The best books are those that tell you what you already know, but didn’t know that you knew.—Neel Burton, psychiatrist and philosopher, University of Oxford
There is more to being human than the absence of disorder.
If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent much of your life trying to make sense of things—happiness and suffering, love and loss, reason and emotion, the strange business of being human.
We live in an era of rapid change. Many of the structures that once gave us identity, meaning, and direction have weakened. More than ever, we must answer life’s deepest questions for ourselves. How should we live, love, work, suffer, and die?
My search for answers has taken me through philosophy, psychology, literature, history, and ancient wisdom—because the deepest truths often emerge where disciplines meet.
I hope you find something here that speaks to you.
If you’re new here, these are good places to begin.
Be prepared to laugh. Musonius could be severe and hilarious in the same breath—a combination that made him one of antiquity’s most admired teachers.
If Stoicism has a forgotten hero, it is Musonius Rufus.
Today, the names of Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius are familiar to millions. But in antiquity, many regarded Musonius as the greatest Stoic teacher of them all. His lectures attracted students from across the Roman world, foremost among them Epictetus.
Unlike Seneca, Musonius wrote no polished essays. His philosophy was not intended for libraries but for life. He taught in public, argued fearlessly, endured repeated exile, and demonstrated by his example that philosophy is not something merely to discuss, but something to live.
For Musonius, philosophy was not an escape from ordinary life but a preparation for it. It taught people how to eat, work, marry, raise children, endure hardship, and come to terms with death. His school, he liked to say, was not some concert hall, where people came to be amused and entertained, but a hospital, where they came, in trepidation, to be treated.
Yet there was nothing gloomy about him. Though uncompromising in his principles, he possessed a wonderfully dry wit. When a man with a long beard claimed to be a philosopher, Musonius replied that he could see the beard—but not the philosopher.
Beginnings
Gaius Musonius Rufus (c. 25–c. 100 CE) was born in Etruria into a family of Roman equestrians.
As a young man, he went about inquiring into the health of people’s souls, suggesting that his sympathies then lay more with the Cynics than with the Stoics.
He later established himself in Rome as one of the most celebrated Stoic teachers of the age.
When, in 60 CE, the paranoid Nero banished Rubellius Plautus, a Stoic and distant cousin of Nero, Musonius followed his friend to Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) and only returned to Rome after Plautus’ death in 62.
Second and Third Exiles
When, in 65, Nero learnt of the Pisonian conspiracy, led by the senator Gaius Calpurnius Piso, to have him overthrown, he condemned nineteen people to death, including Seneca. Though not involved in the plot, Musonius was banished to the barren island of Gyaros, the Alcatraz of the Mediterranean.
Exile, however, seemed to weigh lightly upon him, even on Gyaros, and one of his surviving lectures is entitled, Why Exile Is Not an Evil.
Exile, he says, does not deprive us of water, earth, air, or the sun and stars. Nor does it deprive us of human companionship. But by removing us from luxurious living, it can cure our bodies and souls of many ills.
More significantly, exile does not prevent us from caring for our real needs and acquiring virtue. On the contrary, it provides us with more leisure in which to study and do good deeds.
Resourceful people are resourceful wherever they find themselves. Those who lack resourcefulness have vice, and not exile, to blame for their miseries. Ergo, it is vice, and not exile, that we should fear.
Musonius returned to Rome in 68, in the reign of Galba. In 70, in the reign of Vespasian, he accused and obtained the conviction of Egnatius Celer, who, despite calling himself a Stoic, had colluded with Nero in condemning the Stoic Barea Soranius and his daughter Servilia to death.
When, in 71, Vespasian banished all philosophers from Rome, his reputation rode so high that he was tolerated to remain—before being banished all the same into his third and longest exile, this time in Syria.
He returned to Rome in 79, in the reign of Titus, and died around 100 CE.
The Teacher of Philosophy
Musonius exerted an important influence on his two most famous pupils, Epictetus and the polymath Dio Chrysostom (‘Dio the Golden-Mouthed’).
To separate the wheat from the chaff, he would often turn would-be students away, explaining to the young Epictetus that ‘the more one pushes the intelligent person away from the life he was born for, the more he inclines towards it.’
