Descartes: Not the Father Of Modernity
With Etienne Gilson’s Theology and the Cartesian Doctrine of Freedom being translated into English for the
first time ever at the end of this year, it seemed appropriate to briefly touch
on a matter near and dear to it: Descartes was not the father of modernity (feel free to read that in your best
Maury Povich voice).
The standard tale that one often hears typically opens with a
flourish, by uttering his famous phrase: cogito,
ergo Sum (I think, therefore I am). From there, a story emerges about how
Descartes invented a new philosophy in desperate search for new foundational
certainties that broke radically with a benighted past. This philosophy, in turn, centered around a shift to the subject, a modernity characterized by
epistemology, the search for certainty, a radical mind-body dualism, and the
disenchantment of nature now seen as nothing but “extension” or “brute matter,”
among other things.
Typical in this regard then, is the summary offered by
Stanley Grenz and John Franke in their book Beyond
Foundationalism: “Historians routinely look to the French philosopher René
Descartes as the progenitor of modern foundationalism.”[1]
It turns out, though, that’s not quite right. Lets take the
claims of the standard story in order.
1.)
Break
From the Past?
The German philosopher Kuno Fischer was most likely the
first to characterize Descartes as the father of modernity by placing Descartes’
work The Meditations, and so the “I
think,” at the center of a revolution.[2] As
we mentioned above, the story caught on and became the standard one cluttering
so many intro to philosophy textbooks.
But this historiographical construct can be questioned in several
ways. Etienne Gilson’s soon to be translated book demonstrates that despite
Descartes’ own claims to novelty, both the structure and the content of his
thought can be traced to his Jesuit education and scholastic forebears, for
example. More recently, Christia Mercer has pointed out how indebted Descartes
is to Teresa of Ávila (in particular inward meditation and the concept of a
deceiving demon),[3]
while Michael Allen Gillespie’s work show how much Descartes’ thought resembles
his inheritance of nominalist and voluntarist theology.[4]
Lest we forget the reason for this historical pedantry, Gillespie reminds us: “There has been considerable
debate over the last hundred years about Descartes’ originality, almost all of
it bound up with a debate about the origin and nature of modernity.”[5] Descartes was actually one of the last scholastics, it is argued, not the first modern.
Others have pressed the genealogical
relation further back. Put
succinctly by the profound Catholic sociologist and philosopher Charles Taylor:
“On the way from Plato to Descartes, stands Augustine.”[6]
While a line of continuity pushing the origins of a so-called modernity back
all the way to Augustine has been challenged by many such as Rowan Williams,
Michael Hanby, Matthew Drever, and Jean-Luc Marion among others,[7]
this is usually in service of diverting the line from Augustine to associate
modernity with some other medieval lineage. A particularly powerful recent example would be Lydia Schumacher's work on the reception history of Augustinian illumination theory via the Franciscan order, where Bonaventure becomes a key figure in the transition to modernity.[8] Most
notorious of these stories as of late is the narrative championed by many within the
theological movement known as Radical Orthodoxy, who identify the line not with
Augustine, but with Scotus.[9]
The above claims of historical continuity between Descartes
and a more distant past thereby relativize Descartes as the “Father of
modernity” (because “modern” turns out to be more ancient than realized), but can, on occasion, nonetheless retain an interpretation of Descartes centered on
subjectivity and epistemology. Take Mercer, for example. She points out in
fascinating detail the structural similarities between Descartes’ Meditations and Teresa of Ávila’s Interior Castle, thereby arguing that
Descartes is dependent upon Teresa. Nonetheless in another sense her
“revisionary” genre-shifting account remains quite traditional, maintaining as
it does the stranglehold fascination on Descartes’ Meditations apart from and in priority to his other works.[10]
Largely outside the Anglophone world, scholarship since the
1980’s has focused on rethinking the structure of Descartes’ total body of writing,
questioning the standard interpretations since Kuno Fischer portraying Descartes as a foundationalist. This in itself will seem quite
counter-intuitive for readers of Descartes. Didn’t he doubt everything until he
found the singular point he could not doubt? “I think, therefore I am,” right? Didn’t
he build from that foundation? Isn’t this also, then, a turn to the subject?
