Descartes 0198751826

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DESCARTES Edited by

JOHN COTTINGHAM

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

This hook has been printed digitally and produced in a standard .\fJl'cification in order to ensure its continuing avai/ahi/ity

CONTENTS

OXFORD

Abbreviations and References

UNIVERSITY PRESS

Vll

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP

Introduction John Cottingham

OxtlJrd University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan South Korea Poland Portugal Singapore Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc .. New York Introduction and selection

Oxford University Press 1998

Not to be reprinted without pem1ission The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) Reprinted 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any fom1 or hy any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly pern1itted by law, or under tem1s agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the ahovc should be sent to the Rights Department. Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover And you must impose this same condition on any acquirer ISBN 0-19-875182-6

I. Descartes and the Metaphysics of Doubt Michael Williams II. The Cogito and its Importance Peter Markie III. Clearness and Distinctness in Descartes Alan Gewirth IV. Foundationalism, Epistemic Principles, and the Cartesian Circle Jam es Van Cleve V, Descartes on the Will Anthony Kenny VI. Descartes' Theory of Modality Jonathan Bennett VII. The Epistemological Argument for Mind-Body Distinctness Margaret D. Wilson VIII. Descartes and the Unity of the Human Being Genevieve Rodis-Lewis

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79

101 132

160

186 197

IX. Descartes' Theory of the Passions Stephen Gaukroger

211

Descartes' Treatment of Animals John Cottingham

225

X, Antony Rowe Ltd., Eastbourne

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VI

CONTENTS

XL Descartes' Method and the Role of Experiment Daniel Garber XII. Descartes' Concept of Scientific Explanation Desmond M. Clarke XIII. Force (God) in Descartes' Physics Gary C. Hatfield

Notes 011 the Contributors Bibliography Index of Citations of Descartes' Works Index of Names

234

ABBREVIATIONS AND REFERENCES 259 STANDARD EDITIONS

281

AT

C. Adam and P. Tannery (eds.), (Euvres de Descartes (12 vols.,

rev. edn., Paris: Vrin/CNRS, 1964-76). 311 313 319 325

CSM

J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch (eds.), The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vols. I and II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

CSMK

J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, D. Murdoch, and A. Kenny (eds.), The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. III, The Correspondence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

To assist the reader, whenever references to the above editions were not supplied in the original printing of the articles included here, they have been added, in square brackets [ ], by the editor of the present volume.

OTHER EDITIONS

'l

AG

E. Anscombe and P. T. Geach (eds.), Descartes, Philosophical Writings (London: Nelson, 1969).

AM

C. Adam and G. Milhaud (eds.), Correspondence de Descartes

•:

(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1936-63).

1;

·~

CB

J. G. Cottingham (ed.), Descartes' Conversation with Burman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976).

Hall

T. S. Hall (ed.), Descartes, Treatise on Man (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972).

HR

E. S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (eds.), The Philosophical Works of Descartes (2 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911).

K

A. Kenny (ed.), Descartes: Philosophical Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).

~

s :

··~ j•

\':

· ·~·

;s 1

viii

ABBREVIATIONS AND REFERENCES

Olscamp P. J. Olscamp (ed.), Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry and Meteorology (Indwnapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965).

Note: In the original printing of the articles, references to Descartes' individual works (Discourse, Meditations, Regulae, etc.) were given in a number of different ways (e.g. in Latin, or French, or in various abbreviated forms), and to avoid confusion these have been changed to a consistent format throughout the volume. In the case of works other than by Descartes, references in the notes to frequently cited books or articles have been shortened to author and title alone; full publication details are given under the relevant heading in the Bibliography. Finally, additional explanatory notes have occasionally been inserted by the editor of the present volume: these arc indicated by a letter suffix (e.g. '3a'): footnotes with a number alone are by the original authors.

INTRODUCTION JOHN COTTINGHAM

Descartes is one of those very few philosophers whose ideas changed the shape of the subject. Whether for good or ill is at first hard to say. His reputation is a strangely ambivalent one: on the one hand, the revered 'father of modern philosophy'; on the other hand, the reviled source of such dangerous errors that the label 'Cartesian', 1 by the end of the twenti2 eth century, has for many philosophers become almost a term of abuse. But despite the frequent modern denunciation of his (actual or supposed) doctrines, Descartes is still perhaps the most widely studied philosopher in the canon. The scenario of his philosophical masterpiece, the Meditations, where the lonely thinker sits by the fire and systematically dismantles his previous beliefs in order to make the laborious journey from doubt to certainty, is familiar to countless undergraduates; and the first truth discovered along the road, cogito ergo swrz, 'I am.thinking, therefore I-e;ast';'is perhaps-the.best-known saying in philosophy. ·· ····-· ···- ----~-------· Why should we study Descartes? A superficial, though true, answer would be that he is.)mporta_llt_for .!!?:.~~.'.!i:!~!.9!Y of ideas'. Yet Descartes' significance for today's philosophers is of a quiteCilsiillct kind from, for example, that which his great contemporary Galileo has for today's scientists. Galileo is respected as a brilliant early theorist and researcher, whom 1 ·Cartesian': pertaining to Descartes, from 'Cartesius', the Latin version of his name. Many of Descartes' writings were published in Latin, which was still the language most commonly used in the seventeenth century by those who wished to reach an international audience. ' Compare the following remark: 'Frege exposed Cartesian errors about thought while retaining ... Cartesian errors about ideas. It is as if the residual Cartesian poison running through the philosophical systems of the day was gathered by Frege ... into a single virulent boil ready to be lanced by Wittgenstein' (Anthony Kenny, Frege (Harrnondsworth: Penguin. 1995), 212). ' The actual wording of the famous Latin phrase does not occur in the Medilations (1641). but may be found in the Principles of Philosophy (1644); its French equivalent, 'je pense done je suis', occurs in the earlier DL1'l·ourse on the Method (1637).

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JOHN COTTINGHAM

present-day physicists can look back to as a pioneer of modern dynamics and astronomy. But no modern scientist spends time seriously deb~ting the truth of Galileo's views: what was wrong has long since been discarded; what was on the right lines, long since incorporated. With Descartes' relationship to modern philosophy, things are very different. In the first place, there is still a small but by no means negligible minority of modern philosophers whose outlook in various key areas of the subject might fairly be described as Cartesian. 4 In the second place, even among that larger number of philosophers who regard most of Descartes' philosophical doctrines as suspect, those doctrines still carry a powerful resonance: so far from their being of merely 'historical' interest, some of the twentieth century's most original thinkers have expended vast amounts of energy in combating them. In the third place, and most strikingly of all, Descartes' thinking, irrespective of whether or not his conclusions are accepted, has had a pervasive and enduring effect on the very structure of the philosophical agenda. When philosophers ask about what counts as certain and reliable knowledge, about the relationship between mind and matter, the respective roles of reason and experience in scientific inquiry, the nature of subjectivity and how it relates to the objective world of science-the way in which these central problems are formulated would be largely inconceivable without the particular stamp which Descartes placed upon philosophy. Rene Descartes was born in 1596 in the small town between Tours and Poi tiers which now bears his name. His mother died when he was just over I year old, and he was brought up by his maternal grandmother; his father remarried when he was 4. At the age of 10, he was sent away to boardingschool at the Jesuit College of La Fleche (between Angers and Le Mans), where he remained till he was 18. He was educated in the tradition now known as 'scholasticism'-the comprehensive body of philosophy based on the teachings of Aristotle, as systematically adapted to the demands of the Christian faith by the great thirteenth-century philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas. The scholastic tradition had dominated the universities and schools of Europe for many centuries by the time Descartes was ' For direct supporters of the Cartesian conception of the mind as a non-material substance, see e.g. Richard Swinburne. '/lie l:vollllion of1he Soul (Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1986). and ~ichad Foster. The b11111a1erial Se/{ (London; Routledge. 1991 ). Philosophers who reject (artesian duahsm. but rctam the Cartesian notion of a mental domain inaccessible from the o_bjective perspectiv_e of physical science. include T. Nagel. in Mori/I/ Questions (Cambridge: ( ambndge Umverstty Press. 1979). ch. 12. and M. Lockwood. in 7/ie Mind. the Brain and the Qua/1111111 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). ch. 16. For the influence of Descartes' thought in the theory of language use and acquisition. sec Noam Chomsky, Cartesian Unguistics (New York: Harper and Row. 1966), esp. 59-TJ..

INTRODUCTION

3

a pupil, and he studied such recent exponents of the genre as the Spanish Jesuit Francisco Suarez (whose vast Metaphysical Disputations was published in 1597) and the Feuillant scholar Eustachius a Sancto Paulo, whose elegant Compendium of Philosophy in Four Parts, first published in 1609, became a highly popular textbook; it aimed to provide a definitive summary of the complete corpus of established philosophical knowledge, covering logic, physics, metaphysics, and ethics. But the old order was crumbling. Early in 1610, in Padua, Galileo turned his newly constructed telescope on Jupiter, and discovered four satellites orbiting round it-the first really hard piece of evidence against the traditional Ptolemaic view that the Earth was the centre of all motion; he also observed mountains on the Moon, a decisive refutation of the hallowed Aristotelian thesis that all celestial bodies are perfectly spherical. What the young Descartes, then 14, made of these events, we cannot guess, but it is known that he was one of those chosen to take part in a spectacular ceremony held at La Fleche that summer to mark the death of the College's royal benefactor, Henry IV; in the course of the solemnities a sonnet was recited hailing the discovery of the moons of Jupiter, which 'brightened the gloom of the King's death'. ·I was educated', Descartes subsequently wrote, 'in one of the most famous schools of Europe, where I thought there must be learned men if they existed anywhere on earth'; nevertheless, he wryly observed, 'I found myself beset by so many doubts and errors that I came to think I had gained nothing from my attempts to become educated but increasing recognition of my ignorance' (AT VI 4-5: CSM I 113). When, as a young man, Descartes decided to seek for knowledge in 'the great book of the world' (AT VI 9: CSM I 115), he found a vastly more stimulating mentor in the Dutchman Isaac Beeckman (seven years his senior), whom he met accidentally in Breda, on 10 November 1618. The scholastic curriculum Descartes had followed at school firmly separated physics from mathematics, the latter being supposed (because it dealt with purely abstract objects) to have no relevance to the study of actually existing bodies. Beeckman, by contrast, grasping what was to be the key to the seventeenth-century revolution in science, aimed for an approach which 'combined mathematics and physics in an exact way'. 5 'You alone', Descartes wrote to him a few months later, 'roused me from my state of indolence ... If perhaps I should produce something not wholly to be despised, you can rightly claim it as your own' (AT X 163: CSMK 4). ' The phrase comes from Beeckman's journal for December 1619; see Journal tenu par Isaac Beeckman de 1604 a 1634. ed. C. de Waard et al. (The Hague: Nijhoff. 1939-53). 244.

