Rene Descartes, A Discourse on Method, Meditations on the First Philosophy, Principles of Philosophy, trans. John Veitch (New York: Dutton, 1975).

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Response

In 1938, before the philosophy of science had disabused itself of its presentist progress narrative, Gaston Bachelard condemned Descartes’ vortical plenist universe as the “metaphysics of the sponge” and “pre-scientific,” what John Schuster paraphrases as “the sub-scientific progeny of cancerous metaphor and baroque ego projection.” While that may be an entertaining critique of Descartes’ cosmology, it is not a very productive one. If we resist the convenience of anachronistically viewing past events as either steps toward ignorance or enlightenment, and instead as a complex interplay of ideas and actions whose “correctness” by present standards is irrelevant to their contemporaneous significance, then Descartes vortical fluid cosmology can be seen not as a deviation, but a contribution, to scientific thought.

Descartes may have, in the course of his Principles of Philosophy, provided us with a contemporaneously context-appropriate rubric for evaluating his cosmological contributions. Principles contains not just natural-philosophical conclusions, but also a framework for natural philosophizing in general. In its preface, Descartes describes the four possible origins of the “degrees of wisdom at which we have arrived”: self-evident notions, or those which do not require cogitation; sensorial experience; notions acquired in conversation with others; and, as an extension of the third means, the reading of texts written by capable persons, as a kind of conversation. Descartes acknowledges a fifth path, “incomparably more sure and elevated than the other four,” to search for first causes and true principles to deduce everything else, but that no one has yet succeeded in this endeavor. For Descartes, it is on followers of this fifth path that the title of true philosopher has historically been bestowed. Indeed, this understanding of philosophy was the paradigmatic conception of truth since the time of the ancients. Descartes aim, and the purpose of the Principles, is to show that deductions from first principles are only valid if the principles are valid, and that previous attempts at this “fifth way” relied on false premises. Descartes produces two first principles of his own. Descartes first first principle might be called “ontology by thought” — that a thinker, no matter how plagued by uncertainty and doubt, cannot doubt he or she is thinking while doubting — this is his first principle as regards metaphysical concerns. For “physical or corporeal things,” Descartes takes as his principles that “there are bodies extended in length, breadth, and depth, which are of diverse figures and are moved in a variety of ways.” Even though Descartes, by design, has his physical principles as derivative from his metaphysical principles, the fact that he compartmentalizes them to their appropriate purposes makes possible a revolutionary materialist approach to natural philosophizing. Descartes’ “metaphysics of the sponge” fluid cosmology is significant of this natural-philosophical development. Further, Descartes contributes to the philosophy of science by eroding the absolutism of truth and encouraging the reevaluation of evidence when he says, “while we only possess the knowledge which is acquired in the first four grades of wisdom, we ought not to doubt of the things that appear to be true in what regards the conduct of life, nor esteem them as so certain that we cannot change our opinions regarding them, even though constrained by the evidence of reason.” Moreover, Descartes legitimates the necessity of the role of experimental practice. For Descartes, the “greater number” of truths deducible from the first principles he sets down “depend on certain particular experiments that never occur by chance.” While Descartes may have believed in the realism of his cosmology, he nevertheless designed it inside a philosophical framework which made possible and even encouraged its constant reexamination. In this sense, Cartesian cosmology was put forth, perhaps as the first, as a hypothesis and not a fact.

Descartes’ “sub-scientific progeny of cancerous metaphor and baroque ego projection” rendered moot the conflict over the purported motion of the earth. For Descartes, motion is the translation of an object relative to the stuff in contact with it, and not relative to some absolute point of reference. Since in the Cartesian cosmology, the heaven is composed of a mobile fluid in which the solid bodies are embedded, the earth can be said to move around the sun motionlessly, being carried in its orbit by its fluid medium, without altering its position relative to the enveloping fluid. The planets (and earth is just a planet like the others to Descartes), thus achieve mobility without motility. This fluid cosmology defuses the Tychonic/Copernican conflict. For Descartes the sun is much larger than the earth, the moon is much smaller, the sun is much farther, the sun is just another fixed star, the remainder of the fixed stars are inconceivably distant from the earth, and likewise distant from each other. With these few assertions, Descartes instantiated the solar-systemic model and laid the groundwork for the idea of gravitational neighborhoods. He broke the Aristotelian/Ptolemaic spheres and disassociated the fixed stars from our sun and planets, demythologizing the relationship between all components in the firmament and creating an astronomic typology in which the sun is an instance of the “star” type and the earth is an instance of the “planet” type, eliminating our symbolic specialness from the cosmological order. This was made possible by Descartes’ refutation of a centuries old scholastic-Christian philosophical first principle: that the universe was created by God for us, “supposing that he did it all for our benefit” would be “the height of presumption” . . . quite a lot of work for a cancerous metaphor driven by baroque ego-projection.

