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Modernity and the Seeds of Solipsism


The most significant philosophical assault upon the integrity of the notion of the World was entailed by Descartes's attempt to make the viability of the physical universe depend upon the certitude of God's existence which in turn he grounded upon the certainty of the cogito. The seeds of solipsism contained in such a project have been harvested in any number of ways in contemporary thought. The existence of God and a fortiori of the physical world were not found to have the same authoritativeness as that of the existence of the self. No less important in this light was Leibniz's endeavor to ground the coherence of the World Order on the principle of sufficient reason. By raising to the level of consciousness the questions of the existence and coherence of the world, Descartes and Leibniz transformed the "naively given" into the "intuitively given." And once a thinker claims intuitive certainty for any principle or doctrine, he challenges his colleagues to test that claim by recourse to their own intuitions. The collapse of consensus is almost surely the consequence.

Source: David L. Hall, Eros and Irony: A Prelude to Philosophical Anarchism
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), p.143.
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