Dictionary: ex·is·ten·tial·ism (ĕg'zĭ-stĕn'shə-lĭz'əm, ĕk'sĭ-)

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n.

A philosophy that emphasizes the uniqueness and isolation of the individual experience in a
hostile or indifferent universe, regards human existence as unexplainable, and stresses freedom
of choice and responsibility for the consequences of one's acts.

existentialist ex'is·ten'tial·ist adj. & n.

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Geography Dictionary: existentialism

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A doctrine which emphasizes the difference between human existence and that of inanimate
objects. Later supporters of this philosophy saw human beings as self-created; they are not
initially endowed with characteristics but choose their own characteristics by ‘leaps’. Thus a
person may be said to believe in God because he or she has chosen to do so. Other existentialists
see that the only certainty for each one of us is death, and that the individual must live in the
knowledge of that certainty.

In geography, existentialism sees individuals as striving to build up a self which is not given,
either by nature or by a culture. Human beings are thus not rational decision-makers but the
subjects of their experiences. Landscapes are seen through the eyes of the beholder. Such a view
runs counter to the ‘mechanistic’ views of, say, environmental determinism or economic
determinism, which would seem to deny human beings any freedom of action.

Political Dictionary: existentialism

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Concept borrowed by twentieth-century European philosophers from the theologian Søren

Kierkegaard (1813-55) but shorn of any religious meaning. First attested in English in 1941,
apparently as a translation of German Existentialismus, itself derived from Kierkegaard's Danish
neologism Existents-Forhold. Nietzsche and Heidegger are also formative influences on many
(mostly literary figures rather than philosophers) who describe themselves as existentialists.
Existentialism is very hard to define but may be summarized as the belief that people are all that
there is. It is expressed in reaction to the grand designs in human history seen by Hegel and his
followers. In particular, it denies the existence of natural law, an unchanging human nature, or
indeed any objective rules. Each individual is cursed with freedom and must make his or her own
way in the world, although many people resort to devices to hide this from themselves. Life is
without ultimate meaning, but we are forced to make choices all the time. The spirit of
existentialism is well summarized in a poem (1922) by A. E. Housman (1859-1936) on being an
unacknowledged homosexual in a homophobic society:

The laws of God, the laws of man,

He may keep that will and can
And how am I to face the odds
Of man's bedevilment and God's?
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made

See also Sartre, Jean-Paul.

Literary Dictionary: existentialism
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existentialism [eksi‐stench‐ăl‐izm], a current in European philosophy distinguished by its

emphasis on lived human existence. Although it had an important precursor in the Danish
theologian So/ren Kierkegaard in the 1840s, its impact was fully felt only in the mid‐20th
century in France and Germany: the German philosophers Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers
prepared some of the ground in the 1920s and 1930s for the more influential work of Jean‐Paul
Sartre and the other French existentialists including Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and
Maurice Merleau‐Ponty. In terms of its literary impact, the thought of Sartre has been the most
significant, presented in novels (notably La Nausée (Nausea), 1938) and plays (including Les
Mouches (The Flies), 1943) as well as in the major philosophical work L'Être et le néant (Being
and Nothingness), 1943). Sartrean existentialism, as distinct from the Christian existentialism
derived from Kierkegaard, is an atheist philosophy of human freedom conceived in terms of
individual responsibility and authenticity. Its fundamental premise, that ‘existence precedes
essence’, implies that we as human beings have no given essence or nature but must forge our
own values and meanings in an inherently meaningless or absurd world of existence. Obliged to
make our own choices, we can either confront the anguish (or Angst) of this responsibility, or
evade it by claiming obedience to some determining convention or duty, thus acting in ‘bad
faith’. Paradoxically, we are ‘condemned to be free’. Similar themes can be found in the novels
and essays of Camus; both authors felt that the absurdity of existence could be redeemed through
the individual's decision to become engagé (‘committed’) within social and political causes
opposing fascism and imperialism. Some of the concerns of French existentialism are echoed in
English in Thom Gunn's early collection of poems. The Sense of Movement (1957), and in the
fiction of Iris Murdoch and John Fowles. See also phenomenology.

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: existentialism

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Philosophical movement oriented toward two major themes, the analysis of human existence and
the centrality of human choice. Existentialism's chief theoretical energies are thus devoted to
questions about ontology and decision. It traces its roots to the writings of Søren Kierkegaard
and Friedrich Nietzsche. As a philosophy of human existence, existentialism found its best 20th-
century exponent in Karl Jaspers; as a philosophy of human decision, its foremost representative
was Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre finds the essence of human existence in freedom — in the duty of
self-determination and the freedom of choice — and therefore spends much time describing the
human tendency toward "bad faith," reflected in humanity's perverse attempts to deny its own
responsibility and flee from the truth of its inescapable freedom.

For more information on existentialism, visit Britannica.com.

French Literature Companion: Existentialism

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A philosophy which gives priority to human existence, that is to say, subjective experience of the
world, rather than to abstract or ‘objective’ structures or essences. It views human existence as
radically different in nature from the existence of the physical world, in so far as men and
women are free to make of themselves the kind of people they want to be and, to some extent, to
make for themselves the kind of world they want to live in. This freedom entails concomitant
responsibilities; it is not freedom in a void, for each person's freedom comes into contact and
possible conflict with that of everyone else. Our ‘being-in-the-world’ is bound up with our
‘being-with-others’, and in this sense Existentialism has an overriding moral dimension, even if
it eschews any notion of moral rules or absolutes. In fact, Existentialists usually espouse a
situational ethics, in which the consequences of a particular act in particular social and historical
circumstances take priority over absolute ethical norms. This is quite contrary to any view of a
‘moral law’ (e.g. Kant's), but not necessarily radically incompatible with a certain kind of liberal
Christianity. Indeed, the first Existentialist is generally considered to be the 19th-c. Danish
theologian, Søren Kierkegaard, who set out to defend subjective experience against the
totalization and objectivization of the Hegelian system. 20th-c Existentialists are generally more
keen to explore all the implications of a thoroughgoing atheism, though there have been several
notable Catholic Existentialists, such as Gabriel Marcel in France.

Heidegger's Sein und Zeit (Being and Time, 1927) and Sartre's L'Être et le néant (1943) are
probably the best-known Existentialist works of this century [Sartre's thought is more fully
treated in the entries devoted to him and to L'Être et le néant]. Neither discusses individual
human existence in the usual sense: Heidegger's work centres on Dasein (being-there, existence)
which is not individuated, and, although Sartre's adoption of Corbin's translation of Dasein as ‘la
réalité humaine’ has been criticized for its humanism, it does avoid the individuation inherent in
the notion of a ‘human being’. Sartre's own examination of the pour-soi of human consciousness
is also distinct from any notion of person or individual ego. Existentialists prefer to explore
‘consciousness’ or perhaps the ‘subject’, rather than the ‘self, for the former terms do not imply
that identity or essence which is called in question by Existentialism.

Existentialism is popularly associated with the notoriety it enjoyed in Paris in the 1940s, when its
opposition to the dominant encoded forms of power and ideology was discussed and perhaps
lived out in the hothouse atmosphere of Saint-German-des-Prés cafés and night-clubs. The
identification of a philosophical movement with the life-style of its major proponents (here,
principally, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir) is, however, necessarily short-lived, and existential
philosophy has wider implications than the youthful revolt encapsulated in the Left-Bank protest
movement. It is possible that post-war France needed the sugar-coating of a cult movement to
help it swallow Existentialism's high moral seriousness.

[Christina Howells]

German Literature Companion: Existentialism

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Existentialism in its various forms takes its origins from Kierkegaard, whose works, subjected to
violent attack in his lifetime, have in the 20th c. exercised a powerful influence which has been
greatly increased by the effects of industrial development and of two world wars. The sense of
threatened individuality, of dread (Angst), of solitude, and of tragedy springs from the conditions
of life in this age, but a powerful formulation of them lay ready to hand in Kierkegaard's
writings. It is only in France that there arose, around Sartre, a movement which can properly be
called existentialisme. Germany has existential philosophers, some, like Jaspers, willingly so
called, others, like Heidegger, rejecting the description. The preferred locution is
Existenzphilosophie. Almost all writers of the 20th c. reflect existential problems. A symptom of
the consciousness of the problem is the widespread use by critics of the neologism existentiell.
Philosophy Dictionary: existentialism
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A loose title for various philosophies that emphasize certain common themes: the individual, the
experience of choice, and the absence of rational understanding of the universe with a
consequent dread or sense of absurdity in human life. The combination suggests an emotional
tone or mood rather than a set of deductively related theses, and existentialism attained its zenith
in Europe following the disenchantments of the Second World War. However, the first
significant thinker to stress such themes was Kierkegaard, whose work is generally regarded as
the origin of existentialism. Existentialist writing both reacts against the view that the universe is
a closed, coherent, intelligible system, and finds the resulting contingency a cause for
lamentation. In the face of an indifferent universe we are thrown back upon our own freedom.
Acting authentically becomes acting in the light of the open space of possibilities that the world
allows. Different writers who united in stressing the importance of these themes nevertheless
developed very different ethical and metaphysical systems as a consequence. In Heidegger
existentialism turns into scholastic ontology; in Sartre into a dramatic exploration of moments of
choice and stress; in the theologians Barth, Tillich, and Bultmann it becomes a device for
reinventing the relationships between people and God. Existentialism never took firm root
outside continental Europe, and many philosophers have voiced mistrust of particular
existentialist concerns, for example with being and non-being, or with the libertarian flavour of
its analysis of free will.

US History Encyclopedia: Existentialism

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Existentialism, a philosophical and literary movement identified largely with the French
intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre, gained influence after World War I. The roots of existentialism are
varied, found in the work of the Danish religious thinker Søren Kierkegaard, the Russian novelist
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Sartre's philosophy was
influenced by the German phenomenologist Edmund Husserl and philosopher Martin Heidegger.
Existentialism is notoriously difficult to define. It is as much a mood or temper as it is a
philosophical system. The religious existentialism of Kierkegaard, Karl Jaspers, and Gabriel
Marcel differs from the resolute atheism of Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus.
Nonetheless, certain essential assumptions are shared.

In existentialism, existence is both freedom and despair. In a world without apparent meaning or
direction, the individual is radically free to act. Most individuals are afraid to confront the
responsibility entailed by radical freedom. In Sartrean terms, bad faith and inauthenticity allow
individuals to consider themselves as an essence, a fixed entity; they playact in life. In contrast,
the existential individual refuses illusions. Death looms as a boundary situation, defining the
limits of existence. The recognition of such limits and the responsibility for one's actions lead to
an existential despair that can overwhelm the individual.
However, Sartre, Beauvoir, and religious existentialists consider despair a painful but necessary
stop on the road to freedom. Since existence is prior to essence, the existential individual at every
moment confronts the nothingness of existence. Transcendence occurs when the individual
undertakes a project that will give meaning to his or her life. While such acts are individually
subjective, they are intertwined with everyone else's reality. No act, or failure to act, is without
larger meaning and context. Existentialism, initiated with the subjective despair of the individual,
ends with an ethic founded upon the shared goal of human solidarity.

Religious existentialism also begins with individual anguish and despair. Men and women are
radically alone, adrift in a world without apparent meaning. Religious existentialists, however,
confront meaning through faith. Since existentialism is concerned with the individual and
concrete experience, religious faith must be subjective and deep. Faith is less a function of
religious observance than of inner transformation. But, as Kierkegaard elucidated, because of the
enormous distance between the profane and the sacred, existential religious faith can never be
complacent or confident. For existential men and women, whether religious or secular, life is a
difficult process of becoming, of choosing to make themselves under the sign of their own
demise. Life is lived on the edge.

Sartre and Beauvoir believed that existentialism would fail to catch hold in the United States,
because it was a nation marked by optimism, confidence, and faith in progress. They were
mistaken. Existentialism not only became significant in the postwar years, but it had been an
important theme earlier. This is hardly surprising, because an existential perspective transcends
national or historical boundaries. It is, as many existentialists have argued, part of the human
condition.

American Existentialism: Before the Fact

An existential mood or perspective has long been important in America. Kierkegaard's theology
of despair was anticipated in the Puritan's anguished religious sensibility. The distance between
the individual and God that defined Puritanism has existential echoes, as the historian Perry
Miller noted in his study of Jonathan Edwards's theology. Herman Melville's character Captain
Ahab in Moby-Dick (1851) personifies the existential individual battling to create meaning in a
universe abandoned by God. Radical alienation and the search for meaning in an absurd world
are common themes in the work of the late-nineteenth-century writer Stephen Crane. William
James, professor of philosophy at Harvard University, posited a pluralistic and wild universe. His
vision promoted both radical freedom and anguish of responsibility. For James, much like Sartre
later, consciousness is an active agent rather than an essence. Therefore, the individual must
impose order on the universe or confront a life without depth or meaning. Similarly, turn-of-the-
century dissenters from American optimism and progress, such as James, Henry Adams, and
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., developed an existential perspective that appreciated the tragic
elements in modern life and that upheld a heroically skeptical stance in the face of the absurd
nature of existence. In the 1920s, novelists from the Lost Generation, such as Ernest Hemingway
and F. Scott Fitzgerald, spiritually wounded survivors of World War I, presented characters
adrift, searching for existential meaning in their lives.

Kierkegaard in America
Beginning in the late 1920s, largely through the efforts of the retired minister Walter Lowrie,
Kierkegaard's existential theology entered into American intellectual life. By the late 1940s, most
of Kierkegaard's writings had been translated by Lowrie. For Lowrie and the theologian
Reinhold Niebuhr, Kierkegaard's impassioned Christian perspective, with its emphasis on how
the reality of death granted meaning to life, questioned the complacency of mainstream
Protestantism. Kierkegaard offered a tragic vision of life based on faith rather than church
dogma. The Kierkegaardian focus on the inner life, on the individual wrestling with God, fit well
with the perspective of many intellectuals and artists in America who were filled with anxiety
and in search of transcendence. By the 1940s, and well into the 1960s, Kierkegaardian ideas
appeared in the Pulitzer Prize–winning poem The Age of Anxiety (1947) by W. H. Auden, in a
symphony based on that work by Leonard Bernstein, in the paintings of Mark Rothko and
Barnett Newman, and in the novels of Walker Percy. The political implications of
Kierkegaardian existentialism were generally conservative. The former communist agent
Whittaker Chambers found a refuge from radical politics in Kierkegaard; others discovered that
Kierkegaardian concerns about anxiety and salvation led them away from political engagement
and toward an inward despair or religious sanctuary.

French Existentialism in America

In the wake of the economic and physical destruction caused by World War II in Europe and the
dawning of the Cold War and nuclear age, French existentialism became a worldwide vogue. It
seemed to be a philosophy appropriate for the postwar world. Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus
triumphantly visited the United States in the late 1940s. Their writings were quickly translated
and reached wide audiences. Sartre's philosophical opus, Being and Nothingness (1943), was
translated by Hazel E. Barnes in 1956. In that same year, the Princeton University professor
Walter Kaufmann's important anthology of existentialist writings appeared. In this work, and in
many other popularizations and collections of existentialism, the existential canon was narrowly
presumed to be thoroughly European, in origin and current expression.

By the 1950s, existentialism fit neatly into the general sense of alienation and tragedy popular
among American intellectuals. Existentialism's emphasis on the sanctity of the individual, his or
her rejection of absolutes, and comprehension of the alienating nature of modern existence fed
into postwar examinations of the totalitarian temper. For the African American writers Richard
Wright and Ralph Ellison, existential ideals allowed them to critique both Marxism and
American racism. Each of them sought in the late 1940s and early 1950s, with the help of
existentialism, to ground their characters within the concrete experiences of racism while relating
problems to the human condition. The novelist Norman Mailer's existentialism presented the
battle between good and evil as at the heart of the human condition. The art critic Harold
Rosenberg's concept of action art defined abstract expressionist painting with the vocabulary of
existentialism. Although many intellectuals associated with the Partisan Review rejected
existentialism because of Sartre and Beauvoir's radical politics, they nevertheless shared basic
assumptions about the tragic responsibility that came with freedom.

Existentialism in the 1960s

For a younger generation, coming of age in the 1960s, the left-wing political associations of
Sartrean existentialism were celebrated rather than rejected. Existentialism had become
entrenched in the university curriculum by the early 1960s. Student radicals embraced existential
commitment and rejected inauthenticity. Existentialism gave students a language to question the
complacent assumptions of American society. It placed all questions in the realm of choice;
passivity was a choice not to act. For Robert Moses, the decision to go to Mississippi in the early
1960s to organize voting campaigns for disfranchised blacks was an existential commitment. The
repression that he faced was part of the absurd nature of existence. His ability to continue,
despite the violence, was testimony to his existential beliefs. The ideas of Beauvoir in her The
Second Sex (U.S. translation, 1953) influenced the American women's liberation movement of
the late 1960s and early 1970s. Employing the terminology that she and Sartre had developed,
Beauvoir's famous words that "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman" signaled the
existential fact that woman existed not as an essence but as a being with the choice to create her
own existence. Betty Friedan, most famously, used many of Beauvoir's concepts in her own
influential book, The Feminine Mystique (1963).

The Fate of Existentialism

In the late 1970s, existentialism's popularity waned for a host of reasons. The existential
imperative for the individual to choose, in the hands of pop psychologists, was stripped of its
anguish and despair and corrupted into a rather facile expression of unlimited human potential.
In academic culture, universalist ideals of the human condition and freedom conflicted with
poststructural and postmodernist thought. But existentialism, like postmodernism, viewed
identity as something created, albeit with a greater sense of anguish. Today, existentialism
remains a symbol of alienation and a critique of confident individualism.

Bibliography

Barnes, Hazel E. An Existentialist Ethics. New York: Knopf, 1967.

———. The Story I Tell Myself: A Venture into Existentialist Autobiography. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Barrett, William. Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy. Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday/Anchor, 1958.

Cotkin, George. Existential America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

Fulton, Ann. Apostles of Sartre: Existentialism in America, 1945– 1963. Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press, 1999.

Kaufmann, Walter, ed. Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. New York: Meridian, 1956.

May, Rollo. The Meaning of Anxiety. New York: Ronald Press, 1950.

—George Cotkin
Columbia Encyclopedia: existentialism
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existentialism (ĕgzĭstĕn'shəlĭzəm, ĕksĭ–) , any of several philosophic systems, all centered on the
individual and his relationship to the universe or to God. Important existentialists of varying and
conflicting thought are Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Gabriel Marcel, and
Jean-Paul Sartre. All revolt against the traditional metaphysical approaches to man and his place
in the universe. Thinkers such as St. Thomas Aquinas, Blaise Pascal, and Friedrich Nietzsche
have been called existentialists, but it is more accurate to place the beginnings of the movement
with Kierkegaard. In his concern with the problem of the individual's relationship to God,
Kierkegaard bitterly attacked the abstract metaphysics of the Hegelians and the worldly
complacency of the Danish church. Kierkegaard's fundamental insight was the recognition of the
concrete ethical and religious demands confronting the individual. He saw that these demands
could not be met by a merely intellectual decision but required the subjective commitment of the
individual. The necessity and seriousness of these ethical decisions facing man was for
Kierkegaard the source of his dread and despair. Kierkegaard's analysis of the human situation
provides the central theme of contemporary existentialism. Following him, Heidegger and Sartre
were the major thinkers connected with this movement. Both were influenced by the work of
Edmund Husserl and developed a phenomenological method that they used in developing their
own existential analyses. Heidegger rejected the label of “existentialist” and described his own
philosophy as an investigation of the nature of being in which the analysis of human existence is
only the first step. Sartre was the only self-declared existentialist among the major thinkers. For
him the central idea of all existential thought is that existence precedes essence. For Sartre there
is no God and therefore no fixed human nature that forces one to act. Man is totally free and
entirely responsible for what he makes of himself. It is this freedom and responsibility that, as for
Kierkegaard, is the source of man's dread. Sartre's thought, as expressed in his novels and plays
as well as in his more formal philosophical writings, strongly influenced a current in French
literature, best represented by Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir. In France the most
prominent exponent of a Christian existentialism was Gabriel Marcel, who developed his
philosophy within the framework of the Roman Catholic Church. Aside from Heidegger, the
leading German existentialist was Karl Jaspers, who developed the central Kierkegaardian
insight along less theological lines. Various other theologians and religious thinkers such as Karl
Barth, Martin Buber, Paul Tillich, and Reinhold Niebuhr are often included within the orbit of
existentialism.

Bibliography

See J.-P. Sartre, Existentialism (1947); J. Macquarrie, Studies in Christian Existentialism (1966);
R. C. Solomon, ed., Existentialism (1974); D. E. Cooper, Existentialism: A Reconstruction
(1990); D. B. Raymond, ed., Existentialism and the Philosophical Tradition (1991).

World of the Mind: existentialism

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Several central themes characterize the principal writings of the existentialists from the 1920s to
the 1940s.

(i) The very name existentialism indicates that existence, properly speaking, belongs only to
human beings; in Heidegger's famous phrase, human being is the only being for whom being is
an issue.
(ii) There are various 'states' in which humans' attunement to their world is manifest, such as
anxiety, boredom, and joyousness.
(iii) In Sartre's famous phrase, 'human existence precedes essence', that is, an individual's
essence, his 'real' nature, is not fixed in advance; rather, it is established through his or her own
non-trivial choices.
(iv) An individual can 'fall away' from the difficult task of choosing him- or herself and become
lost in the public, the herd, or the 'they'.
(v) Only human beings are always in the process of becoming, they are always ahead of
themselves, and oriented towards the future.

Conscious being is not itself given as just another part of the natural world, one that must be
made sense of; it is the being who gives sense to its experiences of the world and other subjects.
As conscious beings humans are different from other (sentient) beings in that some things make
a difference for them. Humans' unique mode of being is signalled by the term 'existence' which
literally means 'to stand out from'; humans stand out from everything else, and their interest in
things makes these things stand out from the background. Their forward-directed projects drive
their yet-to-be-filled lives. Only through this temporal dimension, the horizon of one's projects,
can possible options become one's own actualities.

The existentialists were devoted to the demolition of dualist oppositions, such as that between
the mind and body. On their view, experience of the 'outer' world is mediated by a unique kind of
body, the living body or flesh; this is not itself reducible to purely physical properties. Mindful
behaviour is exhibited by the whole body's actions, i.e. speech and gestures which show sense-
giving and sense-making activities. Also, the opposition between 'inside' and 'outside': it is one
thing that has an inside and an outside, not one thing on this side and another thing on that side.
My mind is not located inside my body, nor my thoughts in my mind, in the way that water fills a
bucket. My skin surface is a fleshy membrane through which my encounter with the world takes
place. Things and persons and values become parts of me through my comportment towards
them; not real object-like parts, but vital moments of my own self-chosen life. Merleau-Ponty
said, 'Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism; it keeps the visible spectacle
constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system.' Prior
to the existentialists the subject was constituted by a unique point of view: one that is private,
privileged, and incorrigible; objects are 'over-against' the subject. For the existentialists
subjective features permeate the objective world; subject-endowed meanings are found
everywhere. In 'falling away' subjects turn themselves and others into objects and hence
reinforce the philosophical notion of a basic opposition between mind and world.

(Published 2004)

— Paul S. MacDonald
 Bibliography

• Cooper, D. E. (1999). Existentialism: A Reconstruction (2nd edn.).

• Guignon, C., and Pereboom, D. (eds.) (1996). Existentialism: Basic Writings.
• MacDonald, P. S. (ed.) (2001). The Existentialist Reader.

Wikipedia: Existentialism
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For other uses see existential

The philosophers Søren

Kierkegaard and Friedrich
Nietzsche foreshadowed
existentialism.

Existentialism is a term that has been applied to the work of a number of nineteenth and
twentieth century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences,[1][2] took the human
subject — not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual[3][4]
and his or her conditions of existence — as a starting point for philosophical thought. Existential
philosophy is the "explicit conceptual manifestation of an existential attitude"[5] that begins with
a sense of disorientation and confusion in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world.
[6][7]
Many existentialists have also regarded traditional systematic or academic philosophy, in
both style and content, as too abstract and remote from concrete human experience.[8][9]

Contents
[hide]

• 1 History
o 1.1 Origins
o 1.2 19th century
 1.2.1 Kierkegaard and Nietzsche
 1.2.2 Dostoyevsky and Kafka
o 1.3 Early 20th century
 o 1.4 After the Second World War
• 2 Concepts
o 2.1 Focus on concrete existence
o 2.2 Existence precedes essence
o 2.3 Angst
o 2.4 Freedom
o 2.5 Facticity
o 2.6 Authenticity and inauthenticity
o 2.7 Despair
o 2.8 The Other and The Look
o 2.9 Reason
o 2.10 The Absurd
• 3 Relation to Nihilism
• 4 Criticism
• 5 Influence outside philosophy
o 5.1 Cultural movement and influence
 5.1.1 Film and Video
 5.1.2 Literature
 5.1.3 Theatre
 5.1.4 Music
o 5.2 Theology
o 5.3 Existential psychoanalysis and psychotherapy
• 6 See also
• 7 Notes
• 8 References
• 9 Further reading

• 10 External links

History
Existentialism is foreshadowed most notably by nineteenth-century philosophers Søren
Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, though it had forerunners in earlier centuries. In the 20th
century the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (starting from Husserl's phenomenology)
influenced other existentialist philosophers such as Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and (absurdist)
Albert Camus. Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Franz Kafka also described existential themes in their
literary works. Although there are some common tendencies amongst "existentialist" thinkers,
there are major differences and disagreements among them (most notably the divide between
atheistic existentialists like Sartre and theistic existentialists like Tillich); not all of them accept
the validity of the term as applied to their own work.[10]

Origins

The term "existentialism" seems to have been coined by the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel
in the mid-1940s[11][12][13] and adopted by Jean-Paul Sartre who, on October 29, 1945, discussed
his own existentialist position in a lecture to the Club Maintenant in Paris. The lecture was
published as L'existentialisme est un humanisme, a short book which did much to popularize
existentialist thought.[14]

The label has been applied retrospectively to other philosophers for whom existence and, in
particular, human existence were key philosophical topics. Martin Heidegger had made human
existence (Dasein) the focus of his work since the 1920s, and Karl Jaspers had called his
philosophy "Existenzphilosophie" in the 1930s.[15][16] Both Heidegger and Jaspers had been
influenced by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. For Kierkegaard the crisis of human
existence had been a major theme.[17][18][19] He came to be regarded as the first existentialist,[20]
and has been called the "father of existentialism".[21] In fact he was the first to explicitly make
existential questions a primary focus in his philosophy.[22] In retrospect, other writers have also
implicitly discussed existentialist themes throughout the history of philosophy and literature. Due
to the exposure of existentialist themes over the decades, when society was officially introduced
to existentialism, the term became quite popular almost immediately.

Examples include:

• the Buddha's teachings,[23]

• Saint Augustine in his Confessions,[24]
• William Shakespeare's Hamlet.[25]

19th century

The Søren Kierkegaard Statue in Copenhagen.

As early as 1835 in a letter to his friend Peter Wilhelm Lund, the Danish philosopher Søren
Kierkegaard wrote one of his first existentially sensitive passages. In it, he describes a truth that
is applicable for him:

What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so
far as a certain knowledge must precede every action. The thing is to understand myself, to see
what God really wishes me to do: the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the
idea for which I can live and die. ... I certainly do not deny that I still recognize an imperative
of knowledge and that through it one can work upon men, but it must be taken up into my life,
and that is what I now recognize as the most important thing.

—Søren Kierkegaard, Letter to Peter Wilhelm Lund dated August 31, 1835, emphasis added[26]

The early thoughts of Kierkegaard would be formalized in his prolific philosophical and
theological writings, many of which would later form the modern foundation of 20th century
existentialism.[22][27]

Kierkegaard and Nietzsche

Main article: Kierkegaard and Nietzsche comparisons

Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche were two of the first philosophers considered
fundamental to the existentialist movement, though neither used the term "existentialism" and it
is unclear whether they would have supported the existentialism of the 20th century. They
focused on subjective human experience rather than the objective truths of mathematics and
science, which they believed were too detached or observational to truly get at the human
experience. Like Pascal, they were interested in people's quiet struggle with the apparent
meaninglessness of life and the use of diversion to escape from boredom. Unlike Pascal,
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche also considered the role of making free choices, particularly
regarding fundamental values and beliefs, and how such choices change the nature and identity
of the chooser.[28][29] Kierkegaard's knight of faith and Nietzsche's Übermensch are exemplars
who define the nature of their own existence. These idealized individuals invent their own values
and create the very terms under which they excel. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were also
precursors to other intellectual movements, including postmodernism, nihilism, and various
strands of psychology.

Dostoyevsky and Kafka

Two of the first literary writers who were important to existentialism were the Czech author
Franz Kafka and the Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky.[30] Dostoevsky's Notes from
Underground details the story of a man who is unable to fit into society and unhappy with the
identities he creates for himself. Many of Dostoevsky's novels, such as Crime and Punishment,
covered issues pertinent to existential philosophy while offering story lines divergent from
secular existentialism: for example, in Crime and Punishment one sees the protagonist,
Raskolnikov, experience an existential crisis and then move toward a Christian Orthodox
worldview similar to which Dostoevsky had himself come to advocate.
Kafka created often surreal and alienated characters who struggle with hopelessness and
absurdity, notably in his most famous novella, The Metamorphosis, or in his master novel, The
Trial. In his philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus, the French existentialist/absurdist Albert
Camus describes Kafka's oeuvre as "absurd in principle",[31] although he also finds present the
same "tremendous cry of hope" as is to be found in religious existentialists such as Kierkegaard
and Shestov, and which Camus himself rejects.[32]

The cover of Kafka's absurdist 1915 novella Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis), about a
man who is inexplicably transformed into an insect

Early 20th century

In the first decades of the 20th century, a number of philosophers and writers had explored
existentialists ideas, the only difference was in the name. The Spanish philosopher Miguel de
Unamuno y Jugo, in his 1913 book The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations, emphasized
the life of "flesh and bone" as opposed to that of abstract rationalism. Unamuno rejected
systematic philosophy in favor of the individual's quest for faith. He retained a sense of the
tragic, even absurd nature of the quest, symbolized by his enduring interest in Cervantes'
fictional character Don Quixote. A novelist, poet and dramatist as well as philosophy professor at
the University of Salamanca, Unamuno's short story about a priest's crisis of faith, "Saint Manuel
the Good, Martyr" has been collected in anthologies of existentialist fiction. Another Spanish
thinker, Ortega y Gasset, writing in 1914, held that the human existence must always be defined
as the individual person combined with the concrete circumstances of his life: "Yo soy yo y mi
circunstancia" ("I am myself and my circumstances"). Sartre likewise believed that human
existence is not an abstract matter, but is always situated ("en situación").

Although Martin Buber wrote his major philosophical works in German, and studied and taught
at the Universities of Berlin and Frankfurt, he stands apart from the mainstream of German
philosophy. Born into a Jewish family in Vienna in 1878, he was also a scholar of Jewish culture
and involved at various times in Zionism and Hasidism. In 1938, he moved permanently to
Jerusalem. His best-known philosophical work was the short book I and Thou, published in
1922. For Buber, the fundamental fact of human existence, too readily overlooked by scientific
rationalism and abstract philosophical thought, is "man with man", a dialogue which takes place
in the so-called "sphere of between" ("das Zwischenmenschliche").[33]

Two Russian thinkers, Lev Shestov and Nikolai Berdyaev became well-known as existentialist
thinkers during their post-Revolutionary exiles in Paris. Shestov, born into a Russian-Jewish
family in Kiev, had launched an attack on rationalism and systematization in philosophy as early
as 1905 in his book of aphorisms All Things Are Possible.

Berdyaev, also from Kiev but with a background in the Eastern Orthodox Church, drew a radical
distinction between the world of spirit and the everyday world of objects. Human freedom, for
Berdyaev, is rooted in the realm of spirit, a realm independent of scientific notions of causation.
To the extent the individual human being lives in the objective world, he is estranged from
authentic spiritual freedom. "Man" is not to be interpreted naturalistically, but as a being created
in God's image, an originator of free, creative acts.[34] He published a major work on these
themes, The Destiny of Man, in 1931.

Gabriel Marcel, long before coining the term "existentialism", introduced important
existentialist themes to a French audience in his early essay "Existence and Objectivity" (1925)
and in his Metaphysical Journal (1927).[35] A dramatist as well as a philosopher, Marcel found
his philosophical starting point in a condition of metaphysical alientation; the human individual
searching for harmony in a transient life. Harmony, for Marcel, was to be sought through
"secondary reflection", a "dialogical" rather than "dialectical" approach to the world,
characterized by "wonder and astonishment" and open to the "presence" of other people and of
God rather than merely to "information" about them. For Marcel, such presence implied more
than simply being there (as one thing might be in the presence of another thing); it connoted
"extravagant" availability, and the willingness to put oneself at the disposal of the other.[36]

Marcel contrasted "secondary reflection" with abstract, scientific-technical "primary reflection"

which he associated with the activity of the abstract Cartesian ego. For Marcel, philosophy was a
concrete activity undertaken by a sensing, feeling human being incarnate — embodied — in a
concrete world.[37][38] Although Jean-Paul Sartre adopted the term "existentialism" for his own
philosophy in the 1940s, Marcel's thought has been described as "almost diametrically opposed"
to that of Sartre.[39] Unlike Sartre, Marcel was a Christian, and became a Catholic convert in
1929.

