Emerging Background of Descartes and Spinoza

 

The sources of knowledge in the medieval period were faith, belief, and authority by the church. The people were not able to question anything and they had to accept what the church says because the church is there to govern people on behalf of the god. 

“They sought to explain the natural and the human by reference to such tents of faith as God, creation, the Incarnation, using philosophical and logical argument to do so” (Leff, 1958, p. 11). 

However, renaissance made the ground to the modern philosophy. The term ‘modern’ itself indicates that it is a new approach to philosophy that occurred as a direct opposition to the previously existed philosophical eras.  

Moreover, Descartes did the break for the medieval period which was his main contribution to the modern philosophy. For that, he is named as the ‘father of modern philosophy’. He was a revolutionary philosopher. Though he is considered as a rationalist, he used reason along with skepticism as the source of knowledge instead of faith, belief and authority.

 However, Descartes was not brave enough to go beyond the power of the church because the church was able to ban his books if he went for further explanations of the things related to both science and philosophy that contradicts with the views of the Bible. It is an unfortunate of the whole philosophical context. He mediated his thinking between church and highly philosophical thoughts. To illustrate, he mainly used rationalism and used doubt as the method instead of the dogmatic methods which was used in the medieval period. But he ended up with the same point that medieval philosophers tried to prove. That is proving the existence of the God. His religious ideas and the force of the church has affected to that. The emerging ground of Descartes philosophy has formed with the indirect affect of the church.

Furthermore, Spinoza was a Hebrew who was born at Amsterdam. He was brave enough to emphasize the limitness of Judaism in contrast with Descartes. He did not try to prove the existence of God as Descartes had done. But we cannot assume that he has completely ignored religious background when forming his philosophy. 

“The past of the race of a man, the achievement of a man’s people, cling to him, and have an influence beyond the operation of his conscious thought and outside the influence of his speculative principles” (Iverach, 1904, p. 134)

The Judaism background has affected to his work ‘ethics’ without his knowledge. But his main aim was not to prove the existence of God. Spinoza did not merely accept the concept of God as Descartes. Although Descartes completely turned all his philosophy back to a religious context after building a revolutionary philosophy, Spinoza has emerged with a philosophy which was challenged to Judaism. 

Now it is clear that though Descartes and Spinoza had done a great contribution to the modern philosophy, their emerging background was different. But the attempt that Descartes was taken should be appreciated because it was a huge challenge to get out from the medieval philosophical thought. Therefore, he has done a great contribution to the modern philosophy. Similarly, Spinoza has also done a great contribution by rejecting existed religious authority. 

Furthermore, Descartes had failed to acquire the principles for the logical conclusion. According to Spinoza “there is no real mystery about the source of Descartes’ failure in this respect” (Cottingham, 1992, p. 413). Spinoza further expressed the reason why he assumes that Descartes has failed. He says that “Descartes had been influenced by theological politics; he had been afraid of flying in the face of Church doctrine’ (Cottingham, 1992, p. 413). Spinoza has identified the weakness of the emerging background of Descartes and constructed his philosophy. He further explained, “Descartes had made concessions in his system in order to accommodate traditional Christian beliefs about God, freedom, and immortality” (Cottingham, 1992, p. 413).