In 1619, when returning home to France from fighting in the Thirty Years’ War in Bohemia, René Descartes (1596–1650) had a dream in the German town of Ulm, where Einstein was to be born over 280 years later, of “the unification and the illumination of the whole of science, even the whole of knowledge, by one and the same method: the method of reason”.
It was a highly ambitious undertaking, apparently not possible today, for the Cartesian scholar Bernard Williams has said that while such an idea was still a reasonable project in the first half of the seventeenth century, it would be regarded as ‘megalomaniac insanity’ in today’s postmodern world.
Nevertheless, Descartes was following in the footsteps of Francis and Roger Bacon, who had previously sought to develop a coherent body of knowledge that is universally applicable. The former, known as Doctor Mirabilis in thirteenth-century Europe, had proposed a vast encyclopaedia of all the known sciences, based on the experience that arises from experimentation, as a harbinger of modern science.
Over three hundred years later, Roger Bacon went further beyond Aristotle’s deductive reasoning with Novum Organum (The New Organon). In his Plan for the Great Renewal, Bacon sought to place the foundations deeper and further back than ever done before, saying, “What the sciences need is a form of induction which takes experience apart and analyses it, and forms necessary conclusions on the basis of appropriate exclusions and rejections.
In Descartes’ case, “His recipe for a rational method of thought was to dismiss from the mind all inherited ideas, which depend on birthplace and background, and start again from scratch with ideas open to all people, religions, and traditions.” Descartes did so because early seventeenth-century Europe was in a state of intellectual, religious, economic, and social crisis, not unlike today.
Moving to the Netherlands in 1628 – where he had more freedom to publish his writings, away from this turmoil to some extent – it took Descartes another nine years to fulfil his grandiose vision with mirabilis scientiæ fundamenta ‘the foundations of a marvellous science’. He did so in Discourse on the Method of Properly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking the Truth in the Sciences, with three supplementary essays on Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology, to illustrate the practicalities of the Method. Although these were not intended to be separated from the Discourse, which Descartes regarded as a preface, this has often happened, especially the one on Geometry, which introduced an algebraic system of coordinates for Euclidean space, much used today.
In the autobiographical Part I of Discourse, Descartes said that after studying the world of human affairs, he “resolved one day to study also myself”, to guide him in his path in life. However, following the establishment of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge in the 1660s, self-inquiry has been excluded from the methods of science, leading to the psychosocial chaos the world is in today.
But where to begin? Well, Descartes set himself four rules that he should “never fail to observe”. In brief, these are:
- Never to accept anything as true that I did not know to be evidently so.
- To divide each of the difficulties that I was examining into as many parts as might be possible.
- To conduct my thoughts in an orderly way, beginning with the simplest and easiest to know.
- Everywhere to make such complete enumerations and such general reviews that I would be sure to have omitted nothing.
For myself, when I set out to integrate all knowledge into a coherent whole in May 1980, I was similarly inspired to set four rules for myself. Specifically, my reasoning should be based on simplicity, clarity, integrity, and consistency, which meant seeking the underlying regularities and patterns of the world we live in by adopting an egalitarian approach to concept formation, even if this led to contradictions.
However, having set out to doubt everything with the principle of systematic scepticism, Descartes was concerned not to upset the Jesuits. For having read Galileo’s Starry Messenger in 1611 as a teenager, it was a bitter blow to his endeavours to learn that the Catholic Church had condemned Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems in 1632. (It seems that neither Descartes nor Galileo read Kepler’s New Astronomy or Harmonies of the World, which established the heliocentric model of the solar system on sound mathematical principles.)
So, to obtain permission to publish his revolutionary treatise, Descartes wrote a third discourse emphasizing his political and religious orthodoxy. He began by writing that one cannot begin rebuilding a house in which one lives until one has also provided oneself with some other accommodation in which to be lodged conveniently while the work is going on. So, he told his readers that he had established a provisional moral code, which “was to obey the laws and customs of my country”.
Having described his four rules of reason and his maxims of moral philosophy, Descartes felt free to write Part IV. After saying that he had “rejected as being false all the reasonings I had hitherto accepted as proofs,” he famously wrote:
But immediately afterwards I became aware that, while I decided thus to think that everything is false, it followed necessarily that I who thought must be something; and observing that this truth: I think, therefore I am, was so certain and so evident that all the most extravagant suppositions of the sceptics were not capable of shaking it, I judged that I could accept it without scruple as the first principle of the philosophy I was seeking.
