Descartes, Dewey and the Question on the Possibility of Knowledge

Abstract: The question about the possibility of knowledge is foundational to the field of epistemology, in

the sense that to investigate the meaningfulness of the question about the possibility of knowledge is to

investigate the need for an epistemology at all. In this paper, Dewey’s views about the possibility of

knowledge are contrasted with those of Descartes. Research into the early philosophy of Descartes will

show that he is concerned with providing a method for effective enquiry into the Mathesis. The Mathesis

is a body of universal and necessary truths of order and connection between ideas, and it will be

correspondingly characterized throughout the paper. The case of Dewey results more contentious. He

rejects views that are central to Descartes and many other great Modern philosophers; on top of that,

Dewey claims that the question for the possibility of knowledge is wrongly posed and ultimately

meaningless. I will characterize Dewey’s view as proposing the abandonment of purely epistemological

enquiry, and the transformation of philosophy in a social enterprise for the regulation of conduct.

In this paper I will compare the philosophies of Descartes and Dewey. Though I

focus in their differing views about the possibility of knowledge, I will also offer

remarks and insights that might help us draw other implications about their respective

philosophical positions. First I will illustrate Cartesian epistemology through a careful

reading of his Rules for the Direction of Mind, which provides us a fresher and less

dogmatic image of Descartes than the Meditations. In the second section I analyze

Dewey’s views by relying in a contemporary selection of his texts. I conclude by

discussing Dewey’s alleged anti-Cartesianism in light of the anteceding investigations.

1. Descartes: in search for the Mathesis.

In this section I discuss Descartes’ Rules for the Direction of the Mind. This early

and unfinished piece was not published during the author’s lifetime, and it does not

feature any of his later compromises with the dogmas of the Catholic Church. Indeed,

throughout the Rules Descartes shows little interest for issues of an explicitly moral or

existential kind, although he insists, in various passages, on the intrinsic practical and

moral value of the method for anyone who follows it. Not only the method is devised to

avoid the superstitious appeal to authority as well as to increase the power of human

intellect; it also aims at enhancing mutual understanding among humans through the

investigation and uncovering of the Mathesis, which Descartes sees, as soon will be

clear, both as a source of universal truth, and a manifestation of a common core seed of

reason that unites all humankind. My aim here is to provide a succinct, though fair and

clear, understanding of what Descartes was up to in his philosophical project, such that

his views can be faithfully contrasted to those of Dewey. To that effect, I limit my

discussion to rules I to XII, and to rule XVI.

The first four rules are external characterizations of the method. In rule I, Descartes

states that the aim of the method is “the direct the mind with a view to forming true and

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sound judgments about whatever comes before it” (Descartes 1954, 153). He complains

that science has been traditionally understood in the image of the arts. While learning

one skill makes difficult to learn others, however, learning one science does not destroy,

but rather “increases the power to learn others” (Joachim 1957, 1). Philosophers must

then realize that if only the light of reason can illumine knowledge, and if this reason is

unitary, then the unity of the sciences is possible too. Now, from this possibility springs

its desirability and, actually, a duty for the philosopher. Further, the more the unity of

science is fulfilled, the more the intellect can “show the will what it should choose”

(Descartes 1989, 62)1. Hence, not only it is convenient to pursue the unity of science,

but to disregard it means to degrade every single bit of knowledge. It follows that the

aim of the method is not simply to learn truths but, rather, interconnected truths, that is,

truths that enable us to compose a unitary, complete and truthful image of the world.

The second rule, where Descartes compels us to “occupy ourselves only with those

objects that our intellectual powers appear competent to know certainly and

indubitably”, is at once a criterion of scientific knowledge and a principle of intellectual

economy. But, what kind of truths can the individual know with absolute certainty?

… that he exists, that he thinks, that the triangle is defined only by three lines, the sphere by one surface only, and similar things, which are more numerous than most

think (Descartes 1954, 155)

It should be noted that Descartes here grants an equal status to the “I exist”, the “I think”, and truths from arithmetic and geometry. Absolute truths are presented as a

manifold and not as an interconnected whole featuring the peculiar relations between

ontology, epistemology and theology that Descartes will later build in his Meditations.