In Germany, the psychologist and philosopher Karl Jaspers — who later described
existentialism as a "phantom" created by the public,[40] — called his own thought, heavily
influenced by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche — Existenzphilosophie. For Jaspers, "Existenz-
philosophy is the way of thought by means of which man seeks to become himself...This way of
thought does not cognize objects, but elucidates and makes actual the being of the thinker."[41]
Jaspers, a professor at the University of Heidelberg, was acquainted with Martin Heidegger,
who held a professorship at Marburg before acceding to Husserl's chair at Freiburg in 1928.
They held many philosophical discussions, but later became estranged over Heidegger's support
of National Socialism. They shared an admiration for Kierkegaard,[42] and in the 1930s Heidegger
lectured extensively on Nietzsche. Nevertheless, the extent to which Heidegger should be
considered an existentialist is debatable. In Being and Time he presented a method of rooting
philosophical explanations in human existence (Dasein) to be analysed in terms of existential
categories (existentiale); and this has led many commentators to treat him as an important figure
in the existentialist movement.

After the Second World War

Following the Second World War, existentialism became a well-known and significant
philosophical and cultural movement, mainly through the public prominence of two French
writers, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, who wrote best-selling novels, plays and widely-
read journalism as well as theoretical texts. These years also saw the growing reputation outside
Germany of Heidegger's book Being and Time.

Sartre had dealt with existentialist themes in his 1938 novel Nausea and the short stories in his
1939 collection The Wall, and had published a major philosophical statement, Being and
Nothingness in 1943, but it was in the two years following the liberation of Paris from the
German occupying forces that he and his close associates — Camus, Simone de Beauvoir,
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others — became internationally famous as the leading figures of a
movement known as existentialism.[43] In a very short space of time, Camus and Sartre in
particular, became the leading public intellectuals of post-war France, achieving by the end of
1945 "a fame that reached across all audiences."[44] Camus was an editor of the most popular
leftist (former French Resistance) newspaper Combat; Sartre launched his journal of leftist
thought, Les Temps Modernes, and two weeks later gave the widely reported lecture on
existentialism and humanism to a packed meeting of the Club Maintenant. Beauvoir wrote that
"not a week passed without the newspapers discussing us";[45] existentialism became "the first
media craze of the postwar era."[46]
French philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir

By the end of 1947, Camus's earlier fiction and plays had been reprinted, his new play Caligula
had been performed and his novel The Plague published; the first two novels of Sartre's The
Roads to Freedom trilogy had appeared, as had Beauvoir's novel The Blood of Others. Works by
Camus and Sartre were already appearing in foreign editions. The Paris-based existentialists had
become famous.[47]

Sartre had travelled to Germany in 1930 to study the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and
Martin Heidegger,[48] and he included critical comments on their work in his major treatise Being
and Nothingness. Heidegger's thought had also become known in French philosophical circles
through its use by Alexandre Kojève in explicating Hegel in a series of lectures given in Paris in
the 1930s.[49] The lectures were highly influential; members of the audience included not only
Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, but Raymond Queneau, Georges Bataille, Louis Althusser, André
Breton and Jacques Lacan.[50] A selection from Heidegger's Being and Time was published in
French in 1938, and his essays began to appear in French philosophy journals.

Heidegger read Sartre's work and was initially impressed, commenting: "Here for the first time I
encountered an independent thinker who, from the foundations up, has experienced the area out
of which I think, Your work shows such an immediate comprehension of my philosophy as I
have never before encountered."[51] Later, however, in response to a question posed by his French
follower Jean Beaufret,[52] Heidegger distanced himself from Sartre's position and existentialism
in general in his Letter on Humanism.[53] Heidegger's reputation continued to grow in France
during the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1960s, Sartre attempted to reconcile existentialism and
Marxism in his work Critique of Dialectical Reason. A major theme throughout his writings was
freedom and responsibility.

Albert Camus was a friend of Sartre, until their falling-out, and wrote several works with
existential themes including The Rebel, The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus, and Summer in
Algiers. Camus, like many others, rejected the existentialist label, and considered his works to be
concerned with people facing the absurd. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus uses the analogy of
the Greek myth to demonstrate the futility of existence. In the myth, Sisyphus is condemned for
eternity to roll a rock up a hill, but when he reaches the summit, the rock will roll to the bottom
again. Camus believes that this existence is pointless but that Sisyphus ultimately finds meaning
and purpose in his task, simply by continually applying himself to it. The first half of the book
contains an extended rebuttal of what Camus took to be existential philosophy in the works of
Kierkegaard, Shestov, Heidegger and Jaspers.

French-Algerian philosopher, novelist, and playwright Albert Camus

Simone de Beauvoir, an important existentialist who spent much of her life as Sartre's partner,
wrote about feminist and existential ethics in her works, including The Second Sex and The
Ethics of Ambiguity. Although often overlooked due to her relationship with Sartre, de Beauvoir
integrated existentialism with other forms of thinking such as feminism, unheard of at the time,
resulting in alienation from fellow writers such as Camus. Frantz Fanon, a Martiniquan-born
critic of colonialism, has been considered an important existentialist.[54]

French philosopher and novelist Simone de Beauvoir

Paul Tillich, an important existential theologian following Søren Kierkegaard and Karl Barth,
applied existential concepts to Christian theology, and helped introduce existential theology to
the general public. His seminal work The Courage to Be follows Kierkegaard's analysis of
anxiety and life's absurdity, but puts forward the thesis that modern man must, via God, achieve
selfhood in spite of life's absurdity. Rudolf Bultmann used Kierkegaard's and Heidegger's
philosophy of existence to demythologize Christianity by interpreting Christian mythical
concepts into existential concepts.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, an existential phenomenologist, was for a time a companion of Sartre.

His understanding of Husserl's phenomenology was far greater than that of Merleau-Ponty's
fellow existentialists. It has been said that his work, Humanism and Terror, greatly influenced
Sartre. However, in later years they were to disagree irreparably, dividing many existentialists
such as de Beauvoir, who sided with Sartre.
Colin Wilson, an English writer, published his study The Outsider in 1956, initially to critical
acclaim. In this book and others (e.g. Introduction to the New Existentialism), he attempted to
reinvigorate what he perceived as a pessimistic philosophy and bring it to a wider audience. He
was not, however, academically trained, and his work was attacked by professional philosophers
for lack of rigor and critical standards.[55]

Concepts
Focus on concrete existence

Existentialist thinkers focus on the question of concrete human existence and the conditions of
this existence rather than hypothesizing a human essence, stressing that the human essence is
chosen through life choices. However, even though the concrete individual existence must have
priority in existentialism, certain conditions are commonly held to be "endemic" to human
existence.

What these conditions are is better understood in light of the meaning of the word "existence,"
which comes from the Latin "existere," meaning "to stand out." Man exists in a state of distance
from the world that he nonetheless remains in the midst of. This distance is what enables man to
project meaning into the disinterested world of in-itselfs. This projected meaning remains fragile,
constantly facing breakdown for any reason — from a tragedy to a particularly insightful
moment. In such a breakdown, we are put face to face with the naked meaninglessness of the
world, and the results can be devastating.

It is in relation to the concept of the devastating awareness of meaningless that Albert Camus
claimed that "there is only one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide" in his
The Myth of Sisyphus. Although "prescriptions" against the possibly deleterious consequences of
these kinds of encounters vary, from Kierkegaard's religious "stage" to Camus' insistence on
persevering in spite of absurdity, the concern with helping people avoid living their lives in ways
that put them in the perpetual danger of having everything meaningful break down is common to
most existentialist philosophers.

Existence precedes essence

Main article: Existence precedes essence

A central proposition of existentialism is that existence precedes essence, which means that the
actual life of the individual is what constitutes what could be called his or her "essence" instead
of there being a predetermined essence that defines what it is to be a human. Although it was
Sartre who explicitly coined the phrase, similar notions can be found in the thought of many
existentialist philosophers, from Kierkegaard to Heidegger.

It is often claimed in this context that a person defines himself, which is often perceived as
stating that we can "wish" to be something — anything, a bird, for instance — and then be it.
According to most existentialist philosophers, however, this would be an inauthentic existence.
What is meant by the statement is that a person is (1) defined only insofar as he or she acts and
(2) that he or she is responsible for his or her actions. For example, someone who acts cruelly
towards other people is, by that act, defined as a cruel person. Furthermore, by this action of
cruelty such persons are themselves responsible for their new identity (a cruel person). This is as
opposed to their genes, or 'human nature', bearing the blame.

As Sartre puts it in his Existentialism is a Humanism: "man first of all exists, encounters himself,
surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards." Of course, the more positive,
therapeutic aspect of this is also implied: You can choose to act in a different way, and to be a
good person instead of a cruel person. Here it is also clear that since man can choose to be either
cruel or good, he is, in fact, neither of these things essentially. [56]

Angst

Angst, sometimes called dread, anxiety or even anguish is a term that is common to many
existentialist thinkers. It is generally held to be the experience of our freedom and responsibility.
The archetypal example is the experience one has when standing on a cliff where one not only
fears falling off it, but also dreads the possibility of throwing oneself off. In this experience that
"nothing is holding me back", one senses the lack of anything that predetermines you to either
throw yourself off or to stand still, and one experiences one's own freedom.

It can also be seen in relation to the previous point how angst is before nothing, and this is what
sets it apart from fear which has an object. While in the case of fear, one can take definitive
measures to remove the object of fear, in the case of angst, no such "constructive" measures are
possible. The use of the word "nothing" in this context relates both to the inherent insecurity
about the consequences of one's actions, and to the fact that, in experiencing one's freedom as
angst, one also realizes that one will be fully responsible for these consequences; there is no
thing in you (your genes, for instance) that acts in your stead, and that you can "blame" if
something goes wrong.

Not every choice is perceived as having dreadful possible consequences (and, it can be claimed,
our lives would be unbearable if every choice facilitated dread), but that doesn't change the fact
that freedom remains a condition of every action. One of the most extensive treatments of the
existentialist notion of Angst is found in Søren Kierkegaard's monumental work Begrebet Angest
(The Concept of Dread).

Angst is often described as the drama adolescents trouble with during their developmental years.
In pop-culture 'angst' is used to describe a particular attitude, often towards family or
governmental systems. In this light, the angst of popular teenage life could be used to describe
the often-theorized 'existential crisis' that is adolescence.

Freedom

The existentialist concept of freedom is often misunderstood as a sort of liberum arbitrium where
almost anything is possible and where values are inconsequential to choice and action. This
interpretation of the concept is often related to the insistence on the absurdity of the world and
the assumption that there exist no relevant or absolutely good or bad values. However, that there
are no values to be found in the world in-itself does not mean that there are no values: We are
usually brought up with certain values, and even though we cannot justify them ultimately, they
will be "our" values.

In Kierkegaard's Judge Vilhelm's account in Either/Or, making choices without allowing one's
values to confer differing values to the alternatives, is, in fact, choosing not to make a choice —
to flip a coin, as it were, and to leave everything to chance. This is considered to be a refusal to
live in the consequence of one's freedom; an inauthentic existence. As such, existentialist
freedom isn't situated in some kind of abstract space where everything is possible: since people
are free, and since they already exist in the world, it is implied that their freedom is only in this
world, and that it, too, is restricted by it.

What is not implied in this account of existential freedom, however, is that one's values are
immutable; a consideration of one's values may cause one to reconsider and change them. A
consequence of this fact is that one is not only responsible for one's actions, but also for the
values one holds. This entails that a reference to common values doesn't excuse the individual's
actions: Even though these are the values of the society the individual is part of, they are also his
own in the sense that s/he could choose them to be different at any time. Thus, the focus on
freedom in existentialism is related to the limits of the responsibility one bears as a result of one's
freedom: the relationship between freedom and responsibility is one of interdependency, and a
clarification of freedom also clarifies what one is responsible for.

Facticity

A concept closely related to freedom is that of facticity, a concept defined by Sartre in Being and
Nothingness as that "in-itself" of which you are in the mode of not being. This can be more
easily understood when considering it in relation to the temporal dimension of past: Your past is
what you are in the sense that it co-constitutes you. However, to say that you are only your past
would be to ignore a large part of reality (the present and the future) while saying that your past
is only what you were in a way that would entirely detach it from you now. A denial of one's
own concrete past constitutes an inauthentic lifestyle, and the same goes for all other kinds of
facticity (having a body (e.g. one that doesn't allow you to run faster than the speed of sound),
identity, values, etc.).

Facticity is both a limitation and a condition of freedom. It is a limitation in that a large part of
your facticity consists of things you couldn't have chosen (birthplace, etc.), but a condition in the
sense that your values most likely will depend on it. However, even though your facticity is "set
in stone" (as being past, for instance), it cannot determine you: The value ascribed to your
facticity is still ascribed to it freely by you. As an example, consider two men, one of which has
no memory of his past and the other remembers everything. They have both committed many
crimes, but the first man, knowing nothing about this, leads a rather normal life while the second
man, feeling trapped by his own past, continues a life of crime, blaming his own past for
"trapping" him in this life. There is nothing essential about his committing crimes, but he
ascribes this meaning to his past.
However, to disregard your facticity when you, in the continual process of self-making, project
yourself into the future, would be to put yourself in denial of yourself, and would thus be
inauthentic. In other words, the origin of your projection will still have to be your facticity,
although in the mode of not being it (essentially). Another aspect of facticity is that it entails
angst, both in the sense that freedom "produces" angst when limited by facticity, and in the sense
that the lack of the possibility of having facticity "step in" for you to take responsibility for
something you have done also produces angst.

Authenticity and inauthenticity

The theme of authentic existence is common to many existentialist thinkers. It is often taken to
mean that one has to "find oneself" and then live in accordance with this self. A common
misunderstanding is that the self is something you can find if you look hard enough, that one's
true self is substantial.

What is meant by authenticity is that in acting, one should act as oneself, not as One, one's genes
or any other essence. The authentic act is one that is in accordance with one's freedom. Of
course, as a condition of freedom is facticity, this includes one's facticity, but not to the degree
that this facticity can in any way determine one's choices (in the sense that one could then blame
one's background for making the choice one made). The role of facticity in relation to
authenticity involves letting one's actual values come into play when one makes a choice (instead
of, like Kierkegaard's Aesthete, "choosing" randomly), so that one also takes responsibility for
the act instead of choosing either-or without allowing the options to have different values.

In contrast to this, the inauthentic is the denial to live in accordance with one's freedom. This can
take many forms, from pretending choices are meaningless or random, through convincing
oneself that some form of determinism is true, to a sort of "mimicry" where one acts as "One
should." How "One" should act is often determined by an image one has of how one such as
oneself (say, a bank manager) acts. This image usually corresponds to some sort of social norm,
but this does not mean that all acting in accordance with social norms is inauthentic: The main
point is the attitude one takes to one's own freedom and responsibility, and the extent to which
one acts in accordance with this freedom.

Despair

Commonly defined as a loss of hope,[57] Despair in existentialism is more specifically related to

the reaction to a breakdown in one or more of the "pillars" of one's self or identity. If one is
invested in being a particular thing, a waiter or an "upstanding citizen," for example, and one
finds oneself in a situation in which one has done something or had something happen to oneself
that compromises this being-thing, one would normally find oneself in a state of despair, a
hopeless state. An athlete who loses his legs in an accident may despair if he has nothing to "fall
back on," for instance. One is confronted with the irreality of what one had taken to be one's self.

What sets the existentialist notion of despair apart from the dictionary definition is that
existentialist despair is a state one is in even when one isn't overtly in despair: As long as one has
based one's identity on such pillars so that one is vulnerable to having one's world break down,
one is considered to be in perpetual despair. And as, in Sartrean terms, there is no human essence
based in reality from which to constitute one's sense of identity, despair is the truly human
condition. As Kierkegaard defines it in his Either/or: "Any life-view with a condition outside it is
despair."[58] In other words, it is possible to be in despair without despairing.

The Other and The Look

The Other (when written with a capital "o") is a concept more properly belonging to
phenomenology and its account of intersubjectivity. However, the concept has seen widespread
use in existentialist writings, and the conclusions drawn from it differ slightly from the
phenomenological accounts. The experience of the Other is the experience of another free
subject who inhabits the same world as you do. In its most basic form, it is this experience of the
Other that constitutes intersubjectivity and objectivity. To clarify, when one experiences
someone else, and that this Other person experiences the world (the same world that you
experience), only from "over there", the world itself is constituted as objective in that it is
something that is "there" as identical for both of the subjects; you experience the other person as
experiencing the same as you. This experience of the Other's look is what is termed the Look
(sometimes The Gaze).

While this experience, in its basic phenomenological sense, constitutes the world as objective,
and yourself as objectively existing subjectivity (you experience yourself as seen in the Other's
Look in precisely the same way that you experience the Other as seen by you, as subjectivity), in
existentialism, it also acts as a kind of limitation of your freedom. This is because the Look tends
to objectify what it sees. As such, when one experiences oneself in the Look, one doesn't
experience oneself as nothing (no thing), but as something. Sartre's own example of a man
peeping at someone through a keyhole can help clarify this: At first, this man is entirely caught
up in the situation he is in; he is in a pre-reflexive state where his entire consciousness is directed
at what goes on in the room. Suddenly, he hears a creaking floorboard behind him, and he
becomes aware of himself as seen by the Other. He is thus filled with shame for he perceives
himself as he would perceive someone else doing what he was doing, as a Peeping Tom. The
Look is then co-constitutive of one's facticity.

Another characteristic feature of the Look is that no Other really needs to have been there: It is
quite possible that the creaking floorboard was nothing but the movement of an old house; the
Look isn't some kind of mystical telepathic experience of the actual way the other sees you
(there may also have been someone there, but he could have not noticed that you were there). It
is only your perception of the way another might perceive you.

Reason

Emphasizing action, freedom, and decision as fundamental, existentialists oppose themselves to

rationalism and positivism. That is, they argue against definitions of human beings as primarily
rational. Rather, existentialists look at where people find meaning. Existentialism asserts that
people actually make decisions based on the meaning to them rather than rationally. The
rejection of reason as the source of meaning is a common theme of existentialist thought, as is
the focus on the feelings of anxiety and dread that we feel in the face of our own radical freedom
and our awareness of death. Kierkegaard saw strong rationality as a mechanism humans use to
counter their existential anxiety, their fear of being in the world: "If I can believe that I am
rational and everyone else is rational then I have nothing to fear and no reason to feel anxious
about being free."[citation needed] However, Kierkegaard advocated rationality as means to interact
with the objective world (e.g. in the natural sciences), but when it comes to existential problems,
reason is insufficient: "Human reason has boundaries".[59]

Like Kierkegaard, Sartre saw problems with rationality, calling it a form of "bad faith", an
attempt by the self to impose structure on a world of phenomena — "the Other" — that is
fundamentally irrational and random. According to Sartre, rationality and other forms of bad
faith hinder us from finding meaning in freedom. To try to suppress our feelings of anxiety and
dread, we confine ourselves within everyday experience, Sartre asserts, thereby relinquishing our
freedom and acquiescing to being possessed in one form or another by "the look" of "the Other"
(i.e. possessed by another person — or at least our idea of that other person). In a similar vein,
Camus believed that society and religion falsely teach humans that "the Other" has order and
structure.[60] For Camus, when an individual's consciousness, longing for order, collides with the
Other's lack of order, a third element is born: absurdity.

The Absurd

Main article: Absurdism

The notion of the Absurd contains the idea that there is no meaning to be found in the world
beyond what meaning we give to it. This meaninglessness also encompasses the amorality or
"unfairness" of the world. This contrasts with "karmic" ways of thinking in which "bad things
don't happen to good people"; to the world, metaphorically speaking, there is no such thing as a
good person or a bad thing; what happens happens, and it may just as well happen to a "good"
person as to a "bad" person.

Because of the world's absurdity, at any point in time, anything can happen to anyone, and a
tragic event could plummet someone into direct confrontation with the Absurd. The notion of the
absurd has been prominent in literature throughout history. Søren Kierkegaard, Franz Kafka,
Fyodor Dostoevsky and many of the literary works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus contain
descriptions of people who encounter the absurdity of the world. Albert Camus studied the issue
of "the absurd" in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus.

Relation to Nihilism
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Though nihilism and existentialism are distinct philosophies, they are often confused with one
another. A primary cause of confusion is that Friedrich Nietzsche is an important philosopher in
both fields, but also the existentialist insistence on the absurd and the inherent meaninglessness
of the world. Existentialist philosophers often stress the importance of Angst as signifying the
absolute lack of any objective ground for action, a move that is often reduced to a moral or an
existential nihilism. A pervasive theme in the works of existentialist philosophy, however, is to
persist through encounters with the absurd, as seen in Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus, and it is
only very rarely that existentialist philosophers dismiss morality or one's self-created meaning:
Kierkegaard regained a sort of morality in the religious (although he wouldn't himself agree that
it was ethical; the religious suspends the ethical), and Sartre's final words in Being and
Nothingness are "All these questions, which refer us to a pure and not an accessory (or impure)
reflection, can find their reply only on the ethical plane. We shall devote to them a future
work."[61] Hence, existentialists believe that one can create value and meaning, whilst nihilists
will deny this.

Criticism
Herbert Marcuse criticised Existentialism, especially Being and Nothingness (1943), by Jean-
Paul Sartre, for projecting anxiety and meaninglessness onto the nature of existence itself:
"Insofar as Existentialism is a philosophical doctrine, it remains an idealistic doctrine: it
hypostatizes specific historical conditions of human existence into ontological and metaphysical
characteristics. Existentialism thus becomes part of the very ideology which it attacks, and its
radicalism is illusory".[62] In 1946, Sartre already had replied to Marxist criticism of
Existentialism in the lecture Existentialism is a humanism.[63] In Jargon of Authenticity, Theodor
Adorno criticised Heidegger's philosophy, especially his use of language, as a mystifying
ideology of advanced, industrial society, and its power structure.[citation needed]

In Letter on Humanism, Heidegger criticized Sartre's existentialism:

Existentialism says existence precedes essence. In this statement he is taking existentia

and essentia according to their metaphysical meaning, which, from Plato's time on, has
said that essentia precedes existentia. Sartre reverses this statement. But the reversal of a
metaphysical statement remains a metaphysical statement. With it, he stays with
metaphysics, in oblivion of the truth of Being.

Logical positivists, such as Carnap and Ayer, say Existentialists frequently are confused about
the verb "to be" in their analyses of "being".[64] They argue that the verb is transitive, and pre-
fixed to a predicate (e.g., an apple is red): without a predicate, the word is meaningless.
Influence outside philosophy
Cultural movement and influence

The term existentialism was first adopted as a self-reference in the 1940s and 1950s by Jean-Paul
Sartre, and the widespread use of literature as a means of disseminating their ideas by Sartre and
his associates (notably novelist Albert Camus) meant existentialism "was as much a literary
phenomenon as a philosophical one."[65] Among existentialist writers were Parisians Jean Genet,
André Gide, André Malraux, and playwright Samuel Beckett, the Norwegian Knut Hamsun, and
the Romanian friends Eugène Ionesco and Emil Cioran. Prominent artists such as the Abstract
Expressionists Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, and Willem de Kooning have been understood in
existentialist terms, as have filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and Ingmar Bergman.[65]

Film and Video

The French director Jean Genet's 1950 fantasy-erotic film Un chant d'amour shows two inmates
in solitary cells whose only contact is through a hole in their cell wall, who are spied on by the
prison warden. Reviewer James Travers calls the film a "...visual poem evoking homosexual
desire and existentialist suffering" which "... conveys the bleakness of an existence in a godless
universe with painful believability"; he calls it "... probably the most effective fusion of
existentialist philosophy and cinema."[66]

Stanley Kubrick's 1957 anti-war film Paths of Glory "illustrates, and even
illuminates...existentialism" by examining the "necessary absurdity of the human condition" and
the "horror of war".[67] The film tells the story of a fictional World War I French army regiment
which is ordered to attack an impregnable German stronghold; when the attack fails, three
soldiers are chosen at random, court-martialed by a "kangaroo court", and executed by firing
squad. The film examines existential ethics, such as the issue of whether objectivity is possible
and the "problem of authenticity".[68]

On the lighter side, the British comedy troupe Monty Python have explored existential themes
throughout their works, from many of the sketches in their original television show, the Flying
Circus, to their last major release and the 1983 film The Meaning of Life.[69] Of the many
adjectives (some listed in the introduction above) that might indicate an existential tone, the one
utilized the most by the group is that of the absurd.

Some contemporary films dealing with existential issues include Fight Club, Waking Life, and
Ordinary People[70]. Likewise, films throughout the 20th century such as The Seventh Seal, Ikiru,
Taxi Driver, High Noon, Easy Rider, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, A Clockwork Orange,
Apocalypse Now, Badlands, and Blade Runner also have existential qualities.[71] Notable
directors known for their existentialist films include Ingmar Bergman, François Truffaut, Jean-
Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, Akira Kurosawa, Stanley Kubrick, Andrei
Tarkovsky,Tokuma Shoten and Woody Allen.[72] Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York
focuses on the protagonist's desire to find existential meaning in life as he sees its end.[73]
The contemporary New York avant-garde artist Barbara Rosenthal has produced a large body of
"Existential Wall Works"[74] and "Existential Video"[75].

Literature

Since 1970, much cultural activity in art, cinema, and literature contains postmodernist and
existential elements. Books such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) (now
republished as Blade Runner) by Philip K. Dick, Toilet: The Novel by Michael Szymczyk and
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk all distort the line between reality and appearance while
simultaneously espousing strong existential themes. Ideas from such thinkers as Dostoevsky,
Foucault, Kafka, Nietzsche, Herbert Marcuse, Gilles Deleuze, and Eduard von Hartmann
permeate the works of artists such as Chuck Palahniuk, Michael Szymczyk, David Lynch,
Crispin Glover, and Charles Bukowski, and one often finds in their works a delicate balance
between distastefulness and beauty.

Theatre

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote No Exit in 1944, an existentialist play originally published in French as
Huis Clos (meaning In Camera or "behind closed doors") which is the source of the popular
quote, "Hell is other people." (In French, "l'enfer, c'est les autres"). The play begins with a Valet
leading a man into a room that the audience soon realizes is in hell. Eventually he is joined by
two women. After their entry, the Valet leaves and the door is shut and locked. All three expect
to be tortured, but no torturer arrives. Instead, they realize they are there to torture each other,
which they do effectively, by probing each other's sins, desires, and unpleasant memories.

Existentialist themes are displayed in the Theatre of the Absurd, notably in Samuel Beckett's
Waiting for Godot, in which two men divert themselves while they wait expectantly for someone
(or something) named Godot who never arrives. They claim Godot to be an acquaintance but in
fact hardly know him, admitting they would not recognize him if they saw him. Samuel Beckett,
once asked who or what Godot is, replied, "If I knew, I would have said so in the play." To
occupy themselves they eat, sleep, talk, argue, sing, play games, exercise, swap hats, and
contemplate suicide—anything "to hold the terrible silence at bay".[76] The play "exploits several
archetypal forms and situations, all of which lend themselves to both comedy and pathos."[77] The
play also illustrates an attitude toward man's experience on earth: the poignancy, oppression,
camaraderie, hope, corruption, and bewilderment of human experience that can only be
reconciled in mind and art of the absurdist. The play examines questions such as death, the
meaning of human existence and the place of God in human existence.

Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead is an absurdist tragicomedy first staged at
the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1966.[78] The play expands upon the exploits of two minor
characters from Shakespeare's Hamlet. Comparisons have also been drawn to Samuel Beckett's
Waiting For Godot, for the presence of two central characters who almost appear to be two
halves of a single character. Many plot features are similar as well: the characters pass time by
playing Questions, impersonating other characters, and interrupting each other or remaining
silent for long periods of time. The two characters are portrayed as two clowns or fools in a
world that is beyond their understanding. They stumble through philosophical arguments while
not realizing the implications, and muse on the irrationality and randomness of the world.

Jean Anouilh's Antigone also presents arguments founded on existentialist ideas.[79] It is a tragedy
inspired by Greek mythology and the play of the same name (Antigone, by Sophocles) from the
5th century B.C. In English, it is often distinguished from its antecedent by being pronounced in
its original French form, approximately "Ante-GŌN." The play was first performed in Paris on 6
February 1944, during the Nazi occupation of France. Produced under Nazi censorship, the play
is purposefully ambiguous with regards to the rejection of authority (represented by Antigone)
and the acceptance of it (represented by Creon). The parallels to the French Resistance and the
Nazi occupation have been drawn. Antigone rejects life as desperately meaningless but without
affirmatively choosing a noble death. The crux of the play is the lengthy dialogue concerning the
nature of power, fate, and choice, during which Antigone says that she is "... disgusted with
[the]...promise of a humdrum happiness"; she states that she would rather die than live a
mediocre existence.

Critic Martin Esslin in his book Theatre of the Absurd pointed out how many contemporary
playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Arthur Adamov wove into
their plays the existential belief that we are absurd beings loose in a universe empty of real
meaning. Esslin noted that many of these playwrights demonstrated the philosophy better than
did the plays by Sartre and Camus. Though most of such playwrights, subsequently labeled
"Absurdist" (based on Esslin's book), denied affiliations with existentialism and were often
staunchly anti-philosophical (for example Ionesco often claimed he identified more with
'Pataphysics or with Surrealism than with existentialism), the playwrights are often linked to
existentialism based on Esslin's observation.[80]

Music

This section requires expansion with:

examples and additional citations.

Many solo artists and bands have released existentially themed works ranging from single songs
to entire albums. Some of these artists have focused and built their entire careers exploring these
themes. Notable examples include Jim Morrison of The Doors, Scott Walker, Straylight Run,
Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, Trent Reznor of the industrial band Nine Inch Nails, Howard
Devoto of Magazine [81] among others. Also in Electronica style, a good example is Enigma for
the albums MCMXC a.D., Le Roi Est Mort, Vive Le Roi! and The Screen Behind the Mirror.

Theology

Main article: Christian existentialism

Christ's teachings had an indirect style, in which his point is often left unsaid for the purpose of
letting the single individual confront the truth on their own.[82] This is evident in his parables,
which are a response to a question he is asked. After he tells the parable, he returns the question
to the individual.
An existential reading of the Bible would demand that the reader recognize that he is an existing
subject studying the words more as a recollection of possible events. This is in contrast to
looking at a collection of "truths" which are outside and unrelated to the reader, but may develop
a sense of reality/God.[83] Such a reader is not obligated to follow the commandments as if an
external agent is forcing them upon him, but as though they are inside him and guiding him from
inside. This is the task Kierkegaard takes up when he asks: "Who has the more difficult task: the
teacher who lectures on earnest things a meteor's distance from everyday life-or the learner who
should put it to use?"[84] From an existential perspective, the Bible would not become an
authority in an individual's life until that individual authorizes the Bible to be such.
Existentialism has had a significant influence on theology, notably on postmodern Christianity
and on theologians and religious thinkers such as Nikolai Berdyaev, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich,
Wilfrid Desan and John Macquarrie.

Existential psychoanalysis and psychotherapy

Main article: Existential therapy

One of the major offshoots of existentialism as a philosophy is existential psychology and

psychoanalysis, which first crystallized in the work of Ludwig Binswanger, a clinician who was
influenced by Freud, Edmund Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre. A later figure was Viktor Frankl,
who had studied with Freud and Jung as a young man[citation needed]. His logotherapy can be regarded
as a form of existential therapy.

An early contributor to existential psychology in the United States was Rollo May, who was
influenced by Kierkegaard. One of the most prolific writers on techniques and theory of
existential psychology in the USA is Irvin D. Yalom. The person who has contributed most to
the development of a European version of existential psychotherapy is the British-based Emmy
van Deurzen.

Anxiety's importance in existentialism makes it a popular topic in psychotherapy. Therapists

often offer existential philosophy as an explanation for anxiety. The assertion is that anxiety is
manifested of an individual's complete freedom to decide, and complete responsibility for the
outcome of such decisions. Psychotherapists using an existential approach believe that a patient
can harness his anxiety and use it constructively. Instead of suppressing anxiety, patients are
advised to use it as grounds for change. By embracing anxiety as inevitable, a person can use it
to achieve his full potential in life. Humanistic psychology also had major impetus from
existential psychology and shares many of the fundamental tenets. Terror management theory is
a developing area of study within the academic study of psychology. It looks at what researchers
claim to be the implicit emotional reactions of people that occur when they are confronted with
the knowledge they will eventually die.

