Why Did Rene Descartes Do Not Exist

Rene Descartes

Descartes never did a stroke of useful work in his life. At various times he

described himself as a solider, a mathematician, a thinker and a gentleman. The

last comes closest to describing his attitude toward life as well as his social

status. Descartes was indisputably the most original philosopher to appear in the

fifteen centuries following the death of Aristotle.

Rene Descartes was born March 31, 1596, in the small town of La Haye,

in the Creuse Valley thirty miles south of Tours, France. Rene was the fourth

child. Descartes spent a solitary childhood, accentuated by his sickly nature, and

he quickly learned to do without company. From his early years he is known to

have been introspective
God must

exist, be definition, so it cannot make any sense to say, "God does not exist."

Squares do not need to exist, but it would be impossible to say that there

was a 3-sided square. If there is a mountain, there must be a corresponding

valley. If there is a valley; there must be a corresponding mountain. God must

exist the way that all squares that happen to exist must have 4 sides.

The problem of Descartes was, as we have seen, to reconcile the

mechanical theories of his time with the ideas of God, soul and freedom. He was

not contented to accept the mechanistic view of the universe, including man,

which the science of his day seemed to demand. At the same time, he was

unwilling to discredit science altogether and return to the older spiritualistic

tradition. His solution lay in making a sharp distinction between mind and body.

The body, for him, was purely mechanical processes. He believed that here

cause and effect was supreme, that there were no breaks in the chain of
It wills an active principle. It is free,

for example, to will to love God or not. It is free to think pure thoughts or not. It

is free to create imaginary pictures and to move the body in any way it cares.

The volitional part of man's nature, then, is in the soul, and can be influenced by

the body only indirectly. The will, according to Descartes, is independent of the

body, and can, if it so desires, produce states of the body. The will is free.

Further, the ideal for which man should strive is to keep the will free from

influences of the body and any other outside influences. While Descartes has

separated mind and body in an effort to reconcile the mechanistic science of his

day and the religion of the times, he left unanswered the question of the

relationship between mind and body. How can the free will of the individual

influence the body? This was the problem, which his immediate successors

attacked.

Descartes felt that the logical result of science was a mechanical and

materialistic universe, but he was equally certain that this was not the complete

explanation of the universe. Consequently, he was anxious to discover a way