Descartes
Contrast with Hobbes
Conceptualist vs Nominalist
With Descartes, we are switching to continental rationalist philosophy. The contrast works out like following. Hobbes is a nominalist, influenced by William Ockham, no universals, the only explanatory principles needed are efficient cause and material cause, no formal and final causes. Consequently, his nominalist gives rise to empiricist epistemology in which he tries to see what are uniform patterns of cause and effect relationship. In contrast to that, Descartes is a conceptualist, which makes possible his rationalism, and he maintains that we have some intuitive innate knowledge of general principles and universal premises.
Epistemology
In the theory of knowledge, both Hobbes and Descartes have a representational view, that is, consciousness is immediately aware of ideas which represent to it external realities. We saw in Hobbes in his distinction of primary and secondary qualities, while the primary qualities are qualities of external things, represented in our minds with association with secondary qualities, and secondary qualities are purely subjective representations, with no objective counterpart.
Methodology
Hobbes method is a re-constitutive method in attempt to restructure our understanding in form of deductive system with empirical premises. Both Hobbes and Descartes want their philosophy to follow a deductive system, but for Descartes, the pattern he follows is not a empirical system, but rather self evident truth, the model is that of geometrical system, where you have axioms, followed by proofs, leading to certain conclusions.
Philosophical Beliefs
Hobbes comes out as a materialist, matter and motions seem to explain everything. Descartes on the other hand is a dualist, he maintains that mind or souls are immaterial entities, so the human beings are composition of two different kinds of things.
Free Will
Hobbes was a determinist, everything including our thoughts are casually determined, what think as free decision are simply ambivalence between two conflicting drives. Descartes with a mind separate from the body is claiming that mind is independent of those causal mechanisms, so he asserts the freedom of the will.
Psychological and Ethic
Psychologically egoism characterizes Hobbes, that is, drive for survival and self preservation is the consuming passion, that self interest is what drives in what we do, as a result in ethics, he appeals to right reason, which is what Ockham had appealed to. The general approach of Hobbes is kind of hedonist, epicurean kind of ethic. Descartes is closer to a Stoic ethic. His view is our passions are themselves good, but they need rational guidance.
God
For Hobbes, God must be the first efficient cause in the whole chain of cause and effect. Descartes wants to say more, since he is a conceptualist, he can only speak of God as efficient cause, not as formal cause, but he does want to have the picture from Medieval. God is not only efficient cause, but also Good.
What is going to assure us that the process of nature is accessible, the empirical methods are going to be reliable? Whitehead argues that it was the confidence in the rationality of God that gives confidence of the intelligibility of God’s creation. The question still arises, not as to objective conditions, but as to subjective conditions which makes human rationality reliable, and which makes human sense believable. Descartes tries to argue for the reliability of human reason and senses, he starts methodologically where the skeptic is, skeptical about reason and senses, but he is arguing reason is trustworthy because a good God will not deceive us by giving us faulty, intellectual faculties, so it rests on the goodness of God. In meditation VI he gets around to talk about sense experience, he has same argument, our senses are reliable because a good God won’t deceive us by giving us unreliable senses. Descartes is able to go beyond by saying God is efficient cause because of the goodness of God and accordingly the reliability of sense and reason, so he is much more optimistic about the development of science and philosophy.
Methodology
You might realize that for all the contrast between Hobbes and Descartes, there is a strong point of similarity initially between Bacon and Descartes. Bacon begins with a theory of how we know by casting down all kinds of idols. He does not trust the philosophical and scientific methods of the past or the philosophical beliefs of past. Descartes in that regard is virtually the same. The first meditation is simply an attempt to expound on the thesis, I doubt and to give reasons for doubt. By identifying the skeptical position and devising a new method breaking out of skepticism into a new era of philosophical inquiry, there is a sense in which both of them are conceding the skeptics point. Bacon coming up with a much more careful empirical method. Descartes comes with a kind of analysis and logical method that he thinks is operative in mathematics. The difference between Bacon’s new method and Descartes’ new method is in the empiricist string, premises where empirical generalization, what you have is evidence and perhaps probability but no certainty. In Descartes’ tradition, the premises are self evident, intuitive, what you have is complete certainty, beyond all doubt. The result is if you are trying to justify believing certain conclusion is true, the most you have in the empirical line is probability, and an approach to justification of beliefs is known as evidentialism today. John Locke says you should proportion your belief in evidence. On the other hand, Descartes with his indubitable certainty, lays the basis for the approach to justification of beliefs which toady is called foundationalism.
