Certainties
THE fame of Descartes has at least three separate and very firm foundations. In philosophy, it was he who made into the starting point of the philosopher's inquiry the question, 'Of what can I be certain,' and by so doing turned Western philosophy on to a path which in good part it has followed ever since. By asking this question, and by finding as the first and basic answer to it the famous cogito ergo sum-1 am thinking, there- fore I exist'--he did something virtually un- thinkable to his predecessors : he made the first certainties of philosophy the immediate data of the individual consc;ousness, and the main prob- lem of philosophy the sceptical difficulty of how I can ever know that anything except these immedi- ate data exists. Earlier philosophers had taken as the first certainties God, or the world, or some other realm of being outside the individual, and asked how the individual was related to them: Descartes took first the experiences of the individual, and asked how he could go beyond them to knowledge of anything 'outside.'
The consequences of this revolution have in- volved, perhaps, as much darkness as light, and many have now come to doubt whether Des- cartes did ask the right question after all. Never- theless, it was a step that Ihotniht had to take, and a great depth of insight has been gained from seeing where it leaLls One extraordinary feature of Descartes' revolution is that it does seem to have been essentially an individual achievement.
Although many elements of his thought are of course less original than he supposed, its central idea seems to have been his alone. Many have supposed themselves to be changing, unaided, the face of philosophy : Descartes really did it.
Second, in mathematics. Descartes has his fame as the founder of analytical geometry. Here his achievement is less startlingly individual. The groundwork was being pursued by his immediate predecessors, and the subject in its present form is said to owe more to the researches, unpublished for many years, of his great contemporary, Fermat. Nevertheless it was he who first clearly brought together algebra and geometry, in a form to produce results of the greatest sig- nificance and power.
His third claim to fame is less fundamental but of large historical Importance. When in 1637, at the age of forty-one, he produced his first pub- lished work, the DiScourse on Method, he wrote it in French, in order to reach over the heads of the scholarly readers who expected their philosophy in Latin, and to reach a wider public of men of good sense who, he hoped, would be more open to the voice of pure reason than were the fusty pedants of the Schools. He wrote it in a French which, in the elegance and simplicity it gives to abstract thought, is a wonderful literary,achieve- ment. By so doing• he made himself the model for an enduring tradition devoted to the values of a rigorous yet unpedantic clarity. This tradition often collapses into a mythology, and Descartes would no doubt pale at the rationalistic idiocies often praised as examples of !'esprit cartesien; yet the tradition has great achievements to its credit, and not solely in France.
Thus Descartes, literary as well as philosophical and mathematical innovator, has every right to a proud place in any series of Classics. The present selectiqn gives us, besides the Discourse on Method, the Meditations of 1641 and one further text. It is a pity, perhaps, that the selection is not rather larger; some extracts from the psycho- logical writings, for instance, would have given a wider view of Descartes' system. A greater pity, however, is what has happened in this version to Descartes' style. Descartes should carry one along; here one stumbles over an uneven terrain, tripping over obscurities, omissions and occasional downright mistranslations. Enough remains for this to be a passable introduction to Descartes' thought: enough has gone to make at least his third claim to fame, as a philosophical stylist of genius, look rather puzzling.
BERNARD WILLIAMS
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