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Dissolving the Medieval Synthesis

Machiavelli dissected the medieval body politic and teased out the reality of early modern governments from their customary and spiritual ideals. His writings, however, were never the solvent of medieval society that we might have expected them to have been. Machiavelli’s The Prince has greater significance for the modern age and the discipline of political science than it did when it was published. This lack of effect cannot be attributed solely to the persecution of the Church, which controlled the dissemination of literature at the time, but also reflected the ironical style and restricted market for the work. It was simply too easy to dismiss The Prince as a perverse and idiosyncratic pamphlet composed by a bitter political outcast who was overly infatuated with his own penchant for ironic antithesis.

Il Principe’s influence was literary rather than revolutionary. It was not long, however, before the literary revival initiated by the humanists, resulted in a more definitive revolt against the medieval mind. It would be a Frenchman, Rene Descartes, who “broke the spell of medieval scholasticism” by applying the tools, methods and standards of mathematics and natural science to its increasingly baroque and artificial structures. The new science developed and used by Bacon, Descartes and Locke emancipated thought by shattering its medieval mental shackles. The achievement of these thinkers was so enormous that, were there no great thinkers before or since, they alone would justify the field of intellectual history.

As a result of the writings of Bacon, Descartes and Locke, the medieval cosmology was shattered and modern science emerged. Bacon and Locke underlined the importance of inductive reasoning or the building of common sense arguments from empirical observations of the natural world. Decartes showed us the importance of deducing arguments rigorously from axiomatic or a priori premises. Scientists have relied on these intellectual tools and strategies ever since; science has evolved into our primary mechanism for understanding and shaping our world.

Philosophy and Science in the Seventeenth Century

When most people think of science, they mean that system of hypothesis, experimentation and observation – the so-called scientific method. That method, of course, is empirical rather than deductive in approach. Its classical hero is Francis Bacon, a seventeenth century Englishman who was to lay the foundation for British empirical philosophy and science that was transported to France in the eighteenth century and generated a monumental movement known as the European Enlightenment.

Equally important, and more important on the Continent, was Rene Descartes. Descartes was a young French nobleman who received a traditional university education in his native land. He was exposed to Aristotelian philosophy and theology, which he positively hated. Instead of learning anything real, Descartes said, he learned a lot of nonsense like how many angels could sit on the head of a pin. He found some relief in the study of mathematics, which at least provided a degree of logical consistency.

Disillusioned with academics and professors that he disparagingly called the schoolmen, Descartes was happy to leave the halls of academe for the real world. In this real world, he was a soldier, courtier, dualist, luxurious liver, man about town – you name it he did it. But he was also a clever man who was distatisfied about the lack of certainty in his life. Since he couldn’t get it from university, he was going to create it for himself. Thus began those legendary sessions when Rene Descartes shut himself up in his room and began to think things out.

Why did he have to think in the first place. What was so wrong with scholastic early modern philosophy? Why did thinkers like Bacon and Descartes hate Aristotelian philosophy? It wasn’t because scholastic philosophy was dumb – far from it. It may have been controlled by the Church, but the Roman Catholic Church was neither as stupid nor as conservative as Descartes and the Enlightenment have led us to believe. The problem had to do with the intrinsic nature of philosophy in the early modern period. Philosophy was regarded as the mother of all subjects; its realm branched far and wide; there was nothing that it did not touch. When linked to theology, it was a formidable force that influenced each and every discipline beneath it. Today, philosophy is something of a fringe discipline, so its had for us to conceive a time when philosophy was the most prestigious subject.

During the seventeenth century – the beginning of the early modern period – mathematics began to make a profound impact on men like Galileo and Descartes. They found its truths to be the most sure and watertight ones. Imagine, then, their irritation when many of these same mathematical certainties were challenged by scholastic philosophers in the Church. Why were these mathematical axioms challenged? They were not challenged because they denied the authority of the Church, at least not in the first instance. They were challenged because mathematical findings were thought to be too abstract and theoretical.

Now, you might say that the scholastic Artistotelian philosophers had a much more elaborate, complex and confused theory of nature. But that theory combined various different kinds of explanation and proofs, including sense experience, religious revelation, logic (both deductive and inductive). The new math, on the other hand, was purely deductive; dealt with ideal systems without much reference to empirical reality; and math stressed something called probability rather than truth.