His school, he insisted, was no place for clever performances. People came not to be entertained but to be cured. Because treatment can sometimes be painful, students might expect to suffer a bit. He measured the success of his lectures not by the applause that they received but by the shock and silence that they provoked.
He quoted Homer after Odysseus had related the length of his labours:
Thus he spoke, and they all stayed softly in silence, And they were held by a magic spell in the shadowy hall.
Epictetus records Musonius saying:
Am I to sit down and tell you clever slogans and sayings so that you praise me as you leave, even though the shoulder is no better than it was, the head still hurts, and the abscess and fistula remain? Do young men leave home for these reasons and leave behind their parents, friends, kinfolk, and property so that they may yell ‘hooray’ when you utter witticisms? Did Socrates do this, or Zeno, or Cleanthes?
Musonius could be severe. By Epictetus’ own account, he once rebuked him for overlooking the omission in a syllogism (formal logical argument). Epictetus sought to excuse himself, saying, ‘It’s not like I burnt down the Capitol’—to which Musonius replied, ‘Idiot, the omission here isthe Capitol.’
Nothing worthwhile, he insisted, is acquired without pain. But if we think that the path of virtue is too arduous, let us consider the alternatives and how much more trouble people put up with for the sake of gain or how many ills they suffer for the sake of fame, even though these things are worthless.
Practical Philosophy
Insofar as we know, Musonius did not work on anything for publication. However, two of his students wrote down his sayings and opinions. The Discourses, collected by a certain Lucius, form the basis of the 21 short lectures preserved in Stobaeus. But a second work, by one Pollio, has been lost except for fragments.
All in all, there remain 31 fragments (preserved in Stobaeus, Epictetus, and Aulus Gellius), as well as the 21 lectures, which altogether fit comfortably within 80 or so pages.
Musonius’ lectures are full of practical, everyday advice aimed at instilling virtue and include a lecture on home furnishings and even a lecture on hair. Men, he advised, ought to grow a beard on the grounds that the beard is the mark of manhood, on a par with a cock’s comb or a lion’s mane.
Besides facial hair, Musonius advocated a vegetarian diet (preferably raw and unprepared), plain clothing, and shelter of a kind that offers little more than the protection afforded by a cave.
He once gave a thousand sesterces to a man claiming to be a philosopher. When his friends protested that the fellow was a charlatan, he let him keep the not-inconsiderable sum, explaining that money was exactly what he deserved.
To do philosophy, said Musonius, is to reason correctly, and to reason correctly is to act correctly. The person who does philosophy thereby takes care of his country, family, and friends—in a word, everybody.
The person who does not do philosophy, even if he be a doctor, lawyer, or some such, is thoughtless, and thoughtlessness is very near to insanity.
Even if one rules only oneself, no one is more kingly than a philosopher or more fit to rule, because one cannot rule others unless one first rules oneself.
Musonius was not merely a teacher of Stoicism. He showed what a Stoic looked like.
Continue Exploring
Delve deeper into the life and times of Musonius in Stoic Stories, an overview of Stoicism through its best stories.
According to Tacitus, Seneca modelled his death on that of Socrates, discussing philosophy with his friends.
Few philosophers have lived a life as dramatic or conflicted as Seneca’s. The emperor Nero made him the richest man in the Roman Empire before ordering him to commit suicide.
Today, Seneca is our most important primary source on ancient Stoicism, followed by Epictetus, Musonius Rufus, and Marcus Aurelius.
Stoicism has exerted a profound influence on the history of ideas, shaping the thought of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Adam Smith, and J. S. Mill. In mental health, it inspired what has become the world’s most widely practised form of psychotherapy: cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT).
The Teacher’s Pet
Lucius Annaeus Seneca was probably born in 4 BCE, the same year as Jesus, in Corduba (modern-day Córdoba), Hispania.
His father, Seneca the Elder (Lucius Annaeus Seneca Maior), was a Roman equestrian who wrote books on rhetoric and Roman history. His elder brother Novatus, better known as Gallio, became a senator, and his younger brother Mela was the father of the poet Lucan.
