Well yesterday I blogged about Baruch Spinoza but today I want to say a few things about the philosopher Rene Descartes, another philosopher I have learned more about recently and am inspired by.

Descartes was a French philosopher and is often considered the founder of modern philosophy and he spent a good portion of his life living in Amsterdam from 1629 to 1649. The importance of Amsterdam and the Netherlands in the 17th century as the one country at the time where there was freedom of thought should not be underestimated and is probably what attracted the likes of Descartes to it.

Descartes is most famous for his phrase Cognito ergo sum (which originally appeared in French as Je Penske, don’t je suis), or “I think therefore I am”. I am currently reading Meta Human by Deepak Chopra and he states it may be more accurate to say “I am, therefore I think” but maybe more on that in a future blog.

Anyway to understand the statement, “I think therefore I am” some further context may be helpful. At the time, many philosophers claimed that truth was acquired through sense impressions however Descartes disagreed. He argued that our senses are unreliable as people are often deceived by their own eyes, dreams and imaginations. Descartes realised that his argument opened the door for ‘radical doubt’ as what was stopping anyone then from doubting the existence of everything? The cognito ergo sum argument was his remedy, even if you doubt the existence of everything you cannot doubt the existence of your own mind. Doubting indicates thinking and thinking indicates existing. Descartes argued that self evident truths such as this and not the senses must be the foundation of philosophical investigations.

Descartes was a rationalist and relied on the power of human logic. His methods opened the door to empirical scientific thinking and had implications for every field raising the question that if the human mind was the true basis for understanding, did it not follow that the central point of all endeavour should be the individual human being?

Descartes aim was to make our minds better equipped for thinking and he believed in grounding all of our ideas to experience and reason not authority and tradition.

Descartes ideas were the first stirrings of the enlightenment and Similar to Spinoza who came after him he had preachers and orthodox professors accusing him of being radical, a revolutionary and an atheist (actually Descartes was a devout catholic) and his ideas that incited this fury also attracted many intellectuals to his work.

Here are some of my favourites Descartes quotes …

Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it.

It is not enough to have a good mind, the main thing is to use it well. 

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.

If you would be a seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.

Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems.

The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as the greatest virtues.

Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power.

I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake.