Don't Walk Away, René

iii.

     In the Third Meditation Descartes formalizes the theory that whatever he perceives clearly and distinctly is true.  He knows he is a thinking thing because he cannot doubt himself in the act of inquiring; i.e., he perceives, clearly and distinctly, his own nature as that which inquires.  What prevents him from being certain about the existence of bodies is that he perceives the ideas of bodies only, beyond which he cannot see.  

     He takes up some of the terminology of Scholastic philosophy, along with some of its assumptions about the nature of reality, in order to get beyond the confines his original argument had set up against further progress.  Having established his identity as a thinking thing, he situates this identity in a system of identities, presumably, based on my limited research, inherited from medieval Christian philosophy, but possibly ultimately derived from Aristotle (?):  reality is composed of substances, which exist concretely in their own right, of which bodies and minds are two kinds; substances have attributes, or qualities: some essential or primary and some accidental or secondary; these attributes in turn have modes, or ways they can modify substances.  Extension is the primary, essential attribute of bodies, because this is what makes them bodies; and figure is a mode of extension.  Differently shaped bodies are all extended but distinguishable from each other by their respective figures, and so on.  Minds, being thinking things, have the essential attribute of thought; and in the course of doubting, understanding, willing, etc. manifest the various  modes of thought.

     Thoughts cannot exist without minds, and so, in Descartes' terminology, have less reality than minds, just as a mode of extension has less reality than an extended thing, which exists in its own right.  A shape has less reality than a thing with some particular shape, because it exists only in the existence of the thing; and roundness has even less reality than shape, because there must first be such a thing as shape in general before there can be, among its possibilities, one called roundness; while the reverse is not true--shape as such does not depend upon the existence of roundness as one of its modes.  

     Descartes remarks that, although all his thoughts are in one sense the same, they are in another very different:  they share the same "formal" reality as modifications of the attribute of thought; but, in that they are about different kinds of things, they have different "objective" realities.  Some represent substances, some attributes, some modes; and in this they have different degrees of objective reality.  A substance is more real than its attributes because it must exist to support them; it brings them into being.  Since our ideas of bodies--i.e., our sensible images of them--are among the effects produced by them (he assumes), it follows that the bodies themselves have more reality.

     He reasons that, in all cases, a cause has at least as much reality as its effects.  Moreover, the original cause of an idea must have at least as much formal reality as the idea has objective reality, though it may act through a series of ideas.  The idea of a rock must have originally been caused by a rock or by something with as much formal reality, and not, e.g., by a mode of extension. 

     God, then, according to Descartes, is the infinite mind.  Because, in Scholastic terms, infinite substances have more reality than finite ones, it is not possible that our idea of God has as its ultimate cause a mere finite substance or another idea.  Because Descartes can conceive of a thing whose cause must be something with more formal reality than he himself possesses, he knows (he supposes) that there is something outside himself.  And because he can conceive of the infinite mind, he knows (he supposes) that the infinite mind exists, because no finite substance could have been its original source.  So God exists and he, Descartes, is not God.  

     

     It seems to me that, in his Third Meditation, Descartes has largely abandoned the project begun in the first two Meditations.  Rather than proceed by continuing to doubt wherever possible in order to isolate possible foundations of knowledge, he has escaped from the grave limitations he had imposed on himself by appealing to a tradition, with little argument.  I will briefly enumerate my objections to the "progress" achieved in the Third Meditation: (1) he defined God as the infinite mind, elaborating a series of questionable perfections for him, and had already prepared a place for him in his metaphysics, to which he ascended without argument.  It isn't clear to me that there can be an infinite mind.  I would submit that there's nothing clear or distinct about God as he describes him with his various moral and other superlatives; (2) even if there is a logical hierarchy of dependence, such that modes depend on attributes which depend on substances, it does not follow that ideas of substances depend on (real) substances.  There is no obvious reason to suppose that the causes of ideas must possess as much formal reality as the resulting ideas possess objective reality; this is something that can be doubted and for which Descartes has not argued; (3) even if God exists, there is no ground for assuming that deception is  a sign of imperfection, and no reason to exclude it as a possibility. 

     I'm not sure I extracted everything from this Meditation I should have.  Let us see what my friend Dr. Muad'dib Kenobi Seagull has to say about it. 

