Rule 12 holds that we must use our intellect, imagination,
sense perception, and memory to their fullest extent. Using these
tools well will help us to combine the matters we’re investigating
with knowledge we already have. Rule 12 contains a lengthy, inaccurate description
of how the brain works and how memories are made, the point being
that the brain learns to intuit simple things from experience. Descartes
concludes Rule 12 (and the first set of rules) by saying that a
problem can only be classed as perfectly understood if three things
happen: we know what kind of problem it is when we come across it,
we know what we need to deduce the answer, and we can see that the
kind of problem it is and the means to deduce the answer depend
on one another. The method for solving these simple problems was
to be outlined in the second set of rules, which was never completed.
Analysis
The first three rules express the importance of certainty
in Descartes’ thinking. Descartes stresses the value of “true and
sound judgments” and “certain and evident cognition” and goes so
far as to argue that studying something that only serves to raise
more questions is more harmful than not studying at all. If the
information in your mind is jumbled, it is impossible to create
any cohesive system of thought, and, as a result, everything you
think you know is open to doubt. Rule 4 lays the groundwork for
the intellectual rebirth that Descartes discusses in Discourse
on the Method. Descartes’ education was excellent, but
it left him open to much doubt. He has read all the experts, and
enjoyed learning from them, but he finds that all too often the
experts disagree. If two learned people hold opposing views on the
same topic, how can it be determined who is right? According to
Descartes, at least one party is wrong in such situations, and more
often that not, both are wrong. For if one were right, he should
be able to prove his point to the other through irrefutable logic.
In Rules 5 and 6, Descartes lays out several theories
that foreshadow other, grander thoughts he goes on to explain in Discourse on
the Method and Meditations on First Philosophy.
He asserts that every problem can be broken down into simple parts
and that there exist parts so simple that they can’t be broken down
into simpler parts. These “absolute” ideas can be accurately perceived
just by looking at them. These absolutes prefigure Descartes’ later
ideas of clear and direct perception. He ultimately concludes that
whatever can be clearly and directly perceived is true. After breaking
everything down into perfectly understandable parts, the next step
is to figure out how the simple parts relate to one another. After
that relation has been determined, the task is to understand out
how the complicated parts relate to the simple parts. In these rules,
Descartes insists that repeated review of the chain of relationships
between all the parts of a problem makes it easy to see at a glance
how any single part relates to all the others.
Descartes’ assurance, in Rule 8, that anyone can attain
real knowledge by employing his method indicates that he was promoting
the democratization of knowledge. Unlike most scholars of his time,
Descartes occasionally switched from the scholarly language of Latin
to publish in French, the language of his people. This, he always
argued, was because a person who approached his writings with a
mind unburdened by the prejudices that come with scholarship was
the only person who would really be able to understand his points.
Descartes held a firm belief in the native capacity for reason in
every man. For Descartes, reason is what makes a
man. So every man, from the lowliest plowherd to the most learned
scholar, is endowed with the natural gift of reason. In fact, at
this point in his career, Descartes felt that a plowherd, free of
the burden of received ideas, might have an easier time using reason
than a scholar.
Descartes often employs terms like “intuited,” “natural
light,” and “clear and distinct perception” that don’t seem to fit
in with his skeptical, rational view of the world. But these terms
are used to describe a process that Descartes cannot fully explain.
We intuit and have clear and distinct perceptions as a result of
our reasoning. It happens when we have broken everything down so
thoroughly that there appears in our mind something that we recognize
to be true because it cannot be false. Reason, not divine inspiration,
allows us to make these recognitions. Something intuited is grasped
in the same way one would grasp a simple math equation. Descartes’ extensive
work in geometry and algebra spurred his insistence that problems
in the real world could be expressed in mathematical formulas, a
radical view at the time that would revolutionize the way we study
physics.
