Class Reflections: Rene Descartes Discourse On Method Part 1

it's worth thinking about the subjects they made us study in high school

Earlier this week, we started what will be two week’s study of Rene Descartes works in my Foundations of Philosophy classes. The bulk of that will be working our way through his Meditations On First Philosophy, but we kicked things off by looking for one class session at his shorter Discourse on Method, parts 1-3. Later on, we’ll be revisting that work, looking at the portion of part 5 where Descartes discusses ways we could distinguish human beings (who in his view have minds) from animals or machines.

Parts 2 and 3 of Descartes’ Discourse On Method provide us with the famous four “rules of method” and his three “maxims of provisional morality”, and to be sure, we discussed those in class, both in terms of their meaning and in how one might apply them not just in philosophy or academic subjects, but also to the myriad matters of “real life”. There are a lot of interesting things one might say about those parts of the work, but today my reflections are going to focus just on the very first part.

Descartes provides us with a narrative of his education and his subsequent travels, and well-written stories of that sort are usually pretty interesting. In this case, however, Descartes is rather critical of the education he received, and examines it discipline by discipline, engaging in judgements about whether what he studied was valuable or not from several different perspectives.

This is something that our contemporary students (and probably those of us teaching them) can easily related to. Who didn’t ask at one point in high school (or at least hear one of their classmates asking) questions like: “What is this good for?”, “When will I ever use this in real life?”, or “Why are we learning this?” All too often we criticize those queries when high school or college students without thinking about whether they have any legitimacy to them. After all, why shouldn’t students want to know what studying a subject they’re expected to sit through classes on, which doesn’t seem to have much relevance to the lives they are living or expect to live, is going to do for them down the line?

Some of our students - and perhaps earlier versions of ourselves - are more trusting of the educators and curricula. Descartes himself writes:

I was nourished on literature from the time of my childhood. Because people persuaded me that through literature one could acquire a clear and assured understanding of everything useful in life, I had an intense desire to take it up.

It makes sense, doesn’t it, that he’d take up the study of what he is calling here “literature”? Older people, who presumably know what they’re talking about, told him that it would be something rewarding for him. And he trusted their experience, their prudence, their authority. “Go to college, get a degree, and you’ll go further in life” - that’s something so many kids have been told, and they believe it, at least until they find out the connection between graduating college and success in life is a lot more tenuous than they had been led to believe.

Descartes continues:

But as soon as I had completed that entire course of study at the end of which one was usually accepted into the rank of scholars, I changed my opinion completely. For I found myself burdened by so many doubts and errors that it seemed to me I had gained nothing by trying to instruct myself, other than the fact that I had increasingly discovered my own ignorance.

Now, discovering one’s own ignorance, as we point out earlier in the class, that’s not nothing. But it’s not exactly something either. Definitely not the something that the person studying was hoping for at the end of their studies!

Before we look at Descartes’ own narrative and assessments of the disciplines he studied under this general rubric of “literature”, I ask my students what classes and disciplines they took in high school. We generally start with the four main subjects around which American secondary education revolves, namely:

• English (generally writing classes and literature classes)

• History or more broadly Social Science (so it can include sociology or psychology)

• Science (usually biology, then chemistry, then physics)

• and Mathematics

Most students will have studied these either all four years or at least three years of their time in high school. their If they went to a religious school, they might also have taken a fifth subject over four years, generally called either Religion or Theology.

What else will they generally have taken classes in, often been required to study? Most of them at Marquette have taken classes in a foreign language, almost all of them in Spanish (a few others will have had French, German, Italian, or Mandarin). Most of them will also have had Gym or Physical Education classes, sometimes coupled with Health classes, for at least a few of their four years. And then there are the elective subjects, those that at some schools will get cut if the budget gets too tight. These include:

• Art

• Music

• Shop

• Culinary Arts

• Computer Classes

After we go through this “what did you take” exercise, I ask them a few followup questions about those classes that will connect our brief review of their curricula to Descartes’ review of his:

• which of these subjects have proven useful for them, and for what matters?

• which of these subjects do they think provided them with certain or at least reliable knowledge about matters?

• what have they actually retained in memory from those classes?

That third question isn’t something Descartes is particularly concerned with, since he assumes (quite reasonably) that if you study a subject in an intelligent way, motivated to learn, even if your instructors aren’t great, you should remember most of what you studied in your courses. I’ve learned that, alas, that is often not the case for the students at the many different academic institutions at which I have taught. That’s a real shame, because it tends to continue on through their university education. So many students “learn” what they’re expected to in their classes, and over time retain very little of it. But that’s a topic to discuss more in another post.

Why those other two questions? Because Descartes himself considers whether the subjects that his elder and presumably better-informed teachers had him study really are useful for things that matter, and whether there’s any genuinely reliable knowledge in them or not.

The one discipline that Descartes discovers in his retrospective analysis that does meet these criteria of usefulness and certainty is mathematics.

What about a discipline that he studied, and in fact high schoolers in many other countries also get introduced to, but most American high schoolers don’t, namely philosophy? That’s a mess, according to Descartes, and that’s precisely why he aims to make a new start in the discipline. And since the science, in Descartes’ view, are dependent upon philosophy, if that’s uncertain then they are too.

Now Descartes’ main project includes the task of establishing philosophy on what he thinks will be, for the first time, a truly sound foundation. This isn’t of course a unique endeavor by any means. There are quite a few attempts to do this in modern philosophy, including one very notable attempt by Descartes’ contemporary Thomas Hobbes. After that, he can (and others) can rebuild human knowledge and education along improved lines. But that aspect of his project is something we work through later in our class.

Students have some interesting reactions to discovering that one of the most famous philosophers expressed such pejorative judgements about the subjects they had been assigned to study in high school, and continue to be required to study (at least some of them, at least for a semester or two) in college or university. But they can also relate to this guy who says “I studied what I was supposed to”, and then asks: “Where are the benefits that were supposed to come through spending all this time and thought on those subjects?”

These questions about usefulness, certainty or reliability, and retention of the subjects we collectively tell them are important as components of their “education” - those are well worth raising and reflecting upon in a thoughtful manner. And that’s what they get to see Descartes himself doing, provided we don’t skip over part 1 so we can get to what so many others consider the real “meat” of the Discourse, parts 2 and 3 with the rule and maxims.