Philip Clayton, as one example, gives a lengthy discourse on
why we should avoid the typical portrayals of the pontificating Frenchman.[11]
“Descartes never meant his entire metaphysics
to rest on the human subject,” writes Clayton.[12]
Only later, after his death,
were his attack on the Schools [that is, the medieval scholastics] and his
arguments in the Meditations transformed
into the attempt at making the human subject the central, or sole, metaphysical
and epistemological category. … Descartes became the ‘father of modern
subjectivity’ (or epistemology, or science) only anachronistically, that is, in
light of what his sons and daughters, particularly those in the idealist tradition,
went on to do.[13]
Thus, he says, “we must not Kantianize Descartes.”[14]
As such, “the Meditations [and the “I
think, therefore I am”] turns out to be more coherent when viewed from his
other writings.”[15]
Instead of founding the whole enterprise on the thinking subject, “the cogito plays a specific role within this
overall system” that holds “God as essentia
infinita as the ontological source for all finite objects.”[16]
Cartesian methodology and
epistemology depend on Cartesian theology. Finite agents have their knowledge,
and their being, only to the extent that they participate in God. This
all-perfect being is closer to us than a highest category or first principle;
in a Neoplatonic sense, we are said to participate in or receive being from the
one who is the source of all being.[17]
Clayton thus does something a bit unusual and equal but
opposite to those we mentioned above like Rowan Williams or Jean-Luc Marion, who
want to distance Descartes from Augustine precisely because the latter is not
subject-centered like the former. Clayton views those trying to distance
Augustine from Descartes incredulously. “Given the parallels … the burden of
proof falls on those who would draw a sharp distinction” between Descartes and
Augustine.[18]
However, with this continuity Clayton relativizes the fundament of the cogito rather than turning Augustine
into a proto-modern:
Authors argue frequently that
Descartes must have been the institutor of a new tradition because he based
knowledge claims in the certainty of the individual subject … In the face of
this argument, however, the conceptual background for the cogito, ergo sum becomes much more important. If the argument
already played a traditional role in nonsubject-centered theologians, and
especially if these thinkers had a demonstrable influence on Descartes … [we
must conclude that Descartes is likewise less foundational and more non-subject
centered than imagined].[19]
This is not to downplay differences between the two that are
indeed there—for example Clayton notes Augustine’s thought is quite
doxological, piecemeal, and thoroughly Trinitarian, while Descartes is
decidedly not any of these.[20]
It is, however, to point out that the overall structure of Descartes’ work has
powerful precedent to be read as a whole, and in a more non-subject centered,
and non-foundational manner that overturns Kuno Fischer’s interpretation.
Clayton’s teacher, Wolfhart Pannenberg, agrees with this
line of revisionary scholarship in the first volume of his Systematic Theology:
The argument of Descartes has been subjected to the
persistent misunderstanding that the certainty of the cogito is the basis of the proof … it ascribes to Descartes a view
which Locke pioneered and Kant developed.
Descartes did not make a sure subjectivity which is independent of the
thought of God the basis of certainty about the existence of God. Instead, he was close to the tradition of
so-called ontologism that goes back to Augustine, and which makes the intuition
of God the basis for all other knowledge. The Meditations begin with the cogito,
but this does not mean that it is the material basis of all that follows. It simply serves as Descartes’ fundamental
thesis that the infinite is the condition of all finite things … the idea of
God as the idea of the infinite is the condition of the conceivability of
everything finite, including the Ego itself.[21]
3.) Epistemology?
Though
we have dealt with epistemology a bit already, several other scholars have
taken a different strategy than Clayton, Pannenberg, and others. Instead of
putting together the structure of Descartes’ works as a whole to question the
particular “modernity” he supposedly birthed, other scholars try to resituate
Descartes into broader themes that include but subordinate epistemology.
