Descartes: A Biography

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 Descartes: A Biography

The marshy soil of the United Provinces was a metaphor for the rampant

scepticism that Descartes had to acknowledge in his ambitious building

plans (vii.–). Readers were advised that they should not conclude that

he was supporting scepticism. This would be as misguided, he argued, as

assuming that medical authors offer prescriptions for falling ill simply

because they describe the symptoms of the diseases they discuss.

Meditations on First Philosophy

The most obvious features of this book are that it is written in Latin

rather than in French, and that the first part is presented in the form

of meditations. Descartes should have found it almost as easy to write in

either language, given his classical education at La Fl`eche. However, he

read and wrote French with greater facility than Latin.The linguistic

change and the extra effort were evidently warranted because he wished

to reach an international audience, including readers in England and the

United Provinces, many of whom did not read French. The switch to Latin

may also have been influenced by remnants of his reservations about the

discussion of these questions in theDiscourse on Method, that metaphysical

questions should not be made accessible to uneducated readers. Thus by

appearing in Latin from an international publisher, theMeditationswere

available to every student of philosophy in Europe and, at the same time,

they avoided the risk of misleading uneducated readers who might stumble

unwittingly into metaphysical problems from which they could not easily

escape.

While writing in Latin was the norm at the time, writing in the form

of meditations was far from standard practice. TheSpiritual Exercises

that Descartes practiced at La Fl`eche were designed by Saint Ignatius

as a way of breaking habitual patterns of thinking, and of redirecting a

Christian’s attention to episodes in the life of Christ and to the moral

and religious implications that may be drawn from them. Descartes seems

to have understood the principal obstacle to doing metaphysics in similar

terms. According to him, the human mind is immersed in the immediately

pressing demands of the body, almost constantly from birth, and it finds

great difficulty in reaching the level of abstraction required to notice its

ownthinking. Descartes’ strategy was, in one sense, extremely simple. To

get an idea of the human mind and, by analogy, an idea of God, it is nec-

essary first to become aware of our own thinking activity. TheMeditations