Many within the Church were impressed by some of the findings of the new math, but they resented the egoism of men like Galileo and they disputed the presumed superiority of this new discipline. The new mathematicians also ignored most of the arguments of the Aristotelian schoolmen when they discussed their axioms as if they were truths. By taking on the mathematicians, however, these philosophers soon found themselves running against the spirit of the times. Just as the new math was demonstrating to everyone its ability to change the world and the way we look at the world, only the university experts could explain the subtleties of Aristotelian philosophy. It doesn’t matter that many of the arguments that the Aristotelians leveled at the new math and related science were absolutely right. The new science leveled every criticism in its path.

When one thinks of the new science, Galileo is the individual who comes to mind. Many have the image of him dropping things off the leaning tower of Pisa to demonstrate that all objects fall at the same rate when other factors such as drag are controlled. That experiment never actually occurred. It wasn’t Galileo or the new scientists’ style to conduct empirical experiments. Galileo’s method, unlike Bacon but like Descartes, was overwhelmingly deductive. It was based on the mathematical model and involved few of the characteristics that we today associate with the scientific method.

So, the new science that the Church distrusted was neither experimental nor empirical. It was rational and deductive. Fundamental axioms were constructed and all further conclusions were deductive. The truth proceeds from the axiom which is a given and typically self-referential. Mathematical and scientific frameworks are paradigms or ways of making sense of the world.

The Aristotelian philosophers and theologians were justified, therefore, in criticizing this new way of defining knowledge. But the new scientists were eager to extend their methods beyond math and science to our understanding of human nature and the meaning of life. Descartes, in particular, wanted to bring the kind of certainty he found in math and science to philosophy generally. And he wasn’t alone. Many intellectuals were groping for a more sensible way of forming and answering questions. Francis Bacon, who took a very different path from Descartes, used to say that he wanted to become naked and start all over again. Francois Sanchez attacked Aristotelian philosophy in the following passage:

I questioned the learned men of bygone centuries; then I consulted those who were my contemporaries…but none of their replies was satisfactory…so I turned upon myself and put everything to doubt, as though I had never been told anything by anybody. I began to examine things myself in order to discover the true way of gaining knowledge – Hence the thesis which is the starting point of my reflections: the more I think, the more I doubt.

Several decades later Descartes would say the same thing and espouse his own methodology of doubting every received truth. He had never read Sanchez but, like so many intelligent men of his time, he shared that man’s frustration.

Descartes determined to begin afresh to create a philosophical system that was super tight and certain. In fact, he created a philosophical system that many then and for centuries later believed was absolute truth. Even better, he wrote his philosophical observations in French, rather than scholastic Latin, so that anyone with sufficient intelligence could read them. The venacular had been used by renegade humanists like Erasmus and Thomas More since the fifteenth century. Descartes also came out of the humanist tradition, a philosophy that focuses on the reality of human life in the here and now. But whereas the humanists of the fifteenth-century saw human beings as a reflection of the glory of an unknowable god, the new mathematicians and scientists transformed God into a mathematical principle. God was the first mover – the clockmaker who set the universe in motion. We can know God by studying his clockwork universe.

The new science would eventually eclipse religion. But in Galileo and Descartes time, it was still dangerous to openly challenge church teaching. Descartes walked on eggshells in the dedication to his famous work Meditations on First Philosophy written in 1627 and published some ten years later. In this dedication, he somewhat deceitfully claimed that the purpose of his book was to prove the existence of God. While there may be a proof of God in the Meditations that certainly was not his primary purpose. At any rate, the most fascinating characteristic of the Meditations is that it totally ignores Biblical revelation, one of the primary sources consulted by the scholastics. Descartes suggested that he wanted to prove God’s existence without recourse to the Bible because he wants to show atheists that there are convincing rational arguments for God.

Descartes knew that the Church’s approval was necessary if he was going to get his message out. But he also wanted to demonstrate the superiority of his philosophical method to the arcane teachings of the scholastics. He was willing to cast aside hundreds of years of painstakingly accumulated knowledge in order to put philosophy on a completely new foundation. Ultimately, his writing was intended to destroy the entire intellectual edifice of scholasticism. Both Descartes and Galileo wanted to reduce the control of the Roman Catholic Church over science and to reduce its role to matters of faith and pastoral care. Their writings represent a major shift away from the medieval universe towards a secular society. And the gurus of this new society would not be the Pope, the Cardinals, Bishops and Priests, but scientists.

Mind, God and Matter

Descartes was impressed by the truth of mathematics – a rationalistic system derived from axioms that were intelligible to the mind. The difficulty was to discover the axiom upon which a new metaphysics – a rationalistic science of man — could be built. When Descartes holed himself up in a room, that’s exactly what he set out to do. Descartes wanted to explore nothing but his own thoughts in an environment as far removed from sense experience as possible. Sense experience and matter were devalued from the outset because they provided no certainty.

