DISCOURSE ON METHOD
The full title of this text is Discourse
on the Method of rightly conducting the Reason and seeking for Truth in the
Sciences and it was published in 1637. Descartes
indicates his aim:
I wished to give myself entirely to the search after
truth. We shall see shortly what Descartes meant
by this. He is perhaps most well known for his concern with indubitability and
self-evidence and this is how it is presented in this text:
It is true, however, that it is not customary to
pull down all the houses of a town with the single design of rebuilding them
differently, and thereby rendering the streets more handsome; but it often
happens that a private individual takes down his own with the view of erecting
it anew, and that people are even sometimes constrained to this when their
houses are in danger of falling from age, or when the foundations are insecure.
With this before me by way of example, I was persuaded that it would indeed be
preposterous for a private individual to think of reforming a state by
fundamentally changing it throughout, and overturning it in order to set it up
amended; and the same I thought was true of any similar project for reforming
the body of the sciences, or the order of teaching them established in the
schools: but as for the opinions which up to that time I had embraced, I thought
that I could not do better than resolve at once to sweep them wholly away, that
I might afterwards be in a position to admit either others more correct, or even
perhaps the same when they had undergone the scrutiny of reason. (1978: 12).
Descartes here uses the image of the foundations of
a house. Knowledge needs to be built on secure foundations and the Discourse on Method is concerned
with providing those foundations. Descartes appears to accept that we can
question everything and begin again. Obviously things may not be as easy as
this.
Just
as it would be quite difficult for the owner of the cottage here to take their
home to pieces when the countrysude offers no other form of protection, so we
too may be very attached to certain ideas we hold at any given time. We may find
we have invested heavily in particular ideas and do not want to give them up.
The
Discourse on Methodis
about Descartes' personal search and his personal commitment to starting
thinking anew.
It is at this point that Descartes provides us with
four rules:
- The first was never to accept anything for
true which I did not clearly know to be such; that is to say, carefully to avoid
precipitancy and prejudice, and to comprise nothing more in my judgment than
what was presented to my mind so clealry and distinctly as to exclude all ground
of doubt.
- The second, to divide each of the
difficulties under examination into as many parts as possible, and as might be
necessary for its adequate solution.
- The third, to conduct my thoughts in such
order that, by commencing with objects the simplest and easiest to know, I might
ascend by little and little, and, as it were, step by step, to the knowledge of
the more complex; assigning in thought a certain order even to those objects
which in their own nature do not stand in a relation of antecedence and
sequence.
- And the last, in every case to make
enumerations so complete, and reviews so general, that I might be assured that
nothing was omitted.