|
15 Descartes, Meditations VIb (AT VII 80-90)
Over the second half of Meditations VI, Descartes looked in more detail at what he could
know about material things. His
investigation was guided by the principle that “because of the very fact that
God is not a deceiver … it is impossible for there to be any falsity in my opinions
which I cannot correct with another faculty God has given me” (AT VII
80). He was particularly concerned
with the opinion that material things resemble the ideas we receive of them
through our senses, right down to their weight, heat, colour, and taste, and
with a related opinion that spaces in which there is nothing that can be
sensed are empty. Together these
opinions entail that space is distinct from body, because there can be spaces
where there is no body, and because bodies have other qualities than just
those that have to do with being spatially extended. Descartes wanted, on the contrary, to
identify space and body with one another, and hold that wherever there is
space there is body and that body is nothing more than cut-up bits of space. To support his position, he offered an account
of God’s purpose in giving us sensations, an account that takes off from an
understanding of our nature as thinking beings, who
have been joined to a particular body in such a way that their continued
union can be facilitated or impaired by surrounding bodies. (Descartes liked to speak of things that
facilitate or impair the mind body union rather than things that might
preserve us or kill us because he considered the mind to be immortal.) This investigation culminated in the
statement that “sense perceptions are, strictly speaking, given to me by
nature merely to indicate to my mind which things are agreeable or
disagreeable to that combination of which it is a part,” and not for
recognizing “the essence of bodies placed outside of me.” (AT VII 83) This conclusion gave rise to a further
problem arising from the fact that there are cases in which our sensations cause
us to impair or even destroy the mind body union. (The disease of dropsy, which is
characterized by feelings of thirst that worsen the condition if satisfied,
is an example.) Descartes attempted to
resolve this problem over the closing pages of the mediation. This set of notes culminates with a discussion
of two problems raised by the position Descartes took in Meditations VI: the problem of mind/body interaction, and a
problem his identification of body with space posed for accepted Catholic
doctrine on the sacrament of the Eucharist. QUESTIONS
ON THE
1. Why is it that even
though Descartes thought he could demonstrate that corporeal things must
exist, he still did not think that those things exist exactly as we grasp
them by sense? What must be true of
them?
2. What things did
Descartes think are taught to us by nature and what by a habit of making
reckless judgments?
3. What is the proper
purpose for which sensations were given to the mind?
4. Did Descartes think
that all the motions of our bodies are mechanically caused?
5. What is necessary if
the mind is to be affected by the body?
6. Does the brain feel
pain?
7. Why is it in fact
better that our senses should occasionally deceive us about what is good or
bad for us?
8. What needs to be done
in order to be sure that our senses are not deceiving us?
9. In what does the
difference between dreaming and waking experience consist? NOTES
ON THE The proof of the existence of material things
given over the first half of Meditations
VI establishes that my sensory ideas must be caused by something that is
spatially extended. This is because spatial
extension is the one feature that is objectively present in my sensory ideas
that I know to be a real, positive thing rather than a materially false idea
of nothing. And God would be a
deceiver if the cause of my sensory ideas did not actually contain everything
that is objectively present in those ideas. But while Descartes’s
proof establishes that my sensory ideas must be caused by a spatially
extended thing or things, it does not justify my earlier opinion that the
causes of my sensory ideas must be spatially extended in exactly the way the
objects depicted in those ideas are spatially extended. Because God is not a deceiver, there can be
no incorrigible falsity in my opinions.
But in this case, subsequent sensory experience and reasoning tell me
that objects are not always extended in exactly the way they are depicted as
being extended in my initial sensory experiences. Square towers seen from a distance look
round, and many distant objects appear to be much smaller than they actually
are. There are many other such
examples. This having been said, Descartes was unwilling
to retreat to the view that all we can ever know for sure is just that our
bodies are extended in some way or other.
