If Descartes' goal was to doubt everything doubtable, I actually wonder if he went far enough. He seems to exempt the mind from doubt. "I think therefore I am," does establish that *something* exists that is *doing something*, but I think that's about it. To assume the "I" as he conceived it is what exists and that thinking as he understands it is what is happening seems like privileging his perceptions of his own mind.
If I pursue his initial goal, I have to consider that the "I" pondering this might be a cognitive fragment with predictions of being part of a broader mind, but isn't. Maybe this fragment is connected to an actual mind for purposes of examining it. Or maybe I'm in an incomplete simulation, even of myself, that simply prevents me from noticing the incompleteness.
To be fair to Descartes, the level of skepticism I'm describing here would likely have been inconceivable to a 17th century person. (It's inconceivable to most people today.) He later concludes that while the body is divisible, the mind isn't. (He justifies this with the point that he perceives his mind as completely unified.) The idea of this level of doubt, which actually takes the mind itself as extended, probably just didn't occur to him.
While this level of skepticism is an interesting thought experiment, I don't know how much it really tells us. We can doubt everything, but in the end, if we ignore the world and our body, they will impinge on us in painful ways. It seems like reality is best measured by what enhances the accuracy of predictions of future experiences.
But maybe I'll have a future experience that shows that prediction is wrong. :-)
As for Cartesian doubt, yeah, you can't get too far when you begin with solipsism and apply extreme skepticism, but I guess someone had to do so it...and now we know.
"Or maybe I'm in an incomplete simulation, even of myself, that simply prevents me from noticing the incompleteness."
Yeah, I doubt he'd know what a simulation is, but something like this level of skepticism is captured, I think, in the evil demon thwarting him every time he tries to do simple math. It's unclear at this point what the "I" is for Descartes since as you say there's no reason to think he can move beyond the cognitive fragment that is the cogito to some unified mind (much less immortal soul). That time-bound element of it sometimes gets left out when people discuss "I think; therefore, I am", but I think you see why time is so important here. It's strange to think of a truth so minimal and so completely dependent on an awareness of "now".
Just wanted to add something on what you say here: "He justifies this with the point that he perceives his mind as completely unified." He does say this, esp. in the 2nd. Med., but he also goes back and forth on this at other points, so I'm reluctant to nail him down just yet. I added a bit more explanation in my reply to Jim.
I was thinking about this part from the 6th meditation.
"There is a great difference between the mind and the body. Every body is by its nature divisible, but the mind can’t be divided. When I consider the mind— i.e. consider myself purely as a thinking thing— I can’t detect any parts within myself; I understand myself to be something single and complete."
But I'll admit I found that on a search when following a citation. I've only read the first two meditations all the way through. (Maybe your series will inspire me to finish all six.) So I can't say he doesn't back off later. Although it seems like an important step in the reasoning to his famous substance dualism.
Ah, I see. Ultimately I think you're right about his position later on. I just meant it's hard to see what he thinks of the self as the Meditations evolve, since he confronts some ideas that might not support where he ends up. It's interesting because he says the same thing about the will, that it can't be divided. But then you have to wonder how the will and the intellect are related to the mind, and whether they constitute parts.
That's a good point. I wonder what his response might have been. Or to the fact that I can often momentarily forget things I know, which implies portions of my mind not interacting. Or feel conflicted about something, which implies different portions in conflict. So even by his own standard, the mind seems readily divisible.
Of course, in an age now generally aware of the unconscious mind, it's a lot easier for us to see these indicators.
"So even by his own standard, the mind seems readily divisible."
All I can say is, the dude is hard to pin down! There's something very 'stream of consciousness' about his writing.
It's interesting to take a look at the rest of that quote:
"There is a great difference between the mind and the body. Whereas every body is by its nature divisible, the mind can’t be divided. For when I consider the mind, or consider myself insofar as I am merely a thinking thing, I can’t detect any parts within myself; I understand myself to be something single and complete. The whole mind seems to be united to the whole body, but not by a uniting of parts to parts, as the following consideration shows. If a foot or arm or any other part of the body is cut off, nothing is thereby taken away from the mind. As for the faculties of willing, of understanding, of sensory perception and so on, these are not parts of the mind, since it is one and the same mind that wills, understands and perceives. They are (I repeat) not parts of the mind, because they are properties or powers of it. By contrast, any corporeal thing can easily be divided into parts in my thought; and this shows me that it is really divisible. This one argument would be enough to show me that the mind is completely different from the body, even if I did not already know as much from other considerations. The mind isn’t immediately affected by all parts of the body but only by the brain – or perhaps just by the small part of it which is said to contain the ‘common sense’. [Descartes is referring to the pineal gland. The ‘common sense’ was a supposed faculty, postulated by Aristotle, whose role was to integrate the data from the five specialized senses.] The signals that reach the mind depend upon what state this part of the brain is in, irrespective of the condition of the other parts of the body. There is abundant experimental evidence for this, which I needn’t review here."