What is the problem with the information we get from the senses? Too often, it is deceptive. A mirage may seem real, but it doesn’t exist. Things that are far away seem small, even though they are not. We continually have to correct the misinformation of the senses by using our reason. We can’t even be certain that the information we receive comes from our senses. In dreams, we are bombarded with images and sensations that appear to be real; but, upon awakening, we discover them to be false. And yet, while we were dreaming, we were convinced that these sensations were real.

Descartes pushes the argument one step further, suggesting that we cannot even be certain of the existence of matter. As far as we can tell, the earth, the sky, our friends, solids, liquids and gases exist. But what if some mischievous devil has been tricking us all along into believing that an external world exists. For all we know, he could even have fooled us into thinking that we possess a body that we can manipulate. All of these things could be Plato’s shadows on the wall.

You might think Descartes is really pushing the envelope here, but he has a reason for this methodical skepticism. Only by first ridding ourselves of any knowledge that is suspect in any way can we ever get to those absolutely certain principles or axioms on which we can build a new metaphysics. You might also think that Descartes has backed himself into a corner by doubting almost everything. But Descartes suggests that there is one axiom that remains when doubts have cleared the way. We know with certainty that we exist. Or, rather, I know that I exist. Even if our bodies don’t exist, we can’t doubt that our minds exist. Even if these minds are being deceived by mischevious devils, they must exist to be deceived. Our thinking mind exists. We exist as thinking creatures.

This is Descartes’ first axiom, the famous cogito ergo sum – I think therefore I am. Note how different this is from saying I exist because I feel. For Descartes that would not be sufficiently axiomatic. It would not have logical certainty. To use Descartes words, it would not be something that we know distinctly and with certainty. The first axiom in the Cartesian system, therefore, is that the individual exists, but only in terms of his or her mind.

Where does that leave us? We now appear to have a clear and distinct idea that we exist as thinking beings, but can we know anything else. Descartes suggests that the clear and distinct idea that we have of ourselves as thinking beings must have some parallel with another clear and distinct idea. The other thing that we can know with clarity is God. Descartes acknowledges that this principle may appear far fetched. After all, the concept of a God is a difficult one to grasp let alone to establish as an axiom. But we all do have a concept of God in our minds, so we have to ask ourselves how it got there.

The idea of God can’t come from our senses because our concept of God is as an all perfect being, and there is nothing perfect in existence, apart from the concept of God itself. Our concept of God can’t be an extension of what we see imperfectly formed through our senses either, because we need to have a conception of perfection before we can have a notion of imperfection. If we examine the concept of God from all sides, suggests Descartes, we will eventually arrive at the conclusion that our clear and distinct idea of God must be innate.

Just a moment, you might say. What about our mischievous devil. Couldn’t he or she have put a false idea of God in our minds? No says Descartes and he uses a familiar type of scholastic reasoning to support his argument. A cause, he suggests, must contain all of the properties that are transferred to the effect. Something hot, for example, must be caused by something hot. A cold thing cannot cause a hot thing. The effect must be contained in the cause. The concept of God, which seems to be innate in our minds, must be modeled upon something even greater, but similar, to itself. God must have put it there because a devil implies imperfection. Imperfection cannot be a cause of perfection.

If God put this concept in our heads, then he must exist. And the notion that we have of God must resemble him. Therefore, we can rest assured that God has all of the qualities that we attribute to him: perfection, goodness, omniscience &c. God’s existence is the axiom that gets us out of the box or corner that our methodological skepticism placed us in. Once we are sure that God exists, we can be even more confident that we exist. Even though we’ve already proved our existence as thinking beings, we can now begin to develop an understanding of ourselves as corporeal bodies.

A perfect God would never try to deceive us the way a mischievous devil would. Therefore, we can be more confident that the information that we obtain from our senses about the existence of other bodies like us is probably true. We can trust that we have a physical existence apart from our minds. What we still have to understand, however, is why our God given senses can deceive us.

Descartes says that God’s perfection is displayed in wonder of his entire universe. Human beings are only a small part of God’s creation and we are imperfect creatures. We are deceived by our senses because we don’t understand our limitations. Our senses provide good information to a certain point, but they are meant to be governed by our reason. We continually strive beyond our limitations because we have free will. God doesn’t deceive us; we deceive ourselves by wanting to know things we can never know. We commit the sin of pride in assuming that our abilities our greater than they really are. We want to know and control everything rather than being satisfied with what we can know, which is considerable.

