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.
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.
I wrote the following to my friend:
ReplyDeleteConcerning the Second Meditation, I may be missing something. I get that he cannot doubt his own exsistence as a thinking thing. Then he seems to distinguish sensation from thinking, in order to say that it is through thinking that we really perceive (via the example of wax being melted and having all its sensed qualities changed, yet being apprehended as the same thing by the intellect); but he also says that sensation and imagination are thinking, too, in the sense that he, a thinking thing, imagines and perceives, too; these activities belong to his essence.
Is the proper way to understand this that a thinking thing thinks and imagines and senses, and that it is specifically thinking that allows it to know its own nature? Is there a Latin or French term that covers both thinking and sensation, and that doesn't prejudice us toward one or the other?
July 4
Patrick Sullivan
(...) I meant to add that I feel I'm not understanding what "clear and distinct" means and why this is so significant. Was there previously a standard of clearness and distinctness established by Plato or something?
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My friend replied:
You anticipate correctly a deep connection between Plato and Descartes. The clear and distinct ideas can be interpreted as an echo to the Platonic Forms. I do not think they are the same species anymore, but have "differentiated" in keeping with the evolutionary metaphor. For Descartes, the certainty of a self-evident truth manifests in an idea if it is "clear and distinct." The image proper to any clear and distinct idea is one of precision and clarity modeled and inspired by geometry. Descartes finds the same precision inspirational; I mean, let's face it--the man invented algebraic geometry and the Cartesian coordinate system which maps geometry onto algebra. In some way, I think this has to do with both Plato who was influenced by Pythagoras and Descartes influenced by mathematics that make the clear and distinct ideas and Forms bedfellows.
(...)
The mathematization of God that follows from Descartes impersonalizes God, and I think this is the cause as to why the philosopher's God is always different than the God of faith. This is more stream of consciousness now than me being precise.
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So I conclude from the Second Meditation that there is at least one thing that he cannot doubt, himself as "thinking thing"; and that, even if extension is unreal, and there are no actual bodies, he knows from his reflection on experience that there is an order, hidden from the senses, which his mind grasps, and which is superior to the apparent order revealed by the senses alone, in the sense that knowing wax can melt and reform under various conditions means perceiving a whole, of which some concrete experiences are parts.
ReplyDeleteI do not think there is a value judgment either way about which is more superior--the nonphysical mind or the extended physical body. In Meditation 2, Descartes is arguing that the mind is more reliably known than the body--this is the most important conclusion to take from the second half of the Cartesian meditations. This is also reinforced by the wax example. As the wax melts and changes in its physical properties, the identity of the wax remains still known. We know the identity of the wax through the active operations of the cogito, not the senses or the imagination. Instead, we know it through the active operations of thinking and judgment.
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