historical and political thought in the seventeenth - RePub - Erasmus ...

Chapter 2. Intellectual context
about the fragmented political infrastructure of the Dutch Republic, about the
question of religious unity vis-à-vis religious toleration, and about the possibilty
of concord between several people and the means of achieving it.
The Dutch preoccupation with concord can be seen as forming a part of
the European wide quest for order and stability. This quest, fostered by the
civil and religious wars that plagued Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, did not remain confined to the world of politics or religion. It also
extented to the realm of science and philosophy.
In the view of Richard Popkin the Reformation had led to a crise pyrrhonienne,
an intellectual crisis in which ‘finding a criterion of truth’ in the field
of religion had eventually led to ‘an assault on the bases of all knowledge’
that rendered uncertain all forms of scientific and religious knowledge. 119 It
was this crisis that triggered Descartes to develop his philosophy. In short,
Descartes believed that by doubting man could acquire a knowledge that was
beyond doubt. In first instance, doubting, if ‘properly and diligently’ conducted,
will make man ‘completely uncertain of everything’. But then man
can become aware of the fact that he is doubting or thinking and therefore
must exist – Descartes’s famous cogito ergo sum (‘I think, therefore I am’).
Descartes believed ‘this truth “I think, therefore I am”’ to be ‘so certain and
so assured’ that he declared it to be ‘the first princicple of the Philosophy for
which I was seeking’. Thus, the Frenchman found his answer to the sceptical
crisis of the age in scepticism itself. 120
The impact of Descartes’s ideas on the European stage was profound. In his
monumental study of the Radical Enlightenment Jonathan Israel has identified
Cartesianism as one of the main causes behind the so-called ‘Crisis of the
European Mind’, a phenomenon that Israel described as ‘the unprecedented
intellectual turmoil which commenced in the mid-seventeenth century, with
the rise of Cartesianism and the subsequent spread of “mechanical philosophy”
or the “mechanistic world-view”, an upheaval which heralded the onset
of the Enlightenment proper in the closing years of the century’. 121 In Israel’s
story Cartesianism played an important role in the disruption of ‘the cultural
119 Richard Popkin, The History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle. Revised and Expanded Edition
(Oxford University Press; Oxford, 1 st ed. 1979, 2003), pp. 3, 97-98, with quotes on p. 3 and p. 97.
The term ‘pyrrhonienne’ is derived from Pyrrho of Elis (c.360-c.270 BC), a Greek philosopher who is
regarded as the founder of scepticism. In the words of Richard Popkin, Pyrrho ‘was not a theoretician
but rather a living example of the complete doubter, the man who would not commit himself to any
judgment that went beyond what seemed to be the case’. Ibidem, xviii.
120 Ibidem, pp. 143-57, with quotes on p. 151. Popkin quotes René Descartes, Discours de la Méthode,
IV.
121 Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750 (Oxford
University Press; Oxford, 1 st ed. 2001, 2002), p. 14.
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