Theological Origins of Modernity

188 chapter six
of fairyland.” 70 Can this insight have eluded him in 1619 and 1620, as he
watched (from near or far) the plundering of Bohemia? Or in the 1630s,
when he looked backward over two decades of war? He tells us that it was
at this time that he formulated his method but decided not to develop his
science further until he had a greater knowledge of the world. But would
such worldly knowledge (as opposed to experimental knowledge) change
the basic character of the science itself or alter it in any of its particulars?
It is hard to see how it could. We are thus left with the conclusion that the
greater knowledge of the world was needed to better judge the possible
reception of such a science in the theologically heated atmosphere of the
time. Th e question was not the nature of science itself, although he still had
much to work out, but the mode of presentation that would make it most
acceptable. His concerns were clearly warranted, as the condemnation of
Galileo demonstrated.
Th e Discourse is a more circumspect eff ort. In this work he does not
directly or explicitly attack the Aristotelianism that had come to be regarded
as the foundation of Counter-reformation Catholicism, but rather
lays out a science that calls into question the fundamental ontological and
epistemological presuppositions of Aristotelian science. Th e goal of the
work is also concealed. For example, Descartes claims he has no interest
in reordering politics or education, but we know that he repeatedly tried
to convince the Jesuits and others to adopt his work as their school text in
place of Aristotle. If he was this concerned with education, can he have
been any less concerned with politics? His late letter to Princess Elizabeth
on Machiavelli, in which he shows a keen concern with and knowledge
of political life, suggests otherwise. 71 His explanation for his lack of interest
in transforming the political realm is also disingenuous. He claims in
the Discourse that custom has gone a long way toward making contemporary
political institutions palatable, but the entirety of the argument in
the Discourse aims at showing how insuffi cient custom is to achieve this
goal. Indeed, his argument suggests that custom can never play the role
that he attributes to it here since it remains merely an accumulation of the
opinions of those who act presumptuously without good sense. Indeed,
almost immediately aft er making this claim, at the beginning of part 3, he
refers to events in his own time as an example of the “declining standards
of behavior” in a world in which nothing remains the same. 72
Descartes did not expect an immediate revolutionary change in the order
of things, but he certainly thought that the European world would be
transformed in the long run by the adoption and gradual application of his
science. In the Discourse, he claims that he only seeks to reform himself. If