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9 Descartes, Meditations II In Meditations II Descartes set out to
determine whether there is anything that I could be certain of after the
doubts of Meditations I. He quickly determined that there is: the
fact that I exist. But to know that I
exist is one thing, and to know exactly what I am is something else. The main part of Meditations II is devoted to answering this further
question. Descartes’s
answer was novel. It formulated a
concept that had not existed before: the concept of an entirely incorporeal
mind. What I am, Descartes claimed, is
a mind or thing that thinks. People
prior to Descartes had of course had ideas of something in us that thinks,
called the soul or the spirit. But
they had thought of souls and spirits as parts or forms of the body. Spirits were traditionally thought of as a
mixture of warm air, fire, and aether. Note that these are all physical, gaseous
bodies, invisible to our eyes but still occupying a specific region of space
and able to move and act under compression.
Souls were considered to be something in the body responsible for
animating it and so making it move, grow, reproduce, digest food, sense, and
reason. Many people identified them
with the gaseous animal spirits they supposed to flow through the tubes of
the nerves. Others, like Descartes’s contemporaries, Ralph Cudworth
and Henry More, drew a distinction between body and soul, but considered both
souls and bodies to be extended but souls to be penetrable and “indiscerpible” (indivisible) extension whereas bodies are
impenetrable and discerpible. Those who came closest to thinking that
souls are immaterial were the Christianizing medieval interpreters of
Aristotle, who viewed souls as forms that might be separated from the matter
of the body, and even they still viewed the soul as being intimately
associated with the body, as its form.
Even Aristotle’s predecessor, Plato, when arguing for immortality in
the Phaedo,
conceived of the soul as a material particular that bears the form of life
essentially, the way fire bears heat. Descartes’s Meditations
II, in contrast, forged a conception of mind as a purely thinking thing. Though he did not go so far as to affirm
that the mind could not possibly be an extended body part, like the brain
(that strong claim was one he waited until Meditations VI to make), he did insist that he could conceive of
himself as existing just as a thinking thing, without thereby being compelled
to suppose that he is an extended or physical thing. It was perhaps because this claim was so
new and so radical that he felt compelled to back it up with an argument concerning
the nature of a piece of wax that occupies the second half of the meditation. Meditations II makes
continual reference to a traditional view of the human cognitive powers. According to that view, we possess three
powers: sense, imagination, and understanding or intellect. Sense gives us our sensory experiences,
imagination allows us to form pictures or images of things that are not
currently presented to us by sensory experience, and the understanding gives
us our power to think in general or abstract terms. It will become clear that Descartes meant
to subsume the sensory and imaginative functions under the intellectual, but
because he assumed that his readers would think of them as distinct, he began
by speaking in those terms. His own position on the cognitive powers emerges gradually as
this and the other meditations proceed. QUESTIONS ON THE
1. What was Descartes’s reason for rejecting the claim that God or
some other great being might give all his thoughts to him?
2. Why did
Descartes think that each of the following reasons for denying that he exists
is inadequate:
i. I have
denied that I have senses or a body
ii. I have
persuaded myself that nothing at all exists in the world
iii. There could
be a deceiver who is deceiving me about this
3. Why did
Descartes reject the traditional view that he is a rational animal?
4. Why did he
reject the “spontaneous and natural” view that he is a body animated by
natural spirits? Note: “What about sensing?” AT VII 27. By
“sensing” Descartes must have meant the operation of having one’s sense
organs affected by external objects and receiving impressions of those
objects as a consequence. There is
another, leaner notion of “sensing” that involves simply experiencing sensations,
like the aches a person who has had a limb amputated experiences as if they
were in the absent limb. This is what
Descartes later (AT VII 29)
referred to as sensing “properly speaking,” and what he identified as simply
a mode of thinking. This “proper”
sensing can take place without a body and can occur in dreams.
5. What is
there that Descartes found to be inseparable from himself?
6. Would
Descartes accept that one ceases to think while in a deep sleep?
7. What are
the sorts of things that are involved with thinking and that are in Descartes
insofar as he is a thinking thing?