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JOH N COTTI NG H AM

I NTRODUCTION

Exactly a yea r afte r meeting Beeckman , at the age o f 23, D esca rtes fo und himself in U lm , o n the Danube; o n 10 Nove mbe r, he rema ined closeted a ll da y in a 'stove- heated room' where , he late r wro te, 'I was comple te ly fr ee to co nve rse with myself abou t my own tho ughts' (AT VI 11: CSM I 116). The lo ng ho urs of int e nse meditati on we re fo ll owed by a night o f powe rfull y vivid dreams, involving (a mongs t other thin gs) a discussion abo ut a line from the poet A usonius, ' Q uod vit ae sectabor ite r?' (What road in life sha ll I fo llow?), and a vision of a n ·encyclopaedia' , wh ich seemed to symbo lize 'a ll the scie nces co llected togethe r' .6 D esca rtes awoke convinced he was destined to fo und a new phi losophical system. After further trave ls in E urope, inte rspersed with time spe nt in Paris, Descartes decided to e migra te to the Net herlands in 1628: it was to remain his home (tho ugh with frequent changes o f address) for the rest of his li fe. His earliest major philoso phical work (beg un soon afte r his night of troubled dreams, but aba ndoned unf·inished before he le ft for Ho lla nd ) was the Reg11 /ae ad directionem ingenii (' Rul es for the Directio n o f o ur Na ti ve Inte llige nce') . The Regulae emphas izes the impo rtance o f the pe rcept ions (o r 'intuitions') of a clear and attenti ve mind , purged of the fluctuating impressions of the se nses, a nd typified by the kind o f mathe ma tica l visio n which ena bles us to grasp wit h perfect certaint y that 'a sphere is bounded by a single surface ' (AT X 368: CSM I 14). B ut D esca rtes proposes to exte nd the simplicity and acc uracy of mathematica l know ledge to cover a ll subj ects whose prope rties can be ex pressed in abs trac t terms. He envisages a 'd iscipline which conta ins the primary rudiment s of human reason and extends to the discovery of truths in any field whatsoever ... a ge nera l scie nce which explains all the points that can be raised concerning order a nd measure, irrespective o r the subj ect-m atte r' (AT X 374, 378: CSM I 17, 19). Once arrived in Holland, D esca rtes worked at a number o f scie ntific and mat hematical projects which had inte rested him fo r some time: he developed a system for representing geome trical problems algebraica ll y, lay ing down the fo undations of wha t we now know as co-o rdinate geometry; he did resea rch o n the mathematical a nalys is of problems in optics, ant icipating Snell's law of re fr actio n; and he app lied mechanical prin cip les of ex planation to a number of problems in meteorology. T he res ults of this work were eve ntu a ll y to be published in 1637 as a collectio n o f three

essays, La Dioptrique, Les M eteors , a nd La Geometrie. By 1633, Descartes also had ready for publication a full state me nt of his theories of physics and cosmology-Le Monde ('The World', or 'The U ni verse'); in a concluding portion of the work, the Tra ite de l'homme ('Treatise on the Human Be ing'), Descartes dealt with physiology and the nervous system, using the sa me mechanica l principles he had employed to ex plain the origins and fo rmation of the stars and planets. T he reduction of biology to physics, and in deed the idea that all corporeal phenome na co uld be explained simply by re ference to the movement of particles of a certain size and shape, is one o f the central planks of Cartesia n scientific me thod; in place of the Aristote lian idea that different areas of science require different sta ndards of precision and different principles of explanation, D esca rtes offers a single uniform set of simple mat hematico-mechanical principles to cover all known ph enomena. To the last sentence there belongs a crucial qualification: except for the p he nome na of human tho ught and consciousness. In the Discours de la m ethode (' Disco urse on the Method'),7 prefi xed to the three scientific essays o f 1637, D escartes insisted that while a ll animal and a considerable amo unt o f huma n be ha vio ur could be ex plained 'according to the [mechanica l] dispositio n of the inte rn al organs', like a 'clock consisting onl y of whee ls and springs', the special functions of tho ught and language require a ' rational soul', which ' unlike othe r things, cannot be derived in any wa y from the potentiality of matter, but must be specially created ' (AT VI 59: CSM I 141). This is the famous , or infamo us, thesis of mind-body 'dualism ': the view tha t the mind (or 'soul ' -D escartes uses the two terms interchangea bly) 8 is an independent substance, wholly distinct from the body: 'This " !"-that is, the soul by which I am what I am-is entirely distinct from the body, and indeed is easier to know than the body, and wo uld not fail to be whatever it is, even if the body did not exist' (AT VI 33: CSM I 127). The Discourse reaches this striking conclusion by applying Descartes' so-ca lled method of doubt: 'I decided to . .. reject as absolutely fa lse anyth ing in which I could imagi ne the least doubt, or order to see if I was left believing anyt hing that was e ntire ly indubitable.' It is possible, D escartes argues, to pretend that everyt hing of which I a m aware has no more reality than ' the illusions of m y dreams'; ye t 'while I was trying in this way to think that everythin g was false , immediate ly I noticed that it was necessary that

' The st ory of the drea ms is to ld by Descartes· ea rly bi ographer Ad rie n Bai lle t. and is based on mate rial fro m Descartes· notebooks, which were fou nd am ong his pape rs sho rtl y afte r his d ea th. See Bail le t. Vie de Monsieur /)es-Carles. Bk. I. ch . I: er. Cottin gham. Oescarres. 16 1 ff.

The fu ll ti tle says ' Discourse o n th e Meth od of ri ghtl y conducting reason and reaching the truth in the scie nces' . The Discourse. togeth e r with the three essays design ed to illustrate th e me th od , was publ ished ano nymo usly in Le iden in J un e 1637. ' cf. Synopsis to Medi1ario;1s, Fre ~ch vers io n ( 1647) ( AT IXA 10: CSM II JO n. 3).

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INTRODUCTION

JOHN COTTINGHAM

this truth, I am thinking, therefore I exist, was so firm and sure that even the most extravagant suppositions of the sceptics were incapable of shaking it' (AT VI 32: CSM I 127). 'Je pense, done je suis' (or, in Latin, 'Cogito ergo sum'): this is the first indubitable discovery along the road to the 'long chain' of interconnected knowledge that Descartes proudly advertised. 9 Descartes now swiftly proceeds to reason that he remains unable to doubt his own existence, even while doubting that he has a bodv, or that there is any physical world at all; hence, he concludes, 'I am a ~ubstance whose whole essence is simply to think ... and does not depend on any material thing in order to exist' (ibid.). In the Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) published in Latin four years after the Discourse, Descartes develops the brief and schematic argument of the earlier work in much more detailed and sophisticated terms. 'First Philosophy' was the traditional term for metaphysics; for Aristotle it was the study of 'being qua being', with special reference to the nature of substance (that which exists in its own right): later, in the Middle Ages, metaphysical inquiries tended to be very closely bound up with discussion of the supreme substance, God. Descartes followed broadly in this tradition, but observed to his editor Marin Mersenne that in the Meditations 'the discussion is not confined to God and the soul, but treats in general of all the first things to be discovered by philosophizing' (AT III 235: CSMK 157). As the meditator branches out from awareness of his own existence to proving the existence of God, the argument aims to establish the 'clear and distinct' perceptions of the intellect, purged of the confused deliverances of the senses, as the foundation of systematic and reliable knowledge (what Descartes calls scientia)-knowledge both of the three-dimensional world around us ('the whole of that corporeal nature which is the subject-matter of pure mathematics'), and also of the nature of the mind, a substance that Descartes takes to be indivisible unextended and entirely distinct from the body. ' ' In 1644, Descartes published, in Latin, a lengthy four-part compendium of his metaphysical and scientific views, the Principia philosophiae ('Principles of Philosophy'). In a preface to the French translation, which was issued in 1647, Descartes used a famous metaphor to express his ambition to construct a complete system of knowledge: 'the whole of philosophy is like a tree: 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: CSM I 186). Descartes had always presented his philosophy as 9

Cf. Oiscourse. part ii (AT VI 19: CSM l 120) and part v (AT VI 40-1: CSM 131).

7

primarily practical rather than speculative, having the clear potential to improve the human lot-in mechanics, by controlling the environment and making ourselves 'masters and possessors of nature', and, in medicine, by 'freeing us from innumerable diseases and perhaps even from the infirmity of old age' (Discourse, part vi, AT VI 62: CSM I 143). The place of morals in Cartesian science is, however, more problematic, since the question of how we should live relates to our uniquely human nature-a nature which, for Descartes, is fully explained neither in terms of the mechanisms of the body (in principle the same as those to be found anywhere in 'corporeal nature') nor, on the other hand, in terms of the purely intellectual and volitional operations of the mind, which are 'entirely independent' of the body. Despite the catch-phrase so often attached to his views, Descartes 10 reg~rded the human being as more than a 'ghost in a machine' (an incorporeal spirit manipulating the mechanisms of the body); rather, it is what he called a 'real substantial union of mind and body', characterized by a rich repertoire of properties-feelings, sensation, emotions, passions-that are not reducible either to pure thought or to physical extension. The attempt to understand our human nature, and to use that understanding to complete his science of morals, occupied much of Descartes' time during the 1640s, culminating in his last book, Les Passions de l'ame ('The Passions of the Soul'), which appeared in 1649. Within four months of its publication, the author was dead, a victim of pneumonia, which he contracted in Stockholm on a prolonged visit to the court of Queen Christina of Sweden. By the time of his premature death, the 'new philosophy' of Descartes was already being widely discussed throughout Europe, and despite numerous attempts to suppress his theories in the latter half of the seventeenth century, and despite the subsequent eclipse of his physics by that of Newton, Descartes' ideas and presuppositions increasingly became part of the standard framework of philosophical inquiry. Philosophy, of course, is never a static affair, and our understanding ·of many of the problems Descartes raised has been reshaped and transformed by the work of those who came after him-thinkers such as Leibniz, Hume, and Kant, to name but three of the most important. Yet all these three, and many of their successors, can be seen, in different ways and in varying degrees, as inheritors of the Cartesian tradition in philosophy. Today, as we began by observing, things are very different; but the fact that so much contemporary philosophy feels compelled to insist on its emancipation from Cartesian paradigms is in itself a remarkable tribute 10

See Gilbert Ryle. 11ie Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1949), ch. 1.

