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10 Descartes, Meditations IIIa (AT VII
34-42) Meditations III opens
with a problem. The discoveries of Meditations II about how we know the
essence of the wax and about how we come to know our own nature as thinking
things appear to imply that we can get to the truth of things by looking
within ourselves and carefully studying or “very clearly and distinctly
perceiving” the ideas we find there.
However, in Meditations I
Descartes had declared that all of these ideas might be illusions, arising in
dreams. But what exactly would it mean
for them to be illusory? It could not
mean that they are not really there.
If I think I have the idea of a red circle there has to be something
red and circular “there” before me; otherwise I would never have been
inspired to have the thought. The
illusion, if there is one, is not with the judgment that the thoughts are not
now present to me somehow, but with the judgment that they are or are images
or copies of something that exists apart from me and independently of being
thought of or dreamed up by me. That
judgment may be false, but the ideas themselves that figure in the judgment
would have to be there if I judge something about them, however erroneous
that judgment may be. However, in addition
to this, Meditations I had claimed
that I may get the most basic things wrong about the nature of these ideas
that I see within me. For example,
when I see five points displayed in the configuration they have on the face
of a die, I may be wrong whenever I think what I am seeing is one group of
three points and another group of two points — and wrong even if I draw
distinct circles around these two groups of points. This is what is involved with claiming that
a supremely powerful evil genius might even be able to deceive us even about
those things that we think we grasp most clearly, such as that two plus three
is equal to five. But there just seems
to be something wrong about this second ground for doubt. Just as I can’t come to think that I am
having the thought of a red circular unless there is something red and
circular present to my mind to make me think this, so I can’t come to think
that I am having the thought of five points unless there is a group of three
points and a separate group of two points present to my mind to make me think
of five points. I can’t think the
thought without thinking something that has one specific nature and not
another. If I could be radically
mistaken about this nature of the thought — that it is both red and circular,
or that it consists of one group of two points and another of three — then I
couldn’t be having that particular thought in the first place but must be
having some other one. Mistakes on the
order of thinking that two plus three is more or less than five would only
seem to be possible when I do not go to the trouble of clearly and distinctly
perceiving the thought of five points, but merely remember some sort of
verbal formula that applies to that clear and distinct perception, and manage
to misremember while not going back to give myself the clear and distinct
perception that the verbal formula only describes. This is what happens in more complex cases
when I claim that seven plus nine is fifteen.
I don’t actually inspect a group of fifteen points and see in an
instant how it falls into two groups of seven points and nine points, which
of course it could never do. I make
the mistake because I don’t try to clearly and distinctly perceive this, but
seek to abbreviate that effort of attention by merely recalling some string
of words I thought I uttered to myself to describe the clear and distinct
perception the last time I had it. So here is the
dilemma: Whenever Descartes actually took the trouble to clearly and
distinctly perceive such facts about his ideas as that they exist or that
they have certain natures that resemble one another in some ways and differ
in others, he was sure that he grasped these things so clearly and evidently
that it was impossible to doubt them. But when he ceased contemplating these
ideas and turned instead to consider the infirmity of his own nature and the
possibility of the existence of a demon deceiver, he started to wonder
whether he really had seen things so clearly and began to worry that perhaps
he had made some mistake somewhere. Descartes’s project
was stalled by these considerations.
He would have liked to say that whatever I come to know by inspecting
the thoughts that I find within myself and simply describing what I very
clearly and distinctly perceive in those thoughts must be true. That is, he
would have liked to identify clear and distinct perception of the content of
his own ideas as a source of certain knowledge, and rely on it to continue
establishing new truths. The problem
with this is that to make any progress he needed to be able to rely on his
memory of having clearly and distinctly perceived things, rather than go back
and perform the process all over again.