Careful use of our senses and our reasoning ability to correct one another’s
information and one another’s speculations ought to bring us some way towards
the truth, and there are certain strong natural impulses we have on these
matters that cannot be denied. For Descartes’s
larger purposes (notably, establishing that we can know that body is nothing
more than just spatial extension and is not heavy or solid or hot or coloured, etc.), I can be assured of
at least these general things: that there are many different bodies in
existence, that one of these bodies is special to me, and that the various
other bodies can affect this one special body, some for better, others for worse. Though, as a thinking being, I am “really
distinct” from anything extended, it appears to have been the will of God
that I be unified or bound up with a particular extended thing, my body. As a thinking thing I am also likely
“naturally immortal,” simply because I am not extended in space and so cannot
be broken to pieces. But this natural
immortality notwithstanding, God appears to have willed that I do everything
in my power to preserve my union with the special body I call my own. To this end, God has not joined me to my body
in the way a sailor is joined to a ship.
A good sailor understands the state a ship is in, and knows when it has
fallen into disrepair and what must be done to sail it out of danger. But I do not understand these things about
my body. Instead, I feel them. When the body is in disrepair, I feel pain
and a need to move it in ways that will remove the pain even though I may not
understand why those motions are effective.
Likewise, when the body is in danger or in need of things like food or
drink I feel sensations like fear, hunger, or thirst that drive me to do what
is needed to keep the body in the state required to “preserve the mind/body
union,” that is, to prevent what we call “death,” which is really just the
separation of the mind from the body.
I don’t understand the mechanism of the body or how other objects
interact with it to benefit it or harm it.
I don’t know what makes different foods nutritious or noxious. I just feel needs that prompt me to eat or
drink, and I experience smells and tastes and feelings of heat and cold that
prompt me to eat or drink this rather than that, or do other things that are in
fact necessary for my health, that is, my continued union with my body. Though these feelings do not give me the
sort of understanding of the way my body interacts with its surroundings that
a sailor has of the way a ship works, they are particularly effective means
to induce me to do what is in fact necessary to preserve the mind/body
union. The sailor’s understanding
takes time to acquire and even when acquired it may not motivate the sailor
with any strong concern, as the sailor can simply decide to sail the ship to
pieces and then transfer to another.
But I needed to be motivated to act in the right way to preserve the
mind/body union while still a child who lacked the reasoning ability, or a
young adult, who had it, but lacked the instruction. And I could not be allowed to let the body
fall into disrepair the way a sailor can, who sees the state of disrepair the
ship is in but does not feel any pain over that fact. Thinking along these lines led Descartes to
conclude that the reason all of my sensations were given to me was to assist
me in preserving the mind-body union.
Hunger, thirst, and other appetites teach me what is necessary for me
to do to maintain the body. Pleasure
and pain teach me what objects to pursue and avoid. Smells and tastes teach me what objects are
nutritious or noxious. Colour and
sound to enable me to tell bodies apart from one another when observed from a
safe distance. And so on. The purpose of these sensations is not to
reveal the essence or the properties or the internal constitution of objects
to me, but simply to assist me in determining which are beneficial and which
harmful to the mind body union. Having drawn this conclusion, Descartes was in
a position to reject the natural impulse to consider bodies to be coloured or
hot or cold or possessed of other sensible qualities like those we find in
our sensory ideas. This impulse is a “juvenile
preconception,” formed in our youth and never subsequently considered. When we consider what God’s purpose was in
giving us sensations, we realize that it was never to reveal the nature of
external objects to us. The proper
tool for investigating that nature is just the understanding, and it tells us
that we can only be assured that bodies are extended. Our impulse to think they are more than cut
up bits of space was given to us for an entirely different purpose. The prejudice that spaces that do not contain
anything that affects our senses must be empty must likewise be
abandoned. All we can justly conclude
is that such spaces do not contain anything that it is important for us to know
about for purposes of survival. What
we have since learned about germs and disease, or environmental toxins and
radioactivity shows that Descartes was mistaken about this, but it was a
plausible enough thing to think for the time.