The need for such systematic derivation is promoted and justified in the Rules, to be

sure; but it is not produced in its precise later and dogmatic form. On the other hand,

Descartes dismisses the merely probable knowledge provided by the syllogisms of

Aristotelian, scholastic science. The legitimate sources of knowledge are, then, two: the

intuition of first truths, which must be simple, clear and distinct; and the deduction of

consequences thereof. This requirement of certainty leaves us with arithmetic, geometry

and, above all, algebra as the main model of scientific knowledge. Now, existing

mathematics owe this role to their being the most visible part of the Mathesis; but the

Mathesis, says Descartes, ought to be distinguished from existing mathematics like the

whole from the parts. Given that philosophers are committed to the unity of science,

their main goal is then to discover all truths of the Mathesis, and even those parts of it

which are yet unknown. Anything else, however, we must refrain from studying.

In the third rule, Descartes performs his idiosyncratic reduction to the moi-même

(oneself). Only an individual can follow the method, while appeals to authority are

strongly advised against. Descartes concedes that it is good to read ancient books, but

this must be done with moderation and never to fall prey of the principle of authority. In 1 Lacking a full English translation of the text, I have followed a Spanish one. Therefore, all the quotes to

the Spanish edition of 1989 are my own translations.

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fact, historical knowledge comes out of testimony, and therefore its status is that of

mere opinion. Science, instead, must always be produced by oneself according to

method: one must only trust the truths provided by natural reason, and deduce their

consequences “by a continuous and uninterrupted movement of thought, with clear

intuition of each point” (ibid, 156). Actually, the individual performance of this

“continuous and uninterrupted movement of thought” constitutes Descartes’ epistemic ideal. It signals the absolute primacy of intuition and certainty above deduction: while

deduction merely passes on the truth, it cannot provide assent by itself and, additionally,

we rely on our fallible memory for such assent. Genuine evidence, instead, must be

present. Below we will see how Descartes includes some rules in the method, whose

only purpose is to ensure that the mind can produce actual evidence out of mere

deduction. The first part of the Rules concludes by restating, in rule IV, that “[t]here is

need of a method for finding out the truth” (ibid, 157).

Descartes now sets out to explain the method itself in rules V to VII. First he tells

us what we should understand for method.

[T]he ordering and arranging of the objects on which we must concentrate our

mind's eye if we are to discover some truth. We shall be following this method

exactly if we first reduce complicated and obscure propositions step by step to

simpler ones, and then, starting with the intuition of the simplest ones of all, try

to ascend through the same steps to knowledge of all the rest. (ibid, 157)

Hence, the method has two parts: first, an analysis aimed at finding all the possible

evident and clear truths at hand; second, a synthesis that attempts to compound them all

in a single unity, the uninterrupted train of thought. Inspired by the Mathesis, the

method is itself directed toward the Mathesis, where we can hope to find all absolutely

certain truths. Importantly, however, the method needs not be complete, because it is

grounded in the assumption that the individual already has a prior knowledge of some

truths, and that he is able to make deductions. Therefore, the method is helpful only for

a mind that already thinks more or less correctly. Let us remark this point again: the

method must not be fully specified because it assumes a common and prior substrate of

truths and intellectual principles that can be learned by all human souls by virtue of their

sharing some innate intellectual capacities. On the other hand, the existence of this

common intelligence of humans manifests itself primarily in the intelligibility and

indubitability of arithmetic and geometric truths. The guiding idea of Descartes is, in

consequence, that this common substrate of truths and intellectual capacities that ground

the method and facilitate its application, is itself constituted by the contents of the

Mathesis, to whose study philosophers should be devoted. Therefore, the Cartesian

method is essentially aimed at knowing that which grounds the possibility of method in

the first place: its ultimate object is a body of ordered and interconnected truths which

throws light not only on the knowledge of the particular sciences, but also on the

possibility of knowledge and certainty in general, as well as of mutual understanding.

Thus, I submit that Descartes is hereby opening a space for further enquiry about a

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special kind of transcendental psychology. According to this, Kant can be seen as

developing more fully and in detail the project originally conceived by Descartes as a

methodic formal enquiry into the Mathesis. In turn, although this idea finds its origin in

pythagoreanism, of course, Descartes extends it to the study of the order and connection

of ideas in general, as can be found in any conceivable system of intellectual contents.