8. What is
there that cannot be false in sensing and imagining?
9. What is
there that is really essential to a sensible body like a piece of wax after
we remove everything that has to do merely with the way it manifests itself on special
occasions and concentrate just on those features it must always possess in
any circumstance whatsoever? 10. How do
these features of the wax come to be known? 11. How do the
features that Descartes originally perceived the wax to have come to be
known? NOTES ON THE Descartes opened Meditations II by observing that my
belief in my own existence resists all attempts at doubt. Though the dreaming argument should have
convinced me that I cannot be certain of the existence of an external world
or even of my own body, this is not the same thing as convincing me that I
cannot be certain of my own existence.
After all, Descartes observed, why should I think I am so tied to my
body that I cannot exist without it?
The main point of Meditations
II is made right here. It is still
voiced hesitantly, by way of expressing a doubt (I cannot be certain that I
need a body in order to exist), but it will be voiced with more confidence
later. The other grounds for
doubt fare no better. Might I just be
dreaming that I exist? Then I would
have to be there to do the dreaming.
Might there be an evil genius who tries to trick me into believing
that I exist when in fact I do not?
But how could the evil genius set out to deceive me unless I exist to
be deceived? So the belief in my
own existence is certain because it resists all attempts to show that it is
uncertain. Having established the
certainty of my own existence, Descartes proceeded to ask what exactly it is
that I know to exist. We think that we
are human beings. But it is
controversial what makes one thing a human being and another not, so that
could not be what I can say I know with certainty about myself insofar as I
am certain that I exist. According to one
opinion, the opinion of what we might consider to be the educated person of Descartes’s day, what it means for me to be a human being
is that my nature is determined by an essential form that differentiates me,
as a human being, from other kinds of animal life. This essential form is the form of
rationality. But Descartes quickly
dismissed this view as obscure, claiming that he had no clear idea of what
“rational animality” means, and no hope of being
easily able to find out. If I am now certain that I exist, then I must now be certain of what it is that I am
talking about when I say I exist.
(Otherwise, how could I claim to know that I exist? It would be absurd
to claim that something exists and yet have no idea what this thing is.) But this means that if I do not now know what rational animality is, then that
cannot be what I know about when I claim to be certain of my own existence. So the traditional
view of human nature, and thereby of what I am, cannot be the correct one. Descartes turned to
consider a second view. This is a view
that the average person, not exposed to academic teachings, might hold of
human nature. As Descartes represented
it, this view is an amalgam of information about our nature gleaned from
sensory experience and from a bit of creative imagination. If you ask the average person what it means
to be a human being, they will probably respond by saying, first off, that it
means to have a human body. That is,
that it means having human limbs, a human head, eyes, and other organs. Of course all of these things could just as
well be found in a mannequin or a freshly dead corpse. So Descartes conjectured that the average
person would probably add that over and above the body parts, human beings
contain some animating principle, which we call the soul. This is not something we sense, and the
average person is likely to have only the vaguest notions of it, but
Descartes remarked that those who have thought about the matter have imagined
that the soul must be some sort of very subtle or rare stuff, since it must
permeate all the apparently solid parts of the body, like the muscles. Yet it must be something that is also solid
enough to make them move, and so mobile in its own right. Perhaps it is something like warm air or
breath or fire, which can still exercise a considerable force when
compressed. Descartes’s contemporaries referred to
this conjectural gas as “the animal (i.e., animating) spirits.” But these common sense
views are also open to doubt. The view
that I am my body has already been cast into doubt by the dreaming
argument. And the view that I am
animated by some sort of vapour or fiery breath is fanciful. It is not based on any evidence at all but
is a speculation produced by the imagination. Yet, all the same, Descartes
observed, I am sure that I exist. What
therefore is it that I am sure of?
And, just as importantly, how do I come to be sure of it? We have just ruled out the possibilities
that this knowledge is from education, from sense experience, or from conjecturing
about or imagining likely possibilities. With all the other
possible sources of self-knowledge out of contention, Descartes turned to the
one remaining one: intellectual judgment or understanding. What, he asked, do we understand ourselves
to be? What can we deduce that we must
be if we are to restrict ourselves just to asserting things that cannot be
doubted? One thing that cannot
be doubted is our very thoughts themselves insofar as they exist in us. Even an evil genius could not deceive me
about the existence of my thoughts.