Susan
Neiman is one example. Her strangely wonderful book on horrible things, Evil in Modern Thought, carries the
subtitle: An Alternative History of
Philosophy.[22]
In it she argues Descartes (and modernity) must be read with the broader
theological context of attempting to deal with the problem of evil.[23]
It certainly is possible to begin to worry about the difference between
appearance and reality “because you notice a stick that looks refracted in a
pool of water, or because a dream is so vivid you want to grasp one of its
objects.”[24]
However: “The worry that fueled debates about the differences between
appearance and reality was not the
fear that the world might not turn out to be the way it seems to us—but rather
the fear that it would.”[25]
In this
way, we get Descartes’ deceiver argument backwards (here Neiman is thus similar
to Clayton and Pannenberg). The threat is not the potential of illusion, and
hence an unknowable reality. The threat is that illusion means we now know there is in fact an all-powerful
deceiver or demon. The ultimate point of the cogito is not to build a bridge just to get to the real appearance
of things. Much like Clayton argued above, the endgame is rather to rest secure
in a good God who is the source of all things by banishing what appears
initially as the reality of the Deceiver “who is not a thought experiment but a
threat.”[26]
“This
book [The Problem of Evil in Modern Thought] began as the study of an interesting topic strangely neglected in the
historiography of philosophy,” she writes. “It soon threatened to explode all
[historiographical] confines.”[27]
This is precisely because the decision to read modernity (and so Descartes) in
primarily epistemological terms only occurred retroactively as later
philosophers ignored or erased other, broader contexts like theology. Thus, to
pluck the theme of epistemology out of the problem of evil in which it is
nested is, in Neiman’s terms, to confuse mere “puzzles” with the large scale “problems”
with which traditional philosophy and theology dealt: “This [approach to
modernity] shows the hopelessness of twentieth-century attempts to divide
philosophy into areas that may or may not be connected. … the fragmentation of
subjects that would have been foreign to philosophers from Plato to Nietzsche.”[28]
How did
this historiographical re-write happen? Later in the book she begins to explore
this question: “If any one feature distinguishes twentieth-century philosophy
from its predecessors, it is the absence of any explicit discussion of the
problem of evil.”[29]
This has a traceable and quite sudden emergence. “Through the late nineteenth
century,” she says, “you could take whatever position you wanted on the problem
of evil as long as you were engaged with it. If you were not, you were not a
philosopher.”[30]
With
Bertrand Russell, this appeared to change with startling alacrity. It behooves
us to quote Neiman at length here:
Engagement with the problem of evil continued in British
philosophy through McTaggart and Bradley, to disappear almost entirely with
Bertrand Russell. Russell’s example is particularly instructive because it
underlines that what is at issue cannot be explained in ethical terms. His
commitments to ethical and political engagement, and even to writing works
discussing philosophical questions of general interest, were demonstrated
throughout a long lifetime. And since he began his philosophical career as a
Hegelian, his disregard for the scope of the question of theodicy cannot be a
matter of simple ignorance. Yet Russell’s disinterest [in the problem of evil]
is so great that, like other analytic philosophers, he read it back into history [emphasis added]: even the index to his
895-page History of Western Philosophy devotes
more entries to Egypt than it does to
evil.[31]
And so,
she continues with a diagnosis:
Twentieth-century philosophy saw no future for theodicy and
barely noticed its past. What had functioned as starting point for most
philosophical speculations about appearance and reality, reason and right,
became an embarrassing minor anachronism. We write the history we want to
continue. Philosophers working on problems of foundationalism wished to be part
of the same subject that engaged Kant and Hegel. Standing on giant’s shoulders
is an old recipe for improving your vision—or at least raising your stature. So
contemporary historians described earlier philosopher’s projects in terms they
wished to share. Being represented with certainty was not in fact the greatest
