Essays on the Concept of Mind in Early-Modern Philosophy

Essays on the Concept of Mind in Early-Modern Philosophy

Edited by

Petr Glombí ek and James Hill

Essays on the Concept of Mind in Early-Modern Philosophy, Edited by Petr Glombí ek and James Hill

This book first published 2010

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2010 by Petr Glombí ek and James Hill and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or

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ISBN (10): 1-4438-1918-2, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-1918-3

CONTENTS

1. Introduction ............................................................................................ 1 James Hill 2. Consciousness as Spontaneous Knowledge............................................. 7 Boris Hennig

3. Res Cogitans as Res Dubitans ............................................................... 29James Hill 4. The Mind of God and the Mind of Man: A Puzzle in Spinoza’s Philosophy of Mind ................................................................................... 45 Anthony Savile 5. Idea and Self-Knowledge in Malebranche’s Anti-Cartesian Theory of Mind ..................................................................................................... 63 Jan Palkoska 6. John Locke and the Cambridge Platonists on the Nature of the Mind... 81 G.A.J. Rogers 7. Dull Souls and Beasts: Two Anti-Cartesian Polemics in Locke............ 97 Nicholas Jolley

8. Berkeley’s Last Word on Spirit ........................................................... 115 Margaret Atherton 9. What Kant Could Reid ........................................................................ 131 Petr Glombí ek 10. Metaphysical Egoism and its Vicissitudes......................................... 149 Miran Božovi List of Contributors ................................................................................. 169

Index ........................................................................................................ 171

1.

INTRODUCTION

JAMES HILL

The essays in this volume discuss theories of mind put forward in the century and a half that followed Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy of 1641. These years, sometimes referred to as the ‘early-modern’ period, are unparalleled for the originality and diversity of views that they witnessed as to how we should conceive of the mind and its place in nature. These views include Descartes division of finite beings into mind and matter, Hobbes’ claim that the mind is matter, and Berkeley’s view that mind is an active spirit, and that matter does not exist. They include Descartes’ claim that mind is the first object of knowledge, as well as the view of Locke and Malebranche that the real nature of mind is not an object of knowledge at all. Some philosophers in this period, like Hume, hold that there is no mental substance, while others, such as Berkeley and Leibniz, hold that minds or at least perceiving things are the only real substances. And many other contrasts might be added.

But despite the wide range of viewpoints, there is also common ground among the different thinkers in the early-modern period that gives their discussion of mind a unified character. All the philosophers in question were reacting in some way to René Descartes’ assertion that the mind is, in its very essence, res cogitans or a ‘thinking thing’. This view of Descartes’, which excluded a material basis for the mind, was one of the most controversial and widely discussed parts of his work. Of the six philosophers who wrote the Objections to his Meditations all but one disputed it.1 The debate aroused by Descartes’ theory continued in the second half of the seventeenth century and the first part of the eighteenth century as thinkers were moved to advance their own views, modifying or denying Cartesian doctrine.

Even in cases where there is an explicit rejection of Descartes’ definition of the mind, a tacit acceptance of the basic framework of his theory of res cogitans is almost always evident. In particular, two of Descartes’ assumptions were generally accepted by early-modern philosophers. The first was that the concept of ‘mind’ was in some way

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prior to that of spirit and soul. For Descartes, spirit and soul were practically redundant terms, adding nothing to the meaning of the preferred term ‘mind’ (mens). Hobbes went as far as to treat the terms spirit and soul as meaningless, concentrating exclusively on mind instead. The Cambridge Platonists, may have often talked of the soul, but, as John Rogers points out in his contribution here, they use the term more or less interchangeably with mind.

A second Cartesian assumption usually shared by the philosophers that followed him, was that an investigation of the mind must start from the point of view of the first person. This meant that for most of the philosophers who thought about mind in the period after Descartes, the question of ‘what is the mind?’ became very close, if not equivalent to, the question of ‘what is the self?’ One notable exception here is Hobbes, who thought that the mind should be studied like any other physical phenomenon such as thunder and lightning. But Hobbes aside, the majority of philosophers in this period would have agreed with Berkeley’s statement—discussed by Margaret Atherton in her essay here—that ‘mind’ (or ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’) is equivalent to ‘I’, ‘myself’.2 If Descartes work marks the starting point for early-modern philosophy of mind, our first task is to understand what exactly Descartes meant when he characterised the mind as res cogitans. An answer to this question can only be made if we determine what he meant by cogitans or “thinking”. One popular view is that the term “thinking” in Descartes is synonymous with “being conscious”, and that he is therefore saying that the mind is a conscious substance. Such a view seems to be backed up by Descartes’ use of the Latin term conscientia when defining ‘thought’. But to say that thinking is consciousness in Descartes only brings us to the harder question of what consciousness is. At this point some philosophers—perhaps even a majority—would say that consciousness is an intuitive and elemental concept which we cannot hope to make clearer by definition or explication. The first two essays in this volume take a critical view of this traditional approach to Descartes’ ‘thinking thing’. Boris Hennig argues that we should not assume that we have immediate access to Descartes’ concept of consciousness. Descartes, partly inspired by scholastic use, employed the term conscientia in a rather specific sense that is not equivalent to our term ‘consciousness’, which today typically refers to “introspective knowledge of our own mental activity”. Descartes’ understanding of conscientia takes conscious thoughts to be spontaneous answers to the question of “what to think?”. This means that, on Hennig’s view, Descartes has a narrower understanding of thought than is usually

Introduction 3

recognised, and thinking does not comprise all the mental content that today we bring together under the term “consciousness”. It does not include involuntary association, and the chatter of what Hennig calls “mental bullshit”, which, although it may be open to introspection, is not actively endorsed by the subject. In a second essay focusing on Descartes’ concept of mind, I argue that we should understand his term “thinking” in something like its ordinary, pre-philosophical, meaning. In this sense, thinking is an intellectual power involving judgement. Descartes’ method of doubt, with which I am primarily concerned, can then be treated as an attempt to purify and activate thought in this intuitive sense, and the “thinking thing” that emerges from the doubt, has the distinctly intellectual character of the doubter (res dubitans). If sense experience, imagination and sensation are then included by Descartes under the umbrella term “thought”, and treated as belonging to a thinking thing, it is because he was convinced that these all implicitly involve intellectual judgement.

Unlike Descartes, Spinoza saw the human mind not as an independent thing, or res, but as a mode of God’s intellect. Spinoza also ascribed a peculiar kind of infinity to God, according to which he has an indefinite number of attributes in addition to the Cartesian duo of thought and extension. Anthony Savile’s essay shows us how this doctrine of infinite attributes leads to a certain problem. If I am a mode of God, I must somehow be a mode of all his other, unknown, attributes. This, in turn, suggests that I can represent in thought my modes of these other attributes—just as I represent my mode of extension in being aware of my body. Yet, apart from bodily extension itself, I am not in fact conscious of any further attributes. The problem may be alleviated, Savile suggests, by treating my knowledge of the other attributes, and their modes, as contained in independent modules, or “capsules”, of my mind. This, however, is really just to shift the problem to God’s mind. If God is omniscient, he must somehow be able to survey the conjunction of all his attributes. But how is this possible if he is constituted by finite minds like mine, made up of modules not in proper communication with one another? Savile’s essay offers us an illuminating investigation of this question and of Spinoza’s ability to answer it.

Nicholas Malebranche, the subject of the essay by Jan Palkoska, is usually treated as a Cartesian. But he had a profound disagreement with Descartes on the question of whether the nature of mind could be known. While for Descartes the essence of mind was the first thing to be known, at least by those who reason “in an orderly way”, Malebranche claimed that what we know of mind is delivered by an “inner consciousness” which has

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all the murkiness that Cartesians ascribed to sensation. In contrast to the nature of body, which is perfectly accessible to us in the science of geometry, the nature of the mind is opaque, and we are only aware of a range of subjective feelings. Palkoska explores the relation between Malebranche’s denial that we have insight into the essence of mind, with his famous thesis that “we see all things in God”. Palkoska shows how Malebranche’s first account of this relation, in the first edition of the Search, was marred by circularity, but that in the ‘Tenth Elucidation’, added in a later edition, Malebranche made amends by founding both these views on a general account of representative knowledge.

G.A.J. Rogers’ essay compares the view of mind in the Cambridge Platonists (particularly Cudworth and More) and in Locke, arguing that the distance between the two is not as wide as might first be imagined. In conceiving of mind, the Cambridge Platonists share with Locke an interest and respect for the findings of empirical observation. In addition, their Platonic innatism does not prevent them offering, like Locke, a dispositional account of knowledge. The Cambridge Platonists and Locke also agreed in opposing Descartes’ view that mind is necessarily unextended. One notable difference between them is, however, highlighted by Rogers. While the Cambridge Platonists engage in speculative metaphysics with a dogmatism that borders on “enthusiasm”, Locke is aware of the limits of our understanding and counsels caution when we are tempted to speculate with our limited powers on what the human mind consists in. Nicholas Jolley shows that one of Locke’s primary concerns is to question the assumption, so central to Cartesianism, that the immateriality and immortality of the mind are necessarily linked to one another. Locke, in opposition to this view, holds that immateriality is compatible with mortality, because one can imagine a different “person”, whose thoughts are quite discontinuous with one’s own, inhabiting one’s immaterial soul after death. Conversely, our immortality is perfectly compatible with our materiality, because a post-mortem life is constituted not by the continuity of a soul substance, but by the continuity of sensibility. Jolley goes on to show that Locke is not just representing the common man when he insists, contra Descartes, that animals are sentient and the mind is not perpetually thinking. These views—while certainly reflecting common sense—are a vital part of Locke’s larger strategy of questioning the Cartesian view that immortality and immateriality necessarily go hand in hand.

George Berkeley is a thinker who is often treated as continuing however critically in the tradition of Lockean empiricism. Margaret Atherton’s essay is an expression of the growing awareness of the importance of Descartes in Berkeley’s philosophy, at least in relation

Introduction 5

to his understanding of mind. Atherton shows how Berkeley endorses Descartes’ active concept of mental substance, and she interprets this activity, which characterises the understanding as well as the will, as “present attentiveness”. This, she argues, is what, for Descartes, makes a mind aware of a sensation, and it is what is lacking in cases of ecstasy and inner contemplation, when, despite the presence of a physical stimulus, no ideas of sensation occur. It is present attentiveness that Berkeley is also speaking of when he treats the mind as an active principle, and it is why he can speak of the seemingly passive uptake of sense experience as involving the activity of the mind. The result of Atherton’s analysis of Berkeley’s concept of mind is a highly stimulating suggestion not only about the relation between Berkeley and Descartes, but also about the very character of spiritual substance in Berkeley—a subject which has been so contested amongst commentators.

Petr Glombí ek, in his article on Thomas Reid, defends the Scottish thinker against Kant’s attempt to dismiss his doctrine of common sense as the opinion of the herd. In doing so, Glombí ek provides us with a detailed account of how Reid conceived the mind. One element in Reid’s conception, which, rather surprisingly, he shares with David Hume, is his commitment to naturalism. Reflection on mind is reflection on a part of the natural world, not on some kind of “deficient divine mind”, as Glombí ek puts it. A crucial difference from Hume, however, which in fact brings Reid closer to Kant, is that all our faculties involve judgement. The difference between perception, memory and imagination is not one merely of intensity or vivacity of content, as Hume would have it, but is rather constituted by the distinctive judgements that are internal to these faculties. The overall result of Glombi ek’s interpretation is that we see more clearly how Reid anticipates Kant, and, indeed, how Kant might have learnt something from him (if he had only read him).

The final piece by Miran Božovi brings to light a remarkable strand in eighteenth century French philosophy. The égoïstes, as they were called, held a position that today we would term solipsism—only the self (solus ipse) exists. Even if the existence of the égoïstes themselves is, as Professor Božovi remarks, somewhat difficult to verify, the fact that they appear in the writings of Diderot and others does at least show that they existed in the imagination of the early-modern mind. Why, one might ask, was solipsism conceived and explored at this period in European philosophy, and not, say, in Ancient Greece? It seems that early-modern philosophy of mind somehow provoked the thought of solipsism in certain readers. Božovi argues that this is not only because of an oft-mentioned misreading of Berkeley, but also because of an idiosyncratic reaction to

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Spinozan pantheism in which the reader attempts to occupy, at least in her imagination, the standpoint of Spinoza's God. The égoïstes developed a sceptical scenario which has haunted modern thought ever since and which amounts to madness when it is actually adopted as belief, as in the tragic case of the elderly Louis Althusser.

The title of this volume is, of course, inspired by Gilbert Ryle’s book The Concept of Mind. Ryle’s work had a strongly polemical aim: he was not only critical of Descartes’ ghostly understanding of mind, which he saw as the product of an “intellectualist legend”, he even at times seems to be opposed to the very concept of mind, which, he tells us, is “a considerable logical hazard”.3 Mind, he suggests, is an unhelpful abstraction, and we should spend more time thinking about persons, and their dispositions to act. Our title reflects the concern of the different early-modern authors represented here with the very concept of mind that Ryle thus identifies and rejects.

But Ryle’s approach also has one fundamental point of agreement with the approach of these essays. The common ground is that a philosophical investigation into mind is something that may be distinguished from the discipline of psychology. The term “psychology”, which acquired its modern meaning in the nineteenth century, refers to a science based on observation and experiment, often with the help of laboratories, and with an emphasis on measurement. Psychology seeks new information about the mind, in contrast to philosophy which, as Ryle puts it, aims “to rectify the logical geography of the knowledge that we already possess.”4 A philosophical investigation of the mind will, of course, be receptive to empirical enquiry. It is primarily concerned, however, with conceiving the mind’s overall nature and place, rather than adding to specialised knowledge of its activities and abilities. These essays, we hope, reflect the vigour of this kind of philosophical reflection in Descartes and his successors.

Notes

1 The lone assenter was the theologian Caterus, author of the First Objections. 2 See his Principles of Human Knowledge, section 2 (T.E. Jessop and A.A. Luce ed., Works of George Berkeley, Edinburgh: Nelson, 1948-57, vol. II, pp. 41-2). 3Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind, Oxford: Hutchinson, 1949, p. 161 4 Ibid, p. 9.

2.

CONSCIOUSNESS AS SPONTANEOUSKNOWLEDGE

BORIS HENNIG

I am going to claim that the picture of the mind that Descartes gives in the Second Meditation is not in fact what is usually called a Cartesian picture of the mind. This does of course not mean that one should stop arguing against the Cartesian picture of the mind. For all I know, this picture is wrong. It also does not necessarily mean that Descartes’ picture of the mind is better than the so-called Cartesian one. But it means at least that arguing against Cartesianism is not the same as arguing against Descartes. Descartes might well be a more worthwhile enemy than an anonymous Cartesian, if only because his views and arguments are clearly stated.

I will first introduce the systematic question that I raise in this contribution: What is the distinctive feature of the mind and its activity, i.e. what is consciousness? Then I will sketch a Cartesian picture of the mind (as opposed to Descartes’ own picture), according to which consciousness is a kind of introspective awareness. For the details of this picture, I will refer to Sebastian Rödl’s dissertation on self-reference and normativity.1 This book is also important here because Rödl suggests an alternative to the Cartesian picture that will turn out to significantly resemble the picture of the mind that I think Descartes actually endorsed. An exposition and discussion of Rödl’s views will therefore help setting the stage for Descartes’ own alternative to the Cartesian picture of the mind.

1. Thought and Consciousness

According to the title of the Second Meditation, this is where Descartes introduces the notion of a human mind. As everyone knows, he argues that even an evil and omnipotent demon could not deceive a thinking being

Boris Hennig 8

into thinking that it, the thinking being, does not exist. The reason is that to be deceived is to think, and therefore there must be a thinking thing if there is to be a deceived thing. This thinking thing is the mind. What kind of activity is thinking? In the context of the Second Meditation, one should not just identify thinking with mental activity in general. It would be wrong for Descartes to reason that since being deceived involves one kind of mental activity, the mind whose existence is proven in the Second Meditation must be capable of all other kinds of mental activity as well. One cannot conclude, for instance, that because imagining something is a mental activity, any being that may be deceived must also be capable of imagining things – unless imagining something is necessarily involved in being deceived. There must be some general definition of “thought”, such that thinking turns out to be exactly what one must be capable of doing in order to be possibly deceived. Descartes offers the following two definitions.2

(1) Under the term “thought” I include everything that is in us in such a way that we are immediately conscious of it. Thus all operations of the will, the intellect, the imagination, and the senses are thoughts. I add “immediately”, though, in order to exclude the things that follow from these, such as the voluntary motion that has thought as its origin, but is not itself a thought. (Meditations, AT VII 160)3

(2) By the term “thought”, I understand all things that happen in us such that we are conscious of them, insofar as there is consciousness of them in us. Yet in this way not only understanding, wanting, and imagining, but also having sensations is the same as thinking. (Principia, AT VIIIA 7)

In order to understand what the human mind is, we need to understand these two definitions. Descartes does not define thoughts as events that occur in a mind, and he cannot do this, since he is going to define the mind as the thing that thinks. Therefore, that thoughts occur “in us” cannot already mean that they occur in some inner mental space. This is obvious from the first passage quoted above. Descartes writes that there are some things in us of which we are only mediately conscious, such as the bodily movements that follow from our thoughts. These bodily movements do not take place in our minds. They are “in us” in a broader sense: by being attributable to us, such that we are, as bodily human beings, the ones who move.

Not everything that is in us, such that we are conscious of it, is therefore a thought. Our bodily movements are in us, and we may be conscious of them, but they are not thoughts. According to the first definition quoted above, the difference between such movements and

Consciousness as Spontaneous Knowledge 9

thoughts is one of immediacy. We are conscious of the bodily movements that result from our thoughts, but only mediately: only by being conscious of something else.4 According to the second definition, the difference is not one of immediacy, but one of respect. If there are bodily movements in us of which we are conscious, these bodily movements are thoughts only insofar as we are conscious of them. Sensory perceptions, for instance, involve sense organs, nerves, and other bodily things and processes.5

When we are conscious of such perceptions, we are conscious of them only in a certain respect, and in this respect, these sense perceptions are thoughts. Likewise, when we go for a walk, there are certain bodily movements in us, and we may be conscious of these movements. Insofar as we are conscious of them, our bodily movements are thoughts; insofar as we are not conscious of them, they are not.

2. Cartesianism

It is obvious that in order to understand any one of Descartes’ two definitions of “thought”, one needs to understand what he means by “consciousness”. Most commentators take it to be some kind of introspective knowledge that we have of our own mental activity. According to this view, to be immediately conscious of a thing is to introspectively know it without doing so only by introspectively knowing something else. And the respect in which we are conscious of a thing is what we introspectively know of it; as opposed to what we do not know of it, or do know of it but not by introspection.

Let me turn to a particular instance of this view: Sebastian Rödl’s 1997 PhD thesis Selbstbezug und Normativität (published 1998). Rödl does not endorse the view that consciousness is some kind of introspective awareness, but he states it and ascribes it to Descartes. I should note that he has recently thoroughly revised his thesis, and one of the many differences between the two versions is that whereas the first presents itself as a critique of the Cartesian picture of the mind, there are almost no references to Descartes and Cartesianism left in the revised version (2007).6 None of what I am going to discuss is therefore meant as a critique of Rödl’s present day views, since he might have changed his views on Descartes. I refer to the earlier exposition not in order to criticize his work, but merely in order to shed light on what I take to be Descartes’ actual picture of the mind. Instead of discussing Rödl’s Selbstbezug und Normativität, I could as well have invented my own anti-Cartesian strawman, but referring to a real if possibly outdated account has the advantage that there is some context that may serve to clarify the position

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in question. In Selbstbezug und Normativität, Rödl raises four closely related but

distinguishable objections against Cartesianism. (1) Infallible introspective knowledge. According to Rödl, Cartesians

think of the mind as an inner space, the state of which is immediately and infallibly known (1998, p. 134). If consciousness were a kind of introspective knowledge of one’s own thoughts, Descartes would define the mind as an entity that has immediate introspective knowledge of all states and events that occur within it, such that these states and events are mental only insofar as the mind is introspectively aware of them. As a consequence, there could be nothing in the mind that it does not immediately know. The mind is the thinking thing, all it does is thinking, and an activity qualifies as thinking only if and insofar as the mind has (immediate) introspective knowledge of it. On the other hand, its own thoughts would seem to be the only things of which it can have this immediate knowledge. The mind could know things other than thoughts only mediately, by immediately knowing thoughts, which have these things as their objects.

(2) Semantic self-sufficiency of the mental. The idea of the mind as a transparent inner space leads to the assumption that the contents of the mind are semantically self-sufficient. Rödl’s Cartesian takes consciousness to be a kind of knowledge by which we fully and immediately know our own thoughts. Unless the objects of these thoughts are again our thoughts, we know these objects only mediately, by knowing our thoughts. Whereas the contents of the mind are thus supposed to be fully and immediately accessible to the subject, the objects in the outer world are not. They are only mediately accessible. This however means that the contents of our minds could not for their intelligibility depend on anything in the world. If there were anything about our thoughts that we knew only by knowing something that is not a thought, we would not immediately know the thought, but only know it by means of knowing this other thing. For a Cartesian (as Rödl describes this position), this is impossible. Rödl refers to the resulting view, that thoughts are semantically self-sufficient, as a “Cartesian ontology” of mental states (p. 229).

(3) Division into mental and physical parts. Rödl further speaks of a “Cartesian operation” of dividing thoughts and actions into (a) a part that is purely mental and not essentially related to anything non-mental, and (b) a non-mental part (p. 149). This is something that Descartes seems to do, for instance, in the Second Meditation. He writes there that even if he cannot be sure whether he has a body, with which he could perceive and imagine things, he can at least be sure that he seems to perceive and


imagine things, and that if one understands sensation in precisely this way (presumably as seeming to perceive), it is nothing other than thinking (AT VII 29). I will return to this passage later on. On the face of it, Descartes appears to divide perceptions into two independent parts: the seeming to perceive something, and the rest, such that the seeming is purely mental and the rest merely bodily.

(4) The impossibility of reference to particular material objects. The picture of the mind as fully transparent to itself, together with the “Cartesian operation”, finally leads to what Rödl calls the “Cartesian assumption”, that we can attribute bodily features to ourselves only on the basis of a contingent relation between our minds and our bodies (p. 32). This results as follows. According to the second definition of “thought”, our activities are thoughts and thus belong to the mind only insofar as we are conscious of them. Since Descartes says that we can fully understand everything that belongs to the mind without assuming that any material object exists, there cannot be anything bodily about our thoughts insofar as we are conscious of them. Now, by performing the Cartesian operation, we can divide everything of which we are conscious into two independent parts, such that we are immediately and fully conscious of one of these parts, and not at all immediately conscious of the other one. Further, the Cartesian operation divides not only thoughts into purely mental parts and a possible bodily remainder, it also divides human beings into purely mental things and perhaps a bodily remainder. The mind does not have any bodily features, and the body has no mental attributes. Once this division is in place, the only way to bring the parts together is to say that as a matter of contingent fact, they happen to be present in roughly the same place at the same time.

Rödl argues against the Cartesian assumption by showing that without the possibility of locating oneself as a mind relative to spatial objects, one cannot relate to any particular spatial object at all. The argument runs as follows. I can locate myself relative to another thing in space only if I take myself to be located somewhere in the same space. But only bodily objects occupy spatial locations. In order to refer to any bodily object, I must therefore already conceive of myself as a bodily object. According to Rödl’s Cartesian, however, the thinking thing is in no way bodily and therefore, it does not occupy any particular spatial location. And something that occupies no spatial location cannot relate to any particular item in space. Therefore, if the mind has no bodily features, it cannot even relate to its own body. This shows that Rödl’s Cartesianism is impossible.

If Cartesianism is wrong, we must ask how to avoid it. Rödl shows that Cartesianism leads to an absurdity, but he does not show where exactly

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things start going wrong. Instead, he provides an alternative account of the nature of self-consciousness that does not lead to the same absurdity. In order to see in more detail what is wrong with Cartesianism, we must therefore contrast it with Rödl’s own alternative. This will pay off later, since I will argue that Rödl’s alternative to Cartesianism is very similar to Descartes’ own alternative to Cartesianism.

The main difference between Rödl’s Cartesianism and his alternative to it lies in that according to Rödl, self-knowledge is not knowledge of a special object, but knowledge of a special kind (2007, p. 59). Thus in order to avoid Cartesianism, we must distinguish between different ways of knowing our own thoughts and actions. Rödl draws this distinction as follows. The knowledge we have of material things in our environment is demonstrative or descriptive. We may also know our own thoughts in this way, for instance when we write them down and read them later. However, when we presently think our thoughts and perform our actions, we (also) know them in another way. We know them by thinking and performing them, and not only by observing the results of thinking and performing them (1998, p. 148). This knowledge is neither demonstrative nor descriptive. In Self-Consciousness, Rödl refers to it as spontaneous knowledge.

If this is how to avoid Cartesianism, we need to ask three questions: (1) What exactly is spontaneous knowledge and how is it possible? (2) How (if at all) does the notion of spontaneous knowledge help to avoid the four Cartesian errors pointed out by Rödl? And (3) what does this have to do with the real Descartes?

3. Spontaneous Knowledge

What exactly is spontaneous knowledge? According to Rödl, we spontaneously know our own thoughts and movements by thinking and performing them. This works only for special objects of knowledge. I cannot spontaneously know my haircut by having it, but I can spontaneously know my thoughts by having them. The reason is that spontaneous knowledge is constitutive of the actions and thoughts that are its object. I cannot know my haircut by having it because I can have a certain haircut without knowing it. I can know my thoughts by having them because I cannot have a thought without (spontaneously) knowing it. The crucial point is thus that actions and thoughts are necessarily such that the one who thinks and performs them has spontaneous knowledge of them. Spontaneous knowledge is knowledge of objects that are only possible because there is spontaneous knowledge of them.


This may be a bit easier to see in the case of intentional actions, although very similar considerations apply to thoughts. An action is intentional if it may be properly described in terms of an intention, and to describe an action in terms of an intention is to describe it as a means to a certain end. The kind of reasoning in which we relate means to practical ends is practical reasoning. An action is thus intentional if and insofar as it may be properly described as resulting from practical reasoning (whether the agent explicitly goes through this reasoning or not). This explains why and how knowledge can be constitutive for intentional actions. Since intentional actions are properly described as results of practical reasoning, the knowledge that manifests itself in such reasoning can be prior to the actual bodily movement. An agent may therefore know something about her own intentional actions without having to observe herself perform them.

Rödl makes this point by saying that an intentional action is the answer of an agent to the question what to do. We give this answer by performing certain bodily movements. We do not have to observe our movements in order to know what we are aiming at by performing them, because these movements are our answer to a question that we know and understand. It may of course happen that we fail to move as we want, so that we fail to actually do what we intend to do. Such a failure is something that we can only know by observation. We can know our own actions by performing them, but we cannot know our failures by failing. The reason is that a failure is not as such an answer to the question what to do.

One might therefore say that there are two aspects of an intentional action: In one respect, it is an answer to the question what to do, and in another respect, it is a bodily movement. Insofar as the action is an answer to the question what to do, we may have spontaneous knowledge of it; insofar as it is a bodily movement, we know it by observation. These two aspects of an action seem to be independent, since one may perform the same movements without intending the same, and one may intend the same while performing different movements. Rödl accordingly says that “practical reasoning arrives at the kind of thought on which movement may rest” (2007, p. 19). Since we may fail to move as we intend, it seems that our movements cannot be identical to our intentions; only our intentions seem to directly result from practical reasoning. It therefore seems that all we can say is that the movements rest on our thought.

However, to distinguish between movement and intention in this way is to perform the Cartesian operation. It is to split up something that is both mental and physical into two parts, a purely mental one and a purely physical one. Rödl does not want to perform the Cartesian operation.

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Therefore, he also writes that an intentional action is “a thought that is a movement” (ibid., my emphasis). It is neither a mere thought nor a mere bodily movement, but both at the same time: thought and movement.

How is it possible that an intentional action is both a thought and a movement, if one may fail to move as one thinks? Rödl’s idea is that successful agency is necessarily the fundamental case. When we successfully carry out an intention, there is no distinction between our answer to the question what to do, which is a thought, and the bodily movement that rests on this thought. In this case, the entire action is a thought that is a movement: action = thought = movement. Problems arise only if we do not in fact manage to move as we intend to do. In such cases, there will be a difference between intention and result, and accordingly between our spontaneous knowledge of what we are aiming at and our observational knowledge of what is in fact happening. For instance, I may intend to switch on the light, but end up ringing the doorbell. In this case, I am unsuccessfully switching on the light and unintentionally ringing the doorbell. Although I am acting with the intention to switch on the light, it would be wrong to say that I am intentionally switching on the light; for I am actually ringing the doorbell. On the other hand, although ringing the doorbell is the action that I am actually performing, it would be somewhat out of place to ask what I am aiming at by ringing the doorbell. Asking this question is only a way of pointing out that something is wrong. I cannot answer this question because under the description “ringing the doorbell”, what I am doing is not my answer to the question what to do. One may therefore say that insofar as my action is intentional, it is not the ringing of the doorbell, and insofar as it is the ringing of the doorbell, it is not intentional.

When I fail to move as I intend, I am performing a bodily movement that is not in every respect my answer to the question what to do. What I am in fact doing is my answer to the question what to do only to a limited extent, but it must be this answer to some extent. Otherwise, it would not at all be my intentional action. And to the extent to which it is this answer, there is no difference between thought and movement. For instance, when I ring the doorbell when trying to turn on the light, there is at least one action that I perform successfully and intentionally: to push a certain button. This action is at the same time a thought and a movement. My movement is my thought insofar as it is my answer to the question what to do. It is this answer insofar as it is intentional. And I have spontaneous knowledge of it insofar as both of this is the case. Therefore, insofar as I have spontaneous knowledge of my own bodily movements, these bodily movements are thoughts.


What I have said about intentional agency also applies, mutatis mutandis, to thoughts. We do not, of course, intentionally think certain thoughts in order to achieve practical ends. But still, we aim at something when we think. We aim at truth, consistency, accuracy, adequacy, and the like. We choose what to think in the light of epistemic goods and standards. For instance, we generally trust our senses and thus take our sense impressions to be veridical. Doing so is giving a certain answer to the question what to think: In general, what one should think is what one’s senses convey. And as in the case of practical reasoning, this is why we can know what we are thinking without observing ourselves. Our conscious thoughts are our answers to the question what to think, and insofar as they are these answers, we can have spontaneous knowledge of them.