We now come to the VIth rule, where Descartes advises us to serialize the ideas

previously derived by analysis. According to this principle of seriality, we take, as a

starting point and reference, what is more absolute, simple and certain; then we place in

order the progressively more compound and relative ideas, which contain ever more

relations of genera within them. Hence we ensure that we can proceed backwards from

complexity to total simplicity, reaching back from relative ideas to the absolute ones.

In rule VII, Descartes restates the need for achieving truths within comprehensive

chains of truthful reasoning where all our objects of knowledge are “scrutinized by a

movement of thought which is continuous and nowhere interrupted” (ibid, 158). To this

effect, contents must be included in an enumeration which is both adequate and

methodical. The necessity of this device of enumeration is no other than preserving

certainty in deduction; for, as we saw, deduction alone cannot provide certainty, and

therefore we need to supply our reasoning with a special device that secures it.

Enumeration, says Descartes, must consider as many terms as necessary, and order and

distinguish them as much as possible and necessary, according to genera and species.

However, it only needs to be “sufficient”, for it is a mere means serving a more

important end.

The fundamentals of the Cartesian method lie in the seven rules already examined.

What Descartes does next is providing us with some extra advice on the details of

application of the method. Rule VIII is a second principle of intellectual economy,

where he asks us to bring the analytical part of the method to a halt when we have

arrived to an intuition of a truth so simple, that it cannot be decomposed further while

remaining apt for intuition. This rule should take us, says Descartes, to study the

faculties of our own mind before any other subject-matter; for only this knowledge,

inasmuch as it makes us acquainted with the limits of human understanding, enables us

to know, beforehand, whether a given research is intrinsically impossible; thus we can,

consequently, refuse to proceed in order to “refrain from futile toil” (ibid, 162).

Rules IX and X invite us to consider two other subject-matters of similarly great

importance. Our first concern must be with the “smallest and easiest points”, so that we

get “accustomed to behold the truth by clear and distinct intuition” (ibid, 162). Next we

must pursue “just those inquiries of which the solution has already been found by

others; and it ought to traverse in a systematic way even the most trifling of men's

inventions though those ought to be preferred in which order is explained or implied”

(ibid, 162). Therefore, Descartes calls attention to the intrinsic value of reproducing,

among the reasonings of our ancestors, all those that led them to discover truths or to

make inventions which now are regarded as common heritage of all mankind, even if

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they are basic. The bigger prize is to be found, of course, in those where “order is

explained or implied”; for here we are probably investigating a part of the Mathesis.

Finally, we will discuss three more rules. Rule XI insists that the individual be able

to produce chains of truth through continuous and uninterrupted acts of thought. In this

sense, a sequence of true propositions is less valuable that a hypothetical set of true

propositions that were altogether intuited at the same time, if such thing was possible,

because the latter would be a way not only of making our knowledge much more

certain, but also “of greatly increasing the power of the mind”. One must be able, so to

speak, to produce truthful thoughts that can instantaneously and easily be tracked back

to the most simple and certain intuitions. This continued insistence of Descartes in our

producing uninterrupted trains of thought cannot be underemphasized. Not only it

summarizes his epistemic ideal; it also clarifies his ideas about the Mathesis or about

human psychology. For one thing: while in rule XII he recommends us to employ all the

aids that our mental capacities (that is, understanding, imagination, memory and the

senses) provide, he also reckons that our senses and, above all, our memory, are likely

to distract or obstruct our minds toward the production of such continuous train of

thoughts. Now, as we have seen, the production of this uninterrupted train of intuitions

requires us to begin our reasoning from basic and indubitable truths, and recapitulate

from there all the interconnected truths of the Mathesis, thus, from the most simple to

the highly complex, in an indefinitely long series where our certainty would not

diminish even a bit. We must then ask: is there a more visible obstacle in this progress

of thought, than our mnemonic fragility? In fact, long deductive chains become infected

of uncertainty for their necessary reliance on memory.

Although this failure in the automatism of thought already took Descartes to

include the device of enumeration as part of the method (rule VII), he recommends a

number of interesting alternative strategies to safeguard the production of uninterrupted

trains of thought. Thus, not only we must constantly enumerate our achieved truths,

recapitulating forward and backward with the aid of the analytic-synthetic method. It is

also helpful, says Descartes in rule XVI, to make use of ordered dispositions of signs

and sketchy diagrams that briefly represent our ideas, so that our memory is here backed

up by the senses, which now face an environment of pre-selected and ordered evidence

on which we can rely afterwards in order to reduce or eliminate distractions for thought.