It is, moreover, entirely consistent with the view that these spaces
are not truly empty but contain things too small to see. That these things should happen to be
dangerous to the mind/body union is something Descartes himself noted when he
mentioned poisoned food (poisoning was a favourite method of assassination at
the time). God cannot be expected to
have made us sensitive to everything in
the environment that might be dangerous to the mind/body union, he
observed. He is not obliged to make us
omniscient. It is enough that we
understand that his purposes in giving us those sensations we have was to
enable us to do something to
preserve that union, rather than to give us insight into the true nature of
things. Sensory
illusion. There is a more serious problem with this
account of the purpose of sensory experience.
It is one thing for our senses to fail to inform us about things that
are dangerous to the mind/body union.
It is quite another for them to misinform us, and induce us to do
things that might be bad for us. Some
of this might be due to willful perversity on our part, as when we persist in
consuming in alcohol or tobacco or other substances that appear noxious to us
on first encounter, or when we spice and season foods to make them
artificially palatable so that we over-indulge. But there are other cases where we cannot
so easily be blamed. Descartes
instanced the sensation of thirst felt by a person with dropsy — a sensation
that, if satisfied, would actually worsen the body’s condition. Should we treat these sorts of experiences
the way we treat experiences of square towers that look round from a distance
— as evidence that what our senses tell us about what is good or bad for the
mind/body union is not implicitly to be trusted? This is hardly tenable. There is a particular urgency to our
obtaining knowledge of the state of our own bodies. We cannot afford to indulge in doubts
about, say, whether we really need to move away from the fire or not. But
given the particular urgency of this matter, it is particularly disturbing
that God should not have given us reliable sensations of pleasure and
pain. How is this fact to be
reconciled with his goodness? Descartes’s reply to this problem
what that this is a case where God really could not have made things any
better than he did. This sort of
design flaw is one that is inevitable when making a being that is a union of
a mind with a body. To explain why, Descartes
developed a theory of the physiology of sensation, and an account of the
mechanics of the mind/body union. The body, Descartes observed, is an extended
thing, and as such is divisible into a number of parts, indeed into
infinitely many parts. But the mind is not divisible into parts. It might carry out different activities,
such as willing or understanding or sensing, but it is not divisible into a
willing part that is set outside of the understanding part, or a sensing part
that is set outside of the other two (the sensing function might be a
redundant one that the mind need not perform, but it is not an external part
that could be cut off with a scalpel).
Moreover, experiments with amputations would seem to indicate that the
mind is not in communication with each and every one of the body’s parts (I
find myself to be as completely and wholly contained in what is left of my
body after the loss of a limb or an eye as I was previously in the whole;
none of my mind seems to have been cut off with the amputated part). Insofar as it is united with the body, it
is joined to it just at a small part, likely in the brain. If we accept that the mind communicates with
the body in the brain, and that external objects communicate with it at the
surface of the sense organs, something has to happen to bring the effect from
the sense organ to the mind.
Consistent with his belief that all we can be sure bodies have is extension
and motion, Descartes supposed that what happens in sensation is that certain
bodies either emit or reflect particles or themselves fly through the air and
hit our sense organs. Depending on the
shape and motion and size of these impacting bodies, the sense organs are
impressed, like wax, or made to vibrate, like drum skins. Behind the sense organ Descartes supposed
there to be a number of “tubes” or “strings” — the nerves. (If the nerves are tubes, then they are
filled with a very fine, vaporous fluid or gas called the animal spirits.) The effect of impression or vibration of the
sense organ is to “pull” on the nerve cord, or change the motions of the
animal spirits flowing through the nerves.
