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Gary Steiner. Descartes as a Moral Thinker: Christianity, Technology, Nihilism. JHP Book Series. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2004. Pp. 352. Cloth, $60.00.
This work takes as its starting point the need to ground Descartes's moral philosophy in something more fundamental than human reason. Finding inspiration in Heidegger's lament, "In what soil do the roots of (Descartes's) tree of philosophy find their support?" (and not allowing that the tree might be hydroponic), Steiner proceeds to ground the "concrete content and absolute authority" of Descartes's moral principles in his Christian faith (13). This is a book with a mission: to keep the secularizing readers of Descartes's philosophy from the Church door. It stands as an important reminder that in understanding Descartes we cannot ignore his theology and achieves this goal in a lucid and erudite fashion. But the central tenet of the book-that Descartes subordinated much of his thinking about morals to the authority of religion-is, in my view, fundamentally mistaken.
Steiner's Descartes is the pivotal transitional figure between the orthodox Christianity of the late scholastic period and the secular modernism of Kant. Caught between the two, Descartes's thinking is pulled in opposing directions, towards the "earthly ethos" and its twin ideals of technological mastery over nature and the autonomy of reason, and the "angelic ideal"-a transcendent ideal according to which truth and goodness are conceived sub specie aeternitatis as a gift from God. Steiner reads the earthly ethos as symbolic of modernity and modernity as the gradual de-sanctification of our sovereignty over nature, but in Descartes, at least, we are not yet there. What tempers Descartes's modernist inclinations is his recognition of the limits of human reason.
Steiner argues that, towards the end of his life, Descartes resigned himself to a definitive morality based on the "three or four" maxims of the "provisional morality" of the Discourse-a morality grounded ultimately not in human reason but in the Christian religion, in which "by God's grace" Descartes had the good luck to be raised. Of note is the first maxim, which is the principle of conformity to the laws, customs, religion, and moderate opinions of one's immediate fellows. Descartes recognizes the moral relativism implicit in this maxim-the "Persians and Chinese" are likely to follow their own customs and...