So the mind is not made up of parts, but the will is a property or power of the mind. Then he poses a dependence of the mind on the brain, specifically the pineal gland, which was apparently thought to be the source of integrated sensory information.
And YET. As much as he wants to separate mind-substance from body-substance, he doesn't think the mind drives the body as a ship:
"Nature also teaches me, through these sensations of pain, hunger, thirst and so on, that I (a thinking thing) am not merely in my body as a sailor is in a ship. Rather, I am closely joined to it – intermingled with it, so to speak – so that it and I form a unit. If this were not so, I wouldn’t feel pain when the body was hurt but would perceive the damage in an intellectual way, like a sailor seeing that his ship needs repairs. And when the body needed food or drink I would intellectually understand this fact instead of (as I do) having confused sensations of hunger and thirst. These sensations are confused mental events that arise from the union – the intermingling, as it were – of the mind with the body."
Not sure what to make of all this. He seems a reluctant dualist at times.
It's hard to tell with early modern writers. I've seen speculation that some of their arguments were made for political reasons, to keep the church off their back. It makes sense, particularly when you look at the fate of those who didn't play that game (Bruno, La Mettrie, etc.) or who played too close to the edge (Galileo). On the other hand, it seems like all we can really respond to are the arguments they did write.
If we did not trust our sensory perceptions we could not survive let alone thrive. However, it must be noted that everything without a doubt happens in our heads. And for the most part, that scenario is at the root of the problem for us. The intellect of the mind determines “what is and what is not”. There is no empirical arbiter in this relationship because the mind is a sovereign system.
Empiricism itself and the facts gathered by the scientific method are subordinate as well to intellection and furthermore, intellection or mentation is by its very nature “a priori”. It is not just math that is a priori, the general property of the extension of all objects is a priori as well. The church of empiricism somehow fails to acknowledge this simple fact or conveniently whitewashes it over.
For all practical purposes, our reality is Cogito however, that does not mean that Cogito is not physical because the motion required for all thoughts result in structure and/or form. And as I stated earlier: what makes something physical is the fact that it has structure and/or form, and that structure as in all forms requires the “first cause” of motion.
Actually, I prefer reasoning over the schema of rationality. Rationality is an efficient and productive tool that is absolutely necessary for survival. However, rationality by itself is limited in scope therefore it cannot be trusted. This is due to the fact that rationality always begins with an assumption and by extension, progresses from this point of origin. And is not an assumption nothing more than a possibility?
As a species, we are really, really, really good at rationalizing but we do not know how to reason......... but that's another story.
Ah, I meant rationalism in the classical sense (rationalism vs. empiricism). What reminded me of that was when you said, "It is not just math that is a priori, the general property of the extension of all objects is a priori as well"—which sounds exactly like Descartes! For him what matters is reason, the intellect, which is where we discover the form and structure of the physical world.
Thanks Tina Lee. Did I just call you Rene? Shame on me : ) Anyway, always interested in how we define facts and truth. These go unexamined, and a lot of arguments go nowhere because we don't agree on definitions. I would like to see a good logic book addressing these concepts.
Haha...no worries! I assumed you were referring to Descartes, but I wasn't sure what you meant beyond that. We did talk about logic books earlier. I might do a post at some point on basic logic, but I didn't have "facts" specifically in mind. That's a complicated matter. SEP has an entry on "facts" to give you an idea of how complicated facts are: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/facts/
Descartes will have difficulty establishing how his "clear and distinct ideas" are exempt from the deceiving demon, but that's another story. The only truth he can really point to is that the existence of _doubt_ logically entails the _existence_ of doubt. I think Mike is right to suggest that Descartes made some additional assumptions about there being a "mind" or an "I" or a "thinking." It's interesting to ask whether "I feel, therefore I am" would be an acceptable re-formulation for Descartes. My opinion is that he regarded "thinking" as less susceptible to deceiving demons than "feeling," just because of its abstract nature. This distinction certainly finds its home in science, which in an important sense has learned to "ignore the world and our body" -- for example, the supposed reality of colour -- in favour of more abstract concepts considered to be the true reality.