These effects are propagated along the nerves and into the brain,
where a physical organ called the corporeal imagination is impressed. Impressions on the corporeal imagination in
turn, through more nerves, propagate impressions to the part of the brain
that communicates Even if this story is not correct in all of
its details, it makes a general point that Descartes took to be beyond doubt:
given that our bodies are extended and our minds capable of communicating with
them only at a point, it is inevitable that sensation be the product of
transmitting a signal from receptors on the body’s surface in to the locus of
its communication with the mind. But
this means that, equally inevitably, there will be some chance that the
process of sensation will be interfered with, due to agents acting within the
body to interrupt, alter, or even generate a signal in the absence of its
usual cause. This is a feature of the
design that follows necessarily from the fact that an unextended mind has
been joined to an extended body, and even God could not do anything to
rectify it. In the case of vision and hearing this problem
is magnified, because these senses inform us of things that exist at a
distance from us, and there is a further chain of causes (e.g., reflected and
refracted light rays, echoes) intervening between the object and the sense
organ, creating yet more avenues for interference or distortion. God has designed us in such a way that certain
kinds of signal, coming to the locus of the soul from the receptors on the
outer surface of the body, arouse certain kinds of ideas of sensation in the
mind. And, being all good, God will
have made us so that the ideas that are aroused by a signal are the ones
that, in the great preponderance of cases, we ought to get: the ones that
will correctly represent whether the object is good or bad for us and that
will correctly inform us about where those objects are and how they are
shaped and moving. That is: • the ideas we get of the shape, size,
position, order, and motion of objects are ideas that represent the actual
shape, size, position, order, and motion of the objects normally causing the
signal; • the ideas we get of the sensible
qualities contained within a particular figure at least correspond to some
smaller structure of parts within the figure of the objects normally causing
the signal so that same corpuscular structures always bring about same ideas • our ideas of pleasure and pain are
caused by truly beneficial or harmful corpuscular structures in the objects
normally causing the signal; • our sensations of bodily states like
hunger, thirst, fatigue, and cramping, are linked to volitions to move our
bodies in ways that are truly beneficial to the union. It is just that, sometimes, these signals can
be interfered with, either by very small, undetectable parts entering into
the bodies that normally cause a sensation, or by some agent interfering with
the transmission of the signal en route. God can do nothing to prevent this, and it
is rather a mark of his goodness that we have been designed so as to get the
correct ideas in normal circumstances. This means that, in normal circumstances, we
can trust our senses to inform us accurately about the disposition of objects
in space around our bodies, about at least their larger-scale shapes, sizes,
positions, orders and motions, about which ones are different in ways that do
not depend on their gross size or shape, and about whether they are good or
bad for us. Moreover, when mistakes
are made they will typically be the result of some specific agent interfering
with the connection between one of the sense organs and the brain. It is unlikely that all five senses,
distributed throughout the body as they are, would simultaneously be attacked
at once. Consequently, we have a ready
means at our disposal to correct almost all sensory errors. We need merely be careful to check the
reports given by one sense against those given by the others and assent only
to those reports that all the senses agree on giving. At the close of Meditations VI Descartes applied this claim to resolve the doubts
raised by the dreaming argument. He
claimed that as long as we bring all our faculties, particularly our memory,
to bear before making a judgment, we will discover that dreams contain
tell-tale discontinuities. When the
dreaming sequence starts, a whole scene just pops into existence without our
being able to tell where it came from or how we got to be there observing
it. Moreover, in dreams events
frequently occur that are in violation of established laws of nature. In
waking life, in contrast, there is continuity to our experience and a
rigorous obedience of events to natural laws.
Therefore, we need only consider whether our experiences are coherent
and regular in order to discriminate waking from dreaming experiences. Though it is not explicit, this argument most
likely depends on the same appeal to the goodness of God in not allowing us
to be deceived that all of the other doctrines of the second half of Meditations VI presuppose. It is logically possible that we could have
coherent dreams. It is also logically possible that we might dream that we
remember a coherent past to our current dream. Descartes seems to have rejected these
possibilities on the ground that God would not have made our memories
defective in any irremediable or undetectable way, and would not have allowed
us to have dreams that are so coherent as to be more than temporarily
undetectable. All this having been said, the concluding
sentence of the Meditations remains
worth quoting and considering. But because the need to get things done
does not always permit us the leisure for such a careful inquiry, we must
confess that the life of man is apt to commit errors regarding particular
things, and we must acknowledge the infirmity of our nature. In the end, absolute certainty in all things
is neither possible nor necessary. The
demands of daily life are often such as to prohibit taking the time for a
careful examination of whether all the senses, memory, and the understanding
agree on some point. As a consequence
we will continue to get things wrong.
