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Cartesianism
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Cartesianism is a set of philosophical traditions and scientific attitudes. Metaphysically, Cartesianism is rationalist and Platonic, meaning that certain knowledge is derived by reason from innate ideas. This opposes the empiricist Aristotelian view that all knowledge is probable and is based on sense experience. In practice... Cartesians developed probabilistic scientific views from observation and experiment, as did empiricists. Cartesians had to be satisfied with uncertainty in science because they believed that God is omnipotent and that his will is entirely free. From this it follows that God, who, in addition to the material world, created all truths (such as those of mathematics and the laws of nature), could, nonetheless, given his infinite intellect and his free will, arbitrarily make even contradictions be true.
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Perhaps the most enthusiastic proponent of Cartesianism was a former student of Martonfalvi, Miklós Apáti (1662–1724). This Debrecen theologian was a follower of Pierre Poiret, the master of modern European psychology and irrational rationalism. Like Descartes, Apáti believed that man's cognitive ability was limitless; he adopted Descartes' terminology and methodology in arguing that free will was the keystone of self-knowledge, and that the principal instrument for understanding man's environment was mathematics. The publication in Amsterdam of Apáti's main work,
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Cartesianism affirmed the two positive axioms of the supremacy of reason, and the invariability of the laws of nature; and its instrument was a new rigorous analytical method, which was applicable to history as well as to physical knowledge. The axioms had destructive corollaries. The immutability of the processes of nature collided with the theory of an active Providence. The supremacy of reason shook the thrones from which authority and tradition had tyrannised over the brains of men. Cartesianism was equivalent to a declaration of the Independence of Man.
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Cartesianism was critically evaluated in England by Henry More and was popularized by Antoine Le Grand, a French Franciscan, who gave an exposition of the typically ingenious mechanistic explanation of light and colour. Light consists of tiny, spinning globes of highly elastic, subtle matter that fly through the air in straight lines and bounce like tennis balls on angles consistent with the laws of optics. Different colours, in this view, are caused by different speeds and spins of the globes, determined by the texture of the surfaces that reflect or transmit light. The spectrum of colours caused by light passing through a triangular prism is the result of the globes passing more slowly through thicker rather than thinner portions. The same spectrum of colours occurs when light passes through thinner and thicker parts of raindrops, giving rise to rainbows. Such simple mechanistic explanations were shown by Newton and others to be inadequate for explaining the forces of gravitation and chemical bonding.
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Schmaltz's "radical" Cartesians acquire their credentials largely through their opposition to "mainstream" Cartesianism as described by Bouillier. Yet many historians would contest even placing the label "history" on Bouillier's work. It narrates the history of Cartesianism in idealized philosophical terms, and it is ... preoccupied with demonstrating Descartes' Catholic orthodoxy (the thesis which Watson amusingly labels "The Saint Descartes Preservation Society"). This fact is not surprising when one realizes that the book was published in the early years of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte's imperial reign, at a time when concerns about secularism, materialism, and clerical authority made Descartes' Catholicism a particular source of intellectual interest. Yet a contemporary historian might see a certain interest in framing the history of radical Cartesianism in more contemporary terms given the very different climate of opinion today. Unfortunately Schmaltz possesses no such historical instincts.
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Descartes's influence is so pervasive... that all Western philosophers, even when they deny Cartesianism, can be said to be Cartesians, as they can be said to be Greeks; their positions are necessarily responses to issues posed by Descartes. Descartes also stands at the beginning of modern mathematics; through his invention of analytic geometry, he laid essential ground for the invention of the infinitesimal calculus by Newton and Leibniz. Cartesian method was brilliantly elaborated by the Jansenists Pierre Nicole and Arnauld in logic and grammar texts that are fundamental to linguistics. Hume's distinction between fact and value issued from the elevation of the mathematically objective over the emotional and subjective. Descartes's skeptical, mathematical method underpins modern science; his rationality forms modern Western consciousness; and his intense desire to control mind and matter corresponds to the ultimate secular goal of contemporary science and society. This stress on mastery of nature, including man, has led to the contemporary sense of "Cartesian" as standing for everything that is crassly materialistic, logical, unfeeling, and inhuman in science, technology, and society.
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