See also
• Abandonment
• Angst
• Anguish
 • Atheist Existentialism
• Existential humanism
• Existential crisis
• Existential phenomenology
• Existential meaning
• Existentiell (Heideggerian terminology)
• List of major thinkers and authors associated with existentialism
• Existential therapy
• Psychodrama
• Lightness
• Meaning of Life
• Colin Wilson
• The Ister (film)
• Human, All Too Human (TV series)

• Martin Heidegger
• Karl Jaspers
• Soren Kierkegaard

Notes
1. ^ John Macquarrie, Existentialism, New York (1972), pages 18–21.
2. ^ Oxford Companion to Philosophy, ed. Ted Honderich, New York (1995), page 259.
3. ^ John Macquarrie, Existentialism, New York (1972), pages 14–15.
4. ^ D.E. Cooper Existentialism: A Reconstruction (Basil Blackwell, 1999, page 8)
5. ^ Solomon, Robert C. (1987). From Hegel to Existentialism. Oxford University Press.
pp. 238. ISBN 0195061829. http://books.google.com/books?
id=3JA3vyj4slsC&pg=PA238.
6. ^ Robert C. Solomon, Existentialism (McGraw-Hill, 1974, pages 1–2)
7. ^ D.E. Cooper Existentialism: A Reconstruction (Basil Blackwell, 1999, page 8).
8. ^ Ernst Breisach, Introduction to Modern Existentialism, New York (1962), page 5
9. ^ Walter Kaufmann, Existentialism: From Dostoevesky to Sartre, New York (1956),
page 12
10. ^ Walter Kaufmann. Existentialism: From Dostoevsky to Sartre. (Cleveland: The World
Publishing Company, 1956) 11
11. ^ D.E. Cooper Existentialism: A Reconstruction (Basil Blackwell, 1990, page 1)
12. ^ Thomas R. Flynn, Existentialism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press,
2006, page 89
13. ^ Christine Daigle, Existentialist Thinkers and Ethics (McGill-Queen's press, 2006, page
5)
14. ^ L'Existentialisme est un Humanisme (Editions Nagel, 1946); English Jean-Paul Sartre,
Existentialism and Humanism (Eyre Methuen, 1948)
15. ^ John Potevi, A Dictionary of Continental Philosophy (Yale University press, 2006,
page 325)
16. ^ Thomas R. Flynn, Existentialism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press,
2006, page 89
17. ^ S. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, "A First and Last Declaration":
"...to read solo the original text of the individual, human-existence relationship, the old
text, well known, handed down from the fathers, to read it through yet once more, if
possible in a more heartfelt way."
18. ^ Michael Weston, Kierkegaard and Modern Continental Philosophy (Routledge, 2003,
page 35)
19. ^ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kierkegaard/
20. ^ Christine Daigle, Existentialist Thinkers and Ethics (McGill-Queen's press, 2006, page
5)
21. ^ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kierkegaard/
22. ^ a b Ferreira, M. Jamie, Kierkegaard, Wiley & Sons, 2008.
23. ^ Mulder Jr., Jack. Mystical And Buddhist Elements in Kierkegaard's Religious Thought,
Edwin Mellen Press, 2006
24. ^ Storm, D. Anthony. Søren Kierkegaard: A Primer
25. ^ Kaufmann, Walter. From Shakespeare to Existentialism. Princeton University Press,
1980
26. ^ Kierkegaard, Søren. The Essential Kierkegaard, edited by Howard and Edna Hong.
Princeton, 2000
27. ^ Marino, Gordon. Ed. Basic Writings of Existentialism. Modern Library, 2004.
28. ^ Luper, Steven. "Existing". Mayfield Publishing, 2000, p.4–5
29. ^ Ibid, p. 11
30. ^ Hubben, William. Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Kafka, Scribner, 1997.
31. ^ Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (Trans. Justin O'Brien, Hamish Hamilton, 1955,
page 104)
32. ^ Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (Trans. Justin O'Brien, Hamish Hamilton, 1955,
page 107)
33. ^ Maurice S. Friedman, Martin Buber. The Life of Dialogue (University of Chicago
press, 1955, page 85)
34. ^ Ernst Breisach, Introduction to Modern Existentialism, New York (1962), pages 173–
176
35. ^ Samuel M. Keen, "Gabriel Marcel" in Paul Edwards (ed.) The Encyclopaedia of
Philosophy (Macmillan Publishing Co, 1967)
36. ^ John Macquarrie, Existentialism (Pelican, 1973, page 110)
37. ^ John Macquarrie, Existentialism (Pelican, 1973, page 96)
38. ^ Samuel M. Keen, "Gabriel Marcel" in Paul Edwards (ed.) The Encyclopaedia of
Philosophy (Macmillan Publishing Co, 1967)
39. ^ Samuel M. Keen, "Gabriel Marcel" in Paul Edwards (ed.) The Encyclopaedia of
Philosophy (Macmillan Publishing Co, 1967)
40. ^ Karl Jaspers, "Philosophical Autobiography" in Paul Arthur Schilpp (ed.) The
Philosophy of Karl Jaspers (The Library of Living Philosophers IX (Tudor Publishing
Company, 1957, page 75/11)
41. ^ Karl Jaspers, "Philosophical Autobiography" in Paul Arthur Schilpp (ed.) The
Philosophy of Karl Jaspers (The Library of Living Philosophers IX (Tudor Publishing
Company, 1957, page 40)
42. ^ Karl Jaspers, "Philosophical Autobiography" in Paul Arthur Schilpp (ed.) The
Philosophy of Karl Jaspers (The Library of Living Philosophers IX (Tudor Publishing
Company, 1957, page 75/2 and following)
43. ^ Ronald Aronson, Camus and Sartre (University of Chicago Press, 2004, chapter 3
passim)
44. ^ Ronald Aronson, Camus and Sartre (University of Chicago Press, 2004, page 44)
45. ^ Simone de Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, quoted in Ronald Aronson, Camus and
Sartre (University of Chicago Press, 2004, page 48)
46. ^ Ronald Aronson, Camus and Sartre (University of Chicago Press, 2004, page 48)
47. ^ Ronald Aronson, Camus and Sartre (University of Chicago Press, 2004, chapter 3
passim)
48. ^ Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidgger — Between Good and Evil (Harvard University
Press, 1998, page 343
49. ^ Entry on Kojève in Martin Cohen (editor), The Essentials of Philosophy and
Ethics(Hodder Arnold, 2006, page 158); see also Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the
Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit (Cornell University Press,
1980)
50. ^ Entry on Kojève in Martin Cohen (editor), The Essentials of Philosophy and
Ethics(Hodder Arnold, 2006, page 158)
51. ^ Martin Hediegger, letter, quoted in Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidgger — Between
Good and Evil (Harvard University Press, 1998, page 349)
52. ^ Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidgger — Between Good and Evil (Harvard University
Press, 1998, page 356)
53. ^ William J. Richardson, Martin Heidegger: From Phenomenology to Thought
(Martjinus Nijhoff,1967, page 351)
54. ^ Macey, David. Franz Fanon: a Biography. New York City: Picador, USA. p. 129–130.
55. ^ K. Gunnar Bergström, An Odyssey to Freedom University of Uppsala, 1983, page
92;Colin Stanley, Colin Wilson, a Celebration: Essays and Recollections Cecil Woolf,
1988, page 43)
56. ^ Baird, Forrest E.; Walter Kaufmann (2008). From Plato to Derrida. Upper Saddle
River, New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall. ISBN 0-13-158591-6.
57. ^ http://www.tfd.com/despair
58. ^ http://books.google.com/books?id=GJHlYmo7kXEC&printsec=frontcover&dq=either-
or&ei=VMizSaryPKeGzgSjsLHtCg#PPA531,M1
59. ^ Soren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers Vol 5, p. 5
60. ^ Camus, Albert. "An Absurd Reasoning"
61. ^ Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, Routledge Classics (2003).
62. ^ Marcuse, Herbert. "Sartre's Existentialism". Printed in Studies in Critical Philosophy.
Translated by Joris De Bres. London: NLB, 1972. p. 161
63. ^ Text at marxists.org
64. ^ Carnap, Rudolf, Uberwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Spache
[Overcoming Metaphysics by the Logical Analysis of Speech], Erkenntnis (1932),
pp.219–241. Carnap's critique of Heidegger's "What is Metaphysics".
65. ^ a b "Steven Crowell" article by 2004-08-23 in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
66. ^ © James Travers 2005 http://72.14.205.104/search?
q=cache:iPYJjAhhAuMJ:filmsdefrance.com/FDF_Un_chant_d_amour_rev.html
 67. ^ Holt, Jason. "Existential Ethics: Where do the Paths of Glory Lead?". In The
Philosophy of Stanley Kubrick. By Jerold J. Abrams. Published 2007. University Press of
Kentucky. ISBN 081312445X
68. ^ Holt, Jason. "Existential Ethics: Where do the Paths of Glory Lead?". In The
Philosophy of Stanley Kubrick. By Jerold J. Abrams. Published 2007. University Press of
Kentucky. ISBN 081312445X
69. ^ "amazon.com's Films with an Existential Theme". http://www.amazon.com/Films-with-
an-Existential-Theme/lm/2XUY93GON1RKW. Retrieved 2009-02-02.
70. ^ Existential & Psychological Movie Recommendations
71. ^ Existentialism in Film
72. ^ Existentialist Adaptations - Harvard Film Archive
73. ^ "Review: 'Synecdoche, New York'".
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/movies/la-et-synecdoche24-
2008oct24,0,5252277.story. Retrieved 2008-11-17.
74. ^ Eisenlohr, Klaus, [1]"Barbara Rosenthal existential wall works photography, drawing
and performance at Gallery Lucas Carrieri" "Frameworks Archive", May-August 2009,
retrieved September 4, 2009
75. ^ Eisenlohr, Klaus. [2] "Barbara Rosenthal: Existential Video," "Directors Lounge
Contemporary Art and Media News" retrieved September 4, 2009
76. ^ The Times, 31 December 1964. Quoted in Knowlson, J., Damned to Fame: The Life of
Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), p 57
77. ^ Cronin, A., Samuel Beckett The Last Modernist (London: Flamingo, 1997), p 391
78. ^ Michael H. Hutchins (14 August 2006). "A Tom Stoppard Bibliography: Chronology".
The Stephen Sondheim Reference Guide.
http://www.sondheimguide.com/Stoppard/chronology.html. Retrieved 2008-06-23.
79. ^ Wren, Celia (12 December 2007). "From Forum, an Earnest and Painstaking
'Antigone'". Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2007/12/11/AR2007121102254.html. Retrieved 2008-04-07.
80. ^ Kernan, Alvin B. The Modern American Theater: A Collection of Critical Essays.
Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1967.
81. ^ "The Existential Notion that "God is Dead" in Industrial Music".
http://facweb.stvincent.edu/academics/religiousstu/writings/rodkey1.html. Retrieved
2009-02-02.
82. ^ Palmer, Donald D. Kierkegaard For Beginners. 1996. Writers And Readers Limited.
London, England. p.25
83. ^ Hong, Howard V. "Historical Introduction" to Fear and Trembling. Princeton
University Press. Princeton, New Jersey. 1983. p. x
84. ^ Kierkegaard, Soren. Works of Love. Harper & Row, Publishers. New York, N.Y. 1962.
p. 62

References
• Razavi, Mehdi Amin (1997), Suhrawardi and the School of Illumination, Routledge, ISBN
0700704124
• Albert Camus Lyrical and Critical essays. Edited by Philip Thody (interviev with Jeanie
Delpech, in Les Nouvelles litteraires, November 15, 1945). pg 345.
Further reading
• Appignanesi, Richard; and Oscar Zarate (2001). Introducing Existentialism. Cambridge,
UK: Icon. ISBN 1-84046-266-3.
• Cooper, David E. (1999). Existentialism: A Reconstruction (2nd ed.). Oxford, UK:
Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-21322-8.
• Luper, Steven (ed.) (2000). Existing: An Introduction to Existential Thought. Mountain
View, California: Mayfield. ISBN 0-7674-0587-0.
• Marino, Gordon (ed.) (2004). Basic Writings of Existentialism. New York: Modern
Library. ISBN 0-375-75989-1.
• Szymczyk, Michael (2004). Toilet: The Novel. Bloomington: Authorhouse (USA). ISBN
978-1418423865.
• Solomon, Robert C. (ed.) (2005). Existentialism (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford University
Press. ISBN 0-19-517463-1.
• Appignanesi, Richard (2006). Introducing Existentialism (3rd ed.). Thriplow, Cambridge:
Icon Books (UK), Totem Books (USA). ISBN 1-84046-717-7.
• Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness.
• Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism and Humanism.
• Rose, Eugene (Fr. Seraphim) (1994). Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern
Age. Saint Herman Press (1 September 1994). ISBN 0-938635-15-8.

External links
Introductions

• Friesian interpretation of Existentialism

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Existentialism
• "Existentialism is a Humanism", a lecture given by Jean-Paul Sartre
• Bioexistentialism
• The Existential Primer

Journals and articles

• Stirrings Still: The International Journal of Existential Literature

• Existential Analysis published by The Society for Existential Analysis

Existential psychotherapy

• An Introduction to Existential Counselling

• International Society for Existential Therapy
• HPSY.RU — Existential & humanistic psychology History of existentially-humanistic
psychology's development in formerly Soviet nations
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Translations: Existentialism
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Home > Library > Literature & Language > Translations

Dansk (Danish)
n. - eksistentialisme

Nederlands (Dutch)
existentialisme (filosofie)

Français (French)
n. - existentialisme

Deutsch (German)
n. - Existentialismus

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - (φιλοσ.) υπαρξισμός

Italiano (Italian)
esistenzialismo

Português (Portuguese)

Existentialism Is a Humanism

Written: Lecture given in 1946

Source: Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre, ed. Walter Kaufman, Meridian Publishing
Company, 1989;
First Published: World Publishing Company in 1956;
Translator: Philip Mairet;
Copyright: reproduced under the “Fair Use” provisions;
HTML Markup: by Andy Blunden 1998; proofed and corrected February 2005.
My purpose here is to offer a defence of existentialism against several reproaches that have been
laid against it.

First, it has been reproached as an invitation to people to dwell in quietism of despair. For if
every way to a solution is barred, one would have to regard any action in this world as entirely
ineffective, and one would arrive finally at a contemplative philosophy. Moreover, since
contemplation is a luxury, this would be only another bourgeois philosophy. This is, especially,
the reproach made by the Communists.

From another quarter we are reproached for having underlined all that is ignominious in the
human situation, for depicting what is mean, sordid or base to the neglect of certain things that
possess charm and beauty and belong to the brighter side of human nature: for example,
according to the Catholic critic, Mlle. Mercier, we forget how an infant smiles. Both from this
side and from the other we are also reproached for leaving out of account the solidarity of
mankind and considering man in isolation. And this, say the Communists, is because we base our
doctrine upon pure subjectivity – upon the Cartesian “I think”: which is the moment in which
solitary man attains to himself; a position from which it is impossible to regain solidarity with
other men who exist outside of the self. The ego cannot reach them through the cogito.

From the Christian side, we are reproached as people who deny the reality and seriousness of
human affairs. For since we ignore the commandments of God and all values prescribed as
eternal, nothing remains but what is strictly voluntary. Everyone can do what he likes, and will
be incapable, from such a point of view, of condemning either the point of view or the action of
anyone else.

It is to these various reproaches that I shall endeavour to reply today; that is why I have entitled
this brief exposition “Existentialism is a Humanism.” Many may be surprised at the mention of
humanism in this connection, but we shall try to see in what sense we understand it. In any case,
we can begin by saying that existentialism, in our sense of the word, is a doctrine that does
render human life possible; a doctrine, also, which affirms that every truth and every action
imply both an environment and a human subjectivity. The essential charge laid against us is, of
course, that of over-emphasis upon the evil side of human life. I have lately been told of a lady
who, whenever she lets slip a vulgar expression in a moment of nervousness, excuses herself by
exclaiming, “I believe I am becoming an existentialist.” So it appears that ugliness is being
identified with existentialism. That is why some people say we are “naturalistic,” and if we are, it
is strange to see how much we scandalise and horrify them, for no one seems to be much
frightened or humiliated nowadays by what is properly called naturalism. Those who can quite
well keep down a novel by Zola such as La Terre are sickened as soon as they read an
existentialist novel. Those who appeal to the wisdom of the people – which is a sad wisdom –
find ours sadder still. And yet, what could be more disillusioned than such sayings as “Charity
begins at home” or “Promote a rogue and he’ll sue you for damage, knock him down and he’ll
do you homage”? We all know how many common sayings can be quoted to this effect, and they
all mean much the same – that you must not oppose the powers that be; that you must not fight
against superior force; must not meddle in matters that are above your station. Or that any action
not in accordance with some tradition is mere romanticism; or that any undertaking which has
not the support of proven experience is foredoomed to frustration; and that since experience has
shown men to be invariably inclined to evil, there must be firm rules to restrain them, otherwise
we shall have anarchy. It is, however, the people who are forever mouthing these dismal
proverbs and, whenever they are told of some more or less repulsive action, say “How like
human nature!” – it is these very people, always harping upon realism, who complain that
existentialism is too gloomy a view of things. Indeed their excessive protests make me suspect
that what is annoying them is not so much our pessimism, but, much more likely, our optimism.
For at bottom, what is alarming in the doctrine that I am about to try to explain to you is – is it
not? – that it confronts man with a possibility of choice. To verify this, let us review the whole
question upon the strictly philosophic level. What, then, is this that we call existentialism?

Most of those who are making use of this word would be highly confused if required to explain
its meaning. For since it has become fashionable, people cheerfully declare that this musician or
that painter is “existentialist.” A columnist in Clartes signs himself “The Existentialist,” and,
indeed, the word is now so loosely applied to so many things that it no longer means anything at
all. It would appear that, for the lack of any novel doctrine such as that of surrealism, all those
who are eager to join in the latest scandal or movement now seize upon this philosophy in which,
however, they can find nothing to their purpose. For in truth this is of all teachings the least
scandalous and the most austere: it is intended strictly for technicians and philosophers. All the
same, it can easily be defined.

The question is only complicated because there are two kinds of existentialists. There are, on the
one hand, the Christians, amongst whom I shall name Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel, both professed
Catholics; and on the other the existential atheists, amongst whom we must place Heidegger as
well as the French existentialists and myself. What they have in common is simply the fact that
they believe that existence comes before essence – or, if you will, that we must begin from the
subjective. What exactly do we mean by that?

If one considers an article of manufacture as, for example, a book or a paper-knife – one sees that
it has been made by an artisan who had a conception of it; and he has paid attention, equally, to
the conception of a paper-knife and to the pre-existent technique of production which is a part of
that conception and is, at bottom, a formula. Thus the paper-knife is at the same time an article
producible in a certain manner and one which, on the other hand, serves a definite purpose, for
one cannot suppose that a man would produce a paper-knife without knowing what it was for.
Let us say, then, of the paperknife that its essence – that is to say the sum of the formulae and the
qualities which made its production and its definition possible – precedes its existence. The
presence of such-and-such a paper-knife or book is thus determined before my eyes. Here, then,
we are viewing the world from a technical standpoint, and we can say that production precedes
existence.

When we think of God as the creator, we are thinking of him, most of the time, as a supernal
artisan. Whatever doctrine we may be considering, whether it be a doctrine like that of Descartes,
or of Leibnitz himself, we always imply that the will follows, more or less, from the
understanding or at least accompanies it, so that when God creates he knows precisely what he is
creating. Thus, the conception of man in the mind of God is comparable to that of the paper-
knife in the mind of the artisan: God makes man according to a procedure and a conception,
exactly as the artisan manufactures a paper-knife, following a definition and a formula. Thus
each individual man is the realisation of a certain conception which dwells in the divine
understanding. In the philosophic atheism of the eighteenth century, the notion of God is
suppressed, but not, for all that, the idea that essence is prior to existence; something of that idea
we still find everywhere, in Diderot, in Voltaire and even in Kant. Man possesses a human
nature; that “human nature,” which is the conception of human being, is found in every man;
which means that each man is a particular example of a universal conception, the conception of
Man. In Kant, this universality goes so far that the wild man of the woods, man in the state of
nature and the bourgeois are all contained in the same definition and have the same fundamental
qualities. Here again, the essence of man precedes that historic existence which we confront in
experience.

Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative, declares with greater consistency that if

God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being
which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it. That being is man or, as Heidegger
has it, the human reality. What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean
that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself
afterwards. If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is
nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus,
there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is. Not
that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he conceives
himself after already existing – as he wills to be after that leap towards existence. Man is nothing
else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism. And this is
what people call its “subjectivity,” using the word as a reproach against us. But what do we mean
to say by this, but that man is of a greater dignity than a stone or a table? For we mean to say that
man primarily exists – that man is, before all else, something which propels itself towards a
future and is aware that it is doing so. Man is, indeed, a project which possesses a subjective life,
instead of being a kind of moss, or a fungus or a cauliflower. Before that projection of the self
nothing exists; not even in the heaven of intelligence: man will only attain existence when he is
what he purposes to be. Not, however, what he may wish to be. For what we usually understand
by wishing or willing is a conscious decision taken – much more often than not – after we have
made ourselves what we are. I may wish to join a party, to write a book or to marry – but in such
a case what is usually called my will is probably a manifestation of a prior and more spontaneous
decision. If, however, it is true that existence is prior to essence, man is responsible for what he
is. Thus, the first effect of existentialism is that it puts every man in possession of himself as he
is, and places the entire responsibility for his existence squarely upon his own shoulders. And,
when we say that man is responsible for himself, we do not mean that he is responsible only for
his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men. The word “subjectivism” is to be
understood in two senses, and our adversaries play upon only one of them. Subjectivism means,
on the one hand, the freedom of the individual subject and, on the other, that man cannot pass
beyond human subjectivity. It is the latter which is the deeper meaning of existentialism. When
we say that man chooses himself, we do mean that every one of us must choose himself; but by
that we also mean that in choosing for himself he chooses for all men. For in effect, of all the
actions a man may take in order to create himself as he wills to be, there is not one which is not
creative, at the same time, of an image of man such as he believes he ought to be. To choose
between this or that is at the same time to affirm the value of that which is chosen; for we are
unable ever to choose the worse. What we choose is always the better; and nothing can be better
for us unless it is better for all. If, moreover, existence precedes essence and we will to exist at
the same time as we fashion our image, that image is valid for all and for the entire epoch in
which we find ourselves. Our responsibility is thus much greater than we had supposed, for it
concerns mankind as a whole. If I am a worker, for instance, I may choose to join a Christian
rather than a Communist trade union. And if, by that membership, I choose to signify that
resignation is, after all, the attitude that best becomes a man, that man’s kingdom is not upon this
earth, I do not commit myself alone to that view. Resignation is my will for everyone, and my
action is, in consequence, a commitment on behalf of all mankind. Or if, to take a more personal
case, I decide to marry and to have children, even though this decision proceeds simply from my
situation, from my passion or my desire, I am thereby committing not only myself, but humanity
as a whole, to the practice of monogamy. I am thus responsible for myself and for all men, and I
am creating a certain image of man as I would have him to be. In fashioning myself I fashion
man.

This may enable us to understand what is meant by such terms – perhaps a little grandiloquent –
as anguish, abandonment and despair. As you will soon see, it is very simple. First, what do we
mean by anguish? – The existentialist frankly states that man is in anguish. His meaning is as
follows: When a man commits himself to anything, fully realising that he is not only choosing
what he will be, but is thereby at the same time a legislator deciding for the whole of mankind –
in such a moment a man cannot escape from the sense of complete and profound responsibility.
There are many, indeed, who show no such anxiety. But we affirm that they are merely
disguising their anguish or are in flight from it. Certainly, many people think that in what they
are doing they commit no one but themselves to anything: and if you ask them, “What would
happen if everyone did so?” they shrug their shoulders and reply, “Everyone does not do so.” But
in truth, one ought always to ask oneself what would happen if everyone did as one is doing; nor
can one escape from that disturbing thought except by a kind of self-deception. The man who
lies in self-excuse, by saying “Everyone will not do it” must be ill at ease in his conscience, for
the act of lying implies the universal value which it denies. By its very disguise his anguish
reveals itself. This is the anguish that Kierkegaard called “the anguish of Abraham.” You know
the story: An angel commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son; and obedience was obligatory, if it
really was an angel who had appeared and said, “Thou, Abraham, shalt sacrifice thy son.” But
anyone in such a case would wonder, first, whether it was indeed an angel and secondly, whether
I am really Abraham. Where are the proofs? A certain mad woman who suffered from
hallucinations said that people were telephoning to her, and giving her orders. The doctor asked,
“But who is it that speaks to you?” She replied: “He says it is God.” And what, indeed, could
prove to her that it was God? If an angel appears to me, what is the proof that it is an angel; or, if
I hear voices, who can prove that they proceed from heaven and not from hell, or from my own
subconsciousness or some pathological condition? Who can prove that they are really addressed
to me?

Who, then, can prove that I am the proper person to impose, by my own choice, my conception
of man upon mankind? I shall never find any proof whatever; there will be no sign to convince
me of it. If a voice speaks to me, it is still I myself who must decide whether the voice is or is not
that of an angel. If I regard a certain course of action as good, it is only I who choose to say that
it is good and not bad. There is nothing to show that I am Abraham: nevertheless I also am
obliged at every instant to perform actions which are examples. Everything happens to every
man as though the whole human race had its eyes fixed upon what he is doing and regulated its
conduct accordingly. So every man ought to say, “Am I really a man who has the right to act in
such a manner that humanity regulates itself by what I do.” If a man does not say that, he is
dissembling his anguish. Clearly, the anguish with which we are concerned here is not one that
could lead to quietism or inaction. It is anguish pure and simple, of the kind well known to all
those who have borne responsibilities. When, for instance, a military leader takes upon himself
the responsibility for an attack and sends a number of men to their death, he chooses to do it and
at bottom he alone chooses. No doubt under a higher command, but its orders, which are more
general, require interpretation by him and upon that interpretation depends the life of ten,
fourteen or twenty men. In making the decision, he cannot but feel a certain anguish. All leaders
know that anguish. It does not prevent their acting, on the contrary it is the very condition of
their action, for the action presupposes that there is a plurality of possibilities, and in choosing
one of these, they realize that it has value only because it is chosen. Now it is anguish of that
kind which existentialism describes, and moreover, as we shall see, makes explicit through direct
responsibility towards other men who are concerned. Far from being a screen which could
separate us from action, it is a condition of action itself.

And when we speak of “abandonment” – a favorite word of Heidegger – we only mean to say
that God does not exist, and that it is necessary to draw the consequences of his absence right to
the end. The existentialist is strongly opposed to a certain type of secular moralism which seeks
to suppress God at the least possible expense. Towards 1880, when the French professors
endeavoured to formulate a secular morality, they said something like this: God is a useless and
costly hypothesis, so we will do without it. However, if we are to have morality, a society and a
law-abiding world, it is essential that certain values should be taken seriously; they must have an
a priori existence ascribed to them. It must be considered obligatory a priori to be honest, not to
lie, not to beat one’s wife, to bring up children and so forth; so we are going to do a little work
on this subject, which will enable us to show that these values exist all the same, inscribed in an
intelligible heaven although, of course, there is no God. In other words – and this is, I believe,
the purport of all that we in France call radicalism – nothing will be changed if God does not
exist; we shall rediscover the same norms of honesty, progress and humanity, and we shall have
disposed of God as an out-of-date hypothesis which will die away quietly of itself. The
existentialist, on the contrary, finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there
disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. There can no
longer be any good a priori, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. It is
nowhere written that “the good” exists, that one must be honest or must not lie, since we are now
upon the plane where there are only men. Dostoevsky once wrote: “If God did not exist,
everything would be permitted”; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is
indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find
anything to depend upon either within or outside himself. He discovers forthwith, that he is
without excuse. For if indeed existence precedes essence, one will never be able to explain one’s
action by reference to a given and specific human nature; in other words, there is no determinism
– man is free, man is freedom. Nor, on the other hand, if God does not exist, are we provided
with any values or commands that could legitimise our behaviour. Thus we have neither behind
us, nor before us in a luminous realm of values, any means of justification or excuse. – We are
left alone, without excuse. That is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free.
Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the
moment that he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does. The
existentialist does not believe in the power of passion. He will never regard a grand passion as a
destructive torrent upon which a man is swept into certain actions as by fate, and which,
therefore, is an excuse for them. He thinks that man is responsible for his passion. Neither will an
existentialist think that a man can find help through some sign being vouchsafed upon earth for
his orientation: for he thinks that the man himself interprets the sign as he chooses. He thinks that
every man, without any support or help whatever, is condemned at every instant to invent man.
As Ponge has written in a very fine article, “Man is the future of man.” That is exactly true.
Only, if one took this to mean that the future is laid up in Heaven, that God knows what it is, it
would be false, for then it would no longer even be a future. If, however, it means that, whatever
man may now appear to be, there is a future to be fashioned, a virgin future that awaits him –
then it is a true saying. But in the present one is forsaken.

As an example by which you may the better understand this state of abandonment, I will refer to
the case of a pupil of mine, who sought me out in the following circumstances. His father was
quarrelling with his mother and was also inclined to be a “collaborator”; his elder brother had
been killed in the German offensive of 1940 and this young man, with a sentiment somewhat
primitive but generous, burned to avenge him. His mother was living alone with him, deeply
afflicted by the semi-treason of his father and by the death of her eldest son, and her one
consolation was in this young man. But he, at this moment, had the choice between going to
England to join the Free French Forces or of staying near his mother and helping her to live. He
fully realised that this woman lived only for him and that his disappearance – or perhaps his
death – would plunge her into despair. He also realised that, concretely and in fact, every action
he performed on his mother’s behalf would be sure of effect in the sense of aiding her to live,
whereas anything he did in order to go and fight would be an ambiguous action which might
vanish like water into sand and serve no purpose. For instance, to set out for England he would
have to wait indefinitely in a Spanish camp on the way through Spain; or, on arriving in England
or in Algiers he might be put into an office to fill up forms. Consequently, he found himself
confronted by two very different modes of action; the one concrete, immediate, but directed
towards only one individual; and the other an action addressed to an end infinitely greater, a
national collectivity, but for that very reason ambiguous – and it might be frustrated on the way.
At the same time, he was hesitating between two kinds of morality; on the one side the morality
of sympathy, of personal devotion and, on the other side, a morality of wider scope but of more
debatable validity. He had to choose between those two. What could help him to choose? Could
the Christian doctrine? No. Christian doctrine says: Act with charity, love your neighbour, deny
yourself for others, choose the way which is hardest, and so forth. But which is the harder road?
To whom does one owe the more brotherly love, the patriot or the mother? Which is the more
useful aim, the general one of fighting in and for the whole community, or the precise aim of
helping one particular person to live? Who can give an answer to that a priori? No one. Nor is it
given in any ethical scripture. The Kantian ethic says, Never regard another as a means, but
always as an end. Very well; if I remain with my mother, I shall be regarding her as the end and
not as a means: but by the same token I am in danger of treating as means those who are fighting
on my behalf; and the converse is also true, that if I go to the aid of the combatants I shall be
treating them as the end at the risk of treating my mother as a means. If values are uncertain, if
they are still too abstract to determine the particular, concrete case under consideration, nothing
remains but to trust in our instincts. That is what this young man tried to do; and when I saw him
he said, “In the end, it is feeling that counts; the direction in which it is really pushing me is the
one I ought to choose. If I feel that I love my mother enough to sacrifice everything else for her –
my will to be avenged, all my longings for action and adventure then I stay with her. If, on the
contrary, I feel that my love for her is not enough, I go.” But how does one estimate the strength
of a feeling? The value of his feeling for his mother was determined precisely by the fact that he
was standing by her. I may say that I love a certain friend enough to sacrifice such or such a sum
of money for him, but I cannot prove that unless I have done it. I may say, “I love my mother
enough to remain with her,” if actually I have remained with her. I can only estimate the strength
of this affection if I have performed an action by which it is defined and ratified. But if I then
appeal to this affection to justify my action, I find myself drawn into a vicious circle.

Moreover, as Gide has very well said, a sentiment which is play-acting and one which is vital are
two things that are hardly distinguishable one from another. To decide that I love my mother by
staying beside her, and to play a comedy the upshot of which is that I do so – these are nearly the
same thing. In other words, feeling is formed by the deeds that one does; therefore I cannot
consult it as a guide to action. And that is to say that I can neither seek within myself for an
authentic impulse to action, nor can I expect, from some ethic, formulae that will enable me to
act. You may say that the youth did, at least, go to a professor to ask for advice. But if you seek
counsel – from a priest, for example you have selected that priest; and at bottom you already
knew, more or less, what he would advise. In other words, to choose an adviser is nevertheless to
commit oneself by that choice. If you are a Christian, you will say, consult a priest; but there are
collaborationists, priests who are resisters and priests who wait for the tide to turn: which will
you choose? Had this young man chosen a priest of the resistance, or one of the collaboration, he
would have decided beforehand the kind of advice he was to receive. Similarly, in coming to me,
he knew what advice I should give him, and I had but one reply to make. You are free, therefore
choose, that is to say, invent. No rule of general morality can show you what you ought to do: no
signs are vouchsafed in this world. The Catholics will reply, “Oh, but they are!” Very well; still,
it is I myself, in every case, who have to interpret the signs. While I was imprisoned, I made the
acquaintance of a somewhat remarkable man, a Jesuit, who had become a member of that order
in the following manner. In his life he had suffered a succession of rather severe setbacks. His
father had died when he was a child, leaving him in poverty, and he had been awarded a free
scholarship in a religious institution, where he had been made continually to feel that he was
accepted for charity’s sake, and, in consequence, he had been denied several of those distinctions
and honours which gratify children. Later, about the age of eighteen, he came to grief in a
sentimental affair; and finally, at twenty-two – this was a trifle in itself, but it was the last drop
that overflowed his cup – he failed in his military examination. This young man, then, could
regard himself as a total failure: it was a sign – but a sign of what? He might have taken refuge in
bitterness or despair. But he took it – very cleverly for him – as a sign that he was not intended
for secular success, and that only the attainments of religion, those of sanctity and of faith, were
accessible to him. He interpreted his record as a message from God, and became a member of the
Order. Who can doubt but that this decision as to the meaning of the sign was his, and his alone?
One could have drawn quite different conclusions from such a series of reverses – as, for
example, that he had better become a carpenter or a revolutionary. For the decipherment of the
sign, however, he bears the entire responsibility. That is what “abandonment” implies, that we
ourselves decide our being. And with this abandonment goes anguish.
As for “despair,” the meaning of this expression is extremely simple. It merely means that we
limit ourselves to a reliance upon that which is within our wills, or within the sum of the
probabilities which render our action feasible. Whenever one wills anything, there are always
these elements of probability. If I am counting upon a visit from a friend, who may be coming by
train or by tram, I presuppose that the train will arrive at the appointed time, or that the tram will
not be derailed. I remain in the realm of possibilities; but one does not rely upon any possibilities
beyond those that are strictly concerned in one’s action. Beyond the point at which the
possibilities under consideration cease to affect my action, I ought to disinterest myself. For there
is no God and no prevenient design, which can adapt the world and all its possibilities to my will.
When Descartes said, “Conquer yourself rather than the world,” what he meant was, at bottom,
the same – that we should act without hope.