For example, an evil genius could not make me think that I am
experiencing red without giving me a thought of red. Were the evil genius to destroy that
thought, then I could not think it. These reflections led
Descartes to conclude that whatever else he is, he must at least be a bundle of various kinds of thoughts, including
sensations, fantasies, desires, aversions, and intellectual apprehensions of
both the imagistic and the more abstract, purely conceptual type. But there is something else as well. Among the thoughts that Descartes found
within himself are judgments: affirmations, denials, and doubts. He also found inferences: judgments that
one judgment follows from others. These
sorts of thoughts, judgments and inferences, contain other thoughts that have
been bound together or unified in the larger thought that is the judgment or
inference. Even judgments that
distinguish or separate one thought from another do this. Moreover, the same thought may figure in
many different judgments, in which it is bound up with various other
thoughts. So we might say that by
means of thoughts and judgments various thoughts are made one thought. We might also think of judgments and
inferences as being more like operations performed on things than like things
themselves. It is as if, when I make a
judgment, there is something that looks at the various thoughts contained in
the judgment and compares them with one another. Were this the case, there would be
something over and above a unity of thoughts in larger thoughts. There would be some thing that has the
thoughts or that thinks them. Yet this
relating and thinking thing could not be distinct and separate from its
thoughts. It has to have some sort of
access to them if it is to relate them.
They have to be one with it in the same way that they are one with one
another, so that it can draw them all together in the unity of its judgment
or inference. In drawing this
conclusion, Descartes did not rule out the possibility that I might be
something even more than just a thing that is bound up with a number of
thoughts, a “thinking thing.” In
particular, he did not mean to positively deny that I might also have a body. His point was just that, at this stage in
his investigations, all that I can know for sure is that I am a thinking
thing. Since I cannot grasp how other
supposed aspects of human nature, like having a body, could possibly be
required for thinking (I see no contradiction in the notion of an immaterial
spirit or angel having thoughts or dreams), I am in no position to include a
body in my notion of myself. Note also that, by
saying that I am a thing that has various kinds of thoughts, including
sensations, fantasies, and desires, Descartes did not mean to imply that
objects corresponding to or resembling what is envisioned in these thoughts
must exist outside of me. He was only affirming that thoughts of
these different types must exist inside
of me, and that I must exist as a thing that is having these thoughts.
Indeed, Descartes took this last point so far as to speculate that thinking
might be so central to my nature that I can exist only insofar as I think, so
that a suspension of the act of thinking would entail the destruction of my being,
just as a suspension of the capacity to move, reproduce, and take in
nourishment from the environment would entail the destruction of an animal,
which can only be considered to be alive insofar as it performs these
functions. The implicit distinction
that is drawn here, between thought and object, is as serious as the more
explicitly drawn distinction between being a mind and being a body. It is not entirely unprecedented. The ancient sceptics had come up with a
number of arguments directed to show that we only experience “appearances” of
objects and not those objects themselves.
And mechanistic natural philosophers wanted to treat at least the
sensible qualities as only appearances existing in sentient creatures and not
properties of external bodies. But it
can safely be said that common opinion did not distinguish between thought
and object. To see red or feel a
shape, on the common view, is to see and feel a property of an object
existing outside of us. For Descartes
in contrast, any kind of thought, be it of primary or secondary qualities, is
a something that exists in the being who has the thought. Its reference to an external object is open
to doubt and in need of demonstration and all the demonstration could do, if
successful, is establish a resemblance between the thought and the object,
not an identity. It follows that in
reaching his conclusion about what I am, Descartes was actually expanding the
list of things that I can be certain of.
I cannot just be certain that I exist; I must also be certain that my
thoughts exist in me insofar as I think them.