We can only clearly and distinctly perceive so much at once, given
that our minds are limited. If we want
to go beyond what they can hold in a moment, we need to rely on chains of
inference or demonstration and so on memory of what we have clearly and
distinctly perceived in the past. But
when we stop clearly and distinctly perceiving something, that is when doubt
enters in — doubt about whether we really did clearly and distinctly perceive
it or are misremembering or having false memories fed to us, and even a more
radical doubt whether we might have some defect that leads us to radically
misperceive even when we think we are perceiving most immediately and
clearly. The only way Descartes could
proceed was by eliminating the worries that some demon could deceive me even
about what I seem to most clearly and distinctly perceive, or that, even if
there is no such demon, my nature might be so defective that it fails to
inform me correctly about what I most clearly and distinctly perceive. Doing this meant establishing that I have
been created by a benevolent being, who does not want to deceive me, who gave
me reliable knowing powers, and who would not allow me to be systematically
deceived by any other creature. This
is the project of Meditations III. Over the course of Meditations III Descartes offered two
arguments for the existence of a benevolent God. Both are causal arguments. A causal argument works by saying that
something must exist because, if it did not, something else, that we all know
exists, could not have been caused to exist.
For instance, you get a postcard from your friend postmarked in In the past, people
who tried to give causal arguments for the existence of God did so by
pointing to the way the world has been designed to sustain life, and arguing
that this could only be explained by assuming God caused it. But since the existence of an external
world is something that is still open to doubt for Descartes in Meditations II, he could not appeal to
this argument. At the outset of Meditations II he was only certain of his
own existence, and of the existence of his own thoughts. He had no choice but to base his causal
arguments on these effects. His first
and most important causal argument is devoted to trying to prove that God
must exist because otherwise a particular idea that he had, the idea of God,
could not exist. His second argument
attempts to prove that God must exist because otherwise he himself could not
exist. QUESTIONS ON THE
1. What made
Descartes so sure that nothing we very clearly and distinctly perceive could
be false?
2. Is the
existence of the earth, sky, and stars clearly and distinctly perceived? If not, why not, if so, in what sense?
3. Are the
truths of mathematics clearly and distinctly perceived? If not, why not, if so in what sense?
4. What is the
proper definition of the term, “idea?”
5. What is the
most frequently occurring error in judgment, in Descartes’s
opinion?
6. Explain Descartes’s distinction between natural impulse and light
of nature.
7. Why is it
an error to suppose that because I have some ideas that come and go
independently of my will, that therefore these ideas must be caused by
external objects?
8. Explain Descartes’s distinction between formal and objective
reality.
9. Why could
an effect not be greater than its cause? 10.
Can an idea of an object be more perfect than
the object itself? NOTES ON THE Descartes’s initial
project in Meditations III was to
inquire into the causes of his ideas.
He wanted to find out if all of his ideas might be caused just by
himself, or whether some of his ideas must have been caused by something
other than himself. He wanted, in
particular to find out whether some of his ideas must have been caused by a
benevolent God. As a preliminary to
undertaking this investigation, he thought it best to first survey his ideas
and arrange them into groups or classes.
(Recall the second of the methodological rules he had presented in Discourse II.) This led him to claim
that all of our thoughts fall into three groups: those that are like pictures
or images of things (ideas), those that involve a passion or emotion felt
with reference to some pictured or imagined object, and those that make some
sort of judgment about one or more pictured or imagined objects. The thoughts in the first group are ideas
in the “proper” sense, and they are the most fundamental, as thoughts in the
second or third group need them to build on. Descartes proceed to
ask about the causes of these fundamental ideas. Some of them seem to be innate. We seem to have thought them for as far
back as we can remember. So perhaps
they were part of our original constitution.
Other ideas, often called “factitious” (from the Latin “facio” meaning
“I make”), appear to us to be produced through an effort of our own imaginations. But there are some ideas that we seem to
come upon “by adventure” as it were, that is, that we experience both
independently of the will and only upon finding ourselves in particular
circumstances. In some translations, Descartes’s references to the ideas in this last class are
translated using the term, “adventitious.”
He proceeded to ask where these adventitious ideas might come
from. Does their existence establish
that particular objects must exist for a time at different places here and
there around us? If I am cold I may
very much want to be warm, but wanting it will not by itself bring these
sensations about. I need to move to
bring myself into the presence of something like a fire. Similarly, if I am annoyed by music coming
from another apartment, I may very much want the sound to go away, but the
idea will stay with me nonetheless.