There are many things that go on in our minds of which we do not have this kind of spontaneous knowledge. I often notice that I am mentally humming a tune without thereby answering any questions, that I am imagining random pictures, and that I am talking mental bullshit. One can observe this, by introspection, in the same sense in which one can observe that one’s hair looks funny. There is a clear distinction between such introspective knowledge of what goes on in one’s own mind, and spontaneous knowledge of it. Rödl identifies conscious self-knowledge with spontaneous knowledge. To self-consciously think a thought is to give it as an answer to the question what to think.7

4. Conscientia

For Rödl’s Cartesian, consciousness is some kind of introspective awareness by which we notice what happens in our minds. For Rödl himself, the self-conscious knowledge that we have of ourselves as thinking subjects is not knowledge by introspection, but spontaneous knowledge that we have of our thoughts insofar as they are our answers to the question what to think. What is consciousness (conscientia) for Descartes? Descartes uses this term in his definition of thought, but he does not define it anywhere. And he says that in general, when the meaning of a term is obvious, he does not define it (AT VIIIA 8).8 As I have argued elsewhere in more detail, these are good reasons for asking what Descartes’ predecessors took to be the obvious meaning of the Latin word conscientia.9 Here I can only give a brief, sketchy, and possibly cryptic answer to this question. Also, I will presently confine myself to scholastic authorities.

Aquinas takes conscientia to be an act of applying knowledge to a

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particular action.10 When we decide what to do, we go through a process of practical reasoning and come up with an action. In Rödl’s terms, we give an answer to the question what to do. But this application of practical knowledge is not yet what Aquinas calls conscientia. The act by which we determine what to do is called choice (electio). Conscientia is an act by which we go through the same reasoning a second time, in order to ascertain two things: first, whether we intentionally did a certain thing and what our intentions were; second, whether we had good reasons for doing what we did and whether our intentions were good.

According to Bonaventure and later Franciscan authors such as Walter of Bruges, conscientia cannot be any old kind of knowledge that we have of what we did and why we did it. They insist that it must be practicalknowledge, which actually guides us in our actions.11 Our conscientia is not only our knowledge of what we are doing, or what someone else should do in a certain situation, but it is our knowledge of what we should be doing in our situation, and as such, it is knowledge that makes us act. Bonaventure and his followers thus describe an agent’s conscientia as her knowledge how to answer, for herself, the question what to do. It is practical knowledge in two senses: It is knowledge about actions and it is knowledge that guides these and further actions.12 As Suárez says, practical knowledge is not only cognitive, but causative (De Bonitate12,2,4, 440b).

If conscientia is practical knowledge, it must in some sense be the cause of the actions it is about. But as Aquinas and Bonaventure emphasize, our conscientia does not efficiently cause the bodily movements that an agent performs on the basis of practical reasoning.13 These movements are caused by choice and appetite, not by the agent’s conscientia. What the conscientia causes is not the movement, but only its being an action for which the agent is accountable. As Rödl might put it, conscientia does not cause the movement itself, but only the thought on which it rests. It causes the action only insofar it is intentional.

So much for the traditional sense that the term “conscientia” had in the time before Descartes. For the scholastic authorities just considered, conscientia is knowledge that we have of our actions insofar as they are intentional. We have this knowledge by going through the reasoning that leads to an action. That is, we have it because and insofar as our actions are answers to the question what to do. It is not theoretical but practical knowledge: We do not only know what to do, but we determine what to do. We know our actions not only by observing them, but by intending them.14

It is commonly supposed that Descartes did not use the word


“conscientia” in this traditional sense but gave it a new meaning. And indeed, the word does acquire a quite different and apparently new meaning among the critics and followers of Descartes. As for Descartes himself, however, there is no reason to think that he uses it in an unorthodox way. First, he does not seem to be aware of any unorthodoxy. Second, the traditional meaning suits his purposes very well. The only change he needs to make is to shift from practical knowledge of intentional actions to practical knowledge of thoughts. Traditionally, conscientia is the knowledge that we have of our intentional actions insofar as they result from our practical reasoning. That we have such knowledge of them causes them to be intentional. Very much in line with this, Descartes takes conscientia to be the practical knowledge that we have of our thoughts insofar as they are our answer to the question what to think, such that they are our thoughts because and insofar as we have conscientia of them. His conscientia is not a kind of introspective awareness, but spontaneous knowledge.

One objection that may be raised at this point is that Descartes seems to give a new meaning to the term cogitatio, which he does define, and he includes perception, sensation, and imagination in his list of instances of cogitatio. These however seem to be instances of receptive knowledge.15 If so, some of our conscious activity is receptive rather than spontaneous, and this seems to speak against identifying Descartes’ consciousness with a kind of practical knowledge. Further, Descartes explicitly says that since sensation and imagination depend on the body, they do not belong to the essence of the thinking thing (AT VII 78). Now if Descartes defines thought as what is spontaneously known, then why does he at the same time include perception and sensation in his list of instances of thought, even though they depend on the body? This may seem especially strange since the First Meditation is supposed to lead the mind away from the senses, and therefore Descartes should have good reasons for not classifying sensation and imagination as instances of thought.16

However, that perceptual knowledge is receptive knowledge does not mean that we must have receptive knowledge of our perceptions. We may spontaneously know that we receptively know something (Rödl 2007, p. 144). Thus, even though perception and imagination are not kinds of spontaneous knowledge, they may still be things that are spontaneously known. Further, that a belief is our answer to the question what to think does not mean that we perform an act of intentionally believing something, by which we aim at some practical good. Both intentional actions and beliefs are our answers to the question how to do certain things, but these questions take on very different forms. The question what

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to do is a question about means to practical ends. The question what to think is a question about justification according to epistemic standards. When we consciously perceive something, we answer this latter question. We do not deliberate what to think based on our preferences. Rather, some perceptual content is given, and all we do is decide how to deal with it. We need to integrate our perceptions with our beliefs, such that when we have a sensation that does not fit our beliefs, we either change other beliefs or treat the sensation in a special way, in order to consciously accept it as our perception. There are norms and standards that apply to all our conscious perceptions, and this is possible only because to perceive something is in some sense to affirm its actual presence. That we cannot simply choose what to think does not mean that the question what to think is not a practical question. We still determine what to think, if not at will. On the other hand, we cannot freely invent the content of our perceptions, and according to Descartes, we cannot even freely choose what to imagine. Both depend on bodily processes that we do not completely and immediately control. Therefore, just as there is a bodily side to our actions that might turn out to differ from what we intend, there is a bodily element in our perceptions and imaginations, which may conflict with our answer to the question what to think. Still, imagination and sense perception are conscious activities, since we also have spontaneous knowledge of them.

5. The Real Descartes

I conclude that for Descartes, consciousness (conscientia) is not a kind of introspective awareness. It is not knowledge by observation, but practical knowledge. It is what Rödl calls spontaneous knowledge. That we are conscious of our thoughts means that we consciously think them, and this means that they are our answers to the question what to think. This also answers the question why a being that may be deceived must be capable of thinking. The key presupposition of being deceived is that one aims at not being deceived, i.e. at a true and accurate representation of something. Further, whenever one aims at something, one must have spontaneous knowledge of the act of aiming at it. This act may fail, but even in this case there must be some act that fails of which one has spontaneous knowledge. Therefore, the only thing that an evil demon could not possibly take away from us is our spontaneous knowledge of what we aim at in our thoughts.

If this is how we should read Descartes, we should review the four objections that Rödl raises against Cartesianism, and ask to what extent they still apply.


Let me begin with the so-called Cartesian operation. We have seen that it is important for Rödl not to divide actions into two independent parts, such that one of them is a mere intention, and the other a mere bodily movement. Likewise, it is important for him not to divide thoughts into a part that is purely mental and another part that is a mere brain process, or whatever the bodily correlate of a thought may be. Cartesians, as Rödl depicts them, do this in two ways. First, they allow for thoughts and intentions that do not have any bodily correlate at all. Second, they divide actions, imaginations, and sensations into one part that is bodily, and another one that is mental.

Does Descartes perform the Cartesian operation? I have already pointed out that in the Second Meditation, he distinguishes between actually perceiving a thing and seeming to perceive this thing, and he seems to say that only the latter is a thought. Here is the passage:

Yet I certainly seem to see, to hear, and to be warmed. This cannot be false, this is what is properly called sensation in me, and taken in precisely this way (praecise sic sumptum), it is nothing but thinking. (AT VII 29)

Descartes says that sensations are thoughts if they are precisely taken to be mere appearances. What does he mean by “precisely” here? A bit earlier in the Second Meditation, he writes that he is “precisely only” (praecise tantum) a thinking thing (AT VII 27). Gassendi criticizes this formulation. Since Descartes does not yet know anything about his body in the Second Meditation, Gassendi objects, he can also not know that he is not a bodily thing. Therefore, his claim that he is precisely only a thinking thing is unwarranted (AT VII 263-5). In a letter to Clerselier, Descartes replies that by saying that the mind is precisely only a thinking thing, he did not want to say that all it really is is merely a thinking thing. Rather, he says, “praecise” in this context means as much as “cut short.” What Descartes wants to say is thus that if the mind is only considered in a certain restricted way, it is nothing but a thinking thing.17 The same might well be true for the passage quoted above: If we consider our sensations and perceptions in a certain restricted way, they are nothing but thoughts. This does not mean that thoughts are really nothing but mere appearances. It only means that if we take them to be at least as much as such appearances, they are thoughts.

The general structure of Descartes’ argument is the following: We may consider A insofar as it is B, and considered praecise in this way, A is nothing but C. It does not follow from this that A is nothing but B, B nothing but C, or A nothing but C. For instance, one may consider Daniel Craig insofar as he is the new James Bond, and considered in this

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restricted way, one may say that he is a good actor (or a bad one, for that matter). But this does not mean that Daniel Craig is nothing but the new James Bond, or that the new James Bond is nothing but a good actor, or that Daniel Craig is nothing but a good actor. In particular, it does not follow that insofar as Daniel Craig is someone other than the new Bond, he is not a good actor. Likewise, one may consider a perception in a certain restricted way, namely only insofar as it is an apparent perception. Considered in this way, the perception turns out to be a thought; but this does not imply that the perception is nothing but a thought, that thoughts are nothing but appearances, or that insofar as the perception is not merely apparent, it is something other than a thought. Therefore, in the Second Meditation, Descartes does not claim that sensations are thoughts onlyinsofar as they are mere appearances.

Perception, sensation, and imagination are thus kinds of thought if considered in a certain restricted way. In the Second Meditation, the relevant restrictions are imposed by the context. Descartes is still engaged in doubting everything he can doubt, and under these conditions, his sensations and imaginations can only figure insofar as they are at least apparent sensations and imaginations, not insofar as they are whatever else they may be. When Descartes says that as long as these restrictions are in place, the sensations and imaginations of the thinking thing are thoughts insofar as they are appearances of actual sensations and imaginations, he does not say that under normal circumstances, they are just that.18 He has no business in denying that under normal circumstances, sensations are bodily processes.

It is important to see what Descartes is trying to show in the Second Meditation. His aim is to show that the thing whose existence cannot be doubted is a thinking thing. The point he makes is that in order to doubt whether a sensory image corresponds to anything real, it is enough to seemingly perceive. As long as the thinking thing seems to perceive and imagine things, he argues, it is at least thinking something. Therefore, there must be a thinking thing even if it only seems to perceive and imagine. But what is enough in this context may not be enough in other contexts. There may (and probably must) be thinking things that do not only seem to perceive and imagine things, but actually do perceive and imagine them.

I conclude that in the Second Meditation, Descartes does not perform the Cartesian operation as Rödl describes it. He does not divide the acts of the mind that involve the body (sensation, perception, and imagination) into two independent acts, one of which is purely mental, the other merely bodily. All he says in AT VII 29 is that even if such acts are considered


insofar as they are only appearances of sensing, perceiving, and imagining, they are still thoughts.

As for the impossibility of spatial objects, I agree with Rödl that one cannot refer to any particular bodily object without locating oneself relative to a (possibly different) bodily object. As a consequence, a pure mind cannot refer to any particular bodily object. This however does not show, as Rödl seems to suppose, that the concept of a pure mind does not make any sense at all. It only shows that if there were a pure mind, it could not relate to any particular body. It could only relate to pure ideas and to minds, such as itself and God.19 (It might also be able to relate to abstract bodies, such as geometrical shapes.) This only implies that the human mind, as long as it does relate to particular bodily things in the world and is united to a human body, is not a pure mind. Strictly speaking, only the immortal soul that survives its separation from the human body is a pure mind (and it is so only until the resurrection of the body). According to Descartes, the embodied mind that we have during our lives as human beings is not pure. It is true that he does not explain how a thinking thing may be impure, such that it may relate to bodily things. But at least he does not assume that a mind can both be pure and relate to a particular bodily item at the same time.

Self-sufficiency of the mental. On the basis of what has been said so far, it should also be clear to what extent the contents of our minds are semantically self-sufficient. Most of our beliefs are based on sense perception and imagination. A pure mind may have beliefs about God and itself as a pure mind, but it cannot have beliefs about particular material objects. Descartes has no problem admitting that our empirical ideas and thoughts depend for their existence on there being more than our own mind. He emphasizes that qua mental states, all our ideas are indistinguishable, and that they can be distinguished only by distinguishing the objects they represent (AT VII 40). Unless all objects of our ideas are further ideas, this clearly means that our ideas are not semantically self-sufficient. We need to be able to distinguish among things that are not ideas in order to distinguish between different ideas.

There is also a second way in which Descartes explicitly admits that there must be more than our minds for our minds to be possible. He argues that if a thinking thing such as our mind exists, there must also be another, more perfect thinking thing. Therefore, our mind depends on something external to it. Further, in the Sixth Meditation, he considers the suggestion that God, the perfect thinking being, might be the only other thing there is, and that our ideas of particular material things derive directly from God. He rejects it, since then it would seem that God is a deceiver. For we are

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inclined to think that our ideas of particular material things derive from such things, and we have no means of correcting this assumption (AT VII 79-80). In any case, there could be no finite mind without there being more than this finite mind. One reason for this is precisely that a finite mind is not semantically self-sufficient.

What about the Cartesian conception of consciousness as infallible knowledge? If there is anything objectionable about a mind that is transparent to itself, then this objection still applies. If consciousness is practical knowledge rather than introspective awareness, Descartes does not any longer claim that we know all our thoughts by introspection. But still, he claims that we necessarily know all our thoughts, since we must have practical and spontaneous knowledge of all of them. Thoughts are only possible as spontaneously known by the thinker. Therefore, the thinking thing must have spontaneous knowledge of everything that belongs to it. This is true for thinking subjects as Rödl depicts them as much as for a Cartesian mind.

On the other hand, Descartes occasionally concedes that we do not necessarily know what is in our minds. In the Discours, for instance, he writes that the activity by which we believe something differs from the activity by which we know that we have this belief, such that we may believe something without knowing that we do so (AT VI 23). One might account for this by assuming that in the Discours, Descartes speaks of introspective knowledge, and that he claims that although we must spontaneously know all our thoughts, we need not be introspectively aware of all of them. In a letter to Mersenne, however, Descartes also writes that our own thoughts are not fully within our power (AT III 249), and this should mean that we need not even spontaneously know everything about our own thoughts. This is a puzzling passage, and it might not be possible to make sense of it in the end. In any case, Descartes does not say, without qualification, that we necessarily know everything that is in our minds.

If consciousness is spontaneous knowledge, there is a fairly clear sense in which it must be infallible. We have spontaneous knowledge of our thoughts and actions insofar as they are our answers to the question what to do and think. This means that in cases where we are actually doing what we intend to be doing, we must also spontaneously know what we are in fact doing. In other cases, where we fail to act as we intend, we must at least know spontaneously what we are aiming at. We cannot fail to know what we are doing insofar as we are doing what we intend to do, and if we are performing any intentional action at all, there must be some extent to which we are doing what we intend to do. Likewise, we cannot fail to


know what we are thinking, insofar as we are thinking what we take to be epistemically justified.

There is a further sense in which spontaneous knowledge may be taken to be infallible: We cannot spontaneously know what we take to be mistaken. Giving the answer to the question what to do and evaluating it as the correct answer are one and the same. We cannot evaluate whether what we are doing is right or wrong independently of deciding what to do, and we cannot evaluate our thoughts as true or false independently of deciding whether we should entertain them or not. We may of course evaluate our own thoughts and actions as mistaken or wrong, but when we do so, we cease to provide them as our answers to the question what to think and what to do. Therefore, when we evaluate our own thoughts as mistaken, we cease to have spontaneous knowledge of them, and we cease to have spontaneous knowledge of them precisely because we take them to be mistaken. Further, that we cannot reject the objects of our spontaneous knowledge while having spontaneous knowledge of them means that we cannot at all truly evaluate them according to moral or epistemic standards while spontaneously knowing them. In order to evaluate an answer to the question what to do, one must also be able to evaluate it as incorrect, and this we cannot do while at the same time giving that answer. Spontaneous knowledge is thus infallible, in this sense, because there can be no spontaneous knowledge of a failed action or thought insofar as it fails. The objects of our spontaneous knowledge are irrejectable, because spontaneous knowledge necessarily withdraws before it fails.

Let me now point to an issue in which Rödl and Descartes clearly take different sides. According to Descartes, there is an ideal observer and evaluator of all our thoughts and actions. This evaluator is God: the infinite thinking thing whose thoughts are not subject to any further evaluation. God’s evaluation may be arbitrary, but it cannot possibly be wrong. His thoughts are infallible, not only because he cannot question them as long as he entertains them, but because by thinking them, he objectively determines what is right and wrong. God is a thinker who can judge himself, and the thoughts of God are, by definition, true.

According to Rödl, in contrast, an observer of my actions and thoughts can only evaluate these as actions and thoughts by employing a standard that also applies to her own actions and thoughts. All thought is an answer to the question what to think, and every such answer can be mistaken. Further, all evaluation of a thought is a further thought, and it can be as mistaken as the first. I have argued that we cannot take our own actions and thoughts to be mistaken while and insofar as we have spontaneous knowledge of them. If consciousness is such spontaneous knowledge, this

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means that we cannot truly evaluate what we are conscious of. Further, if thought is conscious activity, we cannot at the same think and truly evaluate our own thoughts (that is, insofar as we have spontaneous knowledge of them, we can only evaluate our thoughts as correct). In order to truly evaluate their own thoughts, thinking subjects must distance themselves from their thoughts, and when they distance themselves from a thought in this way, they cease to have spontaneous knowledge of it. Therefore, no thinking thing can reject its own current thoughts as mistaken.

But if thoughts are answers to the question what to think, they must be subject to a standard of correctness. Every answer to the question what to think can be mistaken, and therefore, every thought is subject to an evaluation that might reveal it to be mistaken. Now, because one cannot think and reject a thought at the same time, this means that every thought must be subject to a possible evaluation from a second or third person perspective. There can be no thinking subject whose thoughts are not subject to such an evaluation. Descartes assumes that there is a thinking thing whose thoughts are not subject to any evaluation by any other thinking being. Rödl argues that there can be no such perfect evaluator (1998, p. 271). The reason is that first, no thinking being can judge itself. Second, there can be no thinking being whose thoughts are not subject to any evaluation.

6. Conclusion

I have argued in this contribution that in order to understand Descartes’ picture of the mind, we must understand what he means by consciousness, and that consciousness is not a kind of introspective awareness. I take it that Rödl has successfully demonstrated that if consciousness were a kind of introspective awareness of what happens in the mind of a thinker, the mind would be semantically self-sufficient and could not relate to any particular spatial item. However, Descartes does not think of the human mind in this way. I have argued that in Descartes’ time, the term conscientia was mainly used for the knowledge of our own actions that may be expressed by a practical syllogism. It is knowledge that we have because and insofar as we perform the actions known and are accountable for them. If this is so, Descartes’ consciousness is not a kind of introspective awareness but rather a kind of spontaneous knowledge. We have this knowledge of our own thoughts and actions insofar as they are our answers to the question what to think and what to do. According to Rödl, self-conscious subjects are beings that may spontaneously know


their own thoughts and actions. They know themselves by being themselves. When Descartes defines the mind as a being that is conscious of its own thoughts, he is basically saying the same as Rödl. For Descartes, thought is what happens in a subject such that and insofar as this subject is immediately conscious of it. If consciousness is spontaneous knowledge, this means that thinking subjects are subjects who engage in an activity of which they have spontaneous knowledge. This also explains why only conscious beings can be deceived. One can only be deceived if one aims at not being deceived, and whenever one aims at something, one must have spontaneous knowledge of the act of aiming at it. If consciousness is spontaneous knowledge, this means that one must engage in conscious activity in order to be possibly deceived. It further explains why Descartes thinks that the existence of the human mind implies the existence of God. For Descartes, God personifies all standards of correctness, and if to engage in conscious activity is to provide an answer to the question what to think and what to do, all conscious activity must be subject to some standard of correctness. For Descartes, this means that all conscious activity presupposes the existence of a being that can apply this standard without being subject to it, i.e. God.

I have also pointed out that Rödl and Descartes disagree on an important point. They both argue that we may be conscious of our own thoughts and actions because we determine what to do and think in the light of certain practical ends and epistemic standards. All conscious activity is therefore subject to an evaluation in terms of practical ends or epistemic standards. According to Descartes, however, there is an ideal evaluator of all human thought, such that conscious activity might also be defined as an activity that is subject to an evaluation by this ideal evaluator in terms of practical ends and epistemic standards. According to Rödl, only a being whose actions are subject to an evaluation as thoughts and actions can understand what it is to think and act. Every thinker must therefore be subject to an evaluation from a second- or third person perspective, and every evaluator of a thought must be subject to a further such evaluation.

Notes

1 Sebastian Rödl, Selbstbezug und Normativität (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1998). 2 Cf. Robert McRae. “Descartes’ Definition of Thought”, in R. J. Butler, ed., Cartesian Studies, (London: Basil Blackwell, 1972), 55-70; John Cottingham. “Descartes on ‘Thought’,” The Philosophical Quarterly 28 (1978), 208-14; Daisie Radner. “Thought and Consciousness in Descartes”, Journal of the History of

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Philosophy 26 (1988), 439-452; and James Hill. “What Does ‘To Think’ (cogitare) Mean in Descartes’ Second Meditation?” Acta Comeniana 19 (2005), 91-103. 3 This refers to Adam and Tannery, Oeuvres de Descartes (Paris: Vrin, 1996), vol. VII, page 160. Translations are in general my own. 4 This is also true of my unconscious desires: I may be aware of them, but only on the basis of what my psychoanalyst tells me. They are unconscious because I am only mediately aware of them. Cf. David Finkelstein. “On the Distinction Between Conscious and Unconscious States of Mind”, American Philosophical Quarterly36 (1999), 81. 5 See AT VII 27, among other passages, for the claim that sensations depend on the body. For imagination, cf. AT VII 72. 6 Sebastian Rödl, Self-Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007). 7 Finkelstein notes that there seems to be something wrong with saying “I unconsciously believe that p, and in fact, p” (1999, p. 81). The reason might well be that whenever we accept p as a fact, we also give p as an answer to the question what to think. Therefore, we cannot both accept p and not be conscious of our belief that p. 8 See also AT IV 116 and AT X 369. 9 It is important to see, first, that although the term conscientia is of central importance for Descartes, it is impossible to extract its meaning from Descartes’ own writings. This can only be shown by carefully looking at these writings. It follows that in order to understand what Descartes means by conscientia, we must look at the way in which this term was traditionally used before Descartes. Second, before Descartes, there are no clear instances where “conscientia” means what we today call consciousness or introspective awareness. Again, this claim can only be established by an extensive survey of the passages that belong to the tradition on which Descartes built. I have done my best to establish these two claims in Conscientia bei Descartes (Freiburg: Alber Verlag 2006); Cf. also my “Cartesian Conscientia”, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 15 (2007), 455-484. 10 Summa Theologiae Ia 79,13; De Veritate 17,1. 11 Bonaventure, In II Sent. 39,1,1; Walter of Bruges, Quaestiones Disputatae 13 c.a., p. 118; Cf. Rudolf Hofmann, Die Gewissenslehre des Walter von Brügge und die Entwicklung der Gewissenslehre in der Hochscholastik (Münster: Aschendorff,1941). 12 Hill claims that because conscientia is a kind of scientia, it must be some kind of intellectualistic knowledge (2005, p. 101). This is far from plausible, given that up to the time of Descartes, conscientia is clearly practical, moral, and normative knowledge. On the other hand, this also means that Hill is clearly right in rejecting the view that Cartesian thoughts must be conscious in the present-day sense of “conscious” – if there is one. 13 Aquinas, De Veritate 17,1 ad 4; Bonaventure In II Sent. 39,1,1 c.a. 14 The account of conscientia that I have just sketched is of course not particularly Cartesian. We need to refer to the tradition precisely because Descartes does not give his own positive account. And Descartes’ tradition is also everyone else’s


tradition. 15 In Principia II,2, Descartes writes that the mind is aware (conscius) that sensations do not originate from it (AT VIIIA 41). 16 His main reason for including imagination seems to be that at least according to his earlier account in the Regulae, our imagination plays a crucial role in geometrical (and therefore generally in scientific) thought. Cf. Dennis L. Sepper, Descartes’ Imagination (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996). 17 Cf. AT VII 8 and AT VII 27. See John Cottingham. “Cartesian Dualism: Theology, Metaphysics, and Science”, in Cottingham, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Descartes, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 236-257) 243; Marleen Rozemond, Descartes’ Dualism. (Cambridge. Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 12. 18 AT VII 33, he says that for now, in the Second Meditation, he does not distinguish between seeing and thinking that one sees. 19 Descartes claims that the mind can relate to itself and to God without being united to a body. Cf. AT VII 73 (pura intellectio happens when the mind turns toward itself); III 395 (on ideas of the pure mind); IV 114 and XI 350 (our ideas of our own will do not depend on the body).

3.

RES COGITANS AS RES DUBITANS

JAMES HILL

Descartes begins his philosophical journey in a state of radical doubt. The negative significance of this doubt could hardly be more obvious: it clears away previous dubitable beliefs in preparation for laying the foundations of a new and absolutely trustworthy science. But there is also, I believe, a positive side to the doubts. The very process of doubting, by the way it exercises the mind, brings about an intellectual awakening. I shall argue that only by appreciating this positive exercitational aspect of Descartes’ doubting, are we able to understand what is meant, in the Second Meditation, when the mind is characterised as “res cogitans”. In particular, I hope to show why this thinking thing has, for Descartes, a distinctly judgemental, intellectual nature.

1. Leading the Mind away from Sense

Let us begin by looking at Descartes’ own justification of the method of doubt. Aware of its controversial nature, Descartes sought to justify it, in the Synopsis of the First Meditation, in three different ways. He writes that the method is designed to free us from our “preconceived opinions”; he writes that the method of doubt is “the easiest route by which the mind may be led away from the senses”; and he says that the doubts will “make it impossible for us to have any further doubts about what we subsequently discover to be true”.1

My proposal is that the second motivation is most important: the leading of the mind away from the senses (abducere mentem a sensibus). This, I believe, holds the key to the method of doubt as a whole. Descartes’ sceptical method teaches the mind to think in detachment from sense. It shows that thinking can be radically non-sensual. We need to appreciate this transformative character of doubting, I shall argue, if we are to understand what Descartes means by a “thinking thing”.

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What about the other two motivations that are mentioned in the passage from the synopsis—the abandonment of preconceptions and the preparation of the mind for certain knowledge? I believe that these goals are achieved precisely through the the leading of the mind away from sense. This is most obvious with the abandonment of preconceptions. What are the preconceptions that the meditator has, and is seeking to abandon? The answer to this question must take into account that he begins as a “creature of sense”—an empiricist.2 His preconceptions may reasonably be supposed, therefore, to be based on his trust in the senses. It is because he is attached to the Thomist principle nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu, that the meditator conceives of things by the use of images.3 Leading the mind away from the senses is designed to break this habit of conceiving things by images. This then allows the meditator to escape from what Descartes saw, rightly or wrongly, as the characteristic preconceptions of empiricism—the view that the mind is a physical thing like wind, fire or ether;4 that there are qualities in bodies resembling colours, sounds, smells etc;5 that where we perceive nothing there is indeed nothing (a vacuum)6, and so on.

What about the role of the method of doubt in preparing us for the certain knowledge to come? How does the detachment from sense help us here? One reason is, of course, that the doubts clear the ground. This is the negative role of the method of doubt that we described earlier. But I believe that answer would be inadequate if it was not supplemented by the observation that leading the mind away from sense is, for Descartes, eoipso to lead it to what he calls the “primary” or “common notions”. And it is only by becoming aware of these intellectual elements that the mind equips itself to formulate the certain principles on which Descartes’ scientia is to be founded. The “natural light of reason”, which grasps these notions and which enables the meditator to prove the existence of God in the Third Meditation is, at the beginning of the Meditations, obscured by the senses.7 Leading this benighted mind “away from sense” is to reveal to it the notions, including a conception of causality, that constitute the light of the intellect.

While we cannot deal comprehensively with the doctrine of the primary notions here, we can at least outline their place in Descartes’ thought. Most importantly they are mental content that is accessible without any specific sense experience. While Descartes sometimes talks of “primary” notions, he also talks of “common” notions. Included among these notions are intuitive concepts as “thought”, “substance”, “existence”, “reality”, “God” and so on, as well as the basic axioms that govern rational thought, such as “Nothing comes from nothing” and other principles

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attaching to causation.8 Notions such as these, he thinks, are not properly clear to a mind that has not turned away from the “glare” of sense experience.9 While they are latent in all rational thought, we are not capable of establishing a true first philosophy until they are cleansed of the encumbrance of sense images, and made fully conscious to the rational enquirer.

In the Replies, when explaining the meditational method, and the role of radical doubt in it, Descartes writes:

In metaphysics ... there is nothing which causes so much effort as making our perception of the primary notions clear and distinct. Admittedly, they are by their nature as evident as, or even more evident, than the primary notions which the geometers study; but they conflict with many preconceived opinions derived from the senses which we have got into the habit of holding from our earliest years, and so only those who really concentrate and meditate and withdraw their minds from corporeal things, so far as is possible, will achieve perfect knowledge of them.10

“Leading the mind away from the senses” involves, then, a turning towards these intellectual notions. As Descartes writes in reply to Hobbes, “I wanted to prepare my readers’ minds for the study of the things which are related to the intellect, and help them to distinguish these things from corporeal things”.11 Since corporeal things are, for Descartes, known exclusively through the images of sense, he means that the method of doubt allows the mind to turn away from such imagery and to grasp the notions known to the intellect alone.

2. The Deceiving God

If leading the mind away from the senses can be treated as the most fundamental transformation to be achieved by the method of doubt, how does the method bring about this goal? A promising answer to this question would say that the method of doubt leads to a withdrawal of assent from the senses. The meditator detaches himself from his former beliefs about corporeal things that the senses have impressed on him.