The Meditations has not
provided us with a remedy for all error.
But, in Descartes’s estimation, it has at least
provided us with certainty about some very basic and foundational truths, and
so a secure foundation on which to build the rest of our knowledge, fallible
though that superstructure might turn out to be. CARTESIAN
DUALISM One of the most serious challenges faced by
the Cartesian philosophy concerns the nature of the mind/body union and the
manner in which mind and body might interact with one another. Critics have charged that it is impossible
to understand how the mind is able to move the body or the body able to cause
the mind to experience sensations, and that it is impossible to understand
how two such radically distinct substances could be welded together to form
the “substantial union” Descartes spoke of in Meditations VI.
This problem becomes particularly acute in
connection with Descartes’s attempt to resolve the
problem of sensory error. In that
attempt, he maintained that since the mind is unextended and the body
extended, there must be just one place within the body where the two communicate.
Earlier, this claim was defended by appeal to experiments with
amputations. But these experiments
only provide partial confirmation of Descartes’s
position. Were I to have a stroke, or
were a part of my brain to be amputated, I would sense that I had lost a part
of my mental capacities. This suggests
that the mind may be connected with the body at more than just a point, and
that severing off parts of the brain may be tantamount to severing off parts
of the mind. Hobbes’s materialism took this consequence to
its logical conclusion: simply deny that there is any such thing as mind and
attempt to account for all the characteristic mental functions by reducing
them to operations of the brain. Those who have been unwilling to accept either
of these radical solutions are called dualists, because they follow Descartes
in holding that mind and body are two distinct kinds of thing, neither of
which is reducible to the other, and they have inherited Descartes’s
problem of accounting for how the thing in us that senses, thinks, and wills
could interact with the body. Among
the solutions to this problem that dualists have come up with are Leibniz’s
pre-established harmony, Spinoza’s double aspect theory, and Malebranche’s occasionalism.
According to the theory of pre-established harmony there are both
material and spiritual things, but neither interacts in any way with the
other; rather, like two clocks that independently tell the same time, each
evolves over time in accord with its own internal principles, but does so in
such a way that changes in the one just happen to be completely in accord
with changes in the other. According
to the double aspect theory, there is really only one substance, but this
substance appears to us in two different ways depending on whether it is
considered through the senses or through the intellect; therefore, mind does
not interact with body; there is just one thing that changes over time and
that appears in one way as a body in motion (when viewed using the senses)
and in another way as a mind with ideas (when viewed using the
intellect). According to the theory of
occasionalism, God is constantly inspecting minds
and bodies, and on those occasions where particular motions occur in the
sensory parts of the brain, God causes the mind to experience corresponding
ideas of sense, whereas on those occasions where particular volitions occur
in the mind, God moves the body in corresponding ways. Descartes’s own position on this
problem is difficult to make out. While some of his remarks might be taken to
suggest a commitment to occasionalism, his claims
that when God made us he mixed two distinct substances to form a substantial
union, and that the mind is naturally so constituted as to receive certain
sensations as a consequence of affection of the corporeal imagination,
suggest that he may have held that there is some sort of real causal
interaction between the mind and the body.