Seneca was raised in Rome. His tutors included Attalus the Stoic, Sotion, and Papirius Fabianus. He so admired Attalus that he ‘practically laid siege to his classroom’. He was ‘the first to arrive and the last to leave’ and often left with the desire to be poor.
He suffered from poor health—possibly tuberculosis on a background of asthma—and, from his mid-twenties, spent several years convalescing in Alexandria, where he lived with his mother’s sister and her husband, Gaius Galerius, the governor of Egypt.
The three sailed back to Rome in 32, but Galerius perished in a shipwreck.
These early experiences of illness and uncertainty may help to explain Seneca’s lifelong preoccupation with adversity, mortality, and the best use of life.
Exile on Corsica
A few years after his return, Seneca was elected quaestor, making him a senator.
According to the historian Cassius Dio (d. c. 235 CE), Seneca, ‘who was superior in wisdom to all the Romans of his day and to many others as well,’ spoke so eloquently in the Senate that the emperor Caligula ordered his execution, only to stay the order after being told that he was in any case terminally ill.
In 41, the throne passed to Caligula’s uncle Claudius, and the new empress Messalina, seeking to eliminate a potential rival, accused Caligula’s sister Julia Livilla of adultery with Seneca. The Senate sentenced Seneca to death, but Claudius commuted the sentence to exile on Corsica.
On Corsica, Seneca wrote the Consolation to Polybius, a letter purporting to comfort Polybius, Claudius’ literary secretary, on the death of his brother, but more likely intended to flatter the emperor in the hope of being recalled from exile.
Tutor and Adviser to Nero
In 49, following the downfall of Messalina, Agrippina the Younger, a sister of Caligula and Julia Livilla, married her uncle Claudius, and had Seneca recalled to tutor her twelve-year-old son, Nero.
When the lad acceded to the throne in 54, Seneca became his adviser and, alongside the praetorian prefect Sextus Afranius Burrus, provided good government during the first five, relatively benign, years of his reign, the so-called quinquennium Neronis.
In 58, the senator Publius Suilius Rufus, who had been close to Claudius, began attacking Seneca with a series of accusations centred upon his rapid rise to fabulous wealth. ‘By what kind of wisdom or maxims of philosophy,’ he inveighed, ‘has Seneca within four years of royal favour amassed three hundred million sesterces?’ In response, Seneca prosecuted Suilius, who was banished to the Balearic Islands.
The charge has echoed down the centuries. How could a Stoic philosopher preach simplicity while becoming the richest man in Rome?
In 59, Nero had Agrippina murdered, and Seneca wrote the self-exculpatory speech that he delivered to the Senate, a speech so artful that the senators moved to congratulate the emperor upon his own mother’s murder.
Downfall and Suicide
But now the tide would turn against our man.
After the death of Burrus in 62, Seneca lost whatever remained of his restraining influence over Nero. Having read the runes, he twice petitioned to retire, once in 62 and again in 64, but Nero refused to cut him loose. Still, he contrived to spend almost all his time on his country estates, working, among others, on his Letters to Lucilius.
His prolonged absences from court may have stoked Nero’s suspicions. When, in 65, the Pisonian conspiracy to overthrow Nero came to light, the emperor condemned a first wave of nineteen people to death, among them Seneca and his nephew Lucan.
By the end of the year, Seneca, his two brothers, and the twenty-five-year-old Lucan had all four been made to commit suicide.
According to the historian Tacitus (d. 120 CE), Seneca modelled his death on that of Socrates, discussing philosophy with his friends and chiding them for their outbursts of emotion.
He slit one vein, and then another, and then a few more, but would not bleed enough to die. Now in considerable pain, he took some hemlock, but this too failed to do the deed. At last, to dilate his veins and ease the pain, he immersed himself in a hot bath and finally suffocated to death.
His wife Pompeia Paulina, whom he had married in later life, attempted to share his fate, but Nero ordered that she be rescued and bandaged up.
Legacy
Seneca had seen the writing on the wall, which is why he worked so assiduously in his final years, seeking, through the Letters, to make himself as immortal as any mortal can be.