problem the external world had traditionally posed for philosophy—but it was
the one most twentieth-century philosophers wanted to solve.[32]
An analysis that even blooms into an interesting hypothesis
on the difference between Analytic and Continental philosophy:
[A] difference remains between
philosophers trained in Europe and those trained in Britain or America. The
former were likely to have learned something about the problem of evil and
retained some connection to it in their own work. Contemporary analytic
discussion of the problem of evil, by contrast, remains squarely confined to
the marginalized field of philosophy of religion. … One consequence is a
different estimate of [the problem of evil] for the question of metaphysics, so
that the broad narrative of the history of modern philosophy as the transformation
of ontology to epistemology is still the story most often told.[33]
The historian of science Peter Harrison in his book The Fall of Adam and Foundations of Science
tells a very similar story of historical erasure.[34]
In it, Harrison wants, like Neiman, to reinsert the theology deleted to create
the story of a “turn to epistemology” as the quintessentially modern move. To
do so, through an incredibly thorough reading of sources, Harrison indicates that
“theories of knowledge put forward in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
can be accounted for largely in terms of different assessments of the Fall and
its impact on the human mind.”[35]
As such, “the various [epistemological] solutions offered to the problem of
knowledge in the early modern period are closely related to assessments of
exactly what physical and cognitive depredations were suffered by the human
race as a consequence of Adam’s original infraction” so that “advocates of
[what we usually call] ‘rationalism’ and ‘empiricism’ largely fall out along
lines related to an underlying anthropology.”[36]
In this way, Harrison anticipates a host of other recent scholarship that
displays how central interpreting and reinterpreting the narrative of Adam and
Eve was for the development of modern science and philosophy.[37]
More ambitiously:
The event of the Protestant
Reformation, the crisis of authority that it precipitated, and the new theological
anthropology that it promoted, together challenged the Aristotelian-scholastic
dominance of human learning and necessitated the establishment of new
foundations for knowledge.[38]
Here, Harrison specifically references Descartes as an
example of this new taxonomic breakdown of the modern era: “Descartes’
confident assertion that the ‘natural light’ of reason could provide the basis
of a complete and certain science … presupposed the divine image even in fallen
beings.”[39]
This was an essentially Catholic (even Thomist) take, as opposed to the
“mitigated skepticism” of Luther and Calvin. As such, opinions arising in a
modernity characterized by “epistemology” actually “mirror their confessional
allegiances [to Protestantism and Catholicism].”[40] In this case, instead of a turn to
epistemology per se (Harrison here
specifically aims his sights at Kuno Fischer’s elevation of Descartes’ Meditations as Clayton did above), it is
more properly described as primarily focused on theological anthropology.
Even more curiously, rather than a story of falling away
from God and faith, “what distinguishes seventeenth-century discussions of
knowledge from scholasticism is not their secular character but rather the fact
that they tend to be more explicit [emphasis
added] in their reliance on the resources of revealed theology than their
medieval equivalents.”[41]
It is worth noting that Harrison quibbles with another thesis on modernity as well:
that of Richard Popkin.[42]
In Popkin's seminal work, modernity is not characterized by certainty and foundationalism, but is
actually undergirded by a culture of skepticism and doubt. Here, Montaigne
rather than Descartes is the exemplary figure.
Harrison agrees more with that story than Fischer’s, as far
as it goes. However, he argues that the rise of skepticism was not just due to the
rediscovering of Pyrrhonian skepticism, and the crisis of the authority wrought
through the Reformation. Equal to this was the revitalization of a variety of
forms of Augustinian anthropology that had acute, if varied, takes on the extent
of the Fall’s damage to human capacities. Indeed, this Augustinian
anthropology led to justifying meticulous forms of experimentation in order to
circumvent the weaknesses of our faculties inherited from the fall of Adam.