This admission of a convenient primacy of the senses above memory as part of a

coherent strategy of epistemic practice is all the more revealing, for it calls into question

some of the stereotypical criticisms that have been customarily issued against Descartes.

In particular, who would deny that his suggestion, that we should make intelligent use

of the surrounding space and of bodily marks for supporting and enhancing the work of

thought, is but a mere (though informal) reformulation of the extended, embodied and

enactive theses in contemporary philosophy of mind? Some of the proponents of the

latter views have occasionally presented themselves, however, in open opposition to

“Descartes’ dualism”. The lesson to be learned is: prudence and respect.

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2. The pragmatism of John Dewey.

Pragmatism is a philosophical stance, and a general approach toward theorizing,

which was envisioned and systematically developed by Charles S. Peirce toward the end

of the nineteenth century, thus leading to the first distinctly American philosophical

school. Peirce embraced Kantian philosophy but overturned its system of categories in

order to account for crucial developments in logic, mathematics and the natural

sciences. William James and John Dewey further developed pragmatism as a

philosophy that drew diverse implications from evolutionary theory and from historicist

approaches toward science and philosophy; eventually, this latter brand of pragmatism

was able to attract a much wider social recognition than Peirce’s own project. In this

section we will examine Dewey’s pragmatism. We will do this by first presenting his

basic and positive theoretical commitments, and then summarizing his own criticisms to

the philosophy, or philosophies, which he radically opposed to.

2.1. Consequences of Darwinian view of the world.

The biological account of the human being provided by Darwin has, according to

Dewey, radically altered our views about a number of central philosophical problems.

Dewey owes more to William James’ humanistic pragmatism than to the more logically

minded Charles S. Peirce and, in fact, the psychological investigations of the former had

a great influence in Dewey. This influence is partly due to the fact that James’ psychology features a biological, Darwinian conception of man, making it very suitable

for Dewey’s project of drawing philosophical consequences of Darwinism that could be used for criticizing Modern philosophers and enhancing our understanding of human

life and human society. In accordance to this, Dewey’s central concepts will be those of practice and experiment, which he will discuss critically along the dimensions of

knowledge, aesthetics and ethics, although he refuses to make a clear distinction among

the three.

In what follows I will try to briefly ponder the role of Darwinism in Dewey’s

philosophy. To begin with, a fundamental tenet of pragmatism, such as that the

relevance of some theory lies in its practical consequences, must be understood against

the background of an instrumental and functionalist account of knowledge. In such a

view thought, and eventually all its products, are to be understood as tools that can be

more or less adapted for our survival and welfare. Knowledge and language, however,

are not tools of the individual but, rather, they are mediated by society. There is a social

production of knowledge and, moreover, as each system of knowledge production

features a preferred social formulae, different views of knowledge will offer different

solutions to the problem of social order. In consequence, ideas –and especially,

epistemological ideas- may be false and, additionally, they may be morally or politically

undesirable. Dewey thinks, of course, that the opposite holds for Darwinism. Not only

Darwinism is true; furthermore, if properly interpreted, it can become a pillar of the

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philosophy most suitable for liberal democracy, which is, in turn, the only political

system where human individuals and societies can flourish.

To see how Dewey interprets the consequences of evolutionary theory in order to

reconceive fundamental philosophical categories, let us consider his criticism of the

concept of experience. Descartes and the empiricists had understood experience

primarily as a knowledge-affair, but Dewey will portray it as an active “intercourse of a living being with its physical and social environment” (Dewey et al. 1998, 45). Nor can

experience be understood as the passive reception and registration of some given, which

then becomes the possession of an epistemic subject; it is rather a projection or

anticipation that reaches forward into the unknown; not an adjustment to a given past

reality, but a practical engagement that actively constitutes or changes that very

environment through time. Experience, in fact, is not even a psychical thing that

happens before the theater of the mind like a presentation or a show, but an undergoing

that happens in this genuinely objective environment which we can actively modify by

our doings. The more complex the organism, the more intelligent are its actions and

adjustments, and the more importance it has in the active co-production of its

environment and in the determination of its own needs. On the other hand, experience is

not only about particulars that could be later synthetized by a separate, abstract thought;

rather, it is always pervaded by connections and continuities, full of thought and

inference. In consequence, our views about the activity of thinking need change as well.

