Descartes’s confusions

I recently read the Discourse on the Method, and I thought that there were many confusions in it, so I thought to write those down. As in my previous commentaries of some other works, I will quote freely from the Project Gutenberg edition, and not give page numbers, since word lookups can easily be made.

I have not read any of Descartes’s later works just yet, so it might be the case that he addresses those problems in them.

0. Contents

1. Methodical doubt
2. Existence and dreams
3. Thought and imagination
4. Notions and God

1. Methodical doubt

Descartes’s method may be reviewed by comparing it with my method, since my method is the right one. This sharply brings to light its merits and demerits.

Descartes is wrong to doubt of all his reasonings, which he “had hitherto taken for demonstrations”, simply because “some men err in reasoning, and fall into paralogisms”. This would make it impossible to do philosophy, if he applied it consistently; it breaks the First Rule. Indeed, the true first principles of philosophy are the laws of logic.

Descartes is right to disregard all things that he believed on the authority of others, since authority is of no weight in philosophy, according to the Second Rule. He is also right to look for self-evident first principles, since this is the best way to follow the Third Rule; although what he really looks for are “indubitable” principles, which is not quite the same, and we have seen that he was able to doubt some things unreasonably.

Descartes is right not to accept any sense data as first principles, according to the Second Rule. However, what he did choose as a first principle nevertheless contains unexamined appearances, as well as a fundamentally unclear concept, as will be shown next.

2. Existence and dreams

Descartes’s ontology may be reviewed by comparing it with my ontology, since my ontology is the right one. This clearly shows where his confusions crept in.

Descartes’s first principle was I think, therefore I am. In most other passages, Descartes refers to existence rather than being, apparently taking the terms to be synonymous – in the Meditations, he apparently said “I am, I exist” – so that I prefer to use existence to refer to his concept. The problem with this concept is that it is fundamentally unclear.

By existence, Descartes certainly does not mean what I mean by being, since he applies the word to a particular thing, namely himself. Indeed, he seems to refer to himself as a subject of change, since he uses thinking as a verb.

So we might think that, by existence, he means what I mean appearance. But if so, then his sense perceptions are just as apparent as his thoughts, and he has no more reason to doubt of one set of appearances than of the other set.

Dreams

Descartes’s supposed reason for this was that “the very same thoughts (presentations) which we experience when awake may also be experienced when we are asleep, while there is at that time not one of them true”. Presumably, the perceptions that are not true are the ones that lack what he means by “existence”, while the true ones do have it. But what does he mean by saying they are not true?

Clearly he does not mean that they are not apparent – as he says, “although I might suppose that I was dreaming, and that all which I saw or imagined was false, I could not, nevertheless, deny that the ideas were in reality in my thoughts.”

And he does not mean that they are not intelligible either – as he says, “if it happened that an individual, even when asleep, had some very distinct idea, as, for example, if a geometer should discover some new demonstration, the circumstance of his being asleep would not militate against its truth”.

Clearly, then, by existence, Descartes means “whatever distinguishes what we perceive in dreams from what we perceive when awake”. But this distinction can only apply to corporeal perceptions, and so, it makes no sense to apply it to “I think”, nor to say that such “existence” is “comprised in the idea” of God, as he says.

Unclear first principle

Descartes thought that his concept of existence was quite clear, requiring no definition, as he said in the Search for Truth:

there are things that we cannot know without seeing them; therefore to learn what doubt is, what thought is, it is necessary only that we ourselves should think and doubt. The same holds good of existence; it is only necessary to know what we understand by this word; we know at the very same moment what the thing is, at least in so far as we can know it, and there is no necessity here for a definition, which will more confuse than clear up the matter.

As we have seen, what he meant by existence was not in fact so clear at all. Whatever it is, it is neither being nor appearance, it applies univocally to our fleeting thoughts and to the eternal God, and somehow, it also distinguishes what we see in dreams from what we see when awake. This is incomprehensible. Descartes never should have left the schools.

3. Thought and imagination

“I think” is a perfectly true judgment about appearances. It means that we are aware of some changing appearances in our minds, and by those appearances, we understand the concept “thought”; and that those thoughts can only be imagined as existing together in a single whole, which we call ourselves. This is reasonable. It does not prove that we are incorporeal, of course, though the thoughts themselves are. Foremost, it is not a first principle.

Descartes confusedly thought that his judgment about his thoughts was exempt from the practice of not admitting unexamined appearances, because it was not about objects of the external senses, which is what we often mean by sensible things, which, in turn, we often contrast with intelligible. As he says, right after his proof of God’s “existence”:

But the reason which leads many to persuade them selves that there is a difficulty in knowing this truth, and even also in knowing what their mind really is, is that they never raise their thoughts above sensible objects, and are so accustomed to consider nothing except by way of imagination, which is a mode of thinking limited to material objects, that all that is not imaginable seems to them not intelligible. The truth of this is sufficiently manifest from the single circumstance, that the philosophers of the schools accept as a maxim that there is nothing in the understanding which was not previously in the senses, in which however it is certain that the ideas of God and of the soul have never been; and it appears to me that they who make use of their imagination to comprehend these ideas do exactly the some thing as if, in order to hear sounds or smell odors, they strove to avail themselves of their eyes; unless indeed that there is this difference, that the sense of sight does not afford us an inferior assurance to those of smell or hearing; in place of which, neither our imagination nor our senses can give us assurance of anything unless our understanding intervene.

He was right to think that we should think through understanding rather than imagination, and he was right to think that imagination is limited to material objects. But he was wrong to think that matter is extension, which is a definition that he made up out of whole cloth, having clearly slept through his scholastic education. Matter is the subject of appearance and change, and thoughts undergo change; his thought that “I think”, being a judgment about changing things, was itself about his imagination, though those images were incorporeal ones.

I note by the way, as was evident from my previous teachings, that the sentence which I italicized in the quote, and which is known as the peripatetic axiom, is in fact true about all forms known by the intellect – everything except the simple, general concept of being, as well as operations such as negation, implication, and disjunction. Since such forms constitute almost everything we know, the laws of logic being a mere trifle, I find that the sentence is quite true, and perfectly reasonable to say, as long as the caveat is not forgotten. The idea of the soul, in either sense of the word, really is only known through the senses; and the idea of God is just the same as the concept of being.

4. Notions and God

Descartes’s proof of the “existence” of God hinges on discussing whether his notion of God was held “from nature”, “from nothing”, or “from himself”.

This is the sort of imaginative thinking that I complained about in my blog post on learning. The origin of our concepts is a meaningless and indifferent consideration. Thoughts do not have a spatial location, and cannot approach us “from” anywhere.

If by the thought’s being from somewhere, what is meant is its efficient cause, then it should be noted that efficient causation is a relation between appearances, and so, it could not exist between a thought and God, which is not an appearance, but a reality.

More perfect things are perfectly able to be an effect of the less perfect, contrary to what Descartes thinks. He has no reason to suppose otherwise. The origin of life is nowadays often conceived to have happened through chemical reactions among inanimate things, and the origin of sensation through mutation and reproduction among these living creatures; these processes seem perfectly intelligible.

More perfect things are likewise able to be dependent on the less perfect, as our sensitive and rational powers are dependent upon the vegetative. It is true that nothing else could be if God were not, but this cannot be generalized into a principle about more perfect and less perfect apparent things.

The intelligible form of an apparent thing is always, of course, more perfect than the apparent thing itself. And God – pure and simple being, which might be called the “form of form” or “form of the good” – is likewise more perfect than all the other forms which formally depend upon it. If Descartes could only have understood the relationship between appearances and realities, he wouldn’t have been as confused as he was.