In ‘Five Parables’ (from Historical Ontology, Harvard University Press, 2002), Ian Hacking writes,
I had been giving a course introducing undergraduates to the philosophers who were contemporaries of the green family and August der Stark. My hero had been Leibniz, and as usual my audience gave me pained looks. But after the last meeting, some students gathered around and began with the conventional, ‘Gee, what a great course.’ The subsequent remarks were more instructive: ‘But you could not help it…what with all those great books, I mean like Descartes…’ They loved Descartes and his Meditations.
I happen to give terrible lectures on Descartes, for I mumble along saying that I do not understand him much. It does not matter. Descartes speaks directly to these young people, who know as little about Descartes and his times as I know about the green family and its time. But just as the green family showed itself to me, so Descartes shows himself to them….The value of Descartes to these students is completely anachronistic, out of time. Half will have begun with the idea that Descartes and Sartre were contemporaries, both being French. Descartes, even more than Sartre, can speak directly to them….I do find it very hard to make sense of Descartes, even after reading commentaries, predecessors, and more arcane texts of the same period. The more I make consistent sense of him, the more he seems to me to inhabit an alien universe.
A few brief responses:
1. ‘Conventional’? This makes me think Hacking inhabits ‘an alien universe.’ Students gathering around me at the end of the semester and telling me they thought they had just finished a ‘great course’? Be still my beating heart.
2. I suspect I too give ‘terrible lectures on Descartes.’ I’ve now taught Descartes four times–twice in introductory core classes, and twice in Modern Philosophy–and I remain unconvinced that I’ve been competent in making Descartes understandable on any of those occasions. In part, this is because, like Hacking, I ‘find it very hard to make sense of Descartes.’ Perhaps it’s because of the apparatus that Descartes employs, perhaps because I don’t find foundationalism a coherent doctrine, or perhaps it’s the scholastic language in the Meditations. Whatever the reason, I feel defeated by Descartes.
3. What I find most surprising about Hacking’s comments is his recounting of his students’ reactions. For I am not alone in this relationship with Descartes: I sense a general skepticism directed at him from my students as well. This might be because of my incompetent teaching of Descartes, but I’ve come to think that many students find the Meditations a let down after the Discourse on Method (and the opening of the Meditations). There is an austerity, a novelty, promised there that the subsequent sections simply do not deliver on; students, in particular, feel cheated by Descartes’ reliance on a benevolent, non-deceiving God to make his arguments work. (Of course, this is merely an impressionistic take on students’ reactions whenever these portions make their appearance: ‘All that talk about the Enlightenment, a new method, rejection of authority, an intellectual hygiene and discipline, and then we get this?’)
My second time teaching Modern Philosophy, I geared up, determined to finally lay the Descartes bugbear to rest, reading the Meditations carefully, determined to make sense of them to myself and to my students, to give good ‘ol Rene the best chance possible. Three weeks later, I surrendered.
Samir Chopra 
Yup it’s really tough. Try teaching selections from The Passions of the Soul, with smaller selections from Le Monde, L’homme, and maybe The Discourse on the Method if you still want to link his primary concerns with mechanical reinterpretations of natural philosophy – optics, fluid mechanics, cosmology, physiology, imagination, the passions – back to the standard philosophers’ myth of the foundational epistemologist. Tell them that some 90% of Descartes’ correspondence concerns topics we would call science. Tell them that of course he did not think you could build the whole of knowledge on the cogito or on a single rational ‘method’ . Explain the Meditations as an outlying rather than foundational text by reference to his need to retro-justify the mechanical philosophy by making space for it within standard scholastic concerns. Then run through the bewildering, drawn-out post-Kantian history by which he turned from the dangerous proto-materialist proto-atheist in the C18 into the boring purveyor of schoolboy errors we were all taught. Get them reading Gaukroger and Schuster, Des Clarke and Catherine Wilson, and Descartes’ own letters. And Malebranche. And enjoy.
Thanks for the wonderful comment Jonno! (I should read your book on Descartes as well, of course). I think my poor exposure to Descartes is what has caused me all this angst. That impoverished education has resulted in a particularly narrow conception of Descartes, one that I then mistakenly promulgate in class. This is especially ironic, because when I introduce Descartes in class, I introduce him as a scientist and Renaissance man extraordinaire, only to not do justice to him by merely taking on the Meditations. I think your post and the pointers you provide suggest a far more interesting configuration of the Modern Philosophy class than the one that I’ve taken on thus far.
Wow, I don’t get the difficulty at all.
Then again, I’ve literally taught Descartes hundreds of times. He appears every time I teach Intro, which is 6 times a year.
The Meditations is one of the most accessible “classic” philosophy text that one can read, given it’s diary-like style. That, plus connections with popular films like The Matrix, and I have to say, he’s one of my students’ favorites (and I am by no means at a “top school” of any sort, but rather a public university in the lower Midwest, the student body of which is largely drawn from small farming communities).
The primary/secondary quality distinction, which is one of the key points to emerge from the Ball of Wax experiment is intuitive and interesting; the question of what it is possible to know and how one knows what one thinks one knows is ubiquitous and perennial. The distinction between knowledge that is direct and unmediated and knowledge that is indirect and mediated is important and not hard to spell out.
So, I admit to being puzzled. Not only do I not find Descartes difficult to teach: I find him one of the easiest to teach. And students love him, for the most part.
–DK
Dan,
I’m really not sure what it is. I’ve never enjoyed the Meditations. The latter Meditations are especially turgid (before it picks up again in the Sixth). The dreaming-doubting model is colorful, sure, but this method of resolving his puzzles simply hasn’t appealed to me and it certainly hasn’t to my students. The wax and umbrella examples are good, as you point out, but that’s about it for me. Again, as I said, perhaps its because of the difficulties I mentioned in my post and perhaps its because of the feeling of a gigantic letdown after all the promises made (and after the initially promising start in the First Meditation).
I’m sure my problems with D. have affected my students’ perceptions of him. I like Sutton’s suggestions though and might try a part of that the next time I teach Modern.
Oh, look, the solutions he offers are completely worthless. The only really useful, interesting stuff is in the first two Meditations, and it’s there that I spend the bulk of my time.
I suspect he knew there was no solution…if only because the solution he offers is *that* lame. But for all sorts of reasons, he couldn’t admit it. Some had to do with the larger culture—and some of it had to do with his own intellectual commitments and hopes for the future of science.
I generally teach Descartes and Locke’s basic epistemology and then spend the rest of the time on Hume’s critique and Reid’s philosophy of common sense. Kant is too difficult and unlike Descartes is *long* as well as ridiculous (and much more poorly written). Why read something long and false, when you can read something short and false?
–Dan K.
I’ve never taught Descartes, and while it may be problematic methodologically speaking, at least for a philosophical introduction to Descartes’ philosophy, I’ve warmed up to some of his work in discovering how contemporary philosophers have mined the Cartesian corpus for value. For example, consider Galen Strawson’s elaboration of Cartesian naturalism with regard to the mind and mental experience, or John Cottingham’s discussion of “Cartesian ethics” (i.e., the moral psychology), or Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad’s brilliant comparison of Descartes’ dream analogy to similar arguments in the work of the Yogācāra Buddhist philosopher, Vasubandhu and the Advaita Vedāntin philosopher, Śaṅkara, or how Raymond Tallis builds upon aspects of the infamous Cogito argument to articulate what he terms the “Existential Intuition” in his philosophical exploration of first-person being. (references available upon request)
Patrick, those references would be much appreciated. BTW, I’ve met Ram-Prasad – at a conference a couple of years go – and he is a very smart dude.