World Self-Revealed

In his now-classic Sources of the Self (143-4), Charles Taylor observes that Descartes is “in many ways profoundly Augustinian: the emphasis on radical reflexivity, the importance of the cogito, the central role of a proof of God’s existence which starts from ‘within,’ from features of my own ideas, instead of starting from eternal being.”

Descartes’s inward turn doesn’t come from Greece: “the language of inner/outer doesn’t figure in Plato or indeed in other ancient moralists.” But “Augustine does give a real sense of the language of inwardness.”

Augustinian as Descartes is, though, he introduces something new. He does “in a very real sense, place the moral sources within us. Relative to Plato and relative to Augustine, it brings about in each case a transposition by which we no longer see ourselves as related to moral sources outside of us, or at least not in the same way. An important power has been internalized.”

Knowing becomes a matter of constructing the correct representation of outer reality: “To know reality is to have a correct representation of things – a correct picture within of outer reality. . . . A representation of reality now has to be constructed. As the notion of ‘idea’ migrates from its ontic sense to apply henceforth to intra-psychic contents, to things ‘in the mind,’ so the order of ideas ceases to be something we find and becomes something we build.” These representations must be certain to count as knowledge: “There is no real knowledge where I have a lot of ideas in my head which happen to correspond to things out there, if I have no well-grounded confidence in them.”

Almost in passing, Taylor remarks that “this conception of knowledge comes to seem unchallengeable, once an account of knowledge in terms of a self-revealing reality, like the Ideas, was abandoned” (144).

Two glosses: First, the epistemological turn, the subjective and inward turn, marked by Descartes is also, necessarily, a shift in ontology. Whether Descartes or Galileo or others are responsible, it’s a shift to an understanding of the world as inert, or at least as uncommunicative. If we restore the ontology – if reality speaks itself to us – then the whole problem that the notion of “mental representations” was designed to solve evaporates. We don’t need to construct an inner map of the external world because the two are not external to one another in the first place.

Second, Taylor describes the change in terms of a migration of “ideas” from the forms of things to things that exist only in the mind. We could state the change more theologically: It’s a loss of faith in a world that declares glory of God, a world charged with God’s grandeur, and liturgical creation that speaks praise to the Creator.