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INTRODUCTION

to the pervasive influence of the philosophical revolution which Descartes inaugurated.

stratified. Exposing first the liability of the senses to optical illusions and other errors, next our lack of 'sure signs' to distinguish waking from sleeping experiences, and finally even the certainty of our belief in the existence of those 'general kinds of things' out of which our dreams are composed, the Cartesian meditator probes 'ever more deeply into the bases of our convictions' (p. 34). This differentiation of levels of doubt is one of Descartes' most characteristic innovations. And it has three important implications. First, by exploring the suggestion that dreams can, in effect, reproduce the content of waking experiences, Descartes prepares the way for a radical kind of doubt never raised in classical scepticism: 'the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes sounds and all external things' may be no more than 'the delusions of dreams'-snares which the imaginary 'malicious demon' has 'devised to ensnare my judgement' (AT VII 22: CSM II 15). Secondly, ·[t]he progressive development of Cartesian doubt insinuates, without ever directly arguing for, a foundational conception of knowledge' (Williams, pp. 37-8 below); in other words, Descartes is inviting us to accept the assumption that, however extreme our doubts about what exists 'out there', there will be a more fundamental level of certainty, relating to inner consciousness and its contents. Williams draws the striking conclusion that the sceptical arguments of the First Meditation are already 'loaded' in favour of a conception in which the 'thoughts', or mental contents, of the subject are taken to enjoy a special sort of immediacy and directness. Williams describes the 'loading' involved here as 'metaphysical', though the reader may initially feel that it might more properly be called 'epistemic' (and certainly Descartes himself distinguished the 'order of discovery' followed in the Meditations from the metaphysical order of reality that underpins it). If Williams is right, however, Descartes' procedure assumes from the start a certain picture of reality, a new conception of the 'mental' whereby the 'sensory contents' of the mind can be abstracted from the (bodily) senses that give rise to them. So far frnm being a natural presentation of the ordinary pre-philosophical outlook, the story told in the Meditations is a highly artificial one. '[T]he scepticism whose limits are explored involves the special dubitability of beliefs about the external world, and the external world only emerges as a distinct problem once the important metaphysical concessions have already been made' (p. 48).

II

In embarking on the metaphysical inquiries designed to yield the foundations of his new philosophy, Descartes, as we have seen, deploys his celebrated 'method of doubt' to sort out what is reliable in his previous beliefs from what must be discarded. As Michael Williams puts it, in the opening essay of this collection, the Meditations follows 'a journey from prephilosophical common sense to metaphysical enlightenment, each step of which is taken in response to an encounter with scepticism' (p. 28 below). Descartes himself, of course, was not a sceptic: 'no sane person', he wrote in the Synopsis to the Meditations, 'has ever doubted that there really is a world, and that human beings have bodies, and so on' (AT VII 16: CSM II 11). But he uses the weapons of the sceptic to encourage us to weed out the 'prejudices' or 'preconceived opinions' (Latin praejudicia)'' that we may have uncritically accepted from parents, teachers, and other authoritie~; what is left after the weeding process, what survives the doubt, will provide 'foundations for the sciences that are stable and likely to last' (AT Vil 17: CSM II 12). But although the First Meditation presents a series of doubts in the voice of the ordinary 'pre-philosophical' person, Michael Williams points out ~hat 'the doubts are much less natural, much less metaphysically non-committal, than they are made to seem' (p. 29). Arguments for doubting our ordinary beliefs had been around for a long time before Descartes: many of the traditional lines of reasoning used~ by the ancient Greek sceptics were presented in the works of Sextus Empiricus, who wrote (in Greek) around AD 190; and Latin editions of Sextus, making his work available to a much wider audience, had been published in the 1560s, not long before Descartes' birth. But Descartes' reasons for doubt, though drawing on some of the traditional materials, are structured in a very different way. In the first place, as Williams notes, the classical presentation of scepticism is 'flat': a variety of arguments of roughly equal status are deployed to impugn a variety of types of belief. But Descartes' arguments are directed particularly against the material world: like Plato and Augustine before him, Descartes sees true knowledge as relating not to the fluctuating world of the senses, but to a more abstract, intellectual domain. And in the second place, Descartes' doubts are what Williams calls 11

For the role of praejudicia or conrnewe opi11io11es ('habitual opinions'). see AT VII 22: CSM II 15.

The first foothold of certainty which the meditator attains, as he tumbles around in the 'deep whirlpool' of doubt (first paragraph of Second Meditation), is knowledge of his own existence. Even given the extreme doubt

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INTRODUCTION

represented by the scenario of the malicious demon, bent on deceiving him in every possible way, Descartes recognizes one indubitable truth:

philosophy: '[h]e never adequately explains what this mental vision is, or why apprehending a proposition by it is sufficient to make belief in the proposition very reasonable' (p. 71). A further difficulty, as many commentators have pointed out, is that the referent of the 'I' in 'I think' is not something Descartes is really entitled to be sure of. '[W]hat is it about Descartes' self-awareness when he clearly and distinctly perceives that he thinks that makes his awareness an awareness of him?' (Markie, p. 73 below). Descartes takes himself to be aware of an individual, unitary self, but never quite explains how that self is to be individuated ('How do I know that I am not ten thinkers thinking in unison?', asks Elizabeth Anscombe, echoing a worry first voiced by one of Descartes' contemporaries13). Finally, there is a problem about how far Descartes' certainty about his thinking extends. Sometimes Descartes uses the term cogitatio ('thought') in a very broad way, which seems to include volitions, desires, and items of sensory awareness (e.g. 'I long to hear her voice'; 'I seem to smell perfume'), as well as intellectual activities like doubting and cogitating; yet does this mean that the meditator can be indubitably certain that he is angry or depressed or in love (Markie, p. 76), and that any of these mental states would do as a basis for the certain knowledge of his own existence? There are complex questions to be explored here, some of which have still to be answered satisfactorily by defenders of Descartes.

let him deceive me as much as he can, he will never bring it about that l am nothing so long as r think that l am something. So after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind. (AT VII 25: CSM II 17)

Although this line of thought has an immediate and intuitive appeal for most people, the precise status of 'the Cogito', as it has come to be called, has been minutely analysed and debated by generations of philosophical critics and commentators. Descartes tended to respond rather brusquely to those in his own day who wished to debate it: 'this knowledge is not the work of your reasoning, or information passed on to you by your teachers: it is something your mind sees, feels and handles' (ATV 138: CSMK 331). But what exactly does this come down to? As Peter Markie points out in his essay (Chapter II), Descartes often talks in ways which suggest that there is an immediate self-evident inference from one's thinking to one's existence. Yet the inference is not, as it were, wholly self-contained and self-sufficient: to make it, Descartes conceded, you have to know what thought is, what existence is, and also the 'simple notion' that it is impossible to think withollt existing (Principles of Philosophy, part i, art. 10). This is not a matter (as Descartes explained elsewhere) of deducing one's existence from one's thinking by means of a syllogism, starting with the major premiss 'whatever thinks exists' (AT VII 140: CSM II 100); rather, given simply a knowledge of the meanings of the terms, and the selfevident relationship between them, one is directly aware in one's own case that for as long as one is thinking, one must exist. Yet, what is it that gives thinking a privileged certainty in the first place? 'Ambulo ergo sum' (I am walking, therefore I exist) will not do for Descartes, since I might be mistaken about the truth of 'ambulo' (I might be only dreaming I am walking, or the malicious demon might be making me hallucinate that I am walking 12 ). But if a deceptive god can trick me about physical actions in this way, why should he not also be able to trick me about the things I think I see clearly with my mind's eye, such as that I am thinking (compare Descartes' own remarks about this in the Third Meditation, AT VII 36: CSM II 25). This notion of 'seeing with the mind's eye', elsewhere called 'intuition' or 'clear and distinct perception', is, according to Markie, 'the least clear and distinct concept' in Descartes' " Or. to use a fantastic scenario beloved of present-day philosophers, l might be a surgically excised brain. kept alive in a vat of nutrients by an insane scientist who delights in stimulating the cerebral cortex so as to give me all the sensations of walking.

'I am certain that I am a thinking thing,' says Descartes, taking stock at the start of the Third Meditation; and he proceeds to ask whether, in virtue of knowing this, he can identify what is required for being certain about anything. The answer he comes up with is what has come to be known as the 'truth rule': 'I seem to be able to lay it down as a general rule that whatever I perceive very clear and distinctly is true' (AT VII 35: CSM II 25). We might feel inclined to object (using a phrase of Wittgenstein's in a rather different context): 'how can he generalize so irresponsibly from a single case?' Moreover, as we have already seen, there are problems about the very notions of clarity and distinctness. What exactly are these supposed features of our mental perceptions? How are they defined, and how do we identify them? In his classic paper on this topic, Alan Gewirth (Chapter III) starts by pointing out that the immediate objects of our perception are, for Descartes, ideas: 'I take the word "idea" to refer to whatever is immediately perceived by the mind' (Second Replies, AT VII 13 Anscombe is quoted by Markie, p. 75 below. For a seventeenth-century anticipation, see the letter to Descartes from 'Hyperaspistes' of July 1614 (AT III 404).

12

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JOHN COTTINGHAM

INTRODUCTION

181: CSM II 127). Ideas have (to use the modern jargonP) 'intentionality': they represent or refer to things. But since 'we can have no knowledge of things except via ideas' (AT III 476: CSMK 202), clearness and distinctness, Gewirth points out, must be 'qualities internal to ideas and perceptive acts' (p. 82 below). Now this fact is often interpreted as implying that Descartes 'privatized' ideas, or regarded them as inhabiting an entirely subjective domain; and in this case, clearness and distinctness would b~ purely psychological (as opposed to logical) aspects of our thought, which makes it hard to see how they could be indicators of truth. Gewirth, by contrast, argues that Descartes characterizes clearness and distinctness in normative terms. For an idea to be clear and distinct, Gewirth suggests, there has to be an '"equality" of its direct and interpretative contents' (p. 87), and (as explained by Gewirth) this turns out to be a logical, not a psychological, relation-one which depends on an analysis of the representational content of the idea, as opposed to subjective features like, say, vividness. This, however, still does not indicate how we tell whether an idea is clear and distinct. Herc Gewirth explains Descartes' method by invoking his example of the wax in the Second Meditation: starting with an obscure and confused conception of the wax, based on sensory qualities (like smell and colour) which turn out to vary under different conditions, the meditator slowly reaches towards a more stable and precise conception by discarding every feature that is non-essential to the wax, until (as Gewirth puts it) 'a direct content is attained which survives every reductive device, remaining so long as the object can be conceived, and without which the object can no longer be conceived' (p. 96 below). A further problem remains, however: even after this careful and precise procedure, there still seems to be a gap between the 'idea' directly perceived by the mind and the real 'thing' it represents. It is in order to ensure that ideas match realitv that the role of God in Descartes' system is so crucial: in Gewirth's words, 'the methodological orientation must be supplemented by a metaphysical one, culminating in the divine guarantee' (p. 98).

