The Science of Modern Virtue: On Descartes, Darwin, and Locke

2 - The Virtue of Science and the Science of Virtue: DesCartes’ Overcoming of Socrates

tHe Virtue of sCienCe anD tHe sCienCe of Virtue DesCartes’ oVerCoMinG of soCrates Thomas Hibbs iN oNe of hIS LetteRS to PRINCeSS eLIZABeth, Descarteswrites: Beatitude seems to me to consist in a perfect contentment of spirit and an interior satisfaction. . . . It seems to me that each person is able to render himself content and without need of any others provided only that he observes three things, to which correspond the three rules of morality, which I have given in the Discourse.1 The passage does not resolve the famous debate about the relationship between the “provisional morality” of the Discourse and what has come to be called the final or definitive morality, but it does indicate that the provisional morality contains important elements in Descartes’ mature understanding of the good life for human beings.2 It also indicates that beatitude is much more of a preoccupation of Descartes than has usually been acknowledged. he speaks here, as elsewhere, of the sovereign good, 2 The Virtue of Science and the Science of Virtue 25 “the theme or the end to which our actions tend” (le motif, ou la fin à laquelle tendent nos actions).3 He explains, “to have a contentment that is solid, it is necessary to follow virtue, that is, to have a constant and firm will to execute everything that we judge to be better and to employ all the power of which we are capable to judge well” (pour avoir un contentement qui soit solide, il est besoin de suivre la vertu, c’est-à-dire d’avoir une volonté ferme et constante d’exécuter tout ce que nous jugerons être le meilleur, et d’employer toute la force de notre entendement à en bien juger).4 On the surface of his writings, Descartes apparently tables or ignores or suppresses the question of the good; he certainly addresses it in a manner that leaves its relationship to his overall project unclear. To discern the unity in his various projects, we not only need to display the connections between the different texts and parts of his philosophy, we also need to see the way the texts themselves operate as spiritual exercises, fields for the practice of the virtues constitutive of the sovereign good. As Matthew Jones convincingly argues in The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution, Descartes’ most influential books such as the Discourse and the Meditations offer a “series of striking images and recondite reasoning intended to effect a moral and epistemic transformation of the attentive reader.”5 In a manner that calls to mind Plato, even as it transforms the pedagogy of the Academy, Descartes’ mathematical and natural-philosophical writings constitute “practices that can help one live the good life.”6 Going beyond Jones, David Lachterman, in his groundbreaking Ethics of Geometry, argues that The Geometry is the key text in Descartes’ corpus. The overcoming of the geometry of Euclid and Apollonius involves much more than a display of greater mathematical expertise. It demonstrates the success of the new method and reflects a very different conception of the relationship of intellect to nature, body, and human community. Lachterman speaks of the “disparate ways (mores) and styles in which the Euclidean and the Cartesian geometer do geometry, comport themselves as mathematicians both toward their students and toward the very nature of those learnable items (ta mathemata) from which their disciplined deeds take their name.”7 As Amos Funkenstein has noted, in contrast to ancient, Aristotelian science, Cartesian science opts for linguistic univocity and methodological homogeneity.8 Cartesian logic drops discourse through middle terms in favor of sequential ordering. Reasoning in terms of proportions or relations was not novel; it was part of ancient geometry. What is new is the 26 Thomas Hibbs application of this mode of reasoning to the knowable as such, its elevation to the status of universalis mathesis.9 Another noteworthy feature of the universal science is its accentuation of construction over demonstration and its introduction of motion into the very operation of geometrical proof. In Euclidean geometry, theorems or proofs predominate over problems or constructions ; the elegant use of the perfect passive participle, for both problems (Quod erat faciendum) and theorems (Quod erat demonstrandum) indicates that the geometrical object and its properties have always already existed. By contrast, in Cartesian geometry, the focus is on problems rather than theorems and the constructions arise from temporal motion. The transformations wrought within Cartesian geometry are...