He backs himself into a corner with his method of doubt, doesn't he? It's hard to see a way out from here!
On the mind's unity, maybe so, but if that's the case he contradicts himself, or maybe it would be more charitable to say he goes back and forth, his thoughts wavering, undecided. Is this thinking thing a soul? But he doesn't seem to have much to say about souls here; they're just insubstantial vapor: "The next belief was that I ate and drank, that I moved about, and that I engaged in sense-perception and thinking; these things, I thought, were done by the soul. If I gave any thought to what this soul was like, I imagined it to be something thin and filmy – like a wind or fire or ether – permeating my more solid parts. I was more sure about the body, though, thinking that I knew exactly what sort of thing it was. If I had tried to put my conception of the body into words, I would have said this: By a ‘body’ I understand whatever has a definite shape and position, and can occupy a ·region of· space in such a way as to keep every other body out of it; it can be perceived by touch, sight, hearing, taste or smell, and can be moved in various ways. I would have added that a body can’t start up movements by itself, and can move only through being moved by other things that bump into it."
Thinking or mind doesn't seem to be a soul, or at least he has a fairly low opinion of souls at this point. To him a soul is some sort of vapor—practically nothing. He's more sure about the body. But all of this is supposed to reflect his opinions before his method of doubt. After he discovers the cogito (2nd Med) he goes on to say:
"Well, then, what am I? A thing that thinks. What is that? A thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wants, refuses, and also imagines and senses.
That is a long list of attributes for me to have – and it really is I who have them all. Why should it not be? Isn’t it one and the same ‘I’ who now doubts almost everything, understands some things, affirms this one thing – namely, that I exist and think, denies everything else, wants to know more, refuses to be deceived, imagines many things involuntarily, and is aware of others that seem to come from the senses? Isn’t all this just as true as the fact that I exist, even if I am in a perpetual dream, and even if my creator is doing his best to deceive me? These activities are all aspects of my thinking, and are all inseparable from myself. The fact that it is I who doubt and understand and want is so obvious that I can’t see how to make it any clearer. But the ‘I’ who imagines is also this same ‘I’. For even if (as I am pretending) none of the things that I imagine really exist, I really do imagine them, and this is part of my thinking. Lastly, it is also this same ‘I’ who senses, or is aware of bodily things seemingly through the senses. Because I may be dreaming, I can’t say for sure that I now see the flames, hear the wood crackling, and feel the heat of the fire; but I certainly seem to see, to hear, and to be warmed. This cannot be false; what is called ‘sensing’ is strictly just this seeming, and when ‘sensing’ is understood in this restricted sense of the word it too is simply thinking.
All this is starting to give me a better understanding of what I am. But I still can’t help thinking that bodies – of which I form mental images and which the senses investigate – are much more clearly known to me than is this puzzling ‘I’ that can’t be pictured in the imagination."
So here "thinking" is quite broad and encompasses imagination and sensations...so it's not yet known to reflect reality (and this is what he's primarily concerned with). But the "I" still isn't clear because later (4th Med.) he'll talk about the will as "a single unitary thing; its nature is such, it seems, that there could be no way of taking away parts of it." Then he says:
"...As well as knowing that I exist, at least as a thinking thing, I have in my mind an idea of corporeal nature; and I am not sure whether my thinking nature – which makes me what I am – is the same as this corporeal nature or different from it. I take it that my intellect has not yet found any convincing reason for either answer; so I am indifferent with regard to this question – nothing pushes or pulls me towards one answer or the other, or indeed towards giving any answer."
So it's all a bit hair-pulling! It seems to me "thinking" and "mind" are not quite clear. If "I" is a "thinking thing" which is unified, how can it include the will which he describes as being indivisible? At times he even seems to suggest the "I" might be the will:
"My will is so perfect and so great that I can’t conceive of its becoming even greater and more perfect; it is a striking fact that this is true of my will and not of any other aspect of my nature...When the will is considered not relationally, but strictly in itself, God’s will does not seem any greater than mine."
Hm.