Thus far, therefore, Descartes has emphasized the greater significance of reason or logic than our sense data. He has tried to prove two axioms: the existence of the thinking individual and the concept of perfection (i.e. God). He has also used these axioms to develop a theory of how we can know things (epistemology) and he has shown us in what sense we have freedom of will.

What I’ve left out in this discussion so far is the difference between formal and objective reality – between axioms and things – which allowed Descartes to proceed from the idea of perfection to existence. In addition, I haven’t talked about the two other proofs of God that Descartes offered. The first is really a technical issue. God or perfection has a formal existence in that we can conceive of it. It is when we consider that this idea can only have been put into our minds by something that contains all the characteristics that we attribute to a perfect creator that we can affirm an objective, as well as a formal, reality.

The two proofs of God are of a different nature. First, Descartes discusses how he himself came to be. He eliminates various causes that might be possible, such as himself or his parents, and eventually fixes on God as the Creator. In the second, he digs deeper into the concept of God itself, focusing upon its clear and distinct character, which he believes is similar to the clear and distinct idea of a triangle. Unlike a triangle, a square or a circle, Descartes points out that our idea of God is one of perfection. It is inconceivable that something could be perfect and yet not exist. The concept of perfection implies existence.

Having satisfied himself as to God’s existence, Descartes then proceeds to engage in a fascinating form of circular reasoning. Whereas he formerly argued that we can only accept things as being true if we have a clear and distinct idea of them, he now points out that we have discovered the source, and ultimate proof, of these ideas. That proof is God, the one being that cannot deceive us. Thus, things are true not only because of their rational clarity, but because our reason comes from God himself.

Descartes now can discuss the external world of material objects, bodies and other minds in terms of the axioms he has proven. It was this discussion, in particular, that had the most significant implications for seventeenth century science, philosophy and religion. First, it should be clear that Descartes has proven the idea of a perfect creator rationally rather than by referring to revelation. Second, he has created an intellectual framework in which we can criticize any religious teachings including biblical revelations that don’t square with our God-given reason. Third, once Descartes has proven the existence of an all-perfect creator, God no longer needs to enter the debate.

Notice too Descartes’ fascinating discussion of the sin of pride and the existence of free will. Sin is defined essentially as an irrational searching for knowledge that we can’t know through our reason. Free will is what causes us to want to know more than we can, and sin is what occurs when we try to do this. Descartes’ ingenious argument hardly conforms to any biblical discussion of sin. Whatever happened to good old-fashioned sins like envy, sloth and lust. Descartes isn’t interested in these medieval notions.

Descartes, in other words is a thoroughly modern man. He believes in the power of reason to understand the world. The reason that approves in the deductive reasoning of the mathematician and scientist. Give Descartes a couple of self-referential axioms and he will move the world, or at least understand a great deal of it. The world is a rational place; once we learn to control our free wills, we can study it. God gave us our reason as the tool for understanding; biblical revelation is irrelevant. Far less relevant are the teachings of the Church and the Church fathers which are based on intricate interpretations of earlier interpretations.

Once we accept that God created a rational clockwork universe, we can leave him out of the mathematical equation. He is important as an axiom and nothing else. Descartes’ universe is a rational and very secular place. In the Cartesian universe, God was reduced to being the prime mover or the clockmaker who put the universe in motion. But once it was created, God could not intervene in his universe. That would be irrational.

Descartes constructed a clockwork universe. The image was indelibly printed on the minds of scientists for generations, before concepts like relativity and chaos entered the picture. After Descartes, clockmaking became a popular vocation in France. It allowed individuals to play at being God. More important, it acted as the mechanistic model of a universe governed by the laws of cause and effect.

The Ghost in the Machine

The Cartesian universe had profound implications for scientific investigations. While we have a clear and distinct understanding that there are material objects external to ourselves, we cannot assume that these objects are precisely as they appear to our senses. We cannot allow such faulty mechanisms as smell, taste, and touch to mislead us about the nature of the objects themselves. Consider, says Descartes, something as simple as a candle. When exposed to a flame, the candle is dramatically altered; it has a different feel, shape, colour and smell.

What remains that we can know clearly and distinctly about the candle? Descartes answers this question in the way we would expect of a mathematician or new scientist. All that we can ever know about the candle is that it is an extended object in space that is capable of motion. It has height, length and width and all the properties derived from physics. That is all that we can ever know about objects. We can measure them and we can measure their interactions with one another, but we can never really, really know them.

