Discourse on the Method: What is the scientific method according to Descartes?

The four steps of Descartes’ scientific method—1) radical doubt, 2) divide difficulties into parts, 3) start with simples and ascend to composites, 4) complete enumeration—add up to a formula for how to think for yourself. This turns out to require the unification of yourself as a teacher and yourself as a student—or guiding yourself even and especially when you don’t know where you are going. We tend toward either all teacher or all student, which Descartes gives us through an image of two kinds of brains. One is all courage and precipitous judgment, the other all modesty and capitulation. But Descartes suggest we in fact need both, that we can’t actually be one without the other. For the terrible truth—the paralyzing truth that makes philosophy so dangerous—is that you will only have one teacher in your life: you. And the first thing you need to teach yourself is how to learn. And this is incredibly complicated, and it is an art that all human beings think they already have. We are, Descartes notes in the famously ironic first sentence of his Discourse—all content with our allotment of good sense, our ability to tell the true from the false and judge accordingly. But it is precisely thinking that we already know how to judge which gets in the way of our learning how to judge. Descartes’ explanation? We do not know how to think for ourselves, because we are not ourselves. We are reflections—images—of our circumstances: our time, our culture, the fashion of the day. Thus Descartes is modeling the possibility of being free from the given, from the accidental circumstances that we identify as ourselves, so that we can be more than mere accidents.

This is why Descartes’ method has no content, but is a formula; you are the content. He has to stand in, but why can he stand in? Because he knows he is mediocre. Descartes is the exceptional man who knows he is exceptional because he is a man, not because he is Descartes. So the problem is that something has to move us to learn, and what moves us to learn is the same thing that moves us not to learn: natural egoism. The price of becoming an exceptional man, then, is to give up your attachment to being an exceptional individual. You can all think for yourselves; in this exceptional capacity, you are all exactly the same. The catch, however, is that you can only think for yourself as a human being, not as Ron, Sarah, Alison, Josh. Because what is exceptional about you is that you are human. Not that you are beautiful, or smart; not that you are American or Christian; not that someone loves you or that you have survived great hardship. What is exceptional about you is that you are human. And the most exceptional among men know this about themselves.

Your individuality is the sign of your enslavement; it is everything about you that has been given to you. So Descartes makes a counter offer: let it go and be free. Be men who are like gods instead of beasts who are like men—who are chained to the given and attached to their chains because they are flattering fables and histories—those seductive images of exceptional individuals. You want to be Hamlet, Achilles, Harry Potter, Don Quixote, Elizabeth Bennet, Isabella Archer; or you want to be Batman, Rocky Balboa, James Bond, Indiana Jones, Katniss Everdeen. Descartes’ proposal: don’t want to be an image of a man; be a man—the image of god. And to do this you have to give up being someone else—not just the great poetic fables of our humanity, but the fable of who you tell yourself you are, your own history. Only then have you mastered the art of learning and can begin teaching yourself, because, again, what is exceptional about man is that he can learn, and what gets in almost every man’s way is that he thinks he already knows. This is our investment: Descartes cannot free you and he cannot think for you. But if you are courageous and modest enough to take him as the image of a man—the image to undo the power that image has over all men—then you might just be able to use his formula to set your imagination free, to imagine a new world, which is what has happened because of Descartes.

The scientific method, then, is a way to think for yourself instead of letting your givenness think for you. All men can learn this art, because that is what it is to be a man—we each possess the whole of reason. In this Descartes agrees with the ancients. Therefore thinking for yourself—the unity of teaching and learning—ranks among the studies that can be acquired through work and practice. Like math and unlike poetry. The great deception of nature is that most free beings appear not to be free because they have fallen for appearance. Changing the way you see the world changes the world; and seeing yourself—self-awareness—changes you: it frees you to be an exceptional beast. Or just a man.

Descartes thus gives us two imperatives at once: 1) Stop wanting to be exceptional; you already are—which makes you just like everyone else. 2) Stop being mediocre—and wanting, like everyone else, to be exceptional, which is exactly what is keeping you from being exceptional.

— Charlie Barrett, Faculty Member