After all, if I know myself as a thinking being, then I must know of
my thoughts as things that are in me. all of these things [doubts, thoughts,
affirmations, denials, volitions, refusals, images, sensations] belong to
me. Is it not the very same “I” who
now doubts almost everything, who nevertheless understands something, who
affirms that this one thing is true, who denies other things, who desires to
know more, who wishes not to be deceived, who imagines many things even
against my will, who also notices many things which appear to come from the
senses? What is there in all of this
that is not every bit as true as the fact that I exist ...? Which of these things is distinct from my
thought? Which of them can be said to
be separate from myself? [AT VII 28-29] The point is put more
emphatically later, in Meditations
III: what was it about these things that I
clearly perceived? Surely the fact
that the ideas or thoughts of these things were hovering before my mind. But even now I do not deny that these ideas
are in me. [AT VII 35] In reaching this
foundational conclusion, Descartes avoided any reliance his senses. He relied instead on a kind of inward
observation or consciousness that made him aware of, among other things, the
existence of sensations. But he did
not rely on the sensations themselves — as he would have if he supposed that
they told him about things that exist outside of his mind. Rather than learn about himself by doing
medical, anatomical, physiological, or psychological research, he uncovered
what he took to be his essential nature merely by introspection. Descartes was not
entirely comfortable with this last observation. He worried that, as certain
and evident as it appeared to him to be, his position on his nature was too
unconventional, too radical, and too much at variance with both established
opinion and common sense to win ready acceptance. The “armchair” reflections that justify it
pose a particular impediment to its acceptance. Descartes was aware that we have a sort of
prejudice in favour of whatever we can come to know through the exercise of
our senses and imagination, and a contrary prejudice against all abstract and
purely intellectual thought. Our
senses and imaginations give us concrete images or pictures of things and
these thoughts are vivid and detailed.
The abstract notions we grasp with pure understanding and reasoning,
in contrast seem to us to be ephemeral and difficult to get a hold on. How can it be, Descartes worried, that what
he took to be most true and certain about us should be grasped by a kind of
abstract thinking rather than by what we intuitively take to be the more
accurate and reliable picturing and imaging capacities provided by our senses
and imaginations? What may have been
particularly troubling to Descartes was the thought that he had not really
answered the question of what I am. He
had stated that I am “A thing that thinks,” that is “A thing that doubts, understands,
affirms, denies, wills refuses, and that also imagines and senses.” (AT VII
28). But this is not really what I am; it is rather what I do.
Descartes answered the question of what sort of thing I am by giving a
list of the operations that this thing performs. But what is the thing that performs these operations, the substance or substratum
in which they inhere? If I say that I
am a body, then I can at least point to it and describe it as a thing that
fills space and persists over time.
But what could Descartes identify as the thing does the thinking? This may be why, even
though the job of Meditations II
was effectively over once Descartes had established that I know myself just
as a thinking thing, he could not leave the subject without backing it up by
further attack on the kind of pictorial thinking that makes us believe we
know things we can sense and imagine better than ourselves considered as
thinking things. THE ARGUMENT FROM THE PIECE OF WAX In order to buttress
his conclusion, Descartes asked us to consider a paradigm instance where we
would think we are getting information about an object through the
senses. He then brilliantly managed to
convince us that what we most certainly know about this object is not
anything that we can picture, but only something that we can understand. All the pictorial qualities of the object
turn out, upon due consideration to be transient and merely apparent. His point was that if this paradigm case of
sensory experience does not in fact yield valuable knowledge of an object,
but what we most accurately know of the object is instead revealed by
understanding, then we should not hesitate to recognize that the same is true
of our knowledge of ourselves. Descartes made his
case by considering a piece of wax.
What do we really know about it, he asked, and how do we know it? We think we know it by sensing, which gives
us a vivid and detailed picture of the object. But just how accurate is this picture? Here is what we sense: a yellow colour, the
taste of honey, a flowery smell, a rapping sound the wax makes when tapped,
and certain tangible qualities of firmness, coolness, shape, and size. But heat the wax and see what happens: The yellow colour disappears and the wax
turns white and even transparent. The
honey taste and flowery smell are burned off.