Even his carefully staged suicide may have been a part of that immortality project. Tacitus hints as much when, having related Seneca’s last words to his friends, he writes, ‘After these and some similar remarks, which might have been meant for a wider audience…’
Upon his death, Seneca’s works were instantly popular and, according to Quintilian, were ‘in the hands of every young man’. Seneca has been read by most everyone since, including the ‘French Seneca’, Michel de Montaigne, who modelled his Essays upon the Letters.
Continue Exploring
Delve deeper into the life and times of Seneca in Stoic Stories, an overview of Stoicism through its best stories.
In the Odyssey, Odysseus is never more free, or more himself, than when he declares himself to be ‘Nobody’.
In Stephen Daldry’s 2002 film The Hours, Julianne Moore plays Laura Brown, a pregnant housewife living in 1950s California. She spends the morning baking a birthday cake for her husband, caring for her young son, and performing all the duties expected of a devoted wife and mother.
But all is not as it seems.
Beneath this picture of domestic contentment, something has begun to shift. Perhaps for the first time, Laura seems to experience her own life as though she were standing outside it. Later that day, she books into a hotel room. Alone at last, she lies on the bed reading Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. For a few precious hours, she escapes the life waiting for her outside the door.
Some years later, she vanishes without trace, abandoning her husband and young children and inventing a new life for herself in Canada. What she did is difficult to understand, or forgive. But it is not her decision that makes the story so compelling. It is the feeling that precedes it. Long before she acts, she has begun to look upon her own life as though it were not her own.
Many thoughtful people have experienced something similar.
Perhaps you are at a birthday party or sitting in a meeting when, suddenly, everything feels strange. You zoom out of the room and wonder, How did I end up here? Or perhaps it happens on the homeward commute or while changing a nappy in the middle of the night. The feeling lasts only a few seconds before necessity kicks in. But for that brief moment, you are no longer simply living your life. You are looking in on it.
It was precisely this human potential that fascinated the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980). For Sartre, human beings are unlike anything else in the natural world. A tree simply exists. A stone simply exists. But human beings are conscious not only of the world but also of themselves within it. We can step back from our own lives and ask questions that no other creature appears capable of asking: Who am I? How did I become this person? Whatnow?
This capacity for self-reflection is both our highest freedom and our heaviest burden—for we are never wholly identical with the life we happen to be living. Had things been only slightly different, we would be living an altogether different life. Indeed, there are countless lives that we could have lived, and could still live.
Most of the time, however, we do our utmost to forget this unsettling truth. Sartre called this mauvaise foi, or ‘bad faith’.
Bad faith is not ordinary lying. We do not consciously deceive ourselves. Rather, we come to identify with the roles we occupy. We begin to see ourselves as nothing more than a teacher, a doctor, a parent, a husband, or a wife, forgetting that these are only the lives we happen to be living. We begin to mistake our lives for ourselves.
One example of bad faith that Sartre gives is that of a waiter who does his best to conform to everything that a waiter ought to be. His every movement is a little too precise; his every smile, a little too practised. He is trying so hard to be a waiter that he forgets that he is first a free human being who happens to be waiting tables.
When I was a junior doctor, I too played at being a doctor—partly because it was what everyone expected, and what many of my patients needed. But because I had read Sartre as a teenager, I could sometimes catch myself doing it.
Like Laura Brown, I would suddenly become aware that my role was only a role. Laura had not ceased to love her husband or her son, nor had she forgotten her responsibilities towards them. But she could no longer identify with the life that she happened to be living. A gap had opened up between herself and her life.
Most people expend a great deal of effort trying to close that gap. They tell themselves that they have no real choice, that it is too late to change, that people depend on them, or that this is simply who they are. Often these rationalisations contain a good deal of truth. We are born into circumstances that we cannot simply wish away, and we acquire obligations that we cannot lightly discard.
Still, there is a world of difference between acknowledging our constraints and denying our freedom altogether. The first is maturity. The second is bad faith.
For Sartre, freedom does not mean doing whatever we feel like doing. Laura Brown is not some heroine of liberation. Her story is tragic because freedom and responsibility so often pull in opposite directions. Sartre’s point is not that we should walk away from our commitments whenever they become alien or burdensome, but that we should not simply endure them as though we had no choice in the matter.
That is why those fleeting moments of estrangement matter. When you suddenly wonder, How did I end up here?, you are not necessarily having a crisis. You are opening a window of choice and freedom.
