Discourse on Method

What It Is

Published anonymously in Leiden in 1637, and not published alone: it was the preface to three scientific essays, on optics, on meteorology, and on geometry, and the last of those introduced the coordinate system that still carries Descartes's name.

He wrote it in French rather than Latin, deliberately, so that it would reach people outside the universities. It is short, first-person and disarmingly plain. Six parts: his education and his disappointment with it, the four rules of his method, a provisional code for living while the rebuilding goes on, the metaphysics, the science, and a closing defence of publishing at all.

That last caution was not affectation. Descartes had suppressed a completed treatise on the physical world after hearing what happened to Galileo in 1633, and he never published it in his lifetime.

Why It Matters

Modern philosophy is usually dated from this book. Not because of any single conclusion, but because of where Descartes decides to start: not with what authorities have established, but with what he himself cannot doubt. Knowledge becomes something a single mind builds and certifies. Everything from the Enlightenment's confidence to the modern demand that a claim show its reasoning descends from that move.

The sentence everyone can quote arrives here, in French, without ceremony. So does the division between thinking mind and extended matter that has set the terms of four hundred years of argument about consciousness, and that neuroscience is still, unhappily, arguing with.

The prose is part of the achievement. Descartes wrote philosophy that an intelligent person with no training could follow, in the vernacular, at a time when that was close to a political act. The clarity is not incidental to the argument. It is the argument, performed.

Before You Read

An hour or two. It is the easiest book on this list to read and one of the easiest to misread, because it goes down so smoothly that you can finish it without noticing what you have agreed to.

Slow down in Part 4. The entire metaphysics is compressed into a few pages, and Descartes himself admitted they were too brief; he wrote the Meditations partly to say it properly. Read the Meditations afterwards, in the same volume, and the Discourse doubles in weight.

Part 3, the provisional moral code, is the part nobody quotes and the part most worth having: what to do while you are still working out what is true.

Which Translation to Read

• Donald Cress (Hackett) — recommended. Accurate, unfussy, and bound together with the Meditations, which is how this book should be met. It is the standard classroom text across North America for good reason: it costs almost nothing and it does not get between you and the French. The cost: Cress gives you the text and very little else. The notes are thin, and there is no real guidance on the seventeenth-century science Descartes assumes you know. View on Amazon →
• Cottingham, Stoothoff and Murdoch (The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, volume 1, Cambridge University Press, 1985). The scholarly standard, and the version quoted in the literature. Take it if you want Descartes entire. The cost: it arrives inside a large collection. You are buying a volume rather than a book.
• Ian Maclean (Oxford World's Classics, 2006). The best introduction and notes for a first-time reader, particularly good on the scientific context and on what Descartes was risking. The cost: it prints the Discourse without the Meditations, so you will need a second book.

Take Cress for the pairing with the Meditations, Maclean for the guidance, Cottingham if Descartes is going to be a project rather than an evening.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read it straight through in one sitting. Then read it again with a pencil, and this time distrust the tone.

The modesty is a tactic. Descartes tells you repeatedly that he is only describing his own path and recommending it to nobody, and he was writing four years after the Inquisition forced Galileo to his knees. He is being careful. Notice where the carefulness thickens; that is where the dangerous claims are.

Read the introduction afterwards. Most of them summarise the argument, and this is a book that works best if you have to find the argument yourself, which takes about ninety minutes and is the whole point.