The withdrawal of assent from the senses in the First Meditation is certainly one important result of the method. The meditator’s sceptical arguments are, after all, overwhelmingly aimed at calling into question beliefs based on sense-experience. The meditator not only begins by pointing to the deceptions of sense themselves, but also the sceptical thoughts he entertains concerning the possibility that he might be mad,

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that he might be dreaming, or he might be being tricked by an evil demon, are all, arguably, directed at sensory belief.

But there remains one sceptical argument that is a problem for an interpretation which says that it is only assent at issue when Descartes talks of leading the mind away from sense. This is a thought about the origin of our minds. The meditator says that he cannot exclude the possibility that a deceiving God has created him with a nature that makes him go wrong in the simplest intellectual operations such as counting the sides of a square, or adding two to three.12 This argument (which needs to be carefully distinguished from the evil demon scenario), is a thought about an internal source of deception: it is the consideration that we may have been formed as epistemically-flawed beings. Indeed, we may be so hopelessly flawed that even our most simple arithmetical calculations are in error.

I will refer to this argument as “the deceiving God argument”. This title, despite its having tradition on its side, is not really altogether apt. The argument concerns the origin of the enquirer, whatever the nature of that origin. It does not necessarily assume that he is the creation of a god. Indeed, the narrator (no doubt alluding to Epicurean tychism) accepts that he may be the result of “fate or chance or a continuous chain of events”.13

These non-theistic possibilities, he argues, actually strengthen the case for deception:

since deception and error seem to be imperfections, the less powerful they make my original cause, the more likely it is that I am so imperfect as to be deceived all the time. 14

So the deceiving God argument amounts to the proposal that as long as I am not sure about the cause of my being I cannot rule out the possibility that my nature has been formed such that I go wrong “every time I add two and three or count the sides of a square”.15

Now, if Descartes meant to lead the mind away from sense by withdrawing assent from sensory based beliefs, then the deceiving God argument would be an anomalous and problematic element in his strategy. This argument, after all, seems to be designed to withdraw assent from intellectual matters. The distinctive aim of detaching the mind from sense would thus be thwarted. In order for us to see how the method does indeed lead us away from sense and not from the intellect we need to approach the method from a different point of view.


3. The Performance of Doubt

Despite appearances to the contrary, I shall try to show that the deceiving God argument actually reinforces the legitimacy of the intellect. It continues a tendency, found in the other arguments of the First Meditation, to lead the mind towards the pure intellect, and to establish the fundamental importance of thought that is free of all sense imagery. To demonstrate this, I no longer wish to concentrate, as we normally do, on the objects of doubt, that is, on the propositions that the meditator is led to deny, or be sceptical towards. Instead I wish to focus on the performanceof the doubt, on what the meditator is doing as he entertains the doubts of the First Meditation.

It is well known that the Meditations owe their title, and—to a certain extent—their form, to a genre of Roman Catholic ascetic exercise. While the writers in this tradition were concerned with spiritual matters, Descartes’ Meditations offer the reader a training of the intellect. Descartes’ “cognitive exercises”, as Gary Hatfield has called them, 16 share with their spiritual counterparts an important feature. The meditational form cannot be cleanly separated from the conclusions arrived at. “There is no detachable product in which a meditation results that could be acquired by someone who has not been through the meditation’s actual praxis.”17

The exercitational dimension is especially important when we are considering the method of doubt. Descartes recommends, in the Replies to Objections, that the reader “give months or at least weeks” to considering the First Meditation alone, before going any further.18 It is highly unlikely that he thought that we need this amount of time to understand the arguments of the First Meditation, and much more likely that Descartes had in mind the beneficial effect of excercising the doubts over this extended period. Such exercise was necessary if we are to be prepared for the arguments and insights of the later Meditations.

What are we exercising when we exercise doubt? For Descartes doubt is, above all, a rational process. Indeed, reason is required to understand and implement the strategy of withdrawing assent itself: “Reason”, he writes “leads me to think that I should hold back my assent from opinions which are not completely certain and indubitable just as carefully as I do from those which are patently false”.19 The goal of certainty which informs the method of doubt is, in other words, one that is understood and endorsed by reason. Equally, the meditator’s doubts are themselves based on rational arguments. As Descartes emphasises in reply to Gassendi, “we need some reason for doubting; and that is why in my First Meditation I

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put forward the principal reasons for doubt.”20 Even when he considers that he may be the victim of a deceiving god, we should notice, Descartes emphasises that the sceptical argument “is based on powerful and well thought-out reasons”.21

But it is not just reason, strictly understood, that we are exercising in doubting. We are also exercising the will. Sartre characterised the method of doubt as, in the widest sense, an “action”. It is not “spontaneous doubt”, which “invades me” in an instance. It is a concerted effort, planned and carefully articulated.22 Or as Edwin Curley has emphasised, the method of doubt is “a resolution to attempt to doubt all previous beliefs by searching for grounds of doubt”.23 We might add that the method of doubt is a motivated resolution to action. It is motivated by the meditator’s refusal to be misled or to become the victim of deception. The doubter, as Descartes writes in the Second Meditation, is “unwilling to be deceived”.24

Let us make the point more comprehensively: doubt involves the exercise of judgement. Judging, for Descartes, brings together both the intellect and the will. We exercise our volition by affirming or denying propositions, just as we exercise our intellect in grasping the propositions as they are affirmed or denied. Even in holding back, or reserving, judgement, as required by the sceptical method, the will is exercised. All the modes of assent involve acts of volition according to Descartes’ understanding of judgement presented in the Fourth Meditation, and they all involve the intellect in understanding what is, or is not, assented to. The doubting mind is a judging mind.

So, the method of doubt combines the exertions of two faculties—intellect and will25—which in scholastic philosophy were generally treated as belonging exclusively to the rational soul. The method of doubt is exercising that part of the mind that was thought to be uniquely rational and human. Now, crucially, even when intellectual propositions themselves become the object of doubt, in the deceiving God argument, the exercise of the doubt itself remains a rational, intellectual process—it involves argument, judgement and a willed aim.

4. Higher Order Reflection

Let us examine the deceiving God argument in view of what we have just said about the exercise of doubt. Does the possibility of a deceiving God not call into question the validity of rational reflection tout court?Some writers on Descartes have thought that it does, and they have seen this as a fatal flaw in the method of doubt. The deceiving God argument is treated by them as a step too far, rendering Descartes’ method self-


defeating. A succinct statement of this view is provided by Thomas Nagel who argues that in setting up the deceiving God possibility, and in grasping its implications, Descartes has already unwittingly displayed his “unshakeable attachment” to logical thought, “undisturbed by the possibility that his mind is being manipulated.” The doubt therefore, for Nagel, fails and Descartes “can’t even consider the implications of that possibility without implicitly ruling it out.”26

To respond to Nagel’s objection on Descartes’ behalf, we need to become aware of a further characteristic of the meditator’s doubt: it is a higher-order form of judgement. It stands back from the data of both sense and the first order judgements of the intellect. In so doing, it opens up a new space of second-order reflection. Even when calling into question the objects of intellectual knowledge, the intellect is exercised at a new level—one of a higher order than the disciplines of arithmetic and geometry which are doubted. Descartes never raises doubts about the validity of the intellect as it conducts the method of doubt itself.Philosophical doubt, as a higher-order intellectual exercise, remains beyond the reach of its own negation.

Once one recognises the higher-order character of the deceiving God argument, one realises that it does not raise a doubt about our intelligence or intellect per se. The intellect that is exercised at the higher-order level remains quite untouched. It is no accident therefore that only arithmetic and geometry are mentioned as being called into question, and we should avoid the temptation of treating these as part of an unspoken list that would go on to include logical axioms or the common notions. The common notions are actually assumed because they are being put to use in our very understanding of the deceiving God argument. The intellect in withdrawing its assent from the simplest assertions of mathematics and other first–order disciplines, keeps for itself the basic principles of rationality.27 Nagel is right, then, to point out that the sceptical argument actually uses and affirms these principles, but he is wrong to claim that Descartes has ever sought to call these principles into question. Nagel, it seems, simply does not take seriously the possibility that it might actually be part of Descartes’ overall strategy to affirm these principles.

We have said that the common notions, for Descartes, involve a conception of causality. Now, the deceiving God argument clearly depends on our assuming some kind of causal relation. How else could our origin have a potential impact on our knowledge of arithmetic and geometry if not by its causing our possession of defective faculties? Indeed, in the passage that refers to non-theistic explanations of our origin, a rather specific, view of causality is asserted which links the level of

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perfection in the cause to the level of perfection in the effect. If we may return to a statement that we have already quoted:

since deception and error seem to be imperfections, the less powerful they make my original cause, the more likely it is that I am so imperfect as to be deceived all the time. 28

This understanding of causality is vital to the deceiving God doubt, and is not itself made the object of this doubt. This needs to be borne in mind when reading the Third Meditation where critics have often accused Descartes of plucking a causal conception out of thin air to make possible the validity of his proof of God. In fact this kind of causal principle was already internal to hyperbolic doubt and the meditator can therefore appeal to it, with some justification, as a deliverance of the “natural light”.29

5. Cartesian Doubt is not Universal

At this point the reader may feel that we are underestimating the breadth of Descartes’ doubt. Does not the narrator say, in concluding the deceiving-God argument, that there is “not one of my former beliefs about which a doubt may not properly be raised”?30 Does he not say “in future I must withhold my assent from these former beliefs just as carefully as I would from obvious falsehoods, if I want to discover any certainty”?31

Indeed, at the very start of the Meditations the narrator commits himself to “the general demolition of my opinions’, and talks of the aim of “rejecting all my opinions”, 32 and the conclusion of the deceiving God argument seems to have brought that negative task to fruition.

We must be wary when we read the comments just quoted lest we overlook their first-personal character. The meditator talks (let us emphasise) of “the general demolition of my opinions”; he says there is “not one of my former beliefs about which a doubt may not properly be raised”; and so on. The narrator is concerned with beliefs that he has had prior to embarking on the method of doubt. It is easy to forget this, and to assume that he is talking of all beliefs per se, or even of “all propositions”. In other words, we forget that the Meditations is a narrative, related in the first person, and go back to reading it as a treatise instead, with a kind of neutral, third-personal perspective.

We have said the meditator starts out as “a creature of sense”—an empiricist—who bases his judgements on the deliverances of sense perception. He is a beginner in philosophy who, by his own admission, has been “struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood”. When the meditator refers to all his beliefs prior to the


Meditations, he should be taken to mean a set of propositions that are largely sense-based. Included also are the propositions of arithmetic and geometry, which any grown-up person will have learnt and used. But there is no reason to assume that, before his meditational journey began, the narrator consciously or explicitly held, for example, the causal principle, or “common notion”, that we have drawn attention to. Such a general and abstract philosophical proposition only becomes clear to him as the Meditations progress.

In his “Conversation with Burman”, Descartes tells us:

the author is considering at this point the man who is only just beginning to philosophize and who is paying attention only to what he knows he is aware of. As regards the common principles and axioms, [...] men who are creatures of the senses, as we all are at a pre-philosophical level, do not think about these or pay attention to them.33

He even goes on to say:

if people were to think about these principles in the abstract, no one would have any doubt about them; and if the sceptics had done this, no one would ever have been a sceptic; for they cannot be denied by anyone who carefully focuses his attention on them.34

It is quite wrong, then, to think that the doubts of the First Meditation apply to all intellectual objects. The abstract principles of reason and logic that enable the doubts are themselves simply not consciously “focused” on and thus not subjected to doubt.

Our interpretation is reinforced by Descartes’ response to Gassendi’s charge that he is “asking for something impossible” in the Meditations “in wanting us to give up every kind of preconceived opinion”. The objector “has not realized”, Descartes retorts, “that the term ‘preconceived opinion’ applies not to all the notions which are in our mind”, but only to “opinions which we have continued to accept as a result of previous judgements that we have made”.35 In the Principles, Descartes suggests that there is a conflict between our having preconceived opinions and our recognising common notions. He says that preconceived opinions may “blind” us to the common notions,36 and that those who suffer from preconceived opinions cannot easily grasp the common notions.37

Descartes view, then, seems to be that the common notions are not subject of the meditator’s doubt because he does not consciously adhere to them, despite the fact that he is reliant on them in the enactment of his doubts. He has not yet judged that they are true. Indeed, the reason why the meditator is not explicitly aware of the common notions he is using is

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precisely because his mind is crowded with the prejudices of sense. The validity of the common notions only starts to become properly clear once the method of doubt is applied, and those preconceived opinions recede. It is only in the Third Meditation, one will remember, that the full view of causality, known to the “natural light”, is explicitly set forth.38

6. Res Cogitans and Res Dubitans

I have argued that the method of doubt involves higher order reflection which presupposes certain intellectual elements, or notions, that are never subjected to doubt. The meditator never calls into question his rationality in so far as it enables this higher order reflection. On the contrary, this rational power is exercised and implicitly confirmed by the doubting. I now wish to examine the implications of our understanding the method of doubt for the conception of the mind that emerges in the Second Meditation—what Descartes calls res cogitans.

When the meditator first defines himself as a “thinking thing” he says, by way of explanation, that he is talking about a “mind, or spirit, or intellect, or reason” (“mens, sive animus, sive intellectus, sive ratio”).39 It is easy to assume that Descartes is just blotting out the traditional meaning of these terms and reinventing them to fit his concept of res cogitans. Indeed, such a reading might seem to be supported by the meditator’s comment that these are “words whose meaning I have been ignorant of until now”.40

But Descartes must be paying some attention to the traditional meanings of these terms, otherwise why would he choose these, and not other words, to be synonymous with res cogitans? He clearly wants us to see res cogitans as having something in common with the meaning with these four Latin words. That Mens and animus are on this list is perhaps relatively unsurprising as they were typically used, in a rather loose way, for the mind in general. But intellectus and ratio had a narrower meaning. By making res cogitans synonymous with these two, Descartes confirms that, as he says in the synopsis to the Second Meditation, he is conceiving the mind itself as an “intellectual nature” (natura intellectuale).41

The intellectual character of res cogitans should not surprise us if the meditator is using his doubting in the First Meditation as the paradigm of thought. Thinking in this sense is the intuitive sense of being intellectually active, which involves intellect and will. When the meditator says he is a res cogitans, he is generalising the doubting mind—the res dubitans if you like—that emerges from the First Meditation. He is identifying himself


with the one who performs the kind of thought that is performed in the method of doubt.

This is borne out, again, in the subsequent elucidation of his nature as res cogitans, in which the meditator provides a list of the mental activities that fall under the term cogitatio: “A thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, is willing, is unwilling, and also imagines and has sensory perceptions.”42 Doubting, one will notice, is the first activity on this list. The subsequent mental activities that are itemised are all derived from this paradigmatic case of thinking, exercised in the First Meditation. This is shown in the passage that immediately follows where the unity of the mind is affirmed by considering the different aspects of doubting:

Is it not one and the same “I” who is now doubting almost everything, who nonetheless understands some things, who affirms that this one thing is true, denies everything else, desires to know more, is unwilling to be deceived, imagines many things even involuntarily, and is aware of many things which apparently come from the senses?43

This gives a very good summary of how the mind’s different acts are involved in the method of doubt. We have already noted, for example, that the use of the method involves the will to avoid deception —the meditator “is unwilling to be deceived”. So the model which Descartes presents to us for understanding his res cogitans is the performer of the method of doubt. And res cogitans therefore has the intellectual nature of the doubter.

7. Res Cogitans and the Status of Sense

But there now arises a question about the status of imagination and sense. These two do appear at the end of the list of cogitationes and thus they belong, as modes of thinking, to the res cogitans. They also are mentioned in the passage we have just quoted that explicates the unity of the “I” by pointing to the single subject of the different acts involved in doubting. How can this be if res cogitans is an intellectual nature that has been “led away” from the senses?

The question of how imagination and sense are related to the intellectual nature of res cogitans is complex. In the present context let us notice the detachment with which imagination and sense are added to the list of cogitationes (“and also imagines and has sensory perceptions”). This detached status will be given a metaphysical justification in the Sixth Meditation, where it is argued that we can understand ourselves without the ability to imagine and sense, but not without the intellectual activities, which we found to be involved in doubting. In reference to the

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imagination—and the point must apply to sense too—the meditator claims, in the Sixth Meditation:

I consider that this power of imagining which is in me, differing as it does from the power of understanding, is not a necessary constituent of my own essence, that is, of the essence of my mind.44

But these comments come late in the Meditations and they presuppose a knowledge of God, and the possibility of his realising whatever is clearly and distinctly conceivable by us. Descartes actually provides a solution to the problem of the status of sense and imagination in the Second Meditation itself.

I am referring to the examination of his perception of a piece of wax. The wax example is significant because it is exactly the kind of case—the perception of a particular body—that the empiricist treats as straightforward and unproblematic. The meditator finds that in order to perceive the piece of wax as a piece of wax through all the changes that it undergoes as it melts, he must be judging intellectually. The countless possible changes could not be grasped by any finite series of images produced by the imagination. He thus finds that the intellect is actively participating even in the perception of the objects of corporeal images. His conclusion is relevant to our discussion:

I now know that even bodies are not strictly perceived by the senses or the faculty of imagination but by the intellect alone, and that this perception derives not from their being touched or seen but from their being understood.45

The intellect here is no longer to be understood as a faculty. Descartes says quite explicitly to Hobbes that he is talking of the intellect in the Second Meditation as “the thing which understands” and not a “mere faculty”.46 The intellectual mind—which performed the method of doubt—is now found to be active in sense and imagination.

The Scholastic and Epicurean empiricists held that the mind is a hierarchy of faculties, of which the intellect is the highest. Descartes is here implicitly rejecting the hierarchy and reworking the very notion of faculties. The Cartesian mind has become the intellect itself, though in a more replete and ample sense than the Scholastic faculty of intellect. Even the senses and imagination are now operations of the intellect—however confused and indistinct. The judging, rational performer of the method of doubt is now seen to constitute the very nature of the mind in all its


activities. The mind is not endowed with an intellect among other faculties: it is an “intellectual substance” (substantia intelligentia).47

Descartes will, of course, continue to use the term “faculty”, but he does not use it in the strong sense of a part of the mind or a “module”.48

He will also continue to talk of the intellect itself as a faculty. But by that he means a “pure” operation of the intellectual substance, when it is turned towards itself rather than towards material things. Intellect is thus both the nature of the mind and a faculty of the mind: it is the nature when we refer to the underlying constitution of the mind that enables all its operations; it is a faculty when we refer to a specific kind of mental operation that does not involve corporeal imagery, but only the inner content of the mind itself.49

My aim has been to suggest that we reappraise our understanding of Descartes’ term “thinking thing”. I believe we should at least be ready to question the dominant tradition which is content to treat thinking as amounting to consciousness. I also believe we should take seriously the possibility that term “thinking” (cogitare, penser) retains its intellectual sense for Descartes. By doing so we become better able to understand why Descartes calls the mind not only res cogitans, but also an intellectual substance.

Notes

1 AT VII 12; CSM II 9. Here and in what follows AT refers to C. Adam and P. Tannery (trans. and ed.), Oeuvres de Descartes, revised edition, Vrin, 1964-76; and CSM refers to J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D. Murdoch (transl. and ed.), The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Cambridge University Press, 1985 (in both cases the roman numerals refer to the volume number).2 Descartes uses this phrase to describe the beginner at AT V 146; CSMK 332.3 AT VII 75-6; CSM II 52: The meditator looks back to his premeditational state remarking that ‘I easily convinced myself that I had nothing at all in the intellect which I had not previously had in sensation’4 AT VII 26; CSM II 17.5 AT VII 82; CSM II 56-7.6 AT VII 82; CSM II 56.7 In the Third Meditation common notions are introduced as deliverances of the natural light, and in the Sixth Meditation an important common notion, ‘what is done cannot be undone’, is described as ‘known by the natural light’ (AT VII 82; CSM II 57).8 Descartes lists the ‘axioms or common notions’ in the Second Set of Replies (AT VII 164-66; CSM II 116-17). He mentions ten, of which the first five directly involve causality.

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9 ‘I know of no other way of making sound judgements about the notions which can be taken for principles, except that we must prepare our mind to divest itself of all the views with which it is preoccupied, and to reject as doubtful everything that might be doubtful.’ (AT II 435; CSMK 129)10 AT VII 157; CSM II 111.11 AT VII 172; CSM II 121.12 AT VII 21; CSM II 14.13 AT VII 21; CSM II 14. ‘Tychism’ refers to the probabilistic moment in Epicurean thought, which holds that, because the universe is infinitely old, the complex form of the human organism, as well as the apparent design of our universe, must sooner or later arise by chance interaction of the atoms—see, for example, Lucretius, De rerum natura, I. 1021-1029.14 Ibid.15 Ibid.16Viz the title of his ‘The Senses and the Fleshless Eye: The Meditations as Cognitive Exercises’ in Amélie Rorty ed., Essays on Descartes’ Meditations,University of California Press: Berkeley, 1986, pp. 45-80.17 Kosman 1986, p. 21. ‘The Naive Narrator: Meditation in Descartes’ Meditations’, in Amelie Rorty (ed.), Essays on Descartes’ Meditations, University of California Press, 1986. 18 AT VII 130; CSM II 94.19 AT VII 18; CSM II 12.20 AT IXA 204; CSM II 270.21 AT VII 21-22; CSM II 15.22 J-P. Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness, transl. Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick, Hill and Wang, 1960, p. 69. 23 Edwin Curley, Descartes against the Skeptics, Harvard University Press, 1978, p.44.24 AT VII 28; CSM II 19 (my emphasis).25 See AT IV 63; CSMK 229 where Descartes talks of two aspects of doubt, one which concerns the intellect and one which concerns the will.26 Thomas Nagel, The Last Word, OUP, 1997, p. 60 Incidentally, Nagel differs from us in treating the evil demon and the deceiving God argument as one and the same thing.27 This can be understood as assuming that logicism is false, and that mathematics is not a branch of logic.28 AT VII 21; CSM II 14.29 Here I am indebted to the analysis of Janet Broughton, in her Descartes’s Method of Doubt, Princeton University Press, 2002, esp. pp. 163-5. She prefers to call the causal principle, along with Leibniz, ‘the principle of sufficient reason’. I have reservations about this label, which seems to be too general to capture the view of causality the meditator presupposes.30 AT VII 21; CSM II 14-5.31 AT VII 22; CSM II 15.


32 AT VII 18; CSM II 17. The emphasis is mine.33 AT V 146; CSMK 332.34 AT V 146; CSMK 333.35 AT IXA 203-4; CSM II 270.36 AT VIIIA 24; CSM I 209 (Principles I.49)37 AT VIIIA 24; CSM I 209 (Principles I.50)38 See in particular AT VII 40-41; CSM II 28-29.39 AT VII 27; CSM II 18: 40 AT VII 27; CSM II 18.41 AT VII 12; CSM II 9. In a letter to Silhon of May, 1637, Descartes says that the notion of ‘intellectual nature’ represents both God—when thought of without limitation—and the human soul—when thought of as limited (AT I 353; CSMK 55). See also Discourse IV, where Descartes writes ‘I had already recognized very clearly from my own case that the intellectual nature is distinct from the corporeal ...’ (AT VI 35; CSM I 128).42 AT VII 28; CSM II 19. 43 AT VII 28; CSM II 19.44 AT VII 73; CSM II 51.45 AT VII 33; CSM II 22.46 AT VII 174; CSM II 123.47 This phrase is used to describe the mind in the Sixth Meditation, AT VII 78; CSM II 54. See also Principles I, 48, AT IXB 23; CSM I 208 where Descartes talks of ‘intellectual or thinking things’.48 AT VII 86; CSM II 59: ‘I am unable to distinguish any parts within myself.’49 Martial Gueroult argues that intellect appears in two different ways in Descartes’ writings: it both constitutes the essence or attribute of the thinking thing, and it is also a mode of that attribute (Descartes selon l’Ordre des Raisons, Vol 1 & 2, Editions Montaigne, 1953, p. 77). I differ from Gueroult, however, in that I take intellect and the will to be involved in the essence of res cogitans, whereas he treats that essence as pure intellect. I would argue that, for Descartes, the intellect must always be accompanied and conducted by volition. My discussion of this theme must, however, wait for another occasion.

4.

THE MIND OF GOD AND THE MIND OF MAN: A PUZZLE IN SPINOZA’S PHILOSOPHY

OF MIND

ANTHONY SAVILE

In an intriguing and intriguingly obscure passage towards the end of the Treatise on the Reform of the Understanding Spinoza suggests that knowledge of the fundamental metaphysical truths that govern the world is available to us as a direct consequence of God’s existence, given only an adequate account of that figure’s nature. The passage in question runs:

... to order and unify all our insights (perceptiones) we must enquire as soon as may be whether there exists a Being, and at the same time what it is, that is the cause of all things, and in such a way that its objective essence should be the cause of all our ideas, so that (as I have said) our minds should represent Nature as perfectly as possible (quam maxime referet naturam). Then the mind will possess objectively (objective) Nature’s essence, its order and its unity. (TRU §57)1

I shall not discuss the passage in any detail, but shall start off by outlining one way in which Spinoza’s thought may be understood.2 Doing this will emphasise the marked difference between his conception of God’s contribution to our epistemic standing and that of Descartes. It will also throw into sharp relief a puzzle in his philosophy of mind that threatens to upset this picture and which I do want to consider more closely.

In Descartes’ case systematic and self-conscious knowledge of the world’s working depends on our ability to call on God’s benevolence in our regard, his willingness to ensure that our clear and distinct ideas accord with the truth. The atheist, whose ideas may be clear and distinct, will believe what is true just as much as the faithful, but not being able to call on God’s good will, lacks what is needed for knowledge proper

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(scientia rather than mere cognitio), to wit the insight that what is clearly and distinctly perceived is true.

For Spinoza, by contrast, no appeal to God’s benevolence is available, since for him God has no such trait, being simply identical with the natural world, operating by blind causal mechanisms and untouched by any view of the good or the benefit that would accrue to us and our like from one ordering things rather than another. So, one is bound to ask, whence the reference to God in securing our large general knowledge of the world’s working?

Putting it crudely, the answer is supplied by this very identification of God and Nature, where Nature has to be understood to range as much over the extended world’s expression in the attribute of Thought as over the extended world itself. Just as the extended world comprises all finite modes, and God is the totality of such modes, so the Divine Intellect is made up of the totality of ideas of those same modes, comparably to the way in which, in the local case, our minds are constituted by the ideas of those extended complexes that make up our bodies (Ethics 2.15).

Under this disposition, just as there is nothing to God’s extended nature that does not derive from individual things, so there is no content in the Divine Intellect that is distinct from the ideas of finite things that express the nature of substance in the attribute of Thought. Those ideas (scilicet finite minds) are literally parts of God’s mind, as is affirmed at Eth. 2.11 coroll.: “it follows that the human mind is a part of God’s infinite intellect”.

The crude sketch needs elaboration to accommodate the “fixed things” (TRU ibid.) that make up the essence of substance, and which Spinoza distinguishes from particular things that are subject to change. These fixed things are, or certainly include, together with “the eternal verities”, the laws that govern all change (material and intellectual), and which fleetingly appear in the Ethics as “immediate and mediate infinite modes” (Eth. 1.21-3). Here I shall simply make an interpretative proposal about these matters without arguing for it. The immediate infinite modes, I suggest, are well taken as those very most general and basic laws that govern all change, be that physical or mental, and which, as derived infinite mediate modes, take specific forms in their application to different sorts of thing. At the highest level their holding determines what it is to be corporeal or what it is to be mental, and as such they constitute God’s formal essence in the first case and his objective essence in the latter one (the vocabulary is established and scholastic).

Do we then have to enlarge God’s nature and intellect by adding these infinite modes to them? And if we do, does that not enlarge God’s nature

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beyond the way envisaged by the crude version of the story where the Divine Intellect is exhausted by ideas of finite things? To the first question, the answer is “No”. The second then falls idly away. No enlargement takes place just because the infinite modes are no more than the most generally uniform ways in which finite modes behave. As Spinoza puts it (Letter 4), what exists is exhausted by substance and its modes. The attributes then, defined by the immediate infinite modes, are not some third class of being, but merely ways in which finite matters are uniformly expressed in Thought and Extension.

If this understanding of the infinite modes is correct, God just is the totality of the finite modes that constitute the one necessarily existing substance.3 Since in the corporeal domain the ubiquitous operation of physical laws is something that makes up the world of Nature (God as Extension), likewise the lawlike ways in which thoughts (“ideas”) develop and interact are recorded in the Divine Intellect just in virtue of being everywhere realised in the workings of our minds and the minds of other finite things. Now we can see why it is natural for Spinoza to think that we cannot misrepresent Nature in matters that are common to all things and which make up the essence of the world and capture its order and unity. There can be no divergence between the contents of individual minds which function under determinate laws and the ideas of those same law-governed things in God’s mind. They are one and the same. At this high level of generality our ideas cannot but be adequate.

So do we have ideas of the essence of things? Again, not separately from our ideas of particular things Spinoza’s nominalism would forbid that but we do have ideas of some of those things, namely our own bodies, as they behave in their lawlike ways, and in that respect we grasp their essence and that of other extended things too. Equally, when we reflect from the philosophical perspective on our mental life, we see it flows under laws that define mentality itself. And that aspect of them will characterise the flow of elements in the Divine Intellect as much as it does in our own. In the passage I quoted from the Treatise, Spinoza talks of God’s objective essence causing all our ideas, and on this interpretation that comes to the thought that the laws governing the working of the Divine mind are precisely what determine the course that our thoughts take (together of course with their particular finite antecedents) in the hypothetico-deductive way generally outlined at Eth. 1.17, 25-28 and reiterated with specific reference to the mind at Eth. 2.5 and 2.9.