Marxists, to whom I have said this, have answered: “Your action is limited, obviously, by your
death; but you can rely upon the help of others. That is, you can count both upon what the others
are doing to help you elsewhere, as in China and in Russia, and upon what they will do later,
after your death, to take up your action and carry it forward to its final accomplishment which
will be the revolution. Moreover you must rely upon this; not to do so is immoral.” To this I
rejoin, first, that I shall always count upon my comrades-in-arms in the struggle, in so far as they
are committed, as I am, to a definite, common cause; and in the unity of a party or a group which
I can more or less control – that is, in which I am enrolled as a militant and whose movements at
every moment are known to me. In that respect, to rely upon the unity and the will of the party is
exactly like my reckoning that the train will run to time or that the tram will not be derailed. But
I cannot count upon men whom I do not know, I cannot base my confidence upon human
goodness or upon man’s interest in the good of society, seeing that man is free and that there is
no human nature which I can take as foundational. I do not know where the Russian revolution
will lead. I can admire it and take it as an example in so far as it is evident, today, that the
proletariat plays a part in Russia which it has attained in no other nation. But I cannot affirm that
this will necessarily lead to the triumph of the proletariat: I must confine myself to what I can
see. Nor can I be sure that comrades-in-arms will take up my work after my death and carry it to
the maximum perfection, seeing that those men are free agents and will freely decide, tomorrow,
what man is then to be. Tomorrow, after my death, some men may decide to establish Fascism,
and the others may be so cowardly or so slack as to let them do so. If so, Fascism will then be the
truth of man, and so much the worse for us. In reality, things will be such as men have decided
they shall be. Does that mean that I should abandon myself to quietism? No. First I ought to
commit myself and then act my commitment, according to the time-honoured formula that “one
need not hope in order to undertake one’s work.” Nor does this mean that I should not belong to
a party, but only that I should be without illusion and that I should do what I can. For instance, if
I ask myself “Will the social ideal as such, ever become a reality?” I cannot tell, I only know that
whatever may be in my power to make it so, I shall do; beyond that, I can count upon nothing.

Quietism is the attitude of people who say, “let others do what I cannot do.” The doctrine I am
presenting before you is precisely the opposite of this, since it declares that there is no reality
except in action. It goes further, indeed, and adds, “Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he
exists only in so far as he realises himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions,
nothing else but what his life is.” Hence we can well understand why some people are horrified
by our teaching. For many have but one resource to sustain them in their misery, and that is to
think, “Circumstances have been against me, I was worthy to be something much better than I
have been. I admit I have never had a great love or a great friendship; but that is because I never
met a man or a woman who were worthy of it; if I have not written any very good books, it is
because I had not the leisure to do so; or, if I have had no children to whom I could devote
myself it is because I did not find the man I could have lived with. So there remains within me a
wide range of abilities, inclinations and potentialities, unused but perfectly viable, which endow
me with a worthiness that could never be inferred from the mere history of my actions.” But in
reality and for the existentialist, there is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of
love other than that which is manifested in loving; there is no genius other than that which is
expressed in works of art. The genius of Proust is the totality of the works of Proust; the genius
of Racine is the series of his tragedies, outside of which there is nothing. Why should we
attribute to Racine the capacity to write yet another tragedy when that is precisely what he did
not write? In life, a man commits himself, draws his own portrait and there is nothing but that
portrait. No doubt this thought may seem comfortless to one who has not made a success of his
life. On the other hand, it puts everyone in a position to understand that reality alone is reliable;
that dreams, expectations and hopes serve to define a man only as deceptive dreams, abortive
hopes, expectations unfulfilled; that is to say, they define him negatively, not positively.
Nevertheless, when one says, “You are nothing else but what you live,” it does not imply that an
artist is to be judged solely by his works of art, for a thousand other things contribute no less to
his definition as a man. What we mean to say is that a man is no other than a series of
undertakings, that he is the sum, the organisation, the set of relations that constitute these
undertakings.

In the light of all this, what people reproach us with is not, after all, our pessimism, but the
sternness of our optimism. If people condemn our works of fiction, in which we describe
characters that are base, weak, cowardly and sometimes even frankly evil, it is not only because
those characters are base, weak, cowardly or evil. For suppose that, like Zola, we showed that the
behaviour of these characters was caused by their heredity, or by the action of their environment
upon them, or by determining factors, psychic or organic. People would be reassured, they would
say, “You see, that is what we are like, no one can do anything about it.” But the existentialist,
when he portrays a coward, shows him as responsible for his cowardice. He is not like that on
account of a cowardly heart or lungs or cerebrum, he has not become like that through his
physiological organism; he is like that because he has made himself into a coward by actions.
There is no such thing as a cowardly temperament. There are nervous temperaments; there is
what is called impoverished blood, and there are also rich temperaments. But the man whose
blood is poor is not a coward for all that, for what produces cowardice is the act of giving up or
giving way; and a temperament is not an action. A coward is defined by the deed that he has
done. What people feel obscurely, and with horror, is that the coward as we present him is guilty
of being a coward. What people would prefer would be to be born either a coward or a hero. One
of the charges most often laid against the Chemins de la Liberté is something like this: “But,
after all, these people being so base, how can you make them into heroes?” That objection is
really rather comic, for it implies that people are born heroes: and that is, at bottom, what such
people would like to think. If you are born cowards, you can be quite content, you can do
nothing about it and you will be cowards all your lives whatever you do; and if you are born
heroes you can again be quite content; you will be heroes all your lives eating and drinking
heroically. Whereas the existentialist says that the coward makes himself cowardly, the hero
makes himself heroic; and that there is always a possibility for the coward to give up cowardice
and for the hero to stop being a hero. What counts is the total commitment, and it is not by a
particular case or particular action that you are committed altogether.

We have now, I think, dealt with a certain number of the reproaches against existentialism. You
have seen that it cannot be regarded as a philosophy of quietism since it defines man by his
action; nor as a pessimistic description of man, for no doctrine is more optimistic, the destiny of
man is placed within himself. Nor is it an attempt to discourage man from action since it tells
him that there is no hope except in his action, and that the one thing which permits him to have
life is the deed. Upon this level therefore, what we are considering is an ethic of action and self-
commitment. However, we are still reproached, upon these few data, for confining man within
his individual subjectivity. There again people badly misunderstand us.

Our point of departure is, indeed, the subjectivity of the individual, and that for strictly
philosophic reasons. It is not because we are bourgeois, but because we seek to base our teaching
upon the truth, and not upon a collection of fine theories, full of hope but lacking real
foundations. And at the point of departure there cannot be any other truth than this, I think,
therefore I am, which is the absolute truth of consciousness as it attains to itself. Every theory
which begins with man, outside of this moment of self-attainment, is a theory which thereby
suppresses the truth, for outside of the Cartesian cogito, all objects are no more than probable,
and any doctrine of probabilities which is not attached to a truth will crumble into nothing. In
order to define the probable one must possess the true. Before there can be any truth whatever,
then, there must be an absolute truth, and there is such a truth which is simple, easily attained
and within the reach of everybody; it consists in one’s immediate sense of one’s self.

In the second place, this theory alone is compatible with the dignity of man, it is the only one
which does not make man into an object. All kinds of materialism lead one to treat every man
including oneself as an object – that is, as a set of pre-determined reactions, in no way different
from the patterns of qualities and phenomena which constitute a table, or a chair or a stone. Our
aim is precisely to establish the human kingdom as a pattern of values in distinction from the
material world. But the subjectivity which we thus postulate as the standard of truth is no
narrowly individual subjectivism, for as we have demonstrated, it is not only one’s own self that
one discovers in the cogito, but those of others too. Contrary to the philosophy of Descartes,
contrary to that of Kant, when we say “I think” we are attaining to ourselves in the presence of
the other, and we are just as certain of the other as we are of ourselves. Thus the man who
discovers himself directly in the cogito also discovers all the others, and discovers them as the
condition of his own existence. He recognises that he cannot be anything (in the sense in which
one says one is spiritual, or that one is wicked or jealous) unless others recognise him as such. I
cannot obtain any truth whatsoever about myself, except through the mediation of another. The
other is indispensable to my existence, and equally so to any knowledge I can have of myself.
Under these conditions, the intimate discovery of myself is at the same time the revelation of the
other as a freedom which confronts mine, and which cannot think or will without doing so either
for or against me. Thus, at once, we find ourselves in a world which is, let us say, that of “inter-
subjectivity”. It is in this world that man has to decide what he is and what others are.
Furthermore, although it is impossible to find in each and every man a universal essence that can
be called human nature, there is nevertheless a human universality of condition. It is not by
chance that the thinkers of today are so much more ready to speak of the condition than of the
nature of man. By his condition they understand, with more or less clarity, all the limitations
which a priori define man’s fundamental situation in the universe. His historical situations are
variable: man may be born a slave in a pagan society or may be a feudal baron, or a proletarian.
But what never vary are the necessities of being in the world, of having to labor and to die there.
These limitations are neither subjective nor objective, or rather there is both a subjective and an
objective aspect of them. Objective, because we meet with them everywhere and they are
everywhere recognisable: and subjective because they are lived and are nothing if man does not
live them – if, that is to say, he does not freely determine himself and his existence in relation to
them. And, diverse though man’s purpose may be, at least none of them is wholly foreign to me,
since every human purpose presents itself as an attempt either to surpass these limitations, or to
widen them, or else to deny or to accommodate oneself to them. Consequently every purpose,
however individual it may be, is of universal value. Every purpose, even that of a Chinese, an
Indian or a Negro, can be understood by a European. To say it can be understood, means that the
European of 1945 may be striving out of a certain situation towards the same limitations in the
same way, and that he may reconceive in himself the purpose of the Chinese, of the Indian or the
African. In every purpose there is universality, in this sense that every purpose is comprehensible
to every man. Not that this or that purpose defines man for ever, but that it may be entertained
again and again. There is always some way of understanding an idiot, a child, a primitive man or
a foreigner if one has sufficient information. In this sense we may say that there is a human
universality, but it is not something given; it is being perpetually made. I make this universality
in choosing myself; I also make it by understanding the purpose of any other man, of whatever
epoch. This absoluteness of the act of choice does not alter the relativity of each epoch.

What is at the very heart and center of existentialism, is the absolute character of the free
commitment, by which every man realises himself in realising a type of humanity – a
commitment always understandable, to no matter whom in no matter what epoch – and its
bearing upon the relativity of the cultural pattern which may result from such absolute
commitment. One must observe equally the relativity of Cartesianism and the absolute character
of the Cartesian commitment. In this sense you may say, if you like, that every one of us makes
the absolute by breathing, by eating, by sleeping or by behaving in any fashion whatsoever.
There is no difference between free being – being as self-committal, as existence choosing its
essence – and absolute being. And there is no difference whatever between being as an absolute,
temporarily localised that is, localised in history – and universally intelligible being.

This does not completely refute the charge of subjectivism. Indeed that objection appears in
several other forms, of which the first is as follows. People say to us, “Then it does not matter
what you do,” and they say this in various ways.

First they tax us with anarchy; then they say, “You cannot judge others, for there is no reason for
preferring one purpose to another”; finally, they may say, “Everything being merely voluntary in
this choice of yours, you give away with one hand what you pretend to gain with the other.”
These three are not very serious objections. As to the first, to say that it does not matter what you
choose is not correct. In one sense choice is possible, but what is not possible is not to choose. I
can always choose, but I must know that if I do not choose, that is still a choice. This, although it
may appear merely formal, is of great importance as a limit to fantasy and caprice. For, when I
confront a real situation – for example, that I am a sexual being, able to have relations with a
being of the other sex and able to have children – I am obliged to choose my attitude to it, and in
every respect I bear the responsibility of the choice which, in committing myself, also commits
the whole of humanity. Even if my choice is determined by no a priori value whatever, it can
have nothing to do with caprice: and if anyone thinks that this is only Gide’s theory of the acte
gratuit over again, he has failed to see the enormous difference between this theory and that of
Gide. Gide does not know what a situation is, his “act” is one of pure caprice. In our view, on the
contrary, man finds himself in an organised situation in which he is himself involved: his choice
involves mankind in its entirety, and he cannot avoid choosing. Either he must remain single, or
he must marry without having children, or he must marry and have children. In any case, and
whichever he may choose, it is impossible for him, in respect of this situation, not to take
complete responsibility. Doubtless he chooses without reference to any pre-established value, but
it is unjust to tax him with caprice. Rather let us say that the moral choice is comparable to the
construction of a work of art.

But here I must at once digress to make it quite clear that we are not propounding an aesthetic
morality, for our adversaries are disingenuous enough to reproach us even with that. I mention
the work of art only by way of comparison. That being understood, does anyone reproach an
artist, when he paints a picture, for not following rules established a priori. Does one ever ask
what is the picture that he ought to paint? As everyone knows, there is no pre-defined picture for
him to make; the artist applies himself to the composition of a picture, and the picture that ought
to be made is precisely that which he will have made. As everyone knows, there are no aesthetic
values a priori, but there are values which will appear in due course in the coherence of the
picture, in the relation between the will to create and the finished work. No one can tell what the
painting of tomorrow will be like; one cannot judge a painting until it is done. What has that to
do with morality? We are in the same creative situation. We never speak of a work of art as
irresponsible; when we are discussing a canvas by Picasso, we understand very well that the
composition became what it is at the time when he was painting it, and that his works are part
and parcel of his entire life.

It is the same upon the plane of morality. There is this in common between art and morality, that
in both we have to do with creation and invention. We cannot decide a priori what it is that
should be done. I think it was made sufficiently clear to you in the case of that student who came
to see me, that to whatever ethical system he might appeal, the Kantian or any other, he could
find no sort of guidance whatever; he was obliged to invent the law for himself. Certainly we
cannot say that this man, in choosing to remain with his mother – that is, in taking sentiment,
personal devotion and concrete charity as his moral foundations – would be making an
irresponsible choice, nor could we do so if he preferred the sacrifice of going away to England.
Man makes himself; he is not found ready-made; he makes himself by the choice of his morality,
and he cannot but choose a morality, such is the pressure of circumstances upon him. We define
man only in relation to his commitments; it is therefore absurd to reproach us for irresponsibility
in our choice.
In the second place, people say to us, “You are unable to judge others.” This is true in one sense
and false in another. It is true in this sense, that whenever a man chooses his purpose and his
commitment in all clearness and in all sincerity, whatever that purpose may be, it is impossible
for him to prefer another. It is true in the sense that we do not believe in progress. Progress
implies amelioration; but man is always the same, facing a situation which is always changing,
and choice remains always a choice in the situation. The moral problem has not changed since
the time when it was a choice between slavery and anti-slavery – from the time of the war of
Secession, for example, until the present moment when one chooses between the M.R.P.
[Mouvement Republicain Poputaire] and the Communists.

We can judge, nevertheless, for, as I have said, one chooses in view of others, and in view of
others one chooses himself. One can judge, first – and perhaps this is not a judgment of value,
but it is a logical judgment – that in certain cases choice is founded upon an error, and in others
upon the truth. One can judge a man by saying that he deceives himself. Since we have defined
the situation of man as one of free choice, without excuse and without help, any man who takes
refuge behind the excuse of his passions, or by inventing some deterministic doctrine, is a self-
deceiver. One may object: “But why should he not choose to deceive himself?” I reply that it is
not for me to judge him morally, but I define his self-deception as an error. Here one cannot
avoid pronouncing a judgment of truth. The self-deception is evidently a falsehood, because it is
a dissimulation of man’s complete liberty of commitment. Upon this same level, I say that it is
also a self-deception if I choose to declare that certain values are incumbent upon me; I am in
contradiction with myself if I will these values and at the same time say that they impose
themselves upon me. If anyone says to me, “And what if I wish to deceive myself?” I answer,
“There is no reason why you should not, but I declare that you are doing so, and that the attitude
of strict consistency alone is that of good faith.” Furthermore, I can pronounce a moral judgment.
For I declare that freedom, in respect of concrete circumstances, can have no other end and aim
but itself; and when once a man has seen that values depend upon himself, in that state of
forsakenness he can will only one thing, and that is freedom as the foundation of all values. That
does not mean that he wills it in the abstract: it simply means that the actions of men of good
faith have, as their ultimate significance, the quest of freedom itself as such. A man who belongs
to some communist or revolutionary society wills certain concrete ends, which imply the will to
freedom, but that freedom is willed in community. We will freedom for freedom’s sake, in and
through particular circumstances. And in thus willing freedom, we discover that it depends
entirely upon the freedom of others and that the freedom of others depends upon our own.
Obviously, freedom as the definition of a man does not depend upon others, but as soon as there
is a commitment, I am obliged to will the liberty of others at the same time as my own. I cannot
make liberty my aim unless I make that of others equally my aim. Consequently, when I
recognise, as entirely authentic, that man is a being whose existence precedes his essence, and
that he is a free being who cannot, in any circumstances, but will his freedom, at the same time I
realize that I cannot not will the freedom of others. Thus, in the name of that will to freedom
which is implied in freedom itself, I can form judgments upon those who seek to hide from
themselves the wholly voluntary nature of their existence and its complete freedom. Those who
hide from this total freedom, in a guise of solemnity or with deterministic excuses, I shall call
cowards. Others, who try to show that their existence is necessary, when it is merely an accident
of the appearance of the human race on earth – I shall call scum. But neither cowards nor scum
can be identified except upon the plane of strict authenticity. Thus, although the content of
morality is variable, a certain form of this morality is universal. Kant declared that freedom is a
will both to itself and to the freedom of others. Agreed: but he thinks that the formal and the
universal suffice for the constitution of a morality. We think, on the contrary, that principles that
are too abstract break down when we come to defining action. To take once again the case of that
student; by what authority, in the name of what golden rule of morality, do you think he could
have decided, in perfect peace of mind, either to abandon his mother or to remain with her?
There are no means of judging. The content is always concrete, and therefore unpredictable; it
has always to be invented. The one thing that counts, is to know whether the invention is made in
the name of freedom.

Let us, for example, examine the two following cases, and you will see how far they are similar
in spite of their difference. Let us take The Mill on the Floss. We find here a certain young
woman, Maggie Tulliver, who is an incarnation of the value of passion and is aware of it. She is
in love with a young man, Stephen, who is engaged to another, an insignificant young woman.
This Maggie Tulliver, instead of heedlessly seeking her own happiness, chooses in the name of
human solidarity to sacrifice herself and to give up the man she loves. On the other hand, La
Sanseverina in Stendhal’s Chartreuse de Parme, believing that it is passion which endows man
with his real value, would have declared that a grand passion justifies its sacrifices, and must be
preferred to the banality of such conjugal love as would unite Stephen to the little goose he was
engaged to marry. It is the latter that she would have chosen to sacrifice in realising her own
happiness, and, as Stendhal shows, she would also sacrifice herself upon the plane of passion if
life made that demand upon her. Here we are facing two clearly opposed moralities; but I claim
that they are equivalent, seeing that in both cases the overruling aim is freedom. You can
imagine two attitudes exactly similar in effect, in that one girl might prefer, in resignation, to
give up her lover while the other preferred, in fulfilment of sexual desire, to ignore the prior
engagement of the man she loved; and, externally, these two cases might appear the same as the
two we have just cited, while being in fact entirely different. The attitude of La Sanseverina is
much nearer to that of Maggie Tulliver than to one of careless greed. Thus, you see, the second
objection is at once true and false. One can choose anything, but only if it is upon the plane of
free commitment.

The third objection, stated by saying, “You take with one hand what you give with the other,”
means, at bottom, “your values are not serious, since you choose them yourselves.” To that I can
only say that I am very sorry that it should be so; but if I have excluded God the Father, there
must be somebody to invent values. We have to take things as they are. And moreover, to say
that we invent values means neither more nor less than this; that there is no sense in life a priori.
Life is nothing until it is lived; but it is yours to make sense of, and the value of it is nothing else
but the sense that you choose. Therefore, you can see that there is a possibility of creating a
human community. I have been reproached for suggesting that existentialism is a form of
humanism: people have said to me, “But you have written in your Nausée that the humanists are
wrong, you have even ridiculed a certain type of humanism, why do you now go back upon
that?” In reality, the word humanism has two very different meanings. One may understand by
humanism a theory which upholds man as the end-in-itself and as the supreme value. Humanism
in this sense appears, for instance, in Cocteau’s story Round the World in 80 Hours, in which one
of the characters declares, because he is flying over mountains in an airplane, “Man is
magnificent!” This signifies that although I personally have not built aeroplanes, I have the
benefit of those particular inventions and that I personally, being a man, can consider myself
responsible for, and honoured by, achievements that are peculiar to some men. It is to assume
that we can ascribe value to man according to the most distinguished deeds of certain men. That
kind of humanism is absurd, for only the dog or the horse would be in a position to pronounce a
general judgment upon man and declare that he is magnificent, which they have never been such
fools as to do – at least, not as far as I know. But neither is it admissible that a man should
pronounce judgment upon Man. Existentialism dispenses with any judgment of this sort: an
existentialist will never take man as the end, since man is still to be determined. And we have no
right to believe that humanity is something to which we could set up a cult, after the manner of
Auguste Comte. The cult of humanity ends in Comtian humanism, shut-in upon itself, and – this
must be said – in Fascism. We do not want a humanism like that.

But there is another sense of the word, of which the fundamental meaning is this: Man is all the
time outside of himself: it is in projecting and losing himself beyond himself that he makes man
to exist; and, on the other hand, it is by pursuing transcendent aims that he himself is able to
exist. Since man is thus self-surpassing, and can grasp objects only in relation to his self-
surpassing, he is himself the heart and center of his transcendence. There is no other universe
except the human universe, the universe of human subjectivity. This relation of transcendence as
constitutive of man (not in the sense that God is transcendent, but in the sense of self-surpassing)
with subjectivity (in such a sense that man is not shut up in himself but forever present in a
human universe) – it is this that we call existential humanism. This is humanism, because we
remind man that there is no legislator but himself; that he himself, thus abandoned, must decide
for himself; also because we show that it is not by turning back upon himself, but always by
seeking, beyond himself, an aim which is one of liberation or of some particular realisation, that
man can realize himself as truly human.

You can see from these few reflections that nothing could be more unjust than the objections
people raise against us. Existentialism is nothing else but an attempt to draw the full conclusions
from a consistently atheistic position. Its intention is not in the least that of plunging men into
despair. And if by despair one means as the Christians do – any attitude of unbelief, the despair
of the existentialists is something different. Existentialism is not atheist in the sense that it would
exhaust itself in demonstrations of the non-existence of God. It declares, rather, that even if God
existed that would make no difference from its point of view. Not that we believe God does
exist, but we think that the real problem is not that of His existence; what man needs is to find
himself again and to understand that nothing can save him from himself, not even a valid proof
of the existence of God. In this sense existentialism is optimistic. It is a doctrine of action, and it
is only by self-deception, by confining their own despair with ours that Christians can describe
us as without hope.

Further Reading: Simone De Beauvoir Archive | Marxism & Ethics | Ethics of Ambiguity, de
Beauvoir 1947 | Marxist Humanism | Marxists Internet Archive

Jean-Paul Sartre Archive | Value_of_Knowledge

phenomenology

Dictionary: phe·nom·e·nol·o·gy (fĭ-nŏm'ə-nŏl'ə-jē)

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n.

1. A philosophy or method of inquiry based on the premise that reality consists

of objects and events as they are perceived or understood in human
consciousness and not of anything independent of human consciousness.
2. A movement based on this, originated about 1905 by Edmund Husserl.

phenomenological phe·nom'e·no·log'i·cal (-nə-lŏj'ĭ-kəl) adj.

phenomenologically phe·nom'e·no·log'i·cal·ly adv.
phenomenologist phe·nom'e·nol'o·gist n.

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A phenomenon is that which appears. In the political and philosophical senses of

phenomenology, the basic concept therefore is ‘the study of appearances (as unspokenly opposed
to reality)’. The term was popularized by Hegel's title The Phenomenology of Spirit and later,
with a different meaning, by Edmund Husserl (1859-1938). For Husserl, phenomena can be
studied only subjectively, not objectively—thus phenomenology is a close cousin of
existentialism (see Sartre). Some psychologists borrowed the term to mean ‘as naïve and full a
description of direct experience as possible’, and applied it to the perception of sensations of
such things as colour and motion.

Literary Dictionary: phenomenology

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phenomenology, a philosophical movement based on the investigation of ‘phenomena’ (i.e.

things as apprehended by consciousness) rather than on the existence of anything outside of
human consciousness. Phenomenology was founded in the early years of the 20th century by the
German philosopher Edmund Husserl, who hoped to return philosophy to concrete experience
and to reveal the essential structures of consciousness. In an amended form, Husserl's
phenomenology was developed by his student Martin Heidegger, and became an important
influence on existentialism and the modern tradition of hermeneutics. Its impact on literary
studies is most evident in the work of the Geneva school on authors' characteristic modes of
awareness; but other kinds of phenomenological criticism—such as that of the Polish theorist
Roman Ingarden—place more emphasis on the reader's consciousness of literary works. In this
sense, phenomenology has prepared the ground for reception theory. For a more extended
account, consult Robert R. Magliola, Phenomenology and Literature (1977).

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: phenomenology

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Philosophical discipline originated by Edmund Husserl. Husserl developed the

phenomenological method to make possible "a descriptive account of the essential
structures of the directly given." Phenomenology emphasizes the immediacy of
experience, the attempt to isolate it and set it off from all assumptions of existence
or causal influence and lay bare its essential structure. Phenomenology restricts the
philosopher's attention to the pure data of consciousness, uncontaminated by
metaphysical theories or scientific assumptions. Husserl's concept of the life-world
— as the individual's personal world as directly experienced — expressed this same
idea of immediacy. With the appearance of the Annual for Philosophical and
Phenomenological Research (1913 – 30), under Husserl's editorship, his personal
philosophizing flowered into an international movement. Its most notable adherents
were Max Scheler and Martin Heidegger.

For more information on phenomenology, visit Britannica.com.

French Literature Companion: Phenomenology

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A method of philosophical enquiry developed by Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), modified by

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), and reinterpreted in France by, among others, Marcel, Ricœur
and, notably, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty.

Phenomenology investigates the ground and constitution of meaning. It involves an intuitive and
reflective scrutiny of the sense-giving acts of consciousness prior to their conceptual elaboration,
and a description of phenomena in the various modes in which they are present to consciousness.
The complementary relationship of consciousness and its objects implies that things are as they
appear to us: being and appearing coincide. Phenomenology argues against the view that there
are hidden ‘things-in-themselves’ which lie beyond phenomena; it attempts to transcend the
opposition between the idealist reduction of the world to the knowledge we have of it and the
realist postulate that the external world exists independently of the activity of the mind. The
emphasis is upon the ‘intentionality’ of consciousness: i.e., the fact that consciousness is always
consciousness of something, is directed towards its objects in acts not only of perception and
cognition, identification and synthesis, but also of willing, desiring, imagining, etc. The goal of
Husserl's investigation, to be sharply differentiated from that of traditional psychology, was to
elucidate, through an ‘eidetic reduction’, the essential structures of our acts of consciousness. A
necessary prior step was to eliminate, following the example of Descartes, all presuppositions
and prejudices, whether philosophical, scientific, or naïve, concerning the world and our
knowledge of it. A more radical and controversial aspect of Husserl's method involved a
reinterpretation of the cogito whereby belief in and judgements concerning the factual existence
of phenomena are suspended, thus revealing, as the only certainty to survive this
‘phenomenological reduction’, the activity of the ‘transcendental Ego’ as the absolute source of
knowledge.

This apparent return to idealism was called into question by Heidegger and by the
phenomenologists of the French school. Heidegger reflected not upon ‘pure’ consciousness but
upon man's ‘being-in-the-world’ and upon human existence in terms of its temporality and
historicity; he described such categories of experience as anxiety and authenticity, and his
ultimate aim, in an ambitious move towards ontology, was to elucidate the meaning of Being
itself. Sartre argued against Husserl that the Ego is a secondary construct, an object for
consciousness rather than a subject within consciousness (La Transcendance de l'Ego, 1936-7);
for Merleau-Ponty the inherence in the world of the embodied subject is the primordial and
irreducible experience (Phénoménologie de la perception, 1945).

However, the French existential phenomenologists drew selectively upon the theories of both
Husserl and Heidegger [see Existentialism]. In his early works Sartre explored the structures of
emotion and imagination. For him our emotions are ways of ‘intending’ the world as hateful,
hostile, or sympathetic: we unreflectively experience our emotions as though they were objective
qualities of the world (Esquisse d'une théorie des émotions, 1939). The act of imagining, in that
it exemplifies our freedom and our ability to envisage what is not the case, is the paradigm of
consciousness in its powers of projection, negation, and sense-giving detachment from the real
(L'Imaginaire, 1940). In L'Être et le néant (1943) the translucent activity of consciousness or
being-for-itself creates a meaningful world against the undifferentiated, opaque background of
being-in-itself. Merleau-Ponty, while convinced that Husserl's ‘reductions’ fail to capture the
richness of concrete phenomena, was impressed by the apparent primacy of the ‘life-world’ in
his later thought. Implicitly critical of Sartre's dualistic ontology and of his apparent insistence
on the translucency of consciousness, Merleau-Ponty argued that the body is the subject of pre-
reflective intentionality, perception, and action. The body-subject and the world are
complementary, the world offering a store of potential meanings which may be realized by the
intentional acts of embodied consciousness.

Among those acts are those of the artist and the writer. Hence the close affinity between
phenomenology and the ‘worlds’ revealed in art and literature, made visible in Sartre's creative
writing, in Merleau-Ponty's reflections on painting, and in the literary criticism of, for instance,
Georges Poulet and Jean-Pierre Richard. For them the latent patterns of meaning of those
imaginary worlds lie beneath their superficial structure at a pre-conceptual level of sensation,
image, and spatial and temporal configuration: it is the task of the critic to make those patterns
manifest. [See also Ricœur.

[Rhiannon Goldthorpe]

Bibliography

• H. Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 3rd edn. (1982)

• M. Hammond, J. Howarth, and R. Keat, Understanding Phenomenology (1991)

Philosophy Dictionary: phenomenology

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A term that emerged in the 18th century, in the writings of Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728-77)
and Kant, to denote the description of consciousness and experience in abstraction from
consideration of its intentional content (see intentionality). In Hegel, phenomenology is instead
the historical enquiry into the evolution of self-consciousness, developing from elementary sense
experience to fully rational, free, thought processes capable of yielding knowledge. The term in
the 20th century is associated with the work and school of Husserl. Following Brentano, Husserl
realized that intentionality was the distinctive mark of consciousness, and saw in it a concept
capable of overcoming traditional mind-body dualism. The study of consciousness, therefore,
maintains two sides: a conscious experience can be regarded as an element in a stream of
consciousness, but also as a representative of one aspect or ‘profile’ of an object. In spite of
Husserl's rejection of dualism, his belief that there is a subject-matter remaining after epochē or
bracketing of the content of experience, associates him with the priority accorded to elementary
experiences in the parallel doctrine of phenomenalism, and phenomenology has partly suffered
from the eclipse of that approach to problems of experience and reality. However, later
phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty do full justice to the world involving nature of
experience. In a different usage, the phenomenology of a subject (such as religion) is the study of
what it means to pursue a particular form of life, regardless of whether anything that is said in
following it out is true or false.

Archaeology Dictionary: phenomenology

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[Th]

A set of theoretical approaches that attempt to understand the way in which people experience
the world they create and inhabit; the study of human experience and consciousness in everyday
life. The starting point is the idea of ‘being’ in the world, that is being situated in a physical and
social space. Writing in the early 20th century, Edmund Husserl believed he could create a
presuppositionless analysis of human experience, but this was challenged by Martin Heidegger
who maintained that any observer was situated within the world being observed.

Sports Science and Medicine: phenomenology

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A philosophical approach that concentrates on the detailed description of conscious experiences.