“This interpretation of the origins of experimental science,” he writes, “runs
contrary to a long-standing view, first articulated by the French philosophes, that associates the origins
of science with a new and unqualified faith in the powers of reason.”[43]
Just as fascinating, this “Adamic” context explains more
readily how many saw Descartes in his own time. Henry More (1614-1687) for
example, in his early enthusiasm for Cartesianism “reckoned Descartes to be the
seventeenth-century heir to Mosaic wisdom” thus recovering Adam’s prelapsarian knowledge recorded secretly in the book of Genesis.[44]
This also rises to a level of self-awareness in Descartes, who attributes his
method and philosophical system to a lost divine science, now recovered.[45]
Yet, just as Neiman argued theodicy was written out of
modern philosophy and forgotten, so too Harrison notes “the twentieth century
witnessed the final stages of the secularization of scientific knowledge, along
with the development of a degree of historical amnesia about the role of
religion in its early modern origins.”[46]
4.)
Irreconcilable
Mindy/Body Dualism?
Moreover, the Adamic context for Descartes’ work, much like
Clayton’s argument for its theological context above, calls attention to the
whole of Descartes’ oeuvre—one that expands our vision beyond the Meditations. As such, the place of the
body and its relationship to the mind as a unity is much more emphasized than
the traditional picture captured in Gilbert Ryle’s memorable phrase of
Descartes’ “myth of the ghost in the machine.”[47]
Certainly, in the Meditations,
Descartes asserts that mind and body are different substances. But the
contentious claim is not that Descartes talks about dual substances. It is rather the interpretation of the claim that this therefore constitutes an inseparable and unbridgeable
gulf.
Pace Daniel
Dennett, Peter Harrison rightly calls our attention to the fact that Descartes
explicitly refused the metaphor of a
pilot and her ship as an image encapsulating mind/body relations.[48] So close is the attempt at mind/body unity that recent scholarship has called attention to the previously ignored extent the emotions play
in Descartes thought,[49]
his emphasis on cultivating physical health in order to keep the mind sound,[50]
and others even going so far as to deny he is a dualist at all, such as in the work of Gordon
Baker and Katherine Morris.[51]
To those of us who ever took a Philosophy 101 course, a complete denial that Descartes was a
dualist seems absurd. Surely, it might be said, there is some room for
revision, but denial? Here the target is the “occasionalism” that Descartes
supposedly invokes to reconcile the two substances, mind and body.
Occasionalism is the notion that despite the fact mind and body, as two
substances, cannot causally interact one with the other, God has ordained their
movements to correspond. Thus, when you stub your toe, it is not causally
acting upon your mind to register pain. Rather, it is the preordained harmony
of the will of God that these two independent sequences should conjoin and
mirror.
Much as in theology, where perichoresis as a concept is sometimes misunderstood historically
primarily as a Trinitarian doctrine, when in fact it originated in Christology
(and of course had earlier pre-Christian origins in Stoic and Platonic mixture
theory), so too, here Descartes’ occasionalism was not spawned to deal with
substance dualism or the mind/body relation, as is often suggested. Rather, it
is originally used by Descartes to understand how matter—in his system
completely inert—acts upon itself. So
to say, for Descartes, two substances interacting wasn’t the problem; any substance interacting was.
Here too, as Margaret Osler has amply demonstrated, matter
interacted and maintained inertia purely at the behest of God’s will.[52]
As such Harrison attributes the mind/body interaction not to a problem of
substance dualism in Descartes, but to a general difficulty of describing
causality at all:
On one plausible reading, Descartes
asserts that the correlation between mental event and bodily movements are
simply natural properties of the body-mind amalgam. In much the same way that
God established the physical laws that govern the interactions of material
things—the laws of nature—God also decreed what correlation there would be
between mental events and physical events.[53]
Even further, though this at least mitigates the intention of dualism, a further step
against interpreting Descartes as a dualist occurs through one of his
inconsistencies. He insists there is “only one substance,” that is, God. While
Descartes de facto does not want to
compromise the integrity of creation, he in no way provides the concepts to do
so. As such, as bizarre as it may seem, instead of a radical dualist Descartes’
thought taken as a whole tends towards monism. In fact, as Philip Clayton
argues, Spinoza merely follows Descartes here, discarding his half-hearted and
unsupported notion of created substances and dissolves them into the singular
substance of God/Nature.[54]
[1]
Stanley J. Grenz and John R. Franke, Beyond
Foundationalism: Shaping Theology in a Postmodern Context (Louisville:
Westminster John-Knox Press, 2001), 31.