"This distinction certainly finds its home in science, which in an important sense has learned to "ignore the world and our body" -- for example, the supposed reality of colour -- in favour of more abstract concepts considered to be the true reality."
Yes indeed! I'm getting there in the next post. I think you're making an important point here. As far as believing in the veridicality of the abstract and mathematical over the sensory, I don't think we have moved all that far away from Cartesian philosophy.
"Because I may be dreaming, I can’t say for sure that I now see the flames, hear the wood crackling, and feel the heat of the fire; but I certainly seem to see, to hear, and to be warmed. This cannot be false; what is called ‘sensing’ is strictly just this seeming, and when ‘sensing’ is understood in this restricted sense of the word it too is simply thinking."
"This cannot be false" -- here, perhaps, we have the origin of the idea that "introspection is infallible." But clearly Descartes is saying that his experiences can be fallible. All he's saying is that the mere fact of his having experiences is incontestable.
But sensing can be fallible, and Descartes looks to what he calls "clear and distinct ideas" to distinguish the fallible from the infallible. Their clearness and distinctness is surely still at the mercy of deceiving demons, which he just sort of forgets (referring to God as a guarantor, I believe). But that quality of clearness and distinctness arises only for thinking, not for sensing: the sort of clarity that says a triangle must have three sides, or that its angles add up to a straight line.
I think you're right that "introspection is infallible" comes from such statements, which really don't amount to much knowledge at all. It's like saying, "I believe that I could be deluded, but I can't doubt that I'm experiencing these possible delusions...right now."
"Their clearness and distinctness is surely still at the mercy of deceiving demons, which he just sort of forgets (referring to God as a guarantor, I believe)."
In the next post he'll tackle the evil deceiver and we'll see what happens to those clear and distinct ideas and God and the cogito. :)
I believe that your senses can be far more trustful than five hours of blind meditation. Maybe I am an empirst , I don't know but who can we pretend to learn something without observing it?. (Sensory Percceptions can be verified you know)
I'm enjoying this series Tina!
If Descartes' goal was to doubt everything doubtable, I actually wonder if he went far enough. He seems to exempt the mind from doubt. "I think therefore I am," does establish that *something* exists that is *doing something*, but I think that's about it. To assume the "I" as he conceived it is what exists and that thinking as he understands it is what is happening seems like privileging his perceptions of his own mind.
If I pursue his initial goal, I have to consider that the "I" pondering this might be a cognitive fragment with predictions of being part of a broader mind, but isn't. Maybe this fragment is connected to an actual mind for purposes of examining it. Or maybe I'm in an incomplete simulation, even of myself, that simply prevents me from noticing the incompleteness.
To be fair to Descartes, the level of skepticism I'm describing here would likely have been inconceivable to a 17th century person. (It's inconceivable to most people today.) He later concludes that while the body is divisible, the mind isn't. (He justifies this with the point that he perceives his mind as completely unified.) The idea of this level of doubt, which actually takes the mind itself as extended, probably just didn't occur to him.
While this level of skepticism is an interesting thought experiment, I don't know how much it really tells us. We can doubt everything, but in the end, if we ignore the world and our body, they will impinge on us in painful ways. It seems like reality is best measured by what enhances the accuracy of predictions of future experiences.
But maybe I'll have a future experience that shows that prediction is wrong. :-)
Thanks, Mike, I'm glad you're enjoying it.
As for Cartesian doubt, yeah, you can't get too far when you begin with solipsism and apply extreme skepticism, but I guess someone had to do so it...and now we know.
"Or maybe I'm in an incomplete simulation, even of myself, that simply prevents me from noticing the incompleteness."
Yeah, I doubt he'd know what a simulation is, but something like this level of skepticism is captured, I think, in the evil demon thwarting him every time he tries to do simple math. It's unclear at this point what the "I" is for Descartes since as you say there's no reason to think he can move beyond the cognitive fragment that is the cogito to some unified mind (much less immortal soul). That time-bound element of it sometimes gets left out when people discuss "I think; therefore, I am", but I think you see why time is so important here. It's strange to think of a truth so minimal and so completely dependent on an awareness of "now".
Just wanted to add something on what you say here: "He justifies this with the point that he perceives his mind as completely unified." He does say this, esp. in the 2nd. Med., but he also goes back and forth on this at other points, so I'm reluctant to nail him down just yet. I added a bit more explanation in my reply to Jim.
I was thinking about this part from the 6th meditation.