Theory is not something entirely immaterial and abstract, but it can and it should be

embodied in order to enhance our practical dealings with the world; indeed, practices do

not take its value from thought but, conversely, the value of thought springs from its

practical consequences. We can no longer speak of a separate intellect preoccupied only

with its own sensational bearings and ideas, but only of more or less intelligent

practices, one of which –and not the most important- is mental (“internal”) reflection about certain intellectual contents. Truth should then cede its traditionally dominant role

in philosophy to the more fundamental category of success. As Dewey puts it:

Success and failure are the primary "categories" of life; achieving of good and averting

of ill are its supreme interests; hope and anxiety (which are not self-enclosed states of

feeling, but active attitudes of welcome and wariness) are dominant qualities of

experience. (Dewey et al. 1998, 48)

For Dewey, then, the task of philosophy becomes to discover and develop new

methods by which action can be made progressively more intelligent and successful.

Ultimately the goal is social, i.e. that people achieve their ends, and are actually able to

enrich and enlarge these ends along their moral and aesthetic dimensions.

Now, at this stage of history, the success of modern science and technology cannot

be doubted. They have shown that the experimental method provides experience with a

power to regulate conduct and enhance its consequences. Thus, we, in our daily life, but

also as philosophers, should learn from scientific and technical activity in order to

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succeed in safely controlling things and, of course, ourselves: it is not the formalistic

and a priori method, but the experimental one, from which philosophy can learn. We

can also learn, however, from the perverse effects that sprang from the isolation

between objects and subjects in Modern philosophy, and to which science has escaped.

Science is a social practice that needs not a permanent reduction to oneself in the

subjective domain; indeed, it is so successful precisely because it has developed social

strategies that are themselves intelligent. It follows that the sheer possibility of moral

progress for society depends on understanding that intelligence essentially emerges in

and through intelligent joint practice. Individualistic and privatistic views of knowledge

or morals cannot be worthwhile inasmuch as they disregard this lesson.

The idea that the sciences provide us with a guide for mastering nature with the aid

of machines could already be found in Bacon and Descartes. Dewey’s model of knowledge is, however, much closer to Bacon’s than to Descartes’. This will become clearer in the next subsection. However, Dewey’s ideas about the role of the sciences and, particularly, of philosophy in the regulation of conduct also echo those of Comtean

positivism, according to which the development of scientific Psychology and Sociology

should aim at producing techniques for controlling human behavior, even if we are to

make it not only more intelligent but also freer. Technologies, therefore, do not reduce

to mere art-craft; they involve discussion, criticism and enhancement of intelligent

practices. In this sense, education systems or philosophy should be understood either as

technologies or as technological activities. It follows that philosophers must be

concerned with providing society with tools for achieving more safety, security and

control in the fulfillment of values and social needs through intelligence practice; but

also in the extension of these values and, with it, the extension of our power to enact

and fulfill them. As can be seen, Dewey’s philosophical ideal is not merely epistemic,

i.e. certainty; rather, it is a technological, experimental reinterpretation of it.

2.2. Epistemology and the consequences of the search for the immutable.

Dewey understands the opposition between his philosophy and philosophies of the

immutable, as analogous to the opposition between the evolutionary theory of natural

selection and fixism. We will now characterize these philosophies of the immutable and

Dewey’s criticism of them.

Dewey thinks that the rejection of probable and mutable knowledge is a correlate of

the traditional philosophical despise for bodies, materiality and practice for the sake of

theoretical formalism. He sees the origins of the preference for theory and immutability

in the rationalizations of the Greek world carried by Plato and Aristotle. The fixist view

of the world features a number of interrelated mottos and inclinations, which can be

summarized thus: a formalistic approach that ranks mathematics as the highest science;

the setting of certainty as the highest epistemic ideal; the requirement of a foundation

that secures this certainty; the preference for closed and absolute philosophical systems

where certainty propagates from the foundations to the rest of reality; and a contempt

