Descartes and Pascal compared

Descartes and Pascal compared: analysis and differences between the two modern philosophers exponents of the current of rationalism.

Descartes and Pascal compared

Blaise Pascal and René Descartes, or Descartes , are two important French philosophers, both exponents of the philosophical current of rationalism.

There are similarities and differences in their thoughts: let’s see in detail what they are.

The philosophy of the modern age is characterized by some central themes: reason and science, the theme of freedom and the centrality of man , a theme that we find central in Descartes and in the great exponents of rationalism and empiricism , two currents that confront each other between the 17th and 18th centuries. At the beginning these two currents were considered opposite, but with a work by Kant this opposition is overcome and today philosophical historiography tends to make their opposition less strong by underlining the common aspects especially regarding the problems faced.

Descartes

Descartes is the greatest exponent and founder of rationalism , a term that has a double meaning:

A generic meaning for which rational is any philosophy that recognizes an order in reality accessible to reason, the opposite is irrationalism, that is, a vision of the world according to which reality escapes any order.
A specific meaning that indicates a line of thought that established itself in Europe in the 17th century and whose exponents were Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz.

This movement is characterized by the recognition of human reason as a fundamental instrument for the recognition of truth . For the authors of rationalism, rational evidence is a sufficient criterion for recognizing the truth of a principle or a proposition. The opposite of this current is empiricism , a current that asserted itself between 600 and 700 whose greatest exponent is Locke, according to whom the foundation of the criterion of truth of a principle is sensitive experience. For empiricists, experience is the foundation of all our knowledge contents, but it is also the criterion that allows us to verify the correctness of what reason elaborates starting from experience . Therefore, it is not enough for a statement to be evident to reason, but it must be verified empirically.

Descartes’ philosophical project is that of a general refoundation of all knowledge because the knowledge of his time appears to him rich in themes and contents, but also uncertain and confused, in some ways contradictory. Descartes was born in 1596 in an age in which Copernicanism was asserting itself, coexisting with Aristotelianism. Descartes follows this program with regard to two fundamental objectives:

Define a method of knowledge , wants to find a few simple rules that allow us to distinguish with certainty the true from the false and that allow us to proceed easily in the construction of the edifice of knowledge. Descartes’ most famous work is the Discourse on the Method
Finding indisputable foundations for the construction of knowledge. The basic certainties will be: the existence of the Self, of God and of a physical world .

This project for Descartes also had purposes linked to a need to improve man’s life, in fact certain knowledge would have allowed us to find new techniques to reduce fatigue, the discomforts that man must face to transform the environment that surrounds him and would have allowed us to reduce illnesses, therefore to improve and prolong man’s life.

Life of Descartes

Descartes was born in 1596 to a family of the minor aristocracy of the toga , he was educated in a Jesuit college in France, the college of La Fleche, but he came out unhappy because the knowledge he had acquired seemed rich, but confused, this did not depend on bad teachers or poor ability, but on the nature of the knowledge of the time. Descartes decided to undertake a military career and enlisted first with the army of Maurice of Orange , then with Maximus of Bavaria . In 1619 he took part in the Thirty Years’ War as an officer and had a lot of time to cultivate his studies. In November 1619 he himself recounted having had 3 dreams in which the foundations of a marvelous science were revealed to him, so he went on a pilgrimage to Loreto.

Probably the dreams give birth to the idea of a mission and to intuit the first rules in the method, in the following years he begins to write The rules for the guidance of the intellect in which he defines the four fundamental rules of the method. He then leaves the military career and dedicates himself to studies and travels because he wants to study the great book of the world.

Descartes chooses the mathematical model because it allows us to distinguish the true from the false and allows everyone to proceed towards knowledge with simplicity. The rules are:

Clarity and evidence , that is, accepting as true only that which is clearly and evidently true and rejecting that which is in doubt;
Analysis , whereby when faced with a complex problem it is necessary to break it down into simple parts that can be tackled individually;
The synthesis , once the problem has been broken down, it is necessary to reproduce the overall vision by connecting the individual parts together;
Enumeration , which requires checking the completeness of one’s procedure by checking that one has addressed all the problems, and Descartes suggests doing this by enumerating them.

