Summary: Rules for the Direction of the Mind
The Rules for the Direction of the Mind (Regulae) is an early work by Descartes, which he reworked throughout his life, and which only appeared posthumously.
An unfinished text, it contains the seeds of the founding elements of Descartes's thought: the search for a method to find certain truths, the arithmetic-geometric model, etc.
Other works: Meditations on First Philosophy Passions of the Soul
Descartes sets out in this work the various rules of a universal method for guiding thought when it seeks to reach truth.
Rule 1: we must seek to enunciate sound and true judgements about everything that presents itself to [the mind]
1.
This first rule is an opportunity for Descartes to develop an important idea: we must not adopt in science the principle of specialisation, namely to study a single science.
The principle of specialisation is necessary in art: we become a master (for example, a virtuoso at the violin), if we devote ourselves only to the object of our art: It is not the hands of the same man that can become accustomed to cultivating the fields and playing the zither
2.
To reach truth, on the contrary, we must not specialise in a single science. Here Descartes develops a critique of the scattering of the sciences -current in his time, as in ours- which should in fact be reinscribed within one science.
The unity of the sciences comes from their essential common ground:
All the sciences are nothing other than human wisdom, which always remains one and identical with itself, however different the objects to which it applies may be, and which receives no more diversity from them than the light of the sun receives from the variety of things it illuminates.3.
Unity is therefore this universal wisdom
4, which Descartes also calls good sense.
Man has seen fit to limit himself to discovering truths by specialising in this or that discipline, when on the contrary, each truth discovered helps us to discover others, in other fields.
The aim of study must be this general end (universal wisdom), rather than this or that particular end. Utility or happiness are examples of particular ends that some sciences wrongly aim at. The sciences should not be studied for the purpose of improving human existence.
This would, if we sought only that, cause us to omit many things necessary to arrive at other knowledge, because they appear at first sight to be devoid of interest or utility
5. So, for example, we would not study what might be happening in such and such a galaxy so far away that we could never get there, because that is something useless to man.
So what should we do? On the contrary, we must persuade ourselves that all the sciences are so closely linked together that it is much easier to learn them all together than to separate one from all the others
6.
We should also think about developing the natural light of [our] reason
7. This will enable us to progress much faster than those who apply themselves to particular sciences.
Rule 2: We should deal only with those objects of which our mind seems able to attain a certain and indubitable knowledge
8.
The doubtful, the probable, the uncertain must be avoided. This requirement, which is still found in the Meditations on First Philosophy, is fundamental in Descartes. If we introduce the doubtful into our reasoning by accepting merely probable arguments, then the hope of extending our knowledge is not so great as the risk of diminishing it
9.
On the contrary, we must seek the certain, the obvious, the necessary, and by thus ascending from certain propositions to certain propositions, discover indubitable truths.
However, it seems that these are very rare. Descartes answers that they are far more numerous than we think, and suffice to demonstrate rigorously innumerable propositions, on which they have hitherto been able to state nothing better than probabilities
10.
Yet it seems that no idea is the subject of a consensus on the part of the scientific community, and that no idea can be presented as an indubitable universal truth.
In fact, there is one field in which such universal assent exists (at least in Descartes' time): it is arithmetic and geometry. These were to constitute a kind of model: the mind must strive to achieve human wisdom, adopting the same procedures and the same demand for certainty as found in mathematics.
1 Les Règles pour la direction de l’esprit, le Livre de poche, Paris, 2002 p.75
2 Ibid.
3 p.76
4 Ibid.
5 p.77
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 p.78
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.