perception is undoubtedly true' (Fourth Meditation, AT VII 62: CSM II 43). But this at once raises the thorny problem of the 'Cartesian Circle' (first pointed out by Descartes' acute contemporaries, Marin Mersenne and Antoine Arnauld 15 ): if we can be sure of the truth of our clear and distinct perceptions only once we have established God's existence, how are we entitled to rely on the clear and distinct perceptions needed to prove his existence in the first place? The problem seems to be a devastating one for Descartes' procedure, since it suggests that the Cartesian journey to knowledge can never get started. In his analysis of the issue, James Van Cleve (Chapter IV) discusses and rejects several proffered solutions, including the view that in the early stages of his inquiry Descartes regards it as sufficient that he is irresistibly convinced of the truth of certain propositions, God being invoked at a later stage to provide a metaphysical guarantee of their objective truth. Van Cleve rejects this solution on the grounds that Descartes is playing for 'higher stakes' (p. 106): in seeking the foundations for his new science, he demands the kind of certainty that implies not just psychological conviction, but also objective truth. Moreover, such certainty must be able to survive every 'epistemically possible' doubt (p. 108)-including what Descartes himself called the 'hyperbolical' scenario of the malicious demon. Van Cleve's own solution trades on the idea that, to get started, Descartes does not require a general guarantee of the truth of all clear and distinct perceptions; it is enough that for any given proposition, if he clearly and distinctly perceives it, then he is certain of its truth (what Van Cleve calls 'principle A'). Now if we accept that the meditator does clearly and distinctly perceive a stock of premisses (such as 'If I think, I exist'), which he knows for certain to be true, the crucial point is that, to have such knowledge, the meditator does not need to apply or invoke principle A; he simply needs for his initial inquiries to be covered by that principle. The issues here reach far beyond Cartesian scholarship, since, as Van Cleve shows, they are crucially relevant to debates in contemporary epistemology between 'foundationalist' and 'coherentist' theories of knowledge. Descartes (who may be regarded as the father of foundationalism) is often criticized on the grounds that he cannot (on pain of circularity, or an infinite regress) justify the fundamental epistemic principles he employs. Van Cleve argues, by contrast, that this criticism rests on a misunderstanding, since 'a subject need not know that an epistemic principle is true in order for the circumstance [it specifies] to give him knowledge' (p. 120). The debate continues.

Descartes' invoking of God as the guarantor of human knowledge is a pervasive feature of his metaphysics: 'God is supremely perfect and cannot be a deceiver on pain of contradiction; hence every clear and distinct 1

' The term (not used by Gewirth) is in fact a revival of a medieval Latinism (from imentioa reaching 0111 jiJY or poil//i11g at something): the label, common though it has become. is not a very happy one, since it risks confusion with the ordinary meaning c'Jf 'intentional'. Descartes himself avoids the term, but uses an even more opaque plece of ja;gon, 'objective reality' (AT Vil 41: CSM II 28). It would be more perspicuous to talk of the 'representational' nature of ideas. or thell' 'aboutness".

15 See Second Objections (AT VII 125: CSM II 89) and Fourth Objections (AT VII 214: CSM [[ 150).

14

I N TR O D UC TI ON

J OHN COTT I NG H AM

111

T he cent ra l ro le o [ God in D escartes' epistemo logy and metaphysics presents th e Cartesian in q ui re r with a philosop hica l problem somewhat ana logous to the ancie nt ' pro ble m o [ evil ' in Christi a n t heo logy . T he theologian as ks why, if crea tio n is the wo rk of a God who is supre me ly good, the re is evil in th e wo rld ; the Ca rtesian seeke r fo r kn owledge as ks why, if his me ni al powe rs we re bestowed o n him by a pe rfect God , he is none th e less so ofte n subj ect to int ellectua l erro r. Like some o f his theologica l predecessors, D esca rt es ide ntifies huma n freedo m as the culprit; o r, to be more precise, he takes o ur liabilit y to e rro r to be a functio n of the re lat io nship betwee n the inte llect and the will. O ur inte llect, tho ugh limited (the re a re many things we finite beings do not pe rceive clea rl y) is no ne the less a perfect instrument , in so fa r as whatever we rlo clea rl y and distinctl y perce ive is guara nt eed to be true. But o ur will , as D esca rtes put s it , 'extends wide r th an the inte llect' (Fo urth Medi tatio n, AT VII 58: CSM 11 40)-that is, we have the freedom lo jump in a nd affirm o r deny a propos itio n eve n whe n we do not clea rl y and distinctl y pe rce ive its truth o r fa lsity. T he ro ute to truth thus becomes a matte r o f restra ining the will , and re membe ring to give asse nt o nl y to what is clearly and distinctl y perceived. In his ana lysis o [ the Ca rtesian theory o[ the will , A ntho ny Kenn y (Chap ter V) a rgues first o f a ll that in his ea rl y writings D esca rtes fo ll owed scho las tic o rth odoxy in trea ting judge me nt (a ffirmin g o r denying a proposition) as an int e llectua l act, but that by the 1640s he had a rri ved at the position that judgeme nt sho uld be co nside red as an act of will, like pu rs uing o r shunning. Kenn y proceeds to as k why Desca rtes sho uld have lu mped judgeme nt together with des ire and aversio n in this way, sepa rating it fr om inte llectua l pe rception; a nd he suggests as a possible justifica tion th at asse nting o r dissenting to a pro positi o n ca n be rega rde d as a fo rm o f 'commitm ent ', subj ect, lik e othe r commitme nts, to being appra ised as 'since re o r insincere, ras h o r ca utio us, right o r wro ng' (p. 144). B ut if th is is the ra tio na le fo r D esca rtes' position, Kenn y a rgues tha t it is funda menta ll y flawed, since the 'onus o f ma tch' applying lo be li efs is quite the opposite lo th at ap plying to des ires: if I asse rt it to be a sunny day, then things go wro ng if my asse rti on fa ils to fi t the weat her: b ut if l desire it to be a sunn y day, the n things go wro ng if the wea ther fa ils to ma tch my wishes. H aving dealt with th ese conceptua l prelimina ries, Kenn y goes on in the second ha lf of his essay to ex po und a lo ng-standing and vit a lly impo rta nt distincti o n betwee n two concep ti o ns of freedom: firstl y, ' fr eedom o f indil'-

15

ference', which is a two-way, contra-ca usa l power to X or not to X; and second ly, 'freedom of spontane ity', which is the freedom I have whe n I do something simply beca use I wa nt to. Now the situa tion of the meditator when he foc uses o n some clea rl y and distinctl y perce ived propos ition is, according to D escartes, that he cannot but assent to its truth: 'from a great ligh t in the intellect', says the Fo urth Meditation, ' there fo llows a great inclina tio n of the will' (AT VII 59: CSM II 41 ). When my inte llect is illuminated by the 'light of reason', I spo ntaneously, a nd irresistibly, asse nt to the truth of the relevant proposition. My assent here is completely dete rmined, but I am no ne the less free in the seco nd sense indicated above; as D escartes puts it , I have a 'spontaneous' be lief which is ' uncompe lled by any exte rna l fo rce' (ibid.). But what of D esca rtes' attit ude to who lly unde termine d fr eedo m, o r freedom of indifference? This is complicated by the fac t tha t whe n he speaks dispa ra gingly of 'indiffe rence' in th e Fo urth Meditation (as ' the lowest grade of freedo m'), he means the sit uatio n when I am 'waverin g', with insufficient informatio n to ena ble me to decide. The re is anothe r passage, however (from a le tter to Mesla nd of 9 Fe bruary 1645 16), where D esca rt es appears to cla im that we have freedom of the will in the traditi ona l strong sense of 'indiffe rence'-a 'positive fa cult y of dete rminjng o neself to one o r other of two contraries' (AT IV 173: CSMK 245 ). This at first sight suggests a n inconsistency in D escartes, since if we always enj oy fr eedom of indifference in this indeterministic se nse, this implies that the will is not constrained by the light o f reason, but ca n a fter a ll resist assenting even to clea rl y and distinctly perceived truths. Ke nn y argues convincingly, however, tha t D escartes ho lds such ' libe rty of perversion' (withholding assent from a clearly perceived truth) to be availa ble o nl y subsequently to a give n perce ption (if, for example, we allow the re levant proposition to slip o ut of foc us) ; but at the time we a re actually pe rce iving it, we cannot but assent. Descartes' pronouncements on fr eedo m are not always e asy to decipher, but Kenny makes a strong case for the consistency of his position. As fo r whether 'libe rty of sponta ne ity' is a sufficiently robust notion to support the concepts of genuine human a uto nomy and responsibility, this is something that remains in ho t dispute a mong philosophe rs even today. D escartes' attribution to the will o f powers often previously assigned to the intellect is pa rt of a te nde ncy in his philosophy which is sometimes ca lled 'vo lunta rist'. Anothe r striking example is his doctrine that the 'eternal truths' (the necessary truths of logic a nd mathematics) are creations of the 16

As Kenny notes. the date and add ressee of thi s letter are in doubt.

16

17

JOHN COTTINGHAM

INTRODUCTION

will of God. The dominant tradition in philosophy regards such truths as propositions which are 'true in all possible worlds'. or which 'could not have been otherwise'. Descartes, by contrast, asserts that they are the result of a divine fiat, just like the creation of this world: God '\v'as free to make it not true that the radii of the circle are equal-just as free as he was not to create the world' (AT I 152: CSMK 25). This 'allegedly strange, peculiar, curious, and incoherent doctrine' (Jonathan Bennett, p. 160 below) first appears in a number of letters to Mersenne in the early 1630s, and although it is not explicitly asserted in the Discourse, Meditations, or Principles, there are other texts that make it plain that Descartes continued to maintain it. The problem with Descartes' allowing this 'worm of contingency'17 into the centre of his system is that it seems clearly inconsistent with the 'absolute certainty' that he sometimes claimed for his philosophy.18 Indeed, if nothing is absolutely necessary or impossible, if God could even have made contradictory propositions both true (as Descartes sometimes goes so far as to assert-AT IV 118: CSMK 235), then the logical foundations of all valid reasoning seem threatened. In his interesting attempt to rescue Descartes from some of these problems, Jonathan Bennett (Chapter VI) points out, first of all, that the passages where Descartes discusses his doctrine of the divine creation of the eternal truths tend primarily to emphasize the greatness of God-the total dependence of all things on him-rather than his 'omnipotence' (in the sense of an ability to do absolutely anything). The main impulse behind his discussions seems to be one of piety and respect for the Deity, a refusal even to contemplate that there might be anything at all that does not depend on his will. Moreover, even in the passages where Descartes apparently suggests that God could do anything, he always couples this with a warning that we should not attempt to grasp what he could or should do; 19 and as Bennett points out, this 'cuts both ways', for '[a]nyone who asserts "God can do everything" implicitly claims to grasp what God can do' (Bennett, p. 164 below). It is important to remember that Descartes frequently stresses that God is 'incomprehensible': we can know he exists, and understand some of his attributes, but we cannot fully 'comprehend' or grasp him-'just as we can touch a mountain, but not put our arms round it' (AT I 152: CSMK 25). There is, however, for Bennett, a purely philosophical rationale for Descartes' theory of the dependence of the eternal truths on God's will,

one that is independent of considerations of religious piety, and concerns instead the analysis of 'modal concepts' (that is, concepts involving the notions of necessity and possibility). Bennett's claim is that 'Descartes held ... that our modal concepts should be understood or analysed in terms of what does or does not lie within the compass of our ways of thinking' (p. 167). The necessity of a proposition like '2 + 2 = 4', in other words, consists in our being unable to conceive otherwise. Moreover, God's ·making' it necessarily true amounts to his creating our nature such that we cannot understand any other possibility than that two and two should equal four. If the Descartes who emerges on this interpretation appears as a distinctly 'modern' figure, 20 this is a bullet Bennett is quite prepared to bite: 'there was in Descartes a wide, deep, vivid streak of subjectivism or pragmatism about truth-a willingness to treat results about the settlement of belief as though they were results about how things stand in reality' (p. 171 ). Bennett does not claim that his interpretation can be squared with everything Descartes wrote; indeed, he discerns a tension between this subjectivist stance and residual objectivist hankerings which often lead Descartes into 'notoriously shaky and murky' arguments. But Bennett's resounding conclusion is that the 'best and most disciplined parts' of Descartes' epistemology and metaphysics belong to this subjectivist strand in his thought.