Does this prove that my sensations of heat are caused by some hot
object like fire, or of sounds by some sounding object? Descartes thought
not. When we think about why we are
convinced of the necessity of the existence of such causes of our sensations we
realize that it is not because we clearly and distinctly perceive the
connection. The proposition “my
adventitious ideas are caused by something that exists outside of me and that
resembles them” is not known by identifying simple natures and intuiting
relations between them. It is instead
the product of an unreflective “natural impulse” or “juvenile preconception”
formed in infancy and never subjected to close scrutiny. The difference between
what is known by means of “clear and distinct perception” and what is known
by means of “natural impulse” or “juvenile preconceptions” is an important
for Descartes, because both affect us in the same way: they leave us feeling
convinced of something. But one of
these things, clear and distinct perception, is supposed to be infallible,
whereas the other, natural impulse, is supposed to induce us to make
judgments that are still open to doubt. We had better be able to tell the
difference between the two if we are to avoid taking whatever we are strongly
convinced of to be a clear and distinct perception. Unfortunately, what Descartes had to say on
this matter is not very satisfying. As
he explained it, a clear and distinct perception is based on an evident grasp
of the nature of things whereas a natural impulse is “blind.” Rather than arise from a “well founded
judgment” (AT VII 40), a natural impulse is the product of an automatic
instinct that operates unreflectively and without any discernment. The proof of this is that we cannot see any
foundation for the claims we are led to make by natural impulse. The impulse carries us beyond what we
actually discern when we contemplate the nature of our adventitious ideas and
induces us to “blindly” make assertions that we do not in fact perceive to be
true. Arguments such as the dreaming
argument or the demon deceiver argument make this clear by providing grounds
for doubt — doubts that simply would not arise if we had a truly clear and
distinct perception of the facts in question.
Clear and distinct perception, in contrast, is made in the “light of
nature.” There is a “light” that
illuminates the nature of the things that we are judging about and this
“light” makes it so evident that the judgment is correct that we cannot
resist assenting to it, try as we might. The attempt I have
just made to explain the distinction between clear and distinct perception in
the light of nature and juvenile preconception on the basis of a natural
impulse does not go beyond appeals to metaphors of light and blindness. It fails to come up with a criterion that
we can unerringly apply to determine whether a proposition is suggested by
natural impulse or by clear and distinct perception. But we can at least say this much: in clear
and distinct perception there is some kind of process of analysis of compounds
into simple ingredients and some sort of judgment based on comparison of
simple ingredients. In natural impulse
there is just a hunch. Descartes went on to
offer two further reasons for doubting that our adventitious ideas come from
things existing outside of us that resemble those ideas. These reasons further support the assertion
that this proposition is not in fact clearly and distinctly perceived. The first is that the most that such
experiences prove is that we have ideas that occur independently of our
wills. But to occur independently of
our wills and to occur independently of us are not the same thing. Our wills may not be the only things in us
that are capable of producing ideas.
