Descartes As a Moral Thinker: Christianity, Technology, Nihilism

Although commentary on Descartes is voluminous, the importance of morality in his thought has been all but overlooked in contemporary English-language scholarship. Considered to be the first modern philosopher, he is often interpreted as a wholly secular thinker who acknowledged no authority above the human will. In this important reassessment of the great French philosopher, Gary Steiner shows the influence of Christian thought on the moral foundations of Descartes’s philosophy.

Steiner provides a close analysis of all of Descartes’s texts and correspondence bearing on morality. By placing his work in historical context, Descartes’s indebtedness not only to Galileo and Bacon in developing his conception of autonomous human reason becomes clear, but also to Augustine and Aquinas in conceptualizing the human condition and the role of belief in God. Providing an extensive survey of German, French, and English scholarship on Descartes, Steiner concludes with an in-depth examination of contemporary debates about secularization, nihilism, and modernity in such thinkers as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Hans Blumenberg, and Karl Löwith. Steiner shows how Descartes’s own ambivalence about the relation between faith and reason can shed light on contemporary controversies about what Blumenberg calls "the legitimacy of the modern age."

Rene Descartes (1596-1650) served as a bridge between the piety of the Christian Middle Ages and the secular rationalism of modernity, says Steiner (philosophy, Bucknell U.), but almost all studies of him have focused on the near bank of that divide. He finds as well in the French philosopher's writing a set of underlying Christian moral commitments that stand in an uneasy tension with his insights into the power of human reason: an ambivalence between an angelic ethos and a technological ethos. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Gary Steiner (Lewisburg, PA) is associate professor of philosophy at Bucknell University and the translator of Karl Löwith’s Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism and (with Jeffrey S. Turner) of Gerold Prauss’s Knowing and Doing in Heidegger’s "Being and Time."