Supporters of this approach do not deny objective reality, but emphasize the importance of each
person's unique subjective experience of events on the way he or she reacts to the events.
Columbia Encyclopedia: phenomenology

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phenomenology, modern school of philosophy founded by Edmund Husserl. Its

influence extended throughout Europe and was particularly important to the early
development of existentialism. Husserl attempted to develop a universal
philosophic method, devoid of presuppositions, by focusing purely on phenomena
and describing them; anything that could not be seen, and thus was not
immediately given to the consciousness, was excluded. The concern was with what
is known, not how it is known. The phenomenological method is thus neither the
deductive method of logic nor the empirical method of the natural sciences; instead
it consists in realizing the presence of an object and elucidating its meaning through
intuition. Husserl considered the object of the phenomenological method to be the
immediate seizure, in an act of vision, of the ideal intelligible content of the
phenomenon. Notable members of the school have been Roman Ingarden, Max
Scheler, Emmanuel Levinas, and Marvin Farber.

Bibliography

See E. Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (tr. 1931, repr. 1989) and
Cartesian Meditations (tr. 1960, repr. 1970); M. Farber, The Foundation of Phenomenology
(1943, repr. 1967); R. Zanes, Way of Phenomenology (1970); M. A. Natanson, ed.,
Phenomenology and the Social Sciences (2 vol., 1973); H. Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological
Movement (1981); R. Grossman, Phenomenology and Existentialism (1984).

World of the Mind: phenomenology

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A term used in philosophy to denote enquiry into one's conscious and particularly
intellectual processes, any preconceptions about external causes and consequences
being excluded. It is a method of investigation into the mind that is associated with
the name of Edmund Husserl, as it was he who did most to develop it, although
when Husserl's system appeared on the philosophical scene, the word already had a
long history and had undergone a conspicuous semantic evolution.

The first use of it goes back to Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728–77), a disciple of
Christian Wolff (1679–1754). Lambert published in 1764 a treatise on epistemology
dealing with the problem of truth and illusion, under the rather pedantic title of
Neues Organon oder Gedanken über die Erforschung des Wahren und der
Unterscheidung von Irrtum und Schein (New Organon, or Thoughts on the Search
for Truth and the Distinction between Error and Appearance), in the fourth part of
which he outlines a theory of illusion that he calls 'phenomenology or theory of
appearance'. Although he belongs to a period in the history of philosophy in which
the question of the intuition of essences had not yet been raised, his implicit
definition of phenomenology, taken literally, does not sound odd to the post-
Husserlian reader, except that to him, Lambert, an appearance (or phenomenon) is
necessarily an illusion. More important, Lambert was acquainted with Kant, and
Kant in 1770 was writing to him about the need for a 'general phenomenology'
which he conceived as a preparatory step to the metaphysical analysis of natural
science. According to Spiegelberg (1960), what Kant called phenomenology was in
fact synonymous with his idea of the critique of pure reason, though nothing allows
us to suppose that he specifically used the term forged by Lambert to qualify
phenomena as antithetic to noumena or things in themselves.

It is, however, with Hegel's Die Phänomenologie des Geistes (Phenomenology of the
Mind), published in 1807, that the term is used explicitly for the first time to label a
philosophical work of fundamental importance. A significant step in its evolution
from Lambert to Hegel may be found in J. G. Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre (Theory of
Science), in which its role is to establish the origin of phenomena as they exist for
consciousness; and in Hegel's elaborate system, its basic task is primarily historical
since it aims at discovering the successive steps of realization of self-consciousness
from elementary individual sensations up to the stage of absolute knowledge
through dialectic processes.

The few authors worth mentioning who dealt with phenomenological problems
between Hegel and Husserl are William Hamilton (1788–1856), who in fact equates
phenomenology with psychology as opposed to logic, Eduard von Hartmann (1842–
1906), whose studies on religious, ethical, and aesthetic consciousness were greatly
inspired by Hegel's phenomenology, and, to some extent, Charles Sanders Peirce,
though his work on the classification of phenomena belongs more to metaphysics
than to an actual phenomenology of subjective experience. Except in the case of
Hegel, phenomenology was not a major field of reflection until Husserl's
monumental work.

Since Husserl's transcendental phenomenology is discussed in some detail in the

entry under his name, it will suffice here to underline its distinctive features. In
contrast with pre-existing philosophies, it is no mere, closed, abstract construct that
theoretically allows the philosopher to pronounce on the conditions of principles of
experience; it is rather an endless attempt to stick to the reality of experienced
phenomena in order to exhibit their universal character. In order to succeed in the
endeavour, Husserl has to discard the classic dualistic view, according to which the
knowing subject reaches the world only through representation — a position typical
of rationalistic and idealistic systems. Hence he refers, after Brentano, to the
intentional character of consciousness, and condemns psychologism (the theory
that psychology is the foundation of philosophy) in view of the contradiction it
brings about: that the supposedly universal laws of logic and mathematics would be
dependent on the concrete functioning of psychological mechanisms.

The Husserlian standpoint is thus a radical one, since it aims at 'going back to the
things themselves' by claiming that there is no reason to suppose that phenomenon
and being are not identical. In other words, the noema (object content) and the
noesis (knowing act) are directly related by the intentionality of consciousness, so
that every phenomenon is intuitively present to the subject. However, phenomena,
as they are grasped by the subject, are always given under a particular profile. No
object whatsoever is given in its totality as a simultaneous exhaustible whole, but
every profile conveys its essence under the form of meaning for consciousness. In
order to reach the essence of any object, one is bound to proceed to unceasing
variations around the object as thematic reality, i.e. to discover the essence through
the multiplicity of possible profiles. This procedure applies to all phenomena,
ranging from current perceptual experience to the highly intricate constructs
characterizing the various fields of knowledge, such as physics and psychology.

Every phenomenon belongs to a regional ontology by virtue of its essence, as

revealed by the so-called eidetic intuition, the essence (eidos) being the sum of all
possible profiles. In the course of this process, consciousness operates as a
constitutive moment, i.e. its activity in grasping the essence of phenomena is,
perforce, part of the process of their emergence. Thus Husserl overcomes the
classic dualism of subject and object. Reaching the universal essence of an object
through eidetic intuition, i.e. discovering the basic structure implied by its very
existence, is a process which Husserl calls eidetic reduction. This being granted, the
next step consists in referring phenomena to subjectivity without falling back into
psychologism, since the empirical subject, as referred to psychology's own regional
ontology (or Descartes' res cogitans), belongs to a realm of contingent being, which
cannot furnish by itself the necessary foundation for the organization of the
absolute principles governing universal essences. Husserl is therefore bound to
exclude belief in the natural world as the ultimate reference of all our intentional
acts. This process is termed phenomenological reduction. It presupposes, in
Husserl's terms, a provisional 'bracketing' (Einklammerung) of the natural and a
description or explication of our intentional acts as referred to pure noematic
structures. The final accomplishment of this process is the transcendental
reduction, by which the fundamental conditions of every possible meaningful
intentional relation must be elucidated. This is the core of Husserl's theory of
transcendental subjectivity or transcendental ego.

Thus Husserl's phenomenology reconsidered the philosophical problem of

consciousness in a radical fashion and contributed thereby to the placing of
psychology — and the human sciences in general — within a new epistemological
framework. Criticism of the one-sidedness of both empiricist and idealistic
standpoints could be developed so that the shortcomings of dualistic views, with all
their derivatives such as mechanicism, parallelism, and phenomenalism, became
more apparent. As a fundamental theory of phenomena ranging from perception to
creative thinking, it has provided a firm starting point for the integration of concepts
of the subject at different levels: hence phenomenologically inspired hypotheses
such as those that guided F. J. J. Buytendijk and V. von Weiszäcker in
anthropological physiology. The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty's
analyses of the experienced body (1942) and perception (1945) were
phenomenological works that contributed to the transforming of the classical
standpoints in psychology.

(Published 1987)

— Georges Thinès

Bibliography

• Farber, M. (1943). The Foundations of Phenomenology.

• Kockelmans, J. J. (1967). Edmund Husserl's Phenomenological Psychology: A
Historico-critical Study.
• Misiak, H., and Sexton, V. S. (1973). Phenomenological, Existential and
Humanistic Psychologies.
• Spiegelberg, H. (1960). The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical
Introduction, 2 vols.
• Strasser, S. (1963). Phenomenology and the Human Sciences.
• Thinès, G. (1977). Phenomenology and the Science of Behaviour.

Wikipedia: Phenomenology

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Phenomenology may refer to:

• Phenomenology (architecture), based on the experience of building materials

and their sensory properties
• Phenomenology (particle physics), the part of particle physics that deals with
the application of theory to high energy experiments
 • Phenomenology (philosophy), a philosophical method and school of
philosophy founded by Edmund Husserl (1859 – 1938)
• Phenomenology (psychology), used in psychology to refer to subjective
experiences or their study
• Phenomenology (science), used in science to describe a body of knowledge
which relates empirical observations of phenomena to each other
• Phenomenology of Perception, the magnum opus of French
phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty
• Phenomenology of religion, concerning the experiential aspect of religion in
terms consistent with the orientation of the worshippers
• The Phenomenology of Spirit by Georg Hegel (1770 – 1831)
• Existential phenomenology in the work of Husserl's student Martin Heidegger
(1889 – 1976) and his followers

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an
internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to
the intended article.

René Descartes

Who2 Biography: René Descartes, Philosopher / Mathematician

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• Born: 31 March 1596

• Birthplace: La Haye, France
• Died: 11 February 1650 (lung trouble)
• Best Known As: The philosopher who said "I think,
therefore I am" Source

René Descartes is often called the father of modern science. He

established a new, clear way of thinking about philosophy and
science by rejecting all ideas based on assumptions or emotional beliefs and accepting only those
ideas which could be proved by or systematically deduced from direct observation. He took as
his philosophical starting point the statement Cogito ergo sum -- "I think, therefore I am."
Descartes made major contributions to modern mathematics, especially in developing the
Cartesian coordinate system and advancing the theory of equations.

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5min Related Video: René Descartes

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 Statistics Dictionary: René Descartes

Home > Library > Science > Statistics Dictionary

(1596–1650; b. La Haye, France; d. Stockholm, Sweden) French philosopher and mathematician.

His birthplace is now named Descartes (a lunar crater and a street in Paris also bear his name).
Descartes was initially educated at a Jesuit college in Anjou. At that time his health was poor and
he was permitted to remain in bed until 11.00 a.m. — he continued this habit throughout his life.
His treatise on universal science published at Leyden in 1637 included three appendices. One,
'La Géométrie', introduced the ideas of coordinate geometry and in particular the use of Cartesian
coordinates.

Scientist: René Descartes

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[b. La Haye, France, March 31, 1596, d.

Stockholm, Sweden, February 11, 1650]

The philosopher Descartes was the first to publish a

detailed account of how to use coordinates for
locating points in space, called analytic geometry,
although Fermat developed the concept slightly
earlier. In an appendix to his book Discours de la
méthode Descartes gave analytic geometry to the René Descartes
world and used the new technique to solve
Library of Congress
problems in geometry. Analytic geometry made
calculus and many other advances in mathematics
possible. Descartes also developed (incorrect) theories of how the planets move and obtained
important (correct) results in optics. His emphasis on rational thought was important in creating
modern science.

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(b La Haye, 31 March 1596; d Stockholm, 11 Feb 1650). French philosopher. His principal
contribution to music theory was the Compendium musicae (1618), in which he attempted to
define the dual relationship between the physical and psychological phenomena in music. The
bulk of the work is devoted to the practical aspects of music as part of the process of sensory
perception. He also contributed to music theory on period structure and harmonic inversion.

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Home > Library > Miscellaneous > Biographies

The French thinker René Descartes (1596-1650) is called the father of modern
philosophy. He initiated the movement generally termed rationalism, and his
"Discourse on Method and Meditations" defined the basic problems of philosophy
for at least a century.

To appreciate the novelty of the thought of René Descartes, one must understand what modern
philosophy, or rationalism, means in contrast to medieval, or scholastic, philosophy. The great
European thinkers of the 9th to 14th century were not incapable of logical reasoning, but they
differed in philosophic interests and aims from the rationalists. Just as the moderns, from
Descartes on, usually identified philosophy with the natural and pure sciences, so the medievals
made little distinction between philosophical and theological concerns.

The medieval doctors, like St. Thomas Aquinas, wanted to demonstrate that the revelations of
faith and the dictates of reason were not incompatible. Their universe was that outlined by
Aristotle in his Physics - a universe in which everything was ordered and classified according to
the end that it served. During the Renaissance, however, men began exploring scientific
alternatives to Aristotle's hierarchical universe. Further, new instruments, especially Galileo's
telescope, added precision to scientific generalizations.

By the beginning of the 17th century the medieval tradition had lost its creative impetus. But the
schoolmen, so called because they dominated the European universities, continued to adhere
dogmatically to the traditional philosophy because of its association with Catholic theology. The
rationalists, however, persistently refused professorships in order to preserve their intellectual
integrity or to avoid persecution. They rejected the medieval practice of composing
commentaries on standard works in favor of writing original, usually anonymous, treatises on
topics suggested by their own scientific or speculative interests. Thus the contrast is between a
moribund tradition of professorial disputes over trivialities and a new philosophy inspired by
original, scientific research.

Descartes participated in this conflict between the scholastic and rationalist approaches. He spent
a great part of his intellectual effort - even to the extent of suppressing some of his writings -
attempting to convince ecclesiastical authorities of the compatibility of the new science with
theology and of its superiority as a foundation for philosophy.

Early Life

Descartes was born on March 31, 1596, in La Haye, in the Touraine region, between the cities of
Tours and Poitiers. His father, Joachim, a member of the minor nobility, served in the Parliament
of Brittany. Jeanne Brochard Descartes, his mother, died in May 1597. Although his father
remarried, Descartes and his older brother and sister were raised by their maternal grandmother
and by a nurse for whom he retained a deep affection.
In 1606 Descartes entered La Flèche, a Jesuit college established by the king for the instruction
of the young nobility. In the Discourse Descartes tells of the 8-year course of studies at La
Flèche, which he considered "one of the most celebrated schools in Europe." According to his
account, which is one of the best contemporary descriptions of 17th-century education, his
studies left him feeling embarrassed at the extent of his own ignorance.

The young Descartes came to feel that languages, literature, and history relate only fables which
incline man to imaginative exaggerations. Poetry and eloquence persuade man, but they do not
tell the truth. Mathematics does grasp the truth, but the certainty and evidence of its reasoning
seemed to Descartes to have only practical applications. Upon examination, the revelations of
religion and morals seem as mysterious to the learned as to the ignorant. Philosophy had been
studied by the best minds throughout the centuries, and yet "no single thing is to be found in it
which is not subject to dispute." Descartes says that he came to suspect that even science, which
depends upon philosophy for its principles, "could have built nothing solid on foundations so far
from firm."

Travel and First Writings

The 18-year-old Descartes left college with a reputation for extreme brilliance. In the next years
he rounded out the education befitting a young noble. He learned fencing, horsemanship, and
dancing and took a law degree from Poitiers.

From 1618 to 1628 Descartes traveled extensively throughout Europe while attached to various
military units. Although a devout Catholic, he served in the army of the Protestant prince
Maurice of Nassau but later enlisted in the Catholic army of Maximilian I of Bavaria. Living on
income from inherited properties, Descartes served without pay and seems to have seen little
action; he was present, however, at the Battle of Prague, one of the major engagements of the
Thirty Years War. Descartes was reticent about this period of his life, saying only that he left the
study of letters in order to travel in "the great book of the world."

This period of travel was not without intellectual effort. Descartes sought out eminent
mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers wherever he traveled. The most significant of these
friendships was with Isaac Beeckman, the Dutch mathematician, at whose suggestion Descartes
began writing scientific treatises on mathematics and music. He perfected a means of describing
geometrical figures in algebraic formulas, a process that served as the foundation for his
invention of analytic geometry. He became increasingly impressed with the extent to which
material reality could be understood mathematically.

During this period Descartes was profoundly influenced by three dreams which he had on Nov.
10, 1619, in Ulm, Germany. He interpreted their symbols as a divine sign that all science is one
and that its mastery is universal wisdom. This notion of the unity of all science was a
revolutionary concept which contradicted the Aristotelian notion that the sciences were
distinguished by their different objects of study. Descartes did not deny the multiplicity of
objects, but rather he emphasized that only one mind could know all these diverse things. He felt
that if one could generalize man's correct method of knowing, then one would be able to know
everything. Descartes devoted the majority of his effort and work to proving that he had, in fact,
discovered this correct method of reasoning.

From 1626 to 1629 Descartes resided mainly in Paris. He acquired a wide and notable set of
friends but soon felt that the pressures of social life kept him from his work. He then moved to
Holland, where he lived, primarily near Amsterdam, for the next 20 years. Descartes cherished
the solitude of his life in Holland, and he described himself to a friend as awakening happily
after 10 hours of sleep with the memory of charming dreams. He said his life in Holland was
peaceful because he was "the only man not engaged in merchandise." There Descartes studied
and wrote. He carried on an enormous correspondence throughout Europe, and in Holland he
acquired a small, but dedicated, set of friends and disciples. Although he never married,
Descartes fathered a natural daughter who was baptized Francine. She died in 1640, when she
was 5.

First Works

Descartes's research in mathematics and physics led him to see the need for a new methodology,
or way of thinking. His first major work, Rules for the Direction of the Mind, was written by
1629. Although circulated widely in manuscript form, this incomplete treatise was not published
until 1701. The work begins with the assumption that man's knowledge has been limited by the
erroneous belief that science is determined by the various objects of experience. The first rule
therefore states that all true judgment depends on reason alone for its validity. For example, the
truths of mathematics are valid independently of observation and experiment. Thus the second
rule argues that the standard for any true knowledge should be the certitude demanded of
demonstrations in arithmetic and geometry. The third rule begins to specify what this standard of
true knowledge entails. The mind should be directed not by tradition, authority, or the history of
the problem, but only by what can clearly be observed and deduced.

There are only two mental operations that are permissible in the pure use of reason. The first is
intuition, which Descartes defines as "the undoubting conception of an unclouded and attentive
mind"; the second is deduction, which consists of "all necessary inference from other facts that
are known with certainty. "The basic assumption underlying these definitions is that all first
principles are known by way of self-evident intuitions and that the conclusions of this "seeing
into" are derived by deduction. The clarity and distinctness of ideas are for Descartes the
conceptual counterpart of human vision. (For example, man can know the geometry of a square
just as distinctly as he can see a square table in front of him.)

Many philosophers recognized the ideal character of mathematical reasoning, but no one before
Descartes had abstracted the conditions of such thinking and applied it generally to all
knowledge. If all science is unified by man's reason and if the proper functioning of the mind is
identified with mathematical thinking, then the problem of knowledge is reduced to a question of
methodology. The end of knowledge is true judgment, but true judgment is equivalent to
mathematical demonstrations that are based on intuition and deduction. Thus the method for
finding truth in all matters is merely to restrict oneself to these two operations.
According to the fourth rule, "By method I mean certain and simple rules, such that if a man
observe them accurately, he shall never assume what is false as true … but will always gradually
increase his knowledge and so arrive at a true understanding of all that does not surpass his
powers." The remaining sixteen rules are devoted to the elaboration of these principles or to
showing their application to mathematical problems. In Descartes's later works he refines these
methodological principles, and in the Meditations he attempts a metaphysical justification of this
type of reasoning.

By 1634 Descartes had written his speculative physics in a work entitled The World.
Unfortunately, only fragments survive because he suppressed the book when he heard that
Galileo's Dialogue on the Two Great Systems of the Universe had been condemned by the
Catholic Church because of its advocacy of Copernican rather than Ptolemaic astronomy.
Descartes also espoused the Copernican theory that the earth is not the center of the universe but
revolves about the sun. His fear of censure, however, led him to withdraw his work. In 1634 he
also wrote the brief Treatise on Man, which attempted to explain human physiology on
mechanistic principles.

Discourse and Meditations

In 1637 Descartes finished Discourse on Method, which was published together with three minor
works on geometry, dioptrics, and meteors. This work is significant for several reasons. It is
written in French and directed to men of good sense rather than professional philosophers. It is
autobiographical and begins with a personal account of his education as an example of the need
for a new method of conducting inquiry.

The work contains Descartes's vision of a unity of science based on a common methodology, and
it shows that this method can be applied to general philosophic questions. In brief, the method is
a sophistication of the earlier Rules for the Direction of the Mind. In the Discourse Descartes
presents four general rules for reducing any problem to its fundamentals by analysis and then
constructing solutions by general synthesis.

Meditations on First Philosophy appeared in 1641-1642 together with six (later seven) sets of
objections by distinguished thinkers including Thomas Hobbes, Antoine Arnauld, and Pierre
Gassendi and the author's replies. The Meditations is Descartes's major work and is one of the
seminal books in the history of philosophy. While his former works were concerned with
elaborating a methodology, this work represents the systematic application of those rules to the
principal problems of philosophy: the refutation of skepticism, the existence of the human soul,
the nature of God, the metaphysical basis of truth, the extent of man's knowledge of the external
world, and the relation between body and soul.

The first meditation is an exercise in methodological skepticism. Descartes states that doubt is a
positive means of ascertaining whether there is any certain foundation for knowledge. All
knowledge originates either from the senses or from the mind. Examples of color blindness,
objects seen in perspective, and so on testify to the distortions inherent in vague sense
perception. The recognition of these phenomena as distorted suggests a class of clear perceptions
which are more difficult to doubt. But Descartes then points out that such images appear as clear
to man in dreams as in an awakened state. Therefore all sensory experience is doubtful because
sense data in itself does not indicate whether an object is seen or imagined, true or false.

What about the realm of pure ideas? Descartes simplifies the argument by asking whether it is
possible to doubt the fundamental propositions of arithmetic and geometry. Man cannot doubt
that two plus two equals four, but he may suspect that this statement has no reality apart from his
mind. The standard of truth is the self-evidence of clear and distinct ideas, but the question
remains of the correspondence of such ideas to reality. Descartes imagines the existence of an
all-powerful "evil genius" who deceives man as to the content of his ideas, so that in reality two
plus two equals five.

The second meditation resolves these skeptical issues in a deceptively simple manner by arguing
that even if it is doubtful whether sense images or ideas have objects, it is absolutely true that
man's mind exists. The famous formula "I think, therefore, I am" is true even if everything else is
false. Descartes's solution is known as subjectivism, and it is a radical reversal of previous
theories of knowledge. Whereas nature had been assumed to be the cause of man's images and
ideas, Descartes states that man is a "thinking thing" whose subjective images and ideas are the
sole evidence for the existence of a world.

The third meditation demonstrates that God is "no deceiver," and hence clear and distinct ideas
must have objects that exactly and actually correspond to them. Descartes argues that the idea of
God is an effect. But an effect gets its reality from its cause, and a cause can only produce what it
possesses. Hence either Descartes is a perfect being or God exists as the cause of the idea of
God.

The fourth meditation deals with the problem of human error; insofar as man restricts himself to
clear and distinct ideas, he will never err. With this connection between ideas and objects
Descartes can emerge from his doubts about knowledge. The external world can be known with
absolute certainty insofar as it is reducible to clear and distinct ideas. Thus the fifth meditation
shows the application of methodology to material reality in its quantifiable dimensions, that is, to
the extent to which material reality can be "the object of pure mathematics."

The sixth, and final, meditation attempts to explain the relation between the human soul and the
body. Since Descartes believed in mechanism, there could be no absolute connection between a
free soul and a bodily machine. After considerable hesitation he expresses the relation between
mind and matter as a "felt union." The body is the active faculty that produces the passive images
and imaginings man finds in his mind. Actually Descartes's explanation is logically impossible in
terms of the "subjective" separation of mind; similarly, the unresolved dualism of the "felt union"
violates the principle of assenting only to clear and distinct ideas.

The remainder of Descartes's career was spent in defending his controversial positions. In 1644
he published the Principles of Philosophy, which breaks down the arguments of the Meditations
into propositional form and presents extra arguments dealing with their scientific application. In
1649 Descartes accepted an invitation from Queen Christina of Sweden to become her teacher.
There he wrote The Passions of the Soul, which is a defense of the mind-body dualism and a
mechanistic explanation of the passions. But Descartes's health was undermined by the severity
of the northern climate, and after a brief illness he died in Stockholm in 1650.

Further Reading

The most complete edition of Descartes's works in English is The Philosophical Works of
Descartes, translated by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.T.R. Ross (2 vols., 1955), although many
editions of individual works in new translations are available in paperback. The standard
biography is Haldane's Descartes: His Life and Times (1905; repr. 1966). The best general
introductions to Descartes's philosophy are A. Boyce Gibson, The Philosophy of Descartes
(1932); Stanley V. Keeling, Descartes (1934; 2d ed. 1968); and Albert G. A. Balz, Descartes and
the Modern Mind (1952). Works on specialized topics of an analytic or critical nature include
Norman Kemp Smith, Studies in the Cartesian Philosophy (1902) and New Studies in the
Philosophy of Descartes: Descartes as Pioneer (1952); Jacques Maritain, Three Reformers:
Luther Descartes, Rousseau (trans. 1928) and The Dream of Descartes (trans. 1944); and Leslie
J. Beck, The Method of Descartes: A Study of the Regulae (1952).

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(born March 31, 1596, La Haye, Touraine, France — died Feb. 11, 1650, Stockholm,
Swed.) French mathematician, scientist, and philosopher, considered the father of
modern philosophy. Educated at a Jesuit college, he joined the military in 1618 and
traveled widely for the next 10 years. In 1628 he settled in Holland, where he would
remain until 1649. Descartes's ambition was to introduce into philosophy the rigour
and clarity of mathematics. In his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), he
undertook the methodical doubt of all knowledge about which it is possible to be
deceived, including knowledge based on authority, the senses, and reason, in order
to arrive at something about which he can be absolutely certain; using this point as
a foundation, he then sought to construct new and more secure justifications of his
belief in the existence and immortality of the soul, the existence of God, and the
reality of an external world. This indubitable point is expressed in the dictum Cogito
ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am"). His metaphysical dualism distinguished
radically between mind, the essence of which is thinking, and matter, the essence
of which is extension in three dimensions. Though his metaphysics is rationalistic
(see rationalism), his physics and physiology are empiricistic (see empiricism) and
mechanistic (see mechanism). In mathematics, he founded analytic geometry and
reformed algebraic notation.

For more information on René Descartes, visit Britannica.com.

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Descartes, René (1596-1650). One of the principal creators of modern philosophy and science,
an emblematic figure of the power of independent thinking.

He was born in Touraine and educated at the Jesuit college of La Flèche. From 1618 to 1620 he
served in the army; in November 1619, while garrisoned in Germany in a ‘poêle’ (a small house
heated by a central stove), he experienced a spell of ‘enthusiasm’ in which he discovered ‘les
fondements d'une science admirable’. Between 1620 and 1629 he travelled, but was based in
Paris, frequenting scholarly circles. In 1629, having decided to devote himself to philosophy, he
settled in Holland, where he lived for the rest of his life. His voluntary exile gave him freedom
and solitude, though he entertained many visitors and kept up a voluminous and fascinating
correspondence.

In his early years in Holland he was much occupied by scientific research, but metaphysics
became his dominant concern in the late 1630s. Having refrained from publishing for many
years, he grew increasingly concerned to win over readers to his philosophy, and to oust
scholasticism from the schools. In 1649 he accepted an invitation from a royal admirer, Queen
Christine of Sweden, but fell ill and died in Stockholm.
Descartes's youthful writings are only preserved in fragmentary form. His first major work, the
Regulae ad directionem ingenii (Règles pour la direction de l'esprit), written in Latin before
1629, was published posthumously. It contains 21 ‘rules’ designed to establish a method for
achieving, within the field open to human understanding, a scientific certainty as firm as that of
mathematics. Using this method, which combines intuition, observation, experiment, and
deduction, he then worked on a treatise, Le Monde, ou le Traité de l'homme, in which he offered
a mechanistic account of the universe (a heliocentric system) and of human beings, their bodily
motions, and sensations. The work was completed by 1633, but Descartes abandoned publication
on hearing of Galileo's condemnation.

His first published book, and his most famous, was the Discours de la méthode, published in
French in 1637 together with essays on optics, meteorology, and geometry. It is a complex work,
whose six parts are given unity as the story of the author's search for truth. In Part 1, starting
from the premiss that ‘le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partagée’, Descartes offers his
intellectual autobiography as a possible model for the proper conduct of the mind. He tells of his
book-centred Jesuit education, which failed to satisfy his desire for certain knowledge, and of his
decision to make a clean break and think for himself. Part 2 recounts, with superb confidence,
the discovery of the true method; as in the Regulae, this consists in taking nothing for granted,
accepting only ideas which are entirely self-evident, and proceeding from them by orderly
‘chains’ of reasoning. In Part 3 he sets out the prudently conformist ‘provisional ethics’ which he
adopted until he had arrived at a rationally based morality.

Part 4, the centre of the book, sets out Descartes's first metaphysical discoveries. Having
submitted all ideas to methodical doubt, he is left with the unshakeable principle: ‘Je pense, donc
je suis’ (Cogito, ergo sum, often referred to as ‘the cogito’). He proceeds from this to a radical
distinction between the thinking substance (mind, spirit, or soul) and the material world; this is
the famous Cartesian ‘dualism’. The final basic principle in Part 4 is the existence of a perfect
being, God, which is deduced from the very fact that we possess an idea of perfection. God in
turn guarantees the value of sense experience, and thus of experimental science. Part 5 contains a
summary of the doctrine of Le Monde, emphasizing the distinction between human beings, with
their immaterial souls, and animals, which are seen as ‘machines’—an aspect of Descartes's
philosophy that caused much controversy. Part 6 is a fascinating discussion of his publishing
strategy and the way he sees his public responsibility as a scientist.

His later works develop the ideas of the Discours. The Méditations (published in Latin in 1641,
in French in 1647) is his most important work of pure philosophy. Using the first-person form
again, it attempts to establish more firmly the metaphysics of the Discours, in particular the
existence of God and the mind-matter distinction. Methodical doubt is given added force here by
the fiction of a ‘mauvais génie’ dedicated to deceiving us. The work is followed by a number of
lengthy replies to objections from readers such as Gassendi, Hobbes, and Arnauld. The
Principes, published in Latin in 1644 and in French in 1647, is Descartes's fullest account of his
philosophy. Book 1 is devoted to metaphysics, Books 2-4 to physical science, including
cosmology. The work is designed to replace existing school manuals, and is divided into easily
assimilated short chapters; declaring that all normal people are capable of philosophy, Descartes
in a preface of 1647 urges readers to read it in the first instance ‘like a novel’. An unfinished
dialogue, La Recherche de la vérité, shows a similar concern for popularization.
His last major work, Les Passions de l'âme (1650), written at the request of Princess Elizabeth of
Bohemia, explains the passions in accordance with his dualistic principles. The pineal gland in
the brain is declared to be the place of interaction between body and mind. If the body affects the
mind, the converse is also true; writing in Neostoical vein, and expressing values also embodied
in the heroes of Pierre Corneille, Descartes exalts the free will of the ‘généreux’.

His ideas, powerful in their own right, are given added force by his rhetorical skill. His tone and
style—even his choice between Latin and French—correspond to his projected readers, whose
reactions are provoked, anticipated, and answered. The man is very present in the writing. At
times he is disarmingly modest, at times fiercely ironic. His plain style is often lifted to a higher
plane by the striding rhythm of his sentences and his striking images.

Descartes's philosophy, Cartesianism, exercised a great influence, even when when it was
rejected. His cosmology, with its ‘horror of the vacuum’ and its planets whirled around in
vortices (tourbillons) of ether, succumbed to Newtonian physics, though not before supplanting
Aristotle in the colleges. His doctrine of ‘innate ideas’ was ousted, or at least modified, by
Locke's sensationalism. His body-soul dualism, with its need to explain the reciprocal action of
the two substances, continued to tease philosophers, notably Malebranche and Leibniz. But his
greatest legacy was his method, together with his confidence in the possibility of explaining and
conquering nature. For better or worse, he was one of the fathers of the Scientific Revolution; his
methodical doubt and his independence of mind continued to inspire Enlightenment thinkers,
even if they discarded many of his scientific theories as fantasies.

[Peter France]

Bibliography

• A. J. P. Kenny, Descartes: A Study of his Philosophy (1968)

• G. Rodis-Lewis, L'Œuvre de Descartes (1971)
• B. Williams, Descartes (1978)

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Descartes, René (1596-1650) French mathematician and founding father of modern philosophy.
Born in La Haye, near Tours, Descartes was educated at the new Jesuit college at La Flèche,
before reading law at Poitiers. In 1618 he enlisted at his own expense in the Dutch army of
Maurice of Nassau, in order to have the leisure to think. His interest in the methodology of a
unified science is supposed to have been stimulated by a dream ‘in a stove-heated room’ when he
was serving at Ulm in 1619. In the subsequent ten years he travelled widely, returning to Holland
in 1628. Little is known of his private life, but the death of his illegitimate five-year-old daughter
Francine in 1640 is known to have been a devastating blow. His first work, the Regulae ad
Directionem Ingenii (1628/9), was never completed. In Holland, between 1628 and 1649,
Descartes first wrote, and then cautiously suppressed, Le Monde (1634), and in 1637 produced
the Discours de la méthode as a preface to the treatise on mathematics and physics in which he
introduced the notion of Cartesian coordinates.