In a part of §57 that I have not quoted Spinoza explicitly exempts our ideas of singular things from his argument. We can take it that our ideas of them are also caused by God’s objective essence, but as they figure in

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our minds notably as ideas of our own bodies they do not qualify as knowledge in the way that our ideas of the order, essence and unity of nature do. We know from Eth. 2.38-40 that while ideas that are common to all things (and their implications) are adequate, our ideas of our bodies (Eth. 2.27) and external things (Eth. 2.26 coroll.) are not; nor are the ideas we have of singular ideas (Eth. 2.29). As parts of God’s mind, however, they are adequate, as with us they are not. The ultimate ground for this distinction is that adequate knowledge of singular things demands knowledge of their causes, and then the causes of those causes and so on (Eth. 1 Ax. 4), and we are lacking that in the various cases which Spinoza considers. By contrast, there is no such imperfection or partiality in our sensitivity to the laws governing the behaviour of bodies or to our ideas of them precisely because what we are aware of there is common to everything. In that respect we are Godlike. When it comes to God’s knowledge of particulars, however, since God’s mind, that is, the totality of finite ideas, contains the ideas of all particulars in all causal chains, there there is no comparable failure or partiality. In the Divine Intellect ideas that are for us inadequate are adequate, adequacy and inadequacy being determined in relation to the total contents of the minds in which that idea is considered.4

2. It is at this point that the puzzle of my title arises. The passage from the Treatise speaks of our minds reflecting Nature “as perfectly as possible”, and there is no hint in that expression of any merely limited possibility for the enquiring human mind, or even indeed for the uninquisitive mind. That is sufficiently confirmed by the following sentence, the last in the passage quoted. For all that, however, Spinoza’s insistently repeated characterisation of God as absolutely infinite brings with it for him a panoply of essential and unknown attributes ranging far wider than Thought and Extension. Every mode of substance is necessarily expressed not just in those two familiar ways, but in myriad others as well. Were that not the case, we as modes of this particular substance would not have to do with attributes of God, but of some lesser Being, one not “constituted of an infinity of attributes, each one of which expresses eternal and infinite essence” (Eth. 1 Def. 6). So, one wonders, how can the human mind reflect nature “as perfectly as possible”?

One of Spinoza’s acuter readers, Tschirnhaus, raised the issue with him (Letter 65), mildly adverting to our surprising ignorance of these other essential aspects of the Deity. In the light of the Ethics itself, that may have been a telling way to beard Spinoza since at Eth. 2.13 he had argued that body and body alone is the object of thought and that since we have no awareness of any other plausible candidates for the mind’s object, we

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can infer that there are none. Thus the Proof goes: “If, besides the body, there were any other object of the mind, since there exists nothing that has no effect, our minds would of necessity have an idea of that effect. But there is none, so the object of the mind is the actually existing body and nothing else”. Even if Spinoza had in fact just been thinking of candidates in the realm of Extension for being the mind’s object, he does not make it explicit that the argument is meant to be so restricted. So it would have been quite reasonable for Tschirnhaus to take him to be ruling out not just other modes of Extension than the body but also modes of other attributes than Extension as well.

In Letter 66 Spinoza offers a rebuttal of Tschirnhaus’s objection, one that initially sounds too far-fetched to be meant as anything other than a stop-gap. So he says in a somewhat condescending fashion that we have many minds which operate according to different causal laws and which in consequence are necessarily opaque to each other, since transparency would require causal uniformity. As he puts it: “To reply to your objection I should tell you that in truth all things are expressed in an infinity of ways in God’s infinite intellect, but that this infinity of ideas or expressions cannot enter into the constitution of one and the same mind. This infinity of ideas forms an infinity of minds since, falling under an infinity of different attributes, these ideas have no connection with one another. ... Just consider the point carefully and you will see that there is no difficulty.”

Tschirnhaus is indeed on to something here, but however odd it sounds, Spinoza’s response shows that the objection needs to be pressed and reformulated. What militates against taking his suggestion seriously is the apparently wild implication that we all have a plurality of minds, an infinitely rich plurality in fact, though we can let that detail pass. And if that is not enough to render the idea incredible, it does abruptly face a more immediate obstacle. This is that the identity of minds is necessarily given by the totality of ideas that express a given mode rather than the totality of ideas of a mode expressed in a particular attribute. Thus the ideas I have of my body and the ideas I have of my mind are both ideas that belong to one and the same mind, since both are expressions of the same mode of substance (this familiar mode that is me) as revealed in the two distinct attributes of Thought and Extension. By parity of reasoning, if the mode which is me were expressed in some third attribute, X, there would of necessity be an idea of myself as X in the attribute Thought, failing which God’s intellect would not enjoy the infinite reach that it must have, (Eth. 2.9 coroll.). This idea too would have to belong to my mind, which in consequence must be singular and not plural.

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What does this show? Less than appears, I think, since a relatively light adjustment will serve to meet the immediate difficulty and also make Spinoza’s reply a little less bizarre than it at first seems. We are familiar enough nowadays with a conception of the mind as modular in certain respects, and with the idea of some of its modules being inaccessible to others, even to the highest level of conscious control. It does Spinoza a service to see his reply to Tschirnhaus as dimly foreshadowing this idea, and to note how comfortably it can be deployed to block the objection with which he is faced.

In lightly revised form then Spinoza can be read as saying that the mind should be thought of as multiply modular in such a way that every feature of a given mode is expressed in each of the individual mind’s diverse modules. What gives rise to the seeming ignorance of our situation that Tschirnhaus points to is that the ideas we are conscious of are always located in one particular module of the mind (its Extension box, say), and from that module we have access to no others. They are as it were tightly sealed off from one another. And, Spinoza can say, there is every reason to suppose that they must be so. Just as extended things have causal influence only over extended things, the laws that govern them being restricted to matters of extension, so our ideas are causally productive of other ideas only within a given module, since their governing laws are likewise modularly restricted. To have an idea of a given mode is always to think of it under a certain attribute, and while ideas are individuated in terms of their reference rather than their mode of presentation, their reference is always individuated with respect to a particular attribute.5

To give an example, while my idea of you and my idea of my own body may be instances of the very same idea (expressions of the same bodily state of the mode that is me in the attribute of Extension)6, my idea of a given mode in Extension and of that same mode in attribute X are different ideas. In having one I do also have the other, but I do so via different causal routes under different causal laws, and so the ideas in question cannot be identical.7

Against this background it is open to Spinoza to tell Tschirnhaus that strange as it may seem we do know that we have ideas of ourselves in many different attributes, for we know we have ideas of our body and we do that just in virtue of having ideas of our body. Since we are necessarily Xly constituted, we must have ideas of ourselves as X, and so we know we are attributively thus constituted. Similarly with other attributes than X as well. However, because we are only aware of ourselves as X in the mind’s X box, we cannot expect that to be revealed to us as we inspect ourselves


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from within the mind’s Extension box, which is what Tschirnhaus was expecting to do. The substance of the reply to Tschirnhaus may be inconsistent with Eth. 2.13, but if it is Spinoza could view his letter as a needed correction to the doctrine propounded there.8

Going one step further, Spinoza need have no fear of being reminded of his commitment to the transparency of the mind at Eth. 2.21, 22, which one might suppose would upset matters for him here. If we have the idea of ourselves as extended in a given way, then Spinoza takes it that we know we have that idea we have an idea of that idea and by parity of reasoning, if we have ideas of ourselves as X we must know we have ideas of ourselves as X, which at first sight we seem not to. However, just as awareness of ourselves is always in a given module, so too self-conscious awareness of ourselves is restricted to that same module. In this way not only do we know that there are expressions of ourselves in many attributes other than Extension and Thought, but we are self-consciously aware of that being the case in all these different modules too. Our seeming ignorance is merely encapsulated ignorance, not unqualified ignorance. These are the sorts of thing that Spinoza final admonishment to Tschirnhaus might cover, and they do apparently free him from any charge of inconsistency coming from that quarter.

To end this part of the discussion one last hesitation must be stilled. This is that it could seem improper for me to speak on Spinoza’s behalf of the laws of Thought being different as we move from one attribute to another. Earlier on I proposed that we should think of an attribute as defined by the laws that govern it, and indeed the highest laws that do so, those that appear at Eth. 1.21 as the infinite immediate modes. Now it might strike one that in speaking of distinct laws of Thought as they apply in different putative modules of the mind one risks abandoning the crucial idea that Thought is an attribute at all, indeed the very one that constitutes God’s objective essence (essentia objectiva), the Divine Intellect. So surely these laws must be the same whether or not they apply to objects of different attributes. In that case appeal to the multi-modular encapsulation of the mind looks unavailable.

The difficulty is apparent, not real. Within the realm of Extension there are basic laws that apply to everything extended and then there are also determinations of those further laws of extension that have their specific domains. To explain how flowers grow and reproduce we need to appeal to botanical matters rather than just basic physics, even though basic physics holds true of flowers as much as anything else. So, faced with this objection it seems right to say that while the attribute of Thought is defined in terms of basic laws (quite possibly laws of logic) they have

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their specific forms at each of the different modules that generate their objects, the Extension module, the X module and so on. What makes these laws all laws of Thought is their sharing their basic structure, but what gives rise to the modularity of the mind is the impermiability of one attribute to another under the more specific laws of Thought that apply to them (effectively, the holding of the basic laws in distinct domains of discourse). In Spinoza’s parlance I have suggested that the ideas of substance’s attributively determined affections (modes) are caused under laws of Thought that can be categorised as mediate infinite modes, which themselves are specifications of the highest level laws, those immediate infinite modes that define the attribute Thought itself. In this way the Divine Intellect can retain the absolutely infinite reach Spinoza believes it must have.

3. I said above that Tschirnhaus was onto something, though his objection needed to be pressed and reformulated. If it is thought of as a purely epistemic challenge, which is how he presented it, we have just seen that it can be resisted. Giving it a rather more metaphysical turn may give Spinoza a harder ride.

When it comes to establishing negative metaphysical theses Spinoza expresses a preference for argument by reductio, “because that accords with the nature of things” (Letter 64). Any reductive argument at this point would seek to show that a substance possessing attributes Thought and Extension could not accommodate a third one, and so no larger number either. Of course this might well conflict with the identification of our substance (our world of Nature) with God and with the essential nature of God as absolutely infinite. The very fundamental role of those claims in his thinking may do something to explain the length to which Spinoza was prepared to go in defending himself against Tschirnhaus as he did.

It may well have seemed obvious that there was no reductio in the offing here. Considerations of causality are not available because no causal truths about Thought and Extension could rule out the existence of other attributes subject to other causal laws; and then the self-contained vocabulary of the various attributes, which flows from each attribute being “conceived through itself” (Eth. 1.10), militates in favour of consistency in any combination of them. There being no other possible source of discomfort, no threat of reductio looms. So, given the argument that there can only be one substance and that it exists of necessity, there can be no contradiction in holding it to possess many, even infinitely many, attributes and so perfectly fitting the definition of God at Eth. 1 Def. 6.

Never the less, there really is cause for concern. I can put it like this. While we finite modes may be vastly ignorant, all our ideas being of our


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own bodies in one way or another, the Divine Intellect embraces everything. So no modal fact can escape it. If a mode is expressed in Extension as p, there must be an idea of p in that mode’s mind (cf. Eth. 2.12). By the God is Nature thesis there will then also be an idea of p in the mind of God, not because God’s mind perfectly reflects or represents finite minds, but just because it is simply constituted by them in their totality as they in their turn are constituted by the totality of their own ideas.

Now let us understand modes not just as individuals but as facts as well. Then a mode of substance can be expressed (in Extension) as your being F and in Thought as your belief that you are F, which belief is one of the ideas in the Divine Intellect. Then too, we may observe that it will be a fact that you are F and a further fact that I am G, with a consequent enrichment of God’s intellect, which leaves mine unchanged. So the Divine intellect contains the two ideas ImF and Im G.

Since minds and bodies are complexes, Spinoza certainly wants to allow that sometimes at least the obtaining of corporeal state p and the obtaining of corporeal state p makes for the obtaining of a further corporeal state (p & p ), distinct from either of its constituents. In consequence there must be a corresponding expression of this new fact in the attribute of Thought which finds its place in the Divine Intellect as I(p&p ) alongside those other ideas of p and of p , Ip and Ip . In our example this increment to God’s mind can be conveniently notated as the idea I(ImF & Im G).

One might suspect that there is already something off-colour about this, since if there is any such complex idea in the Divine Intellect, it ought to be there only because that is an idea that records the physical state of some mode expressed in Extension, and it certainly is not an extended state of m nor of m either. However, as long as simple or complex modes can combine in a given attribute to constitute further distinct complex modes there is no great difficulty. The idea in God’s intellect I(p & p ) is just the idea of another mode, the complex p , say, which has its place in the extended realm of finite things in the way our very complex bodies do. (If there are limits to the existence of complex modes of extension, that can be supplied by insisting on true complexes displaying functional cohesion in the way Spinoza thinks of the unity of the body in the discussion immediately after Eth. 2.13. Then there will be no possibility of constructing complex modes out of arbitrarily chosen physical facts, and no call for there to be any corresponding ideas in the Divine Intellect.)

What now are we to say about a situation in which we consider a single mode, m, whose nature is expressed in different attributes, in Extension

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and in X? Under the modular hypothesis we saw that there was no difficulty in allowing that mode m having distinct ideas of itself as E and as X, and no difficulty in supposing that those ideas enter into the Divine Intellect. But what are we to say about the further fact that m is expressed as E and as X, namely (Em & X)? As long as that is in order and a true record of how substance is affected, there should be also an idea of that new fact in God’s mind, I(Em & Xm), just as there was of the extended fact that (p & p ), viz. I(p & p ).

Here we come up against a dead end. Any idea of a mode must have its object, and its objects can only be identified as expressions of that same mode in some particular attribute, that mode presented in one determinate way or another. Yet the idea I(Em & Xm) cannot have as its object the state (Em & Xm) since that is not a state of m in any attribute at all, not in E, not in X, nor in any other. Nor can that idea have its place in any of the encapsulated modules of the enriched mind that Spinoza’s reply to Tschirnhaus envisages. Failing that there can be no such idea, not in the finite mind and a fortiori not in the infinite divine mind either.

Spinoza might consider rejecting such would-be facts on the grounds that they are just as arbitrary as, say, the complex “fact” that, for example, (London is wet & I am hungry) and the like. However, that does not look at all inviting, since if it is a fact about me, for example that (I am fifty and I believe that I am fifty) we already have expressions of a single mode in the two attributes of T and E, giving rise to a further unobjectionable idea I(Em & IEm)9. It ought no less to be a genuine fact about me in the two attributes E and X to the effect that I am E and I am X. Then there should be an idea of that fact in the Divine Intellect too. Yet, as we have just seen, it fails to qualify. The Divine Intellect starts to look beset by ignorance.

4. What fundamentally holds the many minds or the multi-modular conception hypothesis in place is just the definitional conception of God as absolutely infinite, as a substance constituted by an infinity of attributes each of which expresses infinite and eternal essence. And the tortuous consequence that that leads Spinoza to embrace in Letter 66 might well be cited as a good example of the peculiar nuttiness of philosophers that John McDowell has remarked on of being willing to accept the consequences of premises which, in the clear light of day, are cast in doubt by the implausibility of those same consequences.

So what is it that inclines Spinoza to his conception of God as absolutely infinite? Two things. First, a desire that God should be maximally real, since the more reality a substance possesses, the more attributes it possesses (Eth. 1.9), which he asserts is a consequence of the


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definition of attribute. Second, the idea of God as unboundedly real, and Spinoza is convinced that that idea is proof against empirical or logical attack. What would set bounds to God’s reality is either being causally limited by something or else being logically constrained. The first is not in question. No substance can be causally limited by another, since that would demand that they fall under some common causal laws, and hence share one or more attributes, which is ruled out at Eth. 1.5. So what is really in question is whether there is any logical limit on God’s reality. That might arise in either of two ways, either through there being an internal incoherence in the idea of God as absolutely infinite or else through the existence of a different substance, which would necessarily possesses some attribute and so be inconsistent with the existence of an absolutely infinite one. Now it made plain at Eth. 1.11 Another Proof that the idea of God, of the absolutely infinite, embodies no internal incoherence, and the proof that there can only be one substance shows confidence that the second way for logic to generate limitation is blocked. So from this point of view it looks as if the idea of absolute infinity is perfectly in order and that only a conception of God as absolutely infinite does just honour to God’s nature.

What has been overlooked though is that whether there is an internal incoherence in the idea of an absolutely unbounded infinity of attributes may depend on what those attributes are, notably when one of them is the attribute Thought. For what we have seen above is that as long as Thought is an attribute, only one other can be combined with it in such a way that every aspect of substance is expressed in Thought. If only that attribute could be discounted as a possibility the concept of an absolute infinity of attributes which the proof of Eth. 1.14 supposes to include every possible attribute10 might be immune to criticism, but given the central place that Thought occupies in the system, the notion of absolute infinity, viewed as Spinoza viewed it, cannot run. Thought is of the essence of substance, and can coexist with only one other attribute, not an infinity of them.

How serious is this? Obviously unless Spinoza can convince his reader that our substance is God, the prospective epistemic gain of the Treatise cannot be banked. Then too, and more urgently perhaps, since no substance can be absolutely infinite in the way Spinoza understands that, the spectre of atheism raises its head as well. So let us ask whether there is not some tolerable adjustment to Spinoza’s definition of God that will ease the discomfort.

The risk of atheism at least would be deflected if only we could take “infinite” in a more modern way than Spinoza did, for then there could be

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an infinity of attributes which excluded Thought and Extension from the list. Then if the Divinity is infinite and necessarily existent, it would have a better claim to be identical with such a set than with this highly restricted one of ours. But then the trouble for Spinoza is that this natural, extended and thinking world would not be God, and the optimistic epistemic claim would not survive.

If instead, God were thought of just as comprising all possible attributes rather than an infinity of them, then unless Thought and Extension, incompatible with those other possibles, X, Y and Z, were themselves the only ones possible, God could not exist. Then we should be back with atheism and ignorance. Nor would it help to think of God in terms of the greatest set of compossible attributes, since although X,Y,Z in the absence of Thought and Extension make up a compossible set of ways a substance could be infinitely expressed (over its infinity of modes, that is), that would still leave our substance consisting of its two compossible attributes being distinct from God. It would also raise the possibility of there being a tie at the upper limit, and hence of there being a plurality of Gods, something almost as bad as supposing there to be no God at all.

Providing Spinoza can argue that Thought must be an attribute of any substance whatever, the second of these three alternatives must be the one to pursue. And to meet this prior requirement he has only to insist strictly on the definition of attribute that he provides at the very start: “By attribute I understand that which the intellect perceives as the essence of substance” (Eth. 1.Def. 4). The intellect in question here can only the Divine Intellect, and we should not for a moment suppose that the definition is framed in these terms to accommodate the imperfections and shortcomings of the human intellect, which Spinoza certainly recognises, but which if invoked here would oblige one erroneously to view him as some sort of philosophical idealist.

So consider a putative substance with attributes X,Y,Z. Does the intellect consider them as of its essence? Only if there are ideas I(X,Y,Z), an objective essence that is a reflection of the X,Y,Z world. Yet if among the attributes of that substance Thought is absent, there will be no such ideas. Could the intellect in question not be the Divine Intellect of our world then? If so, it would have to conceive of X,Y and Z and so on as attributes of some other substance than this one. And owing to the dependence of the Divine Intellect on the contents of the finite minds that this world contains, it would have to conceive of X,Y,Z as attributes of another substance just in virtue of our minds doing so. Yet that would only be possible if our minds were encapsulated in the way elaborated above. That in turn would only be possible if X,Y,Z etc. were attributes


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that qualified this substance, which we know they cannot do. Hence no intellect can take X,Y,Z to be attributes of a substance other than ours. Since no substance can share any of its attributes with others (Eth. 1.5), no substance other than ours can be understood by the intellect to possess any attribute at all as its essence; hence no other substance can exist. So the only attributes there can be are Thought and Extension.

This chain of reasoning suggests that the definition of God at Eth. I Def. 6 should be emended, and a sympathetic way to do that would be to have it read: “By God I understand a substance that is unbounded or infinite in the sense of being constituted by all possible attributes, each one of which expresses an eternal and infinite essence”. Then, given substance’s necessary existence (Eth. 1.7), Spinoza can move on, as he does, to prove at Eth. 1.11 that the only substance that there can be is God, and conclude at Eth. 1.15 that God and Nature are one.

Let it not be objected here that while this substance has attributes Thought and Extension, Thought and X is another possible combination, in which case X could of course “be perceived by the intellect to constitute the essence of substance” and hence be an attribute distinct from either of those we know. If that were so though, given that substance exists necessarily, the attributively constituted Thought & X substance would exist alongside this necessarily existing one too, and then there would be two substances “of the same attribute”, namely Thought, proscribed at Eth. 1.5. Nor can this idea take the guise of supposing that this substance might have had attributes Thought and X rather than Thought and Extension, since substances are individuated by their attributes (Eth. 1.5 Proof), which in our case forbids any conditional abandonment of Extension.

This then does finally get Spinoza to the position in which he can say that the duo Thought and Extension is the only pair of attributes that can co-exist. Interestingly, from what is already in place he could also say that they are also the only ones that must exist, and say that without relying on his proof that there can only be one substance. That God should be thought of in terms of all possible attributes rather than an absolute infinity of them even retains the unlimited aspect of Spinoza’s more ambitious conception. For if there can be no attributes other than Thought and Extension, then there is nothing that God lacks that could set a boundary to the attributes of the substance that is God. Spinoza certainly thought that an absolute infinity of attributes embraced all possible attributes, but also it went further than that by being greater than any number. For him infinities are of their very nature non-denumerable in size, surpassing all

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numerical assignments (See Letter 12). That, of course, has to be given up as a feature of God’s twofold essence, but the loss is entirely sustainable.

In sum, it is open to Spinoza to adjust the definition of God in terms of substance possessing all possible attributes (as defined) and to conclude that God and Nature are identical, that God is unique, that God is unlimited (unlimited by any other substance and by possessing all possible attributes) and infinite in each one of them in virtue of qualifying the infinity of modes that make up this substance. As far as the system goes, nothing of import is sacrificed by the proposed definitional adjustment and the whole gains immunity to contradiction of the kind that erupted under the unreformed régime.

5. The puzzle of my title is now resolved ultimately in Tschirnhaus’s favour and yet also to Spinoza’s long-term advantage with the epistemic argument no longer being under threat. Before reviewing its charm for devoted Spinozists, it is interesting to mark similarities and dissimilarities with the thought of his admired precursor and most notable adversary, Descartes.

A piquant similarity in their thinking is that even though the atheist and the merely uninquisitive may have clear and distinct, adequate and true ideas, and know they have those ideas, they do not know that they are true and adequate. In Descartes’ case to have true scientia requires having at hand the proof of God’s existence and of His benevolence. For Spinoza, too, for epistemic security there is need of a proof of God’s existence. For him what is needed, and what only the philosopher can provide, is insight that God and Nature are one, and in consequence insight that the ideas concerning “fixed things” that furnish the minds of the curious and the incurious alike cannot but be adequate and true. In both cases reflexive knowledge is needed if we are justifiably to claim any systematic mathematical or metaphysical knowledge.

The dissimilarity between the two thinkers is equally notable. In Descartes’ case the real is effectively constituted by God’s mind, in that what determines how things are is a matter of God’s decree that it be so. God’s thinking Fiat lux must be the very creation of light. Our minds, however, can only embrace those elements of reality to which God grants us access, fundamentally those which it is useful for our survival and well-being for us to know. As for the rest, the best we can do is to make hypotheses good enough to provide us with moral certainty (Principles of Philosophy 4.204), but scarcely scientia proper.

By contrast, we have seen that for Spinoza the content of God’s mind, the Divine Intellect, is answerable to the content of finite minds, there being no reality which extends further than they do. It is tempting to


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dramatise the difference between the two here by saying that in his metaphysic Descartes is a realist and Spinoza more of an anti-realist, but that would be rash since even if the real extends for Spinoza no further than can be captured by finite minds, that by itself that does not bring with it any reluctance on his part to embrace bivalence, a reluctance that is characteristic of the anti-realist position. If anything indeed, Spinoza seems more inclined to think that finite minds reach throughout reality rather than that reality is whatever it is to which finite minds reach.11 It is after all a key tenet of the Ethics that all modes of substance are expressed as ideas in the attribute of Thought, a sentiment that is highly realist in tone.

I have said nothing about the strength of Spinoza’s optimistic argument in the Treatise. As I have presented the framework within which it is offered, it will hardly impress the sceptically minded, since the most it tells us is that the deepest truths about the world are firmly encoded in the world’s working, be that the working of the natural world or that of minds thinking about the natural world. What it does not do it to assure us that we can ever accurately articulate those deeply encoded truths. Even when Spinoza insists that we possess these ideas in ways that are adequate and true (Eth. 2.39), which sounds as if it leaves nothing to be desired, that is only at the level of the encoded content and not at the level of its articulation. It may seem strange that in the Treatise Spinoza was not sensitive to this. However, as long as the assumption that an idea’s content is given by its object, i.e. by its reference, rather than the way its object is presented in thought is left unquestioned, it is bound to be hard to see any shortcoming here that needs to be addressed. That pivotal assumption also makes it difficult to see that what Descartes knew required hard intellectual struggle to achieve is not to be had for free under a revised metaphysic, no matter how naturalistic that may be.12

Notes 1 The paragraph numbers are not Spinoza’s own and vary from edition to edition. The reference here is to Spinoza Oeuvres I ed. Charles Appuhn, (Flammarion 1964). In the on-line Latin edition <www.ac-nice.fr/philo/textes/Spinoza-Intellectus Emendatione.htm> the paragraph is numbered §99. The translation here is mine. 2 The positive epistemic character of the passage may sound overplayed by my rendering “referet” as “represent”. A word like “reflect” or “reproduce” would give Spinoza less to answer to. Never the less, the full title of the Treatise speaks not just of the improvement of the understanding but “of the way it is best directed to the acquisition of true knowledge of things” (et de via qua optime in veram

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rerum cognitionem dirigitur). The epistemic intent is at its most pronounced at this point.3 Spinoza repeatedly insists that the distinction between modes and substance is one of reason, not a real distinction. That gives some encouragement to a view of substance as the totality of modes.4 One might want to ask why the idea I have of my body isn’t replete with my body’s causal history too. After all my body is the body that has that history, and of course also the history of those other things that impinge on it. As long as Spinoza focuses on what it is that my ideas are about and not how they present themselves to us, that might seem a way of extending the general optimistic argument of §57 to our ideas beyond those of “fixed things” to those that are “subject to change” as well. Spinoza would certainly decline the invitation, probably for the reason that the information that our bodies retain about our past and the past of things that impinge on them fades or leaves no physical trace, a shortcoming matched in the inadequate nature of the corresponding ideas.5 I take it that this is what really holds together the identification of the object of the mind with the body and the claim at Eth. 2.16 that the idea of a body that is affected by another body the mind’s idea embraces both its own body and that of the body impinging upon it. At the same time it will explain why Spinoza says (ibid. coroll. 2) that the ideas we have of external bodies are more indicative of the nature of our own body than they are of those other things. At this point, having no theoretical way to think about the content of an idea other than as the mode it expresses, Spinoza just does as best he can. 6 Thus it is that Spinoza can say at Eth. 2.17 Schol. that when Paul has the idea of Peter, who has ceased to be present, his idea indicates the state of Paul’s body rather than that of Peter and that strictly speaking there is no falsity involved in such instances of “imagination”. I take it that there is no falsity here because the idea of Peter is a true indication of the body of Paul. Spinoza puts the error down to the absence of another idea that excludes the existence of Peter, and that would be a different idea of Paul’s body, one that his actual bodily state does not match. 7 If they were the same, they would be the same in the Divine Intellect and God’s mind would not be in the slightest enriched by the multiplication of attributes.8 It is inconsistent if the search for the mind’s object is not restricted to the attribute of Extension. If Spinoza had such a restriction implicitly in mind, there would be no ground to suppose his response to Tschirnhaus amounts to a change of view. It would just extend the thought of the Ethics into the unknown. 9 I take it that this is a legitimate denizen of the mind’s Extension box, and not an idea that straddles distinct modules. There is after all no self-standing Thought box, and for Spinoza ideas of ideas are the same as ideas (again the individuation of an idea being given by its reference, which here as elsewhere is a state of the body).10 The inference from infinite to all possible is explicit at Eth. 1.16: “From the necessity of the divine nature an infinity of things must follow in an infinity of ways, that is to say everything that can fall under an infinite understanding.”


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11 This view of Spinoza’s metaphysical stance will be even more obvious to those inclined to take his ideas to be no more than true propositions, the “objective” counterparts of what exists “formally” in Nature. In this essay I have assumed throughout that the ideas that constitute the human and the divine mind are items of mental activity and nothing else. Tschirnhaus does not query that and nor does Spinoza correct him on that score. Nor does any commentator known to me deny it. However, that may well not be the best way to take Spinoza’s account of the mind and if that is so a different way of handling Tschirnhaus’s puzzlement would be in order. In another paper I propose to set out what such an alternative might look like. 12 It is pivotal, I believe, not just in the context of Spinoza’s philosophy of mind, but also in his metaphysical determination to count finite expressions of substance in Thought and Extension as ultimately designating the same modes while distinguishing between their physical and their mental manifestations. Commentators who take Spinoza’s lax, or simply shorthand, assimilation of modes to bodies and ideas rather than the modes that these manifestations of substance are manifestations of, do him an injustice, most notably perhaps in the mistaken claim that for him mind and body are identical. What is true to his thinking is that they are different aspects of the same things, different expressions of the same modes, an entirely different matter that I believe he struggles to express at Eth. 2.7 Schol.. This might sound as if it makes way for a pre-Kantian distinction between how things appear (are expressed) and how they are in themselves. However, that would not be correct. There are no ideas in the Divine Intellect of anything not expressed in one attribute or another, so there can be no distinct reality to substance and its modes other than as manifest in Extension or in Thought.

5.

IDEA AND SELF-KNOWLEDGE IN MALEBRANCHE’S ANTI-CARTESIAN

THEORY OF MIND

JAN PALKOSKA

Nobody who cares would doubt that there are several distinctly anti-Cartesian strains discernible in Malebranche’s philosophy of mind. It is true that Malebranche shares with Descartes and his followers the general metaphysical framework characterised by both substantial and property dualism.1 But within this framework, one can hardly imagine a more resolute departure from the Cartesian orthodoxy than Malebranche’s, as far as the mental side of the dualist dichotomy is concerned. For one thing, (1) Malebranche arguably parts company with Descartes on the fundamental issue of the very essence of mental substance; for another, (2) Malebranche’s famous doctrine of vision in God, boosted with a re-interpretation of Descartes’ notion of idea, amounts in effect to a bold alternative to Descartes’ ontology of cognition and the Cartesian conception of the role of representation in mental acts; finally, there is a fundamental epistemological disagreement as (3) Malebranche bluntly rejects, and in a sense even reverses, a vital Cartesian claim that the (nature of the) mind is better known than (the nature of) body.2 Although a great deal of work has been done in the last few decades to clarify these important claims both taken separately and in their mutual relations3 there still remain challenging problems to be solved. My aim in this paper is to contribute a little to our understanding of the nature of Malebranche’s departure from Descartes. I shall ignore the first perhaps the most controversial in recent scholarship4 of Malebranche’s anti-Cartesian strains. Instead, I shall focus on the way in which Malebranche pursues his epistemological strain (3) (hereafter I will call it simply “the epistemological thesis”) and shall touch also strain (2) with which (3) will presently prove to be intimately interconnected. I shall argue that the way in which Malebranche puts his

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case against the Cartesian tenet that the mind is better known than body in the original version of his seminal The Search After Truth seems to be seriously flawed; and that if he provided any rectification at all, it has to be looked for in the Elucidation Ten he added to a later edition of the book. I set the stage by stating the alleged problem in Malebranche’s anti-Cartesian case in the form of a petitio principii charge in section I. In the following two sections I try to justify the charge in detail. This negative treatment should then bring us to a position, in section IV, from which we can appreciate the argumentative shift that occurs in Elucidation Ten. In section V, I conclude with an outline of some consequences to be drawn from Malebranche’s anti-Cartesian case in the light of the suggested interpretation.

