Cartesian anxiety refers to a dilemma that you either have a fixed and stable foundation for knowledge ''or'' you cannot escape chaos and confusion. The dilemma produces an anxiety that arises from people craving an absolute ground either in the outside world or in the mind.
The dilemma emerged after
René Descartes
René Descartes ( or ; ; Latinized: Renatus Cartesius; 31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650) was a French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, widely considered a seminal figure in the emergence of modern philosophy and science. Mathem ...
posited his influential form of
body-mind dualism. Ever since, western
civilization
A civilization (or civilisation) is any complex society characterized by the development of a state, social stratification, urbanization, and symbolic systems of communication beyond natural spoken language (namely, a writing system).
Ci ...
has suffered from a longing for
ontological
In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality.
Ontology addresses questions like how entities are grouped into categories and which of these entities ex ...
certainty, or feeling that
scientific method
The scientific method is an empirical method for acquiring knowledge that has characterized the development of science since at least the 17th century (with notable practitioners in previous centuries; see the article history of scientific me ...
s, and especially the study of the world as a thing separate from ourselves, should be able to lead us to a firm and unchanging
knowledge
Knowledge can be defined as awareness of facts or as practical skills, and may also refer to familiarity with objects or situations. Knowledge of facts, also called propositional knowledge, is often defined as true belief that is distinc ...
of ourselves and the world around us.
The term is named after
Descartes because of his well-known emphasis on "mind" as different from "body", "
self
The self is an individual as the object of that individual’s own reflective consciousness. Since the ''self'' is a reference by a subject to the same subject, this reference is necessarily subjective. The sense of having a self—or ''selfhood ...
" as different from "
other".
Richard J. Bernstein coined the term in his 1983 book ''Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis''.
References
Philosophy of science
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