Meditations
Meditations I - I doubt
Meditation I develops methodological skepticism. Notice the relativity of sense perception. Second he employs the hypothesis that God deceived us, or perhaps some malign demon deceived us so that we think is so is not at all. What he does is to lay down certain rules he wants, which are described “Discourse on Method”. 1. We will accept as intuitive only what is clear and distinct as to be beyond all doubt. 2. In order to have clarity we ought to analyze any belief into its constituent parts. 3. Reorganize them in the form of logical demonstration. 4. Check and recheck every proof. The crux to it is clarity and distinctiveness. He uses the term intuition and intuitive, by intuitive he means a direct awareness, he doesn’t say we have direct awareness of material objects or existence of God, but our own ideas. Then it is appropriate to say we are taught by the natural light of reason. It is Augustinian in its root, except that what in Augustine is light of divine logos illuminating the object of our knowledge, in Descartes, it becomes simply reason itself. He makes distinction between objective and formal reality. When we have clear and distinct idea, we have objective reality. However, the formal reality of external things is the cause of the objectively real idea. One other phase he uses is self evident and innate. For Plato innate idea is one that is from previous existence. For Descartes, innate simply means it is native and it is of natural origin. What he is saying is the mind itself spontaneously started to think these ideas, and they are a-priori. This is what distinguishes really rationalism from empiricism. Empiricists says that we have no a-priori knowledge. This intuitive criterion of truth is applied not only to premises but to further influences you draw from those premises. His method involves intuition and deduction.
Meditation II - Therefore I exist, a thinking thing
The initial axiom is in the first Meditation, the exercise of clearing the way of things that can be doubted, established the intuitively obvious fact that I doubt. As he reflects on that premise, he notes that doubting is just one form of thinking. So he says I think therefore I am. But what’s important is the scope of what he includes within the statement I think, it includes doubting, perceiving, imagining, affirming and denying, any activity of conscious. He is not thinking of intellect separate from emotion and will, to say think therefore I exist is same as saying I’m conscious therefore I exist. Among things which he includes with thinking are both content and act of consciousness. He is saying there must be an agent that acts in various ways. And all of these are intuitive, they are not inferred, independent of sense perceptions or awareness of external things, introspectively I become aware of this, it’s not mediated through sense perception, these are mental awarenesses. He is consciousness not of material qualities, but of mental qualities, unrelated to physical senses. He gives an example of wax, and thinks that which immediately before consciousness is not the physical qualities, but the idea of wax, which is not reducible to just a collection of physical qualities. What he is doing is acknowledging that he is going to work with a representational theory of knowledge, the mind is aware of its ideas and its mental acts which represent to it external bodies and other external realities. In other words, you don’t have direct awareness of anything that is external, whether it be physical bodies or other minds, or God, what we directly aware of is our own consciousness. If we want to know the existence of God we have to prove it from our consciousness, it has to be a-priori proof, a proof based not on empirical evidence, but on content of one’s own consciousness. And same for the existence of other minds and physical body.
The history of modern epistemology begins here, because we have no way of knowing the existence of external world, physical body, God through inference. For example, for existence of other mind, we only have analogical argument rather than proof. What he meant is that you have to have an alternative theory of knowledge apart from this representational theory of knowledge. We need to have a more direct awareness of other minds. When we get to Hegel he said there is, in existential tradition, there is such awareness.
What follows from I think is that I exist, but the problem is what am I that exist? If the argument is I think therefore I exist, what follows during times when I don’t think, when I’m unconscious? In other words, what we seem to commit to as a starting point is solipsism of the present moment of consciousness. There are three problems leading to solipsism of the present moment: 1. All I know is that I exist 2. The discontinuity of my own consciousness 3. The problem of memory, because memory is a present representation of past consciousness.