I

The crucial moments of Malebranche’s case for his anti-Cartesian epistemological thesis as stated in the RV can be roughly outlined as follows.5 Not being content just with blocking Descartes’s explicit arguments contra by way of attacking their premisses directly,6 Malebranche offers an alternative positive argument for his claim that body is better known than the mind: far from being just a matter of a bare comparison of the number of properties known, or more precisely of properties that can in principle be known (as Descartes supposes in his reply to Gassendi),7 Malebranche indicates, it is above all the way of knowing the properties that is relevant for judging which of the items at issue is better known than another. He then makes it clear which ways of knowing are at work with regard to the mind and body respectively: while bodies are (or at least can be) known by human minds “through ideas [par idées]”, one’s own mind is (or can be) known only “through consciousness or inner sensation [par conscience, ou par sentiment intérieur]”.8 Furthermore, he apparently has it that knowledge through ideas is generally (far) more “perfect” than knowledge through inner sensation, and he presents a reason for this tenet: it is through consulting the idea, but by no means through bare inner sensation, that we are in principle able to know all the properties of which a given thing is capable (or all the modifications of which the essential attribute of a given thing is capable). This crucial difference is because, according to Malebranche, while ideas are “seen in God” by us and “the ideas of things in God include all their properties”, inner sensations provide us just with experiential, inductive knowledge of what actually “takes place in us”. Given these premises, Malebranche is of course able to

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draw the a fortiori conclusion that while bodies are known “quite perfectly” by us, our knowledge of the mind is “imperfect”.9

In view of this exposition, the problem I wish to point out can be stated as follows. As we have just seen, Malebranche strenuously puts the matter as if he were able to derive his epistemological thesis from the allegedly established fact that (i) the mind, unlike bodies, can never be known through ideas by us. Yet it seems to me that at the end of the day, he is by no means entitled to such a derivation. For in establishing (i), he seems to rely substantially on the claim that (ii) for every x (where “x” stands either for bodies or for one’s own mind),10 if x is known through idea, then all the properties of which x is capable can be known (= then x can be known completely).11 Given Malebranche’s commitments concerning the concept of idea, however, I cannot help suspecting that the only way available to him to render (ii) acceptable presupposes unless we wish to charge him with begging the question against Descartes the thesis (in fact amounting to the core of Malebranche’s anti-Cartesian strain (2) introduced above) that (iii) for every x, the idea of x is located and (by implication) seen in God. Now it seems that the only way in which Malebranche is able to establish this last thesis in the RV proper already presupposes that perhaps it is bodies that can be known through ideas, but by no means one’s own mind; and that Malebranche disposes of no resources to establish this last presupposition in its desired function in any alternative way. If correct, this of course amounts to charging Malebranche of the RV proper with a gross petitio principii in establishing the epistemological part of his anti-Cartesian views of the mind. A good deal of modesty is certainly in place in assessing the merits of such a serious charge. Nonetheless, the following two sections are devoted to providing some reasons for holding the charge justified.

II

To begin with, let us have a closer look at the famous doctrine of the “vision in God” which, according to the exposition just given, amounts to the real foundation of Malebranche’s derivation in question. It will be convenient to put the core of the doctrine as follows:

(VG) For every y,12 if y is known through an idea by any finite mind m, then the idea at issue is seen in God by m.

Now it is crucial to get clear on the real import of (VG) in order to appreciate my point. On the one hand, there is no doubt that what

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Malebranche is up to is a sharp alternative to Descartes’ considered attempt to refer with the term “idea” in opposition to the mainstream Augustinian tradition to the constituents, objects or contents of finite human minds. For (VG) strongly suggests (and Malebranche himself is on occasion happy to point this out)13 the re-statement of the Augustinian usage in which “idea” refers to the constituents or objects (operating at the same time as archetypes or universal essences of the created beings) of the divine intellect. On the other hand, it would be a fatal mistake to read the latent controversy over ideas as a mere dispute de nomine as if Malebranche just refused to associate the term “idea” with the same meaning as Descartes: this would misrepresent the crucial thrust of Malebranche’s case, which is (as I see it) to argue that given the meaning Descartes himself associates with the term “idea”, it is wrong to “locate” its denotate(s) within the human mind (as Descartes arguably did), since that very meaning eventually commits one to “locating” them in the divine intellect.

What is this alleged “shared content” in both Malebranche and Descartes, then? To put it straightforwardly, I claim that the meaning of the term “idea”, which Malebranche took as basic for Descartes and his orthodox followers, amounts to the concept “the representative content of particular cogitative acts of finite minds”. I cannot venture here any substantive examination of whether this alleged Malebranche’s reading of Descartes is correct (though I believe that he is essentially right). As for the more immediately relevant evidence to the effect that this indeed amounts to how Malebranche saw the situation, I believe that the following passage from Malebranche’s open Third letter to Arnauld together with his famous explication of the term “idea” in RV III.2.i do furnish that much:

If [Arnauld] claims only to define what he means by the terms, it is permitted to him to name idea the modification or perception of the mind, for one can say that nominal definitions are arbitrary. But in claiming to conclude from that that the modifications of the mind are representative of objects, or that the idea, the immediate object of the mind when it thinks for example of the perfect square, is only the perception which it has of it, only its own modification; it is clear that he abuses his nominal definition, that he changes it into a real definition [definition de chose], and that he supposes what he must prove. (Letter 111, in. N. Malebranche, Oeuvres Complètes, ed. A. Robinet (Paris: J. Vrin, 1958-78), vol. ix, 913)14

I think everyone agrees that we do not perceive objects external to us by themselves. We see the sun, the stars, and an infinity of objects external to us; and it is not likely that the soul should leave the body to stroll about the


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heavens, as it were, in order to behold all these objects. Thus, it does not see them by themselves, and our mind’s immediate object when it sees the sun, for example, is not the sun, but something that is intimately joined to our soul, and this is what I call an idea. Thus, by the word idea, I mean here nothing other than the immediate object, or the object closest to the mind, when it perceives something, [i.e., that which affects and modifies the mind with the perception it has of an object]. (RV III.2.i)15

Having thus clarified the principal thrust of Malebranche’s “vision in God” doctrine, let us proceed to his major attempt at proving it found in RV III.2.i-vi. Notoriously, his argument takes the form of elimination from complete enumeration: Malebranche professes to have presented the complete list of five hypotheses concerning the ways in which the ontological background of the finite minds’ possessing representative knowledge of the natures or essences of things can be conceived, and then tries to show step by step that except for his VG-tenet, the remaining four options are untenable. It is impossible to survey and discuss this monumental piece of philosophy in any detail here; I have to limit myself just to episodes immediately relevant for our present purpose, which is to point out the dependency of Malebranche’s present reasoning on the claim that it is only bodies, not minds, that are known through ideas by the finite minds.

To begin with, this last claim is stated overtly by Malebranche himself as an assumption from the very start of his argument, even in presenting the allegedly complete list of the five hypotheses.16 Yet even putting this somewhat cheap evidence on one side, the same assumption is prominently in operation in RV III.2.v where Malebranche tackles the fourth hypothesis (arguably corresponding to Descartes’ view, and certainly to that of Arnauld),17 according to which the finite mind “sees the essence of objects by considering its own perfections”,18 i.e. (to put it more perspicuously) according to which the representative content of the finite mind’s cogitative acts having essences as their object differs only modally from those very acts19 (conceived of as “modifications” of the Cartesian attribute of thought). Consider what I take to be Malebranche’s statement of the argument proper against the hypothesis in question:20

[C]reated minds (...) can[not] see in themselves the essence (...) of [created - J.P.]21 things (...) since, given their own limitations, created minds cannot contain all beings as does God (...). Therefore, since the human mind can know all beings, including infinite beings, and since it does not contain them, we have a sure proof that it does not see their essence in itself. (...) Consequently, being neither actually infinite nor capable of infinite modifications simultaneously, it is absolutely impossible for the mind to

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see in itself what is not there. It does not see the essence of things, therefore, by considering its own perfections or by modifying itself in different ways. (RV III.2.v/LO 229)

As far as I can see, the argument takes roughly the following form:22

(1) (x knows the essence of things due to its own perfections (or modifications) → the perfections of x represent23 infinite beings.) (2) (The perfections of x represent infinite beings → the perfections of xcontain infinite beings.) Therefore(3) (x knows the essence of things due to its own perfections (or modifications) → the perfections of x contain infinite beings) (4) ¬ (The perfections of x contain infinite beings.) Therefore(5) ¬ (x knows the essence of things due to its own perfections.)

We do not need to discuss the merits of the entire argument on this occasion; what matters now are Malebranche’s possible reasons for accepting the premise (1). Well, taking into consideration Malebranche’s Cartesian ontological background and the context of the proof in question, it is almost certain that what Malebranche has in mind here as the paradigm case is Descartes’ celebrated observation towards the end of his “wax consideration” in the Second Meditation to the effect that (adequately) knowing the essence of the material substance requires comprehending material thing(s), or more precisely their essential attribute of extension, as capable of “innumerable mutations” or “variations”.24

Yet even granting to Malebranche, for the sake of the argument, this manoeuvre as well as the other premisses, it should be clear that what he is entitled to so far is at most in the long run a weaker, particular conclusion that

For some y, if y is known through an idea by any finite mind m, then the idea at issue is seen in God by m.

For in order to attain the stronger, universal conslusion amounting to (VG), he has to ensure that there be no type of being such that representative knowledge of its essence does not imply an infinity (or “innumerability”) in the corresponding representative content. This point is crucial since precisely the case of (one’s own) mind comes to the fore most acutely here. Now there are squarely two options available to Malebranche to ensure that much: either he has to deny that knowledge of the mind is representative at all, or else he has to show positively


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that putting the issue of representativeness to one side knowing the essence of one’s own mind does somehow imply infinity.

The former option eventually amounts, as should be clear by now, to the bare assumption that the mind is not known through ideas as far as the argument at issue is concerned. On the other hand, it seems to me that Malebranche has effectively deprived himself of any resources for carrying out the positive task required by the latter option. To appreciate this, consider probably the most promising (if not the only reasonable) way which prima facie might do the trick for him. It starts with the contention that Descartes too has made in his reply to the attack by Gassendi against the claim that the mind is better known than body, viz. the contention that for any property one knows in a body, there is a corresponding property known in one’s own mind, but not vice versa.25 It seems to follow from this that if one knows bodies as capable of innumerable mutations (of properties), so does one know one’s own mind as capable of innumerable mutations (of properties). Yet Malebranche is not entitled to such an inference, due to what in fact amounts to perhaps the deepest insight of his on the issue of self-knowledge: that is to say, the claim that while as for the properties of bodies, human minds are capable of both a priori and experiential knowledge, it is only experiential knowledge that they can in principle have concerning the properties of one’s own mind. Malebranche makes it clear repeatedly that unlike the former type of knowledge, this latter, experiential type whether its objects are bodies or minds can in principle never yield the relevant innumerability (or infinity) in representative content. Now combine this with the highly plausible claim that the initial correspondence contention of Descartes’ holds only either within the field of a priori knowledge exclusively or within experiential knowledge exclusively,26 and you get the result that the inference in the sense needed by Malebranche would require the possibility of a priori knowledge of one’s own properties, which Malebranche bluntly rejects.27

I conclude, therefore, that the only option available to Malebranche to render his crucial argument against the fourth hypothesis of his basic eliminative argument for (VG) conclusive, is indeed already to assumethat the mind, unlike bodies, is not known through ideas. The same is a fortiori true, of course, of the very (VG)-thesis that the basic eliminative argument is designed to establish.

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III

Thus one step towards justifying my charge of petitio principii on Malebranche’s part has been carried out. However (as will be remembered), yet another task is to be accomplished to attain that result: that is to say, showing that the (VG)-thesis is indeed indispensable for Malebranche to render acceptable the claim that

(IC) For every x, if x is known through idea, then x can be known completely.28

To begin with, Malebranche surely has a point in maintaining that (VG) is sufficient to establish (IC). He puts the matter clearly: “As the ideas of things in God include all their properties, whoever sees their ideas can also see all their properties successively; for when we see things as they are in God, we always see them in perfect fashion, and the way we see them would be infinitely perfect if the mind seeing them were infinite.” (RV III.2.vii/LO 237) And I have nothing substantial to add.

Now what about the by far more controversial claim of mine that (VG) be also a sine qua non for (IC)? Let us begin with observing that in view of the above remarks on Malebranche’s concept of idea, we must resolutely resist the temptation to read (IC) as just a sort of stipulation. We saw that Malebranche had been deeply committed to referring with the term “idea” to the same basic meaning as Descartes and that that meaning amounts, roughly, to “representative content”. When we substitute accordingly, we can see that (IC) amounts, roughly, to

(IC*) For every x, if x is known representatively, then x can be known completely.

And one is by no means tempted to take this latter version as a mere stipulation; rather, it amounts to a substantial thesis having to do with the very nature of representation.

But why on earth should we believe that (IC*) is true? Descartes clearly did not, and at least prima facie this seems quite reasonable: leaving subtleties on one side, no serious consideration of the relation of representation taken simpliciter seems to push us towards the “complete knowledge postulate” in the alleged sense. Malebranche is therefore committed to an independent argument for (IC*) unless he eventually begs the question against Descartes on the issue of knowing one’s own mind. Now there is, of course, one option available namely the simple argument


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hinted at above, employing the (VG)-thesis. Yet although perfectly innocent in itself, we have already seen that with regard to his defence of the anti-Cartesian epistemological thesis, such a manoeuvre would involve Malebranche in vicious circularity at least as far as his canonical way of establishing (VG) is concerned.

It should be clear by now, then, that Malebranche has just two options lest his back is definitely to the wall. Either there is some alternative strategy independent of the (VG)-thesis available to him for establishing (IC); or he must provide for an alternative proof of (VG) that does not require the assumption that the mind, unlike bodies, is not known through ideas. I shall consider both options in order.

As far as I can see, the only at least prima facie viable alternative worth considering within the former option has been suggested by Nicholas Jolley who maintains that the key to understanding the employment of the concept of idea in connection with the epistemological thesis of Malebranche’s is the concept of a priori knowledge: “When Malebranche denied that we have a (clear) idea of the soul, it is a prioriknowledge that is at issue (...). Malebranche offered several arguments to show that we have, and can have, no such knowledge of our mind.”29

Certainly there is something to this suggestion. Malebranche claims, indeed, that we have no a priori knowledge of our own mind.30 Moreover, we already touched another plausible claim of his that the absence of a priori knowledge of x precludes the complete knowledge of x (or more precisely the knowledge that the knowledge of x(‘s properties) is complete), which claim surely establishes a substantial connection of a priority to completeness as stated in the consequent of (IC). It would be foolish to dispute all this as well as the fact that this is indeed how Malebranche seeks to interconnect the issue of a priority with that of knowledge through ideas in the crucial passages; yet I confess I am completely at loss as to how the issue of apriority, taken in itself and in the suggested manner, could possibly help render (IC) more intelligible. For supposing such a line of defense, Malebranche’s case for (IC) would seem to boil down (via the granted premise “if x can be known completely, then x can be known a priori” and contraposition) to defending the claim

(IC**) For every x, if x cannot be known a priori, then x is not known representatively.

(IC**) is no doubt what Malebranche claims or implies repeatedly and strenuously. It appears implausible as it stands, however: unless we change the standard meanings of the crucial words, why should we accept

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that no cognition that can be known only a posteriori by the human mind, has any representative content for that mind? I am not able to find Malebranche arguing for this within the RV proper in a way that begs no relevant questions raised so far. Dropping the suggested manoeuvre, then, and supposing no other line of relevant defense be available to him, what Malebranche can in effect rely on in rendering (IC) acceptable is, indeed, nothing but (VG).

This finally brings us to what has just turned out to be the only remaining way out of the trouble for Malebranche, viz. to establish (VG) in a way that would not involve him in the suggested vicious circularity. As should be clear by now, he has to avoid any commitment to the assumption that the mind, unlike bodies, is not known through ideas in establishing (VG) to attain that much. Now as far as I can discover, there is no hint at such an alternative proof in the RV proper. I submit instead, as announced, that it is Elucidation Ten (Xe Éclaircissement: Sur la nature des idées), added by Malebranche to the third edition of RV (1678), that we should look at to secure help.

IV

Though a considerable amount of reconstruction is required to dig Malebranche’s point out of the hints scattered throughout the ElucidationTen, what follows is arguably (under a charitable reading) the core of the relevant reasoning:31

(A) (z is a representative content → z is necessary, immutable and infinite).32

(B) (z is necessary, immutable and infinite → z cannot be located but in God). Therefore(C) (z is a representative content → z cannot be located but in God).

The most obvious shift in argumentative strategy, as against RV III.2., consists in Malebranche’s switch to the ontological perspective rather than considering the conditions of knowledge. Yet prima facie at least, this makes things still worse for him in view of the above criticisms. For leaving premise (B) to one side for the moment and focusing on (A), this premise seems to commit him (under a plausible supposition that the consequent of (A) is to be read as a logical conjunction of the three attributes) to holding that

(A*) ∀z(z is a representative content → z is infinite).


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But, unfortunately, mutatis mutandis similar critical considerations seem to apply to this blatantly implausible claim as did to (IC**) above; and what is worse, Malebranche is, of course, absolutely precluded from having recourse to (VG) in support of (A*) in the first place.

Although (as we shall see shortly) it is scarcely possible to vindicate Malebranche entirely on this particular point, it seems to me too rash to dismiss the present proof as a complete disaster with regard to our problem. Consider the following dicta of which (A) seems to be taken as a corollary by Malebranche:

[I]t seems to me that the principle that only God enlightens us, and that He enlightens us only through the manifestation of an immutable and necessary wisdom or reason (...) is (...) absolutely necessary if a sound and unshakeable foundation is to be given to any truth whatsoever (...). (Elucidation Ten, LO 613)

[I]f the reason we consult were not necessary and independent, it seems evident to me that there would no longer be any true science (...). [F]or (...) what assurrance would we [then] have that these kinds of truths are not like those that are found only in certain universities, or that last only for a certain time? (Elucidation Ten, LO 615)

Put in due context, both passages indicate what Malebranche is about in stating (A). He seems to realize a disturbing consequence of Arnauld’s (and, arguably, Descartes’) notion of representative content as but modally distinct from the particular mental acts, to the effect (to put it very roughly) that no distinct particular mental acts have numerically the same representative content,33 with all its arguably devastating consequences for the prospects of any firm and objective scientific knowledge; and he seems to take (A) as an expression of some necessary conditions for precluding such results. Now the demand that we secure numerical identity of the representative content is certainly philosophically respectable (to say the least) and surely has nothing to do, in itself, with the issue of kinds of knowledge relative to particular ontological domains. So if Malebranche’s present argument can be rendered intelligible along these lines, then it provides precisely what he needs for escaping the petitio principii charge, viz. a proof of (VG) not depending on the assumption that the mind is not known through ideas.

What about the antecedent of this hypothetical statement, then? Well, in rough outline, while immutability seems to be a plausible sine qua nonfor any mental content to count as numerically identical in different intentional acts, and necessity seems to be at least a tolerable one (for all

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the obvious complications of which the commitment to conceive of representative content propositionally is the least), infinity is clearly the odd man out as regards the premise (A). Now I am inclined to interpret Malebranche’s talk of infinity at this point as just a slip on his part (perhaps an unfortunate recurrence of the erroneous circular idea we discerned in the RV proper). For unlike immutability and necessity, there is no initial plausibility in associating infinity with the demand on identity we have discerned in the background of the argument in the Elucidation Ten; and it is clear by now that any additional support available to Malebranche would involve him in vicious circularity again. Moreover, it is noteworthy that unlike immutability and necessity, infinity is not expressly mentioned in the last quotations, which omission seems to me absolutely right. I therefore submit that infinity be deleted from the consequent of (A). It is not our business to judge whether the premise thus modified be true; it is enough that it has got a sound philosophical ring. As for the other premise (B) (modified through omitting infinity in its antecedent), I think no serious doubt should arise concerning its intelligibility. It is, of course far from obvious that God (or more precisely the divine intellect) is the only (or for that matter the most suitable) place to “locate” immutable and necessary abstract items; yet it is a respectable option, the more so within the general framework of the Cartesian ontology.

I conclude that if amended in the suggested way, the present argument for (VG) indeed opens up, in the long run, the possibility of rendering Malebranche’s case for his anti-Cartesian epistemological thesis sound. This is because while (VG) in any case suffices to justify (IC*), it was not until the argument was amended that Malebranche succeeded in proving (VG) independently of the notion of the infinity of representative content. This move freed his position from the vicious circles which afflicted the RV proper throughout.

V

I have tried to show that contrary to what many scholars seem to have assumed, it was not until his Elucidation Ten that Malebranche was able to put his anti-Cartesian epistemological case in a way that escapes the charge of petitio principii. Apart from the basic merit of rendering Malebranche’s philosophical position sound on this point, I believe my considerations could shed some light on what are the real cruxes and the principal thrust of Malebranche’s claim that the mind is not better known than bodies by us. I cannot push this positive issue here; yet to give a brief


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outline at least, the shift in the Elucidation Ten as regards the argumentative strategy in proving (VG) which shift turned out necessary lest Malebranche got stucked in vicious circles has made it clear that what is at the heart of Malebranche’s anti-Cartesian epistemological case is, at the end of the day, a sort of transcendental consideration concerning the conditions of representative knowledge qua objective. Moreover, once this is realized, the full import of Malebranche’s strenuous employment of the distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge in crucial contexts comes out distinctly. For in view of the conclusion (C) of the argument in the Elucidation Ten, the mysteriousness of the alleged connection between representativeness and apriority as expressed with the (IC**)-thesis above fades away. Finally, at least one important remote consequence of Malebranche’s anti-Cartesian epistemological thesis understood along the suggested lines should not be overlooked: given the connection between the immutability (and necessity) of the representative content on the one hand, and the prospects of scientific knowledge on the other as indicated in the above quotations from the Elucidation Ten, Malebranche’s epistemological thesis is to be read as implying, in the long run, his resolute denial, on epistemic grounds, of the possibility of the science of the mind within the general Cartesian ontological framework he endorsed.

Notes 1 Cf. e.g. De la recherche de la vérité (henceforth RV), 1st edition 1674, II.1.v, English translation N. Malebranche, The Search after Truth, ed. and transl. by T.M. Lennon and P.J. Olscamp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 102 (henceforth LO, 102); III.1.i/LO, 198; III.2.vii/LO, 237. I have been working with a French edition N. Malebranche, Oeuvres, vol. I, ed. G. Rodis-Lewis (Paris: Gallimard, 1979) but I quote from the highly reliable English translation. RV was published several times during Malebranche’s lifetime, and Malebranche did not hesitate to make some important changes and additions to the original text. Crucial in this respect was his addition of numerous “Elucidations”, two of which (added by Malebranche to the third edition of RV in 1678) are going to play an important role in my discussion. I therefore distinguish, whenever needed, between “RV proper”, i.e. RV in its original form without the Elucidations, and between “RV” simpliciter, i.e. including the Elucidations. 2 Malebranche admits Descartes is right as far as the existence of the mind and bodies is concerned but opposes him as regards the knowledge of their natures: “[A]lthough we know the existence of our soul more distinctly than the existence of both our own body and those surrounding us, still our knowledge of the soul’s nature is not as perfect as our knowledge of the nature of bodies (...).” (RV

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III.2.vii/LO, 238; following Descartes, Malebranche standardly uses “mind” and “soul” interchangeably.) Although I hereafter omit the brackets in putting this tenet of Malebranche’s, it is to be taken, throughout this paper, as having to do exclusively with the issue of knowing the natures. 3 Cf. above all S. Nadler, ed., Malebranche and Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), T. Schmaltz, Malebranche’s Theory of the Soul: A Cartesian Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), N. Jolley, The Light of the Soul: Theories of Ideas in Leibniz, Malebranche, and Descartes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), A. Pyle, Malebranche (London: Routledge, 2003). 4 The principal complication here seems to be Malebranche’s tendency to retain verbal agreement with the Cartesian orthodoxy while his overall philosophical position seems to commit him to (a more or less dramatic) change of the meaning of the crucial terms. See N. Jolley, “Malebranche on the Soul”, in: S. Nadler, Cambridge Companion to Malebranche (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 32-37 for a good survey of the debate. 5 The locus classicus of the following exposition is, of course, RV III.2.vii, especially secs. I.-IV. (LO, 236-239). Another crucial passage is Elucidation Eleven (LO, 633-638) which Malebranche attached (together with a few other Elucidations) to the third edition (1678) of his RV. 6 There are two basic arguments (or perhaps two stages of a single argument nothing in my paper turns on how one judges this alternative) to be found in Descartes’s writings. Towards the end of the Second Meditation Descartes writes: “I now know that even bodies are not strictly perceived by the senses or the faculty of imagination but by the intellect alone, and that this perception derives not from their being touched or seen but from their being understood; and in view of this I know plainly that nothing can be more easily or evidently perceived by me than my mind.” (AT VII, 34/ CSM ii, 22f.) And in his reply to Gassendi at AT VII, 360 he relies on a general principle to the effect that the degree of understanding a thing (or substance) is strictly proportional to the number of attributes (or properties) we know in the thing, and he maintains that while there is an attribute in the mind known by us corresponding to each attribute known by us in the body, the converse does not hold. For a critical discussion of these arguments cf. e.g. M. Wilson, Descartes (London: Routledge, 1978), 94-97. For Malebranche’s negative response cf. N. Jolley, The Light of the Soul: Theories of Ideas in Leibniz, Malebranche, and Descartes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 117-124. 7 “As for me, I have never thought that anything more is required to reveal a substance than its various attributes; thus the more attributes of a given substance we know, the more perfectly we understand its nature.” (AT VII, 360/CSM ii, 249) Descartes employs the term “attribute” here in its wider meaning established in the Principles of Philosophy 1:56 (AT VIII-1, 26). “Attribute” in this wider meaning refers roughly to properties in general. 8 RV III.2.vii/LO, 236. So far, the exposition is condensed in Malebranche’s well-known dictum: “‘We know the nature of a substance more distinctly,’ say [the] philosophers following Descartes, ‘as we know more of its attributes. (...)’ (...) But


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who does not see that there is quite a difference between knowing through a clear idea and knowing through consciousness?” (Elucidation Eleven, LO, 635) 9 All this is aptly expressed in RV III.2.vii/LO, 237f.: “[I]t is in God and through their ideas that we perceive bodies and their properties, and for this reason, the knowledge we have of them is quite perfect i.e., our idea of extension suffices to inform us of all the properties of which extension is capable (...). As the ideas of things in God include all their properties, whoever sees their ideas can also see all their properties successively (...). (...) Such is not the case with the soul, which we do not know through its idea we do not see it in God; we know it only through consciousness, and because of this, our knowledge of it is imperfect. Our knowledge of our soul is limited to what we sense taking place in us. If we had never sensed pain, heat, light, and such, we would be unable to know whether the soul was capable of sensing these things, because we do not know it through its idea.” 10 Throughout his argument, Malebranche clearly (though admittedly implicitly) sets aside the cases of knowing God as well as the other (created) minds. I just follow him in this way of qualifying the question in the rest of the present paper. 11 I will henceforth use “x can be known completely” to express the consequent of this conditional. 12 This time, unlike the preceding exposition, the universe of discourse is perfectly general. 13 Cf. e.g. RV III.2.vi, passim. 14 The English translation is taken from N. Jolley, The Light of the Soul: Theories of Ideas in Leibniz, Malebranche, and Descartes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 58. 15 The text in brackets was added by Malebranche not earlier than in 1712, i.e. to the last edition of RV he could himself revise. 16 Cf. RV III.2.i,/LO, 218f. 17 After all, Malebranche himself ascribes the fourth hypothesis explicitly to Arnauld in a footnote in a later edition of RV. 18 Thus the title of RV III.2.v. In accord with the qualification made above (note 2), I have omitted Malebranche’s reference to the existence of objects. 19 Descartes would probably have found this “essentialist” qualification of the hypothesis somewhat odd since for him at least some, if not all “non-essentialist” cogitative acts are representative as well, and he was certainly prepared to hold his modal distinction thesis with respect to all the representative acts whatever. Malebranche, on the other hand, held that it is only the specific “essentialist” cogitative acts which are representative at all. Yet since this complication is insignificant in our context (for it is exclusively knowledge of the natures or essences that is at issue), I will henceforth ignore it. 20 Malebranche’s parallel case against “seeing the existence” of things is omitted in the quotation. 21 The wide context of Malebranche’s proof makes it clear that knowing (the essence) of God is beyond the scope of the present argument.

