Review of 'Meditations and other metaphysical writings' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
It feels quite inappropriate to provide a 'rating' to a collection of philosophical works which so entirely changed the direction and character of western philosophy. Descartes' methods were revolutionary and, in the form of the Principles of First Philosophy, perhaps their most developed methodological elaboration since the Greeks. Descartes wrote with a clarity and humility which is rare to find in philosophers, particularly those who so radically questioned not just the truth of doxa but its very conceptual foundations. Any rating lower than five stars does not do justice to how important this work is.
It is impossible to understand the last 370 years of western philosophy without understanding that is rooted in Plato and then routed through Descartes. An understanding cannot proceed without a familiarity with Descartes. The great philosophers and thinkers of the last few centuries - Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, and many others - …
It feels quite inappropriate to provide a 'rating' to a collection of philosophical works which so entirely changed the direction and character of western philosophy. Descartes' methods were revolutionary and, in the form of the Principles of First Philosophy, perhaps their most developed methodological elaboration since the Greeks. Descartes wrote with a clarity and humility which is rare to find in philosophers, particularly those who so radically questioned not just the truth of doxa but its very conceptual foundations. Any rating lower than five stars does not do justice to how important this work is.
It is impossible to understand the last 370 years of western philosophy without understanding that is rooted in Plato and then routed through Descartes. An understanding cannot proceed without a familiarity with Descartes. The great philosophers and thinkers of the last few centuries - Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, and many others - have to be understood as responding as much to Descartes as to Plato, compared to whom every other philosopher is often called 'a footnote'.
I want to say two brief things about Kant and Heidegger in this context. Descartes wrote that philosophy can, properly speaking, only proceed through introducing radical doubt into all preconceived beliefs (often referred to as doxa) and from beginning afresh from first principles. In this way, Descartes concluded that the first thing I can be certain of is that I exist, because in order to think there must be something that thinks. He then proceeds, having constructed certain foundations, to reason the existence of free will, of God, and of our ability to largely trust our senses. He distinguishes between two substances: mind (characterised by thought, not extended in space) and body (characterised by extension, bu does not think).
Kant wanted to go deeper than that and to ask something like this question: What things must be the case such that we can experience the world at all? Kant developed a highly sophisticated metaphysical system which outlined both what makes thought possible, and what limits it. A key concern of Kant's, then, was to try to understand how our use of reason can go wrong, and to be used in 'impermissible ways'. Kant concludes (not without thorough elaboration of course, I just don't have time to go into it here) that we cannot use reason to prove the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, or the existence of free will; these are essentially practical presuppositions for Kant. It is quite clear therefore that Kant must be understood as engaging as directly with Descartes as his famous rival and inspiration David Hume.
I will say even less of Heidegger, but one way of understanding his masterpiece [b:Being and Time|92307|Being and Time|Martin Heidegger|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1298438455l/92307.SX50.jpg|1309352] (1927) is to see it as an attempt to correct some of the errors of thought which Heidegger thought had been introduced into philosophical thought, by Descartes and by his predecessors and successors in philosophy. In particular, what many like Heidegger see arising out of Descartes' method is what is often called the 'subject-object' relation: the subject (me, the unique thinking substance) and the object (the physical, corporeal world beyond or 'outside' of me) are held to be two distinct and opposed categories. Such a distinction introduces an approach which necessarily tends towards a view kind of methodological individualism and subjectivism, a view of ourselves as disconnected, almost disembodied free agents, separate from and undetermined by the world going on around us.
For Heidegger (as with, for example, Hegel), the task is to collapse such a distinction entirely such that there is no longer any strong distinction made. For Heidegger, the 'subject' (what he refers to as Dasein) is always already 'thrown into' the world, to be what we are is to be 'Being-in-the-world. Our very being and capacity for agency is always historically conditioned. Descartes could no more have chosen to be an astronaut than Sartre could have chosen to be a Samurai. Heidegger criticises Descartes for claiming that our primary way of engaging with the world is through 'knowing'; to the contrary, for Heidegger our existence is characterised both by moods and by a fundamental interconnectedness and embeddedness. Frankly you'd be better off reading Being & Time to really see how Heidegger goes to town on Cartesianism.
There are many reasons to read Descartes, aside from the merit of his clarity, precision and prose, and foremost among them being the huge contributions he made and to better understand the history and context of the history of western philosophy up to this day. Descartes' influence did not end in the century in which he died: his influence can be felt and seen to this day.