17 See Cottingham. ·The Cartesian Legacy'. " ·Absolute certainty arises when we believe it is wholly impossible for something to be other th~~ we judge it to be' (l'ri11cip/es of Philosophy. part iv. art. 206, French version). Compare the letter to Mesland of 2 May 1644 (AT Ill 118-9: CSMK 235).

IV

We turn now to the part of Descartes' philosophy that has generated the most sustained and intense opposition among twentieth-century thinkers, and indeed was searchingly questioned by critics of his own time-his philosophy of mind. The Cartesian claim that the conscious self (at least in 21 respect of its two main faculties of understanding and willing ) is incorporeal-entirely independent of the body and capable of existing without itis harshly out of tune with most present-day work on the nature of mind. The point perhaps needs qualifying: certainly there are many philosophers '" One might say (though Bennett himself does not use the term) that Descartes emerges on this interpretation as in some respects a 'proto-Kantian'. Kant, more than 100 years later, was to suggest a 'Copernican' revolution in philosophy, whereby certain features hitherto su_pposed to belong to nature 'in itself are construed as necessary categones m terms of which our human experience and understanding is structured Gust as Copernicus had proposed that the supposed motion of the celestial sphere is in fact to be explained in terms of the motion of our own planet). . . 21 Feeling, emotion. and sensory awareness are, for Descartes, rather different, as Will emerge later.

18

JOHN COTTINGHAM

INTRODUCTION

today who would agree with Descartes that there is something about the nature of consciousness that resists complete explanation in terms of the quantitative language of physics; but today's prevailing view is that such conscious activity, at the very least, depends on certain physical processes-namely, brain processes, or perhaps (for example, in alien life forms) some other kind of physical processes capable of doing the same job. Descartes' standard view, by contrast, is that the mind is an immaterial s11bsta11ce-a separate entity in its own right, which 'does not require any place, or depend on any material thing, in order to exist' (Disco11rse, part iv, AT VI 33: CSM I 127). Margaret Wilson (Chapter VII), in her careful analysis of the main argument Descartes uses to establish the distinctness of mind and body, begins by pointing out that in establishing that he is a 'thinking thing' (res cogitans) in the Second Meditation, Descartes does not claim to have justified the conclusion that he is essentially distinct from anything physi~al; he does, however, claim that he has a distinct conception of body as an extended thing, and that this conception is separate from that of thought (Wilson, p. 188 below). This now provides the groundwork for the main argument for mind-body distinctness in Meditation Six (the 'epistemological argument', as Wilson calls it). The reasoning (to summarize) is that since I have a clear and distinct understanding that extension belongs to the essence of body, and thought to the essence of mind, and since I also have a clear and distinct conception of body as non-thinking, and of mind as non-extended, it follows that I can clearly and distinctly understand body apart from mind, and vice versa. And since whatever I clearly and distinctly understand can be brought about by God, it follows that God can bring it about that body and mind are apart (or separate); hence the two can indeed exist apart, and are really distinct (cf. AT VII 78: CSM II 54). After mentioning, and refuting, three common but ineffective criticisms of this reasoning (p. 190 below), 22 Wilson proceeds to examine the objection first put forward by Antoine Arnauld (following a hint from Caterus): in perceiving himself as a thinking thing, might not Descartes have perceived only part of his nature; might not physical extension, unbeknownst to him, also be implicated in his essence? The best strategy for the Cartesian at this point (suggested by some remarks of Descartes himself,

unpacked by Wilson) is to argue that, in conceiving of mind as a thinking thing, I have a clear and distinct recognition that thinking is by itself sufficient for me to exist: in conceiving myself as able to exist 'with thought alone' and no other attribute (AT VII 223: CSM II 157), I have what Descartes calls a 'complete' conception of thinking substance. And such complete knowledge, Wilson argues, is 'sufficient for the epistemological argument to go through'. This is not to say, of course, that Descartes' reasoning is free from all problems; but if Wilson is correct, it is a lot less suspect than has been supposed by those who have attempted to dismiss it out of hand.

" Perhaps the most important of these is the objection that all the argument shows is that mind and body could exist apart, not that they are distinct. But Wilson correctly points out that two things are distinct for Descartes merely if it is possi/Jle for them to exist separately. (It follows. incidentallv. that those manv modern critics who maintain that Cartesian mind-body dualism is false. while admitting that· it is at least a logical possibility. are in fact conceding the core of Descartes' theory of the mind.)

19

It is one of the paradoxes of his account of the relationship between body

and mind that, having spent great energy devising arguments to establish the distinction between them, Descartes took almost equal pains to underline their intimate union: 'There is nothing my own nature teaches me more vividly than that I have a body, and that when I feel pain there is something wrong with the body, and that when I am hungry or thirsty the body needs food and drink.' Or again, 'I am not merely present in my body as a sailor in a ship, but am very closely joined and as it were intermingled with it, so that I and the body form a unit' (AT VII 80-1: CSM II 56). In her essay, the great French Cartesian scholar Genevieve Rodis-Lewis (Chapter VIII) examines the status of this 'unit' in Descartes' philosophy. Descartes variously called it a 'single whole', a 'single person who has both mind and body together', an 'entity in its own right', and a 'true substantial union' (AT IX 64, III 694, III 460, III 508: CSM II 56, CSMK 228, 200, 209). Philosophers in the Anglophone tradition have often tended to ignore, or swiftly dismiss, the Cartesian theory of the mind-body union, taking their cue from Descartes' own warning that there is something mind-boggling in conceiving two things at the same time as both distinct and united. 23 RodisLewis, however, by carefully setting the Cartesian theory in its proper historical context, shows that, in contrast to the 'angelism' that was· a popular position of the time (regarding humans as spiritual beings temporarily trapped in animal bodies), Descartes was concerned to do justice to the 'exceptional' and 'unique' character of our human nature. The key to 1

" In the letterto Elizabeth of28June 1643, Descartes says he reckons the human mind is 'not capable of conceiving distinctly and at the same time the distinction between soul and body and their union: for to do this one must conceive of them as a single thing and at the same time to conceive of them as two things, and these two conceptions are mutually opposed' (AT III 693: CSMK 227). The last phrase (in the original: ce qui se colllrarie) should (pace CSMK) probably not be taken to imply that there is an absurdity or a contradiction in regarding body and mind as both distinct and united, but merely as pointing out that one cannot grasp both the. distinction and the union in a single mental act.

21

JOHN COTTINGHAM

INTRODUCTION

grasping the special character of the human mind-body union, which Descartes insisted was better experienced than intellectually analysed (AT III 692: CSMK 227), is to appreciate the significance of the sensations and passions, reducible neither to pure cogitationes nor to purely bodily events, but the result of the interaction between the two. Rodis-Lewis points out that the majority of Descartes' successors, including his socalled disciples, all showed a tendency to bypass the 'union', and replace genuine mind-body interaction with some kind of more abstract correlation or concomitance, thus missing the distinctive core of Cartesian 'anthropology'/4 which Descartes took to have a crucial importance for his science of morals.

ancient traditions in moral philosophy-the intellectualist tradition of the Stoics on the one hand (who construed the passions as false beliefs) and the Augustinian tradition on the other, emphasizing the crucial role of the will as the key to the moral status of our emotional responses. A third influential element, as Gaukroger shows, is the detailed analysis and classification of the passions offered by Aquinas, in the Summa theofogiae. Gaukroger proceeds to explore the central features of Descartes' own account of the passions, which invokes the well-known Cartesian identification of the pineal gland in the brain as the organ of interaction between neural impulses (the 'animal spirits') on the one hand and the activities of the mind or soul on the other. Despite the 'ghost-in-the-machine' caricature of Descartes' position, with the animal spirits pushing into the pineal gland from one side and the 'volitions' of the soul trying to counteract them on the other (see Spinoza's Ethics, part v, preface), Gaukroger rightly points out that although 'the will cannot halt this [the motion of the animal spirits and the resulting stimulation of a desire] directly', nevertheless, 'it can represent objects to itself so vividly that, by the principle of association, the course of the spirits will gradually be halted' (p. 221 below). Descartes' emphasis, like Aristotle's, is on the importance of systematic training and habituation for the cultivation of virtue; but, unlike Aristotle, Descartes insists on treating the subject en physicien, which implies that we need a comprehensive understanding of the role of the body, as well as that of the mind, in our mental and moral life, and also of the interactions between the mental and physical that arise from their 'substantial union'. The direction and regulation, but not suppression, of the passions is for Descartes the key to living a good life; and 'good', Gaukroger aptly concludes, involves both 'being ethical' and also 'being fulfilling', 'for the two are inseparable in Descartes' account' (p. 223).

20

Descartes' schematic list of the modes of awareness that are unique to the mind-body union comprises: First, appetites like hunger and thirst; secondly, the emotions or passions of the mind which do not consist of thought alone, such as the emotions of anger, joy, sadness and love: and finally all the sensations such as those of pain, pleasure, light, colours, sounds, smells, tastes, heat, hardness and the other tactile qualities. (Principles, part i, art. 48: AT VIIIA 23: CSM I 209, emphasis added)

It is the second (italicized) category on this list that has special importance

for Cartesian ethics. The passions, which 'do not consist of thought alone', originate in physiological processes; as a result of psycho-physical associative responses, some innate, others the result of conditioning in early childhood and subsequently formed habits, we find ourselves in the grip of emotional states which we often understand only imperfectly, and whose effect on us, and our tendency to act and react in certain ways, is often quite out of proportion to our reflective thoughts about what we should be pursuing or avoiding. The problem of the mastery of the passions was of course a very ancient one in moral philosophy, but what Descartes brings to it is a systematic exploration of the physiological aetiology of the various emotional responses and, in consequence, a new kind of recipe for dealing with this potentially most rewarding, but often most dangerous, part of our human nature. In his discussion of Descartes' views on the passions, Stephen Gaukroger (Chapter IX) begins by pointing out that moral, medical, and what may be called 'psychotherapeutic' considerations are inextricably intertwined in renaissance and early modern ethics. Moreover, Descartes' approach to the role of the passions in human life has its roots in two " 'The study of the human being' (from the Greek anthropos). Though the term 'anthropology' does not make an explicit appearance in Rodis-Lewis's article. the book of collected essays of which it forms the second chapter is entitled /.'Anthropoloi;ie canesienne.