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for the mutable bodies and action as the lowest forms of reality. But, how did this view

of the world develop? Dewey’s response here resembles to Nietzsche’s psychologism. Paraphrasing Goethe, we could say that in the beginning was the failure: people did not

have enough material mastery over nature, either because they did not have powerful

technologies, or science, or rules to put them into practice in order to successfully

achieve their goals; and this led them to reify their goals into an absolute realm of Being

where failure, pains, mutability or falsehood could be completely eradicated. As they

had no chances of controlling their own actions for safely achieving their needs, the

philosophical goal of practical success succumbed to that of truth, and those of security

and precision to that of certainty. Certainty was not something worldly, however, but it

belonged to the other-worldly realm of private, subjective consciousness. It prominently

stemmed from peculiar properties found in mathematical ideas, like simplicity and

clarity but, even more importantly, in the understanding of mathematics as a realm of

eternal, immutable objects with fixed relations. This is the reason why Modern

philosophers and especially those of rationalist inspiration, always relied more in

mathematics as the primary source of truth, as well as in the mechanicist philosophy of

nature that sprang from it.

This is nowhere clearer than in Cartesian philosophy. Despite Descartes offered

many suggestions advancing the logic of change, adaptation and fallibility promoted by

the scientific revolution, and fully developed later by Darwin, he ended up building the

strongest expressions of this philosophy of the immutable. For Descartes, although

certainty had an absolute prominence, it not only stemmed from mathematics, but also

from the intuition of ideas such as that I exist. In his Meditations, all these commitments

result in an ontological and epistemological foundationalism, that is, the doctrine that

philosophy should first find an absolute and indubitable ground, or at least a set of most

intuitive axioms, then to deduce from them all the a priori consequences that follow.

What Descartes actually did was building a machine for producing necessary truths of

order and connection toward the ideal state of complete subjective certainty. The latter

is constituted by the individual possession of indefinitely many interconnected truths

about the world.

Paradoxically, however, we know that this graceful epistemological destiny of

Descartes’s subject is the outcome of a model of enquiry whose starting point had been

an absolute subjective uncertainty, artificially extended by Descartes’ methodic and

hyperbolic doubt in a process which could only be brought to a halt by absolutizing the

reality of the human soul and of God. In the Meditations, therefore, the attainment of

absolute certainty about the world is preceded by, and tied to, a state of absolute

uncertainty. Lying in the middle of the two poles, we have the foundations of Modern

epistemology: the human soul delivered to the passively registering of sensations and its

active reflecting about them, God, mathematics and deduction. To put into question

either the validity of Descartes’ foundational intuitions, or their systematic organization

according to method amounted, then, to casting into doubt the possibility of any

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certainty at all. This was the road taken by Hume in his criticisms on the possibility of

knowledge, to which Kant would respond with his transcendental philosophy. The

transcendental method was, in turn, an enquiry about the necessary conditions of the

subjective experience of the object, such that the possibility of a concept of the object in

general was possible. In other words: the justification of the possibility of scientific

knowledge in general consisted, for Kant, in a dogmatic psychology that determines

how the faculties of the mind and its products could reduce the sensational manifold to

universally true judgments. The outcome of this enquiry was a transcendental subject

whose necessary forms of the intuition and categories of the understanding allowed him

to build indefinitely many true synthetic a priori judgments about mathematics, but also

about physics; additionally, these a priori forms of the subject constituted the object of

knowledge by providing a frame within which the variable sensational manifolds that

passively impinged on his senses could be organized.

Dewey thinks that Modern epistemology, which starts with Kant and reaches its

climax in Kant, is a failure because the question for the possibility of knowledge in

general is wrongly posed and ultimately meaningless. This is due to the fact that it relies

in a false account of experience, shared by Locke, Hume, Kant and Descartes, where

experience is passive and entirely about particulars (see above). This account, together

with Christian dogmas, helped forge the idea of a psychological subject with inner

states that are his possessions, and who asks for absolutely certain knowledge of the

world and of the other minds. However, the sensory manifolds are abstractions, just as

the transcendental subject is. On the other hand, knowledge is never absolute but always

approximate and about concrete events; likewise, there is no absolute doubt or

uncertainty, but a particular doubt and more or less certainty about something. Dewey

concludes that the possibility of knowledge is discussed only because philosophers had

aimed for unrealistic ideals while they had also developed false concepts of experience

and the subject; of the relations between belief and knowledge; of the separation

between science and the individual; and of the relations between knowledge and action.