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Notes

• 148 – “Now these principles must possess two conditions: in the first place, they must be so clear and evident that the human mind, when it attentively considers them, cannot doubt of their truth; in the second place, the knowledge of other things must be so dependent on them as that though the principles themselves may indeed be known apart from what depends on them, the latter cannot nevertheless be known apart from the former.”
• 149-50 – “I should have here shortly explained wherein consists all the science we now possess, and what are the degrees of wisdom at which we have arrived. The first degree contains only notions so clear of themselves that they can be acquired without meditation; the second comprehends all that the experience of the senses dictates; the third, that which the conversation of other men teaches us; to which may be added as the fourth, the reading, not of all books, but especially of such as have been written by persons capable of conveying proper instruction, for it is a species of conversation we hold with their authors.”
• 150 – “there have been, indeed, in all ages great minds who endeavoured to find a fifth road to wisdom, incomparably more sure and elevated than the other four. The path they essayed was the search of first causes and true principles, from which might be deduced the reasons of all that can be known by man; and it is to them the appellation of philosophers has been more especially accorded.”

 

• 151 – “But the error of those who leant too much to the side of doubt, was not followed for any length of time, and that of the opposite party has been to some extent corrected by the doctrine that the senses are deceitful in many instances. Nevertheless, I do not know that this error was wholly removed by showing that certitude is not in the senses, but in the understanding alone when it has clear perceptions; and that while we only possess the knowledge which is acquired in the first four grades of wisdom, we ought not to doubt of the things that appear to be true in what regards the conduct of life, nor esteem them as so certain that we cannot change our opinions regarding them, even though constrained by the evidence of reason.”

 

• • What does this mean?
• 152 – “But no conclusion deduced from a principle which is not clear can be evident, even although the deduction be formally valid; and hence it follows that no reasonings based on such principles could lead them to the certain knowledge of any one thing, nor consequently advance them one step in the search after wisdom.”

 

• 153 – “Thus by considering that he who strives to doubt of all is unable nevertheless to doubt that he is while he doubts, and that what reasons thus, in not being able to doubt of itself and doubting nevertheless of everything else, is not that which we call our body, but what we name our mind or thought, I have taken the existence of this thought for the first principle, from which I very clearly deduced the following truths, namely, that there is a God who is the author of all that is in the world, and who, being the source of all truth, cannot have created our understanding of such a nature as to be deceived in the judgments it forms of the things of which it possesses a very clear and distinct perception. Those are all the principles of which I avail myself touching immaterial or metaphysical objects, from which I most clearly deduce these other principles of physical or corporeal things, namely, that there are bodies extended in length, breadth, and depth, which are of diverse figures and are moved in a variety of ways. Such are in sum the principles from which I deduce all other truths.”

• Descartes’s epistemology

 

• 154 – “. . . I should wish that the reader at first to go over the whole of it, as he would a romance, without greatly straining his attention, or tarrying at the difficulties he may perhaps meet with in it, with the view simply of knowing in general the matters of which I treat; and that afterwards, if they seem to him to merit a more careful examination, and he feel a desire to know their causes, he may read it a second time, but in order to observe the connection of my reasonings; but that he must not then give it up in despair, although he may not everywhere sufficiently discover the connection of the proof, or understand all the reasonings — it being only necessary to mark with a pen the places where the difficulties occur, and continue to read without interruption to the end . . ..”
• 156 – “. . . the second is physics, in which, after finding the true principles of material things, we examine, in general, how the whole universe has been framed; in the next place, we consider, in particular, the nature of the earth, and of all the bodies that are most generally found upon it, is air, water, fire, the loadstone and other minerals.”
• “Thus, all philosophy is like a tree, of which metaphysics is the root, physics the trunk, and all the other sciences the branches that grow out of this trunk, which are reduced to three principal, namely, medicine, mechanics, and ethics.”