We are something more than the lives we have cornered ourselves into. We could have been a million different people—and still could.
Can the Highest Forms of Human Excellence Be Taught?
If the greatest Athenians could not teach virtue to their own sons, can virtue be taught?
Can courage be taught? Can wisdom? Can goodness?
We take it for granted that mathematics can be taught, languages can be taught, and medicine can be taught. But what of the qualities that matter most? Can they, too, be passed from teacher to pupil, or picked up from a textbook?
More than two thousand years ago, Plato wrestled with exactly this question.
The First Puzzle
In one of Plato’s early dialogues, the Laches, Socrates asks two generals, Laches and Nicias, to define courage. Laches thinks the question an easy one, and asserts that courage is when a soldier is willing to remain at his post and fight against the enemy.
Socrates objects that a soldier who flees from his post can also sometimes be called courageous. He cites the example of the Scythian cavalry who combat both in pursuit and in retreat, and of the mythical hero Aeneas who, Homer says, was always fleeing on horses. Homer praised Aeneas for his knowledge of fear, and called him the ‘counsellor of fear’. When Laches protests that Socrates is speaking of horsemen and charioteers rather than hoplites (foot soldiers), Socrates layers on the example of the Spartan hoplites at the Battle of Plataea, who fled the enemy but then turned back to fight once the enemy lines had broken.
What Socrates really wants to know is what courage is in all of its instances—not only for the hoplite, but also for the horseman, the charioteer, and every other class of warrior, as well as for those who ‘show courage in illness and poverty’, ‘are brave in the face of pain and fear’, and so on. What is it that all these instances of courage have in common? For example, quickness can be found in running, in speaking, and in playing the lyre, and in each instance, ‘quickness’ can be defined as ‘the quality that accomplishes much in a little time’. Is there a similar, single, unifying definition of ‘courage’ that can apply to all of its instances? Before reading on, think upon it for yourself… How would you define courage?
This time, Laches defines courage as ‘a sort of endurance of the soul’. But Socrates points out that endurance can be foolish as well as wise, and foolish endurance is likely to be harmful. After several more attempts, Nicias suggests that courage is some sort of knowledge or wisdom. Socrates says that, if Nicias means that courage is knowledge of the true grounds of fear and hope, then courage must be very rare among men; while animals, which want for such knowledge, could never be called ‘courageous’ but at most ‘fearless’—which, indeed, ordinary language use seems to confirm. Nicias concurs, and surmises that the same is also true of children: ‘Or do you really suppose I call all children courageous, who fear nothing because they have no sense?’
Socrates presses the argument further until he reaches a remarkable conclusion: if courage, and virtue in general, is knowledge, it cannot be separated from the rest of knowledge and wisdom. In seeking to define courage, the three of them have succeeded in defining virtue herself. Virtue is knowledge, which is why people with some measure of one virtue usually have a similar measure of the other virtues and of virtue in general—a thesis known as the Unity of the Virtues.
The First Solution
Courage, says Socrates, is knowledge or wisdom. Suppose I am walking along a beach and see someone drowning. I know that I can’t swim and that the currents are strong, but jump in anyway because a human life is at stake. Moments later, I too need rescuing. Having misjudged the situation, I have only made it worse, and acted not courageously but recklessly.
The lifeguard, in contrast, is a strong swimmer and equipped with a floater. From her years of experience and familiarity with the beach, she knows that if she dives in she stands an excellent chance of making a rescue. Of course, there is some risk involved, but the potential benefit is so large and so likely that it far outweighs the risk. If the lifeguard truly understands all this, she will ‘courageously’ dive in. If she does not dive in, she has not fully grasped the situation.
One of Socrates’ most famous arguments is that no one ever knowingly does evil. People do wrong not because their ethics are overwhelmed by a desire for pleasure, as is often believed, but because they are unable to weigh up pleasures and pains. They act with recklessness or cowardice or foolishness or vice (which are all really one and the same thing) because, from their limited perspective, it seems like the right or best thing to do. But if they knew better, they would behave differently. Virtue, then, is a form of knowledge.