In fact, however, this mutual isolation of knowledge and action in idealistic or

rationalistic philosophies qualified theoretical goodness or certainty as superior than

practical goods and achievements, a conclusion which is essentially perverse. In this

connection, let us recall that for Dewey the problems of knowledge and of social order

are inseparable. He contends that intelligence either means intelligent practice or it is an

abstract formalism that merely reflects a division of labor where mathematics occupies

in knowledge the role that the Emperor or the High Priests occupy in practical matters.

In fact, the philosophy of the immutable is a philosophy of the justification of the social

order, a philosophy where one is only free if she conforms to the rules of nature, in the

last instance the laws of mathematics; that is, she is only free when already subject to

law. It is not a philosophy for creating values, for experimentation, for democracy; but a

philosophy of absolutism and fixed relations. Once we live in democratic societies,

where practical matters are dealt socially with the aid of science and technology, these

ideals of knowledge and social order collapse altogether.

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3. Conclusion: on Dewey’s alleged anti-Cartesianism.

It is customary to speak of an anti-Cartesian turn in contemporary philosophy. In

this trend Dewey was not by any means alone: from very different standpoints, thinkers

like Heidegger, Bachelard or Ryle also rejected basic tenets of Descartes’ philosophy.

To what extent can really be said, however, that Dewey is anti-Cartesian?

Quite obviously, some of Dewey’s criticisms on the modern concept of experience expressly address Empiricism –specifically, Humean associationism- while others are

addressed, more broadly, to internalist or representational psychology. According to

Dewey, a presentational and internalist gnoseology of the private subject conflates

psychological problems about how ideas are formed with logical problems about how to

better conduct research; thus it prevents understanding the activity of knowing as a

practice among other worldly practices, where strategies are developed in interaction

with our peers and environment. Further, separating theory and practice corresponds to

abstracting the subject from the world and transforming him in a passive spectator

whose only activity is disembodied thinking about immutable, abstract objects such as

abstract moral maxims.

These criticisms seem applicable to Kantian philosophy just as well to Descartes’ and other great philosophers. Descartes indeed idealizes intelligence and knowledge in

the abstract, and the Mathesis can be understood as a unitary body of self-standing and

eternal, necessary truth. On the other hand, knowledge of the Mathesis is not praised

with independence of its practical value for the individual, for we must recall that,

according to Descartes, knowledge can “show the will what it should choose”. Further,

the Mathesis can be understood as a virtual (not yet fully realized) body of truths of

order and connection between ideas, or as a set of intellectual principles that are

innately common to all humankind. Let us develop Descartes’ idea for a moment. Knowledge of the Mathesis is always demonstrative and not about single statements,

but rather about interconnected ideas. Truth, therefore, is only granted by the

preservation of certainty through continuous and uninterrupted trains of thought that

demonstrate, according to method, how complex ideas trace back to basic intuitions.

This requirement, together with the possibility of the unity of science, should ideally

take the individual to methodically reproduce all the existing knowledge of humankind

until the full extension of the Mathesis has been uncovered. As a common core of

human reasoning but also a common destination of thought, the Mathesis grounds the

possibility of mutual understanding; of strengthening our mind through the application

of method; and, finally, of passing truth to the next generations while fostering the role

of the individual in this process. Descartes’ ideal of knowledge production is, therefore, not merely to preserve the certainty of the individual, but actually to enable him to

reproduce in and by himself all knowledge which is common to humankind. It is a

structuralist notion of knowledge, where the emphasis in structure and unity seeks to

12

balance individual independence and coherence with tradition and social needs. The

fundamental difference between Descartes and Dewey can be indicated along these

lines. In his Structure of Evolutionary Theory, S.J. Gould speaks of structuralist and

functionalist styles of thinking as alternative and complementary readings of

evolutionary theory. Structuralism would highlight ideas of formal, organic coherence:

structures are preserved in the face of changes and constrain possible directions of

further adaptation: function follows form. In contrast, functionalist thinking tries to

derive every structure from prior adaptations: form follows function. According to

Gould’s portrait of these theoretical interpretations, which echoes traditional pictures of the opposition between rationalism and empiricism, Descartes can be placed toward the

extreme of the first pole, while Dewey often tends toward the second, and sometimes

radically embraces it. As an empirically-minded philosopher with strong formalist

orientations, Charles S. Peirce could be said to occupy a middle place between them.