But since the interaction cannot take place at many points without
treating the mind as coextensive with the brain and reverting to Hobbist materialism, the one-point interaction theory
appears to have been Descartes’s only remaining
option. The precise nature of his
position continues to be a matter of dispute among commentators. SUBSTANCE,
REAL QUALITIES, AND THE EUCHARIST One of the most serious difficulties with
Descartes position in the Catholic France of his own day concerned the threat
his philosophy was taken to pose for the doctrine of transubstantiation and
the theology of the Eucharist. Unlike
the more internal, enthusiastic and iconoclastic forms of Reformed
Protestantism dominant in England and Holland, Catholicism tended to place
emphasis on a more external, ritualistic form of worship, involving beliefs
and ceremonies that the Protestants denounced as absurd and
superstitious. One such element was
the ceremony of the Eucharist, where, in imitation of events reported to have
taken place at the “Last Supper” between Jesus Christ and his disciples, a piece
of bread and a goblet of wine are supposed to be literally (not just
figuratively or metaphorically) turned into the body and blood of Christ,
despite continuing to look to all appearances like bread and wine. The Protestants had maintained that Christ
should be understood to be only spiritually present in the bread and wine,
but the Catholics had denounced this as a patent heresy. Christ had reportedly said “This is my body
… this is my blood.” The Catholics took
this to be meant literally. And they
insisted that ordained Priests acquired the power to re-enact this miracle
during their religious ceremonies. Of
course, the bread and wine continue to look and taste like bread and wine,
even after the miracle has been performed (though there were, of course,
occasional reports of more literal sightings). But, according to the Catholics, they have
really been transformed or “transubstantiated,” notwithstanding the
appearances. This belief was
underwritten by the Aristotelian notions of substance and real quality. At the moment when the priest “consecrates”
the bread and wine, it was thought that the essence or substantial form of
the host changes from that of bread to that of the body and blood of
Christ. However, all the merely
“accidental” qualities that were previously evident in the bread and wine
continue to be there (which is why it still looks, feels, tastes, and smells
the same). However, these qualities
subsist outside of any substance (the substance of Christ’s body and blood
was not supposed to take on these accidental qualities but to exist apart
from them). Crucial to this
explanation of the miracle is the notion that sensible qualities like colour,
smell, and taste, are real qualities that exist outside of us and that can
even exist apart from the substances in which they normally inhere. Even more interestingly, this was taken to
extend, not just to the sensible qualities of smell, taste, and colour, but
also to the extension, shape, size, motion and solidity of the bread and
wine. The substance of Christ’s body
was supposed to exist distinctly from the particular extension of the bread
and wine, a detail that allowed the Catholics to maintain that the whole of
the body of Christ could be present in even very oddly shaped small fragments
of the bread and wine. Insofar as the Cartesian philosophy is
unfriendly to the existence of real qualities, it is unclear that it can
countenance the miracle of the Eucharist.
This is a problem that was raised by Arnauld
in his fourth set of objections to the Meditations. Arnauld wrote: But what I see as likely to
give the greatest offence to theologians is that according to the author’s
doctrines it seems that the Church’s teaching concerning the sacred mysteries
of the Eucharist cannot remain completely intact. We believe on faith that
the substance of the bread is taken away from the bread of the Eucharist and
only the accidents remain. These are extension, shape, colour, smell, taste
and other qualities perceived by the senses. But the author thinks there
are no sensible qualities, but merely various motions in the bodies that
surround us which enable us to perceive the various impressions which we
subsequently call ‘colour,’ ‘taste’ and ‘smell.’ Hence only shape, extension
and mobility remain. Yet the author denies that these powers are intelligible
apart from some substance for them to inhere in, and hence he holds that they
cannot exist without such a substance. … Further, he recognizes no
distinction between the states of a substance and the substance itself except
for a formal one; yet this kind of distinction seems insufficient to allow
for the states to be separated from the substance even by God. Questioning the mystery of the Eucharist was
something that Descartes wanted, at all costs to avoid. Two paths were open to him. One was circumspection of the sort we have
seen him recommend to Regius, cited at the end of
Chapter 7. Taking this path would mean
refraining from denying outright that sensible qualities are real
things. It would mean instead
maintaining that while we have excellent reasons for concluding that external
objects must be extended and so must possess the modifications of which
extension is capable, we do not have the same reasons to think that they must
have any other sort of qualities. They
might possibly have further qualities, though we have no need to suppose any
other such qualities when giving scientific explanations. If we accept that bodies have further
qualities, it is not because we very clearly and distinctly perceive that
they must but only because this is a truth that has been revealed to us (by
the Biblical account of the last supper and the accepted theology regarding
the Eucharist in particular). We might
think that Descartes had good reasons to take this path, because the
arguments of Meditations VI are
simply not strong enough to give us reason to deny the existence of real
sensible qualities. Those arguments go
so far as to assure us that bodies must have the primary qualities of
extension and motion, but they do not rule out the possibility that bodies
might turn out to have other qualities as well. At best, they tell us that we are in no
position to know this without the assistance of revelation. But in the end, this was a path that Descartes
could not take. Allowing for even the
possibility of the existence of real qualities would undermine his physics,
which was invested in the notion that bodies can have no other qualities than
those that arise from extension. So
Descartes took a different route. He
attempted to reconcile his philosophy with the doctrine of
transubstantiation. His reply to Arnauld invoked a distinction between the “superficies”
or outer surface of a body (including all its pores, if it has them, or the
outlines of all of its parts, if it has independently movable parts) and the
material contained within this superficies.