These rules for Descartes guarantee a simple procedure for advancing in knowledge, but two questions arise:

The method must be justified , in fact the fact that these rules work in mathematics does not guarantee that they have universal validity, therefore a foundation for these rules must be found;
To proceed in knowledge one must find some fundamental truths , certain premises of knowledge, this means that Descartes, starting from a methodological problem, moves on to a path that has metaphysical implications, starting from a problem that has to do with the forms of knowledge one moves on to the structure of reality.

Cartesian path

The Cartesian path begins with a doubt, because to reconstruct knowledge it is necessary to clear it of all that is doubt, which is not a skeptical doubt, but a methodical doubt, that is, which has the purpose of doubting everything to identify truths that escape doubt and that will be the foundation of the building of knowledge, while the skeptical one had the purpose of showing that there is no certainty. Descartes does not take all knowledge one by one, but takes into consideration the ways of knowledge and begins with the sensitive one that is all subject to doubt because the senses sometimes deceive us and consequently we must always doubt them, in fact our life could be a dream or a virtual world.

Having discarded sensible knowledge, the rational knowledge represented by mathematics remains, but even here it is possible to give rise to a doubt because we might think that God created the mind in such a twisted way as to make us make mistakes even when it comes to mathematics. So Descartes also discards this because God is good, but there could exist an evil genius who makes us make mistakes, this is a hyperbolic doubt, that is, pushed to the extreme. Man is left with an ineliminable certainty , the fact that if he thinks then something is, the certainty of his own thinking is an indubitable certainty, therefore it is the first indubitable truth of the Cartesian path (cogito ergo sum). One knows that one is something that thinks, a res cogitans . When one says that one is certain of thinking one is on the level of an existential observation, while saying instead that I know that I am a thinking substance one passes to the metaphysical level.

For Descartes, the evidence of cogito ergo sum is the first foundation of clarity and evidence because it is the first clear and evident knowledge.

Objections to the Cartesian Path

The cogito ergo sum and the affirmation of the res cogitans are not only the first certainty of knowledge, but also the first and fundamental justification of the criterion of clarity and evidence because for Descartes the clarity with which the cogito ergo sum presents itself to the mind and its evidence represent the original example of clarity and evidence that we will require of every other knowledge in order to admit it as true.

First objection : they say that Descartes fell into a vicious circle because he first admits the cogito ergo sum with clarity and evidence, then he bases the rule of clarity and evidence on the concept of cogito ergo sum. Descartes’ reply is that there is no vicious circle because the cogito ergo sum is not demonstrated with the rule of clarity and evidence, but is the original clarity and evidence, therefore it does not need a preceding rule.
Second objection : it comes from the French philosopher Gassandi who states that the cogito ergo sum is not an original evidence, but the result of a syllogistic reasoning, that is: everything that thinks is, I think therefore I am, but this reasoning would require the demonstration of the statement that everything that thinks is, which is not demonstrated. Descartes responds to the objection by saying that the cogito ergo sum is not the result of a reasoning, but a truth that imposes itself forcefully in our mind without the need for steps, it is the fruit of an intuition (immediate truth)
Third objection : it is raised by Hobbes who states that when Descartes moves from the observation of the experience of thought to the affirmation of the existence of a thinking substance he makes an incorrect transition, because he moves from the level of an experiential fact to the level of a metaphysical affirmation, that is, the level of the recognition of a reality of which there is no experience. Hobbes expresses this by saying that saying “I think, therefore I am a thinking substance” is equivalent to saying “I walk, therefore I am a walk”. Descartes replies that the transition is legitimate in the case of the experience of thought, but it would not be so in the case of walking, because the experience we have of ourselves is always linked to thought, while the experience we have of ourselves is not always linked to walking.