Perhaps there is some other capacity in us that we are as little aware
of and have as little control over as we are aware of and can control our
digestion, and perhaps this faculty produces our adventitious ideas. This is not far-fetched, if we consider
that the ideas we have in dreams, which we consider to be our own creations,
nonetheless often occur independently of our wills. In this case, the sense of not being in
control is no proof that we are not still the causes. The second
consideration is that even if we were to grant that our ideas are caused by
something existing outside of us, it is a leap to infer that this thing must
resemble our ideas. Descartes once
again appealed to an example to drive his point home: this time not an
example drawn from dreams, but one drawn from what we naively consider to be
veridical experience. We have he
noted, two ideas or “pictures” of the Sun: one supplied to us by our senses
when we look at it, the other supplied by astronomical reasoning. The two ideas are very different, the one
representing the Sun as a circle of bright, yellow light of about the width
of a thumb nail, the other representing it as an immense ball of streaming
particles that cause our sensations of light and colour and heat, many times
larger than the Earth. The ideas are
very much unlike one another and we are inclined to think that the
astronomical idea, and not the sensory one, is the one that accurately
resembles the Sun. If that is so in
this case, it may be in others. And
the bare possibility that it might be so in this case, and so in others,
suffices to establish doubt and prove that we do not have clear and distinct
perception of the matter. That having been said,
there is something about this last argument that gave Descartes pause. This is that many of our ideas, like that
of the Sun, appear to be of or about things that go well beyond anything we
are able to find in ourselves insofar as we consider ourselves to be merely
thinking things. Whether we consider
it to be yellow or a source of flying particles, extended in the form of a
small circle or extended in the form of a huge ball, it exhibits qualities
that we do not find in ourselves insofar as we consider ourselves to be
merely thinking things. How, he
wondered, could we ourselves be the cause of ideas that are nothing like what
we can find to be contained in ourselves insofar as we are nothing other than
things that think? By way of further
explaining this concern, Descartes appealed to a point made just a few
paragraphs earlier: that our ideas are like pictures or images of
things. It must be stressed that this
is merely a simile and is not to be taken literally. Sensations of smells, tastes, sounds, hot
and cold, and hardness and softness are all ideas for Descartes, but they are
obviously not pictures in any literal sense. The point that Descartes was
trying to make by saying that ideas are like pictures is that, like pictures,
they are of or about something. A
picture of Caesar is something — if
it is an oil painting, it consists of coloured oils on canvas — but it is
also of something — an ancient
Roman general. We say, colloquially,
that Caesar is in the picture insofar as the picture is of Caesar, but this
is not literally true. Caesar is in his tomb in Descartes conveyed
this notion by remarking that over and above their “formal reality,” as
things of a certain kind, namely ideas formed by thinking things, our ideas
picture or represent something else, and this represented object is their
“objective reality.” Contemporary usage
has made Descartes’s point less perspicacious than
it was in the 17th century. Today,
when we speak of something as being “objective” we often mean to say that it
has some sort of perceiver-independent or mind-independent status. But this is not at all what Descartes had
in mind when he used the expression “objective reality.” For Descartes, objective reality is the
reality that is represented by an idea — the object the idea is intended to
represent. Rather than referring to
what exists outside of the mind, it refers to what is “in” our ideas in the
special, intentional sense. Whether this “reality” also exists in external
objects outside of the idea is another question and is certainly not
something Descartes wanted to imply when he used the phrase, “objective
reality.” Descartes proceeded to
ask what could be the cause, not just of our ideas considered as mental
states inhering in our minds, but of the particular kinds of content the
ideas have. What could be the cause of
their objective reality? This is a question we
still ask today. We think that some
ideas are crude and simple and that anyone could think of them. Ideas of simple natures like different
shades of colour or different degrees of heat or cold are like that (barring
exceptional impediments like congenital blindness). But other ideas seem, because of their
complexity or beauty, to contain something grand that calls for a special
explanation. We are amazed, for
example, at how Mozart could have composed his pieces or Einstein formulated
the theory of relativity. Yet in doing these things, Mozart and Einstein were
at bottom doing nothing different than all of us do all the time: they were
simply having ideas. But because the
content of those ideas so much exceeds what the rest of us feel capable of
producing, we wonder whether they must not have had some special cause, and
we develop theories of genius or genetic endowment or cultural and
environmental circumstances to explain their occurrence. Descartes asked the
same question. He observed a rich
variety of ideas in himself: ideas of simple natures, of animals, minerals,
and vegetables, of other human beings, of angels and God — even ideas of
ideas. What accounts for the content
of these ideas? There is a certain
view of causality that lies behind this question. Descartes claimed that when a thing comes
to be, it must acquire whatever it contains from somewhere. A blade of grass, for example, must acquire
everything it contains from somewhere — from the seed it grew out of, but
also from the surrounding earth, air, water, and sunlight. The sum of things it acquires its
properties from just is the “efficient and total cause” of that thing. That efficient and total cause must either
have the properties exhibited by the effect already in it, or must contain
something greater than those properties, from which they could be
extracted. As Descartes put it, “there
must be at least as much in the efficient and total cause as there is in the
effect of that same cause” (AT VII 40). Descartes proceeded to
apply this general causal principle to the specific case of ideas. He claimed that just as, in general,
everything that comes to be must have some cause that contains at least as
much as is to be found in the thing that comes to be, so every idea must have
some cause. Ideas are, after all, also
things that come to be. Moreover, this cause must not just be adequate to
account for the coming to be of the idea considered formally as an idea; it
must also be adequate to account for how the idea has come to have the
content that it does, that is, to depict or represent the object that it
represents. To do that, the cause of the idea must actually or literally
contain at least as much as is represented by the idea. Descartes put this point by saying that the
cause of the idea must formally
contain at least as much as is to be found objectively in the idea. The cause could not just objectively contain the qualities that
the idea contains objectively, since to be objectively in a thing means that
the thing is an image or picture of sorts.
