The Music of Reason

by Andrew Kern

Rene Descartes

What its participants called The Enlightenment would be more accurately described as The Great Reduction. One of its leading ideas was laid down by Rene Descartes when he argued that only what is precise and certain could be considered knowledge.

I’m only aware of one person before that who ever explicitly laid down those standards prior to Descartes and that was the Sophist Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic (book one). I wish Descartes could have met Socrates and learned what Thrasymachus learned.

The demand for precision and certainty gave rise to some valuable methods which are continually misused, such as statistics. But it also eliminated, in principle, any kind of knowing that was not precise and certain, such as the nature of love or justice.

Children trained on Descartes principles are inclined toward despair, since they quickly learn quite certainly that very little is precise and certain and they don’t have the time Descartes had to think everything through.

But what a great device this standard becomes for the philosopher or, worse, the expert to make the common man feel like he doesn’t know anything because, after all, he doesn’t have the research to back up his beliefs.

Can you see how this rather absurd standard is necessarily both radical and unworkable? Tradition and the wisdom of the ages can’t possibly stand up to it. Neither can religion, or ethics, or politics.

But why believe it? Why bother demanding that nothing can be known unless it is precise and certain?

I have long wondered what caused Descartes to develop this idea and what its effects were. Its primary effect is what I have called the great reduction. Perhaps this is easiest to make sense of by comparing Descartes’ standard with Plato or Aristotle or St. Augustine or any other pre Scholastic thinker.