Don't Walk Away, René

ii.

After formally rejecting everything that can be doubted, Descartes finally comes upon something that cannot: himself.  He must exist, if only to be the one who is deceived about everything else.  But he can still doubt whether he is a man, or a creature at all.  He is only, essentially, "a thing that doubts, understands, [conceives], affirms, denies, wills, refuses; that imagines also, and perceives."

But among these he makes a distinction between, on the one hand, sensation and imagination, which have to do exclusively with the senses (since to imagine is to create sensible images); and, on the other, thinking as such, the intellect.  He demonstrates the primacy of intellect over sensation and imagination in the production of knowledge using the example of a piece of wax that, in being melted near the fire, loses all its original sensible qualities; yet is still recognized by the mind as having persisted as one thing. 

The nature of a thinking thing, likewise, is recognized by the intellect and not the senses or the imagination. 

I gather that "clear and distinct" images are privileged somehow beyond the present text, though I don't yet see how.  Possibly he is referring to a previous articulation of this same argument and counter-argument from the mists of the history of philosophy, which is largely unknown to me.  I know that Augustine covered some of this same territory.

Because I could not quite make sense of this part of the Second Meditation, I have sent up a philosophical flare, so to speak, to notify my friend Muad'Dib of the impasse, and await his aid. 

Don't Walk Away, Renê

i.

In his First Meditation, Descartes sets about to reject, provisionally, anything about which he can entertain any doubt, so as to discover whether there is anything certain that could serve as a foundation for other knowledge. He does this by assuming for the sake of argument that everything he is experiencing is an illusion; that in reality he is not seated by a fire surrounded by familiar objects; that, furthermore, he does not even have a body with sense organs, limbs, and so on; even that there is no sky or earth to support and contain other things; and that there is, in general, not even such a thing as an extended body that takes up space and has a shape, such as could be the rudiment of the composite physical structures we encounter in actual experience, including our own bodies. Not only can we doubt particular objects and situations, since one can be as certain of their existence in dreams as in waking life, yet discover upon waking that none of it is true; but, says Descartes, we can also doubt general, mathematical truths, since I can be deceived in the midst of thinking about numbers in general as easily as I can in the midst of perceiving a particular thing.

I am very much in sympathy with Descartes on the desirability of getting to the bottom of things, if such a thing is possible, because, as he says, so many errors derive from any one false assumption that starting out with a set of prejudices about the world dooms any investigation of it from the outset. It is plausible, at least, that retreating from all the positions we have taken up about the world and ourselves to an impregnable stronghold of certain truth(s) would tell us where we stand with respect to knowledge.

I remark that Descartes' erasure of all that can be doubted is accomplished in two strokes, the first clearing away all knowledge of particular things, the second all abstract knowledge of the possibility of existing things. In the first case, it is the senses that fall under suspicion; in the second, thinking itself. But can we not then also be deceived about the argument that contains these assertions as premises?

If I can be deceived each time I add two and three, can I not also be deceived each time I think that some particular combination of premises necessitates a particular conclusion?

I have long admired Diogenes of Sinope, the founder of the Cynic school, who is said to have lived in a tub in the marketplace in Athens.  I have appropriated his tub for my purposes here, and I want all who read my words and comment on them to feel that they, too, are in a tub, with me; that rank and station will count for nothing; and that our words must speak for themselves, as there is no room for anything else. 

I'm a student of philosophy in the broadest sense of the term; I'm uncredentialled and at the moment unmatriculated.  I do have academic ambitions, but I'm also critical of the institutions that make philosophy almost exclusively a professional affair.  In my view every thinking being is born into the mysteries that provoke philosophy, and I regard it as unfortunate that the average person feels unqualified to approach them directly. 

Ϯ

A friend of mine, the meta-ethicist Muad'Dib Kenobi-Seagull, has kindly offered to tutor me in some key texts in the philosophical tradition.  We are to begin with Descartes' Meditations; then move on to selections from Kant's First Critique; and then on to Husserl.  I have foundered on the waters of phenomenology for years, and Muad'Dib has offered to throw me a line and tow me safely into the channel.  It is a generous offer, and I hope someday to have occasion to repay the kindness.  I will be posting here on topics that arise in our working through these texts.