One of the points about sensations and passions that Descartes had stressed as early as the Meditations is that they are, in general, of signal benefit to the preservation of life: there is an obvious utility in the fact that we feel thirsty when the body needs fluid. One might have supposed that exactly the same is true of cats and dogs, but Descartes is generally held to have denied that non-human animals have any sensation whatsoever: this is the notorious Cartesian doctrine of the 'bete-machine'. Descartes certainly asserted that animals are 'automata', and that the animal (and indeed the human) body may be regarded as a 'machine made by the hand of God'); but in my essay on Descartes' treatment of animals (Chapter X) I point out that, properly construed, neither of these notions logically

22

23

JOHN COTTINGHAM

INTRODUCTION

implies that animals lack feelings. What Descartes does insist on (in his famous discussion of animals in part v of the Discourse on the Method) is, first, that animal utterances do not amount to genuine language, but are instead a set of programmed responses to stimuli; and secondly, that all the movements and behaviour exhibited by animals can be explained micromechanically, by reference to the movements and shapes of the particles out of which the various organs are composed. Neither of these claims in itself says anything about the truth or falsity of statements like 'Fido is frightened' or 'Felix is hungry'. There are several passages, moreover, where Descartes' argument about animals lacking genuine language is linked to such claims as that all their utterances are 'merely expressions of their fear, their hope, or their joy', so that 'they can do these things without any thought' (emphasis supplied; see letter to Newcastle, quoted below, pp. 230-1). This appears not only not to deny, but actually to assert, the truth of statements like 'Fido is frightened'; and in general it would seem that Descartes wishes to explain such truths micro-mechanically, not to deny them (cf. AT VII 230: CSM II 161). He is. in other words, a reductionist about such phenomena, not an eliminativist. But what about the following 'knock-down' argument: 'the passions arise (as seen in the previous section) from the "union" of body and soul; animals (on Descartes' own insistently reiterated view) lack souls; therefore animals cannot have passions.' Well, that is no doubt what Descartes ought to have said; but what he in fact said was, for example, that 'if you train a magpie to say "good day" to its mistress when it sees her coming, [this will not be genuine language because] all you can have done is to make this word the expression of one of its passions' (AT IV 574: CSMK 303, emphasis added). What may be called the 'orthodox' interpretation of Descartes' conception of animals regards passages like this as unfortunate slips on Descartes' part; on this view, all he really means to attribute to the bird is 'purely physiological' happenings, not the 'actual consciousness' of pain, hunger, or whatever. This kind of response reveals, I think, the extent to which many people have become more 'Cartesian' than Descartes himself: believing that pain is defined by some inner conscious occurrence, accessible only to the subject, they take this characteristic inner occurrence to be always present in those who are 'really' in pain, and proceed to take Descartes to task for denying it occurs in animals. 25 I believe there are

more confusions in this line of thought than can be comfortably exposed in an introductory essay; but for the present purpose I will simply observe that in talking about the distinction between humans and animals Descartes never uses the term 'consciousness' (indeed, the term rarely appears anywhere in his writings); and he certainly never uses phrases like 'the actual consciousness of hunger'. What he denies to animals is thought and language; what he accepts (and scientifically explains) is the truth of statements like 'Fido is angry', 'Felix is hungry', 'Birdie expects a titbit'. If there is something more that needs to be said about animals, which Descartes' theory denies or does not allow for, then the onus is on his critics to explain, in a philosophically coherent way, what it is.

0 ' In a letter to Mersenne of I I June 1640. Descartes observes. 'je n'explique pas sans To make an idea 'open' to the mind, to render known its elements and to see how the necessary connection of its direct and interpretative contents follows from them, is thus the purpose of Descartes' basic methodological precept whereby 'we reduce involved and obscure propositions step by step to simpler ones', until we come to an 'intuition of the simplest ones of all'. 61 The ultimate conceptual elements of ideas are called by Descartes 'simple natures'. They include, on the side of material things, such concepts as 'figure', 'extension', 'motion', and on the side of mental phenomena, 'cognition', 'doubt', 'ignorance', 'volition'. Unlike composite ideas, in which it is possible to discriminate from one another not only direct and interpretative contents, but also various parts of the direct content the necessity of whose connection with one another in the idea is no~ '' Cf. Pri11cip/e.1', part i, art. 27. "'Second Replies (AT Vll 147 (CSM ll 105]). "'' Second Replies (AT VII 152 [CSM II 108]). ."' Regul~e, Rule V (AT X,379 [CSN.1I20]). The de omnibus duhiwndum ['one must doubt everything ] of the Flfst Med1tat1on 1s JUst such a systematic reduction of ideas received 'from the senses or through the senses' to the thoughts which arc their clements.

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CLEARNESS A

. . im Jlc na tures can no t be misinterpre ted, for it is impossell-ev1de nt , th e_ s l . direct a nd an int e rpre tati ve conte nt. To sible to d1scnm111ate 111 th em _a . h le te ly and he nce . 1 at all is to thmk o f t e m comp , think o f these s1 mp es < . l. .t akcs i·t difficult fo r th e mind to · ·1 1 th ir ve ry s1mp 1c1 Y m thino 'oth er' than th e mse lves, clearly; s1m1 a r y, c . o . h ith i e mt e rprct t 11e m as, a ny confuse t em w , · · . . . well 62 Since all composite ideas 1 so that they arc pcrc_c1vcd d1 st11~~th~ta~o att~in a clear a nd distin ct perinvo lvc th ese simples, _it l_ollo~s . . . th e reduction o f th e idea to th ese ception of a ny composite idea i~quires t" o n o f the precise way in which se lf-evide nt e le me nts a nd th e n t e pe rcep Ito form th e idea orioinall y in they are combined in a necessa ry nex us o quest.ion. . . f co urse res ult in a n 'adeq uat e' idea. For in This rebd uc: 10n .do;~~~~c~ th e ide~ must in its direct content represent o rd er to e c ea1 a n . , . ' ob ·eel which it is int e rpreted as rcprese nton ly th e 'forma l i~atu~e o'ln~~~tcr'\tsclf-the idea of infinit y, fo r exa mple, idea o f o bsc urit y need no t be obing, but not th~ o JeC o r . . . must not itse lf be 111find1tc, JUSt asll t:t~ain no t th e tota l syste m of implica. oJ_50 that th e re uc t1 o n w1 ' . . h . . .. . I ' d but th ose e le me nts wh1c are scu1 e li o ns in which a n idea is 111vo ve , . f h "dea's , ff . t'M to es tablis h (or re fut e) th e necessa ry connection o t e I ' . su ic1e n < . . Th var io us ' re la ti o ns o r proportions 111 direct and interpret.at ive contents.I . e l ·d will he nce have been so 're. I h . os 1llo n was m1t1a l y 111 vo vc . wh1c 1,t c p1 op a l.t y between .its d.irec t tscourse, part vi (AT VI 65 [CSM 1144]) "' CL Second Replies (AT VII 135 [CSM II 7]) Fifth Replies (AT VII 354 [CSM 11 245 ]). .

9

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ALAN GEW!RTH

example, in Descartes' description of intuition as 'a pure and attentiv mind's conception, so facile and distinct that there remains no doub concerning that which we understand'. 81 But this facility and indubi tableness are regarded by him as effects, rather than as causes, of clearne and distinctness in the logical and perceptual senses, as culminating th. process whereby the mind recognizes the contents of ideas to be of sueh sort that it is unable to perceive them in any way other than the connection before it. It is in this sense. not in a narrowly psyehological one, that Descartes can say, as Burman reports, that 'whether or not perceptions are clear we shall know best from our own consciousness, and for this it is of the greatest help to know all those elucidations of things which the author set forth in the first book of the Princip/es'. 82 The method of clearness and distinctness as Descartes develops it hence exhibits no merely psychological or subjective criteria, but rather logical and perceptual ones which the mind is to use in order to ascertain the conformity of its thought with a world external to it. · " Re1'11l11e. Rule III (AT X 368 (CSM l 14]).

" Conversmirm wilh !311r111a11 (ATV 160 [CSMK 344]). Cf. !'rincip/es. part i. arts. 47ff.

IV FOUNDATIONALISI\lr, EPISTEMIC PRINCIPLES AND THE CARTESIAN CIRCLE ' JAMES VAN CLEVE

The problem of the Cartesian Circle is sometimes treated as though it were merely an exercise for scholars: Descartes fell into it, and their job is to aet him out of it. But more is at stake than extricating Descartes. In lts generalized form, the Cartesian Circle is none other than the Problem of the Criterion, a problem that any epistemology must face. Moreover, to solve the problem of the Circle one must answer questions about epistemic principles that are pivotal in contemporary debates between foundationalists and coherentists. There is reason to hope, therefore, that by examining Descartes' problem, wc can throw light on problems of our own. This paper is divided into two parts. In Part One I examine solutions to the problem of the Circle that are possible within Descartes' own framework. In Part Two I show how what we learn in Part One may be used to resolve some contemporary disputes that hinge on the status ~f epistemic principles.

PART ONE

The problem of the Cartesian Circle arose for Descartes because he appeared to commit himself to each of the following propositions: (1) l can know (be certain) that (p) whatever I perceive clearly and distinctly is true only if I first know (am certain) that (q) God exists and is not a deceiver. From l'lzi/osophical Review, 88 (1979), 55-91, Copyright@ 1979 Cornell University, bv permissmn of the publisher and the author. ·

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JAMES VAN CLEVE

(2) I can know (be certain) that (q) God exists and is not a deceiver onl if 1 first know (am certain) that (p) whatever I perceive clearly an distinctly is true. Obviously, if (1) and (2) are both true, I can never be certain of either po q. To be certain of either, I would already have to be certain of the othe Yet Descartes said he was certain of both p and q. How can this b possible? 1 Any adequate solution to the problem of the Cartesian Circle will plainly have to deny either (1) or (2). In the next section I consider a. famous solution that denies (1 ).