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22 All the formulas are universally quantified. “x” stands for finite minds. 23 The equivalence (x sees in itself y ↔ the perfections of x represent y) is established implicitly by Malebranche in RV III.2.v, section two. 24 Cf. AT VII, 31. 25 “[N]o matter how many attributes we recognize [cognoscuntur] in any given thing, we can always list a corresponding number of attributes in the mind which it has in virtue of knowing [cognoscere] the attributes of the thing (...).” (AT VII, 360/CSM ii, 249) 26 So that we get the following two variants of Descartes’ correspondence-contention: (1) For any property one knows a priori in a body, there is a corresponding property known a priori in one’s own mind. (2) For any property one knows experientially in a body, there is a corresponding property known experiantially in one’s own mind. Given the essential differences Malebranche discerns in the character of content of the two types of knowledge at issue, any crossover correspondence seems indeed to be precluded. 27 I believe the submitted consideration is in perfect accord with the following passage (otherwise somewhat obscure) from RV III.2.vii: “This [i.e. that our knowledge of the soul’s nature is not as perfect as our knowledge of the nature of bodies] might also serve to prove that the ideas which represent to us things outside us are not modifications of our soul. For if the soul saw all things by considering its own modifications, it would have to know its own nature or essence more clearly than that of bodies, and all the sensations or modifications of which it is capable more clearly than the figures or modifications of which bodies are capable. However, it knows itself capable of a given sensation not throught the perception it has of itself in consulting its idea but only through experience, whereas it knows that extension is capable of an infinite number of figures through the idea it has of extension. There are even certain sensations like colors and sounds which are such that most people cannot tell whether or not they are modifications of the soul, but there is no figure that everyone, through the idea he has of extension, does not recognize as the modification of a body.” (RV III.2.vii/LO, 238) 28 See Section I above, final paragraph. Recall that “known completely” is here (and hereafter) a short for “known as to all the properties of which x is capable”. 29 N. Jolley, “Malebranche on the Soul”, in: S. Nadler, Cambridge Companion to Malebranche (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 45.30 Malebranche offers several remarkably convincing arguments to this effect: cf. especially Elucidation Eleven, LO, 634-636; for a good discussion see N. Jolley, “Malebranche on the Soul”, in: S. Nadler, Cambridge Companion to Malebranche(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 45-47. 31 All the formulas are universally quantified. 32 Necessity, immutability and infinity are initially attributed to “a certain [universal] Reason (une certaine Raison [universelle])” by Malebranche in Elucidation Ten (cf. LO, 613-615). Yet Malebranche clearly commits himself to (A) in the nineteenth section of that Elucidation: cf. LO, 617f.


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33 The point is discussed in detail in N. Jolley, The Light of the Soul: Theories of Ideas in Leibniz, Malebranche, and Descartes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 56f.

6.

JOHN LOCKE AND THE CAMBRIDGE PLATONISTS ON THE NATURE OF THE MIND

G.A.J. ROGERS

It is common amongst historians of early modern philosophy to distinguish between the Empiricists on the one hand and the Rationalists on the other. Traditionally the three great “Continental Rationalists” of the period are regarded as Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. Whilst the “British Empiricists”, Locke, Berkeley and Hume, are the triumvirate with which they are contrasted. However, it has for some time been recognised that this dichotomy does scant justice to the more complex position that each of these philosophers actually occupied. When we turn to examine their stands on particular issues the contrast which the distinction suggests seem to vanish before our eyes, rather as the image in a mosaic evaporates as we approach very closely to the stones of which it is composed.

In this paper I wish to look at the ways in which prima facie we would expect there to be a great contrast between the individuals considered with regard to the nature of mind. On the one hand the Cambridge Platonists, aptly named as the seventeenth-century upholders of a philosophical tradition which undoubtedly had its roots in the thought of the great Greek philosopher for whom they are named, and John Locke, the paradigm of English empiricist philosophy, the antithesis of the rationalist tradition which flowed from Plato’s thought. In particular I wish to examine their understanding of what we should take the mind to be.

Two philosophers, who, as it happens, were both critics of Locke, capture the way in which we should understand the word mind. John Norris in 1704 wrote: “By Mind I think we are properly to mean that power which both perceives and wills”1 and at the end of the century Thomas Reid wrote “We do not give the name of mind to thought, reason, or desire; but to that being which thinks, which reasons, which desires”2. Locke and the Cambridge Platonists would certainly have recognised these uses, and I doubt if they would have disagreed with them, though it is not

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a word the Cambridge Platonists used much. But with Locke the matter is very different. The word mind or minds is used in the Essay concerning Human Understanding (hereafter the Essay) 1311 times, about twice more than any other substantive except for, as we might expect, Idea or Ideas, used a total of 3682 times.3 Other high uses are body, knowledge and truthbut the most frequent of these – body - is used only about half the number of times that mind occurs.

In this paper, by the expression Cambirdge Platonists I shall usually be referring to the two most philosophically important of their number, Henry More (1614-1687) and Ralph Cudworth (1617-1688) though the group also included four or five other thinkers of whom John Smith and Benjamin Whichcote are the most important. As a group they were philosphically the most active in England between Franics Bacon and John Locke and undoubtedly deserve a place in any seroious history of seventeenth century philosophy, something which has been increasingly recognised in recent years. The Cambridge Platonists, as I say, hardly use the term mind at all, but this is not because they are not concerned with it. It is because the word that is used almost interchangeabley with it in the mid to late seventeenth century is soul. In a rare use, Henry More asserts the impossibility of conceiving of the naked essence or substance of a thing and continues: “For the evidence of this Truth, there needs nothing more than a silent appeal to a man’s owne mind, if he doe not find it so”.4

That the terms mind and soul were used more or less interchangeably at the time is confirmed from Locke’s own text. Thus, in the opening words of the Essay concerning Understanding Book I, Chapter II when he is considering the possiblity of innate ideas he writes that some people believe that there are innate notions, “Characters, as it were stamped upon the Mind of Man, which the Soul receives in its very first Being…”5, and a few sections later we have “it seeming to me near a Contradiction, to say, that there are Truths imprinted on the Soul which it perceives or understands not….For to imprint any thing on the Mind without the Mind’s perceiving it, seems to me hardly intelligible”6. Mind and Soul, then are used here by Locke, and more generally by his fellow countrymen interchangeably. But it is also clear that the word soul tends to occur primarily in religious contexts whilst mind features in more secular locations. And this points to a very important difference between Locke’s intellectual objectives and those of the Cambridge Platonists. The latter had as their major objective the creation of a Protestant Christian philosophy that countered, as they saw it, the rising tide of materialism as exemplified in the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. This religious objective colours virtually all of their writings. In strong contrast Locke’s objectives

John Locke and the Cambridge Platonists on the Nature of the Mind 83

were not in that sense religious ones at all. This is not because Locke was not a religious man. He had a deep and life-long commitment to the Protestant Christian religion and many of his writngs were a product of those commitments. But his major philosophical work had quite different objectives. In his Introduction to the Essay he writes that his purpose in writing the book is “to enquire into the Original, Certainty, and Extent of humane Knowledge; together with the Grounds and Degrees of Belief, Opinion, and Assent”. He goes on to say some further things indicating the limited nature of his objectives. He will not therefore “meddle with the Physical Considerartions of the Mind; or trouble my self to examine wherein its Essence consists, or by what Motions of our Spirits, or Alterations of our Bodies, we come to have any Sensation by our Organs, or any Ideas in our Understandings; and whether those Ideas do in their Formation, any or all of them, depend on Matter, or no”.7 This passage raises a host of issues relevant to our theme: Is Locke speculating about a materialist account of the mind? What did he believe about the physiology of sensation? Is this passage important evidence for those who wish to read him as a materialist? These are large questions, but for now I wish to concentrate on only one aspect of his words. It is that these words confirm what he says later in the same section about his intention to follow the “Historical plain Method”8.

How this phrase, “Historical plain Method”, should be unpacked is important. By using it Locke is putting himself firmly in the Baconian camp. He is claiming that he is not presupposing any particular answers to the questions which he poses. He is not trying to prove any theory. Especially is he not trying to pre-judge the outcome of his enquiries. Certainly he is not setting out to provide an answer to fundamental religious questions. There is obviously a lot more that could be said about Locke’s objectives but I hope I have said enough to show that there is a very great contrast between what he was attempting and what were the objectives of his older contemporaries in Cambridge. This is not to deny that Locke had an agenda in his philosophical enquiries. He probably had several. But it is to suggest that we would be wrong to see this as being aimed at a particular religious outcome, even though ultimately his thought was set in such a religious framework. If this is to open Locke to the charge of disingenuousness then any attempt to reach truth is open to the same challenge.

I shall begin my consideration of the subject of this paper with remarks about the Cambridge Platonists. As I have already intimated we shall find little by them on the mind under that heading. But they had plenty to say about the soul.

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Cudworth in the Preface to the Reader of his True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) makes clear the intellectual origins of his large work. It began with his concerns that atheism was a powerful contemporary blight which was strongly supported by arguments drawn from the claim that all actions and events were governed by a fatal necessity which undermined all Christianity and religion by “taking away all guilt and blame, punishment and rewards, and plainly rendering a day of judgment ridiculous”9. Cudworth’s work, like that of Henry More in his many books, rested on an ontology that was sharply dualist and set up in strong opposition to materialism as expounded by Thomas Hobbes, itself strongly associated with a contemporary revival of Epicurean atomism. As it happened both More and Cudworth were also atomists but of a very different hue from Hobbes. Their atomism was always closely tied to an ontology of living forces that was quite at odds with any simple one- substance materialism. Indeed at the heart of their philosophy was the claim that it was impossible to explain many phenomena in the natural world without invoking a non material substance as an immediate cause. It is interesting that many of the examples on which More and Cudworth draw on to support their claim were offered as empirical evidence for the dualist ontology to which they subscribed. It is also worth noting that both of them were (inactive) Fellows of the Royal Society.

Before we turn to that, however, we might note that on the most likely territory the Cambridge Platonists and Locke may not have been so far apart as we might suppose. The most obvious area is their position with regard to innate ideas. After establishing as he sees it “the Idea of a Being absolutely perfect” More goes on to consider “whether the Soul of man beAbrasa Tabula, a Table book in which nothing is writ; or whether she have some innate Notions and Ideas in her selfe.”10 Attacking the notion of a tabula rasa More castigates “some men’s judgements, that they have conceited that the Soul has no Knowledge nor Notion, but what is in a Passive way impressed, or delineated upon her from the objects of Sense”11. More says it can be demonstrated that there is an “actuall Knowledge in a man, of which these outward objects are rather the reminders that the first betters or implanters”. The word “reminders” reminds us that More was a Platonist. Empirical knowledge is itself partly the product of recollection of the forms. But that aside what he goes on to say shows that he has in mind a dispositional sense of knowledge. He writes: “I doe not mean that there is a certain number of Ideas staring and shining to the Animadversive faculty like so many Torches or Starres in the Firmament to our outward sight… but I understand thereby an active sagacity in the Soul, or quick recollection as it were”12 and More compares


this capacity to that of the musician who retains his actual skill, even when he is asleep. Of course Locke would not have had any sympathy with More’s appeal to “recollection” but he had no serious quarrel with the notion of dispositional knowledge as such. He just did not believe that it required a Platonic theory to account for it. They were just examples of what he called “habitual knowledge”. My point here is to suggest that even on the most obvious issue that would normally be thought to separate More and Locke in epistemology the distance between the two was not as great as it would normally be thought to be. It is of course true that More believed that there were many ideas which cannot be explained as having their origin in sense. He lists some of them: cause and effect, whole and part, like and unlike, equality and inequality proportion and analogy, symmetry and asymmetry “all which Relative Ideas I shall easily prove to be no materiall impressions”13. But Locke would argue that each of these ideas could be accounted for by abstraction from sense experiences, or ideas of sensation.

But let us return to ontology. More’s attack on atheism rests on establishing the need for a non material cause for many natural phenomena and he offered us plenty of evidence. Gravitation, magneticism, even witches and other supernatural phenomena, could not be explained, More said, without assuming the existence of a non material agent. Central to many of these cases was the claim that matter was essentially passive. Matter could only act on matter by direct contact. More was undoubtedly influenced in his explanations by Descartes’s model of physical interaction where change in the material world was always the product of pushes, not pulls. But it also was drawn from consideration of the nature of God. God must be perfect and could not, therefore, be material: “an Essence absolutely perfect, cannot possibly be Body, and consequently must be something Incorporeall.”14 But matter is itself not capable of self-motion. It is in itself homogeneous and inert. More has several arguments for this claim but they need not delay us. The crucial claim is that the existence of motion in the world itself can only be understood as the product of some active non-material cause, an “Incorporeal Substance distinct from the Matter” (ibid. p. 81). To those that claim that matter can move itself More answers rhetorically that if it could why would it produce “that admirable wise contrivance of things which we see in the world? Can a blind impetusproduce such effects?” (ibid., pp. 84-5.). Whilst rejecting the claims of astrology in favour of his position, More goes on to produce arguments for the existence of an immaterial substance in man, “which , from the power it is conceived to have in actuating and guiding the Body, is usually called the Soule” (ibid. p. 110). Through a long erudite physiological argument

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that calls upon the teachings of many ancient and modern thinkers from Plato, Aristotle and Hippocrates to Descartes and van Helmont, More claims to demonstrate that the soul is pervasive throughout the body and communicates with it via the animal spirits. The soul itself has its centre of perception confined to the fourth ventricle of the brain (ibid., p. 235). His precision is amazing! For a man who devoted several works to denouncing the “enthusiasm” of others, his ready and confident espousal of theory is somewhat breathtaking.

We cannot follow More through all his account of the soul, his commitment to its pre-existence, and how human souls differ from those of animals; his account of the vehicles that carry the soul after the death of the body (he thinks the ordinary vehicle of the soul after death is air); their connections with ghosts and dreams. But he reaches a series of conclusions which identify his understanding of the soul. It is, he said, “a Substance extended and indiscerpible” (cannot be divied into parts) (ibid. p. 341). It has its own dimensions which are as large or even larger after death, than those of the body which “she” has left. (Souls, for More seem to be predominantly female, whilst minds are usually male.) There then follows a long, and it must be said, very speculative, account of the existence of the soul after she leaves the body which retain the power of sight from their airy vehicles and may well be able to see one another though we ourselves cannot see them, and they have many other properties which we usually associate with a living human being.

From the secular perspective of the twenty-first century it would be easy to mock More’s speculations. But if we do so then I am sure that we show ourselves to be out of touch with the basic presumptions of seventeenth-century life.

If we turn to Ralph Cudworth we find the same ontology and same picture of the universe. Material substance cannot be the only kind of entity. If there was only extended matter then “all would be dead heap or lump; nor could any one substance penetrate another, and co-exist in the same place with it. From whence it follows of necessity, that besides this outside bulky extension, and tumourous magnitude, there must another kind of entity, whose essential attribute or character is life, self-activity, or cogitation”15. In keeping with Cudworth’s objective, the refutation of atomistic atheism, the final paragraph of his massive book concludes “that the first original of all things was neither stupid and senseless matter fortuitously moved, nor a blind and nescient, but orderly and methodical plastic nature; nor living matter, having perception and understanding natural, without animal sense or consciousness; nor did everything exist of itself necessarily from eternity, without a cause”16. That cause was an


absolutely perfect being. The deity acted on the world through “a plastic artificial nature” “as a subordinate instrument of divine providence in the orderly disposal of matter”17. Cudworth’s dualism, then is not of the same kind as Descartes’s. All of nature exemplifies both matter and the non material substance and he holds “that souls are always united to some body or other and that all rational intellectual creatures consist of soul and body”18. Hence the need for an aerial body for the soul after death. Descartes’s understanding of mind required no such supposition.

To read Locke after More and Cudworth is to move from one world to another. It is partly the immanence of religious issues in the writings of the former, whilst reading Locke’s Essay one does not feel the theological questions bearing in so closely. But it is not just that difference. It is also that, in line with what was said earlier, Locke does not appear to have such a prominent agenda driving his writing. It is partly a matter of style, but it is probably more accurate to say that it is not so obvious that Locke is a man attempting to refute a Hobbes or even a Descartes. His goal is to find out what are the nature and limits of human understanding irrespective of what others have said about it and not in any attempt to refute any particular philosopher on the way. Again it is the “natural history” paradigm that drives the style.

The last book that John Yolton published was The Two Intellectual Worlds of John Locke. Man, Person and Spirits in the “Essay” 19. It is an unusual book in the sense that it is surely the first ever to be published which takes as its subject the many, but usually unnoticed, references to spirits in Locke’s work, gives them a context and considers their implications. For our purposes it is worth noting that Yolton does not situate Locke’s thoughts on spirits within the context of anything said by the Cambridge Platonists, which is perhaps somewhat surprising, but that omission gives me the opportunity to do so now. What Locke has to say about spirits is important for our purposes as Locke’s remarks set the framework for his account of the nature of mind.

We should begin by making a general comment on Locke’s whole intellectual approach. It lies in his considerable reluctance to claim anything for which he has not, to his own satisfaction at least, found the best possible reasons. It is of course not that Locke did not recognise the importance of probable claims about the world. He recognised that most of our practical decisions are based upon probabilities, not certainties: “He that will not eat, till he has Demonstration that it will nourish him; he that will not stir, till he infallibly knows the Business he goes about will succeed, will have little else to do, but sit still and perish” (Essay, IV. XIV. 1, p. 652). He is particularly cautious about claiming to know the

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essences of things and is especially harsh on the Cartesian claim to know the essence of both mind and body. Though it is typical of him that he does not refer to Descartes by name. Descartes takes the essence of mind to be thought. Mind is an unextended thinking substance. Thought has to be consciously apprehended to be said to exist, so a mind unconscious of anything - that is, not thinking – is a contradiction. “I know it is an Opinion, that the Soul always thinks, and that it has the actual Perceptions of Ideas in it self constantly as long as it exists; and that actual thinking is as inseparable from the Soul, as actual Extension is from the Body” (Essay, II. I. 9, p. 108). Against this, Locke says that “I confess my self, to have one of those dull Souls, that does not perceive it self always to contemplate Ideas, nor can conceive it necessary for the Soul always to think, than for the Body to move” (Essay, II. I. 10, p. 108). Perception of ideas being to the soul, Locke says, what motion is to the body, not its essence but one of its operations. But we do not have to think of it as always thinking or always in action. It may be true of God but not of man. “We know certainly by Experience, that sometimes think, and thence draw the infallible Consequence, That there is something in us that has a Power to think: But whether that Substance perpetually thinks, or no, we can be no farther assured, than Experience informs us” (Essay, II. I. 10, pp. 108-09). And a little later, “Thus, methinks, every drowsy Nod shakes their Doctrine, who teach, That the Soul is always thinking” (Essay, II.I. 13, p. 111). Locke’s refusal to allow speculative, not to say, dogmatic, theory to determine questions of essence about mind or body, or indeed anything else, is a feature of his thought which guides much of what he has to say about the nature of minds.

It is very clear from the outset, however, that Locke employs a metaphor about the mind which does quite a lot of work in his philosophy. He clearly regards the mind as a thing. It is like blank paper, a thing on which the sense can endlessly impress ideas. However, the metaphor of the wax tablet is not Locke’s invention, but that of those to whom he is opposed. It is they, he says, who claim that innate ideas are imprinted on the mind at its first creation. But it is never the existence of mind that is ever in doubt for Locke, but its essence. What it is and how we may discover its nature is altogether much more problematic than its existence. However, through the Essay we are given many clues as to what Locke took the mind and its nature to be. In Book II, in successive chapters, Locke gives us an account of the different intellectual faculties. Perception, he says, “is the first faculty of the Mind…so it is the first and simplest Idea we have from Reflection, and is by some called Thinking in general.” (II. IX. 1, p. 143). This would, however, be mistaken because


thinking implies a voluntary attention “wherein the Mind is active”. Whereas in perception, “for the most part” the mind is passive. This distinction between the active and passive capacities of the mind is central to all that Locke holds to be true of the essence of the human mind.

The second faculty of the mind that Locke considers is Retention, either in contemplation of ideas we have just received or “to revive again in our Minds those Ideas, which after imprinting have … been as it were laid aside out of Sight….This is Memory” (II. X. 2), which is the power the mind has to revive perceptions which it once had, together with the capacity to realize that we have had them before. Memories, Locke points out, can be either passive or active. Sometimes recollections arrive in our consciousness uninvited whilst only come to mind as a result of conscious activity to recover them. Memory, he notes, is so important that without it virtually all our other faculties are more or less useless. (I note only in passing the importance of memory for his account of personal identity.)

Perception, memory and the other faculties of the mind are powers and it is no surprise that Locke’s account of power is central to his understanding of mind. It is to some of his many remarks on power that we must now turn, in many ways the most complex and difficult chapter in the whole of the Essay, though its complexity need not, for our present purposes, over-detain us.

Power is a property of substances – minds, bodies – and is of two kinds, “as able to make, or able to receive any change: The one may be called Active, and the other Passive Power” (II.XXI. 2). Locke continues:

Whether Matter be not wholly destitute of active Power, as its author GOD is truly above all passive Power; and whether the intermediate state of created Spirits be not alone, which is capable of both active and passive Power, may be worth consideration.

But Locke says he cannot consider the question now as he only interested in explaining how we come by the idea of power and not its nature. But he concludes with the injunction that we should “direct our Minds to the consideration of GOD and Spirits, for the clearest Idea of active Power” (ibid). But he cannot resist returning to the issue a few paragraphs later:

Bodies, by our Senses, do not afford us so clear and distinct an Idea of active Power, as we have by reflection on the Operations of our Minds. For all Power relating to Action, and there being but two sorts of Action, whereof we have any Idea, viz. Thinking and Motion, let us consider whence we have the clearest Ideas of the Powers, which produce these actions (II. XXI. 4, p. 235).

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Body can produce no idea of the idea of thinking. Nor does body in itself produce any idea of motion as such since from the idea of a body we can gain no understanding of the beginning of motion.: “A Body at rest affords us no Idea of any active Power to move” (ibid.). Our ideas of active powers come, Locke says, only from considering the powers of our own minds. We find within ourselves the power to begin or forbear actions of our minds, and motions of our Bodies by as it were, our mind commanding a particular action at our decision. Our ability to do this is called willing. And our ability to exercise our choices with regard to thinking and motion is what we mean by being free.

Locke returns to the nature of our ideas of both body and soul again in his chapter on our ideas of substances. An idea which we have of body is its power to communicate motion by impulse and of our souls the power of exciting motion by thought. But we have no idea at all of how bodies or minds do these things. The outcome is that our idea of spirit is as at least as clear as our idea of body. “The Mind every day, affords us Ideas of an active power of moving Bodies; and therefore it is worth our consideration, whether active power be not the proper attribute of Spirits, and passive power of Matter” (II. XXIII. 28, pp. 311-312). But he does not think we can settle that question, it is a likely hypothesis rather than something that can be decided, at least in this life. And he concludes his account of the nature of mind and body with a summary of his findings:

[T]he Idea we have of Spirit, compared with the Idea we have of Body,stands thus: The substance of Spirit is unknown to us; and so is the substance of Body, equally unknown to us: Two primary Qualities, or Properties of Body, viz. solid coherent parts, and impulse, we have distinct clear Ideas of; So likewise we know, and have two distinct clear primary Qualities, or Properties of Spirit, viz. thinking, and a power of Action; i.e. a power of beginning, or stopping several Thoughts or Motions. (II..XXIII. 29, pp. 312-313).

And with both bodies and minds we have ideas of several of their modes. For thinking these are the modes of believing, doubting, intending, fearing, hoping, willing and the power of moving the body. Locke’s point here is to underline his claim that the properties of mind are as clearly known and also as obscure as those of body. And as a result “we have as much Reason to be satisfied with our Notion of immaterial Spirit, as with our Notion of Body; and the Existence of the one, as well as the other” (II. XXIII. 32, p. 314). Our idea of God is made from the simple ideas of reflection we receive from ourselves. The major ones are those of existence, duration, knowledge, power and happiness, and putting these


together we extrapolate from these to the idea of infinity and thereby form a complex idea of God.

I hope it is obvious from what we have seen of Locke’s position that it is clear that he is committed to an ontology of a thinking substance which has properties very similar to those to which we have seen the Cambridge Platonists subscribed. But there are also important differences. Locke is much more cautious in claiming to know the properties of spirits than were either More or Cudworth. They were certain, for example, that immaterial substance is extended, and therefore totally rejected the Cartesian concept of “unextended thinking substance”. So far as I know Locke never expressed a view on that matter, though as we shall see, he was probably closer to them than to Descartes.

Related to this issue is a passage in the Essay that produced perhaps the most influential misreading of Locke’s argument in the eighteenth century. It was a passage, no more than a folio page, that was taken to imply that Locke was a covert materialist, with all that would imply for his account of mind, but in fact shows nothing of the kind. The most notorious words in this passage are: “We have the Ideas of Matter and Thinking, but possibly shall never be able to know, whether any mere material Being thinks, or no; it being impossible for us, by the contemplation of our own Ideas, without revelation, to discover, whether Omnipotency has not given to some Systems of Matter fitly disposed a power to perceive and think, or else joined and fixed to Matter so disposed, a thinking immaterial Substance … GOD can, if he pleases, superadd to Matter a Faculty of Thinking” (IV. III. 6, p. 541). The implication of this passage is that for all we know there may be no immaterial substances, other than God, in the universe,. It is not difficult to see that such a claim might easily be given either a Spinozist or even a Hobbist reading. But it is important first of all to notice that the passage occurs in a chapter titled “Of the Extent of Human Knowledge”. Throughout the chapter Locke is considering how much we can know “in respect to the several sorts of Beings that are” (IV. III. 31, p. 562). And we must always have in mind his strict definition of knowledge: “We can have Knowledge no further than we have Ideas” (IV. III. 1, p. 538). And although we can prove the existence of particular things by sensation we cannot have knowledge of their underlying nature. And this is because we cannot satisfy any of the sufficient conditions for knowledge with respect to them. We can neither have intuitive knowledge of their nature, and therefore no demonstrative knowledge, nor can we have sensible knowledge of their invisible parts. All we can have are hypotheses and probable conjectures. It is not that Locke believes that God has added power of thought to some parcels of matter, but that he cannot

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see how it can be excluded as a possibility. We might compare his position on this topic to an issue which arises in his exchange with Bishop Stillingfleet. Stillingfleet challenged Locke to explain how his account of matter was compatible with Locke’s account of liberty. Locke replied:

You ask, “how can my way of liberty agree with the idea that bodies can operate only by motion and impulse?” Answ. By the omnipotency of God, who can make all things agree, that involve not a contradiction. It is true, I say, “that bodies can operate by impulse and nothing else20.” And so I thought when I writ it, and can yet conceive no other way of their operation. But I am since convinced by the judicious Mr. Newton’s incomparable book, that it is too bold a presumption to limit God’s power in this point, by my narrow conceptions. The gravitation of matter towards matter, by ways inconceivable to me, is not only a demonstration that God can, if he pleases, put into bodies powers and ways of operation above what can be derived from our idea of body, or can be explained by what we know of matter, but also an unquestionable and every where visible instance that he has done so.21

Locke gives this example when considering Stillingfleet’s challenge to his remarks about the superaddition of thought to matter. In discussing Stillingfleet’s comments Locke claims that God must necessarily be non-material, as knowledge and perception must be naturally part of his (God’s) nature whereas they are not properties that naturally belong to matter. An unthinking God is a contradiction but unthinking matter is not.

In general the dominant theme in Locke’s account of both body and mind is our substantial and indefeasible ignorance. For the most part we cannot establish necessary connections between our ideas of the properties of bodies, nor can our senses detect their minute parts and their properties. The corpuscular hypothesis “is thought to go farthest in an intelligible Explication of the Qualities of Bodies; and I fear the Weakness of humane Understanding is scarce able to substitute another which will afford us a fuller and clearer discovery …of the[ir] powers…” (IV. III. 16, p. 547). And we are even more in the dark about spirits, ideas of which is naturally confined to those we obtain by “reflecting on the Operations of our own Souls with us” (IV. III. 17, p. 548). Our ignorance of the nature and properties of the material world is as nothing compared to that of “Spiritsthat maybe, and probably are, yet more remote from our Knowledge whereof we…can frame …any distinct Ideas of their several ranks and sorts …” concealed from us by “an impenetrable obscurity almost the whole intellectual World; a greater certainly, and more beautiful World, than the material” (IV. III. 27, p. 557). Of angels and such like spirits we have no knowledge except by revelation. That there are other spiritual


beings in other men we can know by their words and actions, and we can prove there is a God. But we cannot know “by our own search and ability” that there are other spiritual beings between us and God, much less of their natures, powers and conditions. But if Locke, unlike Henry More, does not believe there is much empirical evidence for their existence he had sympathy for an analogical argument drawn form nature for what Lovejoy called the great chain of being. In a passage unusual in its speculative nature Locke writes:

It is not impossible to conceive, nor repugnant to reason, that there may be many Species of Spirits…whereof we have no Ideas, as the Speciesof sensible Things are distinguished one from another, by Qualities which we know, and observe in them. That there should be more Species of intelligent Creatures above us, than there are sensible and material below us, is probable to me from hence; That in all the visible corporeal World, we see no Chasms or Gaps. All quite down from us, the descent is by easy steps, and a continued series of Things, that in each remove, differ very little one from another” (III. VI. 12, p. 446-7).

There can be little doubt that Locke seriously underestimated the potential for discovery in both the natural sciences and psychology but this is not the place to follow that interesting question through. All I think I need to say here is that despite Locke’s pessimism his actual influence on the new subject of psychology was considerable, especially through his impact on the work of David Hartley whose Observations on Man (1749) drew heavily on Locke’s account of the nature and source of ideas in his attempt to give a “scientific” account of the mind on principles of method to be found in Newton’s natural philosophy.

Let us now draw some conclusions from our gallop through Locke’s work and compare it with his Cambridge predecessors. I hope I have said enough to establish, against those who have been inclined to read him as some kind of materialist, that Locke was committed to the existence of two basic categories of substance, mind and matter. But he did not share with More and Cudworth a commitment to a particular theory about its nature, and he never shows any inclination to accept a kind of plastic nature as a causal agent between a Deity and the natural material world. He did, however, subscribe to the causal principle that nothing could be in an effect that was not in its cause and for this reason he held strongly that since there are clearly intellectual beings, ourselves, then their cause must itself be intellectual. He expressed his ontology like this:

There are two sorts of Beings in the World, that Man knows or conceives.

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First, such as purely material, without Sense, Perception, or Thought, as the clippings of our Beards, and paring of our Nails.

Secondly, Sensible, thinking, perceiving Beings, such as we find ourselves to be…

If then there must be something eternal, let us see what sort of Being it must be. And to that, it is very obvious to Reason, that it must be a cogitative Being. For it is as impossible to conceive, that ever bare incognitative Matter should produce thinking intelligent Being, as that nothing should of itself produce Matter (IV. X. 9-10, pp. 622-23).

In this sense Locke shared his ontology with the men of Cambridge. But he was never inclined to share their extravagant picture of how that ontology interacted to produce the phenomena of the world. Locke was hostile to enthusiasm wherever it raised its head, but especially in religious, political or philosophical contexts, and I will offer one final example which I think underlies that claim.

