment, uh the intellect itself is in fact reliable. Deart thinks this to be a kind of self-evident or intuitive truth. Because if reason's not reliable, then how do we get to scriptural understanding in the first place? How do we reason and interpret in the first place? There has to be a sense in which we can understand the world. We can understand the word. We can understand ourselves just by the faculties that we've been given.

And so he makes that argument right in the center of the meditations. But I'm going to suggest to you that that's really the center of the entire western intellectual tradition. So that's when we get to meditation 4 for example. Okay, let's briefly here to conclude this introductory lecture look at the introduction to meditations on first philosophy. Who are the meditations written to? Well, Deart says it quite plainly at the very beginning in the introduction. He says that these meditations are written to the dean and doctors of the sacred faculty of theology at the University of Paris. In other words, he's writing the meditations to the theologians.

Why is he doing that? He's basically suggesting I'm going to argue here that there's a wave of skepticism coming. That science and mathematics are making great progress. that the old systems contradict each other and cannot bear the weight of the impending onslaught of math and science. And so if theologians want to be able to convince the common man, if they want to be on par with the sciences at the as they are beginning to emerge, then they need to read the meditations because there they will find proofs for the existence of God, the existence of the soul, the trustworthiness of sense perception, and so forth.

And with those tools, they have everything they need to convince the common man of the truth of central religious convictions. So here we have at the very introduction of uh Renee Deart's meditations a a clear statement of what he's up to. He wants to help the church defend its central religious tenants from the skepticism that's beginning to merge in the academy and other places. Um he says the church is convincing to the choir. It's convincing to you know the the the tenants of Christianity are convincing to those people who have faith already. But there is this percolating emerging secularization in the modern period that Deart says we're not yet ready for.

The world is changing. it the that the Christian era of philosophy is is in a sense over and it it needs to play in the sandbox with the same tools as the common man. And so Deart's meditations are supposed to be those tools and he's he thinks he's tooling up theologians uh for the modern period. U he wants to use natural reason rather than revealed tradition or the word and so forth. It doesn't mean that those things aren't true. It means that kind of like we're going to see later on with uh with the leings's ditch and so forth that anytime you have testimony and written documents, they're always situated.

They always require faith in somebody else. Decart thinks that is not going to cut it in light of these advances that he's seeing. No, we have to have arguments from natural reason and that's what the meditations are going to provide. Um, Hobbes argued that we can't even get God in mind that God is kind of an extrapulation of sense perception. And uh, Deart says, "No, I can think God it intuitively that doesn't mean I have proof for God. I'm going to have to develop that." And that's what he's going to do in meditation three. Uh, same thing with the soul that we all have this intuitive understanding of the soul, but proving its existence is not an easy thing to do. And Deart of course is going to set out to do that in meditations too. Uh and then again uh have that work its way out in the subsequent meditations.

So Deart is interested he's motivated by religious consideration. He famously had three dreams in his youth. I think he was about 23 years old or so. and uh he had these dreams where uh God basically uh uh presents him with this need to establish a firm foundation for knowledge and he begins to work that out the rest of his life. His conviction regarding his Christian faith, I think, is very important to him. But more than that, he sees in a sense science and mathematics with great promise.

And he's going to try to take the methods of science and math and move them into epistemology and establish a new method for proving the existence of God, proving the existence of the soul, proving the existence of the external world. And this will be an injubitable foundation on which everyone can agree. Okay. Is he successful? We're going to turn our sights in the next lecture to meditation one and meditation two to see how he establishes the foundations for this methodology. And then we will uh work that out in subsequent meth med meditations and see how all of these things come to a uh to a final super structure that has been so convincing to the western philosophical tradition for several hundred years now. All right.

Well, that's it for now. Look forward to talking with you more in the next lecture. We turn our sights to meditations. Bye for now. Thanks for stopping by to spend some time with me here on the Firestone Files. I hope today's reflections offered you some new insights and perspective on life. If you enjoyed the episode or found it valuable, I'd appreciate it if you'd take a moment to like, subscribe, and share it with someone you care about. I'd also love to hear your thoughts. What resonated with you? What challenged you? Or what would you like to hear more about in future episodes? Drop a comment below or send in your suggestions to the email in the description. Your input helps shape where we go next. This has been Dr. Chris Firestone. Until next time, keep asking the big questions and remember, the kingdom journey is always best with your friends. Further up and further in. Bye for now.