Descartes: Life, Philosophy, and Historical Context

Descartes: Historical, Cultural, and Philosophical Context

René Descartes (1596-1650) was born in La Haye, France. In 1616, he obtained a degree in Law from Poitiers. However, Descartes was disappointed with his education, a sentiment he would later express in *Discourse on Method*. He found scholastic philosophy unsatisfying, although much of the terminology he later used was taken from it. Descartes found satisfaction only in mathematics. Consequently, he made the decision to "completely abandon the study of literature and, determined not to seek another science than that which I could find in myself or in the great book of the world, I spent the rest of my youth traveling, seeing courts and armies, treating people of different moods and conditions, collecting more experience, and testing myself." Tired of fighting, Descartes accepted the invitation of Queen Christina of Sweden and arrived in Stockholm in 1649. He died shortly thereafter.

Descartes' Historical Context

Descartes' life and work are situated between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a time when knowledge revolved around the relationship between faith and reason, and society was organized according to a theocentric vision of the world. Modernity emerged from the confrontation with the Middle Ages. There was an evolution:

• Medieval Life: Revolved around God.
• Baroque: A crisis of sensibility, with consequences such as pessimism, a sense of constant change, and the transience of time becoming an obsession. Everything became contingent and hazardous, and ultimately, everything was seen as appearance.
• Renaissance Humanism: Initiated a naturalistic turn, promoting an anthropocentric view with man as the focus of intellectual activity. Through philology, Greco-Roman thinkers were rediscovered.

This shift in European thinking led to a "crisis of European consciousness."

Societal Changes During Descartes' Time

Various events brought about great changes:

• Social: The societal structure remained based on "estates."
• Economic: Still largely agricultural. The population declined alarmingly, with half the children dying before their first birthday.
• Religious: For many intellectuals, the uncertainty of faith was gone forever. In Spain and Italy, the Counter-Reformation maintained Catholic unity tightly, while the rest of Europe was still troubled by religious conflicts.
• Scientific: The Scientific Revolution was underway, led by scientists themselves. It began with Copernicus, who, while not sharing the ideas of his time, avoided scandal. The great battle began when Kepler and Galileo publicly defended the Copernican heliocentric hypothesis. Astronomy became the science where the Scientific Revolution took place, shifting from the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic model to a new scientific paradigm.
• Knowledge: There was a crisis of reason, and universities fell into decay.
• Status, Cultural, and Artistic Heritage: Significant changes occurred in these areas.

The Search for Solutions

In seeking solutions to this crisis, philosophy played a crucial role:

Cartesianism represented an attempt to resolve the crisis of thought created by the new science and the collapse of scholasticism. Ultimately, Cartesianism accentuated the crisis. Rationalism and Empiricism became the two major philosophical currents filling the seventeenth century, with Empiricism extending into the eighteenth century.