Descartes or Pascal? (Shirley Mullen, November 7, 2024, Current)
Instead, it was Descartes who always seemed to be given credit for daring to pursue an understanding of the human condition unclouded by the presuppositions of revealed religion. Even though Descartes remained a member of the Roman Catholic church, his pursuit of truth outlined in his 1637 publication Discourse on Method sought to free the pursuit of reliable knowledge from its traditional ties to revealed religion.
First he abandoned any philosophical or theological presuppositions. Then he identified his most unshakeable conviction: his capacity to doubt. From there he moved in a deductive step-by-step process, accepting only “clear and distinct ideas” and ending up with a framework that asserted our ability to trust our sense perceptions of the external world. A divine being figures as a critical step in the argument as the one who guarantees that we are not deceived as the data from the outside world makes impressions on our inner life of the mind. While Descartes’ mention of divinity may have allowed him to escape the charge of atheism or heresy, his god was most certainly not the personal and trinitarian God of Christian orthodoxy. Perhaps most significant of all, Descartes’ account identified rationality as the most quintessential feature of humanness. His dictum, “I think; therefore I am” says it all.
Obviously a metaphysics that has to proceed from the unsupported assertion of “I” is a denial of Reason. But the suckers on the Continent fell for it while the philosophy of the English-Speaking world was protected by skepticism. We are the children of Hume.