Discourse on Method

Introduction

The Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences (French Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison, et chercher la verité dans les sciences) — conventionally the Discourse on Method — is René Descartes's 1637 short methodological work. It was the first major philosophical treatise written in French rather than Latin (Descartes chose the vernacular deliberately, to reach an educated readership beyond the academy), and it contains the most accessible presentation of the cogito argument that Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) would develop in more systematic form.

The Discourse was published not as a stand-alone work but as the introduction to three scientific essays — the Dioptrics (on optics), the Meteors (on weather and atmospheric phenomena), and the Geometry (the founding text of analytic geometry, introducing the Cartesian coordinate system). The packaging is significant: Descartes presents his philosophical method as the procedure that produces the scientific results in the accompanying essays, not as a free-standing philosophical project.

Form, length, date, language

The Discourse is a short work of approximately 30,000 words in French, divided into six parts. It was published in 1637 at Leiden, anonymously (though Descartes's authorship was an open secret). The original language is French. Latin translations followed: Descartes himself oversaw the 1644 Latin edition by Étienne de Courcelles, which became the standard scholarly version.

Why it was written

The Discourse serves multiple purposes simultaneously. It introduces Descartes's method to a broad educated public; it provides the methodological framework for the scientific work in the accompanying essays; it offers Descartes's intellectual autobiography (Part I traces his education and his subsequent dissatisfaction with the inherited learning); it presents the foundational moves (the systematic doubt, the cogito, the existence of God, the reality of the external world) that the Meditations would later develop in more rigorous form.

The broader project unifying these is the establishment of a new philosophical and scientific framework adequate to the conditions of post-Scholastic European intellectual life. The inherited curriculum (Scholastic Aristotelianism) was visibly failing under the pressure of the new physics; Descartes's Discourse presents an alternative — a method grounded in clear and distinct perception, the cogito as foundation, and the systematic reconstruction of knowledge.

Structure and argument

Part I: Considerations Concerning the Sciences. Descartes's intellectual autobiography. He recounts his education at La Flèche, his subsequent dissatisfaction with the inherited learning (philosophy as he received it produced no certain conclusions; he could find no two philosophers who agreed; he resolved to seek knowledge through other means), and his decision to travel and observe the world rather than continue formal study.

Part II: Principal Rules of the Method. The famous four rules:

1. Never accept anything as true that one does not clearly know to be such; admit only what presents itself to the mind so clearly and distinctly that there is no occasion to doubt it.
2. Divide each difficulty into as many parts as possible and necessary to resolve it.
3. Conduct thoughts in order, beginning with the simplest objects and ascending gradually to the more complex.
4. Make enumerations so complete and reviews so general as to be sure of omitting nothing.

The rules are sometimes presented as the Cartesian method in its essence; the more substantial methodological work is the systematic doubt of the Meditations, but the four rules provide the accessible version.

Part III: Morals Adopted Provisionally. Descartes proposes a provisional morality (morale par provision) to follow while pursuing the longer project of philosophical reconstruction: obey the laws and customs of one's country, follow the most moderate opinions, remain firm and resolute in one's actions once decided, and aim to change oneself rather than the order of the world.

Part IV: Proofs of the Existence of God and the Distinction Between Mind and Body. The compressed presentation of the central philosophical moves. The systematic doubt, the cogito (Je pense, donc je suis — the famous French formulation), the analysis of the I as a thinking thing whose essence is thought, the proof of God's existence from the idea of the infinite, the proof of the external world through God's non-deceiving nature. The Meditations (1641) develops each of these moves in more rigorous form.

Part V: The Order of Physical Questions. Descartes's account of the natural-philosophical research program. He describes his suppressed treatise The World (which he had withheld after Galileo's condemnation), the analysis of the human body as a kind of machine, the analysis of animals as automata without souls, and the argument that humans are distinguished from animals by language and reason.

Part VI: Concerning Matters Bearing on the Further Investigation of Nature. The closing reflections on the relation between Descartes's project and the broader scientific community, his reasons for publishing the work, and the practical orientation of natural philosophy toward improving human life.

Key passages

• Part I — the intellectual autobiography; the famous opening claim that good sense is the most equitably distributed thing in the world.
• Part II — the four rules of method.
• Part III — the provisional morality.
• Part IV — the cogito (Je pense, donc je suis); the proofs of God's existence and the mind-body distinction.
• Part V — the analysis of animals as automata; the argument that language distinguishes humans.

Reception history

The Discourse was widely read across Europe in the years following its 1637 publication. The French-language presentation gave it a broader readership than philosophical works of the period typically achieved; the scientific essays attached to it (especially the Geometry) shaped subsequent mathematical and natural-philosophical work. The work was substantial in establishing Descartes's reputation outside narrow philosophical circles.

The relation between the Discourse and the later Meditations has been continuously discussed. The Discourse presents the philosophical core in compressed form; the Meditations develops it more systematically. The cogito in particular takes different forms in the two works (Je pense, donc je suis in the Discourse; ego sum, ego existo in the Meditations), and the precise relation between the formulations has been an interpretive question.

The contemporary reception treats the Discourse as the accessible entry point into Cartesian philosophy and as a substantial work in its own right, especially for its methodological reflections and its intellectual-autobiographical content.

Contemporary engagement

The standard French text is in the Adam-Tannery Oeuvres de Descartes (volume VI). The standard English translation is in volume I of the Cambridge Cottingham-Stoothoff-Murdoch edition (1985). Major recent scholarly work on the Discourse includes the contributions in the Cambridge Companion to Descartes and the substantial engagement in the Stephen Gaukroger biography (Descartes: An Intellectual Biography, 1995).

Further reading

• Descartes — the author
• Rationalism — the tradition
• Cogito — the central foundational claim
• Meditations on First Philosophy — the systematic development of the same philosophical core
• Episteme — the cognitive achievement the method seeks to ground
• Spinoza — the rationalist successor who took the framework in a substantially different direction

The first major French-language philosophical treatise. The accessible introduction to the Cartesian philosophical method.