In Part Five of his Discourse on Method, Descartes discusses and summarizes a treatise he had decided not to publish and its contents. Within this treatise he invents a new world in which “God had put no weight whatever in the matter of which it was constituted,” yet because of the laws of nature it falls into an order similar to that of our own planet (AT44). While this is possible to dismiss as Descartes simply trying to avoid religious persecution, I believe Descartes is making a much more important claim.
It is most likely that Descartes would agree with Bacon that the goal of the sciences is to understand and control nature, and even to be able to superinduce new properties onto it. Without some sort of natural order, this would not be possible. There is no way to understand chaos; it cannot be catalogued or organized. While his method begins with doubting in order to “avoid precipitation and prejudice,” Descartes never doubts the natural laws the sciences are founded in (AT18). A natural order is so essential to the foundation of his method and the sciences in general that Descartes sees no viable option in replacing it with chaos.
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So, natural law is beyond doubt? And this is part of what D.'s two worlds demonstrates?
ReplyDeleteI wonder if the method itself involves a presumption about the natural order of things (i.e. in the relation b/w simples and complexes).
In fact, the very reason to doubt is our confidence in order. After all, if things did not run contrary to our expectation of order on occasion, we would not have doubted in the first place.
This means, as I noted in my comment to "D. knows his God too well", that the doubt it not universal. It concerns only that which has shown itself to be dubious, i.e. sensed, external, extended things.