Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [38]
The Rationalists
Descartes
Everyone with even a smattering of higher education knows that René Descartes was one of the most influential philosophers of the modern era, the inventor of analytic geometry, and a physicist of some accomplishment. Few, however, realize that he was, says the historian of psychology Robert Watson, “the first great psychologist of the modern age.” But, adds Watson, “this is not the same as saying that he was the first modern psychologist. Unlike some scientists of his day, he still made metaphysical assumptions, and consequently his psychology was subservient to his philosophy.”2 Nevertheless, he was the first person since Aristotle to create a new psychology.
Descartes was born in Touraine in 1596; he acquired tuberculosis from his mother, who died of it a few days after his birth, and was a sickly infant, a weakling during childhood, and a small and relatively frail adult. His father, a prosperous lawyer, sent him off at eight to the Jesuit college at La Flèche, where he got a thorough grounding in mathematics and philosophy. His teachers, recognizing both his physical weakness and unusual mental ability, permitted him to remain in bed reading long after the usual hour of rising, and it became his lifelong practice to lie abed and cogitate all morning. Fortunately, he inherited enough money from his father to make this regimen feasible.
In his late teens the small and rather homely Descartes tried the social life and casinos of Paris, found them boring, and turned to the solitary study of mathematics and philosophy. But he grew troubled as he realized that so many learned men had arrived at so many different answers to the important philosophic questions. Discouraged and depressed, he decided to seek answers in the real world; he enlisted first in the army of Prince Maurice of Nassau and later that of the Duke of Bavaria. It is unclear whether or not he saw action but clear that he found ordinary men no wiser than scholars. After several years, he returned to the world of private thought.
Even before returning to private life Descartes had a memorable philosophical epiphany. At twenty-three, he spent one cold morning shut up in a “stove”—his word, but probably a small heated room—and had several visions through which he realized that he could ignore the disparate opinions of the “ancients” and use the rigorous reasoning of mathematics to achieve philosophic certainties. Thus was rationalist philosophy founded.
After returning to civilian life, Descartes spent some time traveling, then lived in Paris for some years, all the while studying philosophy and the physical sciences. At thirty-two he moved to Protestant Holland, partly because in Paris friends too often broke in on his quiet meditations, partly because he was afraid that his approach to truth—first, doubt everything—might lead to accusations of heresy. This he deeply feared; he sought to stay on good terms with the Catholic Church, even interrupting his discussion of body and mind in one work to say, typically, “Recalling my insignificance, I affirm nothing, but submit all these opinions to the authority of the Catholic Church, and to the judgment of the more sage.”3
In Holland he lived mostly in peace, though he was sometimes attacked by Protestant extremists for holding dangerous views; to preserve his quiet and privacy he moved twenty-four times in twenty years. But he was not an ascetic or recluse; he welcomed the visits of fellow savants, had a mistress and a daughter (who died in childhood), and always lived in comfortable surroundings with a retinue of servants.
His most important works, Discourse on Method (1637) and Meditations on First Philosophy (1642), were written during