 

• “I well know, likewise, that many ages may elapse ere all the truths deducible from these principles are evolved out of them, as well because the greater number of such as remain to be discovered depend on certain particular experiments that never occur by chance, but which require to be investigated with care and expense by men of the highest intelligence, as because it will hardly happen that the same persons who have the sagacity to make a right use of them, will possess also the means of making them, and also because the majority of the best minds have formed so low and estimate of philosophy in general, from the imperfections they have remarked in the kind of vogue up to the present time, that they cannot apply themselves to the search after truth.”

 

 

Rene Descartes, Selected Philosophical Writings, trans. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988), http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/descartes1644part3.pdf.

 

• 42 – “One is the infinite power and goodness of God; we mustn’t be afraid of over-estimating the vastness, beauty and perfection of his works. What we should be afraid of is appearing to under-estimate the magnificence of God’s creative power by positing limits that we don’t know for certain to exist.”

 

• “And it would be the height of presumption for us to suppose that we have the mental power needed to grasp the ends that God aimed at in creating the universe — let alone supposing that he did it all for our benefit!”

 

• “And indeed there is a sort of truth in ‘God made everything for our benefit’, because we can make some use of all things, if only by thinking about them and being led by this to admire and wonder at God’s marvellous works.”
  • Is this an assertion of the primacy of theory over practice? That developments are first conceived and then enacted, rather than by reactive explanation of action. What comes first, science or technology?
• 42-3 – “At first glance it seems that the earth is much larger than anything else in the world, and that the moon and sun are much larger than the other stars. But correcting his [sic] mistaken impression by infallible reasoning, we learn that the moon is separated from us by a distance of about thirty times the earth’s diameter, and the sun by a distance six or seven hundred times the earth’s diameter. And by putting together what we know of the distances from us the sun and the moon with their apparent diameters, we learn that the moon is much smaller than the earth and the sun much larger.”
• 43 – “. . . the fixed stars are so far from the earth that by comparison Saturn is a near neighbour.”

 

• “The sun can be counted as one of the fixed stars, and the earth as one of the planets.”

 

• 44 – “There’s no difference between the hypotheses of Copernicus and Tycho, considered simply as hypotheses.”

 

• “Tycho says that he attributes less motion to the earth than Copernicus does, but actually he attributes more.”

 

• “Copernicus had no hesitation in attributing motion to the earth; Tycho ‘corrected’ him about this, regarding it as absurd from the point of view of physics and in conflict with the common opinion of mankind. But he didn’t attend carefully enough to the true nature of motion — despite his insistence that the earth doesn’t move at all he actually attributed to it more motion to it than Copernicus did!”

 

• “My denial that the earth moves is more careful than Copernicus’s and more correct than Tycho’s.”

 

• “The only difference between my position and those of Copernicus and Tycho is that I don’t attribute any motion to the earth, thus keeping closer to the truth than Tycho while also being more careful than Copernicus.”
• 45 – “The fixed stars don’t all turn on the same sphere. Each is surrounded by a vast space that isn’t occupied by any other star.”
• “Some astronomers have thought that all the fixed stars are situated on the surface of a single sphere, but that can’t be right if the sun is one of the fixed stars (or anyway is like the fixed stars in the facts about how it is situated). Why not? Because it’s empirically obvious that the sun is much nearer to us than the fixed stars are, and therefore doesn’t share a sphere-surface with them. The real situation is that the sun is surrounded by a vast space with not fixed stars in it, and the same must be true of each fixed star. So each fixed star must be very distant from all the others, and the fixed stars must vary widely in how far they are from the sun and from us.”
• “It’s not just the sun and the fixed stars that are fluid; so also is every heaven.”
  • What exactly does this mean?
• 46 – “The heavens carry along with them all the bodies that they contain.”