In fact, Dewey’s experimentalism can be read as a functionalist philosophy of

adaptation and creativity that militates against the necessitarist-structuralist demand for

coherence in the reproduction of order and connections. The former primes uncertainty,

openness, contingency and practical continuity while the second is inclined toward

systematic theoretical continuity. Now, because Dewey abhorred the idea of a system of

knowledge, he had to reject foundationalism. Consequently, he aimed at substituting it

for an experimentalism whose purpose is to test foundations and to preserve them only

if their consequences resist their testing. That those foundations cannot be necessarily

true is a corollary of the experimentalist approach, where certainty becomes an obstacle

for action and, in general, for the mind. The structuralist, instead, emphasizes purely

epistemic certainty as can be given within a formal scheme, and he will pose the unity

of science as a necessary goal of rigorous enquiry. Accordingly, he will be more

interested in the production of interconnected truths that preserve already acquired

knowledge with minimal change.

On the other hand, we have tried to show that Descartes’ Rules, if compared to the

Meditations, prove that Descartes’ thought evolved substantially over time2. In the

Rules, for instance, no Ego Cogito is postulated which exists with independence of any

other being except for God; nor is the intellect to be treated as a separate substance or a

part of the soul whose workings are completely independent from those of the body.

What the Rules tells us about knowledge and its relation to practice, or mind and its

relation to body, does not contradict his latter doctrine; it shows, however, a less rigid

and dogmatic view of the author toward these issues. Thus, the reduction to oneself is

not yet a reduction to the Ego Cogito, and mathematical truths (or, for the matter, truths

in general) owe their certainty to their being part of the Mathesis, not to the existence of

(an ex machina, good) God. Yet the Rules already show Descartes’ clear and mature commitment to some of the central contentions of his later philosophy.

2 The reasons behind the evolution of Cartesian thought could be, of course, matter of further discussion.

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I summarize these commitments thus: in the Rules, Descartes builds a philosophy

of the individual researcher3, who should be able to reproduce all the existing

knowledge of humankind through epistemological immersion in the Mathesis through

method. Dewey, instead, wants to spread the values of scientific practice to democracy.

While Descartes places epistemological certainty as his most precious goal, Dewey

reintegrates certainty in philosophy only by debunking its epistemological character and

subordinating it to the category of success. Hence, we should not pursue certainty but

rather safety and security in attaining our goals; while philosophy is not a subjective

enterprise of contemplation of eternal and absolute truth, but a technology of social

reform whose aim is to regulate our conduct for making it more intelligent and freer.

These remarks are basically to make clear the precise extent to which Dewey can be

deemed anti-Cartesian: even though the contrasts between both thinkers are many and

profound, we must ask exactly to which Descartes we are referring to. Furthermore,

there are also similarities between the philosophies of both authors. In this brief essay I

had space for highlighting only some of them.

Bachelard, G. (1968). The Philosophy of No: a Philosophy of the New Scientific Mind. Orion Press.

Cassirer, E. (1923). Substance and Function, and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Translated by

W.C. Swabey and M.C. Swabey. Chicago: Open Court.

Descartes, R., (1993). Meditaciones metafísicas con objeciones y respuestas, Traducido por Peña

García, Vidal. Madrid: Alfaguara.

-- [1954]. “Rules for the Direction of the Mind”, in Philosophical Writings (A Selection).

Translated by M.E. Anscombe and P.Geach. London: Nelson.

-- [1998]. Reglas para la Dirección del Espíritu. Traducido por J.M. Navarro. Madrid: Alianza

Editorial.

Dewey, J., Hickman, L. A., & Alexander, T. M. (1998). The Essential Dewey. Bloomington:

Indiana University Press.

Friedman, M. (2002), “Scientific Philosophy and the Dynamics of Reason," University of California Los Angeles (as Reichenbach Lecture); University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

(Chapel Hill Colloquium), Fall 2003; University of California-Santa Cruz, Spring 2004.

-- [2002], “Einstein, Kant, and the Relativized A Priori”, in Bitbol M., Kerszberg, P., Petitot, J., Transcendental Perspectives on Modern Physics, 253-267.

Gould, S.J. (2002). The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Cambridge, Massachussets: Belknap

Press of Harvard University Press.

Joachim, H.H. (1957). Descartes's Rules for the Direction of the Mind. Greenwood Press.

Kant, I. (2002). Crítica de la Razón Pura. Traducido por Manuel García Morente. Madrid, Tecnos,

2002.

3 Not yet, thus, a “philosophy of the Subject”.