Descartes and the Doubting Mind

James Hill

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441113108
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

Descartes' characterisation of the mind as a 'thinking thing' marks the beginning of modern philosophy of mind. It is also the point of departure for Descartes' own system in which the mind is the first object of knowledge for those who reason in an 'orderly way'. This ground-breaking book shows that the Cartesian mind has been widely misunderstood: typically treated as simply the subject of phenomenal consciousness, ignoring its deeply intellectual character. James Hill argues that this interpretation has gone hand in hand with a misreading of Descartes' method of doubt which treats it as all-inclusive and universal in scope. In fact, the sceptical arguments of the First Meditation aim to lead the mind away from the senses and towards the intellectual 'notions' that the mind has within it, and which are never the subject of doubt. Hill also places Descartes' concept of mind into the wider setting of his science of nature, showing how he wished to reveal a mental subject that would able to comprehend the new physics necessitated by Copernicus' heliocentrism.

Chapter I

Introduction

1. The Aims of the Book

One of René Descartes’ central and most well-known philosophical theses is that the mind is a ‘thinking thing’ or res cogitans. This characterization of the mind is so striking and simple that it may seem to call for little in the way of interpretation. It may even look like a statement of the obvious – what else could the mind be other than a thing which thinks? This book is written in the conviction that it is actually not obvious what Descartes means by a ‘thinking thing’ and his meaning only becomes clear on careful investigation of his metaphysics and particularly of the method of doubt with which it is introduced. I shall be primarily concerned here with how Descartes’ ‘thinking thing’ is related to his understanding of the intellect, of sensation, and of consciousness.

It is one aim of my interpretation to show that we cannot appreciate Descartes’ concept of the mind if we do not see how he is seeking to overcome an empiricist framework. Descartes thought that a sense-based approach to the mind and its abilities was so widespread and familiar at the time he was writing that it had become second nature to philosophers. He thought that this empiricist viewpoint not only overestimated the epistemic importance of sense perception in our finding out about the world, but that it also misunderstood the very nature of thought itself. One reason he was particularly concerned to free himself from empiricism, I shall argue, was because he felt it was an obstruction to the establishment of a new science of nature. He held that to understand the natural world we need to have a non-sensual conception of thought, and such a conception requires a mind that is, in its essence, an intellectual being.

The understanding of ‘thinking’ that I develop here diverges from a well-known and still-prevailing tradition. According to this received view, Descartes’ use of ‘thinking’ is actually equivalent to ‘being conscious’. Consciousness itself is, then, usually treated as phenomenal consciousness: as a simple experiencing of mental phenomena. The Cartesian mind is thus taken to be occupied by a succession of perishing states, of which it is immediately and transparently aware – the contents of our perceptions, sensations and conceptions.

I do not wish to deny the importance of consciousness for Descartes. My aim is rather to question the phenomenalist conception of consciousness that we tend to bring to his writings. I hope to show that, by equating thought with phenomenal consciousness, we simplify Descartes’ understanding of the mind. Among other things, I shall argue that the received view leads to a levelling of all the different mental faculties, rendering all ‘conscious’ activities equally intimate, and equally essential, to the thinking subject. This means that we lose sight of how, for Descartes, certain mental operations and ideas – which we may bring together under the term ‘intellectual’ – are more purely cases of thinking than other operations which employ images derived from sense. If we use the term ‘consciousness’ to explicate Descartes’ term ‘thought’, then, as I shall attempt to show in the final chapter, we should be careful to interpret consciousness itself in a distinctly intellectual way.

Descartes characterizes the mind not only as a ‘thinking thing’, but also as an ‘intellectual substance’. I shall show how the essential character of the mind in his view is constituted by a rational core. Much of what is usually included under the term ‘consciousness’, particularly sensation, has a secondary status for Descartes. One reason for this is that sensation is ‘accidental’ to the mind, in the sense that the mind can, in principle, exist without it, since it can exist without the body which gives rise to the corporeal images that constitute sensation. An equally important reason for the secondary status of sensation is that sensing for Descartes involves implicit judgement. To sense is already to draw upon one’s intellectual powers. As I hope to demonstrate in what follows, Descartes treats sensation as a mode of thought precisely because he holds this intellectualist view of the senses. Sense experience is, so to speak, veined with intellectual activity.