What is involved in the thinking? What am I that exist? He takes it to a pretty obvious thing, that I am is a thinking agent. But there he jumps to a conclusion that is unwarranted, because granted the immediate awareness of myself in the thinking, where does the “thing” come in? Am I aware of the mind that does the thinking? In fact in the very beginning of the work he says he is going to prove the existence of the God and the soul, which is precisely what the Scholastics try to do, to provide a basis for theology. When he equates the thinking thing with soul, Thomas Hobbes raises his obvious objection that why should a thinking thing be a body, since he is assuming it’s brain that does the thinking rather than immaterial soul. Why not a corporeal thinker? To which Descartes has his response, first I have no intuitive of body as I do of mind, that is to say I have intuitive awareness of the agent, but not of the body. Secondly, he claims I do have some notion of a soul substance, he is not saying I have a clear and distinct idea, it’s a notion, which implies it’s more imaginative than explicit. In any case he thinks there is more grounds for affirming a soul substance as a thinker because of his notion than there is ground for affirming that body is the soul substance. Later on we will have further objection by David Hume, who said in our introspective awareness of the mind, what we are aware of is our ideas and being aware of my mind I’m only aware of a bundle of ideas of what I call mind, but I don’t know about what bundles them. He is not talking about awareness of mental acts, but only ideas. But Descartes’s argument hinges not just on representational ideas, but on introspective consciousness of our mental activity, which we don’t find in David Hume. So without mental activity why an agent? Hume is a skeptic about the existence of mind, material bodies and God. So Descartes who started with skepticism, really, according to David Hume, should end up where he started, skepticism.
The story of epistemology from Descartes to Hume is the story of a concerted attempt to argue ones way out of skepticism by a foundationalist approach, an approach, which according to David Hume, fails utterly. So Hume has to find another way out of skepticism, and for him, it’s beliefs as a product of mental habit, sort of pragmatism.
Meditation III - God Exists
Coming to this far, Descartes has two premises available: the existence of Mind and the actual ideas. So if he want to argue for the existence of God, he has to argue from either or both of these. The main body of Meditation III is arguing from our actual ideas, specifically, my idea of God. The other would be the existence of the Mind. In both cases, he tries to construct a causal argument. The existence of Mind means I am a finite fallible and contingent thing. His question is what causes these. Actually he has a suppressed premise that is the causal relations, ideas and contingent Mind aren’t self existent, they must have a cause. It’s an illustration that when you try to suspend everything, you are bound to fail to suspend something you fail to suspend. Notice that he distinguishes three kind of ideas, ideas that are innate, adventitious and factitious. He is going to argue that idea of God is not a factitious one which I cause, it is rather involuntary. Second, he is going to argue the idea of God is not simply adventitious, because the idea of God has the fullest kind of objective reality about it.
Because he is going to say the idea of God has objective reality, he is going to define what that idea is. In fact he seems to identify clarity and distinctness with objective reality of an idea. Notice that in using the phrase objective reality he is talking about the quality of the idea rather than what the idea is about. Because in the representational theory of knowledge it is the idea that is the object of the thought. External things must have a as great a degree of formal reality as the idea as objective reality, which is another way of saying the cause of an idea must be at least as great as the effect. And he thinks that nature teaches us this idea, which means it is an adventitious idea, it’s an idea that we learn in the causal experience. He claims that if the objective reality, or the perfection of any one of my ideas, be such as clearly to convince me to same reality exist in me neither formally or eminently, if as follows from this, my self can not be the cause of it, then it’s a necessary consequence that I am not alone in the world, that solipsism is false. What he is doing is setting the logical apparatus he is going to use.