Descartes has moved us a long way from Aristotle. The Greek philosopher attempted to define the essence of objects. For Descartes, that would be going way beyond any of the clear and distinct ideas that we could rationalize. All we really could ever know was that physical bodies had a certain extension in space and that they bumped into one another in various interesting ways and according to well defined physical laws – the laws of physics. Physical objects can only be described in terms of the mechanical laws that govern them.

This makes the universe and its parts machines lacking any of Aristotle’s vital essences. Descartes universe is a soulless place, a big machine operating according to natural laws. Motion in this universe exists because the clockmaker or prime mover, God, gave it a push. Matter and motion remain constant forever. Motion continues of its own accord, keeping the clockwork universe ticking.

The laws of matter are constant and apply to both inert and living matter. Even animals are matter in motion – complicated machines. Their organs interact with one another and with the environment according to fixed laws that science can discover. Animals were very like the automata that were being created all over seventeenth-century France. Strategically placed throughout the gardens of the palace of Versailles, for example, were numerous mechanical contraptions that moved just like living animals. Animals were just little machines in the bigger machine that is the universe. Their behaviour was totally determined by physics.

Human beings did not entirely escape this description. As physical bodies, the non-essential aspect of man, men and women were also intricate machines that were partly conditioned by their environment. Humans were more than just machines, however. They were conscious and rational beings, and, as such, different from matter and not subject to its laws. They alone had what Aristotle called an essense.

The human mind is not governed by the laws of physics. Mind is free – free even to make mistakes. Mind was completely indivisible whereas matter is infinitely divisible. Mind cannot be broken up into its component parts; it is not subject to space or extension. If one loses a limb, a foot or an arm, one does not thereby lose the fundamental thing that makes one a human – mind or, what Descartes also referred to as, the soul.

The soul charts its own course. It is not governed by external stimuli. Without the soul, the body could still exist and perhaps it would do many of the same things that it does presently. But the creature would be more animal than human. Without the body, however, the soul continues to exist. Still, the soul or mind has a close connection with the body. It can move the body around, and make it respond to its will. So, the question is, how can to things so very different and separate in nature, coexist.

Let’s retrace our steps a little. Descartes’ methodology of rigorous skepticism has finally brought him to the point where he can tell us how to analyze physical objects. He makes them subject to the laws of science. Since matter is different from mind, it makes sense that the methods of analyzing them should be different. Scientists can understand matter and motion by using the laws of physics. Philosophers can map out the very different domain of the soul. But philosophers should not intrude upon the scientific domain; nor should scientists invade the domain of philosophy. The Cartesian discussion of reality is rigidly dualistic.

Cartesian dualism allows us to investigate the clockwork universe and manipulate matter. Science is based on unquestionable axioms that are linked to matter by the laws of physics, which are also the laws of cause and effect. If one cannot discover causes and effects in the physical motion of matter, then it is impossible to derive scientific laws. Descartes love for mathematics led him to create a highly deductive scientific paradigm. Physics, the scientific equivalent of mathematics, is the method for understanding the way the universe works.

This brilliant tour de force not only established the intellectual framework for the new science, but also led to the hegemony of science over religion. The separation of religion and science really dates from this point in intellectual history. Despite initial opposition, the Church was never able to reassert its former control over intellectual life. In addition, science now became a separate discipline and began to make the kind of paradigmatic progress by which it has been characterized ever since. The status of science increased exponentially as scientists became the new priests and sages of the age.

These developments were phenomenal and of huge social, cultural, economic and political significance. But a negative side effect of Cartesian dualism was that human beings were transformed into fragmented entities. On the one hand, the human being became mind, its essential character. On the other hand, the human body became a pneumatic machine. We have mind in body or, as Arthur Koestler put it in his book The Sleepwalkers – the ghost in the machine.

How do these different entities interact with one another. How exactly do they influence one another. Descartes and other rationalists assume that the mind controls the body. But what about when it’s the other way around? What about when the body influences the mind? Descartes never really resolved this problem, and I have no intention of blurring his brilliance by outlining the rather silly solutions that he offered by way of explanation.

If Descartes was never successful in accounting for the strange union of body and soul, he was the person who established physics as a discipline. Cogito ergo sum was the first principle or axiom upon which he built a marvelous edifice. It is ironic that the scientific discipline that he established, eventually denied Descartes of this basic truth. Today’s scientists, of course, deny both that mind is the distinguishing characteristic of humanity and that mind is separate from body.