Today, Descartes’ reasoning is referred to as Cogito, even though he wrote in French rather than Latin, the language of Academe, because he was seeking to reach “the cultured public of society, the ladies of the ‘salons’ rather than the pedants of the University”. It was only in 1644 that Etienne de Courcelles translated the Discourse, with its two scientific supplements, into Latin, as Specimina philosophiæ. In his translation, Je pense, donc je suis became Ego cogito, ergo sum sive existo.
Having described his method of doubt to properly conduct his reason and to seek the truth in the sciences, Descartes then set out to apply his sceptical method to answer the fundamental questions of human existence that puzzled him: the relationships of the human body, mind, and soul to each other and to God. The results of his metaphysical deliberations are contained in Meditations on the First Philosophy in which the Existence of God and the Real Distinction between the Soul and the Body of Man Are Demonstrated, published in 1641 in Latin.
As, this time, Descartes was writing for scholars, he asked his friend Marin Mersenne to distribute his musings to some leading philosophers, such as Pierre Gassendi, Thomas Hobbes, and Antoine Arnauld. Six or seven wrote Objections, which were published along with Descartes’ Replies in Paris. Descartes felt that he needed to take this approach because, “He makes no reference in the body of the text to other thinkers’ views, in accordance with his opinion that everyone is entitled to write what they think true, without worrying about whether they are disagreeing or agreeing with others.”
Descartes wrote six meditations, which is a translation of Latin meditātio, meaning ‘a thinking over something, contemplation’, quite different from vipassana or insight meditation, popular with spiritual seekers today. There is no need to dwell on these, for Descartes had long seen the universe solely on mechanistic principles, which cannot lead to a profound understanding of the relationship of humanity to Divinity. Nothing new can be created from a machine, including Descartes’ innovative philosophy, which purports to start afresh at the very beginning.
In the Sixth Meditation, Descartes compared the human body, which consists of bones, nerves, muscles, veins, blood, and skin, to a clock, made up of wheels and counterweights. He thought that the body would move mechanically, like such a clock, even though it had no mind in it, basing this mechanistic worldview on the separation of mind and body. As he said, “I am only a thinking and unextended being … entirely and truly distinct from my body, and may exist without it.”
This divisive view gave rise to the split between res cogitans ‘thinking substance, mind, or soul’ and res extensa ‘extended substance’, by which Descartes meant an object with breadth, width, and height occupying space. As Bryan Magee tells us “ ‘Cartesian dualism’, the bifurcation of nature between mind and matter, observer and observed, subject and object … has become built into the whole of Western man’s way of looking at things, including the whole of science.”
It is pertinent to mention at this point that Samuel Hartlib arranged for Comenius to meet Descartes at Endegeest Castle near Leiden in 1642, after the latter had moved there from Sandpoort, where he wrote Meditations. At the time, Comenius was staying in Amsterdam, having fled there from London after the English Civil War broke out.
Various commentators have said that they had a friendly enough talk lasting four hours, but, as could be expected, it got them nowhere, not only because they were a Catholic and Protestant, a distinction at the heart of the Thirty Years’ War, still ongoing.
On the one hand, Descartes sought to separate philosophy from theology and rely solely on one’s thought processes in a rational manner. He had little use for Comenius’s efforts to integrate spiritual realities with the discoveries of science, nor for his dedication to the pansophic ideal of a unified knowledge, nor for his proposal for a universal language.
Comenius, on the other hand, found Descartes’s rejection of Biblical authority in the natural sciences quite disturbing. Descartes’ use of doubt to arrive at truth and his intellectual arguments for the existence of God were simply foreign to Comenius’s way of thinking. Knowledge, he believed, must start in lived experience, in what we see, feel, and do. Yet he went beyond empiricism: for him, knowledge ultimately had to be placed within a divine, moral order.
Comenius reports that they parted amiably, encouraging each other to pursue their respective endeavours. Nevertheless, the nature of their disagreement is very succinctly stated in the parting shot of Descartes. He told Comenius: “I will not go beyond the realm of philosophy; accordingly, I shall deal with only a part of that which you will treat in entirety.” It is interesting to note that later Descartes wrote a fairly large work about Comenius’s pansophic scheme which, unfortunately, has never been published.