It’s absolutely necessary to conclude that God exists, for thought the ideas of substances in my mind, owning to this, that I myself is a substance, I shouldn’t have the idea of infinite substance since I am a finite being, unless the idea of infinite being were given by some substance in reality that is infinite. He says that it’s necessary to conclude that I am in possess the idea of being absolutely perfect of God, that his existence is most clearly demonstrated, I am not drawn it from the senses, that is to say it’s not adventitious, it’s not pure production of my mind, which means it’s not factitious, consequently there remains but one alternative that it is innate, in the same way as the idea of myself is innate, in truth it’s not to be wondered that God at my creation implanted this idea in me that it might serve, as it were, the mark of the worker man impressed on its work. In apprehending myself as a finite thinking thing, I find an image of the infinite thinking thing, God. The effect bear witness of the cause.
Standing back from the argument of the existence of God, we can see that it is a cause effect argument, it’s not a cosmological or teleological argument, but a cause effect argument. The effect being the existence of Mind and its idea of God. It’s not an ontological argument, which tries to analyze the idea of God and show it would be a self contradiction to deny the existence of God. But Descartes does in Meditation V develop an ontological argument. Why does he defer the ontological argument to Meditation V? Because he don’t have sufficient logical premises. In order to do ontological argument, he has to be confident that what human reason judges to be logically necessary is logically necessary, not casually necessary. If you look at internal logic of the concept of God, informing an ontological argument, you gotta have confidence in the law governing reason and that is awaits still Meditation IV.
Meditation V - Necessary Truth regarding Material Bodies
I want to start with the object of thought object, Descartes is maintaining that we have other kinds of ideas than particular empirical data, we have concept of universal concepts. He wants to maintain that these concepts have a kind of reality of their own so that certain things are universally true of certain object. It’s in that context he is able to distinguish last two Meditations between essence of material bodies and the existence of material bodies that you perceive with your senses. His approach to Meditation V is thought object, and perception of sensory object in Meditation VI. Coming back to Aristotle’s laws of logic, the laws of logic are objective, they have a reality of their own, as structures of all thought and all meaningful discourse, the rules of logic are objectively real, not in the sense that they are material things, though they are true of real things.
One of the concepts in Meditation V is the concept of God, he deals with it in terms of the objective reality in terms of law of logic. What he is trying to show is the idea of matter and idea of God is that there is some logically necessary truth that we can know independently of experience. Keep in mind that the distinction already emerged between primary and secondary qualities, where secondary qualities has to do with what is accessible by our own sense, while primary qualities are qualities of material things themselves. The essence of matter is that it occupies space, so it has spacial properties, if we can know any logically necessary truth space, we know logically necessary truth about any matter. What is science that tells us what is necessary about space? Geometry. So he is trying to show there are logically geometrical truth. There are necessary truths about any triangle. He has a mechanistic view of material bodies, including the operation of human bodies, matter and casual forces that produce changes in human bodies.
In Meditation V he is more interested in the existence of God. If you follow through the Medieval thought, you will find that God is the one whose essence is to exist. If it is the case, then there is a parallel between necessary truth about material bodies that we know in geometry and God’s existence. Granted the concept of triangle, it is a necessary truth. Granted the concept of God, the contradiction of the existence will be self contradictory. What he develops in Meditation V is an ontological argument for the existence of God. He has the final paragraph in Meditation V: I clearly see the certitude and truth of all science depends on knowledge alone of a true God in as much as before I knew him I can not have any knowledge of any other things, now that I know him, and I possess the means of acquiring perfect knowledge, as relative to God as to other intellectual objects of corporeal nature, in so far as the objects of pure mathematics.
Descartes has never escaped the dependency from Medieval thought. If we suppose God as the one whose essence is good, beautiful and powerful but not a necessary being, Descartes will say that that’s not God. In the medieval context, the top of the hierarchy of being, you have the greatest degree of being, so by definition, the perfectly good is necessary existent. The contemporary objection is that the existence of God is not logically necessary, it’s argued that it’s ontologically necessary, that is to say, granted that God exists, it can not not exist. Some would argue that he is confusing logical necessity and ontological necessity.