His best-known philosophical work, the Meditationes de Prima Philosophia (Meditations on

First Philosophy), together with objections by distinguished contemporaries and replies by
Descartes (the Objections and Replies), appeared in 1641. The authors of the objections are: first
set, the Dutch theologian Johan de Kater; second set, Mersenne; third set, Hobbes; fourth set,
Arnauld; fifth set, Gassendi; and sixth set, Mersenne. The second edition (1642) of the
Meditations included a seventh set by the Jesuit Pierre Bourdin. Descartes's penultimate work,
the Principia Philosophiae (Principles of Philosophy) of 1644 was designed partly for use as a
theological textbook. His last work was Les Passions de l’âme (The Passions of the Soul),
published in 1649. In that year Descartes visited the court of Kristina of Sweden, where he
contracted pneumonia, allegedly through being required to break his normal habit of late rising
in order to give lessons at 5:00 a.m. His last words are supposed to have been ‘Ça, mon âme, il
faut partir’ (‘So, my soul, it is time to part’).

Descartes's theory of knowledge starts with the quest for certainty, for an indubitable starting-
point or foundation on the basis alone of which progress is possible (see method of doubt). This
is eventually found in the celebrated ‘Cogito ergo sum’: I think therefore I am. By locating the
point of certainty in my own awareness of my own self, Descartes gives a first-person twist to
the theory of knowledge that dominated the following centuries in spite of various counter-
attacks on behalf of social and public starting-points. The metaphysics associated with this
priority is the famous Cartesian dualism, or separation of mind and matter into two different but
interacting substances. Descartes rigorously and rightly sees that it takes divine dispensation to
certify any relationship between the two realms thus divided, and to prove the reliability of the
senses invokes a ‘clear and distinct perception’ of highly dubious proofs of the existence of a
benevolent deity. This has not met general acceptance: as Hume drily puts it, ‘to have recourse to
the veracity of the supreme Being, in order to prove the veracity of our senses, is surely making a
very unexpected circuit’.

In his own time Descartes's conception of the entirely separate substance of the mind was
recognized to give rise to insoluble problems of the nature of the causal connection between the
two (see occasionalism). It also gives rise to the problem, insoluble in its own terms, of other
minds. Descartes's notorious denial that non-human animals are conscious is a stark illustration
of the problem. In his conception of matter Descartes also gives preference to rational cogitation
over anything derived from the senses. Since we can conceive of the matter of a ball of wax
surviving changes to its sensible qualities, matter is not an empirical concept, but eventually an
entirely geometrical one, with extension and motion as its only physical nature. Descartes's
thought here is reflected in Leibniz's view, held later by Russell, that the qualities of sense
experience have no resemblance to qualities of things, so that knowledge of the external world is
essentially knowledge of structure rather than of filling. On this basis Descartes erects a
remarkable physics. Since matter is in effect the same as extension there can be no empty space
or void; since there is no empty space motion is not a question of occupying previously empty
space, but is to be thought of in terms of vortices (like the motion of a liquid).

Although the structure of Descartes's epistemology, theory of mind, and theory of matter have
been rejected many times, their relentless exposure of the hardest issues, their exemplary clarity,
and even their initial plausibility, all contrive to make him the central point of reference for
modern philosophy.

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From our Archives: Today's Highlights, March 31, 2006

René Descartes was born 410 years ago today, in 1596. Called the father of modern
philosophy, the French mathematician/scientist/philosopher was famous for his
dictum, "I think, therefore I am" (Cogito ergo sum, in Latin). Also considered the
founder of analytic geometry, Descartes originated the Cartesian coordinates and
Cartesian curves. Some of his research in optics included the refraction and
reflection of light.

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Columbia Encyclopedia: René Descartes

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Descartes, René (rənā' dākärt') , Lat. Renatus Cartesius, 1596–1650, French

philosopher, mathematician, and scientist, b. La Haye. Descartes' methodology was
a major influence in the transition from medieval science and philosophy to the
modern era.

Life

Descartes was educated in the Jesuit College at La Flèche and the Univ. of Poitiers, then entered
the army of Prince Maurice of Nassau. In 1628 he retired to Holland, where he spent his time in
scientific research and philosophic reflection. Even before going to Holland, Descartes had
begun his great work, for the essay on algebra and the Compendium musicae probably antedate
1628. But it was with the appearance in 1637 of a group of essays that he first made a name for
himself. These writings included the famous Discourse on Method and other essays on optics,
meteors, and analytical geometry. In 1649 he was invited by Queen Christina to Sweden, but he
was unable to endure the rigors of the northern climate and died not long after arriving in
Sweden.

Elements of Cartesian Philosophy

It was with the intention of extending mathematical method to all fields of human knowledge
that Descartes developed his methodology, the cardinal aspect of his philosophy. He discards the
authoritarian system of the scholastics and begins with universal doubt. But there is one thing
that cannot be doubted: doubt itself. This is the kernel expressed in his famous phrase, Cogito,
ergo sum [I think, therefore I am].

From the certainty of the existence of a thinking being, Descartes passed to the existence of God,
for which he offered one proof based on St. Anselm's ontological proof and another based on the
first cause that must have produced the idea of God in the thinker. Having thus arrived at the
existence of God, he reaches the reality of the physical world through God, who would not
deceive the thinking mind by perceptions that are illusions. Therefore, the external world, which
we perceive, must exist. He thus falls back on the acceptance of what we perceive clearly and
distinctly as being true, and he studies the material world to perceive connections. He views the
physical world as mechanistic and entirely divorced from the mind, the only connection between
the two being by intervention of God. This is almost complete dualism.

The development of Descartes' philosophy is in Meditationes de prima philosophia (1641); his

Principia philosophiae (1644) is also very important. His influence on philosophy was immense,
and was widely felt in law and theology also. Frequently he has been called the father of modern
philosophy, but his importance has been challenged in recent years with the demonstration of his
great debt to the scholastics. He influenced the rationalists, and Baruch Spinoza also reflects
Descartes's doctrines in some degree. The more direct followers of Descartes, the Cartesian
philosophers, devoted themselves chiefly to the problem of the relation of body and soul, of
matter and mind. From this came the doctrine of occasionalism, developed by Nicolas
Malebranche and Arnold Geulincx.

Major Contributions to Science

In science, Descartes discarded tradition and to an extent supported the same method as Francis
Bacon, but with emphasis on rationalization and logic rather than upon experiences. In physical
theory his doctrines were formulated as a compromise between his devotion to Roman
Catholicism and his commitment to the scientific method, which met opposition in the church
officials of the day. Mathematics was his greatest interest; building upon the work of others, he
originated the Cartesian coordinates and Cartesian curves; he is often said to be the founder of
analytical geometry. To algebra he contributed the treatment of negative roots and the
convention of exponent notation. He made numerous advances in optics, such as his study of the
reflection and refraction of light. He wrote a text on physiology, and he also worked in
psychology; he contended that emotion was finally physiological at base and argued that the
control of the physical expression of emotion would control the emotions themselves. His chief
work on psychology is in his Traité des passions de l'âme (1649).

Bibliography

See biographies by J. R. Vrooman (1970), S. Gaukroger (1995), R. Watson (2002), A. C.

Grayling (2005), and D. Clarke (2006); see studies by J. Maritain (tr. 1944, repr. 1969), A. G.
Balz (1952, repr. 1967), H. Caton (1973), and S. Gaukroger (1989 and 2002; as ed. 1980, 1998,
2000, and 2006).

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Descartes, René (1596–1650), French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. Descartes was
one of the most important intellectual figures of seventeenth-century Europe. His thought, often
regarded as ushering in the "modern" period of philosophy, represented a revolutionary attempt
to break from the restrictive and tradition-bound medieval Scholastic model that governed the
universities and that was dominated by the method and categories of Aristotelian philosophy. By
the time of his death, Descartes's influence extended across Europe and into various intellectual
domains, including theology, medicine, and even rhetoric.

In 1633 Descartes, who had already written a treatise on method, Regulae ad Directionem
Ingenii (Rules for the direction of the mind), was ready to publish a book on cosmology and
physics, Le Monde (The world). But Galileo's condemnation that year by the church for
propounding scientific ideas very much like what Descartes was about to present, including a
heliocentric picture of the universe and a purely mechanistic account of nature's operations,
caused him to withhold the work. He first came to public attention with the publication of his
Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison et chercher la verité dans les sciences
(1637; Discourse on the method of rightly conducting one's reason and reaching the truth in the
sciences) and the ground-breaking essays in geometry, optics, and meteorology that it
accompanied. The Meditationes de Prima Philosophiae (1641; Meditations on first philosophy),
often regarded as Descartes's philosophical masterpiece, is a short work in epistemology and
metaphysics. It was not until his magisterial Principia Philosophiae (1644; Principles of
philosophy) that Descartes offered a complete and systematic presentation of his metaphysical
and scientific views; he hoped that the work would become a standard textbook in university
curricula and supplant the Aristotelian Scholastic works then in use.

Descartes lived most of his adult life in the Netherlands, having left France in search of peace
and solitude to pursue his inquiries. His fame led to an invitation to Sweden by Queen Christina
in 1649; with misgivings about giving up his quiet, familiar life in the Dutch countryside, he
reluctantly joined her court. It was not long, however, before he fell ill from the rigors of the
routine imposed upon him in the harsh Swedish winter and died of pneumonia.

Philosophy, for Descartes, encompasses the whole of human knowledge, systematically ordered,
and can be compared to a tree. Its roots are metaphysics, or "first philosophy" (including the
theory of knowledge); its trunk is physics; and its branches are all of the particular sciences
(medicine, ethics, mechanics) that depend on the most general physical principles. Certainty in
philosophy or science can be achieved only if one proceeds methodically from well-established
first principles to explanations in the particular disciplines by means of a proven method.

In the Meditations, Descartes begins by taking the reader on a journey of intellectual self-
discovery. His goal is to determine what exactly can be known for certain, not just about the
world around us but especially about ourselves. Even under the most adverse skeptical
assumptions about the reliability of our senses and our rational faculties, we can always be
absolutely certain of our own existence. As he so famously expresses it in the Discourse on
Method, the reasoning represented by the proposition "I think, therefore I am" (Cogito ergo sum)
can never be doubted. This single epistemological nugget can serve as the foundation for a host
of other certainties. For once I know my own existence and my nature as a thinking being—
endowed with certain thoughts or clear and distinct ideas—I can establish not only that God, an
absolutely perfect being, exists and cannot be a deceiver, but also that this benevolent God
created me with my rational faculties. Thus, to the extent that I use those faculties properly and
give my assent only to what I clearly and distinctly perceive, I cannot go wrong and will obtain
true beliefs about myself and about the external world.

Among the truths I will thereby discover is the real distinction between mind and matter. One of
Descartes's most important and lasting legacies to philosophy is the doctrine that has come to be
known as "dualism." Mind and matter (or body), according to Descartes, are two essentially and
radically different kinds of substance. Mind is unextended, indivisible, simple thinking; its
modes or properties are ideas or thoughts. Matter, on the other hand, is nothing but extension or
dimensional space, and is therefore divisible; its modes are shape, size, and mobility. There is
nothing materialistic about the mind, and nothing mental or spiritual about the body.

This doctrine is of great importance not only for understanding the nature of the human being,
who is a composite—or, to use Descartes's phrase, a "substantial union"—of these two
substances, but also for science. According to Descartes, the physical world is nothing but
passive matter or extension, divisible ad infinitum into material parts. The active, spiritlike
"forms" of the Aristotelian world picture have been banished from nature. All natural
phenomena, no matter how complex, and regardless of whether they are terrestrial or celestial,
are henceforth to be explained solely in terms of matter and the motion, rest and impact of its
parts. Descartes's separation of mind and matter was a crucial step in the scientific revolution of
the seventeenth century and laid the metaphysical foundations for the mechanical philosophy that
dominated the period until Isaac Newton (1642–1727).

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Descartes, René. Oeuvres de Descartes. Edited by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery. 12 vols.
Paris, 1964–1976.

——. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert

Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. 2 vols. Cambridge, U.K., 1984–1985.

——. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Vol. 3, The Letters. Translated by John
Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny. Cambridge, U.K., 1991.

Secondary Sources

Cottingham, John, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Descartes. Cambridge, U.K., 1992.

Garber, Daniel. Descartes' Metaphysical Physics. Chicago, 1992.

Gaukroger, Stephen. Descartes: An Intellectual Biography. Oxford and New York, 1995.

Kenny, Anthony. Descartes: A Study of His Philosophy. New York, 1968.

Watson, Richard. Cogito Ergo Sum: The Life of René Descartes. Boston, 2002.
Wilson, Margaret. Descartes. London and Boston, 1978.

—STEVEN NADLER

World of the Mind: René Descartes

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Home > Library > Health > World of the Mind

(1596–1650). A pivotal figure in the great 17th-century revolution that marked the
emergence of modern philosophical and scientific thinking. He was born at La Haye
near Tours, and educated at the Jesuit college of La Flèche. He travelled in Germany
during 1619, and on the night of 11 November he had a series of dreams which
inspired his vision of founding a completely new philosophical and scientific system.
In 1628 he moved to Holland, where he lived, with frequent changes of address, for
most of the rest of his life. His philosophical masterpiece, the Meditations on First
Philosophy, appeared in Latin in 1641, and his Principles of Philosophy, a
comprehensive statement of his philosophical and scientific theories, also in Latin,
in 1644. He died of pneumonia in Stockholm, where he had gone to act as tutor to
Queen Christina of Sweden.

Descartes made important contributions in many areas of human knowledge. His

early work was in mathematics, and his Rules for the Direction of the Understanding
(1628) provided a general account of scientific knowledge that was strongly
influenced by mathematical models. His Geometry (published 1637) lays the
foundations for what is now known as analytical geometry. In the Discourse on
Method, a popular introduction to his philosophy, published in French in 1637,
Descartes developed his celebrated 'method of doubt': 'I resolved to reject as false
everything in which I could imagine the least doubt, in order to see if there
afterwards remained anything that was entirely indubitable' (see doubting). This led
to the famous affirmation 'I think, therefore I am' (je pense, donc je suis). On the
basis of this 'Archimedean point' Descartes erected a comprehensive philosophical
and scientific system which was to include both a general theory of the structure
and working of the physical universe, and many detailed explanations of particular
phenomena, such as the mechanics of human and animal physiology. Although the
metaphysical foundations of his system depend heavily on the existence of an
omnipotent, benevolent, and non-deceiving God, Descartes aimed, in all areas of
natural science, to provide explanations in terms of strictly mechanical models and
mathematical principles. All phenomena, whether celestial or terrestrial, were to be
explained ultimately by reference to the shapes, sizes, and motions of bits of
matter: 'I freely acknowledge that I recognize no matter in corporeal things apart
from that which the geometricians call "quantity" and take as the object of their
demonstrations' (Principles, pt. ii).

Descartes's theory of the mind stands out as a striking exception to his general
insistence on mechanical and mathematical explanations. Mental phenomena, for
Descartes, have no place in the quantifiable world of physics, but have a completely
autonomous, separate status. 'I am a substance the whole nature or essence of
which is to think, and which for its existence does not need any place or depend on
any material thing' (Discourse, pt. iv). Developing the theory later known as
'Cartesian dualism', Descartes maintains that there are two radically different kinds
of substance: physical, extended substance (res extensa) — i.e. that which has
length, breadth, and depth and can therefore be measured and divided — and
thinking substance (res cogitans), which is unextended and indivisible. Thus the
human body — including the brain and entire nervous system — belongs in the first
category, while the mind — including all thoughts, desires, and volitions — belongs
in the second.

One of Descartes's reasons for supposing his mind to be essentially non-physical is

that in his Meditations he found himself able to doubt the existence of all physical
objects (including his body), but was unable to doubt the existence of himself as a
thinking being. And from this he concluded that having a body was not part of his
essential nature. But, as some of his contemporary critics pointed out, this
argument seems invalid: ability to doubt that some item X possesses some feature
F does not prove that X could in fact exist without F. Descartes also argued that the
essential indivisibility of the mind proves its non-corporeality, but this seems
question begging, since the premiss that the mind is indivisible would be disputed
by those who maintain that the mind is some kind of physical system. Despite the
shakiness of some of Descartes's arguments, his dualistic approach has continued
to exert a dominatingly powerful influence on theories of the mind. As recently as
1977, for example, we find the eminent neurophysiologist Sir John Eccles and the
famous philosopher Sir Karl Popper maintaining that Descartes was fundamentally
correct. According to Eccles and Popper, the 'self' — the conscious being that is 'me'
— is essentially non-physical. The self may make use of the brain in its operations,
but its operations have separate and independent status over and above the
occurrences in the brain.

As Descartes himself recognized, however, dualism faces considerable philosophical

difficulties. The chief of these is the problem of 'causal interaction'. We know from
experience that mind and body do not operate in total isolation, but interact with
each other: if there is a physical change (e.g. my hand touches a hot stove), a
mental change (e.g. pain) results; and, conversely, a mental event (a volition to
raise my arm) leads to a physical event (my arm going up). Descartes
acknowledges these facts by saying that in many cases mind and body 'intermingle'
to form a kind of unit. Thus, sensations like hunger and thirst are, he maintains,
'confused perceptions' resulting from the fact that 'I am not merely lodged with my
body, like a sailor in a ship, but am very closely united and as it were intermingled
with it' (Meditations, pt. vi). But exactly how there can be such a 'union' or
'intermingling' between two allegedly quite distinct and seemingly incompatible
substances is left something of a mystery. Elsewhere (e.g. in the Passions of the
Soul, 1649), Descartes suggests that the mind or soul, though incorporeal and
indivisible, exercises its functions in one particular part of the brain, the conarion, or
pineal gland. But this manoeuvre seems not to solve but merely to reimport the
problem of causal interaction: if there is a problem about how a non-physical soul
can cause my arm to go up, there will be no less a problem about how a non-
physical soul can cause movements in the brain by acting on the pineal gland.

Although in his psychological and physiological writings Descartes devoted great

efforts to the problem of interaction between soul and body, it is worth
remembering that in his system there are many areas where such interaction
simply does not arise. First, in the case of animal physiology and a great deal of
human physiology (e.g. that concerned with digestion, muscular reflexes, etc.),
Descartes maintained that the soul is not involved at all: what occurs can be
explained purely on mechanical principles. Second, in the case of human beings,
though much of our activity (e.g. sense perception) involves complicated
transactions between soul and body, there are other mental acts (e.g. purely
intellectual thoughts) which, according to Descartes, can occur without any
physiological correlates at all; such 'ideas of pure mind' are, in Descartes's view,
from start to finish non-corporeal. It must be said that advances in brain science
have made this latter part of Descartes's theory increasingly difficult to defend.

Although substantive dualism, the doctrine that the mind is a separate, non-physical
entity, now has ever-fewer supporters, many philosophers have become attracted
by a weaker version of Descartes's theory, which has been termed 'attributive
dualism'. This is the view that, even if the mind is not a separate entity, there are
none the less two distinct sets of properties or attributes that can be ascribed to
human beings: psychological properties (thoughts, feelings, volitions) and physical
properties (e.g. electrical and chemical properties of the nervous system).
Attributive dualists maintain that, even if all human activities must depend on some
kind of physical substrate, there is none the less an important sense in which
psychological descriptions of those activities cannot be reduced to mere
physiological descriptions. This position on the one hand preserves Descartes's
insight that what he called 'modes of extension' (size, shape, volume) are
fundamentally different from 'modes of thought' (thoughts, feelings, volitions), while
on the other hand resisting his conclusion that two separate entities, a 'thinking
thing' and an 'extended thing', are involved. This is similar to the hardware and
software of a computer.

(Published 1987)
See also mind and body; mind–body problem; personal identity.

— John G. Cottingham

Bibliography

• Descartes, R. (1911). The Philosophical Works of Descartes. Trans. E. S.

Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (repr. 1969).
• Popper, K., and Eccles, J. (1977). The Self and its Brain.
• Williams, B. (1978). Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry.
• Wilson, M. (1978). Descartes.

Word Tutor: Descartes

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Home > Library > Literature & Language > Spelling & Usage

IN BRIEF: n. - French philosopher and mathematician.

Quotes By: Rene Descartes

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Home > Library > Literature & Language > Quotes By

Quotes:

"If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt,
as far as possible, all things."

"Whenever anyone has offended me, I try to raise my soul so high that the offense cannot reach
it."

"It is not enough to have a good mind, the main thing is to use it well."

"There is nothing so strange and so unbelievable that it has not been said by one philosopher or
another."
"Everything is self-evident."

"Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it."

See more famous quotes by Rene Descartes

The Dream Encyclopedia: René Descartes

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The rationalist philosopher and mathematician René Descartes (1596-1650) was born at La
Haye, in Touraine, France. After attending the Jesuit college of La Fleche, he went to Holland in
1618 to serve in the army of Maurice of Nassau, and then traveled in Germany. His first
substantial work was the treatise Regulae ad directionem ingenii, which was printed in 1701
although it was never completed. It dealt with Descartes's preoccupation with method as the clue
to scientific advance.

By 1634 Descartes had completed a scientific work, Le morrde, which was suppressed after he
heard of the condemnation of Galileo for teaching the Copernican system. In 1637 he published
three treatises on physical and mathematical subjects-Geometry, Dioptric, and Meteors-prefaced
by Discours de la méthode, which represent a compressed exposition of the foundations of the
Cartesian system.

In Discours de la méthode Descartes introduced his method of systematic doubt in his attempt to
answer the basic question, "What can I know?" which he hoped to answer by critical reflection
on his beliefs. His method was to suspend belief in anything in which he could find or imagine
the slightest grounds for doubt. He suspended belief in the entire physical universe, including
himself; in God; in the past; and even in the truth of mathematical propositions. Among the
arguments by which he extended his doubts are the false judgments we commonly make due to
illusions of the senses and, in particular, the illusions of dreams, to which he frequently referred.

For Descartes the question of who's dreaming about whom was very difficult to answer, as was
the question, How do we know that the perceptions that occur in dreaming are false and those we
experience when awake are true, since the former are often as vivid and distinct as the latter? He
claimed that dreams are merely the result of activity in the sleeper's organs of sense, and that
they respond to the sleeper's desires. And, because we cannot meaningfully distinguish dreaming
perceptions from waking perceptions, we cannot regard the information coming to us from our
senses as providing a stable foundation for knowledge. Descartes's systematic doubt led him to
the only proposition that he could not reasonably doubt, namely, that he the doubter must exist:
"I think, therefore I am."

Beyond the abstract use of dream experiences to cast doubt on the veracity of sense experiences,
Descartes himself had some important personal dreams. On the night of November 10, 1619, he
had a series of dreams that he interpreted as an answer to his desire to find a method that would
enable him to pursue truth as a life occupation. According to his interpretation of the dreams,
which he claimed were a divine sign, his destiny was to search for truth by applying the
mathematical method-by which he meant analytical geometry, in particular, to all other studies.

He had always been in the habit of recording his dreams in his journal, which he referred to as
his Olympica. At some point during the seventeenth century this journal was lost, but the
contents are known today because of the efforts of the Abbé Adrien Baillet. He had access to the
Olympica before it was lost and published a paraphrased version, La vie de M. Descartes, in
1691. It is through this record that we know about a dream he experienced, in three parts, on
November 10, 1619. The following is an account of the Abbé Baillet's version of the events that
unfolded in the first, nightmarish act of the dream, as described in his La vie de M. Descartes:

After he fell asleep he imagined he saw ghosts and was terrified by them. He felt a great
weakness on

René Descartes

Who2 Biography: René Descartes, Philosopher / Mathematician

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• Born: 31 March 1596

• Birthplace: La Haye, France
• Died: 11 February 1650 (lung trouble)
• Best Known As: The philosopher who said "I think,
therefore I am" Source

René Descartes is often called the father of modern science. He

established a new, clear way of thinking about philosophy and
science by rejecting all ideas based on assumptions or emotional beliefs and accepting only those
ideas which could be proved by or systematically deduced from direct observation. He took as
his philosophical starting point the statement Cogito ergo sum -- "I think, therefore I am."
Descartes made major contributions to modern mathematics, especially in developing the
Cartesian coordinate system and advancing the theory of equations.
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Statistics Dictionary: René Descartes

Home > Library > Science > Statistics Dictionary

(1596–1650; b. La Haye, France; d. Stockholm, Sweden) French philosopher and mathematician.

His birthplace is now named Descartes (a lunar crater and a street in Paris also bear his name).
Descartes was initially educated at a Jesuit college in Anjou. At that time his health was poor and
he was permitted to remain in bed until 11.00 a.m. — he continued this habit throughout his life.
His treatise on universal science published at Leyden in 1637 included three appendices. One,
'La Géométrie', introduced the ideas of coordinate geometry and in particular the use of Cartesian
coordinates.

Scientist: René Descartes

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[b. La Haye, France, March 31, 1596, d.

Stockholm, Sweden, February 11, 1650]

The philosopher Descartes was the first to publish a

detailed account of how to use coordinates for
locating points in space, called analytic geometry,
although Fermat developed the concept slightly
earlier. In an appendix to his book Discours de la
méthode Descartes gave analytic geometry to the René Descartes
world and used the new technique to solve
Library of Congress
problems in geometry. Analytic geometry made
calculus and many other advances in mathematics
possible. Descartes also developed (incorrect) theories of how the planets move and obtained
important (correct) results in optics. His emphasis on rational thought was important in creating
modern science.
Music Encyclopedia: René Descartes

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(b La Haye, 31 March 1596; d Stockholm, 11 Feb 1650). French philosopher. His principal
contribution to music theory was the Compendium musicae (1618), in which he attempted to
define the dual relationship between the physical and psychological phenomena in music. The
bulk of the work is devoted to the practical aspects of music as part of the process of sensory
perception. He also contributed to music theory on period structure and harmonic inversion.

Biography: René Descartes

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Home > Library > Miscellaneous > Biographies

The French thinker René Descartes (1596-1650) is called the father of modern
philosophy. He initiated the movement generally termed rationalism, and his
"Discourse on Method and Meditations" defined the basic problems of philosophy
for at least a century.

To appreciate the novelty of the thought of René Descartes, one must understand what modern
philosophy, or rationalism, means in contrast to medieval, or scholastic, philosophy. The great
European thinkers of the 9th to 14th century were not incapable of logical reasoning, but they
differed in philosophic interests and aims from the rationalists. Just as the moderns, from
Descartes on, usually identified philosophy with the natural and pure sciences, so the medievals
made little distinction between philosophical and theological concerns.

The medieval doctors, like St. Thomas Aquinas, wanted to demonstrate that the revelations of
faith and the dictates of reason were not incompatible. Their universe was that outlined by
Aristotle in his Physics - a universe in which everything was ordered and classified according to
the end that it served. During the Renaissance, however, men began exploring scientific
alternatives to Aristotle's hierarchical universe. Further, new instruments, especially Galileo's
telescope, added precision to scientific generalizations.

By the beginning of the 17th century the medieval tradition had lost its creative impetus. But the
schoolmen, so called because they dominated the European universities, continued to adhere
dogmatically to the traditional philosophy because of its association with Catholic theology. The
rationalists, however, persistently refused professorships in order to preserve their intellectual
integrity or to avoid persecution. They rejected the medieval practice of composing
commentaries on standard works in favor of writing original, usually anonymous, treatises on
topics suggested by their own scientific or speculative interests. Thus the contrast is between a
moribund tradition of professorial disputes over trivialities and a new philosophy inspired by
original, scientific research.

Descartes participated in this conflict between the scholastic and rationalist approaches. He spent
a great part of his intellectual effort - even to the extent of suppressing some of his writings -
attempting to convince ecclesiastical authorities of the compatibility of the new science with
theology and of its superiority as a foundation for philosophy.

Early Life

Descartes was born on March 31, 1596, in La Haye, in the Touraine region, between the cities of
Tours and Poitiers. His father, Joachim, a member of the minor nobility, served in the Parliament
of Brittany. Jeanne Brochard Descartes, his mother, died in May 1597. Although his father
remarried, Descartes and his older brother and sister were raised by their maternal grandmother
and by a nurse for whom he retained a deep affection.

In 1606 Descartes entered La Flèche, a Jesuit college established by the king for the instruction
of the young nobility. In the Discourse Descartes tells of the 8-year course of studies at La
Flèche, which he considered "one of the most celebrated schools in Europe." According to his
account, which is one of the best contemporary descriptions of 17th-century education, his
studies left him feeling embarrassed at the extent of his own ignorance.

The young Descartes came to feel that languages, literature, and history relate only fables which
incline man to imaginative exaggerations. Poetry and eloquence persuade man, but they do not
tell the truth. Mathematics does grasp the truth, but the certainty and evidence of its reasoning
seemed to Descartes to have only practical applications. Upon examination, the revelations of
religion and morals seem as mysterious to the learned as to the ignorant. Philosophy had been
studied by the best minds throughout the centuries, and yet "no single thing is to be found in it
which is not subject to dispute." Descartes says that he came to suspect that even science, which
depends upon philosophy for its principles, "could have built nothing solid on foundations so far
from firm."

Travel and First Writings

The 18-year-old Descartes left college with a reputation for extreme brilliance. In the next years
he rounded out the education befitting a young noble. He learned fencing, horsemanship, and
dancing and took a law degree from Poitiers.

From 1618 to 1628 Descartes traveled extensively throughout Europe while attached to various
military units. Although a devout Catholic, he served in the army of the Protestant prince
Maurice of Nassau but later enlisted in the Catholic army of Maximilian I of Bavaria. Living on
income from inherited properties, Descartes served without pay and seems to have seen little
action; he was present, however, at the Battle of Prague, one of the major engagements of the
Thirty Years War. Descartes was reticent about this period of his life, saying only that he left the
study of letters in order to travel in "the great book of the world."

This period of travel was not without intellectual effort. Descartes sought out eminent
mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers wherever he traveled. The most significant of these
friendships was with Isaac Beeckman, the Dutch mathematician, at whose suggestion Descartes
began writing scientific treatises on mathematics and music. He perfected a means of describing
geometrical figures in algebraic formulas, a process that served as the foundation for his
invention of analytic geometry. He became increasingly impressed with the extent to which
material reality could be understood mathematically.

During this period Descartes was profoundly influenced by three dreams which he had on Nov.
10, 1619, in Ulm, Germany. He interpreted their symbols as a divine sign that all science is one
and that its mastery is universal wisdom. This notion of the unity of all science was a
revolutionary concept which contradicted the Aristotelian notion that the sciences were
distinguished by their different objects of study. Descartes did not deny the multiplicity of
objects, but rather he emphasized that only one mind could know all these diverse things. He felt
that if one could generalize man's correct method of knowing, then one would be able to know
everything. Descartes devoted the majority of his effort and work to proving that he had, in fact,
discovered this correct method of reasoning.
From 1626 to 1629 Descartes resided mainly in Paris. He acquired a wide and notable set of
friends but soon felt that the pressures of social life kept him from his work. He then moved to
Holland, where he lived, primarily near Amsterdam, for the next 20 years. Descartes cherished
the solitude of his life in Holland, and he described himself to a friend as awakening happily
after 10 hours of sleep with the memory of charming dreams. He said his life in Holland was
peaceful because he was "the only man not engaged in merchandise." There Descartes studied
and wrote. He carried on an enormous correspondence throughout Europe, and in Holland he
acquired a small, but dedicated, set of friends and disciples. Although he never married,
Descartes fathered a natural daughter who was baptized Francine. She died in 1640, when she
was 5.

First Works

Descartes's research in mathematics and physics led him to see the need for a new methodology,
or way of thinking. His first major work, Rules for the Direction of the Mind, was written by
1629. Although circulated widely in manuscript form, this incomplete treatise was not published
until 1701. The work begins with the assumption that man's knowledge has been limited by the
erroneous belief that science is determined by the various objects of experience. The first rule
therefore states that all true judgment depends on reason alone for its validity. For example, the
truths of mathematics are valid independently of observation and experiment. Thus the second
rule argues that the standard for any true knowledge should be the certitude demanded of
demonstrations in arithmetic and geometry. The third rule begins to specify what this standard of
true knowledge entails. The mind should be directed not by tradition, authority, or the history of
the problem, but only by what can clearly be observed and deduced.

There are only two mental operations that are permissible in the pure use of reason. The first is
intuition, which Descartes defines as "the undoubting conception of an unclouded and attentive
mind"; the second is deduction, which consists of "all necessary inference from other facts that
are known with certainty. "The basic assumption underlying these definitions is that all first
principles are known by way of self-evident intuitions and that the conclusions of this "seeing
into" are derived by deduction. The clarity and distinctness of ideas are for Descartes the
conceptual counterpart of human vision. (For example, man can know the geometry of a square
just as distinctly as he can see a square table in front of him.)

Many philosophers recognized the ideal character of mathematical reasoning, but no one before
Descartes had abstracted the conditions of such thinking and applied it generally to all
knowledge. If all science is unified by man's reason and if the proper functioning of the mind is
identified with mathematical thinking, then the problem of knowledge is reduced to a question of
methodology. The end of knowledge is true judgment, but true judgment is equivalent to
mathematical demonstrations that are based on intuition and deduction. Thus the method for
finding truth in all matters is merely to restrict oneself to these two operations.

According to the fourth rule, "By method I mean certain and simple rules, such that if a man
observe them accurately, he shall never assume what is false as true … but will always gradually
increase his knowledge and so arrive at a true understanding of all that does not surpass his
powers." The remaining sixteen rules are devoted to the elaboration of these principles or to
showing their application to mathematical problems. In Descartes's later works he refines these
methodological principles, and in the Meditations he attempts a metaphysical justification of this
type of reasoning.