The Fatal Objection
If Socrates is right in holding that courage and all of virtue is knowledge, then surely courage and the other virtues can be taught by the same methods as geometry or medicine or any other field of human knowledge. So who is wrong, Socrates in holding that courage is knowledge, or us in our common intuition that courage cannot simply be taught?
Plato returned to the problem in a later dialogue. In the Meno, Socrates observes that people with wisdom and virtue are very poor at imparting those qualities. Themistocles, the great Athenian statesman and general, was able to teach his son Cleophantus skills such as standing upright on horseback and shooting javelins, but no one ever credited the poor wretch with anything like his father’s wisdom—and the same could also be said of Lysimachus and his son Aristides, and Thucydides and his sons Melesias and Stephanus.
Perhaps it was too early in 402, the dramatic date of the Meno, for Socrates to have added his own three sons to the roll of dolts and dunderheads, but Aristotle, who had the benefit of hindsight, tells us that they too grew up to be ‘fools and dullards’.
In another dialogue, the Protagoras, Socrates says that Pericles, who led Athens at the peak of its golden age, gave his sons Paralus and Xanthippus the most excellent instruction in everything that could be learnt from teachers. But when it came to wisdom, this paragon of wisdom simply left them to ‘wander at their own free will in a sort of hope that they would light upon virtue of their own accord’.
A New Answer
If virtue cannot be taught, not even by the most eminent and distinguished of Athenians, then it is not, after all, a type of knowledge.
But then how, asks Meno, did good people come into being?
Socrates replies that he and Meno have overlooked that right action is possible under guidance other than that of knowledge. A man who has knowledge of the road to Larissa (a city in Thessaly) may make a good guide, but a man who has only correct opinion of the road, but has never been and does not know, may in some cases make just as good a guide. If he who thinks the truth can be just as good a guide to Larissa as he who knows the truth, then correct opinion can be just as good a guide to right action as knowledge.
If this be true, how is knowledge, which is the more highly prized, any different from correct opinion? Socrates compares correct opinions to the statues of Daedalus (a mythical architect and craftsman of unsurpassed skill), which had to be tied down to prevent them from running away. Correct opinions can be tied down with ‘an account of the reason why’, whereupon they cease to be correct opinions and petrify into knowledge.
Since courage and the other parts of virtue are not knowledge, all that remains is for them to be correct opinion. This much explains why the likes of Themistocles and Lysimachus and even the great Pericles were unable to make anything much out of their sons—and why, then as today, having children is to dice with the devil. Good people are no different from soothsayers, prophets, and poets, who say many true things when they are inspired but have no real knowledge of what they are saying.
The Teachers We Remember
Courage, like all the virtues, consists not in knowledge but in correct opinion. The virtues relate to human behaviour, and in particular to good or moral behaviour—that is, to ethics. In ethics, the choice of one action over another, or others, involves a complex and indeterminate calculus that cannot be condensed into, and hence expressed as, knowledge. Whereas knowledge is concrete and exact, correct opinion is subtle and ineffable, and more the province of intuition than of reason, of art than of science. For this reason, correct opinion cannot be taught but only ever invited or inspired.
The best education consists not in being taught but in being inspired.
The teachers who we hold in our hearts, those we never forget, are not those who assiduously taught us the most facts, or fastidiously covered every bulleted point on the syllabus, but those who inspired us and opened us up to ourselves and to the world.
Unfortunately, many people are not amenable to being inspired, not even by the most charismatic teachers or greatest works of art—which is why, in the final reckoning, Socrates and Plato held virtue to be a gift of the gods.
…if we were right in the way we spoke … virtue would be neither an inborn quality nor taught, but comes to those who possess it as a gift of the gods which is not accompanied by understanding, unless there is someone among our statesmen who can make another into a statesman. If there were one, he would be said to be among the living as Homer said Tiresias was among the dead, namely, that ‘he alone retained his wits while the others flitted about like shadows’. —Plato, Meno
Modern philosophy began in the warmth of a cockle stove, with three visions.
René Descartes (1596–1650) is often called the father of modern philosophy. The title owes less to any single doctrine than to the ambition of his project. As the old Aristotelian worldview collapsed under the weight of the Scientific Revolution, Descartes set out to rebuild human knowledge from the ground up, in a way that could accommodate God, the soul, and human freedom.