Meditation VI - Truth about Material Existence
He again need to start with a state of consciousness. He distinguishes three kinds of conscious state, 1. conception, 2. imagination and 3. sensation. We already said about conception: having thought object about which certain things are necessarily truth, as with mathematical object and God. All that conception of material body with spacial properties shows that there is nothing logically contradictory about the concept of the material body such that it’s at least logically possible the material body exists. You can’t prove the existence of material body simply abstract idea of matter. In addition to conception, imagination gives us some factitious ideas. All that imagination does, is to provide some persuasion, but still no proof of the existence of things I imagine. But when he turns to sensation, that’s a different matter. He is thinking of sensations in the ordinary common sense use of the term. There are physical sensation includes bodily feelings, so they are adventitious, and they tend to be involuntary. He is asking about the cause of the sensations that I experience. In other words, in these sensations, I feel my own body. Therefore, nature teaches us, by virtue of sensations, about the existence of our own bodies. These sensations are not caused by me, they couldn’t be caused by God, because if it was, he would be deceiving me(if I do not have a bod) he can not deceive me since he is perfect. The only other alternative is that I indeed have a body. What about the rest of the material world. There is a simply cause effect argument, because things happen to my body such that I experience physical sensation, then there must be some thing to cause these things to happen to my body. It’s by that means that we can argue for the existence not only for other bodies but other minds. In my mind, I am aware of my bodily states to my mental states, then by analogy I can see that there is going to be someone else’s bodily states which I observe and mental states which I don’t observe, it’s an argument by analogy. Throughout the 18th century and until the 19th century, in the English and Continental traditions, this is the standard way for arguing the existence of other minds. Until late 19th century and early 20th century that you get some notion of developing awareness of other people’s consciousness.
Meditation IV - Reliabilities of Reason, Problem of Error
Three other things arises, one is the problem of error. There are sensory illusions, how do we account for that? If God is perfect such that the sensing capacities that he give us is not going to be deceived, how come we can be deceived. One reason he proposes is that our bodies are made up of different parts, such that some malfunctioning of one part may cause sensations which are not telling us directly the truth. The other things is the will and intellect involved, there is nothing deceptive about having a whole string of sensations, on which one sensation is proved to be untrustworthy, the error only consists in our making a judgment that involves a reliability of that sensation. The act of judgment involves intellect, and will in affirming the judgment. The error occurs when we allow the will to make judgments beyond the extent to which the intellect is satisfied about the sensations.
The second residual question is about the Mind Body relationship. What Descartes given us so far is the existence of a body which is spatially extended thing and the existence of a Mind which is a thinking thing. The problem is how are these two related. Descartes’ view is both mind and body function as causes, produces effects on others. Certain mental acts can cause bodily changes, and certain bodily changes can produce mental states. There is a causal interaction. It seems reasonable, but how does it happen if they are essentially different and substantively independent entities. What Descartes comes up with in his work on the passions is the interaction takes place in the pineal gland. This mind body causal interaction does not seem to explain the essential unity of a self, it doesn’t seem right to say I’m a mind with a body. There is one alternative from Geulincx, who developed a theory known as occasionalism, saying that the cause of the corresponding behavior of mind and body is God, my thought is just the occasion on which God makes a change in my body and a change in my body is just an occasion on which God causes a change in my mental states. You still hear someone saying that to say God is almighty is to say that God has all the might there is, so all of the causal power that is exerted by a creature is by God. If God is the causal agent for everything that occurs, then occasionalism is all that required, other things that happens are just occasions for the causal power of God. When we get to Spinoza, we’ll see he develops double aspects theory, that is to say ideas and physical changes are simply two aspects of one of the same underlying substance, so the mental and physical are two aspects of one of the same thing. When we get to Leibniz, he will suggest that they are preprogrammed to function in perfect harmony all the way through. But frankly, what are alternatives? In the current period, the one that’s used against those kinds of dualism is in terms of brain dependency of all of our mental states, and if a dualism is desired, then it needs to be dualism in which there is an interdependence, more with a separable soul than an already separated soul.
