This is probably my favorite short
paper I wrote during college. It perfectly articulates my philosophy vis-à-vis the Neoscholastic
establishment viewpoint—that Descartes caused the downfall of philosophy, and
that Aristotle should be restored and Descartes suppressed by the authority of
the academy—by arguing that Descartes was a true philosopher, restored
philosophy, and that no true philosophy can “ruin” philosophy, while a
tyrannically enforced false philosophy most certainly can.
It was written in Humanities 401
on 18 November 2014, as an expansion of the paper from 9 September 2014,
with some elements incorporated from the paper of 13 October 2014. I have made
slight revisions.
Has
Descartes helped or hindered philosophy? Evaluate.
Descartes
has made a positive contribution to the philosophical enterprise. He asks
questions that did not even seem to occur to the ancient or scholastic
philosophers, and in so doing demonstrates his brilliant originality of
thought. Any time valid questions are posed and arguments given it cannot be
held that philosophy is ruined, for that is precisely what philosophy is, the
posing and answering of questions and the response or refutation of such
answers in a constant journey of the human intellect. The unabashed search for
truth which philosophy is demands such honest inquiry, free from the
impositions and constraints of a systematized fundamental world view.
Descartes
sought to transcend these systematic constraints. In his commentary on the Meditations,
Descartes states that no one has ever seriously doubted that he exists, that
he has a body, and that other material things exist. Descartes simply wonders
if it is possible to prove the existence of these things without relying upon
the accuracy of the senses. Actual doubt is improperly attributed to
Descartes, when he really was engaging in systematic doubt; he never
actually doubted the things which he was ‘doubting’ in his thought experiment.
He was simply raising a novel question: whether the things we commonly
apprehend though the senses can be known without the use and accuracy of the
senses.
This
was an honest intellectual and philosophical inquiry which the academic
establishment of his day—and the establishment of the contemporary
Neoscholastic Catholic college—condemns as a fruitless and disordered departure
from the ways of Aristotelian epistemology. Descartes should be commended for
preserving the integrity of the philosophic enterprise, for a philosophy that
simply hands down by the authority of the academy and the ancients ‘perennial
truths’ somehow placed above the realm of disputation is not properly called
“philosophy” so much as a common belief system akin to faith.
As
J. Ratzinger distinguishes in Introduction to Christianity, faith comes
from a community and the authority and loving trust thereof, whereas philosophy
is born of the lone philosopher and its true understanding is based upon an
evaluation of the arguments advanced in defense thereof. Philosophy is
essentially disputative, and the authenticity of the philosophic enterprise is
dependent upon an impartial search for truth. The element of ‘the teacher’ and
‘the taught’ dicens stricte destroys this authentic and disputative
search by replacing it with ‘facts’ passed on by authority. Philosophy is
reduced at best to a history of what has been thought or to a common credo of
the true, and at worst to a dogmatism or quasi-ideology, an ‘ism’ which can
explain everything by deduction from a single premise (cf. H. Arendt)—that
Aristotelian modes of thinking are always correct. Descartes preserves the
integrity of philosophy in his thought by preserving the integrity of properly
philosophic methodology. He serves as a great reminder that cultural and
historical assumptions should not limit the heights of philosophic discovery.
It
is granted that Descartes began the downfall of the supremacy and unquestioned
legitimacy of the ancient philosophy and the Scholasticism which had been built
upon it—a systemic doubt caused by systematic doubt, as it
were.[1] But the need to save a system or
founding principle of a system, e.g. “All knowledge begins with the senses,”
should never necessitate the dismissal of novel modes of inquiry. If a question
is posed and a response is given, it does not serve the pursuit of truth merely
to dismiss it based upon the principles of one’s own system. Rather the
response should be addressed directly within the metaphysical framework in
which the question arose. The historical result of Cartesian thought was the
decline of the unquestioned dominance of Aristotelian, and consequently
Thomistic, modes of thinking, but by so doing Cartesianism has restored
philosophy to its proper methodological integrity, and Descartes has thereby
helped philosophy. He has done this not by displacing Ancient or Scholastic
thought—which are properly philosophic in themselves and deserve an equal place
in dialogue with post-Cartesian modern philosophy—but by transcending the
tyranny of prescribed modes of thought and thereby restoring the truly
philosophic endeavor. Descartes gave to philosophy an entirely new way of
viewing reality by following the rigorous and fearless methodology of
truth-seeking, and the necessary fruits of such effort can never ruin
philosophy. Only dogmatic insistence upon established modes of thought, for no
other reason than the authority of the ages, ruins philosophy.
[1] I added “—a systemic doubt caused by systematic
doubt, as it were.” on 7 October 2015, 7:25pm PST.
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