The only example of a reference to the Cambridge Platonists that I have been able to detect in Locke’s work is to be found in a passage in Book III. The chapter is titled “Of the Abuse of Words”. One such abuse, Locke says is taking words for things, and this is especially true of words for supposed substances. Those who have an over-confidence in the truth of some favoured hypothesis are particularly prone to this. “Who is there, that has been bred in the Peripatetick Philosophy, who does not think the Ten Names, under which are ranked the Ten Predicaments, to be exactly conformable to the nature of Things? Who is there of that School, that is not persuaded , that substantial Forms, vegetative Souls, abhorrence of a Vacuum, intentional Species, etc. are something real? …The Platonistshave their Soul of the World and the Epicureans their endeavour towards Motion…” (III. X. 14, p. 497). He then goes on: “And should Aërial and Ætherial Vehicles come once, by the prevalency of that Doctrine, to be generally received any where, no doubt those Terms would make impressions on Men’s Minds, so as to establish them in the persuasion of the reality of such Things, as much as peripatetick Forms, and intentional Species have hitherto done” (ibid., p. 498). We have already seen that More held there to be such vehicles and Locke’s reference neatly reveals the distance, not in ontology, but in style of thought between Locke and the Cambridge men.

Alsager May 2008


Notes

1 An Essay Towards the Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible World II. iii. 133 (1704).2 Essay on the Intellectual. Powers of Man I. ii. 42 (1785). 3 Cf. Richard Malpas, Locke Newsletter 20, 1990, p.37 ff. 4 The Immortality of the Soul (1659) pp. 11-12. 5 An Essay concerning Human Understanding, edited by P. H. Nidditch (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1975), I. II. 1, p. 48. 6 Essay, I. II. 5, p. 49-50. 7 Essay, I. I. 2, p. 43. 8 Ibid.., p. 44. 9 True Intellectual System of the Universe, “Preface to the Reader”. Quotations are taken from the London edition of 1845 (Reprinted, Bristol 1995, 3 vols.) with the Notes of Dr J.L. Mosheim, translated by John Harrison. Vol. 1, p. xxxiii. 10 An Antidote against Atheism, or an Appeal to the Naturall Faculties of the Minde of Man, whether there be not a God. Second edition, 1655. First published in 1652 in an edition now extremely rare The title itself suggest commitment to innate knowledge. 11 An Antidote against Atheism, p. 19. 12 Ibid..“ p.20. 13 Ibid., p. 22. 14 The Immortality of the Soul , p. 75. 15 TIS. 3, 394. 16 TIS, 3, 515. 17 TIS, 1, 28018 TIS, 1, Preface, p. xlvi.19 Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2004. 20 Essay, II. VIII. 11. 21 Works, 1823, Vol. 4, pp. 467-8.

7.

DULL SOULS AND BEASTS:TWO ANTI-CARTESIAN POLEMICS

IN LOCKE

NICHOLAS JOLLEY

Everyone knows that Locke attacks Cartesian dogmatism in the philosophy of mind.1 His opposition to such dogmatism is perhaps nowhere more evident than in his response to the distinctively Cartesian theses that the mind always thinks and that animals are just machines. Locke himself draws attention to the similarity of spirit underlying both Cartesian doctrines in a passage full of his characteristic irony:

They must needs have a penetrating sight, who can certainly see, that I think, when I cannot perceive it my self, and when I declare, that I do not; and yet can see, that Dogs or Elephants do not think, when they give all the demonstration of it imaginable, except only telling us, that they do so. (E II.i.19)

Locke criticizes the two Cartesian doctrines in much the same way. Descartes offers a question-begging argument for the thesis that the mind always thinks, while those who ‘decree’ that animals are just machines take up this opinion merely because their hypothesis (that only immaterial beings think) requires it (Locke to Collins, 21 March 1704, CL VIII 254). In opposition to such dogmatism Locke preaches respect for observation and experience; indeed, he appears in his famous guise of the champion of common sense against metaphysical speculation run wild. There is no doubt that, at least in the Essay, Locke encourages the reader to see him as the defender of common sense and respect for experience against Cartesian extravagance. But it would be a bad mistake to suppose that this is all that is at issue in Locke’s polemics; to do so would be to be deceived by one of Locke’s favorite rhetorical devices – the familiar pose of the ‘plain, blunt man’ in Mark Antony’s phrase. When

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we turn from the Essay itself to the evidence of the journals and even the Stillingfleet controversy, we see that Locke was well aware of the wider metaphysical and even theological dimensions of the issues. Locke shows that his attacks on the Cartesian doctrines serve the larger purpose of criticizing the traditional view of the mind as an immaterial substance which is thereby naturally immortal. In opposition to this picture Locke not only argues that the mind may not be an immaterial substance; in the journals, in particular, he also argues, more positively, that even if the mind is an immaterial substance, it does not follow that it is immortal in the strong sense necessary to have any bearing on our human concerns and interests.

1. Dull Souls

In a remarkable entry in his journals (dated 20 February 1682), Locke criticizes what he terms the ‘usuall physicall proofe’ of the immortality of the soul. As Locke explains it, the argument runs: ‘Matter cannot thinke ergo the soule is immateriall, noe thing can naturally destroy an immateriall thing ergo the soule is naturally immortal’ (AG 121). According to Locke, the basic trouble with this argument is that it misconceives the issue of immortality; indeed, this mistake is made by both proponents and conventional critics of the argument alike. For when personal immortality is in question, what is at issue is not a state of bare substantial existence and duration but ‘a state of sensibility.’ But the argument from immateriality is powerless to establish immortality in this strong sense; it can establish at most only a form of indestructibility common to all substances, material and immaterial. According to Locke, it is ‘manifestly false’ to say that the soul is necessarily always thinking. In a passage that anticipates the polemic of the Essay, Locke draws out the implications of the thesis that the soul always thinks for the issue of proving the soul’s immortality:

For I aske what sense or thought the soule (which is certainly then in a man) has dureing 2 or 3 howers of sound sleepe without dreameing where by it is plaine that the soule may exist, or have duration for some time without sense or perception and if it may have for this hower it may also have the same duration without perception of pain or pleasure or any thing else for the next hower and soe to eternity. Soe that to prove that immortality of the soule simply because it being naturally not to be destroid by anything it will have an eternall duration which duration may be without any perception is to prove noe other immortality of the soule

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then what belongs to one of Epicurus’s attoms viz. that it perpetually exists but has noe sense either of happynesse or misery. (AG 122)

Here, then, the ‘manifest falsity’ of the Cartesian doctrine that the mind always thinks serves as a key premise in an argument to show that immateriality does not entail immortality in a morally significant sense.2

Locke’s argument seems to take the form of a reductio. Suppose that the immateriality of the mind does entail immortality in a morally significant sense. On the assumption that the mind is immaterial, it follows, then, that the mind can never be without sensibility after death, that is, without the perception of pleasure or pain. But as experience shows, the mind is sometimes without sensibility in this life. Now if the mind can sometimes be without sensibility in this life, it can endure for ever (‘to eternity’) without it. Thus the mind both can, and cannot, survive death for ever without sensibility, or the perception of pleasure or pain. But this is absurd. Therefore, the immateriality of the mind does not entail immortality in a morally significant sense. One problem posed by this argument is that one of its premises seems stronger than is warranted.3 It does not seem correct to say that if the mind can sometimes be without perception of pleasure or pain in this life, it can endure for ever without such perception. Such a premise seems on a par with saying that if I can survive without food for a few hours, I can always survive without food.4 Why should not the nature of the mind be such that it can go for a while without perception of pleasure or pain, but cannot persist very long in such a state? Consistently with being an indestructible substance, it must restore itself, as it were, with bouts of perception of pleasure or pain. It seems that Locke might do better to fall back on the weaker claim: if the mind is sometimes without sensibility in this life, it can sometimes be without it after death. Now on such a formulation Locke can still generate a contradiction provided immortality is understood as a state of uninterrupted perception of pleasure or pain, or sensibility. But for theological purposes it might be adequate to understand immortality, more weakly, as involving post-mortem survival with interrupted perception of pleasure or pain.5 Imagine, for instance, that I survive for all eternity but am only occasionally roused from unconsciousness to experience bouts of appalling torment for my sins. If immortality took this form, the prospect of it could still make a big difference to human concerns. But if immortality is understood in this weaker sense, then Locke cannot generate the contradiction he needs. To say that immortality is a state of interrupted post-mortem sensibility is obviously consistent with saying that the mind after death can sometimes be without perception of pleasure or pain.

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It is perhaps a little unfair to subject a sketchy argument from the journals to detailed criticism; Locke indeed might object to details of the reconstruction given above. But whatever the merits of the argument, it is at least clear what Locke is trying to do: he seeks to show that the fact that our mind is sometimes without any perception at all, and thus a fortiori without any perception of pleasure or pain, has important implications for the issue of immortality. The anti-Cartesian thesis, or strictly a corollary of it, thus appears as a premise in an argument designed to sever the connection between immateriality and immortality in a strong sense. Now in the journals entry Locke does little to argue for or defend the premise itself: although he considers the objection that the mind always thinks, but sometimes forgets some of its past thinking, he dismisses it fairly brusquely. It is in the Essay itself Locke offers detailed argument against the Cartesian dogma that the mind always thinks. As we shall see, it is not entirely clear whether Locke thinks he can show that the Cartesian thesis is actually false, as opposed to a merely unproven hypothesis.

(i) The Arguments of the Essay

In the opening chapter of Book 2 of the Essay Locke adopts two different strategies for attacking the Cartesian thesis. The first is a modest epistemological one: the thesis is simply unproven dogma. Since the thesis that the mind always thinks is not self-evident, it must be proved, but to argue, as Descartes does, that it must always think because its essence is thought is to beg the question (E II.i.10). Moreover, the thesis is not established by empirical evidence: experience suggests that there are gaps in consciousness, as in dreamless sleep. As Locke engagingly puts it, in a tone that has misled readers, ‘I confess my self to have one of those dull Souls, that doth not perceive itself always to contemplate Ideas’ (E II.i.10). Locke is aware, however, of the difficulty of arguing that the thesis is actually falsified by the empirical evidence; to the objection that I slept dreamlessly all last night, Descartes can reply that my memory is deceiving me. It is uncontroversial that Locke seeks to show that Descartes’s argumentative strategy is question-begging and that the empirical evidence does not establish the thesis. What is less clear is whether Locke seeks to show in this chapter that the thesis is actually false. At first sight it may seem that the answer is obviously ‘yes’; it may seem that Locke seeks to expose the falsity of the thesis by means of a reductio ad absurdumargument. Consider, for instance, the well-known thought experiment of Castor and Pollux: these individuals share one continuously thinking soul


which systematically alternates every twelve hours between the two bodies who sleep and wake by turns; while Castor is asleep the soul thinks continuously in Pollux’s body, and vice versa. The moral of the thought experiment is that of such a scenario we are forced to say that there are two persons occupying one soul. Now Locke later writes of the ‘absurdity of two distinct Persons’ which follows from this supposition (E II.i.15). Thus it seems that Locke is arguing that the thesis leads to an absurdity, if not in the strict sense of a contradiction, at least in the informal sense of a thesis that is wildly counterintuitive. But this interpretation encounters difficulties as soon as we reflect on Locke’s discussion of personal identity with which his anti-Cartesian polemic otherwise seems so continuous. For that chapter abounds in suppositions like that of the Castor and Pollux thought-experiment, but there the moral seems to be, not that such suppositions are absurd, but rather that they force us to recognize the truth of the relativity of identity: items such as persons, souls, substances, and human beings all have different identity conditions. Locke actually addresses the issue of absurdity towards the end of the chapter:

I am apt enough to think I have in treating of this Subject made some Suppositions that will look strange to some Readers, and possibly they are so in themselves. But yet I think, they are such, as are pardonable in this ignorance we are in of the Nature of that thinking thing, that is in us, and which we look on as our selves. Did we know what it was….we might see the Absurdity of some of those Suppositions I have made. But taking, as we ordinarily do now, (in the dark concerning these Matters) the Soul of a Man, for an immaterial Substance, independent from Matter, and indifferent alike to it all, there can from the Nature of things, be no Absurdity at all, to suppose, that the same Soul may, at different times be united to different Bodies, and with them make up, for that time, one Man… (E II.xxvii.27)

Although Locke does not explicitly address the Castor and Pollux kind of scenario, he seems to be pointing a moral of general application; suppositions like that of Castor and Pollux involve no absurdity on the current state of our knowledge. One wonders, then, how Locke is entitled to speak of the absurdity of two distinct persons occupying a soul, as he does in his anti-Cartesian polemic. It may seem that Locke has simply changed his mind on this issue between the first and the second edition of the Essay (in which the chapter on personal identity was added) without making the necessary editorial alterations to the earlier discussion. It is possible to defend Locke’s actual claims about absurdity by saying that he is indeed mounting a reductio argument, but one that is ad

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hominem against the Cartesians. The key point is that the argument includes the suppressed, distinctively Cartesian premise that a person is necessarily identical with a certain soul or immaterial thinking substance. But reflection on scenarios like that of Castor and Pollux forces even the Cartesians to recognize that, according to intuitions we all share, two persons could occupy the same soul. The Cartesian doctrine thus leads to a contradiction; the argument is a strict reductio, but one that embodies a distinctively Cartesian premise about the nature of persons.6

This is an ingenious interpretation, but it receives little direct support from the text; at least in Book II, Chapter i, Locke nowhere explicitly states the Cartesian premise about persons necessary to generate the reductio.7 At this stage it is tempting to suppose that for Locke the thought-experiments show something, but that he is not quite sure what. But perhaps we can do better than that. It seems more fruitful to read the point of Locke’s polemic in the light of the concern with immortality addressed in the journals. Such an approach is indeed encouraged by Locke’s explicit concern with the issues of pleasure and pain, happiness and misery in the published Essay. Locke’s point may well be that even if the Cartesians are right about the nature of the soul, they fail to see that their doctrine has no tendency to guarantee personal immortality in a strong, morally significant sense. The Cartesian doctrine cannot rule out the possibility that our soul might survive death but in such a way that stretches of its consciousness might have nothing to do with us. Indeed, Locke may think that the Castor and Pollux thought experiments show that it is possible that my post-mortem soul might always be occupied by another person than me. The consciousness of my post-mortem soul might be as alien to me as Castor’s consciousness is to Pollux. When personal immortality is in question, what I want to know is whether I shall experience pleasure or pain, happiness or misery; the fact that my soul after death may be occupied by another person who experiences happiness or misery is irrelevant to the issue. Such an approach suggests a plausible way of regarding the polemic as a whole. Locke’s argumentative strategy may be viewed as a constructive dilemma. Either the mind always thinks or it does not. If the mind does always think, then this doctrine has no tendency to guarantee personal immortality. If the mind does not always think, then an argument for personal immortality is blocked. So either way there is no rational assurance of personal immortality. ¨


(ii) Dull Souls and Thinking Matter

The evidence of Locke’s journals suggests that his main interest in this area is in showing that immateriality does not entail immortality in a morally significant sense. Now elsewhere in the Essay Locke shows that he is also interested in undermining Descartes’s dogmatic commitment to substance dualism; in particular, Locke seeks to break down at least our resistance to the thinking-matter hypothesis. It is natural to ask whether in his polemic against the Cartesian thesis that the mind always thinks Locke is seeking to advance that project. To prepare the ground for such a discussion it is helpful to clarify the nature of Locke’s target in the polemic of Book II, Chapter i. Locke’s prime target is surely the doctrine that the mind is a persisting immaterial substance which always thinks by virtue of its essence being thought. But it is instructive to notice that there is another form that the Cartesian doctrine could take. Consistently with its always thinking, the soul might be a temporally gappy substance. On this hypothesis, during its existence the soul would think continuously, and think continuously by virtue of its essence, but it would go in and out of existence.8 Surprisingly perhaps, Descartes not only considers this option but indicates that he prefers it to the denial of the thesis that the soul always thinks:

I believe that the soul is always thinking for the same reason that I believe that light is always shining, even though there are not always eyes looking at it, and that heat is always warm though no one is being warmed by it, and that body, or extended substance, always has extension, and in general that whatever constitutes the nature of a thing always belongs to it as long as it exists. So it would be easier for me to believe that the soul ceased to exist at the times when it is supposed to cease to think than to conceive that it existed without thought (Descartes to Gibieuf, 19 January 1642, CSMK 203)

If Locke is targeting all versions of the ‘soul always thinks’ hypothesis, then this version must fall within the scope of his polemic. It is true that Locke’s arguments are not effective against this version; for instance, he cannot appeal to the empirical evidence of dreamless sleep in order to criticize it. Nor does the thought experiment of Castor and Pollux gain any traction against this version of the thesis. Of course Locke could say that the hypothesis of a soul that goes in and out of existence runs counter to the traditional notion of a substance as something that persists uninterruptedly through time; a substance, according to the Aristotelian tradition, is not only a bearer of properties but a temporal persistent. It is

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true that Locke believes that persons are temporally gappy entities, but then he is explicit that persons are not substances. Just how Locke would criticize this further version of Descartes’s thesis is not certain, but one thing is clear: Locke never suggests that in this modified form the soul always thinks thesis might be defensible. If Locke shows no sympathy for the modified version of the thesis, what doctrine, if any, does he wish to defend? His only explicit offering on this point is the suggestion that ‘the perception of Ideas [is] (as I conceive) to the soul, what motion is to the Body, not its Essence, but one of its Operations: And therefore, though thinking be supposed never so much the proper Action of the Soul, yet is not necessary to suppose that it should be always thinking, always in Action’ (E II.i.10; cf. E II.xix.4). The suggestion that thought might be an operation of the soul may seem straightforward and innocent enough, but it is in fact fraught with difficulties. The unwary reader may easily take Locke to be saying that thinking is the operation, but not the essence, of an immaterial substance; that is, he might suppose that Locke agrees with Descartes about this aspect of the ontology of souls, while disagreeing with his thesis that thought constitutes their essence. But this reading goes beyond anything Locke says. And reflection suggests that it is not philosophically attractive to combine the doctrine that souls are immaterial substances with the further thesis that thought is merely an operation of the soul. For we would be invited to suppose that through stretches of its history, the soul is endowed merely with bare powers, ungrounded, it seems, in any structural properties. And such a hypothesis might well seem to smack of barren Scholasticism. In the face of such difficulties Jonathan Bennett has argued that at least a weak form of materialism would be harmonious with Locke’s actual claims, and indeed with the overall tone of his philosophy of mind. According to Bennett, Locke’s real position may be the following:

“While the man is sleeping, and not dreaming, there isn’t any such object as his mind or soul. The fundamental reality at that time consists in a sleeping animal which can, and when it receives certain stimuli will, start thinking again.” This is a long way short of the kind of materialism that finds favor with most Anglophone philosophers today, but it is a step along the way.9

I agree with Bennett that this form of non-reductive materialism is philosophically more attractive than the other options considered so far, and that Locke would have agreed that it was; indeed, it is entirely consistent with the hypothesis, discussed by Locke in Book IV Chapter iii,


that God may have superadded the power of thinking to matter.10 But before endorsing Bennett’s account of Locke’s real position, we need to pay closer attention to further features of Locke’s text. Locke does not offer much in the way of help, but what he does offer is suggestive. For any reader attuned to Locke’s philosophy as a whole, the most striking features of the passage are the negative claim about essence and the parallel between soul and body. We know that the topic of essences was one to which Locke devoted serious and sustained attention. According to Locke, any philosophically worthwhile discussion of the nature of essences must distinguish between the real and the nominal essence. As Locke explains in Book III, the nominal essence is an abstract, general idea constituted by that set of (observable) properties in terms of which we classify particulars into sorts; the real essence, by contrast, is that internal constitution of a thing on which its observable properties depend (E III.iii.15-17). Thus when Locke denies that thinking is the essence of the soul, it is natural to ask whether it is real or nominal essences that are at issue, or perhaps both. Consistently with the suggestive parallel with body and motion, Locke could say that thought does not constitute, and is not even part of, the nominal essence of the soul; for we know that Locke writes that the nominal essence of body can be captured by saying that it is an extended, solid substance (i.e. without the inclusion of motion) (E III.vi.21; cf. E III.x.15). In places Locke seems to allow that the nominal essence of mind or spirit can be captured by saying that it is a thing with a power of thinking (E II.xxiii.3). However, Locke has less to say about the nominal essence of mind or spirit than about the nominal essence of body. Moreover, it is a complicating fact that, at least according to Locke’s official teaching, there is no right or wrong answer to questions of the form: what is the nominal essence of x?; nominal essences simply differ from person to person depending on their observation of co-occurrent properties and their decisions about which properties to include. When he denies that thinking is the essence of the mind, Locke seems to be addressing an issue where there is a fact of the matter that can in principle be discovered. Thus it seems safest to say that Locke’s negative thesis should be understood as a claim about the level of real essences: thought does not constitute the real essence of mind or soul. If thought does not constitute the real essence of mind or soul, then what does constitute it? Here we encounter Locke’s famous thesis about real essences, made most conspicuously in connection with so-called natural kinds, that they are unknown to us: the real essence of gold, for instance, is a certain unknown constitution of physical particles. Now it is consistent with Locke’s agnosticism in this area that the real essence of the

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soul might turn out to be a certain structure of particles, say in the brain. But it is also consistent with Locke’s agnosticism about real essences that the real essence of the soul might be something that is neither mental (according to our current concepts) nor physical at all.11 The materialist option is thus not the only option that is left open by Locke’s polemic against the thesis that the soul always thinks.

2. Beasts

We have seen that, in the Essay and elsewhere, Locke regards the beast-machine doctrine, no less than the thesis that the mind always thinks, as a symptom of the same philosophical vice: both doctrines are expressions of metaphysical dogmatism that flies in the face of common sense and pays insufficient respect to observation and experience. In a letter to Collins Locke writes that those like Norris who subscribe to the beast-machine doctrine, ‘seem to me to decree rather than to argue. They against all evidence of sense and reason decree Brutes to be machins onely because their hypothesis requires it and then with a like authority suppose…what they should prove, viz. that whatsoever thinks is immaterial’ (Locke to Collins, 21 March 1704, CL VIII 254). Now Locke may indeed share the outrage of his compatriot Henry More and others at Descartes’s doctrine of the beast-machine, but again, it would be wholly mistaken to suppose that on this issue Locke is simply concerned to defend common sense against Cartesian dogmatism. In the same journal entry in which he stigmatizes the thesis that the soul always thinks as manifestly false, he shows himself well aware of how issues about immortality and thinking matter are involved in debates over the beast-machine doctrine. In particular, as we shall see, Locke holds that one argument for the beast-machine doctrine depends on the false assumption that immateriality entails immortality in the strong, morally significant sense. It is in the Stillingfleet controversy rather than the Essay that Locke returns to the explicit discussion of these issues. But first we must consider Locke’s treatment of animals in the Essay.

(i) The Argument of the Essay

At first sight Locke’s discussion of the status of animals in the Essay is disappointing. Certainly it stands in striking contrast to his polemic against the Cartesian thesis that the soul always thinks. Not merely does Locke fail to explore the metaphysical and theological dimensions of the beast-machine doctrine in the Essay; he does not engage in extended polemic


against it. Indeed, although there are a number of sharp remarks at its expense, there is little or nothing in the way of direct arguments designed to refute the doctrine; Locke takes it as simply obvious that animals have at least some mental faculties. Perhaps the explanation of this difference in the approaches to the two issues is that the beast-machine doctrine was widely regarded as discredited; certainly it failed to impress readers of Descartes such as Henry More. But though Locke does not seek to refute the Cartesian dogma in the Essay, he does offer an interesting argument for a thesis about the mental faculties of animals; indeed, the argument draws on Descartes himself for inspiration. As we shall see, this argument bears at least indirectly on the issue of the thinking-matter hypothesis. In a passage buried deep in the chapter ‘Of Discerning’ Locke offers an argument for the thesis that animals lack the power of abstracting. A striking feature of this argument is its similarity in structure to a famous argument of Descartes’s in the Discourse on Method. The Lockean argument is so similar at points that it is worth quoting Descartes’s argument to bring out the similarity. Here is how Descartes argues for the thesis that animals lack reason or intelligence:

…we can also know the difference between man and beast. For it is quite remarkable that there are no men so dull-witted or stupid – and this includes even madmen – that they are incapable of arranging various words together and forming an utterance from them in order to make their thoughts understood; whereas there is no other animal, however perfect and well-endowed it may be, that can do the like. This does not happen because they lack the necessary organs, for we see that magpies and parrots can utter words as we do, and yet they cannot speak as we do: that is, they cannot show that they are thinking what they are saying. On the other hand, men born deaf and dumb, and thus deprived of speech-organs as much as the beast or even more so, normally invent their own signs to make themselves understood by those who, being regularly in their company, have the time to learn their language. This shows not merely that the beasts have less reason than men, but that they have no reason at all. (CSM I 140)

Now Locke agrees with Descartes that considerations about language and vocal organs show something about animals, but he believes that they show less than Descartes thinks: what they show is simply that animals lack one mental faculty that is possessed by human beings:

This, I think, I may be positive in, That the power of Abstracting is not at all in them; and that the having of general Ideas, is that which puts a perfect distinction betwixt Man and Brutes; and is an Excellency which the

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faculties of Brutes do by no means attain to. For it is evident, we observe no foot-steps in them, of making use of general signs for universal Ideas;from which we have reason to imagine, that they have not the faculty of abstracting, or making general Ideas, since they have no use of Words, or any other general Signs. Nor can it be imputed to their want of fit Organs, to frame articulate Sounds that they have no use, or knowledge of general Words; since many of them, we find, can fashion such Sounds, and pronounce Words distinctly enough, but never with any such application. And on the other side, Men, who through some defect in the Organs, want words, yet fail not to express their universal Ideas by signs, which serve them instead of general words, a faculty which we see Beasts come short in. And therefore I think we may suppose, That ‘tis in this, that the species of Brutes arediscriminated from Man, and ‘tis that proper difference wherein they are wholly separated, and which at last widens to so vast a distance. (E II.xi.10-11)

Locke’s argument can thus be reconstructed as follows: (1) If animals have the power of abstraction, then if they

have fit vocal organs, they use general terms. (2) Animals have fit vocal organs. (3) Animals do not use general terms. (4) Therefore, animals lack the power of abstraction.

Now Locke has earlier claimed in the same chapter that animals have limited powers of comparing, compounding, and discerning their ideas. The picture that emerges, then, is that animals have some mental faculties in common with human beings, while lacking one other faculty altogether. The thesis that animals lack the power or faculty of abstraction has important implications for epistemology. It is a central tenet of Locke’s theory of knowledge that ‘all general Knowledge lies only in our own Thoughts and consists barely in the contemplation of our abstract Ideas’(E IV.vi.13); abstract ideas are integral to Locke’s anti-Cartesian, anti-nativist theory of scientia or universal, necessary knowledge. Thus animals have reason, but they are incapable of scientia. But though Locke’s thesis is important for epistemology, it has no direct implications for metaphysics. Certainly, it does not entail materialism in any form; it is consistent, for instance, with a Leibnizian ontology according to which animals, like human beings, have souls which are immaterial substances though of a less excellent kind. Nonetheless, the account of animal mentality that Locke sketches in the chapter ‘Of Discerning’ is certainly harmonious with the thinking-matter hypothesis that Locke refuses to exclude in Book IV of the Essay: why not suppose that differences between human and animal consciousness are to be understood in terms of


differences in the organization of matter in the two cases? That Locke himself was well aware of how the thinking-matter hypothesis could accommodate his account of animal and human consciousness is shown by a passage in his exchange with Stillingfleet. As reported by Locke, Stillingfleet challenges him directly about the relationship between his thinking-matter hypothesis and his account of the mental faculties of animals: ‘if it may be in the power of matter to think, how comes it to be so impossible for such organized bodies as the brutes have, to enlarge their ideas by abstraction?’ (LW IV 468). As we would expect, Stillingfleet’s challenge gave Locke little trouble. Locke initially denies that he ever placed thought within the natural powers of matter: his hypothesis is of course that God superadds thought to matter fitly disposed. But having corrected that error, Locke responds in the way that might be expected:

But if you mean that certain parcels of matter, ordered by the divine power as seems fit to him, may be made capable of receiving from his omnipotency the faculty of thinking; that indeed I say, and that being granted, the answer to your question is easy, since if omnipotency can give thought to any solid substance, it is not hard to conceive, that God may give that faculty in a higher or lower degree, as it pleases him, who knows what disposition of the subject is suited to such a particular way or degree of thinking. (LW IV 468)

Locke’s response to Stillingfleet may still leave unanswered difficulties about how far, and in what way, God’s omnipotence is constrained by the organization of matter or ‘disposition of the subject’. But it does show that Locke thought, with some reason, that it is a virtue of the thinking-matter hypothesis that it can easily accommodate what he takes to be the facts about human and animal mentality.

(ii) Arguments of the Stillingfleet Controversy and the Journals

In the Essay itself, then, Locke is reticent about the metaphysical and theological dimensions of the debate over the status of animals; in the controversy with Stillingfleet and in the journals, however, he is much more forthcoming. Indeed, in the replies to Stillingfleet Locke even outlines an argument from animal sensation for at least a restricted version of the thinking-matter hypothesis:

Though to me sensation be comprehended under thinking in general, yet in the foregoing discourse, I have spoken of sense in brutes, as distinct from

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thinking. Because your Lordship, as I remember, speaks of sense in brutes. But here I take liberty to observe, that if your Lordship allows brutes to have sensation it will follow either that God can and doth give to some parcels of matter a power of perception and thinking; or that all animals have immaterial souls and consequently, according to your Lordship, immortal souls, as well as men; and to say that fleas and mites, etc. have immortal souls as well as men will possibly be looked on, as going a great way to serve an hypothesis. (LW IV 466)

Locke’s argument, then, can be reconstructed in the following form: (1) Animals have sensations.

(2) If animals have sensations, then either matter thinks in animals (by divine superaddition) or they have immaterial souls.

(3) Therefore, either matter thinks in animals (by divine superaddition) or they have immaterial souls.

(4) If animals have immaterial souls, they have immortal souls.