Hobbes , however, grasps a real problem because in Cartesian thought a complicated passage is that from saying “I am certain of my thinking and of my existence” to saying “I exist as something characterized by thought”, because they are two different planes, for Hobbes nothing would prohibit us from thinking that we are only matter.

Having demonstrated the principle of res cogitans, Descartes has the problem of demonstrating that there are realities corresponding to our thought contents , a human being does not know things directly, but the ideas of things. In our mind we have three types of ideas:

Fictitious ideas : that we have produced
Adventitious ideas : which seem to come from the outside world
Innate ideas : which we have not produced and do not come from outside, but are in our mind, for example the idea of God.

For Descartes, the idea of God does not come from outside and cannot be produced by us because it is the idea of an infinite and perfect being and this idea cannot be produced by a finite and imperfect being like man. For Descartes, the principle is that the cause of an idea must have at least the same degree of reality as the idea itself, starting from this Descartes provides three proofs of the existence of God:

Man, a finite being, possesses the idea of God , an infinite being, he cannot have produced it by himself, therefore God must necessarily exist as the cause of the idea that is in man’s mind.
Man, an imperfect and finite being who has within himself the idea of God , is a perfect and infinite being, therefore if man had created himself, having within himself the idea of perfection, he would have created himself perfect, but since man is not perfect, then God must necessarily exist as the cause and creator of man who has within himself the idea of God.
Man has the idea of God as the most perfect being, but then necessarily this being possesses existence because if it did not exist it would not be perfect.

Descartes says that God is good and therefore cannot have created us in such a way that we always deceive ourselves, but must have created us in such a way that we can know the truth when we think clearly and distinctly. God becomes the guarantor of the truth of all ideas that present themselves to the mind with clarity and distinctness: mathematical, fictitious, and adventitious ideas.

Two considerations are made:

We should never fall into error, Descartes replies that it would be so if man relied only on the intellect, but the will is also involved because the intellect conceives the idea and the will gives its consent to the idea. The human intellect is finite , the will is capable of going beyond the intellect
Even the Cartesian reasoning between God, clarity and evidence lends itself to the vicious circle. Descartes demonstrates the existence of God with this second criterion and says that God is the guarantor of the truth of what is clear and evident. This objection led Descartes to a clarification: it is not necessary to resort to God to found the criterion of clarity and evidence because it is already demonstrated by the cogito ergo sum. This criterion refers to ideas conceived currently in all their clarity and evidence and taken individually and would not be enough to found science because it is made up of chains of ideas and the scientist does not always have present with clarity and evidence all the ideas that he has previously demonstrated. God guarantees not so much the criterion of clarity and evidence, but rather the permanence in the truth of ideas that have been conceived in the past with clarity and distinction. This conception seems to imply that the truths demonstrated in the past should no longer be demonstrated.

Res Este

If God is not a deceiver then Descartes can take into consideration ideas from the outside which have many characteristics (colors, shapes, flavors), but among these only some are clear and distinct from each other, it is not the qualitative characteristics, but the quantitative ones that are clear and evident.

The only certain thing about external bodies is that they are bodies that occupy a space, that is, they are extended bodies, therefore I can affirm with certainty that in addition to the res cogitans and God there also exists the res estensa which can also be called matter, whose certain characteristic is that it is extended, it occupies a space and this means that the science of the physical world is only interested in the qualities that have to do with extension, not the secondary qualities. Descartes gives a foundation to a mathematical type of physics.

In defining the characteristics of the res extensa, Descartes proceeds by deduction starting from the identification of matter with space and of space with Euclidean space. Descartes states:

That there is no vacuum ( horror vacui ) and he does so with a reasoning because he says that if matter is an extension in space then it is not possible to think of an empty extension because it would be devoid of extension, which leads to a logical contradiction.
Matter is infinite like space and cannot be further extended because it occupies everything
Matter is infinitely divisible like Euclidean space
Matter is endowed with motion originally impressed upon it by God, this quantity of motion is conserved through all transformations and is their cause.