By 1634 Descartes had written his speculative physics in a work entitled The World.
Unfortunately, only fragments survive because he suppressed the book when he heard that
Galileo's Dialogue on the Two Great Systems of the Universe had been condemned by the
Catholic Church because of its advocacy of Copernican rather than Ptolemaic astronomy.
Descartes also espoused the Copernican theory that the earth is not the center of the universe but
revolves about the sun. His fear of censure, however, led him to withdraw his work. In 1634 he
also wrote the brief Treatise on Man, which attempted to explain human physiology on
mechanistic principles.

Discourse and Meditations

In 1637 Descartes finished Discourse on Method, which was published together with three minor
works on geometry, dioptrics, and meteors. This work is significant for several reasons. It is
written in French and directed to men of good sense rather than professional philosophers. It is
autobiographical and begins with a personal account of his education as an example of the need
for a new method of conducting inquiry.

The work contains Descartes's vision of a unity of science based on a common methodology, and
it shows that this method can be applied to general philosophic questions. In brief, the method is
a sophistication of the earlier Rules for the Direction of the Mind. In the Discourse Descartes
presents four general rules for reducing any problem to its fundamentals by analysis and then
constructing solutions by general synthesis.

Meditations on First Philosophy appeared in 1641-1642 together with six (later seven) sets of
objections by distinguished thinkers including Thomas Hobbes, Antoine Arnauld, and Pierre
Gassendi and the author's replies. The Meditations is Descartes's major work and is one of the
seminal books in the history of philosophy. While his former works were concerned with
elaborating a methodology, this work represents the systematic application of those rules to the
principal problems of philosophy: the refutation of skepticism, the existence of the human soul,
the nature of God, the metaphysical basis of truth, the extent of man's knowledge of the external
world, and the relation between body and soul.

The first meditation is an exercise in methodological skepticism. Descartes states that doubt is a
positive means of ascertaining whether there is any certain foundation for knowledge. All
knowledge originates either from the senses or from the mind. Examples of color blindness,
objects seen in perspective, and so on testify to the distortions inherent in vague sense
perception. The recognition of these phenomena as distorted suggests a class of clear perceptions
which are more difficult to doubt. But Descartes then points out that such images appear as clear
to man in dreams as in an awakened state. Therefore all sensory experience is doubtful because
sense data in itself does not indicate whether an object is seen or imagined, true or false.
What about the realm of pure ideas? Descartes simplifies the argument by asking whether it is
possible to doubt the fundamental propositions of arithmetic and geometry. Man cannot doubt
that two plus two equals four, but he may suspect that this statement has no reality apart from his
mind. The standard of truth is the self-evidence of clear and distinct ideas, but the question
remains of the correspondence of such ideas to reality. Descartes imagines the existence of an
all-powerful "evil genius" who deceives man as to the content of his ideas, so that in reality two
plus two equals five.

The second meditation resolves these skeptical issues in a deceptively simple manner by arguing
that even if it is doubtful whether sense images or ideas have objects, it is absolutely true that
man's mind exists. The famous formula "I think, therefore, I am" is true even if everything else is
false. Descartes's solution is known as subjectivism, and it is a radical reversal of previous
theories of knowledge. Whereas nature had been assumed to be the cause of man's images and
ideas, Descartes states that man is a "thinking thing" whose subjective images and ideas are the
sole evidence for the existence of a world.

The third meditation demonstrates that God is "no deceiver," and hence clear and distinct ideas
must have objects that exactly and actually correspond to them. Descartes argues that the idea of
God is an effect. But an effect gets its reality from its cause, and a cause can only produce what it
possesses. Hence either Descartes is a perfect being or God exists as the cause of the idea of
God.

The fourth meditation deals with the problem of human error; insofar as man restricts himself to
clear and distinct ideas, he will never err. With this connection between ideas and objects
Descartes can emerge from his doubts about knowledge. The external world can be known with
absolute certainty insofar as it is reducible to clear and distinct ideas. Thus the fifth meditation
shows the application of methodology to material reality in its quantifiable dimensions, that is, to
the extent to which material reality can be "the object of pure mathematics."

The sixth, and final, meditation attempts to explain the relation between the human soul and the
body. Since Descartes believed in mechanism, there could be no absolute connection between a
free soul and a bodily machine. After considerable hesitation he expresses the relation between
mind and matter as a "felt union." The body is the active faculty that produces the passive images
and imaginings man finds in his mind. Actually Descartes's explanation is logically impossible in
terms of the "subjective" separation of mind; similarly, the unresolved dualism of the "felt union"
violates the principle of assenting only to clear and distinct ideas.

The remainder of Descartes's career was spent in defending his controversial positions. In 1644
he published the Principles of Philosophy, which breaks down the arguments of the Meditations
into propositional form and presents extra arguments dealing with their scientific application. In
1649 Descartes accepted an invitation from Queen Christina of Sweden to become her teacher.
There he wrote The Passions of the Soul, which is a defense of the mind-body dualism and a
mechanistic explanation of the passions. But Descartes's health was undermined by the severity
of the northern climate, and after a brief illness he died in Stockholm in 1650.

Further Reading
The most complete edition of Descartes's works in English is The Philosophical Works of
Descartes, translated by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.T.R. Ross (2 vols., 1955), although many
editions of individual works in new translations are available in paperback. The standard
biography is Haldane's Descartes: His Life and Times (1905; repr. 1966). The best general
introductions to Descartes's philosophy are A. Boyce Gibson, The Philosophy of Descartes
(1932); Stanley V. Keeling, Descartes (1934; 2d ed. 1968); and Albert G. A. Balz, Descartes and
the Modern Mind (1952). Works on specialized topics of an analytic or critical nature include
Norman Kemp Smith, Studies in the Cartesian Philosophy (1902) and New Studies in the
Philosophy of Descartes: Descartes as Pioneer (1952); Jacques Maritain, Three Reformers:
Luther Descartes, Rousseau (trans. 1928) and The Dream of Descartes (trans. 1944); and Leslie
J. Beck, The Method of Descartes: A Study of the Regulae (1952).

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(born March 31, 1596, La Haye, Touraine, France — died Feb. 11, 1650, Stockholm,
Swed.) French mathematician, scientist, and philosopher, considered the father of
modern philosophy. Educated at a Jesuit college, he joined the military in 1618 and
traveled widely for the next 10 years. In 1628 he settled in Holland, where he would
remain until 1649. Descartes's ambition was to introduce into philosophy the rigour
and clarity of mathematics. In his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), he
undertook the methodical doubt of all knowledge about which it is possible to be
deceived, including knowledge based on authority, the senses, and reason, in order
to arrive at something about which he can be absolutely certain; using this point as
a foundation, he then sought to construct new and more secure justifications of his
belief in the existence and immortality of the soul, the existence of God, and the
reality of an external world. This indubitable point is expressed in the dictum Cogito
ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am"). His metaphysical dualism distinguished
radically between mind, the essence of which is thinking, and matter, the essence
of which is extension in three dimensions. Though his metaphysics is rationalistic
(see rationalism), his physics and physiology are empiricistic (see empiricism) and
mechanistic (see mechanism). In mathematics, he founded analytic geometry and
reformed algebraic notation.

For more information on René Descartes, visit Britannica.com.

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Descartes, René (1596-1650). One of the principal creators of modern philosophy and science,
an emblematic figure of the power of independent thinking.

He was born in Touraine and educated at the Jesuit college of La Flèche. From 1618 to 1620 he
served in the army; in November 1619, while garrisoned in Germany in a ‘poêle’ (a small house
heated by a central stove), he experienced a spell of ‘enthusiasm’ in which he discovered ‘les
fondements d'une science admirable’. Between 1620 and 1629 he travelled, but was based in
Paris, frequenting scholarly circles. In 1629, having decided to devote himself to philosophy, he
settled in Holland, where he lived for the rest of his life. His voluntary exile gave him freedom
and solitude, though he entertained many visitors and kept up a voluminous and fascinating
correspondence.

In his early years in Holland he was much occupied by scientific research, but metaphysics
became his dominant concern in the late 1630s. Having refrained from publishing for many
years, he grew increasingly concerned to win over readers to his philosophy, and to oust
scholasticism from the schools. In 1649 he accepted an invitation from a royal admirer, Queen
Christine of Sweden, but fell ill and died in Stockholm.

Descartes's youthful writings are only preserved in fragmentary form. His first major work, the
Regulae ad directionem ingenii (Règles pour la direction de l'esprit), written in Latin before
1629, was published posthumously. It contains 21 ‘rules’ designed to establish a method for
achieving, within the field open to human understanding, a scientific certainty as firm as that of
mathematics. Using this method, which combines intuition, observation, experiment, and
deduction, he then worked on a treatise, Le Monde, ou le Traité de l'homme, in which he offered
a mechanistic account of the universe (a heliocentric system) and of human beings, their bodily
motions, and sensations. The work was completed by 1633, but Descartes abandoned publication
on hearing of Galileo's condemnation.

His first published book, and his most famous, was the Discours de la méthode, published in
French in 1637 together with essays on optics, meteorology, and geometry. It is a complex work,
whose six parts are given unity as the story of the author's search for truth. In Part 1, starting
from the premiss that ‘le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partagée’, Descartes offers his
intellectual autobiography as a possible model for the proper conduct of the mind. He tells of his
book-centred Jesuit education, which failed to satisfy his desire for certain knowledge, and of his
decision to make a clean break and think for himself. Part 2 recounts, with superb confidence,
the discovery of the true method; as in the Regulae, this consists in taking nothing for granted,
accepting only ideas which are entirely self-evident, and proceeding from them by orderly
‘chains’ of reasoning. In Part 3 he sets out the prudently conformist ‘provisional ethics’ which he
adopted until he had arrived at a rationally based morality.

Part 4, the centre of the book, sets out Descartes's first metaphysical discoveries. Having
submitted all ideas to methodical doubt, he is left with the unshakeable principle: ‘Je pense, donc
je suis’ (Cogito, ergo sum, often referred to as ‘the cogito’). He proceeds from this to a radical
distinction between the thinking substance (mind, spirit, or soul) and the material world; this is
the famous Cartesian ‘dualism’. The final basic principle in Part 4 is the existence of a perfect
being, God, which is deduced from the very fact that we possess an idea of perfection. God in
turn guarantees the value of sense experience, and thus of experimental science. Part 5 contains a
summary of the doctrine of Le Monde, emphasizing the distinction between human beings, with
their immaterial souls, and animals, which are seen as ‘machines’—an aspect of Descartes's
philosophy that caused much controversy. Part 6 is a fascinating discussion of his publishing
strategy and the way he sees his public responsibility as a scientist.

His later works develop the ideas of the Discours. The Méditations (published in Latin in 1641,
in French in 1647) is his most important work of pure philosophy. Using the first-person form
again, it attempts to establish more firmly the metaphysics of the Discours, in particular the
existence of God and the mind-matter distinction. Methodical doubt is given added force here by
the fiction of a ‘mauvais génie’ dedicated to deceiving us. The work is followed by a number of
lengthy replies to objections from readers such as Gassendi, Hobbes, and Arnauld. The
Principes, published in Latin in 1644 and in French in 1647, is Descartes's fullest account of his
philosophy. Book 1 is devoted to metaphysics, Books 2-4 to physical science, including
cosmology. The work is designed to replace existing school manuals, and is divided into easily
assimilated short chapters; declaring that all normal people are capable of philosophy, Descartes
in a preface of 1647 urges readers to read it in the first instance ‘like a novel’. An unfinished
dialogue, La Recherche de la vérité, shows a similar concern for popularization.

His last major work, Les Passions de l'âme (1650), written at the request of Princess Elizabeth of
Bohemia, explains the passions in accordance with his dualistic principles. The pineal gland in
the brain is declared to be the place of interaction between body and mind. If the body affects the
mind, the converse is also true; writing in Neostoical vein, and expressing values also embodied
in the heroes of Pierre Corneille, Descartes exalts the free will of the ‘généreux’.

His ideas, powerful in their own right, are given added force by his rhetorical skill. His tone and
style—even his choice between Latin and French—correspond to his projected readers, whose
reactions are provoked, anticipated, and answered. The man is very present in the writing. At
times he is disarmingly modest, at times fiercely ironic. His plain style is often lifted to a higher
plane by the striding rhythm of his sentences and his striking images.

Descartes's philosophy, Cartesianism, exercised a great influence, even when when it was
rejected. His cosmology, with its ‘horror of the vacuum’ and its planets whirled around in
vortices (tourbillons) of ether, succumbed to Newtonian physics, though not before supplanting
Aristotle in the colleges. His doctrine of ‘innate ideas’ was ousted, or at least modified, by
Locke's sensationalism. His body-soul dualism, with its need to explain the reciprocal action of
the two substances, continued to tease philosophers, notably Malebranche and Leibniz. But his
greatest legacy was his method, together with his confidence in the possibility of explaining and
conquering nature. For better or worse, he was one of the fathers of the Scientific Revolution; his
methodical doubt and his independence of mind continued to inspire Enlightenment thinkers,
even if they discarded many of his scientific theories as fantasies.

[Peter France]

Bibliography

• A. J. P. Kenny, Descartes: A Study of his Philosophy (1968)

• G. Rodis-Lewis, L'Œuvre de Descartes (1971)
• B. Williams, Descartes (1978)

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Descartes, René (1596-1650) French mathematician and founding father of modern philosophy.
Born in La Haye, near Tours, Descartes was educated at the new Jesuit college at La Flèche,
before reading law at Poitiers. In 1618 he enlisted at his own expense in the Dutch army of
Maurice of Nassau, in order to have the leisure to think. His interest in the methodology of a
unified science is supposed to have been stimulated by a dream ‘in a stove-heated room’ when he
was serving at Ulm in 1619. In the subsequent ten years he travelled widely, returning to Holland
in 1628. Little is known of his private life, but the death of his illegitimate five-year-old daughter
Francine in 1640 is known to have been a devastating blow. His first work, the Regulae ad
Directionem Ingenii (1628/9), was never completed. In Holland, between 1628 and 1649,
Descartes first wrote, and then cautiously suppressed, Le Monde (1634), and in 1637 produced
the Discours de la méthode as a preface to the treatise on mathematics and physics in which he
introduced the notion of Cartesian coordinates.

His best-known philosophical work, the Meditationes de Prima Philosophia (Meditations on

First Philosophy), together with objections by distinguished contemporaries and replies by
Descartes (the Objections and Replies), appeared in 1641. The authors of the objections are: first
set, the Dutch theologian Johan de Kater; second set, Mersenne; third set, Hobbes; fourth set,
Arnauld; fifth set, Gassendi; and sixth set, Mersenne. The second edition (1642) of the
Meditations included a seventh set by the Jesuit Pierre Bourdin. Descartes's penultimate work,
the Principia Philosophiae (Principles of Philosophy) of 1644 was designed partly for use as a
theological textbook. His last work was Les Passions de l’âme (The Passions of the Soul),
published in 1649. In that year Descartes visited the court of Kristina of Sweden, where he
contracted pneumonia, allegedly through being required to break his normal habit of late rising
in order to give lessons at 5:00 a.m. His last words are supposed to have been ‘Ça, mon âme, il
faut partir’ (‘So, my soul, it is time to part’).

Descartes's theory of knowledge starts with the quest for certainty, for an indubitable starting-
point or foundation on the basis alone of which progress is possible (see method of doubt). This
is eventually found in the celebrated ‘Cogito ergo sum’: I think therefore I am. By locating the
point of certainty in my own awareness of my own self, Descartes gives a first-person twist to
the theory of knowledge that dominated the following centuries in spite of various counter-
attacks on behalf of social and public starting-points. The metaphysics associated with this
priority is the famous Cartesian dualism, or separation of mind and matter into two different but
interacting substances. Descartes rigorously and rightly sees that it takes divine dispensation to
certify any relationship between the two realms thus divided, and to prove the reliability of the
senses invokes a ‘clear and distinct perception’ of highly dubious proofs of the existence of a
benevolent deity. This has not met general acceptance: as Hume drily puts it, ‘to have recourse to
the veracity of the supreme Being, in order to prove the veracity of our senses, is surely making a
very unexpected circuit’.

In his own time Descartes's conception of the entirely separate substance of the mind was
recognized to give rise to insoluble problems of the nature of the causal connection between the
two (see occasionalism). It also gives rise to the problem, insoluble in its own terms, of other
minds. Descartes's notorious denial that non-human animals are conscious is a stark illustration
of the problem. In his conception of matter Descartes also gives preference to rational cogitation
over anything derived from the senses. Since we can conceive of the matter of a ball of wax
surviving changes to its sensible qualities, matter is not an empirical concept, but eventually an
entirely geometrical one, with extension and motion as its only physical nature. Descartes's
thought here is reflected in Leibniz's view, held later by Russell, that the qualities of sense
experience have no resemblance to qualities of things, so that knowledge of the external world is
essentially knowledge of structure rather than of filling. On this basis Descartes erects a
remarkable physics. Since matter is in effect the same as extension there can be no empty space
or void; since there is no empty space motion is not a question of occupying previously empty
space, but is to be thought of in terms of vortices (like the motion of a liquid).

Although the structure of Descartes's epistemology, theory of mind, and theory of matter have
been rejected many times, their relentless exposure of the hardest issues, their exemplary clarity,
and even their initial plausibility, all contrive to make him the central point of reference for
modern philosophy.

Spotlight: René Descartes

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From our Archives: Today's Highlights, March 31, 2006

René Descartes was born 410 years ago today, in 1596. Called the father of modern
philosophy, the French mathematician/scientist/philosopher was famous for his
dictum, "I think, therefore I am" (Cogito ergo sum, in Latin). Also considered the
founder of analytic geometry, Descartes originated the Cartesian coordinates and
Cartesian curves. Some of his research in optics included the refraction and
reflection of light.

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Columbia Encyclopedia: René Descartes

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Descartes, René (rənā' dākärt') , Lat. Renatus Cartesius, 1596–1650, French

philosopher, mathematician, and scientist, b. La Haye. Descartes' methodology was
a major influence in the transition from medieval science and philosophy to the
modern era.

Life

Descartes was educated in the Jesuit College at La Flèche and the Univ. of Poitiers, then entered
the army of Prince Maurice of Nassau. In 1628 he retired to Holland, where he spent his time in
scientific research and philosophic reflection. Even before going to Holland, Descartes had
begun his great work, for the essay on algebra and the Compendium musicae probably antedate
1628. But it was with the appearance in 1637 of a group of essays that he first made a name for
himself. These writings included the famous Discourse on Method and other essays on optics,
meteors, and analytical geometry. In 1649 he was invited by Queen Christina to Sweden, but he
was unable to endure the rigors of the northern climate and died not long after arriving in
Sweden.

Elements of Cartesian Philosophy

It was with the intention of extending mathematical method to all fields of human knowledge
that Descartes developed his methodology, the cardinal aspect of his philosophy. He discards the
authoritarian system of the scholastics and begins with universal doubt. But there is one thing
that cannot be doubted: doubt itself. This is the kernel expressed in his famous phrase, Cogito,
ergo sum [I think, therefore I am].

From the certainty of the existence of a thinking being, Descartes passed to the existence of God,
for which he offered one proof based on St. Anselm's ontological proof and another based on the
first cause that must have produced the idea of God in the thinker. Having thus arrived at the
existence of God, he reaches the reality of the physical world through God, who would not
deceive the thinking mind by perceptions that are illusions. Therefore, the external world, which
we perceive, must exist. He thus falls back on the acceptance of what we perceive clearly and
distinctly as being true, and he studies the material world to perceive connections. He views the
physical world as mechanistic and entirely divorced from the mind, the only connection between
the two being by intervention of God. This is almost complete dualism.
The development of Descartes' philosophy is in Meditationes de prima philosophia (1641); his
Principia philosophiae (1644) is also very important. His influence on philosophy was immense,
and was widely felt in law and theology also. Frequently he has been called the father of modern
philosophy, but his importance has been challenged in recent years with the demonstration of his
great debt to the scholastics. He influenced the rationalists, and Baruch Spinoza also reflects
Descartes's doctrines in some degree. The more direct followers of Descartes, the Cartesian
philosophers, devoted themselves chiefly to the problem of the relation of body and soul, of
matter and mind. From this came the doctrine of occasionalism, developed by Nicolas
Malebranche and Arnold Geulincx.

Major Contributions to Science

In science, Descartes discarded tradition and to an extent supported the same method as Francis
Bacon, but with emphasis on rationalization and logic rather than upon experiences. In physical
theory his doctrines were formulated as a compromise between his devotion to Roman
Catholicism and his commitment to the scientific method, which met opposition in the church
officials of the day. Mathematics was his greatest interest; building upon the work of others, he
originated the Cartesian coordinates and Cartesian curves; he is often said to be the founder of
analytical geometry. To algebra he contributed the treatment of negative roots and the
convention of exponent notation. He made numerous advances in optics, such as his study of the
reflection and refraction of light. He wrote a text on physiology, and he also worked in
psychology; he contended that emotion was finally physiological at base and argued that the
control of the physical expression of emotion would control the emotions themselves. His chief
work on psychology is in his Traité des passions de l'âme (1649).

Bibliography

See biographies by J. R. Vrooman (1970), S. Gaukroger (1995), R. Watson (2002), A. C.

Grayling (2005), and D. Clarke (2006); see studies by J. Maritain (tr. 1944, repr. 1969), A. G.
Balz (1952, repr. 1967), H. Caton (1973), and S. Gaukroger (1989 and 2002; as ed. 1980, 1998,
2000, and 2006).

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Descartes, René (1596–1650), French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. Descartes was
one of the most important intellectual figures of seventeenth-century Europe. His thought, often
regarded as ushering in the "modern" period of philosophy, represented a revolutionary attempt
to break from the restrictive and tradition-bound medieval Scholastic model that governed the
universities and that was dominated by the method and categories of Aristotelian philosophy. By
the time of his death, Descartes's influence extended across Europe and into various intellectual
domains, including theology, medicine, and even rhetoric.
In 1633 Descartes, who had already written a treatise on method, Regulae ad Directionem
Ingenii (Rules for the direction of the mind), was ready to publish a book on cosmology and
physics, Le Monde (The world). But Galileo's condemnation that year by the church for
propounding scientific ideas very much like what Descartes was about to present, including a
heliocentric picture of the universe and a purely mechanistic account of nature's operations,
caused him to withhold the work. He first came to public attention with the publication of his
Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison et chercher la verité dans les sciences
(1637; Discourse on the method of rightly conducting one's reason and reaching the truth in the
sciences) and the ground-breaking essays in geometry, optics, and meteorology that it
accompanied. The Meditationes de Prima Philosophiae (1641; Meditations on first philosophy),
often regarded as Descartes's philosophical masterpiece, is a short work in epistemology and
metaphysics. It was not until his magisterial Principia Philosophiae (1644; Principles of
philosophy) that Descartes offered a complete and systematic presentation of his metaphysical
and scientific views; he hoped that the work would become a standard textbook in university
curricula and supplant the Aristotelian Scholastic works then in use.

Descartes lived most of his adult life in the Netherlands, having left France in search of peace
and solitude to pursue his inquiries. His fame led to an invitation to Sweden by Queen Christina
in 1649; with misgivings about giving up his quiet, familiar life in the Dutch countryside, he
reluctantly joined her court. It was not long, however, before he fell ill from the rigors of the
routine imposed upon him in the harsh Swedish winter and died of pneumonia.

Philosophy, for Descartes, encompasses the whole of human knowledge, systematically ordered,
and can be compared to a tree. Its roots are metaphysics, or "first philosophy" (including the
theory of knowledge); its trunk is physics; and its branches are all of the particular sciences
(medicine, ethics, mechanics) that depend on the most general physical principles. Certainty in
philosophy or science can be achieved only if one proceeds methodically from well-established
first principles to explanations in the particular disciplines by means of a proven method.

In the Meditations, Descartes begins by taking the reader on a journey of intellectual self-
discovery. His goal is to determine what exactly can be known for certain, not just about the
world around us but especially about ourselves. Even under the most adverse skeptical
assumptions about the reliability of our senses and our rational faculties, we can always be
absolutely certain of our own existence. As he so famously expresses it in the Discourse on
Method, the reasoning represented by the proposition "I think, therefore I am" (Cogito ergo sum)
can never be doubted. This single epistemological nugget can serve as the foundation for a host
of other certainties. For once I know my own existence and my nature as a thinking being—
endowed with certain thoughts or clear and distinct ideas—I can establish not only that God, an
absolutely perfect being, exists and cannot be a deceiver, but also that this benevolent God
created me with my rational faculties. Thus, to the extent that I use those faculties properly and
give my assent only to what I clearly and distinctly perceive, I cannot go wrong and will obtain
true beliefs about myself and about the external world.

Among the truths I will thereby discover is the real distinction between mind and matter. One of
Descartes's most important and lasting legacies to philosophy is the doctrine that has come to be
known as "dualism." Mind and matter (or body), according to Descartes, are two essentially and
radically different kinds of substance. Mind is unextended, indivisible, simple thinking; its
modes or properties are ideas or thoughts. Matter, on the other hand, is nothing but extension or
dimensional space, and is therefore divisible; its modes are shape, size, and mobility. There is
nothing materialistic about the mind, and nothing mental or spiritual about the body.

This doctrine is of great importance not only for understanding the nature of the human being,
who is a composite—or, to use Descartes's phrase, a "substantial union"—of these two
substances, but also for science. According to Descartes, the physical world is nothing but
passive matter or extension, divisible ad infinitum into material parts. The active, spiritlike
"forms" of the Aristotelian world picture have been banished from nature. All natural
phenomena, no matter how complex, and regardless of whether they are terrestrial or celestial,
are henceforth to be explained solely in terms of matter and the motion, rest and impact of its
parts. Descartes's separation of mind and matter was a crucial step in the scientific revolution of
the seventeenth century and laid the metaphysical foundations for the mechanical philosophy that
dominated the period until Isaac Newton (1642–1727).

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Descartes, René. Oeuvres de Descartes. Edited by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery. 12 vols.
Paris, 1964–1976.

——. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert

Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. 2 vols. Cambridge, U.K., 1984–1985.

——. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Vol. 3, The Letters. Translated by John
Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny. Cambridge, U.K., 1991.

Secondary Sources

Cottingham, John, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Descartes. Cambridge, U.K., 1992.

Garber, Daniel. Descartes' Metaphysical Physics. Chicago, 1992.

Gaukroger, Stephen. Descartes: An Intellectual Biography. Oxford and New York, 1995.

Kenny, Anthony. Descartes: A Study of His Philosophy. New York, 1968.

Watson, Richard. Cogito Ergo Sum: The Life of René Descartes. Boston, 2002.

Wilson, Margaret. Descartes. London and Boston, 1978.

—STEVEN NADLER

World of the Mind: René Descartes

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(1596–1650). A pivotal figure in the great 17th-century revolution that marked the
emergence of modern philosophical and scientific thinking. He was born at La Haye
near Tours, and educated at the Jesuit college of La Flèche. He travelled in Germany
during 1619, and on the night of 11 November he had a series of dreams which
inspired his vision of founding a completely new philosophical and scientific system.
In 1628 he moved to Holland, where he lived, with frequent changes of address, for
most of the rest of his life. His philosophical masterpiece, the Meditations on First
Philosophy, appeared in Latin in 1641, and his Principles of Philosophy, a
comprehensive statement of his philosophical and scientific theories, also in Latin,
in 1644. He died of pneumonia in Stockholm, where he had gone to act as tutor to
Queen Christina of Sweden.

Descartes made important contributions in many areas of human knowledge. His

early work was in mathematics, and his Rules for the Direction of the Understanding
(1628) provided a general account of scientific knowledge that was strongly
influenced by mathematical models. His Geometry (published 1637) lays the
foundations for what is now known as analytical geometry. In the Discourse on
Method, a popular introduction to his philosophy, published in French in 1637,
Descartes developed his celebrated 'method of doubt': 'I resolved to reject as false
everything in which I could imagine the least doubt, in order to see if there
afterwards remained anything that was entirely indubitable' (see doubting). This led
to the famous affirmation 'I think, therefore I am' (je pense, donc je suis). On the
basis of this 'Archimedean point' Descartes erected a comprehensive philosophical
and scientific system which was to include both a general theory of the structure
and working of the physical universe, and many detailed explanations of particular
phenomena, such as the mechanics of human and animal physiology. Although the
metaphysical foundations of his system depend heavily on the existence of an
omnipotent, benevolent, and non-deceiving God, Descartes aimed, in all areas of
natural science, to provide explanations in terms of strictly mechanical models and
mathematical principles. All phenomena, whether celestial or terrestrial, were to be
explained ultimately by reference to the shapes, sizes, and motions of bits of
matter: 'I freely acknowledge that I recognize no matter in corporeal things apart
from that which the geometricians call "quantity" and take as the object of their
demonstrations' (Principles, pt. ii).

Descartes's theory of the mind stands out as a striking exception to his general
insistence on mechanical and mathematical explanations. Mental phenomena, for
Descartes, have no place in the quantifiable world of physics, but have a completely
autonomous, separate status. 'I am a substance the whole nature or essence of
which is to think, and which for its existence does not need any place or depend on
any material thing' (Discourse, pt. iv). Developing the theory later known as
'Cartesian dualism', Descartes maintains that there are two radically different kinds
of substance: physical, extended substance (res extensa) — i.e. that which has
length, breadth, and depth and can therefore be measured and divided — and
thinking substance (res cogitans), which is unextended and indivisible. Thus the
human body — including the brain and entire nervous system — belongs in the first
category, while the mind — including all thoughts, desires, and volitions — belongs
in the second.

One of Descartes's reasons for supposing his mind to be essentially non-physical is

that in his Meditations he found himself able to doubt the existence of all physical
objects (including his body), but was unable to doubt the existence of himself as a
thinking being. And from this he concluded that having a body was not part of his
essential nature. But, as some of his contemporary critics pointed out, this
argument seems invalid: ability to doubt that some item X possesses some feature
F does not prove that X could in fact exist without F. Descartes also argued that the
essential indivisibility of the mind proves its non-corporeality, but this seems
question begging, since the premiss that the mind is indivisible would be disputed
by those who maintain that the mind is some kind of physical system. Despite the
shakiness of some of Descartes's arguments, his dualistic approach has continued
to exert a dominatingly powerful influence on theories of the mind. As recently as
1977, for example, we find the eminent neurophysiologist Sir John Eccles and the
famous philosopher Sir Karl Popper maintaining that Descartes was fundamentally
correct. According to Eccles and Popper, the 'self' — the conscious being that is 'me'
— is essentially non-physical. The self may make use of the brain in its operations,
but its operations have separate and independent status over and above the
occurrences in the brain.

As Descartes himself recognized, however, dualism faces considerable philosophical

difficulties. The chief of these is the problem of 'causal interaction'. We know from
experience that mind and body do not operate in total isolation, but interact with
each other: if there is a physical change (e.g. my hand touches a hot stove), a
mental change (e.g. pain) results; and, conversely, a mental event (a volition to
raise my arm) leads to a physical event (my arm going up). Descartes
acknowledges these facts by saying that in many cases mind and body 'intermingle'
to form a kind of unit. Thus, sensations like hunger and thirst are, he maintains,
'confused perceptions' resulting from the fact that 'I am not merely lodged with my
body, like a sailor in a ship, but am very closely united and as it were intermingled
with it' (Meditations, pt. vi). But exactly how there can be such a 'union' or
'intermingling' between two allegedly quite distinct and seemingly incompatible
substances is left something of a mystery. Elsewhere (e.g. in the Passions of the
Soul, 1649), Descartes suggests that the mind or soul, though incorporeal and
indivisible, exercises its functions in one particular part of the brain, the conarion, or
pineal gland. But this manoeuvre seems not to solve but merely to reimport the
problem of causal interaction: if there is a problem about how a non-physical soul
can cause my arm to go up, there will be no less a problem about how a non-
physical soul can cause movements in the brain by acting on the pineal gland.

Although in his psychological and physiological writings Descartes devoted great

efforts to the problem of interaction between soul and body, it is worth
remembering that in his system there are many areas where such interaction
simply does not arise. First, in the case of animal physiology and a great deal of
human physiology (e.g. that concerned with digestion, muscular reflexes, etc.),
Descartes maintained that the soul is not involved at all: what occurs can be
explained purely on mechanical principles. Second, in the case of human beings,
though much of our activity (e.g. sense perception) involves complicated
transactions between soul and body, there are other mental acts (e.g. purely
intellectual thoughts) which, according to Descartes, can occur without any
physiological correlates at all; such 'ideas of pure mind' are, in Descartes's view,
from start to finish non-corporeal. It must be said that advances in brain science
have made this latter part of Descartes's theory increasingly difficult to defend.