The latter could change while the former remains the same he
maintained. But were this to happen,
the body would continue to affect our sense organs in the same way, and so
bring about the same sensations in us, even though it is constituted of
material of an entirely different kind (that is, even though its ultimate
parts are differently shaped and moving).
This, in his estimation, constitutes a far more intelligible
explanation of the primary doctrine, that of transubstantiation, than that
offered by the Scholastics with their commitment to real qualities. It preserves the essential tenet that the
substance changes while the way it acts on us remains the same, at the same
time avoiding the Protestant heresies on this topic. This did not go all the way to resolve the
problem, however, and it was not intrinsically very satisfying. It did not account for how an extended
substance could be separated from its modes of size, shape, and motion, which
was also a part of the doctrine, and it raised questions about how far the
substance could have been really transformed if it continued to occupy the
same superficies, given what Descartes had to say about how extended
substances are distinguished from one another. When pressed on these issues, Descartes
became very reticent to go into detail, and turned to the claim that it is
union with a mind that really makes a human substance the kind of thing it
is. The same would have to hold of the
substance of Christ insofar as it shares any physical nature. However, this was all too close to the
Protestant view that Christ is merely “spiritually” present in the
sacrament for comfort, and Descartes
knew it because he asked those to whom he had revealed these speculations to
not reveal his identity. Mesland, a Jesuit who corresponded with Descartes about
these topics and who may have made some moves in the direction of getting Descartes’s philosophy endorsed by the Jesuits, was sent
off to the missions in ESSAY
QUESTIONS AND RESEARCH PROJECTS
1. Over the course of the
Meditations, and particularly over
the second half of Meditations VI,
Descartes frequently invoked the term, “nature,” and discriminated a number
of different kinds of “nature” and senses in which he wanted the term,”nature” to be understood. “Nature taken generally” is defined at AT VII 80, but there is another definition of “nature
taken more narrowly” at AT VII 82. Descartes outlined correspondingly
different accounts of what is “taught by nature” in each of these senses and
what is taught to us by “a certain habit of making reckless judgments.” At AT VII he also
contrasted what has been “taught by nature” with what is known in the “light
of nature.” And over AT VII 84-85 “nature” is used again in a “latter” and a
“former” sense that do not bear any obvious relation to either the “general”
or the “narrow” definitions of “nature.”
Taking all of these passages into account, formulate a general account
of Descartes’s position on “nature” in all of its
senses. Determine whether he managed
to clearly separate the different senses of the term.
2. Did Descartes have any
principled way of distinguishing between what is “taught to us by nature” and
what is taught to us by “a certain habit of making reckless judgments” or is
this distinction irredeemably confused and ambiguous?
3. Undertake a study of Descartes’s correspondence and that of his contemporaries
in order to determine exactly what problems he got into over the issue of the
Eucharist and why.
4. One of Descartes’s most astute critics was Princess Elizabeth of
5. Undertake a this same project with reference to Descartes replies to
the author of the fifth set of the objections to the Meditations, Pierre Gassendi.
6. Did Descartes come up
with an adequate response to the dreaming argument? |
