The Insecure Descartes

The great modern day philosophical systems were formed during the 17th century and began with the deeply insecure Rene Descartes, a man completely overwhelmed by doubt, his only possession. Doubt, thus, became his departure point, as well as the very demeanor of his philosophy. During this time, the three great questions of medieval philosophy flared up again – the philosophies of God, of man and of the world. With regards to Theology, Descartes emphasized the practical side – how to attain heaven – and moves on to the question of God, to conclude that reason cannot accomplish anything with such a great question. Descartes became more and more confused and eventually believed everything to be false, until he realized that his own existence cannot be false. In his "Discourse on Method" Part IV, he says: "While I wished to think thus, that everything was false, it necessarily had to be true that I, who was thinking this, was something; and, observing that this truth that I, who was thinking this, was something; and observing that this truth – "I think, therefore I am" – was so firm and so sure that all the most extravagant suppositions of the skeptics were incapable of shaking it, I judged that I could accept it without a scruple as the first principle of the philosophy I was seeking". He proclaimed to be merely a "thing that thinks" – mens cogitatio. Ego sum res cogitans. He developed the dualist theory in which we find a very definite distinction between body and mind, a theory widely accepted by Christianity. Gilbert Ryle, in his book "The concept of mind", refers to the dualist theory as the official doctrine in which the body serves as a receptacle for the mind or the soul. In this doctrine, the mind is connected to the body by means of the brain that acquires and stores information through the bodily senses.

In the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church the following concise conspectus of Descartes’ philosophy is found: "The beginning of his philosophy was his own self-consciousness – cogito ergu sum. He next turned to the ideas of his own mind, and concluded that in experience, as in mathematics, whatever is clearly and distinctly conceived…………….is true. The first clear and distinct idea which a thinking ego finds outside itself, is the idea of God………… the veracity of our other ideas is guaranteed in turn by God’s existence and goodness….". The thinking ego, is the soul. The ego gained a new and profound rank after the Greek era. Julian Marias says: "In the Christian middle ages, it becomes a subject of a mission, of a destiny, the ego is a creature, but one created in the Image of God, and the subject of a destiny, of a personal mission".

In the history of modern philosophy there is the attempt, not only by Descartes, but by all modern philosophers, to base metaphysics on the ego of man. This ego is the soul that is completely distinct from the body, with God as the ontological basis of the ego and of all things.