René Descartes: biography of this French philosopher

René Descartes has been one of the great thinkers in history. His influence on Western thought and philosophy is undeniable, especially if we take into account his famous work "The Discourse of Method"

It was well ahead of his time, a time when Galileo Galilei, a contemporary of his, was being censored by religious elites, making Cartesian philosophy at first difficult to be even published.

Next we will see the life and work of this philosopher through a biography of René Descartes, in addition to understanding in more detail his philosophical thought.

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Biography of René Descartes

Mathematician, physicist and, better known as a philosopher, René Descartes has been a multifaceted character. Next we will see the biography of him.

Early life

René Descartes was born in La Haye, France, on March 31, 1596. His mother passed away when he was barely 13 months old, and his father, busy with his work in parliament. of Brittany, he barely had time for young Descartes, so his education fell into the hands of his grandmother maternal.

Little René he was educated at a Jesuit college in La Flèche, between 1604 and 1612, which at that time was one of the most famous Jesuit institutions in Europe. This center was of great importance for his intellectual development.

There he learned various things, although he focused on teaching traditional liberal education, theology, and how to be a good gentleman. Years later, Descartes would be critical of the education he received in such a center. At La Flèche, Descartes obtained a bachelor's degree and, later, would travel to Potiers to graduate in law.

In 1616, at just 22 years old, he left for the Netherlands to serve in the ranks of the Mauritius Army of Nassau, Protestant prince in the Thirty Years' War. Later, he would enlist in the ranks of Maximilian I of Bavaria, who was a Catholic. This may seem paradoxical, given that in such a contest Catholics and Protestants were at odds. Descartes would recognize that he had enlisted in different armies to visit new countries and understand the reality of each side.

During the winter of 1619 Descartes was stranded in a small village on the Upper Danube near Ulm. He remained isolated from any social relationship, next to a stove and with no other company than his own thoughts. While there, the foundations that would lay his philosophical system would be revealed to him: the mathematical method and the more than famous Cartesian principle, "I think, therefore I am".

During the night of November 10-11, 1619, the victim of feverish excitement, Descartes would have three dreams in which he would reveal to her the form of his method, and his vocation to consecrate his life to philosophy and science.

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End of military life

Giving up military life, Descartes took the opportunity to travel through German and Dutch lands, returning to France in 1622. He would spend a season in Italy, between 1623 and 1625, and then return to France., settling in Paris and making contact with the most outstanding scientists of the time.

In 1628 he would return to Holland, a country where science was advancing by leaps and bounds thanks to the fact that there was a Relative freedom of thought and science enjoyed good popularity, residing in the Netherlands for 21 years. During the first five years he would dedicate himself to elaborating his own system of the world, what he understood that the human being was and how our soul was encapsulated in our body.

In 1633 he was already well advanced in the writing of Treatise on light, a broad text in which he talked about metaphysics and physics. However, he decided not to publish it, given the terrible condemnation of Galileo Galilei. Discards defended in that work the Copernican heliocentrism. In the end the work would be published posthumously.

In 1637 his famous "Discourse on Method" would appear, presented as a prologue to three scientific essays. The book would gain wide popularity and many educated readers would dare to send letters to its author to discuss what they thought or possible errors in the Cartesian method.

In the speech, Descartes proposed a methodical doubt, with which all the knowledge of the time should be questioned. It is not that it was a skeptical doubt, since it was oriented in the search for principles on which to base knowledge, and not the simple criticism of all knowledge of the moment.

He proposed the Cartesian method for all sciences and disciplines, and it consists of decomposing the most complex problems in simpler parts, until its most basic elements are detected, simple ideas that can be presented as reasons obvious. Then he would come to relate these same ideas to understand the more complex postulates that they were constituting.

In his mechanistic physics, he explained that extension was the main property of material bodies, a postulate exposed in his Metaphysical meditations from 1641. In this work he tried to demonstrate the existence of God and the perfection of him, in addition to the immortality of the soul, already pointed out in the fourth part of the Discourse on the method. As his popularity increased, criticism and threats of religious persecution turned into dark shadows looming over René Descartes.

Flight to Sweden and the end of his life

Tired of struggles, criticism and threats from both French and Dutch ecclesiastical and academic authorities, Descartes, in 1649, He accepted the invitation of Queen Cristina of Sweden, who invited him to reside in Stockholm as her preceptor of philosophy..

This was no accident. Descartes and the monarch had maintained an intense correspondence. But despite the fact that René Descartes enjoyed the company of Cristina of Sweden, a cultured queen, the country he led was not so pleasant to him. She came to describe it as a land of bears, where men's thoughts freeze, along with water.

In the Scandinavian country Descartes he had to get up at four in the morning, in the dark and with the winter cold eating at his bones, to give philosophy classes to the queen, because the monarch only had that free hour due to her royal obligations. This would surely be what ended his life, since he died on February 11, 1650 from pneumonia, having only spent five months in Sweden.

