Discourse on Method - René Descartes (1637)

(Joel Davidson | Home | Books)


I enjoyed my time with this book. It helps that it’s short (70 something pages). I couldn’t read something like this that was 5 times its length. From what I understand, Descartes was writing this as a sort of simplified prelude or footnotes to other, larger works, and I think this feels accurate. The thread is one of Descartes’ own personal enlightenment with the implication that we then should move to a similar state of mathematical enlightenment too. The actual charting of this thread is much more jerky and poorly paced than would typically be stomached if the content wasn’t so revelatory. Descartes talks about his own intellectual history, a few sets of axioms (all of which seems sort of half baked, although close to the money), and then ties some of this together with going on about his findings in natural science and how they he’s managed to accomplish this via his method. And while his ramblings about the inner working of that heart don’t exactly make the reader want to run out and apply his method to their own life, Descartes observations of the rudimentary phenomena of life does feel a fundamental shift in how philosophy is understood, and questions first principles in a way that feels at once enlightening, frighteningly accurate, and, in retrospect, violently obvious. Reading through this over the course of a couple days in 2023 still has much of the bite that I imagine it had back in the day. More than most, I feel this book has obvious revolutionary qualities which Descartes’ own rhetoric helps emphasize. It’s no wonder why, along with Montaigne, his bust sits on a pedestal in Versailles, a figure of enlightenment that any nation would be proud to foster.