A World Crying Out For a Philosopher
The demise of the Aristotelian system, brought about by the Copernican and Scientific Revolutions, left a void that needed filling—ideally by some all-encompassing metaphysical system on the scale of the old, Aristotelian one. If the Earth no longer stood at the centre of the cosmos, was man not the glory of creation, as affirmed in the Bible (1 Corinthians 11:7)? In this new mechanistic, atomistic world of matter in motion, where might God and the immaterial soul fit in? Where freedom and justice? And where, even, heaven and hell?
As recently as 1588, Galileo, qua mathematician, had been invited to address the Florentine Academy on the location, size, and arrangement of hell as described in Dante’s Inferno—underscoring the scale of the mind shift required. Even that paragon of the Scientific Revolution, Newton, albeit in secret, dedicated the larger part of his life to alchemy and the search for the fabled philosopher’s stone.
The three seventeenth-century philosophers who rose to the challenge of formulating a comprehensive metaphysics are René Descartes (1596–1650), Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), who sometimes inserted, with little to no justification, the nobiliary particle von in front of his cognomen.
Three Visions in a Stove-Heated Room
Descartes categorically rejected the substantial forms and primary matter of the mediaeval, Aristotelian schoolmen. In a letter to his friend Marin Mersenne dated 28 January 1641, he writes that his Meditations on First Philosophy ‘contain all the foundations of my physics. But please do not tell people, for that might make it harder for the supporters of Aristotle to approve them. I hope that readers will gradually get used to my principles, and recognise their truth, before they notice that they destroy the principles of Aristotle.’
Two decades earlier, Descartes had been serving in the army of Duke Maximilian of Bavaria. On 10–11 November 1619, while stationed near Ulm or else Neuberg an der Donau, he found refuge in a room with an ‘oven’ (probably a cockle stove) to escape from the cold and reflect on his thoughts. That night, he had three dreams which determined the course of his life. To repay these visions, he vowed to make a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Loretto in the Italian region of Marche—and, in 1623, fulfilled his vow.
What Descartes had seen or grasped on that eve of St Martin’s Day 1619 is the unity of the sciences under mathematics: if a concrete problem could be abstracted into mathematical form, it would become clearer and more amenable to solving. Thus, in the course of his life, he contributed several mathematical innovations. In his La Géométrie (1637), he introduced the modern exponential notation which is taught in every contemporary school. He established the convention of using the letters x, y, z to represent unknown variables in equations, and a, b, c to represent known variables. If that were not impressive enough, he bridged algebra and geometry by transforming numerical relationships into geometrical shapes, plotting these lines and curves on a coordinate plane, and showing how they could be represented in the form of algebraic equations—a field now known as analytic, coordinate, or Cartesian geometry.
Descartes sought to carry the certainty of mathematics into philosophy itself. The culmination of that lifelong project was the Meditations on First Philosophy, which laid the foundations of his new metaphysical system while quietly dismantling that of Aristotle.
The Method of Doubt (Dubitatio methodica)
The closed-in stove-heated room later came to symbolise Descartes’ famous method of doubt, by which he systematically dismantled the edifice of his beliefs to rebuild on a more secure foundation of indubitable truths, to be arrived at through a predetermined set of logical rules.
In this climate of radical doubt, he could doubt the existence of the outside world, even the existence of his own body—but not that he was the one doing the doubting. This insight is encapsulated in his famous dictum, Cogito, ergo sum (‘I think, therefore I am’). The very act of doubting presupposed a thinking self to do the doubting.
Although Descartes knew that he was thinking, and so that he was, he could not be sure that his thinking bore any relation to the outside world. So he introduced an a priori proof (a proof derived from thought alone) for the existence of God, and argued that such a benevolent being would not deceive his favoured creation, man—so long as man had employed his (Descartes’s) method of doubt and taken every precaution to have ‘clear and distinct’ ideas and not to be deceived.
Dualism and the Piece of Wax Analogy
The Cogito also transformed Descartes’ understanding of reality. The indubitability of the thinking self led him to conclude that mind and body must be fundamentally different kinds of substance. The defining attribute of the mind (or soul, or res cogitans) is thought, while that of the body (or res extensa) is extension. It is by the knowable mind, rather than the deceptive senses, that the physical can be apprehended.
