The Persistence of the Sacred in Modern Thought

Chapter 1: The Desecularization of Descartes

• Chapter 1 • The Desecularization of Descartes    It is striking that Descartes is not generally treated in the anglophone academy as a Christian philosopher, in the manner of Augustine, say, or Thomas Aquinas; indeed, he is generally presented in textbooks in a way that systematically downplays the religious dimension of his thought. Descartes, as the cliché has it, was the “father of modern philosophy ”; and modern philosophy, as we all know, is a secular subject, long since emancipated from its medieval servitude to theology. Most modern analytic philosophers steer clear of God, and many are committed to an explicitly naturalistic outlook. Descartes is principally studied, in countless Introduction to Philosophy courses, for what he has to say about topics of interest to modern “mainstream” philosophy , such as the basis of knowledge, the nature of the mind, the structure of science, language and meaning; and should his writings from time to time include reference to God, this tends to be regarded as cumbersome baggage that his philosophical outlook would really be better off jettisoning, if it could only manage to do so, rather than as the vital and indispensable core of the system.1 Of course, most students who have studied Descartes know that he provides “proofs” for God’s existence, and as part of their work they may be expected to expound and criticize his arguments in the Third and Fifth Meditations. But such texts are often treated as little more than target practice 15 16 • John Cottingham (offering the chance to show how great philosophers can produce flawed reasoning). They may be required reading for an exam designed to test knowledge of the Meditations, but they are apt to be taught as something that can be forgotten with relief when one comes to what are taken to be the more important and philosophically interesting questions in the Meditations, such as the dreaming argument, the logic of the Cogito, or the relation between mind and body. There is, perhaps, nothing intrinsically wrong with such selectivity in the teaching of the history of philosophy. It is understandable that an instructor, in expounding any great canonical philosopher of the past, would wish to give special attention to the arguments and theses that seem most relevant to current concerns. But there are dangers. Filleting a fish can make it more presentable for the dinner table, but it also involves discarding the very structure that once gave strength, shape, and stability to the living organism. Most philosophers, I think, would concede that to attempt to teach Aquinas’s philosophy without attending to the centrality of God in his thought would create impossible distortions. In this paper, I want to explore the various ways in which this is also true of Descartes. I shall begin by looking at the role of God in Descartes’s scientific work and shall then move on to a more general exploration of the way in which Descartes’s theism pervades his entire philosophical outlook. Science, Systematicity, and Completeness A striking feature of Cartesian thought sets it apart from a great deal of current philosophy, namely, its systematicity and unity. The hyperspecialization of modern academic philosophy has involved a greater and greater fragmenting of the subject into separate compartments,2 so that the practitioner of philosophy of mind, say, is so involved in technical debates in his or her special area that he or she has little time or inclination to attend a seminar on, say, ethics or the philosophy of science. Such compartmentalization would have been anathema to Descartes. Indeed, it is plausible that, were he alive today, he would see today’s philosophical scene as a reversion to the scholasticism that he regarded as his life’s work to combat. When he promoted his own vision of philosophy as an organic unity, he was partly reacting against the scholastic conception of knowledge as a series of specialities, each with its own methods and standards.3 In his famous arboreal metaphor, he sees the whole of his scientific system (which includes medicine, mechanics, and morals) as a series of branches growing out of the single trunk of physics.4 This implies, for Descartes, that the kind of understanding involved in each case is ultimately based on a uniform mathematical template involving “order and measure,” as he explains in his early work, the Regulae: “I came to see that the exclusive concern of mathematics is with questions or...