An important part of our interpretation of Descartes’ concept of mind is an approach to his method of doubt. This is inevitable. It is, after all, in the context of the radical doubts introduced in the First Meditation that the Cartesian mind emerges and is first characterized as a thinking thing.1 I shall emphasize the aim of the doubts, as stated by Descartes on various occasions, of ‘leading the mind away from the senses’. With this aim in mind I shall develop an understanding of the method of doubt that makes it less ambitious and more practicable than it is often thought to be. In particular, I shall attempt to defend Descartes against a popular view that deems his method of doubt one of ‘universal doubt’ and, as such, an impossible project.2 Descartes himself is not wont to describe his doubt as ‘universal’;3 however, that label seems to have become attached to his work fairly early on, and has stuck every since. David Hume, for example, in his First Enquiry writes:

[Descartes] recommends an universal doubt, not only of all our former opinions and principles, but also of our very faculties; of whose veracity … we must assure ourselves, by a chain of reasoning, deduced from some original principle, which cannot possibly be fallacious or deceitful.4

Hume treats Cartesian doubt as calling into question all our former beliefs and principles and, indeed, even our cognitive faculties themselves en bloc. In the light of this reading, Hume, not surprisingly, is pessimistic about the practicality of such doubt:

The Cartesian doubt … were it ever possible to be attained by any human creature (as it plainly is not), would be entirely incurable; and no reasoning could ever bring us to a state of assurance and conviction upon any subject.5

In Hume’s view, the universality of Descartes’ doubt means that he digs himself into a hole so deep that he has no hope of ever getting back out again. The only comfort that Hume finds is that this Cartesian sceptical project cannot actually be prosecuted ‘by any human creature’, and therefore the starting point of Descartes’ metaphysics may be safely passed over.6

This interpretation of Hume’s is clearly not pure invention. Certain comments made by the meditator may suggest that Descartes is putting forward doubts of a universal character, encompassing truths of purely intellectual thought as well as those derived from the senses. I shall consider and interpret these passages below. Indeed, it may be that Hume captures the original intentions of the meditator, even if he does not accurately describe the method of doubt as it is actually performed in the Meditations. This gives rise to the general question of how we should distinguish between what the meditator consciously aims for and what he in fact succeeds in doing. One possibility is that the meditator thinks he is capable of universal doubt, but that in the course of his attempt to perform this doubt, he discovers he has notions or faculties that cannot be successfully called into question. If this is true, then Hume may give a satisfactory description of the attitude of Descartes’ uninitiated beginner in philosophy, even if he fails to capture Descartes’ own aims in presenting us with the method of doubt.

But, whatever the answer to these interpretational questions, Hume’s view certainly overlooks a crucial positive aspect of Descartes’ sceptical method. Alongside the negative ‘antecedent’ task of clearing away his former beliefs and of calling into question his faculties, the method of doubt is, I shall argue in Chapter IV, an exercise or training of the intellect. The very performance of the doubt forces the meditator to turn away from the image-based faculties of sense, memory and imagination and to exercise the two faculties which together constitute our rationality – intellect and will. This means that the doubt is actually designed to nurture our most fundamental rational powers. If we recognize this it may become easier to understand why Descartes thought that the method of doubt is quite capable of being performed.

The method of doubt, as understood here, makes way for Descartes’ view of the mind as natura intellectualis.7 It is the active intellectual subject of these doubts – the res dubitans, if you will – who comes to know itself as res cogitans. This illumination of our intellectual natures can only be properly appreciated if we pose the question as to which mental faculties are performing the doubting. This question is often overlooked, I think, because there is a widespread assumption that what is truly worthwhile in a philosophical text can be laid out as a formal argument and judged in separation from the subject that thinks it. For some texts such an assumption is perfectly legitimate, but the meditational form of Descartes’ metaphysics demands that we treat the doubts in the First Meditation as not only a series of arguments, but also as a selective cultivation of our mental powers.