II

The solution I have in mind is the Memory Gambit, according to which God is called upon to guarantee not the truth of clear and distinct percep: tions, but the accuracy of our memories. The most able recent defender of this solution is Willis Doney, who cites a number of passages that seem to show that this solution was Descartes' own. 2 In these passages Descartes says that if I remcmbcr3 clearly and distinctly perceiving something thatl do not nmv clearly and distinctly perceive, I can be certain of it if and onlY; if I know that God exists and is not a deceiver. He also says that an atheist can know theorems of geometry if he is clearly and distinctly perceiving them at the time, but warns that doubts may arise later that only know!-. edge of God's veracity can remove. Doney concludes that the function of God is to guarantee the accuracy of memory, 4 and that the atheist's plight is that in his ignorance of God's guarantee, he cannot be sure that he really did clearly and distinctly perceive what he remembers so perceiving. 1 In presenting the problem this way. I follow Doney, "The Cartesian Circle". Cf. Arnauld's 'only remaining scruple' in HR II 92 [AT VII 214: CSM Il 150]. · The more generalized form would be this: how can l know any epistemic principles unless I first know some other propositions from which to derive them? But how can I know those other propositions unless I first know some epistemic principles'! Sec Roderick M. Chisholm, 11le !'rob/em o.f1he Criierion. The Aquinas Lecture, 1973 (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press,· 1973). I shall not address myself to this problem explicitly. but what I would say about it will become clear in Part Two. ' Doney. 'Cartesian Circle'. Passages often cited in this connection arc HR l 184: HR II 38, 39. 114-15, and 245 [AT VII 70, 140, 246, 428: CSM II 48. 100. 171, 289]. 1 Throughout this essay I use 'remember' in the sense of 'ostensibly remember'. so as not to ensure by definition that what is remembered is true. ' Perh.aps Doney does not wish to say that God guarantees that l\'/1a1ever we remember is true. but only that whatever we remember having perceived clearly and distinctly is something that we did perceive clearly and distinctly.

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Limited to what he can clearly and distinctly perceive at each moment, his knowledge will be 'meager and fugitive'. Although the Memory Gambit has some textual plausibility, Harry Frankfurt has convincingly argued that it is neither the solution Descartes intended, nor a very satisfying sqlution in its own right. 5 I shall not repeat his case here, but I do want to p~int out an alternative explanation of the passages that make the Memory Gambit tempting. Consider the following sequence of propositions: (1) I remember clearly and distinctly perceiving p. (2) So, I did clearly and distinctly perceive p. (3) So, p is true. Descartes says that the atheist cannot argue from (1) to (3). According to the Memory Gambit, this is because he cannot take the step from (l) to (2). But another possible explanation is that he cannot take the step from (2) to (3). And if this is what Descartes had in mind, then he must have felt that a divine guarantee for clear and distinct perception was needed after all. 6

III

I pass now to solutions that deny (2). Interesting solutions of this type have been offered by Alan Gewirth and Fred Feldman. Gewirth sums up his basic strategy as follows: 'Descartes's argument is not circular, for, while it is by the psychological certainty of clear and distinct perceptions that God's existence is proved, what God guarantees is the metaphysical certainty of such pcrceptions.' 7 Psychological certainty is a subjective affair, implying only an irresistible compulsion to believe. 8 Metaphysical certainty, on the other hand, is an objective affair, implying truth. 9 If we let 'certain' in (1) and (2) express metaphysical certainty, then Gewirth would deny (2). I do not need to have metaphysical certainty that clear and distinct perceptions are true ' Frankfurt. 'Memory and the Cartesian Circle'. ' This point is well made by A. K. Stout in 'The Basis of Knowledge in Descartes', Mind, 38 ( 1929), 330-42 and 458--72; repr. in Doney (ed.), Descaries, 91. See also Frankfurt, 'Memory and the Cartesian Circle'. 7 Gewirth, 'The Cartesian Circle', (emphasis added). I shall also refor to two other articles by G~wirth: 'The Cartesian Circle Reconsidered' and 'Descartes: Two Disputed Questions'. ' Gewirth 'Cartesian Circle', 374. 'Clear and distinct perceptions are so coercive in their effect upon the mind that the mind cannot help assenting to them as true at the time it has such perceptions' (ibid. 383). " Ibid. 378, 394.

JAMES VAN CLEVE

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FOUNDATIONALISM AND THE CARTESIAN CIRCLE

. . , . existence· it suffices if clear and distinct percepti~ before I prove God. s. , . . , w But once I am psychologically certm gives me psycholog1cal_ ~ethrt.d1~t{; to establish the metaphysical certainty o that God exists, I can use ts a clear an~ distin~t per~eptiot~ds.by this approach of course, is this: how ca. Th big question promp e · ' 1 · e ~ ·. . t . bout God possibly give rise to metap 1ys1c mereysycholog1c~l,certa~n ~s~inct perceptions? Gewirth's answer to th'

~:~:;~t~ \~~~~~cc;:~ ~~im the following reconstruction of his account

Descartes ' programme.:'\'11 . clear . Iv and. d1stmct . . 1y tirn. t the premisses of. Descartes' the ( 1) I perceive f II f o logical argume1;ts are true, and that tl~eir conclus~o~.s o (~1~~ ~h them. I thereby arrive at clear an~ d1st111':~ perc~p ~on svcholo ical certainty) that God exists and is no dece1~er. . (2) ~-propo~ition I' is metaphysically ccrt escrip1io11 t/11 corps li1111u1111 -· - · · ·-

253

is, error. A nd if we are to limit ourse lves to clea r and d istinct pe rcepti o ns, th e n there wo uld seem to be no room for any appea l to experie nce al all, it wo uld see m, even th e sort of appeal that I o utlin ed in the previous section. 19 B ut , I thi nk, th e situa ti o n is a bit mo re complex th an this textb ook summ ary of D esca rtes' epistem ology might sugges t. D esca rt es does ce rta inl y favo ur reason over th e senses, but he certa inl y does not recomm end rejecting th e senses a ltoge th e r. T he full est acco unt o f D esca rtes' views on th e senses and th e ro le th at they play in th e acquisition of kn owledge occurs in th e Sixth Meditati on. T he reconside rati o n o f the senses, rejected ea rlie r in th e F irst Meditati o n, begins ea rl y in th e Sixth Med ita tio n. Ea rlie r, unsuccessful a ttem pts to prove the existe nce o f bod ies led th e meditato r to conside r mo re carefull y th e fac ult y of im ag inati o n a nd the closely re lated fac ult y of sensation (AT VII 74 [CSM II 51J). A nd so th e medi ta to r goes back over th e conside rati o ns th a t led him fi rst to trust th e senses, ending with a review of th e considerati ons th at o ri gina ll y led him to qu esti on th e senses (AT VIJ 74-7 [CSM II 51-4]) . A t this po int , th e meditato r notes: But now, after I have begun to know myse l f and my author a bit be tter, I do not thi nk t hat everyt hin g t hat I seem to ge t from my senses shoul d sim ply be accepted, hu t t hen I don't t hink t hat everythi ng shou ld be rendered doubtfu l eith er. (AT V II 77-8 [CSM II 54])

T he se nses loom la rge in the res t o f th e Medit ati o n. T he meditato r first d istin guishes betwee n th e mind and th e body. T hen th e q uestio n turns to the exte rna l wo rld , a nd it is he re th at th e senses ma ke th eir first p ositive contributio n to th e e nte rprise. T he meditato r begins: ' Now th ere is in me a ce rtain pass ive fac ult y o f se nsing, th at is, of receiving a nd kn owing the ideas o f se nsible things' (AT VII 79 [CSM II 55]) . We have a pass ive fac ult y o f sensa ti on. B ut this wo uld be o f use onl y if th e re we re, somewhere, a n active fac ulty fo r producing th ese ideas, a ca use . This, D esca rtes arg ues, co uld no t be in me, fo r it seems to in vo lve neither my und ersta nding no r m y will , th e two fac ulties I have. So , th e meditator reasons, the ideas of sensati o n he has must come fro m o utside of him , eithe r fro m G od or fro m bodi es (i.e. bod ies as un de rstood in th e F ifth Med itatio n, things exte nded and exte nded a lo ne) o r fro m somethin g e lse. T he medita tor reaso ns th at it must be from bodies the mselves th at o ur ideas de ri ve; God has give n me a 'grea t propensity fo r believing th at th ey co me to m e from 19

Fo r a deve lopmen t of some of these themes in Desca rt es, see Garber, 'Semel in Vi{{l: The Scienti fic Background to Desca rt es' Medi{{ltio11s'. in Rorty (ed.), f:'ssay.1· 011 Descartes' Meditatio11.1'. 81- 116.

DA

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I EL GA R BER

corp o rea l thin gs', while he has give n me ' no faculty at a ll ' fo r lea rnin g that this propensity might be mistak e n (AT Vll 79-80 [CSM II 55]). So, th e medita tor argues to himself, God would be a deceive r if it turn ed o ut that o ur ideas o f bodi es come from a nywh e re else but from bodies th e mse lves. 20

And so, he concludes, bodies exist. The aro um e nl is a ve ry inte restin g o ne. A conclusion is estab lished not because :e have a clear a nd distinct pe rcepti o n th a t bodies exist, exactly , propensity' for be lievi. ng"J\some thin g, ut because th e mcdit a to r has a 'oreat 0 . b and God has oiven him no way o f correctmg th at prope nsit y.- Descartes ad mits he re th a t th e re are a t least some circumstances in which a belief that we seem to ge t from se nsati o n, th e inclin ati o n to be lieve th a t seems to come to us with th e sensa ti o n, is worthy of o ur trust. ll may no t be as worth y o f o ur trust as a ge nuine cl ea r and distinct perception, as he implies in th e Synopsis o f th e Meditations (AT Vil 16 !CSM JI 1l J), a nd 1t may not always be tru e, as a clear and distinct pe rception is. But when se nsati on lead· us to a belief, as it does in this case , a nd when th a t belie f is not overridd en, as it were , by a reaso n for rejectin g it , as is th e case with our beliefs abo ut colo urs actuall y being in thin gs , say, th e n we can trust th e senscs .22 This is th e stra tegy that Descartes pursues in th e remainde r of th e Sixth Meditation in his discussion of th e senses . He a rg ues that wha t he ca lls the 'teachings o f na ture ', whi ch include th e be liefs that appear to arise spo ntaneo usly with sensati ons, can be. trusted as being for th e most part tru e when corroborated by reason: th a t 1s, when reason does not give us bett e r gro unds for rejectin g a judge me nt from the . senses, o r whe n reaso n is in acco rd with th at judgement, or when reason 1s sile nt o n th e question. . . As with clea r a nd distinct perceptions, D escartes is here dcalmg with some thin o th at God oavc us, beliefs that a rc, in a ce rt a in sense, inna te: 'l am dea li~g o nl y will~ th ose thin gs th a t God gave me as a composite o f mind and body' (AT V II 82 [CSM 1157]). As such, Descartes argues, th ey must be in some sense tru e: ' it is doubtl ess tru e th at everythm g th a t

'°

Fo r a full e r presentation of this argum e nt. see ibid. .. " In the ve rsion o f th e arg um e nt give n in l'ri11ciples. part 11. art. I. Desca rt es does seem to a rgue from the fact that ·we see m cle a rl y to sec' th at se nsa ti on p roceeds to us from the o bject o f o ur idea o f bo dy to th e rea l ex iste nce o f body. and d ocs not a ppea l to th e 'great p ro pe nsity' th a t is the nub o f the a rgum e nt in the Mediwtirms. His not clea r why th e l at~r tex t diffe rs fro m th e earlie r one o n this po int. It may re present a genuine chan ge in Desca rtes c.p1ste mo logy . But the n it ma y simpl y refl ect Descartes· desire not to e nter int o his .lull acco unt ol the senses 111 the f'rin cipfes. For the re lat ion be tween th e Meditations a nd the / '1wnpln. sec G arbe r and Cohe n. ·A Po int of Orde r'. " Th a t is. we ca n trust at least some o f the judge me nt s that characte ristica ll y acco mpa ny o ur sense pe rcept io ns. What seems to be a t issue he re is the third o f Desca rt es· three grades o f se nsati on: sec AT V II ·B6-7 ICSM 11 29+-5 ].

