more from this thinker | more from this text
Full Idea
Before Descartes, one could not be impure, immoral, and know the truth. After Descartes, direct evidence is enough, and we have a nonascetic subject of knowledge; this change makes possible the institutionalisation of modern science.
Clarification
'Nonascetic' means self-discipline is not required
Gist of Idea
Modern science comes from Descartes' view that knowledge doesn't need moral purity
Source
report of René Descartes (Meditations [1641]) by Michel Foucault - On the Genealogy of Ethics
Book Ref
Foucault,Michel: 'Essential Works 1954-1984 I: Ethics', ed/tr. Rabinow,Paul [Penguin 1994], p.279
A Reaction
I would have thought Gassendi and the British Empiricists would be a more plausible source for this shift of attitude. Plato would relegate modern science to a lower level of knowledge.
| 7822 | A neo-Stoic movement began in the late sixteenth century [Lipsius, by Grayling] |
| 7504 | Modern science comes from Descartes' view that knowledge doesn't need moral purity [Descartes, by Foucault] |
| 19635 | Hegel produced modern optimism; he failed to grasp that consciousness never progresses [Hegel, by Cioran] |
| 7662 | Romanticism is the greatest change in the consciousness of the West [Berlin] |
| 8060 | In the 17th-18th centuries morality offered a cure for egoism, through altruism [MacIntyre] |
| 8021 | The Levellers and the Diggers mark a turning point in the history of morality [MacIntyre] |
| 8092 | Logic was merely a branch of rhetoric until the scientific 17th century [Devlin] |
| 9307 | Modern Western culture suddenly appeared in Jena in the 1790s [Svendsen] |
| 19648 | Since Kant we think we can only access 'correlations' between thinking and being [Meillassoux] |
| 19674 | The Copernican Revolution decentres the Earth, but also decentres thinking from reality [Meillassoux] |
| 21855 | Only in the 1780s did it become acceptable to read Spinoza [Lord] |
| 20678 | The Scientific Revolution was the discovery of our own ignorance [Harari] |
| 20686 | For millenia people didn't know how to convert one type of energy into another [Harari] |