Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction

if I am thinking, Descartes reflects, then I must exist—we have reached the notorious Cogito ergo sum.
You may well wonder how Descartes is to rebuild anything on the basis of what little has survived so fierce a test. But he isn’t cowed by the task. He has found that his grasp of his own existence is absolutely secure. But he can raise doubts about everything else, even his own body. So he (his mind, soul, self) must be something else, distinct from his body, and capable of existing without it. The body is one thing, the mind another—this is the famous (or infamous) Cartesian dualism that we saw in Chapter 6 (p. 63).
In the next step Descartes observes that he has the idea of a perfect being, God, so the question arises: how did he get the ability to think such a thought? As he points out elsewhere, if you had in mind the plan of an extremely intricate machine we would think that either you were a superb engineer yourself or had got the plan from someone who was. And since Descartes knows that he is far from perfect himself he reckons his idea of a perfect being can’t come from him, but only from a being that is actually perfect. That idea in his mind is the signature left by his creator.
Many readers will feel that Descartes’s idea of a perfect being is far too hazy, imprecise, and in a word imperfect to need anything more than Descartes for its cause. But he held the existence of God to be proved, and took a further step: what he believes when he has achieved the utmost clarity of which he is capable must be true. For otherwise his God-given faculties would be misleading in principle, which would make God a deceiver, and hence imperfect. So if scepticism says that even our very best efforts might lead us to falsehood, just dismiss it.
In Part 5 we are back with autobiography. Descartes turns to his scientific work, things which he had earlier ‘endeavoured to explain in a treatise which certain considerations prevent me from publishing’. These ‘considerations’ were in fact the condemnation of Galileo’s writings by the Church, as Descartes makes clearer (though without mentioning names) in Part 6. There he offers reasons for his decision, and for his further decision to present some of his results in the Discourse after all. The reasons are fairly convoluted, and don’t wholly dispel the suspicion that the case of Galileo had just frightened him off.
At this stage one of those unfortunate little things happens. Descartes was a notable mathematician, and no mean performer in physics. True, the work of Isaac Newton (1642–1727) wiped his physics off the map towards the end of the century, though not before Newton himself had accepted it and attempted to work within it until his late thirties. But the main example he selects for Part 5 is his theory about how the human heart works, and this nowadays sounds just plain quaint and fanciful—he believes it to be much hotter than any other part of the body, and makes it sound like a distillery in action. (All it distils is blood, some readers may be disappointed to learn.)
11. Descartes as physiologist—a naked Cartesian understandably feeling a bit chilly.
In spite (or partly because) of this glitch the Discourse is a rich and memorable work. An eminent founder of modern thought grapples with himself, Aristotelianism, scepticism, academic reaction, public and ecclesiastical opinion, physics, cosmology, and physiology, all in about fifty pages. Now that I call a real feast.Hegel: Introduction to the Philosophy of History
We encountered Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) in Chapter 6, though only briefly. His influence has been massive; we shall see more examples of it in Chapter 9, but important as they are they can give only the barest inkling of the extent of the Hegel-phenomenon. And the opposition to him started two very significant movements: existentialism, through the Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55), and in Britain the analytic school through Moore, Bertrand Russell, and the young Ludwig Wittgenstein. It took heavyweights with an alternative on offer to take people’s minds off Hegel, and then the effect was only partial, local, and temporary.
But there is another reason for introducing a work by Hegel at this point. Nearly all the philosophy we have looked at so far begins from what are relatively ordinary, everyday considerations. (Socrates: what will happen to my children if I do what my friends are suggesting? Hume: you can’t always believe what other people tell you. Descartes: when there’s so much disagreement between the authorities, what can we do but go back to basics and start again?) Hegel’s thought in the Philosophy of History, in contrast, arises out of a grand vision of reality and the forces that move it—this is heavy-duty metaphysics.
Hegel is often said to be a very difficult philosopher. I won’t deny it—if you select a page at random and read it from top to bottom you will probably feel that you might just as well have read it from bottom to top. But one of the most valuable experiences for someone coming new to his philosophy is that of finding how much easier things are if you approach the text with the grand metaphysical vision already in mind. The big picture is the key, so we begin by trying to get some grasp of it. Remember that I warned you back in Chapter 1 to expect to find some philosophy weird. You will find Hegel’s less weird, even if you still don’t believe a word of it, after you have read the Introduction to the Philosophy of History. Here goes.
We start with something called ‘The Idea’. Think of it as being rather like the Ideas of Plato (see p. 70)—a system of abstract universals from which things and events in the world take their shapes and natures. But it differs from Plato in two important ways. First, it