THE FIRST MODERN PHILOSOPHER

(Please be reminded that, in addition to this section, there also several significant Cartesian entries scattered throughout my thematic sections of this book as well.)

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Never mind Thomas Hobbes being interesting and taking up eight entries just in this section, it is not to him that the title of the first modern philosopher deservedly goes. It was bestowed by none other than Dr. Hegel on the first thinker of “modern history” (with regard to the term modern history, we must be paying tribute to Leonardo Bruni’s tripartite division of history, actually originating with… Petrarca?), whose comprehensive grasp of philosophical subject matter, and whose in-depth analysis thereof make him exceedingly worthy of this title. (After all, one has to admit that our good friend Hobbes was too limited in his subject matter, and, besides, his critical preoccupation with “Aristotelity” kept him volens-nolens in the old scholastic mold, whereas René Dèscartes, with his wholesale denunciation of the old school of learning and thinking, made a clean break from the past, creating a new philosophical system all of his own.)

As I have already done before with some others, I find it worthwhile to start with a philosophical summary of Dèscartes by Bertrand Russell, from the Dèscartes chapter of his History of Western Philosophy:

René Dèscartes (1596-1650) is usually considered the founder of modern philosophy, and, I think, rightly. He is the first man of high philosophic capacity, whose outlook is profoundly affected by the new physics and astronomy. While it is true that he retains much of scholasticism, (So does Spinoza, but so what? He is totally free from the spirit of scholasticism, and even in his quite original style shows a profound difference from his predecessors, which is what matters the most) he does not accept foundations laid by predecessors, but endeavors to construct a complete philosophic edifice de novo. This had not happened since Aristotle, and it is a sign of the new self-confidence, which resulted from the progress of science. There is a freshness about his work, which is not to be found in any eminent previous philosopher since Plato. All intermediate philosophers were teachers, with the professional superiority belonging to that avocation. Dèscartes writes not as a teacher, but as a discoverer and explorer, anxious to communicate what he has found. His style is easy and unpedantic, addressed to the intelligent men of the world, rather than to pupils. It is moreover an extraordinarily excellent style. It is fortunate for modern philosophy that the pioneer had such admirable literary sense. His successors, both on the Continent and in England, until Kant, retain his unprofessional character, and several of them retain something of his stylistic merit.

This introductory summary would be incomplete without the concluding paragraph of Russell’s Dèscartes chapter, which is quoted below. Remarkably, Russell promotes here one of my favorite leitmotifs, as well as Nietzsche’s, concerning the blessedness of irrational inconsistency, as opposed to the boring narrowness of logical consistency which, as I believe, happens to keep the mind in chains. I applaud Russell for joining the elite society for the appreciation of random brilliance, which is just a different way of saying irrational inconsistency.

There is in Dèscartes an unresolved dualism between what he learned from contemporary science and the scholasticism that he had been taught at La Flèche. (Reference to the Jesuit College at La Flèche, attended by Dèscartes until the age of twenty.) This led him into inconsistencies, but it also made him far more rich in fruitful ideas than any completely logical philosopher could have been. (Bravo, Russell, for noticing that remarkably in the man so readily labeled as a “rationalist”!) Consistency might have made him merely the founder of a new scholasticism, whereas inconsistency made him the source of two important but divergent schools of philosophy. (That is dualistic idealism represented by the Cartesian parallelism and mutual independence of mind and matter, on the one hand, and surprisingly, materialism as an unintended consequence of that parallelism, interpreted as similitude, on the other.)

At any rate, it has been my great pleasure to have read Dèscartes’ elegantly thought and elegantly written philosophical essays, ever since my early learning years, and to continue this discussion of his philosophy throughout the rest of the Cartesian series in this section.