The interpretation presented here is not just aimed at getting clearer about the important historical question of what Descartes really thought, but it aims also to assess the philosophical strengths and weaknesses of his position. On the one hand, as already indicated, I hope to show that his method of doubt is not the obvious and hopeless failure that it is often thought to be – we cannot agree with Hume that Cartesian doubt ‘were it ever possible to be attained by a human creature would be entirely incurable’. I shall also attempt to show that Descartes’ intellectualist understanding of the mind is an interesting position in its own right. In particular, I hope it will become apparent that Descartes, by arguing that concept empiricism makes the self inconceivable, does indeed point to a significant lacuna in the fundamental philosophical orientation common to the Aristotelian and Epicurean empiricist traditions. Incidentally, Hume, writing almost a century later, implicitly acknowledged this point by finding no place in his own empiricist system for knowledge of an enduring self.8

But while the interpretation here is sympathetic to Descartes’ aims, it also offers a critical perspective. In particular, I shall argue that Descartes often simplifies the position of his empiricist opponent and that he tends to make the dubious assumption that empiricism is necessarily bound up with materialism. Generally, Descartes is inclined to reduce both Aristotelian and Epicurean empiricism to a dogmatic core, ignoring the important differences between these two traditions, as well as refinements of doctrine that are to be found in each. In addition, I shall argue that it is Descartes’ understanding of mind that is the main reason – if not the only one – which leads him to his notorious mechanistic view of animals. The dramatic contraction of the sentient world that we witness in Descartes’ natural philosophy is, in large part, a result of his defining the mental sphere in terms of intellectual thought. The unhappy corollary of my interpretation is that we cannot easily excise the unacceptable Cartesian view of animals from the main body of his metaphysics, and treat it as an ‘optional extra’.

This book aims to tackle one central theme in Descartes’ philosophical work and inevitably only touches on other significant parts of his thought in passing. I will, for example, have little to say about Descartes’ conception of God, the proofs of God’s existence and the role of God in guaranteeing knowledge. Despite this, I shall at least try to show that our interpretation of Descartes’ method of doubt enables one to defend him against the criticism that the proof of God in the Third Meditation involves the ‘monumental gaffe’ of begging the question – the criticism that is often referred to as ‘Arnauld’s circle’. Put crudely, I shall be arguing that Descartes’ meditator doubts less than is usually thought and therefore he has more at his disposal when framing the proof of God that follows his doubts. In particular he never calls into question the ‘common notions’ (notiones communes) which include a conception of causation that is fundamental to the argument for God’s existence in the Third Meditation.

Our focus on the concept of mind, and its emergence from the method of doubt, allows us to engage with issues that are very much alive in contemporary philosophy. Over the last forty years, since Harry Frankfurt’s classic study,9 there has been vigorous discussion of the sceptical method of the Meditations. Interpretations of Descartes’ First Meditation have also played a significant role in how philosophical scepticism in general is conceived.10 Likewise, the recent literature on consciousness almost invariably treats Descartes as not only the first to delineate the modern concept of consciousness, but also as the defender of a view of the mind that has been subject to criticism from many different angles. So in treating of doubt and mind, I am examining a part of Descartes’ thought that is not merely of historical interest, but which remains relevant to contemporary philosophical reflection.

2. Mental Dualism

Sooner or later the reader may start to feel that insufficient consideration is being given to what is often seen as the defining feature of Descartes’ treatment of mind, his substantial dualism. For many people Descartes’ philosophy is virtually to be identified with the ontological split between mind and matter, between two substances which are utterly unlike one another. Often this dualism – unkindly referred to as the ‘ghost in the machine’ – is pressed into service as a negative paradigm, telling us how we should not understand the relation between mind and matter. It leads to the insurmountable problem, we are told, of psychophysical interaction. It is not clear how there can be a causal connection between bodies in space, which can only act by physical impulse, and non-spatial spirits, which have no surfaces for physical impulse to act upon. I do not seek to tackle this problem of causal interaction which, I think, Descartes ultimately tried to alleviate by gesturing towards some form of occasionalism, a path followed by many C...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliographical Note
• Chapter I
• Chapter II
• Chapter III
• Chapter IV
• Chapter V
• Chapter VI
• Chapter VII
• Chapter VIII
• Notes
• Bibliography