The Cartesian model of the universe is mechanistic , every movement finds explanation in terms of matter, bodies and movement. This model is also applied to biology because for Descartes bodies work like machines, for Descartes there are three fundamental laws of movement:

The principle of inertia
The law of rectilinear motion
The principle of conservation of momentum, in this regard Pascal said that God kicked the world and since then it has conserved momentum

Cartesian physics is far from the model of modern physics which is experimental, but for Descartes these principles are the basic theoretical framework of physics, but when it comes to explaining a single phenomenon Descartes recognizes that one must resort to observation or experiment. Descartes’ contribution to mathematics is remembered because he is the inventor of the Cartesian axes with which he united algebra and geometry and he is also the one who advanced algebra by introducing algebraic notation.

Relationships between thought and matter

This question is still current, how does our brain produce thought? How does our thought translate into a sound or a body movement? How do we think?

For Descartes, thought and extension are two distinct, autonomous realities , and we can understand this because we can think of the spirit without the res extensa and the res extensa without the res cogitans. The entities are opposite in their characteristics: the res extensa occupies space, the spirit does not, the res extensa has no awareness while the res cogitans has self-consciousness. Extension is mechanically determined, the res cogitans is free, this for Descartes means that the res cogitans exists even when the body dies.

Descartes, however, must recognize that in man thought and extension are connected because it is undeniable that thought commands the body, just as bodily states are transmitted to thought.

Descartes responds by giving a solution: in humans the connection between the two entities is ensured by a gland located in the center of the brain, the pineal gland which is unique in the body. Impulses from various parts of the body arrive at this gland and transmit them to thought and vice versa. The Cartesian solution was considered unsatisfactory, it was addressed by others, the first being the occasionalists (Melebranche) who adopted the Cartesian vision but rejected the position of the pineal gland arguing that instead it is God who intervenes with every change in our thought with a change in our body and vice versa, they are like two watches, for Descartes there is a mechanism that transmits the movement of one watch to the other, for the occasionalists there is a watchmaker who synchronizes them manually.

Blaise Pascal

Pascal was an opponent of Descartes , but this does not mean that he did not take reason into consideration. Pascal was also a scientist, which means that he had faith in the cognitive possibilities of reason, but he recognized its limits both in the field of mathematics and physics, and especially in relation to the understanding of man’s interiority. For Pascal, science with its instruments cannot give an answer to the questions that man asks himself about his own life, scientific reasoning almost never helps us to understand our soul, for this we need other instruments. Pascal wanted to give an answer relating to the great question on the existence of man , he sought this answer in religion, and it is a more or less acceptable solution, however beyond acceptance remains the interest of the description that Pascal makes of the human condition, which involves believers and non-believers.

Life

Pascal was the son of a wealthy family of the toga nobility , it was his father who took care of the education of his children trying to give them a scientific education. Pascal’s abilities emerged already at a young age, at sixteen he wrote the treatise on conic sections, shortly after he invented the first calculator, the “pascaline”, invented to help his father. Always a boy he began his studies on the vacuum that led him to the demonstration of its existence. However, he was in poor health and fell ill in ’54 at the age of 22 and had a period of convalescence, in which he had frequent conversations with Jansenists who frequented his house because of his sister. These conversations contributed to his conversion , to an opening to religious interest. Pascal discovered the religious dimension in a different context from the scientific and philosophical one, he became a Jansenist even if he never abandoned his scientific interests.

Pascal was involved in the controversy between the Jesuits and the Jansenists which had to do with the question of grace. For the Jansenists, God grants grace to a select few who will be saved by virtue of it, and for them faith is an internal fact. For the Jesuits, divine grace is necessary, but the man who lives in the church fulfilling his duties already has enough grace to go to heaven, so external religion can be sufficient for salvation.

Pascal attacked the position of the Jesuits with the “Provincial Letters” and planned a great work in which he wanted to defend the ancient model of the bon christian whose title was to be “apologia del cristiana” but he never completed it and we only have notes known as “Pascal’s thoughts”.

The central problem for Pascal is the understanding of the human condition, of the meaning of human existence. In the face of this problem, the attempts of science, of the common mentality and of philosophy fail .

