The place of morals in Descartes's philosophy

Descartes is remembered mostly for his contributions in epistemology, metaphysics and physics. Yet by his own account, these philosophical discoveries have value only to the extent that they allow us to improve our lives and gain moral excellence. “Thus the whole of philosophy is like a tree,” he wrote in his Principles of Philosophy. “The roots are metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and the branches emerging from the trunk are all the other sciences, which may be reduced to three principal ones, namely medicine, mechanics, and morals” (AT IXB, 14). And he continued: “By ‘morals’ I understand the highest and most perfect moral system, which presupposes a complete knowledge of the other sciences and is the ultimate level of wisdom.” And so, although he wrote comparatively little about morals (and not much on medicine and mechanics either), he took morality to be one of the great and final ends of his philosophy. After all, he viewed it as the ultimate level of wisdom.

The first time Descartes laid down some moral rules was in his Discourse on Method, published in 1637 when he was 41 years old. We should keep in mind that in this work, as in the Meditations, Descartes is pretending to chronicle his adventures as a clear-minded pilgrim seeking the truth. His goal is to discover what he is certain of – what is ultimately real, whether there is a god, who and what he really is, and so on.