Although substantive dualism, the doctrine that the mind is a separate, non-physical
entity, now has ever-fewer supporters, many philosophers have become attracted
by a weaker version of Descartes's theory, which has been termed 'attributive
dualism'. This is the view that, even if the mind is not a separate entity, there are
none the less two distinct sets of properties or attributes that can be ascribed to
human beings: psychological properties (thoughts, feelings, volitions) and physical
properties (e.g. electrical and chemical properties of the nervous system).
Attributive dualists maintain that, even if all human activities must depend on some
kind of physical substrate, there is none the less an important sense in which
psychological descriptions of those activities cannot be reduced to mere
physiological descriptions. This position on the one hand preserves Descartes's
insight that what he called 'modes of extension' (size, shape, volume) are
fundamentally different from 'modes of thought' (thoughts, feelings, volitions), while
on the other hand resisting his conclusion that two separate entities, a 'thinking
thing' and an 'extended thing', are involved. This is similar to the hardware and
software of a computer.

(Published 1987)

See also mind and body; mind–body problem; personal identity.

— John G. Cottingham

Bibliography
 • Descartes, R. (1911). The Philosophical Works of Descartes. Trans. E. S.
Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (repr. 1969).
• Popper, K., and Eccles, J. (1977). The Self and its Brain.
• Williams, B. (1978). Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry.
• Wilson, M. (1978). Descartes.

Word Tutor: Descartes

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IN BRIEF: n. - French philosopher and mathematician.

Quotes By: Rene Descartes

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Quotes:

"If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt,
as far as possible, all things."

"Whenever anyone has offended me, I try to raise my soul so high that the offense cannot reach
it."

"It is not enough to have a good mind, the main thing is to use it well."

"There is nothing so strange and so unbelievable that it has not been said by one philosopher or
another."

"Everything is self-evident."

"Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it."

See more famous quotes by Rene Descartes

The Dream Encyclopedia: René Descartes

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The rationalist philosopher and mathematician René Descartes (1596-1650) was born at La
Haye, in Touraine, France. After attending the Jesuit college of La Fleche, he went to Holland in
1618 to serve in the army of Maurice of Nassau, and then traveled in Germany. His first
substantial work was the treatise Regulae ad directionem ingenii, which was printed in 1701
although it was never completed. It dealt with Descartes's preoccupation with method as the clue
to scientific advance.

By 1634 Descartes had completed a scientific work, Le morrde, which was suppressed after he
heard of the condemnation of Galileo for teaching the Copernican system. In 1637 he published
three treatises on physical and mathematical subjects-Geometry, Dioptric, and Meteors-prefaced
by Discours de la méthode, which represent a compressed exposition of the foundations of the
Cartesian system.

In Discours de la méthode Descartes introduced his method of systematic doubt in his attempt to
answer the basic question, "What can I know?" which he hoped to answer by critical reflection
on his beliefs. His method was to suspend belief in anything in which he could find or imagine
the slightest grounds for doubt. He suspended belief in the entire physical universe, including
himself; in God; in the past; and even in the truth of mathematical propositions. Among the
arguments by which he extended his doubts are the false judgments we commonly make due to
illusions of the senses and, in particular, the illusions of dreams, to which he frequently referred.

For Descartes the question of who's dreaming about whom was very difficult to answer, as was
the question, How do we know that the perceptions that occur in dreaming are false and those we
experience when awake are true, since the former are often as vivid and distinct as the latter? He
claimed that dreams are merely the result of activity in the sleeper's organs of sense, and that
they respond to the sleeper's desires. And, because we cannot meaningfully distinguish dreaming
perceptions from waking perceptions, we cannot regard the information coming to us from our
senses as providing a stable foundation for knowledge. Descartes's systematic doubt led him to
the only proposition that he could not reasonably doubt, namely, that he the doubter must exist:
"I think, therefore I am."

Beyond the abstract use of dream experiences to cast doubt on the veracity of sense experiences,
Descartes himself had some important personal dreams. On the night of November 10, 1619, he
had a series of dreams that he interpreted as an answer to his desire to find a method that would
enable him to pursue truth as a life occupation. According to his interpretation of the dreams,
which he claimed were a divine sign, his destiny was to search for truth by applying the
mathematical method-by which he meant analytical geometry, in particular, to all other studies.
He had always been in the habit of recording his dreams in his journal, which he referred to as
his Olympica. At some point during the seventeenth century this journal was lost, but the
contents are known today because of the efforts of the Abbé Adrien Baillet. He had access to the
Olympica before it was lost and published a paraphrased version, La vie de M. Descartes, in
1691. It is through this record that we know about a dream he experienced, in three parts, on
November 10, 1619. The following is an account of the Abbé Baillet's version of the events that
unfolded in the first, nightmarish act of the dream, as described in his La vie de M. Descartes:

After he fell asleep he imagined he saw ghosts and was terrified by them. He felt a great
weakness on

After he fell asleep he imagined he saw ghosts and was terrified by them. He felt a great
weakness on his right side, and, believing he was walking through streets, was forced to lean
over to his left side so as to be able to continue his journey.

Ashamed to be walking in this way, he made an effort to stand up straight, but he was foiled by a
violent wind which spun him round three or four times on his left foot.

With great difficulty he managed to drag himself along, fearful of falling at every step. Then,
seeing a college that was open, he entered it hoping to find some respite from his affliction. He
tried to reach the college church in order to say his prayers, but on the way he realized that he
had passed a man he knew without acknowledging him. He tried to retrace his steps in order to
pay his compliments but was again foiled by the wind which blew him back towards the church.
Then, in the middle of the college quadrangle, he saw another person who called him by name
and told him that, if he wished to find Monsieur N., he had something for Descartes to give to
him. The gift appeared to be a melon that had been brought from some foreign country.

He was surprised to see that people who had gathered round the man in the quadrangle to chat
with one another were able to stand firmly upright on their feet, whereas Descartes had still to
walk crookedly and unsteadily, even though the wind had abated.

At this point he awoke in pain, fearing some evil spirits were trying to lead him astray. Having
fallen asleep on his left side, he now turned over on to his right side. He prayed to God to protect
him from all the misfortunes which might threaten him as a punishment for his sins. He
recognized that his sins were grievous enough to call down on him the wrath of heaven, although
in the eyes of men, he had lead a relatively blameless life. He lay awake about two hours,
pondering the problem of good and evil, and then once more fell asleep.

In Descartes's dream, he was forced to lean on his left (corresponding to the unconscious) to
continue walking, since his right (corresponding to the conscious) was so weak that it could no
longer support him. By giving the left a higher significance than the right, the dream reminded
Descartes, who thus far in his life had believed only in reason and rejected both his instinctive
and religious life, of the importance and necessity of his irrational side.

In another dream Descartes came across two books with which he was unfamiliar, a dictionary
and a poetry anthology entitled Corpus poetarum (The Body [Collection] of Poets), containing
some small portraits engraved in copperplate, which was open at the line Quod vitae sectabor
iter (What is the path to the way of life?), followed by a fragment presenting the alternative, Est
et non (To be and not to be). The dictionary represented "all the sciences gathered together,"
whereas the anthology, full of sentences by poets, recalled the discovery of enthusiasm and
imagination. The union of philosophy and wisdom, represented by the two books, constituted the
answer for which Descartes was looking and subsequently informed his waking intuition of the
unity of all the sciences.

Wikipedia: René Descartes

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"Descartes" redirects here. For other uses, see Descartes (disambiguation).
René Descartes
Western Philosophy
17th-century philosophy

Portrait after Frans Hals, 1648.[1]

Full name René Descartes
March 31, 1596
Born La Haye en Touraine (renamed Descartes),
Indre-et-Loire, France
February 11, 1650 (aged 53)
Died
Stockholm, Sweden
Cartesianism, Rationalism,
School/tradition
Foundationalism
Metaphysics, Epistemology, Science,
Main interests
Mathematics
 Cogito ergo sum, method of doubt,
Cartesian coordinate system, Cartesian
Notable ideas dualism, ontological argument for
existence of God; regarded as a founder of
Modern philosophy
Influenced by
Influenced

Part of a series on
René Descartes
Cartesianism
Rationalism
Foundationalism
Doubt & Certainty
Dream argument
Cogito ergo sum
Trademark argument
Mind-body dichotomy
Analytic geometry
Coordinate system
Cartesian circle
Folium
Rule of signs
Cartesian diver
Balloonist theory
Works
The World
Discourse on the Method
La Géométrie
Meditations on First Philosophy
Principles of Philosophy
Passions of the Soul
Notable People
Christina of Sweden
Baruch Spinoza
Gottfried Leibniz
This box: view • talk • edit

René Descartes (French pronunciation: [ʁəne dekaʁt]), (31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650), also
known as Renatus Cartesius (Latinized form),[2] was a French philosopher, mathematician,
scientist, and writer who spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic. He has been dubbed
the "Father of Modern Philosophy", and much of subsequent Western philosophy is a response to
his writings, which continue to be studied closely to this day. In particular, his Meditations on
First Philosophy continues to be a standard text at most university philosophy departments.
Descartes' influence in mathematics is also apparent, the Cartesian coordinate system allowing
geometric shapes to be expressed in algebraic equations being named for him. He is credited as
the father of analytical geometry. Descartes was also one of the key figures in the Scientific
Revolution.

Descartes frequently sets his views apart from those of his predecessors. In the opening section
of the Passions of the Soul, a treatise on the Early Modern version of what are now commonly
called emotions, he goes so far as to assert that he will write on his topic "as if no one had
written on these matters before". Many elements of his philosophy have precedents in late
Aristotelianism, the revived Stoicism of the 16th century, or in earlier philosophers like St.
Augustine. In his natural philosophy, he differs from the Schools on two major points: First, he
rejects the analysis of corporeal substance into matter and form; second, he rejects any appeal to
ends—divine or natural—in explaining natural phenomena.[3] In his theology, he insists on the
absolute freedom of God’s act of creation.

Descartes was a major figure in 17th-century continental rationalism, later advocated by Baruch
Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz, and opposed by the empiricist school of thought consisting of
Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Leibniz, Spinoza and Descartes were all well versed in
mathematics as well as philosophy, and Descartes and Leibniz contributed greatly to science as
well. As the inventor of the Cartesian coordinate system, Descartes founded analytic geometry,
the bridge between algebra and geometry, crucial to the discovery of calculus and analysis. His
most famous statement is "Cogito ergo sum" (French: Je pense, donc je suis; English: I think,
therefore I am; or I am thinking, therefore I exist), found in §7 of part I of Principles of
Philosophy (Latin) and in part IV of Discourse on the Method (French).

Contents
[hide]

• 1 Biography
• 2 Philosophical work
• 3 Dualism
• 4 Mathematical legacy
• 5 Contemporary reception
• 6 Religious beliefs
• 7 Writings
• 8 See also
• 9 Notes
• 10 References

• 11 External links
 Biography

Graduation registry for Descartes at the Collège Royal Henry-Le-Grand, La Flèche, 1616

Descartes was born in La Haye en Touraine (now Descartes), Indre-et-Loire, France. When he
was one year old, his mother Jeanne Brochard died of tuberculosis. His father Joachim was a
member in the provincial parliament. At the age of eleven, he entered the Jesuit Collège Royal
Henry-Le-Grand at La Flèche. After graduation, he studied at the University of Poitiers, earning
a Baccalauréat and Licence in law in 1616, in accordance with his father's wishes that he should
become a lawyer.[4]

I entirely abandoned the study of letters. Resolving to seek no knowledge other than
“ that of which could be found in myself or else in the great book of the world, I spent
the rest of my youth traveling, visiting courts and armies, mixing with people of
diverse temperaments and ranks, gathering various experiences, testing myself in the
situations which fortune offered me, and at all times reflecting upon whatever came
my way so as to derive some profit from it. (Descartes, Discourse on the Method) ”
In the summer of 1618 he joined the army of Maurice of Nassau in the Dutch Republic.[5] On 10
November 1618, while walking through Breda, Descartes met Isaac Beeckman, who sparked his
interest in mathematics and the new physics, particularly the problem of the fall of heavy bodies.
While in the service of the Duke Maximilian of Bavaria, Descartes was present at the Battle of
the White Mountain outside Prague, in November 1620.[6]

In 1622 he returned to France, and during the next few years spent time in Paris and other parts
of Europe. He arrived in La Haye in 1623, selling all of his property, investing this remuneration
in bonds which provided Descartes with a comfortable income for the rest of his life. Descartes
was present at the siege of La Rochelle by Cardinal Richelieu in 1627.

He returned to the Dutch Republic in 1628, where he lived until September 1649. In April 1629
he joined the University of Franeker and the next year, under the name "Poitevin", he enrolled at
the Leiden University to study mathematics with Jacob Golius and astronomy with Martin
Hortensius[7]. In October 1630 he had a falling out with Beeckman, whom he accused of
plagiarizing some of his ideas. In Amsterdam, he had a relationship with a servant girl, Helène
Jans, with whom he had a daughter, Francine, who was born in 1635 in Deventer, at which time
Descartes taught at the Utrecht University. Francine Descartes died in 1640 in Amersfoort.

While in the Netherlands he changed his address frequently, living among other places in
Dordrecht (1628), Franeker (1629), Amsterdam (1629–30), Leiden (1630), Amsterdam (1630–
2), Deventer (1632–4), Amsterdam (1634-5), Utrecht (1635-6), Leiden (1636), Egmond (1636–
8), Santpoort (1638–1640), Leiden (1640–1), Endegeest (a castle near Oegstgeest) (1641-3), and
finally for an extended time in Egmond-Binnen (1643–9).

Despite these frequent moves he wrote all his major work during his 20 plus years in the
Netherlands, where he managed to revolutionize mathematics and philosophy. In 1633, Galileo
was condemned by the Roman Catholic Church, and Descartes abandoned plans to publish
Treatise on the World, his work of the previous four years. "Discourse on the Method" was
published in 1637. In it Descartes lays out four rules of thought, meant to ensure that our
knowledge rests upon a firm foundation.

René Descartes with Queen Christina of Sweden

Descartes continued to publish works concerning both mathematics and philosophy for the rest
of his life. In 1643, Cartesian philosophy was condemned at the University of Utrecht, and
Descartes began his long correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia. In 1647, he was
awarded a pension by the King of France. Descartes was interviewed by Frans Burman at
Egmond-Binnen in 1648.

René Descartes died on 11 February 1650 in Stockholm, Sweden, where he had been invited as a
teacher for Queen Christina of Sweden. The cause of death was said to be pneumonia—
accustomed to working in bed until noon, he may have suffered a detrimental effect on his health
due to Christina's demands for early morning study (the lack of sleep could have severely
compromised his immune system). Others believe that Descartes may have contracted
pneumonia as a result of nursing a French ambassador, Dejion A. Nopeleen, ill with the
aforementioned disease, back to health.[8]

In 1663, the Pope placed his works on the Index of Prohibited Books.
The tomb of Descartes (middle, with detail of the inscription), in the Abbey of Saint-Germain-
des-Prés, Paris

As a Roman Catholic in a Protestant nation, he was interred in a graveyard mainly used for
unbaptized infants in Adolf Fredrikskyrkan in Stockholm. Later, his remains were taken to
France and buried in the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris. Although the National
Convention in 1792 had planned to transfer his remains to the Panthéon, they are, two centuries
later, still resting between two other graves—those of the scholarly monks Jean Mabillon and
Bernard de Montfaucon—in a chapel of the abbey. His memorial, erected in the 18th century,
remains in the Swedish church.

Philosophical work
Descartes is often regarded as the first modern thinker to provide a philosophical framework for
the natural sciences as these began to develop. In his Discourse on the Method, he attempts to
arrive at a fundamental set of principles that one can know as true without any doubt. To achieve
this, he employs a method called hyperbolical/metaphysical doubt, sometimes also referred to as
methodological skepticism: he rejects any ideas that can be doubted, and then reestablishes them
in order to acquire a firm foundation for genuine knowledge.[9]

Initially, Descartes arrives at only a single principle: thought exists. Thought cannot be separated
from me, therefore, I exist (Discourse on the Method and Principles of Philosophy). Most
famously, this is known as cogito ergo sum (English: "I think, therefore I am"). Therefore,
Descartes concluded, if he doubted, then something or someone must be doing the doubting,
therefore the very fact that he doubted proved his existence. "The simple meaning of the phrase
is that if one is skeptical of existence, that is in and of itself proof that he does exist." [10]
René Descartes at work.

Descartes concludes that he can be certain that he exists because he thinks. But in what form? He
perceives his body through the use of the senses; however, these have previously been proven
unreliable. So Descartes concludes that the only indubitable knowledge is that he is a thinking
thing. Thinking is his essence as it is the only thing about him that cannot be doubted. Descartes
defines "thought" (cogitatio) as "what happens in me such that I am immediately conscious of it,
insofar as I am conscious of it". Thinking is thus every activity of a person of which he is
immediately conscious.

To further demonstrate the limitations of the senses, Descartes proceeds with what is known as
the Wax Argument. He considers a piece of wax; his senses inform him that it has certain
characteristics, such as shape, texture, size, color, smell, and so forth. When he brings the wax
towards a flame, these characteristics change completely. However, it seems that it is still the
same thing: it is still a piece of wax, even though the data of the senses inform him that all of its
characteristics are different. Therefore, in order to properly grasp the nature of the wax, he
cannot use the senses. He must use his mind. Descartes concludes:

And so something which I thought I was seeing with my eyes is in fact grasped
“ solely by the faculty of judgment which is in my mind. ”
In this manner, Descartes proceeds to construct a system of knowledge, discarding perception as
unreliable and instead admitting only deduction as a method. In the third and fifth Meditation, he
offers an ontological proof of a benevolent God (through both the ontological argument and
trademark argument). Because God is benevolent, he can have some faith in the account of
reality his senses provide him, for God has provided him with a working mind and sensory
system and does not desire to deceive him. From this supposition, however, he finally establishes
the possibility of acquiring knowledge about the world based on deduction and perception. In
terms of epistemology therefore, he can be said to have contributed such ideas as a rigorous
conception of foundationalism and the possibility that reason is the only reliable method of
attaining knowledge.

In Descartes' system, knowledge takes the form of ideas, and philosophical investigation is the
contemplation of these ideas. This concept would influence subsequent internalist movements as
Descartes' epistemology requires that a connection made by conscious awareness will distinguish
knowledge from falsity. As a result of his Cartesian doubt, he viewed rational knowledge as
being "incapable of being destroyed" and sought to construct an unshakable ground upon which
all other knowledge can be based. The first item of unshakable knowledge that Descartes argues
for is the aforementioned cogito, or thinking thing.

Descartes also wrote a response to skepticism about the existence of the external world. He
argues that sensory perceptions come to him involuntarily, and are not willed by him. They are
external to his senses, and according to Descartes, this is evidence of the existence of something
outside of his mind, and thus, an external world. Descartes goes on to show that the things in the
external world are material by arguing that God would not deceive him as to the ideas that are
being transmitted, and that God has given him the "propensity" to believe that such ideas are
caused by material things.

Descartes was also known for his work in producing the Cartesian Theory of Fallacies. This can
be most easily explored using the statement: "This statement is a lie." While it is most commonly
referred to as a paradox, the Cartesian Theory of Fallacies states that at any given time a
statement can be both true and false simultaneously because of its contradictory nature. The
statement is true in its fallacy. Thus, Descartes developed the Cartesian Theory of Fallacies,
which greatly influenced the thinking of the time. Many would-be philosophers were trying to
develop inexplicable statements of seeming fact, however, this laid rumors of such a proposition
impossible. Many philosophers believe that when Descartes formulated his Theory of Fallacies,
he intended to be lying, which in and of itself embodies the theory.

Dualism
Further information: Mind-body dichotomy and dualism

Descartes in his Passions of the Soul and The Description of the Human Body suggested that the
body works like a machine, that it has the material properties of extension and motion, and that it
follows the laws of physics. The mind (or soul), on the other hand, was described as a
nonmaterial entity that lacks extension and motion, and does not follow the laws of physics.
Descartes argued that only humans have minds, and that the mind interacts with the body at the
pineal gland. This form of dualism or duality proposes that the mind controls the body, but that
the body can also influence the otherwise rational mind, such as when people act out of passion.
Most of the previous accounts of the relationship between mind and body had been uni-
directional.

Descartes suggested that the pineal gland is "the seat of the soul" for several reasons. First, the
soul is unitary, and unlike many areas of the brain the pineal gland appeared to be unitary
(though subsequent microscopic inspection has revealed it is formed of two hemispheres).
Second, Descartes observed that the pineal gland was located near the ventricles. He believed the
cerebrospinal fluid of the ventricles acted through the nerves to control the body, and that the
pineal gland influenced this process. Finally, Descartes incorrectly believed that only humans
have pineal glands, just as, in his view, only humans have minds. This led him to the belief that
animals cannot feel pain, and Descartes' practice of vivisection (the dissection of live animals)
became widely used throughout Europe until the Enlightenment. Cartesian dualism set the
agenda for philosophical discussion of the mind-body problem for many years after Descartes'
death. The question of how a nonmaterial mind could influence a material body, without
invoking supernatural explanations, remains controversial to this day.

Later in correspondence with Princess Elisabeth, he admitted he had no idea how the mind
interacted with the body, abandoning the concept of the pineal glands as connection.

Mathematical legacy
Descartes' theory provided the basis for the calculus of Newton and Leibniz, by applying
infinitesimal calculus to the tangent line problem, thus permitting the evolution of that branch of
modern mathematics.[11] This appears even more astounding considering that the work was just
intended as an example to his Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison, et chercher
la verité dans les sciences (Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and
Searching for Truth in the Sciences, better known under the shortened title Discours de la
méthode; English, Discourse on the Method).

Descartes' rule of signs is also a commonly used method to determine the number of positive and
negative roots of a polynomial.

Rene Descartes created analytic geometry, and discovered an early form of the law of
conservation of momentum (the term momentum refers to the momentum of a force). He
outlined his views on the universe in his Principles of Philosophy.

Descartes also made contributions to the field of optics. He showed by using geometric
construction and the law of refraction (also known as Descartes' law or more commonly Snell's
law, who discovered it 16 years earlier) that the angular radius of a rainbow is 42 degrees (i.e.,
the angle subtended at the eye by the edge of the rainbow and the ray passing from the sun
through the rainbow's centre is 42°).[12] He also independently discovered the law of reflection,
and his essay on optics was the first published mention of this law.[13]

One of Descartes most enduring legacies was his development of Cartesian geometry which uses
algebra to describe geometry. He also invented the notation which uses superscripts to show the
powers or exponents, for example the 2 used in x2 to indicate squaring.

Contemporary reception
Although Descartes was well known in academic circles towards the end of his life, the teaching
of his works in schools was controversial. Henri de Roy (Henricus Regius, 1598-1679),
Professor of Medicine at the University of Utrecht, was condemned by the Rector of the
University, Gisbert Voet (Voetius), for teaching Descartes' physics.[14]

Religious beliefs
The religious beliefs of René Descartes have been rigorously debated within scholarly circles. He
claimed to be a devout Roman Catholic, claiming that one of the purposes of the Meditations
was to defend the Christian faith. However, in his own era, Descartes was accused of harboring
secret deist or atheist beliefs. Contemporary Blaise Pascal said that "I cannot forgive Descartes;
in all his philosophy he did his best to dispense with God. But he could not avoid making Him
set the world in motion with a flip of His thumb; after that he had no more use for God."[15]

Stephen Gaukroger's biography of Descartes reports that "he had a deep religious faith as a
Catholic, which he retained to his dying day, along with a resolute, passionate desire to discover
the truth."[16] After Descartes died in Sweden, Queen Christina abdicated her throne to convert to
Roman Catholicism. (Swedish law required a Protestant ruler.) The only Catholic she had
prolonged contact with was Descartes, who was her personal tutor.

Writings

Handwritten letter by Descartes, December 1638.

• 1618. Compendium Musicae. A treatise on music theory and the aesthetics of music
written for Descartes' early collaborator Isaac Beeckman.
• 1626–1628. Regulae ad directionem ingenii (Rules for the Direction of the Mind).
Incomplete. First published posthumously in 1684. The best critical edition, which
includes an early Dutch translation, is edited by Giovanni Crapulli (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1966).
 • 1630–1633. Le Monde (The World) and L'Homme (Man). Descartes' first systematic
presentation of his natural philosophy. Man was first published in Latin translation in
1662; The World in 1664.
• 1637. Discours de la méthode (Discourse on the Method). An introduction to the Essais,
which include the Dioptrique, the Météores and the Géométrie.
• 1637. La Géométrie (Geometry). Descartes' major work in mathematics. There is an
English translation by Michael Mahoney (New York: Dover, 1979).
• 1641. Meditationes de prima philosophia (Meditations on First Philosophy), also known
as Metaphysical Meditations. In Latin; a French translation, probably done without
Descartes' supervision, was published in 1647. Includes six Objections and Replies. A
second edition, published the following year, included an additional objection and reply,
and a Letter to Dinet.
• 1644. Principia philosophiae (Principles of Philosophy), a Latin textbook at first
intended by Descartes to replace the Aristotelian textbooks then used in universities. A
French translation, Principes de philosophie by Claude Picot, under the supervision of
Descartes, appeared in 1647 with a letter-preface to Queen Christina of Sweden.
• 1647. Notae in programma (Comments on a Certain Broadsheet). A reply to Descartes'
one-time disciple Henricus Regius.
• 1647. The Description of the Human Body. Published posthumously.
• 1648. Responsiones Renati Des Cartes… (Conversation with Burman). Notes on a Q&A
session between Descartes and Frans Burman on 16 April 1648. Rediscovered in 1895
and published for the first time in 1896. An annotated bilingual edition (Latin with
French translation), edited by Jean-Marie Beyssade, was published in 1981 (Paris: PUF).
• 1649. Les passions de l'âme (Passions of the Soul). Dedicated to Princess Elizabeth of
Bohemia.
• 1657. Correspondence. Published by Descartes' literary executor Claude Clerselier. The
third edition, in 1667, was the most complete; Clerselier omitted, however, much of the
material pertaining to mathematics.

See also
• 3587 Descartes, asteroid
• Analytic geometry
• Balloonist theory
• Baruch Spinoza
• Cartesian circle
• Cartesian coordinate system
• Cartesian diagram
• Cartesian diver
• Cartesian morphism
• Cartesian product
• Cartesian product of graphs
• Cartesian tree
• Defect (geometry)
• Descartes' rule of signs
• Dualistic interactionism
 • Folium of Descartes
• Self-organization
• Scientific Revolution
• Solipsism

Notes
1. ^ Russell Shorto. Descartes' Bones. (Doubleday, 2008) p. 218; see also The Louvre,
Atlas Database, http://cartelen.louvre.fr
2. ^ Colie, Rosalie L. (1957). Light and Enlightenment. Cambridge University Press. p. 58.
3. ^ Carlson, Neil R. (2001). Physiology of Behavior. Needham Heights, Massachusetts:
Pearson: Allyn & Bacon. p. 8. ISBN 0-205-30840-6.
4. ^ Baird, Forrest E.; Walter Kaufmann (2008). From Plato to Derrida. Upper Saddle
River, New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall. pp. 373–377. ISBN 0-13-158591-6.
5. ^ Stephen Gaukroger (30 March 1995). Descartes: An Intellectual Biography. Oxford
University Press. pp. 65. ISBN 0198239947. "he went to join the army of Prince
Maurice"
6. ^ Battle of White Mountain, Britannica Online Encyclopedia
7. ^ A.C. Grailing, Descartes: The Life of Rene Descartes and Its Place in His Times,
Simon and Schuster, 2006, pp 151-152
8. ^ "Rene Descartes". Archived from the original on 2007-05-07.
http://web.archive.org/web/20070522055107/http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/philo
sophers/descartes.html. Retrieved 2007-08-15.
9. ^ Rebecca, Copenhaver. "Forms of skepticism". Archived from the original on 2005-01-
08.
http://web.archive.org/web/20050108095032/http://www.lclark.edu/~rebeccac/forms.htm
l. Retrieved 2007-08-15.
10. ^ "Ten books: Chosen by Raj Persaud". The British Journal of Psychiatry.
http://bjp.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/full/181/3/258.
11. ^ Gullberg, Jan (1997). Mathematics From The Birth Of Numbers. W. W. Norton. ISBN
0-393-04002-X.
12. ^ Tipler, P. A. and G. Mosca (2004). Physics For Scientists And Engineers. W. H.
Freeman. ISBN 0-7167-4389-2.
13. ^ "René Descartes". Encarta. Microsoft. 2008.
http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761555262/Rene_Descartes.html#s3. Retrieved
2007-08-15.
14. ^ Cottingham, John, Dugald Murdoch, and Robert Stoothof. The Philosophical Writings
of Descartes.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1985. 293.
15. ^ Think Exist on Blaise Pascal. Retrieved Feb. 12, 2009.
16. ^ The Religious Affiliation of philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes. Webpage
last modified 5 October 2005.

References
Collected works
 • 1983. Oeuvres de Descartes in 11 vols. Adam, Charles, and Tannery, Paul, eds.
Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin.

Collected English translations

• 1988. The Philosophical Writings Of Descartes in 3 vols. Cottingham, J.,

Stoothoff, R., Kenny, A., and Murdoch, D., trans. Cambridge University Press.

Single works

• 1618. Compendium Musicae.

• 1628. Rules for the Direction of the Mind.
• 1637. Discourse on the Method ("Discours de la Methode"). An introduction to
Dioptrique, Des Météores and La Géométrie. Original in French, because intended
for a wider public.
• 1637. La Géométrie. Smith, David E., and Lantham, M. L., trans., 1954. The
Geometry of René Descartes. Dover.
• 1641. Meditations on First Philosophy. Cottingham, J., trans., 1996. Cambridge
University Press. Latin original. Alternative English title: Metaphysical Meditations.
Includes six Objections and Replies. A second edition published the following year,
includes an additional ‘’Objection and Reply’’ and a Letter to Dinet. HTML Online
Latin-French-English Edition
• 1644. Les Principes de la philosophie. Miller, V. R. and R. P., trans., 1983.
Principles of Philosophy. Reidel.
• 1647. Comments on a Certain Broadsheet.
• 1647. The Description of the Human Body.
• 1648. Conversation with Burman.
• 1649. Passions of the Soul. Voss, S. H., trans., 1989. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Dedicated to Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia.

Secondary literature

• Boyer, Carl (1985). A History of Mathematics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press. ISBN 0-691-02391-3.
• Clarke, Desmond (2006). Descartes: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. ISBN 0-521-82301-3.
• Costabel, Pierre (1987). René Descartes - Exercices pour les éléments des solides.
Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ISBN 2-13-040099-X.
• Cottingham, John (1992). The Cambridge Companion to Descartes. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-36696-8.
• Duncan, Steven M. (2008). The Proof of the External World: Cartesian Theism
and the Possibility of Knowledge. Cambridge: James Clarke & Co. ISBN 978-02271-
7267-4 http://www.lutterworth.com/jamesclarke/jc/titles/proofew.htm.
• Farrell, John. “Demons of Descartes and Hobbes.” Paranoia and Modernity:
Cervantes to Rousseau (Cornell UP, 2006), chapter 7.
 • Garber, Daniel (1992). Descartes' Metaphysical Physics. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-28219-8.
• Garber, Daniel; Michael Ayers (1998). The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-
Century Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-53721-5.
• Gaukroger, Stephen (1995). Descartes: An Intellectual Biography. Oxford:
Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-823994-7.
• Grayling, A.C. (2005). Descartes: The Life and times of a Genius. New York:
Walker Publishing Co., Inc.. ISBN 0-8027-1501-X.
• Gillespie, A. (2006). Descartes’ demon: A dialogical analysis of ‘Meditations on
First Philosophy.’[1] Theory & Psychology, 16, 761-781.
• Keeling, S. V. (1968). Descartes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN.
• Melchert, Norman (2002). The Great Conversation: A Historical Introduction to
Philosophy. New York: McGraw Hill. ISBN 0-19-517510-7.
• Moreno Romo, Juan Carlos (Coord.), Descartes vivo. Ejercicios de hermenéutica
cartesiana, Anthropos, Barcelona, 2007'
• Ozaki, Makoto (1991). Kartenspiel, oder Kommentar zu den Meditationen des
Herrn Descartes. Berlin: Klein Verlag.. ISBN 392719901X.
• Schäfer, Rainer (2006). Zweifel und Sein - Der Ursprung des modernen
Selbstbewusstseins in Descartes' cogito. Wuerzburg: Koenigshausen&Neumann.
ISBN 3-8260-3202-0.
• Serfati, M., 2005, "Geometria" in Ivor Grattan-Guinness, ed., Landmark Writings
in Western Mathematics. Elsevier: 1-22.
• Sorrell, Tom (1987). Descartes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.. ISBN 0-19-
287636-8.

External links

Wikisource has original works written by or about: René Descartes

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General

• Discourse on the Method at Project Gutenberg

• Selections from the Principles of Philosophy at Project Gutenberg
• Detailed biography of Descartes
• "René Descartes" in the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia.
• Easily readable versions of Meditations, Discourse on the Method, Principles of
Philosophy, and the Objections to Meditations and Descartes's Replies
• Descartes featured on the 100 French Franc banknote from 1942.
• 1984 John Cottingham translation of Meditations and Objections and Replies.
 • René Descartes (1596–1650) Published in Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition
(1996)
• René Descartes (1596–1650) Published in Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition
(1996)
• Original texts of René Descartes in french at La Philosophie
• René Descartes quotes

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

• René Descartes
• Descartes' Epistemology
• Descartes' Ethics
• Descartes' Life and Works
• Descartes' Modal Metaphysics
• Descartes' Ontological Argument
• Descartes and the Pineal Gland
• Descartes' Physics
• Descartes' Theory of Ideas

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