"There is a great difference between the mind and the body. Every body is by its nature divisible, but the mind can’t be divided. When I consider the mind— i.e. consider myself purely as a thinking thing— I can’t detect any parts within myself; I understand myself to be something single and complete."
But I'll admit I found that on a search when following a citation. I've only read the first two meditations all the way through. (Maybe your series will inspire me to finish all six.) So I can't say he doesn't back off later. Although it seems like an important step in the reasoning to his famous substance dualism.
Ah, I see. Ultimately I think you're right about his position later on. I just meant it's hard to see what he thinks of the self as the Meditations evolve, since he confronts some ideas that might not support where he ends up. It's interesting because he says the same thing about the will, that it can't be divided. But then you have to wonder how the will and the intellect are related to the mind, and whether they constitute parts.
That's a good point. I wonder what his response might have been. Or to the fact that I can often momentarily forget things I know, which implies portions of my mind not interacting. Or feel conflicted about something, which implies different portions in conflict. So even by his own standard, the mind seems readily divisible.
Of course, in an age now generally aware of the unconscious mind, it's a lot easier for us to see these indicators.
"So even by his own standard, the mind seems readily divisible."
All I can say is, the dude is hard to pin down! There's something very 'stream of consciousness' about his writing.
It's interesting to take a look at the rest of that quote:
"There is a great difference between the mind and the body. Whereas every body is by its nature divisible, the mind can’t be divided. For when I consider the mind, or consider myself insofar as I am merely a thinking thing, I can’t detect any parts within myself; I understand myself to be something single and complete. The whole mind seems to be united to the whole body, but not by a uniting of parts to parts, as the following consideration shows. If a foot or arm or any other part of the body is cut off, nothing is thereby taken away from the mind. As for the faculties of willing, of understanding, of sensory perception and so on, these are not parts of the mind, since it is one and the same mind that wills, understands and perceives. They are (I repeat) not parts of the mind, because they are properties or powers of it. By contrast, any corporeal thing can easily be divided into parts in my thought; and this shows me that it is really divisible. This one argument would be enough to show me that the mind is completely different from the body, even if I did not already know as much from other considerations. The mind isn’t immediately affected by all parts of the body but only by the brain – or perhaps just by the small part of it which is said to contain the ‘common sense’. [Descartes is referring to the pineal gland. The ‘common sense’ was a supposed faculty, postulated by Aristotle, whose role was to integrate the data from the five specialized senses.] The signals that reach the mind depend upon what state this part of the brain is in, irrespective of the condition of the other parts of the body. There is abundant experimental evidence for this, which I needn’t review here."
So the mind is not made up of parts, but the will is a property or power of the mind. Then he poses a dependence of the mind on the brain, specifically the pineal gland, which was apparently thought to be the source of integrated sensory information.
And YET. As much as he wants to separate mind-substance from body-substance, he doesn't think the mind drives the body as a ship:
"Nature also teaches me, through these sensations of pain, hunger, thirst and so on, that I (a thinking thing) am not merely in my body as a sailor is in a ship. Rather, I am closely joined to it – intermingled with it, so to speak – so that it and I form a unit. If this were not so, I wouldn’t feel pain when the body was hurt but would perceive the damage in an intellectual way, like a sailor seeing that his ship needs repairs. And when the body needed food or drink I would intellectually understand this fact instead of (as I do) having confused sensations of hunger and thirst. These sensations are confused mental events that arise from the union – the intermingling, as it were – of the mind with the body."
Not sure what to make of all this. He seems a reluctant dualist at times.
It's hard to tell with early modern writers. I've seen speculation that some of their arguments were made for political reasons, to keep the church off their back. It makes sense, particularly when you look at the fate of those who didn't play that game (Bruno, La Mettrie, etc.) or who played too close to the edge (Galileo). On the other hand, it seems like all we can really respond to are the arguments they did write.
If we did not trust our sensory perceptions we could not survive let alone thrive. However, it must be noted that everything without a doubt happens in our heads. And for the most part, that scenario is at the root of the problem for us. The intellect of the mind determines “what is and what is not”. There is no empirical arbiter in this relationship because the mind is a sovereign system.
Empiricism itself and the facts gathered by the scientific method are subordinate as well to intellection and furthermore, intellection or mentation is by its very nature “a priori”. It is not just math that is a priori, the general property of the extension of all objects is a priori as well. The church of empiricism somehow fails to acknowledge this simple fact or conveniently whitewashes it over.