 

• “The earth is at rest in its own heaven which nevertheless carries it along.”

 

• We see that the earth isn’t supported by columns or held up by cables, but is completely immersed in a very fluid heaven. Let us assume that the earth is at rest, having no innate tendency to motion (because we don’t see any such propensity). But let’s not think that this prevents the earth from being carried along by the current of the heaven, following the motion of the heaven without itself moving. Compare this with an unanchored ship that isn’t driven by the wind or by oars, floating motionlessly in the middle of the ocean, though it may be imperceptibly carried along by the ebb and flow of this great mass of water.”

 

• “The same view should be taken of all the planets.”

 

• 47 – “If ‘motion’ is taken in its loose ordinary-language sense, it’s correct to say that the planets other than the earth move, but it’s still not correct to say that the earth moves.”

 

• “All the planets are carried round the sun by the heaven.”

 

• 47-8 – “Let’s stop worrying about the earth’s motion and suppose that the whole of the celestial matter — the heaven — in which the planets are located turns continuously like a vortex with the sun at its centre. Let us suppose further that the parts of the vortex nearer to the sun move faster than the parts further out from the sun, and that all the planets (earth included) always stay surrounded by the same portions of celestial matter. This single supposition lets us smoothly explain all the observed movements of the planets without bringing any supplementary apparatus.”
• 48 – “At some places along a river the water twists around on itself and forms a whirlpool with bits of straw floating in it, and four features of this can help us to understand planetary motion:
  • We see the straws carried around with the whirlpool.
  • Sometimes we see a straw also spinning around its own centre.
  • The straws nearer the centre of the whirlpool complete a revolution more quickly than the ones further out.
  • Although such a straw always has a circular motion, it almost never follows a perfect circle — there are usually some deviations from that.”
• “We can easily imagine all this happening in the same way with the planets, so that this single account explains all the planetary movements that we observe.”

 

• “How the individual planets are carried along.”

• “The movement of sun spots.”

• “How the earth rotates about its own centre, and the moon revolves around the earth.”

• “The motions of the heavens are not perfectly circular.”

• “The planets’ deviations from the plane of the ecliptic.”

• “Their longitudinal motion around the sun.”

• “This hypothesis makes it easy to understand all the observations of the planets.”

• “According to Tycho’s hypothesis the earth should be said to move about its own centre.”

• “It should also be said to move annually around the sun.”

• “The earth’s movement around the sun doesn’t affect the apparent positions of the fixed stars because they are so far away.”

 

• “The answer is that the fixed stars are too far away from the earth for these changes of distance to be observable by any means that we have. The distance that I suppose there to be between the earth and any fixed star is so immense that the whole circle of the earth’s path around the Sun should be counted as a mere point in comparison to it. Some people may find this incredible — I mean those whose minds aren’t accustomed to contemplating God’s mighty works, and who see the earth as the most important part of the universe because it’s where men live and (they think) everything was created for men. But astronomers won’t find it so strange, because they already know that the earth is like a mere point in comparison with the heaven.”

 

• “The supposition that the fixed stars are very distant is also required to explain the motion of comets, which are now agreed to be celestial bodies.”

 

 

John A. Schuster, “‘Waterworld’: Descartes’ Vortical Celestial Mechanics,” in The Science of Nature in the Seventeenth Century: Patterns of Change in Early Modern Natural Philosophy, eds. Peter R. Anstey & John A. Schuster (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), 35-80.

• 35 – “. . . Gaston Bachelard had in 1938 condemned Descartes’ plenist universe, including the vortex mechanics, as the ‘metaphysics of the sponge’, an exemplary ‘pre-scientific’ monstrosity, in other words, the sub-scientific progeny of cancerous metaphor and baroque ego projection.”
• 36 – “It will attempt to show the natural philosophical seriousness of Descartes’ vortex universe as an intellectually constructed object and as a strategic gambit. I shall try to place Descartes’ earliest celestial mechanics in relation to his manoeuvring in the natural philosophical contestation of his time.”

 

• “They, including Descartes, were attempting to displace Aristotelianism, install some version of Copernicanism, and create alternative hegemonic natural philosophical syntheses.”