If the qualities that are pictured by the idea are themselves only
pictured by the object that causes the idea, then that merely pushes the
question back. If the cause itself is
just a picture or image, then there must be some more remote cause that it is
copying, picturing, or imaging.
Ultimately, there must be some cause that actually or literally (that
is, “formally”) contains the properties that are being represented. Armed with this principle,
Descartes proceeded over the immediately ensuing parts of Meditations III to survey his
different ideas and inquire whether at least some of them must have been
caused by objects other than himself. COMMENTARY We might wonder
whether Descartes was entitled to rely on the principles that everything that
comes to be must have a cause, and that a cause must contain at least as much
as is to be found in its effect. Many
of the cause-effect relations we witness regularly, such as the striking of a
match causing a burst of flame, a loud sound producing an avalanche, a shaken
coke can spraying when opened, or a flick of a switch lighting up a building,
at least appear to be cases where the effects are nothing like or contain
much more than their causes. In these
cases, something does seem to come out of nothing. Descartes tried to answer these worries by
stipulating that the “total” cause must contain as much as the effect — for
example, the cause of the avalanche would have to be considered to be not
just the sound, but the precarious position of the snow on the mountainside —
but it is not clear that this really helps. After the doubt of Meditations I, the total cause that I
am aware of in the case of lighting a match is just a collection of simple natures,
collected together in more complex and compound ideas. The effect is another such collection. Look at it as one will, the effect contains
simple natures, such as heat and bright light, that are simply not to be
found anywhere in the total set of circumstances that go to characterize the
cause. This objection would
be greatly mitigated if the corpuscularian or mechanical philosophy of
Galileo, Hobbes, Boyle, and Descartes himself were correct. After all, what chiefly poses the
counterexamples to Descartes’s causal principles
are cases where sensible qualities like colour and heat suddenly emerge in
circumstances where they were previously totally absent, as in the case of
striking a match in the Antarctic night.
Such examples are answered by the mechanical philosophy, which claims
that light and colours and heat and cold are not things that actually exist
other than objectively in our ideas. There is nothing in the outside world
that resembles them, though there is something that causes them: namely
motion. And new motion is never
created out of nothing, even in something like fire (think, for example, of
Galileo’s account of fire as emerging when small particles that were
violently bouncing and vibrating in cells inside of certain bodies suddenly
manage to break free). It only ever
arises as a result of collision with previously moving parts. So if
the mechanical philosophy were correct, then Descartes’s
position on causality would be less contrary to the evidence than it
appears. Of course, the truth of the
mechanical philosophy would need to be established, and were Descartes to
invoke the truth of the mechanical philosophy to underwrite his hypothesis
about the nature of causality, he would be making an illegitimate appeal to
something that, by his own account, is uncertain. In Meditations III Descartes preferred to
rest his position just on the Parmenidean intuition
that something cannot come from nothing, and hence that what is more perfect
or has more reality cannot come from what is less perfect, since then the
excess reality in the effect would have had to come out of nothing. (An interesting consequence of this
intuition is that if heat and light do come out of cold and darkness, then
they simply cannot be more perfect or more real. We will see in the next chapter that
Descartes had a novel argument to justify this thought.) But there is a more
radical question we might ask: Why
should we suppose that whatever comes into being has to be caused by
something? Why could things not simply
pop into existence? To reply that this
would be impossible because then the effect would have been produced by some
dark, featureless entity we call “nothing,” and such an entity cannot act or
do anything, nor can it contain anything that it could contribute to an
effect, is to beg the question. The
question is: “Why does an effect need
to be produced by anything else at all (including a thing called “nothing”)? Why could it not simply pop into
existence?” To answer this question by
saying “because then it would not be produced by anything (i.e., it would be
produced by “nothing”) is not to give an answer at all, but simply to repeat
the very thing that needs to be proven. This is a good example
of a troubling issue alluded to earlier: the difficulty of distinguishing
between clear and distinct perceptions, on the one hand, and natural impulses
on the other. Descartes would have maintained that the principle that a cause
must contain at least as much as is to be found in its effect is clearly and
distinctly perceived. But is it, or is
it merely the product of a natural impulse? Descartes’s causal
principle gives voice to what was in his day a traditional and blindly
accepted view of the nature of causality.