The philosophy of Descartes

Rene Descartes is considered as the promoter of modern rationalist philosophy, one of the first philosophical currents after the end of the Middle Ages. In his approach, it is intended to solve the philosophical and scientific problems through a knowledge that guarantees the certainty of the same postulates.

In its Discourse on the method In 1637 he stated that he intended to elaborate a doctrine that was totally based on new principles, breaking with the philosophical teachings that he had received as a student at La Flèche. He was convinced that reality responded, completely, to a rational order. He wanted to create a method that would allow the entire field of knowledge to be reached with the same security provided by the exact sciences, such as geometry and arithmetic.

His method is composed of four procedures:

• Do not accept as true anything that you do not have absolute certainty.
• Break each problem down into smaller parts.
• Go from the simplest to understand to the most complex.
• Review the entire process to make sure no steps have been skipped.

To accomplish the first step, it is posed methodical doubt, that is, to question all acquired or inherited knowledge. All knowledge has a part that can be criticized, but at the same time there is a part that is impossible to question, and this is the very action of doubting.

That is, we doubt reality, we doubt knowledge, but what we cannot doubt is that we are doubting. In this way we arrive at an absolute and evident certainty: we doubt. Doubt is a thought, with which we are doing the action of thinking. You cannot think without existing, with which, the fact of thinking, doubting and performing other cognitive actions implies the indisputable existence of the thinking self. It is here where his famous phrase arises, "cogito, ergo sum", this is the maxim "I think, therefore I exist.

It is on the basis of this simple phrase, albeit with absolute certainty, that Descartes raises his entire philosophy. You cannot trust the existence of thingsBecause, even if we see or touch them, how can we be sure that they are not deceiving us? How can we be sure that our senses give us truthful information?

Instead, thought is not a material thing, but contains ideas of things, representations of reality. What arises from here is whether our thought contains any idea or representation that can be perceive with the same clarity and distinction, which he considers two criteria of certainty, with which we perceive the reality.

Types of ideas

Descartes reviews all the knowledge that he, previously, he had discarded at the beginning of the philosophical search for him. On reconsidering them, he sees that the mental representations of our way of seeing reality can be grouped into three categories:

• Innate ideas.
• Adventitious ideas.
• Fictitious ideas.

Innate ideas are already, as the name suggests, in us at the moment of birth. They are ideas like beauty or justice. It is not something that is in the external world, they are abstract aspects.

Adventitious ideas would be those that would come from external things, such as the representation of what a horse, a table or a building is. They are the result of our experience, obtaining them through the senses. The problem is that since our senses can fail, we cannot be certain that the adventitious ideas we have are true. Perhaps reality is nothing more than a mere illusion.

Finally they are the fictitious ideas that, as their name suggests, are those representations of things that do not exist, such as monsters in mythology, unicorns or any other. They are made up ideas, creativity. These fictitious ideas are the result of the sum or combination of other ideas that would be adventitious.

Our existence and God's

When examining innate ideas, which are not given to us through the senses since they have no external representation, we find a rather paradoxical fact. Human beings are not perfect, since we die and have our weaknesses, but we can conceive ideas of perfection, like that of God, an infinite, eternal and immutable being.

The idea of ​​God, something perfect, cannot arise from a finite and imperfect individual, it must come from before, through the action of another being, from God himself. The fact that we believe in the existence of God as a perfect being while we are imperfect is the demonstration of that God exists, because if not he has been the one who has put his idea of ​​perfection in our imperfect mind, who has been?

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About the substance

Descartes defines the concept of substance, understood as that which exists in such a way that it only needs itself to exist. Substances manifest through modes and attributes. The attributes are essential properties that reveal the determination of the substance, that is, those qualities without which a substance would cease to be that substance. Modes are not properties, but merely accidental, temporary situations or aspects.

The attribute of bodies is extension, since if they lack it they cease to be bodies. All other properties, such as its shape, color, location and movement are only modes, that is, relatively temporary phenomena.

The attribute of the spirit is thought, since the spirit always has that property. Therefore, there is a thinking substance, called "res cogitans", but this is not a body, since it lacks extension, and its attribute is thought. Then there is a substance that is made up of physical bodies, called "res Amplia", whose attribute would be extension, understood as three-dimensionality. Both substances are irreducible to each other and totally separate and this conception of these two substances is what is called Cartesian dualism.

The human being is made up of a body, that is to say, res vast, and soul, res cogitans. But this collides with the idea that these two substances are totally separate. In the case of the human being, the soul resides in the pineal gland, directing the body. This is how our res cogitans and our extensive res establish contact, the soul being the one that exerts influence over the body.

Bibliographic references:

• Descartes, René (2011). Cirilo Flórez Miguel, ed. Complete work. Library of Great Thinkers. Madrid: Editorial Gredos. ISBN 9788424920807.
• Ruiza, M., Fernández, T. and Tamaro, E. (2004). Biography of René Descartes. In Biographies and Lives. The Biographical Encyclopedia Online. Barcelona, ​​Spain). Recovered from https://www.biografiasyvidas.com/biografia/d/descartes.htm on February 29, 2020.