For all practical purposes, our reality is Cogito however, that does not mean that Cogito is not physical because the motion required for all thoughts result in structure and/or form. And as I stated earlier: what makes something physical is the fact that it has structure and/or form, and that structure as in all forms requires the “first cause” of motion.
Sounds like you prefer rationalism, even if not of the Cartesian variety?
Actually, I prefer reasoning over the schema of rationality. Rationality is an efficient and productive tool that is absolutely necessary for survival. However, rationality by itself is limited in scope therefore it cannot be trusted. This is due to the fact that rationality always begins with an assumption and by extension, progresses from this point of origin. And is not an assumption nothing more than a possibility?
As a species, we are really, really, really good at rationalizing but we do not know how to reason......... but that's another story.
Ah, I meant rationalism in the classical sense (rationalism vs. empiricism). What reminded me of that was when you said, "It is not just math that is a priori, the general property of the extension of all objects is a priori as well"—which sounds exactly like Descartes! For him what matters is reason, the intellect, which is where we discover the form and structure of the physical world.
Did I ask this before Rene? If so forgive me, but what did he say about facts? This is the most abused term in the world today
I'm not sure Descartes was as obsessed with facts as we are, or at least I don't recall what, if anything, he says about them.
Thanks Tina Lee. Did I just call you Rene? Shame on me : ) Anyway, always interested in how we define facts and truth. These go unexamined, and a lot of arguments go nowhere because we don't agree on definitions. I would like to see a good logic book addressing these concepts.
Haha...no worries! I assumed you were referring to Descartes, but I wasn't sure what you meant beyond that. We did talk about logic books earlier. I might do a post at some point on basic logic, but I didn't have "facts" specifically in mind. That's a complicated matter. SEP has an entry on "facts" to give you an idea of how complicated facts are: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/facts/
Thanks!
Descartes will have difficulty establishing how his "clear and distinct ideas" are exempt from the deceiving demon, but that's another story. The only truth he can really point to is that the existence of _doubt_ logically entails the _existence_ of doubt. I think Mike is right to suggest that Descartes made some additional assumptions about there being a "mind" or an "I" or a "thinking." It's interesting to ask whether "I feel, therefore I am" would be an acceptable re-formulation for Descartes. My opinion is that he regarded "thinking" as less susceptible to deceiving demons than "feeling," just because of its abstract nature. This distinction certainly finds its home in science, which in an important sense has learned to "ignore the world and our body" -- for example, the supposed reality of colour -- in favour of more abstract concepts considered to be the true reality.
He backs himself into a corner with his method of doubt, doesn't he? It's hard to see a way out from here!
On the mind's unity, maybe so, but if that's the case he contradicts himself, or maybe it would be more charitable to say he goes back and forth, his thoughts wavering, undecided. Is this thinking thing a soul? But he doesn't seem to have much to say about souls here; they're just insubstantial vapor: "The next belief was that I ate and drank, that I moved about, and that I engaged in sense-perception and thinking; these things, I thought, were done by the soul. If I gave any thought to what this soul was like, I imagined it to be something thin and filmy – like a wind or fire or ether – permeating my more solid parts. I was more sure about the body, though, thinking that I knew exactly what sort of thing it was. If I had tried to put my conception of the body into words, I would have said this: By a ‘body’ I understand whatever has a definite shape and position, and can occupy a ·region of· space in such a way as to keep every other body out of it; it can be perceived by touch, sight, hearing, taste or smell, and can be moved in various ways. I would have added that a body can’t start up movements by itself, and can move only through being moved by other things that bump into it."
Thinking or mind doesn't seem to be a soul, or at least he has a fairly low opinion of souls at this point. To him a soul is some sort of vapor—practically nothing. He's more sure about the body. But all of this is supposed to reflect his opinions before his method of doubt. After he discovers the cogito (2nd Med) he goes on to say:
"Well, then, what am I? A thing that thinks. What is that? A thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wants, refuses, and also imagines and senses.