Moral & Psychological Ethics
In order to get to the passions, we need to see again the mind body relationship. Mind and body are two separate substances, mind can function independently with body and body can function independently with mind. In other words, bodily changes are all physically produced without the aid of the soul. The soul has two functions, voluntary activities like reasoning and imagining and passions, which are passive functions of the soul, awareness, conscious states caused by bodily changes. He says passions are perceptions, sensations and emotions caused by bodily changes. He has a casual theory of our perception, he is distinguishing between perception, caused by external agents, in which sense is adventitious, and on the other hand imagination, which is our creating of images, and is therefore factitious, and also innate ideas. It is perceptions which are among the passions of the soul, the consciousness are caused by movements of animal spirit and bodily changes. In reverse fashion, the soul can have causal influence on the body, by virtue of its active functions. The result is that emotions can be affected by mind, even though they are produced by physical causes, and the moral life becomes a reason controlling passions. What you have is reason guiding the will and influencing the passions. Right reason gives the power to change what we can and also the power to be content of what we can’t change.
There seems to be four streams of thought, which are all focused on what would be an ethic, if he develops them more systematically. One is about passion and the power of the reason to rule passions. Second is the Mind Body relationship such that mind is separate substance, not part of the physical world, free to its causal processes. Both Bacon and Descartes has been accused by some environmental advocates, of laying the ground work of abusive domination over the environment and reaping natural resources. Third is will and intellect relationship which we saw in regards to the problem of error. Insofar as error is a kind of evil, error is to truth what evil is to good, then that will and intellect interplay applies to the good and evil issue as well.
Fourth is a kind of provisional morality. It fits in perfect with what would be the conclusion of his inquiry. The first moral maxim is to obey laws and customs of my country, constantly retaining the religion in which I’ve been brought up with. In all other matter, to follow the most moderate and least excessive could be found. Reason is that if I should be an error I won’t be astray too far from the truth. Second maxim, to be as firm and determined in my actions as I could be, and not to act on the most doubtable decisions. This frees me from repentance and remorse. Third maxim is always to seek conquer myself rather fortune, to change desires rather than established order and generally believe nothing other than our thoughts are wholly under our control. Finally, I plan to make a review of various occupations in the life in order to choose the best and I decided to stay with philosophical occupation because I know nothing which gives me greater contentment of mind. As Stoics says absence of pain in the body and trouble in the mind. Reasons on an a-priori basis yields no ethic and it’s the passions which gives rise to ethic.
I think it’s fair to say that the remainder of 17th century was dominated by Descartes, the term Cartesian is used to speak of not only Descartes but also his successors, including Spinoza, Leibniz, Bayle, Pascale, John Locke, Berkeley etc. Pascal is a mathematician, he distinguishes between rational knowledge and intuitive knowledge. Rational knowledges are things like mathematics, Pascal regards these as applicable in mathematics but inapplicable to science, theology, metaphysics and ethics. Inapplicable in science because we need to perceive examples, and probabilities are what we need to work with, rather than logical certainty. Theology because it begins with revelation, and you cannot demonstrate the existence of God, we need divine revelation to know about God. Ethics because you have disagreement which can not be rationally sound. He seems to adopt skepticism of the day. Frequently that kind of skepticism is associated with intuition, which is direct personal awareness. It’s a matter of intuitive awareness that space is three dimensional. The heart has its reasons that the mind does not know. I think Pascal uses the heart as a unifying core of the whole personality. He sees reason only part of a person’s God given faculties. He sees intuition the kind of things the heart knows as involving the whole of personality by virtue of its inner nature. Pascal stands as a critic of the kind of rationalism that is going to develop for the enlightenment. There is one other side of Pascal is Pascal’s wager. Right reason would go something like this, either God exists or not exists, if he does exist and you believe it, you have everything to gain, if he does not exists and you believe he does, you have nothing to lose, if he does exist and you do not believe it, you have everything to lose, so the gain is all on wagering that God exists, that’s the prudent thing to do.
Rationalism in Three Senses
Rationalism has at least three different meanings. The first is rationalism against empiricism, the empiricism claims all knowledge comes from sense experience, what you do there after might be the same as Descartes does, the difference is just the source of knowledge. The second kind stands against fideism, for whom belief is unrelated to evidence or argument, where rationalism belief depends on arguments. The third sense of rationalism has to do with moral psychology that reason is able to rule in the moral life, that the clarity of ideas, the light of reason can dispel certain emotions. It’s rationalism over voluntarism or rationalism over against romanticism.