Rationalist Philosophy

Abstract

Between the mediaeval cultures of error and the modern aporetic philosophical mind are the rationalist philosophies of Descartes (1596–1650), Spinoza (1632–77), Leibniz (1646–1716), and Locke (1632–1704). Our interest in these thinkers concerns their employment of Neoplatonic principles in rationalist cultures of error. Their defining feature is that they eschew doubt and ambivalence as significant or formative in revealing truth. However, these are different kinds of cultures of error to those that preceded them. Previously cultures of error held thought to be in error in relation to the true, but held also to the idea that the ambivalence of thought — its culture — was educative. The new rationalist cultures of error now find truth in rational thought and error in its ambivalence. The mediaeval cultures of error are reconfigured now in the rational errors of culture. The advance this represents takes reason beyond its status merely as error and opposed to truth in itself. But the cost of this is that the means by which rationalism — the culture of reason — can learn from its experiences of itself are cast aside. Reason extends itself here into everything except itself. In the search for the clear, the distinct, and the unambiguous, reason withdraws from its own conditions of possibility. In particular, Descartes, so often seen as the beginning of modern western philosophy, is only an abstraction — a very important one nonetheless — of reason taking responsibility for itself from within its own groundlessness.