Descartes as a Virtuous Philosopher

          Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) defines virtue as an ability to do whatever one wants and yet get away with anything while maintaining power. If that is the definition of what virtue is, Descartes, I think, is the virtuous philosopher in the 17^th century Europe. Descartes faced a number of serious problems with his new philosophy, but was always able to discern the circumstances he was in, and hence avoid the crucial damage to his reputation. First thing that comes to my mind is the abandonment of the publication of Le Monde in the 1630’s. His philosophy certainly endorsed Copernican heliocentric system, however, upon hearing the Galileo trial, he immediately abandoned his project from circulating in public and later explained his reason for not finishing the book as his coming to his senses. In Principles of Philosophy (1644), Descartes attributed no motion to the earth strictly speaking. This, he did first by defining what motion is, and then describing the earth to be without motion. He says in Part 3 of Principles of Philosophy that “the term ‘motion’ in the strictest sense… is simply the transfer of one body from the vicinity of the other bodies which are in immediate contact with it, and which are being regarded as being at rest, to the vicinity of other bodies” and that “there is no motion occurring in the case of the earth or even the other planets, since they are not transferred from the vicinity of those parts of the heaven with which they are in immediate contact, in so far as these parts are considered as being at rest.” Here, he was able to maintain his belief that the earth rotates around the sun, while not contradicting the Church’s view that the earth is at rest. Lastly, even when his denial of self-subsisting accidents challenged the miracle of Eucharist, he was ingeniously able to fend off the attacks from his opponents. His explanation was that there are three types of surfaces, namely, 1) the surface of the bread, 2) the surface of the air that surrounds the bread, and 3) the surface intermediate between the air and the bread. The first surface changes when the bread undergoes changes, but does not change when the air that surrounds the bread changes, since it does not belong to the air. In this way, the surface remains numerically the same. Similarly, the surface of the air changes with the air but does not change with the bread, but there is this third type of surface, which belongs neither to the bread nor to the air that surrounds it. It only changes with “the shape of the dimensions which separate one from the other.” Because we only see objects, he argues, by looking at the surfaces [L. species] of the objects, what we see in the Eucharist as bread is actually the surface belonging to that dimension and not the surface of the substance of bread or of the air. Just as we recognize a river the same to-day and 10 years ago, even though the surface of the water that flows in the river as well as the air that is over the river changes, the bread we see in the Eucharist is actually the surface that is in between the bread substance and the air substance, which being independent from either of the substance stays numerically the same. This is good for transubstantiation, but certainly not for res extensa, where body just is extension, and surface is a mode of a substance, which cannot exist in its own dimension apart from the substance. When pressed to explain this issue by Arnauld, he wrote to him that since this is of such a crucial significance, “if I dared to come to come to any conclusion on the matter… such conjectures as I make I would prefer to communicate by word of mouth rather than writing.”

Once again, it seems that he was able to answer without really answering the question. For all these reasons, I believe Descartes was a virtuous philosopher par excellence in the 17^th century Europe.

See Descartes’ correspondence with Mersenne in November 1633, where he announced he had decided not to publish the treatise, “For I would not for all the world want a discourse to issue from me that contained the least word of which the Church would disapprove, and so I would prefer to suppress it than to have it appear in a mangled form.”

Malcolm Oster, ed., Science in Europe, 1500-1800 – A Primary Sources Reader (USA: The Open University, 2002).

Malcolm Oster, ed., Science in Europe, 1500-1800 – A Secondary Sources Reader (USA: The Open University, 2002).

See Descartes’ correspondence with Mesland, 9^th February 1645.

See Descartes’ correspondence with Arnauld, 4^th June 1648.