We might call this view the containment model. According to it a cause is not simply a
signal event that often or necessarily happens before an effect occurs; it is
something that actively produces its effect.
It produces the effect, moreover, by either drawing together some of
its own content and excreting this content as its effect, much as a woman
gives birth to a child, or by impressing or imposing or infecting the raw
material that already exists in the effect with its content, much as a signet
ring impresses its form on the sealing wax, a fire imposes its heat on the
surrounding stones, or a diseased person infects others with their
disease. This is not the only way to
understand causality, as will be seen later in connection with Hume. Ironically, Descartes
himself immediately proceeded to say something that challenges this
supposedly certain principle and so poses further problems for his argument. Eminent
causality. Descartes’s causal
principle has an untoward implication.
God is supposed to have created the world. But the world is composed of extended
bodies. If the cause of an effect is
supposed to contain at least much reality as is found in the effect, then it
would appear to follow that God must also be extended. But extension is not one of the attributes
traditionally ascribed to the Christian God, who is rather supposed to be
purely spiritual. Descartes was not the
only Christian philosopher who had to confront this theological
difficulty. Any Christian philosopher
who shared Descartes’s views on causality — and
that included virtually all the philosophers of the medieval period — had the
same problem. The containment model of
causality appears to contradict Christian theology. According to the
containment model, if God created extended bodies, God must contain
extension. According to Christian
theology, God cannot be extended. Rather than reject the
one or the other of these doctrines, Descartes and his medieval predecessors
tried to have things both ways by claiming that, though God does not contain
extension, he does contain things that are more perfect than extension. Extension was supposed to flow from these
more perfect qualities without contradicting the principle that the cause
must contain at least as much as is to be found in its effect. But it is not
clear that this notion can be invoked without giving up the containment model
of causality. If a supposedly more
eminent or perfect or real being can produce something it does not itself
contain, then, however mean or ignoble that result may be when compared to
what is actually present in the more eminent or perfect or real being, it is
still something that is not present in the more eminent or perfect or real
being. It must therefore have come to
be out of nothing, in violation of the containment model. In the final analysis, the notion of
eminent causality is nothing more than what Bacon would have called an Idol
of the Theatre: a piece of jargon used to paper over the existence of a
fundamental theoretical inconsistency. ESSAY QUESTIONS AND RESEARCH PROJECTS
philosophy of his
own. The chief point in dispute
between Malebranche and Arnauld was whether ideas
are objects of apprehension (the view of Malebranche), or acts whereby
objects are apprehended (the view of Arnauld). The Malebranche/Arnauld
dispute has been the subject of extensive scholarly study, but two early
papers on the topic are classics that should be read by any student of 17th
century philosophy: Robert McRae, “‘Idea’ as a Philosophical Term in the 17th
Century,” Journal of the history of
ideas 26 (1965): 175-184, and John Yolton,
“Ideas and Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy,” Journal of the history of philosophy 13 (1975): 145-166. Study
these two papers and report on the main results of each.
2. Does Descartes
have a principled way of distinguishing between what is known by the “light
of nature” and what is known by “natural impulse”?
3. Consider
whether Descartes is in any position to claim to be certain of either of the
causal principles he invokes in Meditations
III. Try to come up with the best
argument you can to defend his position and the best argument you can to
reject it. Determine which argument is
the strongest. |
