Cartesian certainty

Frampton’s book makes it clear that the appeal of Cartesian method was its promise to cut through the fog of skepticism and debate and get to demonstrable certainty. Lodeqijk Meyer’s preface to Spinoza’s Principia philosophiae Cartesianae (1663) makes this explicit:

“You will find that with the exception of mathematics hardly any branch of learning is treated by this method . . . . For almost all who have applied themselves to establishing and setting out the sciences have believed, and many still do believe, that the mathematical method is peculiar to mathematics and is to be rejected as inapplicable to other branches of learning.”

Again, he lamented that so many arguments “depend merely on likelihood and probability, and in this way [academicians, philosophers] thrust before the public a great medley of great books in which you may look in vain for solidity and certainty. Disputes and strife abound, and what one somehow establishes with trivial arguments of no real weight is soon refuted by another, demolished and shattered with the same weapons. So where the mind, eager for unshakable truth, had thought to find its labors a placid stretch of water that it could navigate with safety and success, thereafter attaining the haven of knowledge for which it yearned, it finds itself tossed on a stormy sea of opinion, beset on all sides with tempests of dispute, hurled about and carried away on waves of uncertainty, endlessly, with no hope of every emerging therefrom.”

He regarded Descartes as “the brightest star of our age,” since brought “b a new method from darkness to light whatever had been inaccessible to the ancients, and in addition whatever could be wanting in his own age, he laid the unshakable foundations of philosophy on which numerous truths could be built with mathematical order and certainty, as he himself effectively proved, and as is clearer than the midday sun to all who have paid careful attention to his writings, for which no praise is too great.”

As described by Spinoza, the method that reaches this certainty is a kind of intellectual asceticism – putting aside prejudice, discovering foundations on which things should be build, uncovering causes of error, and understanding everything clearly and distinctly. This is the method Spinoza sought to apply not only to philosophical questions in general, but to biblical criticism in particular.