The wax turns too soft to make a sound when hit and has become
hot. It grows larger and changes its
shape. Yet we still think
this is the same piece of wax. But how could this be,
unless none of those features our senses revealed to us were really essential
to the wax? The features may have all
been there in the wax, but obviously the wax now continues to exist without
any of them. They were nothing more
than accidental features of the wax.
They were just temporary modes in which the wax happened to appear,
but which it could just as well lose without being destroyed. Descartes proceeded to
ask what is really essential to the wax.
He determined that we can say at least that it is a physical body that
takes up space. Were it not to take up
space (were it, for example, to be consumed in the fire) then certainly it
would cease to exist. But what sort of space
does the wax take up? A cubical
space? A globular one? And how much space does it take up? We have
already seen that just as the wax lost or changed its sensible qualities, so
it changed its shape and size. Yet it
is still wax even though it has changed the particular way it happens to be
extended over space. So having a particular shape and size could not be
essential to it. All that is really
essential to it is that it take up some
space, but not that it take it up in any specific way or that it take up any
specific amount. In other words, all
that is really essential to the wax is just that it be extended somehow. Descartes expressed this notion by saying
that it must be something extended (something that takes up space somehow),
flexible (since it can change in shape and size) and mutable (since it can
change the other sensible qualities it exhibits). But if this is what
the wax really is — something extended, flexible, and mutable — how do we
know it? We cannot know it by sense,
because all our senses ever reveal to us is some particular size and shape —
indeed, some particular size and shape invested with other sensible
qualities. The senses give us no
concept of extension in general. Nor can we get this
idea from the imagination. We can
indeed imagine a whole range of different sizes, shapes, and sensible
qualities that the wax might take on, but when we do this we never imagine
extension in general or mutability in general. We always imagine some series or sequence
of particular shapes, sizes, and
other properties. And if we tried to
imagine all of the different sizes, shapes, and other properties that we
understand (note the word) the wax could take on, our imaginations would
quickly become overtaxed. They are
simply inadequate to picture the full range of what we find ourselves able to
understand in the abstract or general concepts of extension, flexibility, and
mutability. We obtain a conception
of extension in general and of the wax as something that can take on an
infinite or arbitrarily large range of sizes, shapes, and other properties
through the understanding rather than through the senses or the
imagination. Thus, the really
essential feature of the wax is something grasped by the understanding, and
not by the picturing capacities of the mind. Someone might object
that even if it is only through the understanding that we come to grasp a
part of the true essence of the wax, it is only through consulting sense
experience that the understanding gets the information it needs to work up to
the apprehension of a general concept like that of extension. After all, were there no piece of wax given
in sensory experience, what would give us the occasion to think of one? Descartes’s answer to
this worry is worth citing. But I need to realize that the
perception of the wax is neither a seeing, nor a touching, nor an
imagining. Nor has it ever been, even
though it previously seemed so; rather it is an inspection on the part of the
mind alone. This inspection can be imperfect and confused, as it was before,
or clear and distinct, as it is now, depending on how closely I pay attention
to things in which the piece of wax consists. [AT VII 31] Note the contrast
between this view and that attributed to Hobbes in Chapter 5. Whereas Descartes declared that all ideas
are grasped by the understanding and that sensing and imagining are just more
confused and obscure apprehensions on the part of the understanding, Hobbes
took the understanding to be nothing more than an ability to grasp the precise
meaning of words, and hence to refer words back to the sensory experiences
they were originally designed to signify.
