10.7 Descartes — Discours de la méthode — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read about 1,800 words of René Descartes's Discours de la méthode (1637): good sense, the book of the world, the four rules of method, and the famous je pense, donc je suis . Follow a philosophical argument told as a personal story, in the first person. Read the long seventeenth-century sentence, with its subordinate clauses and its old spellings such as étois and connoissance . Understand why this short book is seen as a founding text of modern philosophy and of modern French prose. Sentences from this text, before the notes. Read the French aloud; all of them come back below. French English Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partagée ; Good sense is the most evenly shared thing in the world; Ainsi mon dessein n’est pas d’enseigner ici la méthode que chacun doit suivre pour bien conduire sa raison, So my purpose here is not to teach the method that everyone must follow to conduct their reason well, Et je ne sache point de qualités que celles-ci qui servent à la perfection de l’esprit ; And I know of no qualities but these that serve to perfect the mind; c’est-à-dire, d’éviter soigneusement la précipitation et la prévention, that is, to avoid carefully haste and prejudice, Le second, de diviser chacune des difficultés que j’examinerois, The second, to divide each of the difficulties I would examine, Et comme la multitude des lois fournit souvent des excuses aux vices, And just as a multitude of laws often provides excuses for vices, Prerequisites : 10.6 — this lesson follows 10.6 Argument . The philosophy words of 5.20 Vocabulary and the academic French of 5.25 Vocabulary will help; the imperfect subjunctive, que je fusse , que je connusse , appears often and is reviewed in 12.9 Review . About this text René Descartes (1596–1650) was educated by the Jesuits at La Flèche , served as a volunteer in the armies of the Netherlands and of Bavaria, and spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic, where he could work in peace. He died in Stockholm, where Queen Christina of Sweden had invited him. Mathematician as well as philosopher, he invented analytic geometry, the method of locating points by coordinates. The Discours de la méthode appeared anonymously at Leiden in 1637 as the preface to three scientific essays on optics, meteorology and geometry. Descartes wrote it in French, not in Latin, the language of scholars, so that it could be read by anyone with good sense, including women and people without a university education. Its full title begins Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison et chercher la vérité dans les sciences . Its clear, logical French became a model for the prose of the classical age. The text here gives the opening of the first part, the passage on the book of the world, the four rules of the second part, and the opening of the fourth part, where Descartes reaches the certainty of his own existence; about 1,800 words, from the edition of the works of Descartes by Victor Cousin, published in Paris by Levrault in 1824, as transcribed in French Wikisource. The passages left out are marked […]. The edition keeps the old spelling oi for the modern ai : j'étois for j'étais , connoître for connaître . The plan Descartes presents his philosophy as the story of his own mind. Step Where What Descartes does Equal reason Opening of part one Good sense is equally shared; differences of opinion come from the way we use it, not from unequal minds. A story, not a lesson Part one He will not teach the method everyone must follow, only tell how he conducted his own reason. The book of the world End of part one Disappointed by his studies, he travels to learn from real life rather than from books. The four rules Part two Evidence, division, order, enumeration: a short method instead of a long logic. Radical doubt Part four He rejects as false everything that can be doubted: the senses, reasoning, even waking life. The first certainty Part four While doubting, he must exist: je pense, donc je suis . He is a thing whose nature is to think. The method of doubt. Descartes does not doubt because he is a sceptic. He doubts in order to find something that resists all doubt. Each step widens the doubt: the senses sometimes deceive, so suppose they always do; people make mistakes in reasoning, so reject all proofs; dreams feel real, so suppose that all thoughts are dreams. At the bottom of this doubt one thing remains: the one who doubts. Worked example How Descartes builds the long sentence of the cogito. The setting. Mais aussitôt après je pris garde que : the turn comes with mais and a precise moment, aussitôt après , as in a story. The discovery is presented as something that happened to him. The condition. pendant que je voulois ainsi penser que tout étoit faux : the doubt itself is the condition of the certainty. The more he doubts, the more he thinks. The necessity. il falloit nécessairement que moi qui le pensois fusse quelque chose . Notice the strong pronoun moi , placed before its verb, and the imperfect subjunctive fusse after il falloit que . The formula. cette vérité, je pense, donc je suis : five words, set in apposition inside a long sentence, without capital letters or quotation marks in this edition. The famous Latin form, cogito, ergo sum , appeared only later, in Latin works. The test. toutes les plus extravagantes suppositions des sceptiques n'étoient pas capables de l'ébranler : the truth is tested against the strongest possible attack and holds. The conclusion. je jugeai que je pouvois la recevoir sans scrupule pour le premier principe de la philosophie que je cherchois . The whole of his philosophy will be built on this foundation, as a building on a rock. Full translation An English translation of the whole text, made for this course and kept close to the original. The numbers are the paragraph numbers of the original text, so you can move between the two. Discourse on the Method Good sense is the most evenly shared thing