Descartes illustrated this point with one of the most famous passages in the Meditations: the wax analogy. When a piece of wax is heated, all its sensory properties change. Only the mind grasps its underlying essence, which consists in extension (as well as flexibility and movability in space), and recognises it as the same piece of wax. The physical, being extended, is divisible; but mind is indivisible, and therefore not physical. Since it is not physical, mind is beyond the laws of physics, and free and immortal.
[T]here is a great difference between the mind and the body, inasmuch as the body is by its very nature always divisible, while the mind is utterly indivisible. For when I consider the mind, or myself in so far as I am merely a thinking thing, I am unable to distinguish any parts within myself; I understand myself to be something quite single and complete… By contrast, there is no corporeal or extended thing that I can think of which in my thought I cannot easily divide into parts; and this very fact makes me understand that it is divisible. This one argument would be enough to show me that the mind is completely different from the body.
The Soul of Animals
Descartes’s mind-body dualism is commonly taken as the starting point of modern philosophy. His method is indeed revolutionary, but the substance of his philosophy is in fact an attempt to shelter God, man, and his immortal soul from the new mechanism. Thanks to Descartes, those who embraced the Copernican revolution could remain good Christians, or claim as much.
But in solving one problem, Descartes created several others, most notably the place of animals and the mind-body problem.
Under the Aristotelian system, all living things had a vegetative (or nutritive) soul; animals, in addition, had a sensitive soul; and humans, on top of that, had a rational soul.
For fear of granting them immortality and a place in heaven, Descartes denied souls to the animals. Animals, he claimed, are mere automata, whose functions ‘follow from the mere arrangement of the machine’s organs every bit as naturally as the movements of a clock or other automaton follow from the arrangement of its counterweights and wheels’.
For Descartes, it is not merely that animals do not reason, but also, contra common sense, that they do not feel, perceive, or sense. Clearly, he did not have a cat. According to lore, he once threw a cat out of a window in an attempt to demonstrate that the poor thing lacked consciousness.
The Mind-Body Problem
If mind and body truly are incommensurate, how is it possible for them to interact? How might my mind move me to write these words without violating, or else submitting to, the laws of physics? Conversely, how might my eyes and ears relay sense experience to my mind?
Descartes responded to this so-called mind-body problem in two ways. At times, he said, literally, ‘Only God knows.’ At other times, he suggested that mind and body interact at the pineal gland, on the grounds that this structure is mobile and central in the brain. But this only puts the problem at one remove, for the question then becomes, how is it possible for the mind to interact with the pineal gland?
The Philosopher’s Daughter
Although France’s most famous philosopher, Descartes spent the greater part of his adult life in the relative safety of the Dutch Republic. There, he met a servant called Helena who became the mother of his illegitimate daughter Francine (b. 1635), whom he passed off as his niece. When Francine died, aged five, of scarlet fever, he called it the greatest sorrow of his life, even stating that it was not unmanly to cry. Later, a legend arose that he—the philosopher who had compared living bodies to machines—constructed an automaton in her likeness.
The Tree of Life
The name René derives from the Latin Renatus, ‘born again’—fitting for the man who sought to rebuild philosophy from first principles. But although remembered as a philosopher, Descartes looked upon himself first and foremost as a natural philosopher (scientist) and physicist.
In the preface to his Principles of Philosophy (1644), he compared philosophy to a tree, with metaphysics as its roots, physics as its trunk, and the other sciences as its branches—and it is, of course, the branches that bear the fruit.
The ‘other sciences’ could be reduced to three principal ones, medicine, mechanics, and morals—which is why, in 1649, he published a book on the emotions, The Passions of the Soul. He sent a copy to his penfriend Queen Christina of Sweden, who was so impressed that she invited him to join her court.
In October 1649, he left Holland for Sweden. But the northern winter did not agree with him, and the frenetic Christina insisted on taking her lessons at five in the morning. He did not live to see the spring.
Continue Exploring
If you enjoyed this article, you might also enjoy The German Greeks, which traces the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Nietzsche, via Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer.
You must be logged in to post a comment.