Descartes' Metaphysics and the Limits of Human Knowledge

Extract

[...] By taking in the Principles of Philosophy the entirety of his intellectual journey, concerning his research in physics, metaphysics, and morality, Descartes shows us here how, by getting out of the doubt he had imposed on himself concerning everything, he ended up discovering the indubitable reality of his mind, which establishes itself as the first principle of knowledge. But then the limit of human knowledge imposes itself. This spirit substance, capable of knowing and acting on material substance, that is, capable of establishing an objective knowledge of it and acting by modifying it, must now consider its limit in the face of the order of ends. [...]

[...] What is the limit of this knowledge, if it is not found in the phenomenal order itself? Where to find it and how to think it? Part II: From the Presumption of Metaphysics to Know the Order of Ends Explanation of the Second Article The title of the second article is thus edifying, as if it allowed us to answer almost immediately these two questions: « that one would presume too much of oneself if one undertook to know the end that God proposed in creating the world. [...]

[...] This sentence conjugates the spirit of Cartesian metaphysics to its anthropology. What consequences to draw from the fact that, according to its substance, man is a spiritual being in a material world, a being capable of understanding the order of the world and becoming its master? Too hasty an interpretation would lead us to forget the 'like', i.e. the analogy present in this sentence, and to assume that man is described by Descartes as the total possessor and master of nature, i.e. [...]

[...] It is more precisely article 1 and 2 of book III. In the principles of philosophy, as he writes in his preface, Descartes forms the encyclopedic project of ordering the sciences, that is, of establishing with precision and method the architecture of knowledge. He constitutes this order according to the allegory of a tree, whose roots are metaphysics, whose trunk is physics and whose main branches are mechanics, medicine and morality1. In this project, metaphysics, the science of principles or first causes, must constitute the ultimate foundation of all sciences. [...]

[...] Here, metaphysics must give way to anthropology. Man seems determined by the limit of his understanding to know and conceive the order of nature (understood in the sense of its physical laws) but unable to conceive the order of ends (the invisible architecture of the world created by God). Human reason and its free will therefore make him a knowing being within a certain limit, that of a thinking being that considers matter in its limitation and not in its illimitation. [...]