[2]
Nicholas Jolley, “The Reception of Descartes’ Philosophy” in John Cottingham,
ed., The Cambridge Companion to Descartes
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 393-424.
[3]
Christia Mercer, “Descartes’ Debt to Teresa of Ávila, Or: Why We Should Work On
Women In The History of Philosophy,” Philosophical
Studies August 2016.
[4]
Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological
Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2009), 170-207;
Michael Allen Gillespie, Nihilism Before
Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 1-64.
[5] Ibid., 189.
[6] Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Harvard:
Harvard University Press, 1992), 126.
[7]
Rowan Williams, “The Paradoxes of Self Knowledge in Augustine’s Trinitarian
Thought,” in Rowan Williams, On Augustine
(London: Bloombsury, 2016), 155-171; Michael Hanby, Augustine and Modernity (London: Routledge, 2001); Matthew Drever, Image, Identity, and the Forming of the
Augustinian Soul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Jean-Luc Marion, In the Self’s Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012).
[8]
Lydia Schumacher, Divine Illumination:
The History and Future of Augustine’s Theory of Knowledge (Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 57f.
[9] Catherine Pickstock, “Duns
Scotus: His Historical Significance,” Modern
Theology 21:4 (2005): 543-574.
[10]
Mercer, “Descartes Debt to Teresa of Ávila.”
[11]
Philip Clayton, The Problem of God In
Modern Thought (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 1998), 51-117.
[12] Ibid., 54.
[13] Ibid., 55-56.
[14] Ibid., 91.
[15] Ibid., 57.
[16] Ibid., 54.
[17] Ibid., 66.
[18] Ibid., 80.
[19] Ibid., 79.
[20] Ibid., 81-82.
[21]
Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology:
Volume One trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing,
2001), 351-352.
[22]
Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An
Alternative History of Philosophy (New Jersey: Princeton University Press,
2002).
[23] Ibid., 3.
[24] Ibid., 5.
[25] Ibid., 11.
[26] Ibid., 10.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Ibid., 6.
[29] Ibid., 288.
[30] Ibid., 289.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Ibid., 291.
[33] Ibid.
[34]
Peter Harrison, The Fall of Man and the
Foundations of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
[35] Ibid., 2-3.
[36] Ibid., 6.
[37]
For example, Roland Boer and Christina Petterson, The Idols of Nations: Biblical Myths at the Origins of Capitalism (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 2014); David Livingstone, Adam’s
Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins (Maryland:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Stephen Mulhall, Philosophical Myths of the Fall (New Jersey: Princeton University
Press, 2005).
[38]
Harrison, The Fall of Adam, 248.
[39] Ibid.,
[40] Ibid.
[41] Ibid., 9.
[42]
Richard Popkin, The History of
Skepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle (Oxford: Oxford University Press
2003).
[43]
Harrison, The Fall of Man, 249.
[44] Ibid., 122.
[45]
Jason Ä. Josephson-Storm, The Myth of
Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2017), 42.
[46]
Harrison, The Fall of Man, 245.
[47]
Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London:
Hutchinson, 1949).
[48]
Peter Harrison, “Myth 12: That René Descartes Invented The Mind-Body
Distinction,” in Ronald L. Numbers, ed., Galileo
Goes To Jail: And Other Myths About Science and Religion (Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press, 2009), 110.
[49]
Gary Hatfield, “The Passions of the Soul and
Descartes’ Machine Psychology,” Studies
in History and Philosophy of Science 38 (2007): 1-35.
[50]
Harrison, The Fall of Man 166.
[51]
Gordon Baker and Katherine J. Morris, Descartes’
Dualism (London: Routledge, 1996).
[52] Margaret Osler, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy:
Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 201-222.
[53]
Harrison, “That René Descartes Invented the Mind-Body Distinction,” 112.
[54]
Clayton, The Problem of God, 73-74.
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