Common mentality : most men think about something else trying to always keep themselves busy so as not to think about it: “divertissement”, chosen by the common mentality and synonymous with divergence, people think about the future and never the present. What man fears more than anything else is boredom, man therefore does not do sports for what it can give him but only to keep himself busy, if he could reach the prize without doing anything he would not be interested, instead man should seek boredom because in this condition he is forced to reflect.

Science : science is incapable because reason has limits in itself: experience, in fact even in the mathematical field there are notions that reason cannot demonstrate and are assumed as postulates. It is a criticism of the Cartesian conception, for Descartes clarity and evidence ensure truth, reason is not always able to demonstrate the principle from which it derives.

The main limitation of science is the fact that it is incapable of understanding the interiority of man, it does not have access to the spiritual dimension of human experience “the heart has reasons that human reason cannot understand”.

On this distinction Pascal bases the opposition between:

Esprit de geometrie , scientific mathematical rationality that proceeds by steps with the mediation of reasoning and has as its object mathematical truths and studies the physical world;
Esprit de finesse , proceeds intuitively, is unmediated and is based on feeling, has as its object the interiority of man, in particular moral and religious truths.

These are two distinct paths of understanding even if for Pascal the esprit de finesse helps the esprit de geometrie because the basic unprovable concepts are not grasped with mathematical rationality, but with an intuition.

Philosophy remains as a means to solve the problem of understanding, but this too fails because the human condition is intermediate, man is not wise, but not totally ignorant either, he is not happy but aspires to happiness, he is suspended in the universe between infinitely large and infinitely small, he is a weak creature exposed to all the forces of nature that overwhelm him, he is “a reed that bends at every breath of wind but is superior to nature because it is a heavy reed”.

Philosophy has not been able to describe this condition because it has oscillated between two extremes:

The skepticism that reduces man to nothingness
The dogmatism typical of philosophies that take for granted the human capacity to know

Philosophy has not even been able to give man a morality based on rationality, it has failed because it is enough to cross a border to find different rules: moral relativism. Philosophy has also failed in demonstrating the existence of God because there is no rational proof, the proofs given so far demonstrate his existence only to those who believe in him and even if a God exists, he is far from the needs of men, the God of philosophers is abstract, not a God of love that man feels a need for, then who will demonstrate the existence of God is the Christian religion that explains the intermediate condition of man as something that derives from original sin. Man was happy but he is a fallen king who however maintains the memory of what he had been, of his original condition, and therefore tends to this.

The God of the Christians himself is God absconditus , a God whom man does not know completely, who is hidden from him but who in some way reveals himself to him, “not hidden enough for man not to be able to seek him, but not so evident as to reveal himself completely”. Therefore, religion does not give a solution to the problem of the human condition, it does not give a reasonable solution, not contradictory, but not rational, and true philosophy is a meta-philosophy that reflects on the limits of philosophy and rationality.

Meta = speech about.

Even bet topic

It is an argument designed to convince those who are indifferent to religion to approach faith, to consider the convenience of living according to religion, this does not mean that it can lead to true faith or that it demonstrates the existence of God, but it can help to approach thinking that it is worth living according to faith.

There are two alternatives:

Living as if God did not exist
Living as if God existed

When the gambler has to choose between two alternatives, he considers the pros and cons. In the first case, if you win, you win earthly pleasures because you have lived without too many scruples. In the second case, if you win, you win eternal life and if you lose, you lose earthly pleasures.

Any gambler faced with this would choose to live as if God existed because the imbalance between winning and losing is too great, so when in doubt it is better not to risk. This argument has been much criticized, but it must be considered that Pascal did not see this reasoning as aimed at conversion to faith, he was a Jansenist and as such believed that faith should be born from the interior and was linked to divine grace, this argument only had to convince those who had distanced themselves from religion to come back.

Pascal says that faith cannot come from respecting the rules, but he recommends respecting them anyway because this will prepare the soul to open up to faith.