DESCART ES AND THE ROLE OF EXPE RIME NT

255

na ture teaches me has some truth in it' (AT VII 80 (CSM 11 56]). When it is truth about th e nature of things. tha t we are inte res ted in, it is th e lig ht o f reason, clear and d1stmct pe rce ptio ns, that we must turn to first. D escartes wnt es: A n~ so.• n? nature. teaches m e to fl ee what gives me pa in and to seek what gives me pleasu1 e,.and th e bk e. But 1t does not appear th at it teaches us to co nclud e anythin g : bout. . thin gs outside of us. from th e . perceptions of th e se nses without a prior ua11111ia1ton of the 1111e/lect, s111ce knowing th e truth about thin gs seems to pertain to th e_ m111d alone, and not to th e composite [of mind and body]. ( AT VI I 82- 3 [CSM 11 ) 7]; emph asis add ed)

And so, while some o f th e teachings of nature will turn o ut to be tru e it is o nly th e intell ectual examination of th e m that will es tablish this. In' this way D esca rtes res ~ o r es th e senses and rejects th e hype rbo lic rejection of the senses that begms th e M edi!ations; indeed , he goes o n to reject even the dream a rgum e nt that is so promjnent in th e First Meditation (AT VU ~9-90 [CS M lI 61-2]). But thou gh th e teachings of nature, what we lea rn from our senses, are res tored , th ey are subordinate to reason ; they ma y be trust ed. to some ex te nt and 111 some circumstances, but only after th ey have been give n a clea n bill of health by reaso n. It is. with this in ~iind that we should return to the use o f ex perime nt in the rambow case discussed ea rli e r. One can say that in so far as Descartes ?oes aUow th e appea l t.o the sen ·es in at least a ge nera l way, th ere is no 111cons1stency 111 Ca rt esia n e piste mology; as long as what D esca rt es ta kes fro~ th e ex periments to which he appea ls fa lls within th e bounds of proper ~autlon,. there 1s no. s~ecial. proble m here. But there is something more mte res tmg to be said m this case about the way in which experie nce is s ubordinate to reason. In the previous secti o n, I showed th a t while expe rim e nt might functi o n as an a uxiliary to a deduction, it is the deduction itself, a nd not th e expenment, that yields the knowledge. So, for example, in th e anaclastic lme case , while experi e nce mig ht s uggest to us that th e re is som e lawlike relation between angle of incidence and angle of refraction , it is only through deduction that the actual law can be es tablished (see Rule VIII (AT X 394 (CSM 1 29]) ). But the point goes dee pe r still. In the rainbow case, D escartes begins by observing that on his flask , th e stand-in fo r th e ramdrop, th e re are two regi o ns of colour, at roughly 42 and 52 d eorees lrom th e ray o f sunli ght, which angles are th e n dedu ced in th e e nd fro~ his theory. After giving his acco unt, D escart es no tes that an ea rli e r observer th e si~teenth-century mathematician Franciscus Maurolycus, set th~ angles 111correctly at 45 and 56 degrees, on the basis of faulty observations. Descartes no tes that ' this shows how little faith o ne o ug ht to have in

DES CA RT ES AN D THE DA

256

. . . db the true reason' (AT V I 340: o bservations which are not acco mpame y . I . I te the a noles o f the 42) ".i It is on ly beca use we can ca cu a . o_ h 01_scamp 3 . bows fro m the accoun t we have o t the ra mbow l _at pnmary and secon,da? at th1.:y a rc despite the fac t tha t th e inves t1 ga tm_n we can be sure o w 1 ' . l . "" Tl o uoh 1t 1s

~~g~~s;;~~l~~ne~l~~lris~~~-~~atlh~c~~1;~11d:~ ~~:~~- ~l/di~l~:r~~~!~~~~:s:~~:~cs~:~ .

ti l the phe nomena a n

ca usa

. .

de~ua~~~o~~te11~the body o l scientilic kn owledge, strict.ly speak in~'. S 1m~arlyf ~tci: o n! because a deducti on can , indeed , be 1'.1ade Ill the rcvc1se o~n~re~-

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ROLE OF EX P E RIME

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the depe nde ncies th at ar ise . ol t to be trusted. D escartes IS, 0 ' . . . [· c1es o uo 1 . . f I" oht but from the re fl ection o l light o!f o a not rn1l y from rc lract_io n _o. lo ' riate to cause the cha nges in the light surlace whose. t ~xtu1 ~h~s c~fi~~~een. A t o ne point in his discussio n o f the .- d . h an account o f colo ur necessa ry to p1 o uce

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necessa ry to pro duce colour throu gh re lractt1lo1en ~:~1:~sl t~epcc~d~nce of the 338-9) A nd so, 11 seems, . 01 . ~~~~urs s~~~~~ rainbo~ on re fr actio n and re fl ectio n suggested by cxp~1;~ . . .· l· l ilc the ex pe rime nta l dc tc rmm at1o n o l the p us a ded uctive path me nt 1s o nly provisio na · w 1 . 0 0 •• the li 0oht fo llows th ro ugh the dropl et ma y su,,"'c1s~ to .'. 1· the deductio n bl rollow 1t 1s the actua success o . that we might be \ e to . th~t actuall y establishes th e ca usa l connec[rom mtu1ti on;o p t~:o;hecn:omcna. Ex pe riment is im portant in helping t1onfis ~ht~e p~~d~1~~on , but it is the deductio n that, in an impo rt ant sense, Expe rie nce 1s important , lo n 1 na. . f.1xes both the ca usa l pat h and the p i e no.mc D . ·t took orcat pams to but onl y unde r the control _of r eason, as escai cs " . h .· · tl c Sixt h Mcd1tat1 o n. cmfhi~s;.~: t:·e ~[ D escart es' positi on connects in an inte restin g way with[. 11·1 . hy o f science the q uestion o . l ' have a n an ofte n discussed problem in t 1e p I osop . f b ·c rvation. W heth er o r not one can

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, . f the r·1inbow see Bovc r. Fil e U11i11 /Jo 11•. 156-63. '-' For a discussion o f Ma u ro lyc us s th_e o 1y o . ' 1 s·s· va lues for th e an gles de rive fro m The implicati o n o r Descai1es· re ma rks is thMat Malu1 0 yhcua d his' reasons fo r setting the a ngles as . ·1·h· . t e ntire ly fai r. a uro yc us ' ' . . . d. . obse rvat ion al one. IS IS n o I . f il . a th the li oht fo llo ws w1th111 the ralll 1op. he did . reasons based o n_hi s ( in co r'.~ct ) ~na r;;e~s f:~,~· what w;s kn own th rough observation, indeed he kne w th at his calcula te va ue ' I . ( 159-60) · . hh ted to o ffe r a n exp ana t1o n PP· · · . II something fo r wh1c e att c mp . I I t' d oes appea l to a n e xpenm e nt a Y " We must. o f course . re me mbe_r that the ca c~_a 10;1 . ted o ut e arlie r. Descart es wo uld de te rmined va lue for the index o f rc lract 1o n: howevc 1. ns. po 111 sure ly h ave th ought th at a ' reason· co uld be given lo r th ,11 too.

ex perime nt in th e rain bow case shows an inte resting complexity in the who le dispute. D esca rt es does use observa tio n to mo tiva te the theory that he is proposing, or, pe rhaps, to guide us to that theory. In this sense, observa tio n wo uld seem to be atheore tica l fo r D escartes. But at the same time it is extreme ly impo rtant to rea lize that the observations D escartes presents as mo ti va ting his acco unt of th e ra inbow, o r at least guiding it, are not to be trusted fully until we have a n acco unt o f the matter, until we can de rive th ose o bservatio ns fr om mo re basic principl es. T he re is such a thing as pre-theore tical observatio n for D escartes, a nd this does seem to have a ro le to play in his procedure. But , at the sam e time, there is an important sense in which observatio n does not atta in the sta tus of Jae/ until it becomes integrated with th eo ry- indeed , until it becomes subo rdinated to theory. In this way, for D esca rtes, experime nt by itself can establish no fac ts; while ex pe rime nt ca n lead us to facts, it is o nl y the final deduction of a p henomeno n from intuited first principles tha t estab lishes the crede ntials o f a fact , even if first 'discovered ' th ro ugh experime nt. In his rece nt writings, Ia n H acking arg ues that ex pe rime nt must be viewed as in an importa nt sense inde pendent of theori za tion in science: 'expe riment has a life of its own,' he insists.2-' By this he mea ns to point o ut, a mo ng o the r things, that ex perime nt does not functi o n exclusive ly in the se rvice o f theoretica l a rgum e nt , furni shing premisses for theoretical argum ents, testin g th eories proposed , a llowing us to e liminate one of a pair of competing theories and accept a nothe r, and so fo rth. This ma y be true e no ugh for a wide va rie ty of fig ures. But it is no t true for D escartes. For D escartes, at least in the context of the rainbow, ex pe rime nt plays a care fully regime nted role in what is fro m the sta rt a theore tica l proj ect. But , a t the sa me tim e, ne ither do expe rime nta l pheno me na have a ro le ass igned to them in sta ndard hypothe tico-de ducti ve conceptions o f scie ntific method, as the to uchstone o f theory, the atheo retical facts to which we can appea l to adjudicate between alte rna ti ve theories. If my acco unt of experiment is correct, then however much ex periment migh t help us to find the correct account, it is ultimately reason, not experim ent , that is th e to uchstone of reality, fo r the o ry as well as for the ex pe rimenta l facts tha t he lp us construct t heo ries .26 " Ian Hack ing. l • of corroboratmg ~vi c . '' , ,