Seven years later, after twenty-one years in the Netherlands, where Descartes wrote all of his major works, he moved to Sweden in 1649 at the invitation of Queen Christina, a heterodox religious thinker, then in her early twenties. He stayed with his friend Pierre Chanut, the French ambassador in Sweden, who had suggested to the Queen that she should meet this pre-eminent philosopher, scientist, and mathematician and tutor her.
However, the meetings did not go well, not the least because she did not care for his mechanistic philosophy. After the first couple of meetings at the beginning of October, Descartes wrote to the exiled Princess Elisabeth of the Palatinate – with whom he had been corresponding since 1642, when she was similarly in her early twenties – that the Queen was too preoccupied with Greek studies and he doubted that she would ever find time to read his philosophy, apparently not knowing that she had already read Meditations. Then, after this, they met for only four or five more times. For Descartes died of pneumonia on 11th February 1650, in the middle of a bitterly cold winter, being required to meet the Queen at five in the morning, despite being a late riser.
To my mind, the central question about Descartes’ metaphysics, which laid down the foundations of modern philosophy, is what did he mean by mens and animus, translated as ‘mind’ and ‘soul’, respectively, in English. When he wrote the Second Meditation, he said that while he was only a thinking being, these words were previously unknown to him, along with intellectus ‘intellect, understanding’ and ratio ‘reason’.
So, if these terms were new to Descartes, what did his readers understand by them in his day, and how are we to interpret them today? We have little difficulty about the meanings of words we share about res extensa, like moon, horse, and music. But, to what extent do we have a common understanding of the immaterial res cogitans?
For instance, mens is usually translated as esprit in French, obviously cognate with spirit, from Latin spiritus. But this word does not appear in Meditations. To illustrate the dilemma, here is a table of some of the words we use to denote our understanding of our inner worlds in Latin and a few European languages.
| Latin | mens | spiritus | animus |
| English | mind | spirit | soul |
| French | esprit | esprit | âme |
| German | Geist | Geist | Seele |
| Swedish | sinne | anda | själ |
| Czech | mysl | duch | duše |
When we look at these words in Hebrew and Greek, the languages of the Bible, and in Sanskrit and Chinese, there is even more confusion. However, what most seem to agree on is that there is some association between the soul and the breath of humans and other living animals, indicating how little our forebears understood what it means to be human and our place in the Cosmos.
To resolve this conceptual confusion as a Panosopher, I have needed to establish an overarching context for all my learning—by unifying the conceptions of Universe and God in the Bliss of Cosmic Consciousness. On the other hand, because of his split soul, Descartes could not begin his reasoning at the Divine Origin of the Universe and so did not discover the Truth that sets us free with his method of doubt. Rather, his cultural conditioning gave him an anthropomorphic view of the Absolute, which he inherited from the Jewish concept of God, in whose image humans are uniquely formed, supposedly having dominion over all others.
This evolutionary inheritance gives us a major challenge when developing the art and science of humanity that thinkers like Jung and Fromm set out to do in the previous century. In particular, in the 1930s, Jung adopted the German word Psyche to denote the domain studied by psychologists, first used in English in 1647 to mean ‘animating spirit or soul’, from Greek via Latin. For, in German, Geist and Seele can both be translated as ‘mind’. In the French translation of Meditations in 1647, Duc de Luynes translated mens as âme at least once, leading to ‘soul’ in some English translations.
For myself, I have been inspired by Jung’s use of Psyche to denote res cogitans as the Cosmic Psyche, which I have learned to cognitively map with Self-reflective Intelligence, as the eyesight of Cosmic Consciousness. However, while starting afresh at the very beginning, like Descartes, I could not obey the laws and customs of my country, for I became aware in 1980 that the global economy holds the seeds of its own destruction within it. So, since then, I have adopted the most radical change in the work ethic since the invention of money some 4,000 years ago.
This also means that Descartes’ mechanistic philosophy is unsustainable, even though it still dominates the Western mindset, as evidenced by tech billionaires seeking ever-increasing economic growth through the development of machines with so-called artificial intelligence (AI).
Given this critical situation, I have adopted Descartes’ principle of systematic scepticism, as Albert Einstein, Julian Huxley, and Vimala Thakar urged us to do. So, while rebuilding the global economy and the world of learning on Gnosis – as Inner Knowing of the Divine – I have needed to trust in Life to provide me with the funds and experiences that I have needed to be creative within what has sometimes felt like a hostile environment.