Thus, whereas Descartes treated sense and imagination as more confused
forms of understanding, Hobbes declared that understanding can only be
clarified by referring back to what is given in sense. Both philosophers ended up rejecting the
Aristotelian view that there is both a higher (intellectual) and a lower
(sensory-imagistic) cognitive power, but they did so in opposite ways. To return to the text,
Descartes’s point was that while we may have needed
to first get informed of the existence of the wax through what we call
sensing, this sensing is not a distinct cognitive operation, rivalling
understanding, but merely a more imperfect and inadequate form of
understanding that is subsequently rendered more adequate. In order to further
justify this claim, Descartes argued that the distinction between sensing and
understanding is really a distinction in degree and not a distinction in kind. Even what we consider to be simple acts of
sensing actually involve judgment, and the more judgment there is, the more
detailed and correct we take the sensing to be; whereas the less judgment
there is, the more raw and uninformative we take the sensing to be. Looking out a third story window in a 17th
century French city, we see what we take to be men, dressed like musketeers,
walking up and down. But we do not in
all strictness see this. We judge
that there are musketeers walking up and down. All we strictly see are hats and cloaks
that we take to be covering men, but that could possibly be covering
robots. Indeed, even this is going too
far. All that we really see is a
collection of colour patches that we suppose to be hats and cloaks but that
may be nothing more than dreams and figments of our imagination. Further, insofar as we suppose these colour
patches to even look like hats and cloaks it is only because we are judging
that they go together in a certain way.
On our visual fields different colour patches are simply set one
alongside another. Each one is
distinct from the surrounding ones.
But when we think that we are seeing a kilt, we take a whole group of adjacent
colour patches and draw an outline around them, considering that they all
belong together as parts of one object, the kilt, whereas other colour
patches that immediately touch those composing the kilt make up other
objects. In effect, we make the
boundaries between some colour patches more important than the boundaries between
others by considering them to be boundaries between objects and not just
boundaries between differently coloured regions of the same object. This is a judgment that we make about what
we see, not something that we actually see.
We judge that colour patches go together under concepts of objects;
they do not come glued together in that way.
Grasped in this context, what we strictly see is not very much at
all. Right from the outset, Descartes
observed, judgments (or, equivalently put, acts of the understanding) are
necessary to infuse raw sensory data with meaning, and the more the process
of judgment is exercised, the more accurate the result becomes. Let us apply all these
reflections back to the case of the wax.
We have learned that we actually know the wax best through an exercise
of the understanding that involves judging what is essential to it. That judgment tells us that the wax is
something extended, flexible, and mutable.
Compare this piece of information to what my understanding tells me
about myself: that I am a thing that thinks.
The form of both pieces of information is rather similar. In both cases we allude to the existence of
something and then we go on to talk about operations the thing manages to
perform. In the one case these operations
are sensing, imaging, conceiving, judging, asserting, denying, willing, and
so on. In the other they are filling
more or less space, flexing, and changing.
In neither case do we really end up identifying the nature of the
thing that performs these operations.
We describe it merely by appeal to the operations. In the one case, we talk about an extended
thing, in the other about a thinking thing. Note something
further. In the case of the wax we
have no assurance that the thing we are making the judgment about exists
anywhere outside of our thoughts. What
we are really making the judgment about is not some object outside of us, but
merely about the content that appears in some of our thoughts. In other words, our judgment about the wax
is in a way really a judgment about ourselves or something that appears in
us. But if that is the case then we are brought back to Descartes earlier
claim: what we know best is not anything outside of us that we think we can
picture through sense or imagination.
It is rather ourselves as thinking things and the thoughts we contain
that we know best. And the fact that
we can form no picture or image of that thing does not mean that we do not
know it better than anything we can form pictures or images of. ESSAY QUESTIONS AND RESEARCH PROJECTS
1. What is the
basis for Descartes knowledge of his own existence? Did he base it on a piece
of reasoning or an argument, or did he come to know it in some other
way? If the former, how is his
knowledge compatible with the possible existence of an evil genius? If the latter, how is his knowledge to be
understood?
2. Was
Descartes entitled to claim, at this stage in his argument, that he did not
need to have a body in order to be able to understand, affirm, deny, doubt,
will, etc.?
3. Could an
evil genius make me be mistaken about what it is that I am thinking? Would Descartes have allowed that
self-deception is possible?
4. Descartes
claimed to know that he is a thinking thing.
However, to say that what exists is a “thing” suggests that there is
something that bears properties (in this case, that there is something that
has thoughts) and that this thing endures over time, perhaps altering in
state (i.e., changing its thoughts) over time. Is there anything in Descartes’s
account in Meditations II that
might entitle him to affirm that, in addition to the thoughts that he knew
must exist, there must be some one substance in which they all inhere? |