That is a long list of attributes for me to have – and it really is I who have them all. Why should it not be? Isn’t it one and the same ‘I’ who now doubts almost everything, understands some things, affirms this one thing – namely, that I exist and think, denies everything else, wants to know more, refuses to be deceived, imagines many things involuntarily, and is aware of others that seem to come from the senses? Isn’t all this just as true as the fact that I exist, even if I am in a perpetual dream, and even if my creator is doing his best to deceive me? These activities are all aspects of my thinking, and are all inseparable from myself. The fact that it is I who doubt and understand and want is so obvious that I can’t see how to make it any clearer. But the ‘I’ who imagines is also this same ‘I’. For even if (as I am pretending) none of the things that I imagine really exist, I really do imagine them, and this is part of my thinking. Lastly, it is also this same ‘I’ who senses, or is aware of bodily things seemingly through the senses. Because I may be dreaming, I can’t say for sure that I now see the flames, hear the wood crackling, and feel the heat of the fire; but I certainly seem to see, to hear, and to be warmed. This cannot be false; what is called ‘sensing’ is strictly just this seeming, and when ‘sensing’ is understood in this restricted sense of the word it too is simply thinking.
All this is starting to give me a better understanding of what I am. But I still can’t help thinking that bodies – of which I form mental images and which the senses investigate – are much more clearly known to me than is this puzzling ‘I’ that can’t be pictured in the imagination."
So here "thinking" is quite broad and encompasses imagination and sensations...so it's not yet known to reflect reality (and this is what he's primarily concerned with). But the "I" still isn't clear because later (4th Med.) he'll talk about the will as "a single unitary thing; its nature is such, it seems, that there could be no way of taking away parts of it." Then he says:
"...As well as knowing that I exist, at least as a thinking thing, I have in my mind an idea of corporeal nature; and I am not sure whether my thinking nature – which makes me what I am – is the same as this corporeal nature or different from it. I take it that my intellect has not yet found any convincing reason for either answer; so I am indifferent with regard to this question – nothing pushes or pulls me towards one answer or the other, or indeed towards giving any answer."
So it's all a bit hair-pulling! It seems to me "thinking" and "mind" are not quite clear. If "I" is a "thinking thing" which is unified, how can it include the will which he describes as being indivisible? At times he even seems to suggest the "I" might be the will:
"My will is so perfect and so great that I can’t conceive of its becoming even greater and more perfect; it is a striking fact that this is true of my will and not of any other aspect of my nature...When the will is considered not relationally, but strictly in itself, God’s will does not seem any greater than mine."
Hm.
"This distinction certainly finds its home in science, which in an important sense has learned to "ignore the world and our body" -- for example, the supposed reality of colour -- in favour of more abstract concepts considered to be the true reality."
Yes indeed! I'm getting there in the next post. I think you're making an important point here. As far as believing in the veridicality of the abstract and mathematical over the sensory, I don't think we have moved all that far away from Cartesian philosophy.
"Because I may be dreaming, I can’t say for sure that I now see the flames, hear the wood crackling, and feel the heat of the fire; but I certainly seem to see, to hear, and to be warmed. This cannot be false; what is called ‘sensing’ is strictly just this seeming, and when ‘sensing’ is understood in this restricted sense of the word it too is simply thinking."
"This cannot be false" -- here, perhaps, we have the origin of the idea that "introspection is infallible." But clearly Descartes is saying that his experiences can be fallible. All he's saying is that the mere fact of his having experiences is incontestable.
But sensing can be fallible, and Descartes looks to what he calls "clear and distinct ideas" to distinguish the fallible from the infallible. Their clearness and distinctness is surely still at the mercy of deceiving demons, which he just sort of forgets (referring to God as a guarantor, I believe). But that quality of clearness and distinctness arises only for thinking, not for sensing: the sort of clarity that says a triangle must have three sides, or that its angles add up to a straight line.
I think you're right that "introspection is infallible" comes from such statements, which really don't amount to much knowledge at all. It's like saying, "I believe that I could be deluded, but I can't doubt that I'm experiencing these possible delusions...right now."
"Their clearness and distinctness is surely still at the mercy of deceiving demons, which he just sort of forgets (referring to God as a guarantor, I believe)."
In the next post he'll tackle the evil deceiver and we'll see what happens to those clear and distinct ideas and God and the cogito. :)
I believe that your senses can be far more trustful than five hours of blind meditation. Maybe I am an empirst , I don't know but who can we pretend to learn something without observing it?. (Sensory Percceptions can be verified you know)
I agree that senses can be trusted. I see that as the heart of empiricism.
I also enjoying this series. Sort of awake some neurons not used for long. Thanks Tina and Mike!
Glad you’re enjoying it!