(5) But animals do not have immortal souls. (6) Therefore, animals do not have immaterial souls. (7) Therefore, matter thinks in animals (by divine

superaddition). There is no doubt that this is a simple and elegant argument which shows how the commonsense assumption of animal sensation can be made to serve the thinking-matter hypothesis, at least in a modest form. But though Locke shows how the argument would go, does he himself endorse the argument? Even in the Stillingfleet controversy Locke indicates that the argument is an ad hominem one; he says merely that ‘according to your Lordship’ premise (4) is true. But of course we know from the journal entry of 1682 discussed above that Locke does not accept premise (4), at least when immortality is understood in a strong sense as involving a state of sensibility. Let us return to Locke’s critique of the ‘usuall physicall proofe’ of the soul’s immortality in the journal entry:

Those who oppose these men [i.e. the proponents of the proof] presse them very hard with the soules of beasts for say they beasts feele i.e. thinke and therefore their souls are immateriall and consequently immortall. This has by some men been judged soe urgent that they have rather thought fit to conclude all beasts perfect machins rather then allow their soules immortality or annihilation both which seeme harsh doctrines, the one being out of the reach of nature and soe cannot be recond as the naturall state of beasts after this life and the other equalling them in great measure to the state of man if they shall be immortall as well as he. (AG 121)


Here Locke shows his awareness of how the Cartesians have exploited the thesis that immateriality entails immortality to argue for the beast-machine doctrine. But as Locke goes on to remark, parties to the debate have bought into a false conception of immortality; for Locke, as we have seen, immortality is a state of sensibility, not a state of bare subsistence. And immortality in this strong sense is not entailed by immateriality. It seems, then, that the Stillingfleet controversy does not give us an argument for a version of the thinking-matter hypothesis that Locke is prepared to endorse; unless Locke has changed his mind since the time of the journal entry, he not merely questions, but actually rejects, premise (4). It might even be thought that Locke provides the resources for a defense of the attribution of immaterial souls to animals, for he shows that such an attribution does not raise the theological difficulties that it has been supposed to raise. Locke, as it were, can draw the sting out of such an attribution. But to view Locke’s intentions in this light would surely be a mistake. To see this, consider the following Cartesian argument: (1) If animals think (have sensations), they have immaterial souls. (2) If animals have immaterial souls, they have immortal souls. (3) But animals do not have immortal souls. (4) Therefore, animals do not have immaterial souls. (5) Therefore, animals do not think (do not have sensations).12

Locke’s aim is surely to show that the Cartesian argument is vulnerable at two points: not only are there grounds for questioning (1), but there are reasons for saying that (2) is actually false, when immortality is properly understood. And with regard to the project of answering Stillingfleet we may say that Locke seeks to confront him with a dilemma concerning the premise that if animals have immaterial souls, they have immortal souls. If the premise is true, then there is a simple argument from animal sensation (accepted by Stillingfleet) for at least a modest version of the thinking matter hypothesis. If the premise is false, then a standard argument for immortality is blocked. Either way Stillingfleet is forced to accept an unpalatable conclusion.

It is not surprising that Locke encourages the reader to see connections between the two anti-Cartesian polemics discussed in this chapter; for they are in a way two sides of the same coin. Locke’s complaint about the thesis that the mind always thinks is that it accords too much thought to human beings; his complaint about the beast-machine doctrine is that it accords too little to beasts; indeed, it accords them none at all. And of course, as we have seen, both Cartesian doctrines exemplify the spirit of dogmatism which is prepared to override the data of experience. But

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Locke’s aim is not simply to uphold the claims of observation and common sense; in both cases he seeks to show how the falsity of the Cartesian doctrines can be exploited for metaphysical and theological purposes. In this connection Locke’s principal aim is to sever the connection between immateriality and immortality; a subsidiary aim, it seems, is to weaken resistance to the thinking-matter hypothesis. Because of our contemporary concerns it is no doubt the latter aim that is the more conspicuous today. Certainly, readers are likely to be impressed by the way in which the thinking-matter hypothesis can accommodate both animal consciousness and the denial that the mind always thinks.

Abbreviations

AG An Early Draft of Locke’s Essay together with Excerpts from his Journals, ed. R.I. Aaron and J. Gibb (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936)

CL The Correspondence of John Locke, 8 vols, ed. E.S. De Beer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976-89)

CSM The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 2 vols., ed. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)

CSMK The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 3, The Correspondenceed. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, D. Murdoch, and A. Kenny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)

E John Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P.H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975)

LW The Works of John Locke, 10 vols (London, 1823, repr. Scientia Verlag: Aalen, 1963)

Notes

1 I am grateful to Sean Greenberg for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.2 I borrow this helpful phrase from Michael Ayers who discusses this passage in his Locke, vol. II (London: Routledge, 1991), 254 3 Another problem is that the argument may seem to conflate the necessity of the consequence and the necessity of the consequent. In order to generate a contradiction Locke needs the sub-conclusion that the mind can never be without sensibility after death. But on Locke’s analysis of immortality in a morally significant sense, this is equivalent to the claim that the mind is necessarily immortal. But all Locke is entitled to is the premise that necessarily, if the mind is immaterial, it is immortal. 4 Of course, the human body, unlike the mind on Locke’s supposition, is not an indestructible substance. But it is still false to say that if I (that is, my human body)


can survive for a few hours without food, I can survive without it for the whole course of a normal human life. 5 To say this is not to say that any theologian of note has actually held such a position.6 See David Soles and Katherine Bradfield, “Some Remarks on Locke’s Use of Thought Experiments,” Locke Studies 1 (2001), 31-62. 7 See, however, E II.xxvii.12 where Locke alludes to the Cartesian thesis that “’tis one immaterial Spirit that makes the same Person in Men.” 8 I am grateful to Nicholas Sinigaglia for discussion of this point. 9 J. Bennett, “Locke’s Philosophy of Mind,“ V. Chappell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 114. 10 “We have the Ideas of Matter and Thinking, but possibly shall never be able to know, whether any mere material Being thinks, or no; it being impossible for us, by the contemplation of our own Ideas, without revelation, to discover, whether Omnipotency has not given to some Systems of Matter fitly disposed, a power to perceive and think, or else joined and fixed to Matter so disposed, a thinking immaterial Substance: It being, in respect of our Notions, not much more remote from our Comprehension to conceive, that GOD can, if he pleases, superadd to Matter a Faculty of Thinking, than that he should superadd to it another Substance, with a Faculty of Thinking” (E IV.iii.6). 11 For this highly original approach to Locke on the mind-body problem, see Han-Kyul Kim, “Locke and the Mind-Body Problem: An Interpretation of his Agnosticism,” Philosophy 83 (2008), 439-58, and “What Kind of Philosopher was Locke on Mind and Body?” (unpublished paper). 12 For versions of this argument, see Descartes to the Marquess of Newcastle, 23 November 1646 (CSMK 304), and Descartes to More, 5 February 1649 (CSMK 365-6).

8.

BERKELEY’S LAST WORD ON SPIRIT

MARGARET ATHERTON

Readers of Berkeley have frequently been unhappy that he had so little to say about what should be a cornerstone of his theory, immaterial substance or spirit. They have lamented that he never finished the Part II of Principles of Human Knowledge in which he planned to discuss mind or spirit, and some have uncharitably speculated that it was in fact problems with the account he projected that is the reason why Berkeley never gave us this work. For it is unfortunately the case that Berkeley’s remarks on spirit are not only brief and scattered, but the few things that he does say seem to point in different directions. Trying to make sense of what he says has led commentators in a number of different and even conflicting directions. These conflicts emerge, not because commentators have not read the texts under dispute with sufficient care, but because the texts themselves are not conclusive. Proponents of differing interpretations each have their favorite texts to quote, but in a situation like this, dueling quotations will not settle the matter. Some have tried, with considerable success to fill in the gaps in the published works by mining the notes Berkeley made for himself in his Philosophical Commentaries.1 But relying on these notes is always tricky, since there is no sure way of knowing which of the positions expressed there are ones to which Berkeley is going to end up committed, hence what he might have put into Part II of the Principles. There is, however, one other place to turn for hints about what Berkeley would have said if he had written more on spirit and that is to the four speeches that Berkeley added to the 1734 edition of Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, some twenty-one years after he had brought out the first edition, and long after he had given up the idea of writing further parts of the Principles. It seems reasonable to regard these speeches as putting forward the position to which Berkeley regarded himself as committed and which he thought was consistent with whatever else about spirit he did not edit out from his published work at

Margaret Atherton 116

that time. What I am going to propose is that we can regard these speeches as encapsulating Berkeley’s final view on spirit and that we can use them as a touchstone in assessing the viability of particular interpretations of Berkeley’s account of mind or spirit. I want to concentrate, in particular, on Philonous’ last speech, where Berkeley permits him a note of exasperation. “How often must I repeat”, Philonous says, and it is easy to imagine that Berkeley is speaking for himself here. Perhaps Berkeley, like Philonous, felt that he had to clear up misunderstandings more frequently than he would have liked. I think this speech is especially interesting, because it covers several important points about self, mind or spirit. The full speech runs as follows:

How often must I repeat, that I know or am conscious of my own being; and that I my self am not my ideas, but something else, a thinking active principle that perceives, knows, wills, and operates about ideas. I know that I, one and the same self, perceive both colours and sounds: that a colour cannot perceive a sound nor a sound a colour: that I am therefore one individual principle, distinct from colour and sound; and for the same reason, from all other sensible things and inert ideas. But I am not in like manner conscious either of the existence or essence of matter. On the contrary, I know that nothing inconsistent can exist, and that the existence of matter implies an inconsistency. Farther, I know what I mean, when I affirm there is a spiritual substance or support of ideas, that is, that a spirit knows and perceives ideas. But I do not know what is meant, when it is said, that an unperceiving substance hath inherent in it and supports either ideas or the archetypes of ideas. There is therefore upon the whole no parity of case between spirit and matter.2

This then is what I am calling Berkeley’s last word on spirit, and I am going to propose that it includes all the points that must be included in an interpretation of Berkeley’s theory of spirit.3

The context in which Philonous lays down this set of remarks is known as “Hylas’ parity argument”, the argument that accuses Berkeley of inconsistently rejecting material substance while embracing spiritual substance.4 In the passage Berkeley gives a description of “my self”, as “a thinking, active principle that perceives, knows and wills and operates about ideas”, a description which is similar, indeed, strikingly similar, to others he has given. Consider two that come early in the Principles. The first identifies

Something which knows or perceives [ideas], and exercises divers operations, as willing, imagining, remembering about them. The perceiving active being is what I call mind, spirit, soul, or my self. (PHK 2)

Berkeley’s Last Word on Spirit 117

Or, still in the early sections of the Principles, Berkeley tells us

A spirit is one, undivided active being: as it perceives ideas, it is called the understanding, and as it produces or otherwise operates about them, it is called the will. (PHK 27)

The passage added in 1734 does not, it would seem, intend to alter significantly our understanding of what a self or mind is. It does, however, make several important points about this “thinking active being”. Berkeley tells us that it is coherent to understand this being as a “spiritual substance or support for ideas.” He also tells us that we are conscious of the existence and essence of this being. And finally, he says that we are aware that this principle of which we are conscious is “distinct from all sensible things and inert ideas.” So, taking this passage seriously, no account of Berkeley’s theory of self, mind or spirit is adequate unless it explains the sense in which spirit is a substance supporting ideas, that it is accessible, sometimes Berkeley says immediately, to consciousness, and that it is distinct from ideas. I have, it might be said, thrown down a gauntlet here in insisting that no account of Berkeley’s theory of mind is adequate unless it is consistent with this passage. For many readers of Berkeley have found one or another element of the picture drawn here to be sufficiently problematic that they have been prepared to argue that Berkeley is not actually committed to all of the claims being made here. Some have been unhappy with Berkeley’s claim that mind is a substance and have put forward interpretations in which he does not endorse this view.5 Others have been puzzled about how Berkeley could suppose we are conscious or aware of immaterial substance.6 Still others have asked how Berkeley could hold both that ideas are distinct from the mind and that they depend upon the mind.7 The family of claims made in this passage however is not entirely new. Descartes’ account of self or mind relies on some similar points. One way, therefore, to make sense of the passage Berkeley added to Three Dialogues would be to follow the lead of those who maintain that Berkeley’s account of mind is to all intents and purposes Cartesian.8 The question I am going to pursue therefore is whether it is possible to find in Descartes hints to help understand how Berkeley could hold all of the problematic views he asserts in our passage about spirit. The first and most central claim on which Descartes and Berkeley apparently agree as well as one of the most difficult to understand is the ontological claim that mind, self or spirit is a substance. The first issue I want to look at, then, is whether what Descartes means by substance and his reasons for calling mind a substance will be helpful in understanding


Berkeley’s similar claim. Descartes does not use the word “substance” all that often; indeed, there are only two places where he explains what he means by substance in the context of mind. (Indeed, one of the reasons why the views of both Descartes and Berkeley on spirit have been difficult to grasp has been their choice of very old-fashioned vocabulary to express very new-fangled ideas.) The first of Descartes’ accounts of substance is in the Second Set of Replies to the Objections to the Meditations, in which Descartes had been requested to lay out his argument more geometrico. In complying, Descartes gave a definition of substance as “everything in which whatever we perceive immediately resides, as in a subject, or to everything by means of which whatever we perceive exists.” (CSM I I, 114)9 He goes on to explain that he is speaking of a “property, quality or attribute” so long as we have a real idea of such properties, qualities or attributes. So, in this case, a substance is just that in which properties, qualities and attributes reside, and mind, as he goes on to say, is the substance in which thought resides.

Descartes is apparently not telling us much more here than that a substance is the subject of predication. Mind is that thing of which thought is predicable. This account of mental substance seems fairly unhelpful as a way of understanding what Berkeley is getting at. It seems to run afoul of passages, such as PHK 49, where Berkeley rejects this way of talking. He writes there:

As to what philosophers say of subject and mode, this seems very groundless and unintelligible. For instance, in this proposition, a die is hard, extended and square, they will have it that the word die denotes a subject or substance, distinct from the hardness, extension and figure, which are predicated of it, and in which they exist. This I cannot comprehend: to me a die seems to be nothing distinct from those things which are termed its modes or accidents. And to say a die is hard, extended and square, is not to attribute those qualities to a subject distinct from and supporting them, but only an explication of the word die. (PHK 49)

It is true that the example discussed here is of a piece of matter, and matter or material substance is considered by Berkeley to be entirely incoherent, but it is not implausible to imagine Berkeley saying that the sentence, “a mind is thinking”, is saying something about what “mind” means, and not attributing a quality to a subject distinct from that quality Descartes’ second discussion of substance, in Principles of Philosophy,however, is much more elaborate and informative. He gives an entirely new definition of what it is to be a substance:


By substance we can understand nothing other than a thing which exists in such a way as to depend on no other thing for its existence. (PP I Art. 51, CSM I, 210)

Substance is no longer the subject of predication, but is instead an independently existing entity. When applied to created entities, it is that which depends on nothing else (but God’s concurrence) in order to exist. The picture is that anything that is not a substance depends on the nature of some substance in order to exist and hence can be understood only in terms of the nature of the substance on which it depends. We can make use of this conception of substance as an independent being on which other things depend only through a grasp of the nature of the substance, what Descartes calls its principal attribute. In the case of mind, this principal attribute is thought. In order to understand the being of mind, all I have to grasp is its nature as thought, but everything else about mind has to be understood as dependent upon thought to exist. Descartes makes a couple of distinctions that he thinks need to be taken into account in order to understand the relation between a substance and its nature, and between independent and dependent being. He says that the distinction between a substance and its principal attribute or nature is just a conceptual one, and not a real distinction. This is because the nature identifies what has to exist or to be present in order for a thing of this sort to exist. Without thinking, there is no mind. There is no substance waiting as it were to have thinking pinned on it because thinking is the way in which substances of this sort exist. Descartes says:

Thought and extension can be regarded as constituting the natures of intelligent substance and corporeal substance; they must then be considered as nothing else but thinking substance itself and extended substance itself—that is, as mind and body. In this way we will have a very clear and distinct understanding of them. (PP I, Art. 63, CSM I, 215)

So in this sense, mind just is a thinking substance, a thing that thinks. Descartes goes on to say, however, that there is a sense in which

thought is not the same as mind, for, when we are talking about a single mind with many thoughts, then we want to consider these many thoughts as modes of the one mind. Here, we want to think of these thoughts as modes in order to bring to the fore their dependency on minds, that is, that they are not separable from minds. Were this to be the case, Descartes says, we would be treating these thoughts, falsely, as if they were substances. This discussion of thinking substance, as it is laid out in Principles of Philosophy, is no longer open to the kind of criticism


Berkeley leveled in PHK 49. Descartes has been at pains to point out that it is not appropriate to think of substance as a distinct subject to which attributes are pinned, because, on the one hand, the very being of the thing that thinks is its thinking, and on the other, because thoughts are determinations of that thinking, with only a dependent existence. Descartes’ second account of thinking substance is a much more promising model to use in interpreting Berkeley’s similar claims. It would suggest that we take Berkeley’s statement that mind is a substance because it supports ideas as an expression of the dependency relation that Descartes takes to exist between mind and its states. But before we plunge ahead with this line of argument, there is one serious problem with using Descartes’ theory as a model for understanding Berkeley’s that needs to be addressed. In the way in which Descartes lays out his account in Principles of Philosophy, in the passages we have just been discussing, Descartes maintains a strict parallel between thinking substance and corporeal substance. Everything he says about corporeal substance he also says about thinking substance. So far as Descartes is concerned, there is parity between the two kinds of substances. How then is it possible to call Berkeley’s a Cartesian mind, without opening him up to Hylas’ parity argument, the very argument our passage is designed to refute? There is, in addition, one matter that might seem to rule out any meaningful comparison between Descartes and Berkeley right from the start and that is that Berkeley denies that we can have any idea of minds, while Descartes thinks I can have a clear and distinct idea of my self or mind. The importance of this difference has been disputed by Charles McCracken, who suggests that both men would be prepared to agree that we have no image of mind. In any case, I think a resolution of this matter must await further clarification, so I want to set it aside for a moment to look at Descartes’ treatment of mind and body. There are two crucial issues that need attention. The first is the way in which Descartes identifies the nature of each kind of independent being or substance, and the second is the way in which he characterizes the relationship between substance and that which depends upon it. Descartes’ position with respect to body is fairly well understood. The principal attribute of body is extension, that without which no body exists, and that which constitutes the way in which bodies exist as bodies. Any property of a body is a determined way of being extended, hence a mode of body, and unless the property in question is a way of being extended, it doesn’t belong to body. On this kind of view to say that modes of body depend upon body is in fact to say they are conceptually dependent upon body, and flow from the nature of body in the sense that they can be


demonstrated to exist as a determinable of that nature. As Descartes explains in Principles of Philosophy II, 64, it is because of the way in which properties of body follow from the nature of body that physics can be understood as a branch of geometry. So, if this is Descartes’ account of the nature of body, what would a parallel account of mind look like? Walter Ott, in a very interesting paper,10 offers an approach that is, in fact, strictly parallel. His idea is that, on Descartes’ theory of body, to say that the distinction between the corporeal substance and its essence or nature is strictly conceptual is to say the substance and its essence are actually identical. A body just is extension in length, breadth and depth. So the parallel claim for mind is that thinking substance just is thought and properties of thinking substances are determinables of its nature as thought, modes of thought in the same sense that properties of bodies are modes of extension. Ott’s view, and this certainly seems right, is that if this is Descartes’ theory of mind, then Berkeley was not adopting Descartes’ account, but was instead opposing it. He offers as evidence that Berkeley was thinking critically of Descartes a letter Berkeley wrote to Samuel Molyneux on Dec 8, 1709, in which he said:

In Med 3 and in the Answer to the 3: Objection of Hobbes he plainly distinguisheth betwixt himself and cogitation, betwixt an extended substance and extension, and nevertheless throughout his Principles he confounds those things as do likewise his followers.11

Interestingly, the points covered by Berkeley in his letter to Molyneux also form the subject of a series of remarks towards the end of his Notebooks, presumably made at the same time that he was writing to Molyneux. Two of these remarks are particularly germane. Entry 795 reads:

M.S. Descartes owns we know not a substance immediately by it self but by this alone that it is the subject of several acts. Answer to the 2nd

objection of Hobbs.12

Hobbes’ objection concerns the inference from “I am thinking” to “I am a thinking thing”. In his reply, Descartes asserts that he is not, as Hobbes charges, identifying mind and its faculties, but rather claiming minds are things endowed with thought. Berkeley’s second entry, 798, emphasizes this point.

S Descartes in answer to Object: 3 of Hobbs owns he is distinct from thought as a thing from its modus or manner.


It seems that Berkeley in the letter to Molyneux is saying nothing more than what many readers of Descartes (including Ott) have pointed out: that Descartes’ position is not easy to identify from his scattered and not always clear remarks. Berkeley, however, seems to be well aware of at least one reading of Descartes in which mind is not held to be identical to its essence. Indeed, one might speculate that both Descartes and Berkeley are faced with a common problem. It is in the Meditations that Descartes uses the perspective that he considers useful for developing and understanding his position, that of the first person, and here he uses the terminology of “I, a thinking thing” that distinguishes his self from his thinking. It is in the Principles, where Descartes tries to express his ideas in the third-person vocabulary of substance and principle attribute that the appearance of parity between mind and body emerges. It would not be surprising if the fit between these two texts is not perfect and also reasonable that what ought to go is the apparent identity of immaterial substance and thought. Similar tensions might also be found in the way in which Berkeley is thinking and talking about mind. Although he retains Descartes’ third-person academic term “substance”, and with it the view that there is a dependency relation between mind and its ideas, Berkeley too often approaches the mind as a first person problem, as witnessed by the many thought experiments he urges on his readers.13 So Berkeley too is using old-fashioned vocabulary to express a dependency relation, without, as he states clearly, intending to identify mind and thought.14

Before we proceed to make use of this Cartesian model to explicate Berkeley’s views of mind, there is one further disanalogy between the two that must be addressed. In the various discussions Descartes provides of mind I have been looking at here, he identifies ideas as modes or modifications of mind. But this is specifically something Berkeley disavows, most strikingly in the passage from the Principles, PHK 49, from which I have already quoted. Earlier in that self-same passage Berkeley has denied that ideas are in the mind as modes of mind. Here is what he says in the first part of the passage:

…it may perhaps be objected, that if extension and figure exist only in the mind, it follows that the mind is extended and figured, since extension is a mode or attribute, which (to speak with the Schools) is predicated of the subject in which it exists. I answer, these qualities are in the mind only as they are perceived by it, that is, not by way of mode or attribute, but only by way of idea, and it no where follows, that the soul or mind is extended because extension exists in it alone, than it does that it is red or blue,


because these colours are on all hands acknowledged to exist in it and no where else.

The objection Berkeley is looking at is one that says, starting from a consideration of extension and figure, if they are to be attributed to the mind, then the mind has to be extended and figured. In his response, Berkeley denies that this captures the way in which extension and figure are in the mind. They are in the mind because they are perceived by it, and not as a mode or attribute. Having made this point, Berkeley goes on to make one of his remarks about what is agreed “on all hands.” Everyone, he says, thinks that colors like red or blue exist only in the mind, but no one thinks this means that the mind is red or blue. Such a remark, as always, presents us with the problem of working out who Berkeley might have had in mind and what they were all in agreement about.15 But Descartes is at least a potential candidate, since Descartes certainly held that sensations of color exist only in the mind. This suggests Berkeley might have been aware of the possibility that, even though Descartes did refer to thoughts as modes of mind, he did not think this meant that he thought sensations were in the mind by qualifying it, but were instead in the mind because of some other relation sensations and ideas bear to mind. So, because it has been possible to suppose that, in various ways, Descartes might not have been committed to an exact parallel between thinking and corporeal substance, the possibility that Berkeley’s is a Cartesian mind still exists. Certainly both Descartes and Berkeley describe the self, soul, mind or spirit as a substance. Berkeley most often characterizes this substance as perceiving, Descartes as thinking, the thing that thinks or the subject of conscious thought. So in both cases, the way the substance exists is by doing something, thinking or perceiving. In neither case is it necessary to think of the mind as a propertyless substrate or to take the mind to be identical with thought or with its thoughts. And in both cases, what the mind does, thinking or perceiving, is that to which we look in order to understand the existence of ideas. Berkeley says that perceiving supports ideas and Descartes says that thoughts depend on mind. In both cases, the relation between minds and ideas is not symmetrical.16 It is an asymmetrical dependency relation, in which the thinking or perceiving that is the existence of minds constitutes the existence of ideas. Ideas only exist because of something that minds do, and it is the doing or the agency of minds that makes possible the existence of ideas. This asymmetry is the reason why ideas have an existence distinct from minds, they have a distinct kind of existence, dependent existence, not like the independent existence of minds. The existence of ideas is not separable from minds,


however. Unless perceiving is taking place, there are no ideas, but in being perceived, ideas exist. Descartes’ account of substance in the Principles of Philosophy in which the important relation is between independent and dependent existence has provided a template for thinking about both Descartes’ and Berkeley’s account of mind.17

So far, this has been a roundabout way of unpacking what Berkeley is getting at when he says in our passage, “I know what I mean, when I affirm that there is a spiritual substance or support of ideas, that is, a spirit knows and perceives ideas.” I have argued that it is not out of place to accept the help of Descartes in elucidating this part of the passage. The passage begins with a statement which has been no less controversial. It talks about the fact that this self, whose substantial nature we have just been discussing is in fact accessible to consciousness : “I know or am conscious of my own being; and that I my self am not my ideas, but something else, a thinking active principle that perceives, knows, wills, and operates about ideas.” Berkeley is in this passage telling us that the perceiving mind we have just identified as the immaterial support for ideas is something of which I am consciously aware. The thinking or perceiving does not describe some engine in us, outside the realm of our consciousness but generating the ideas of which we are conscious, but is instead included as part of the event of perceiving ideas. When I perceive red or blue or loud or soft I am also supposed to be aware of something else, which is that on which ideas depend. Still worse, in developing an account of mind as substance, it has been described as doing something, thinking or perceiving. It is through the agency of the thinking or perceiving mind that ideas come to exist. But in perceiving ideas of sense like red or blue or soft or hard, we are most often described as receptive. We talk about these ideas as had by or received by the mind, rather than talking about the mind’s doing something in order for these ideas to exist. And, for Berkeley, it is of course important to stress the mind’s passivity with respect to ideas of sense, and to call our attention to the fact that the agent of sensible ideas is not our own mind. The problem that we are currently facing then is how to put this particular bit of the passage we are considering, about the consciousness we have of our selves, with the account of perceiving substance we have been developing. It is indubitably the case that the questions I am raising here are ones that have led many readers to long for the lost Part Two of the Principles.But I am going to suggest that, while a complete answer to these questions must wait for another time, it is at least possible to look to Descartes for hints about how to go about thinking about answers to these questions. Descartes is, on the one hand, an obvious place to look for answers, as the


source of the view that identifies mind with consciousness, and whose cogito argument trades on a willingness he expects from his audience to admit that we are aware in thinking, not only of our own existence but of our nature as conscious thought. But unfortunately Descartes’ own account of the workings of mind, although revolutionary, is almost as sparse and unsatisfactory as Berkeley’s. I am going to suggest, however, that it is possible to reconstruct a line of argument on Descartes’ behalf that will link the mind’s substantiality with its accessibility to consciousness, starting with what is the problem area, ideas of sense.

Descartes’ basic position on the nature and existence of sensations is not all that different from Berkeley’s. In Principles of Philosophy, for example Descartes tells us with respect to sensations:

These may be clearly perceived provided we take great care in our judgements concerning them to include no more than what is strictly contained in our perception—no more than that of which we have inner awareness. (PP 1, 66, CSM I, 216)

We make a grave error when we include in our judgment anything except what is immediately perceived and instead suppose that a sensation has an extramental existence. Descartes, it would seem, is telling us here with respect to sensations that their essence lies in their being perceived. Descartes also thinks that sensations require a good deal of corporeal pushings and pullings before they happen, so that Descartes too thinks we are passive in perception and that the content of the sensations we perceive are a result of the nature of the pushings and pullings to which we have been subjected. But, finally, he also thinks that the mind has to do something before we have sensations. He tells us this in the Optics, where he writes:

We know for certain that it is the soul which has sensory perceptions, and not the body. For when the soul is distracted by an ecstasy or deep contemplation, we see that the whole body remains without sensation, even though it has various objects touching it. (Optics, IV, CSM I, 164)

Descartes is making a very interesting (and often overlooked) argument here. He is telling us that sensations are dependent upon minds in order to exist, that they are states of mind and not states of bodies. This is because all the right sorts of pushings and pullings can be taking place in bodies but the sensation still might not exist. Before the sensation will exist, the mind must be doing something. How to express what Descartes takes the mind to be doing in this suggestive passage is not easy to work out. Here


he only tells us that when minds are not doing it, through ecstasy or contemplation, there are no sensations. When we are in ecstasy or contemplation we have turned ourselves off to sensations, and before we can have sensations, we need to turn the mind on to them. Elsewhere, as in the Principles, Descartes talks of the mind as being present and attentive. He may have the same phenomenon in mind there too. When the mind is present and attentive then it supports sensations and the sensations exist. What is interesting about the view put forward in this passage is that it allows us to think about an activity of the mind that must exist so that there are ideas but which is not an activity responsible for the content of these ideas, which in Descartes’ eyes, still depends upon the objects touching the body. What I am proposing is that we can use this notion, pulled from Descartes, in getting a sense of the self of which Berkeley tells us we are always consciously aware. What he would be pointing to is that each idea we perceive is accompanied and indeed supported by the present and attentive mind whose present attentiveness is the existence of ideas.18 The picture would be that this present attentiveness is something of which we are conscious—we certainly know when we are doing it as opposed to the times when we are not. And in thinking of present attentiveness as something the mind does, we can also get a sense of what Berkeley is getting at when he says: “I know that I, one and the same self, perceive both sounds and colours.” What we are aware of is a single mental agent, bringing its present attentiveness to bear first on sounds and then on colors (or indeed, simultaneously, on both.) I think this proposal opens up several areas of exploration. It might be possible to develop an account of mental activity in sensation which nevertheless requires the presence of inert content, passively received. The idea here is that the mental activity in question is not an independent source of action brought to bear on a distinct object—rather, the activity exists inseparably from the content of perception. So it might be possible to develop a way of thinking about how we can, in perception, be aware of both an inert idea and an active self, distinguishing them, as Ott has suggested, through something like selective attention.19 And it might provide an answer to a worry Charles MacCracken has raised about the accounts that both Berkeley and Descartes give of a unitary mind. How, he asks, can they claim that the mind is a unitary, simple substance if it both wills and understands? It might be that we could say in this case, as in the sound and color case, that both willing and understanding are operations of the same basic mental activity and require the same present attentiveness in order to exist.


There is a great deal more that can be said both in favor of this proposal and no doubt against as well. I am not in the least suggesting that I have given the last word on Berkeley on spirit. All that I have tried to suggest is that by carefully taking Descartes as a model, it is possible to understand what Berkeley says about mind in which perceiving is both a substance supporting ideas and the self accessible to consciousness. If we identify perceiving, the core mental activity or what the mind does with present attentiveness, then it is possible to think about how Berkeley and Descartes thought that the consciousness of the self perceiving is part of each act of perceiving. And, present attentiveness, as described by Descartes, can also be understood as that which supports ideas, that on which they depend, hence, spiritual substance. Putting these two elements together, then, makes it possible to produce a coherent account of Berkeley’s last word on spirit.20

Notes

1 See, for example, Charles McCracken, “Berkeley’s Notion of Spirit,” History of European Ideas 7 (1986): 597-602, and “Berkeley’s Cartesian Concept of Mind: The Return through Malebranche and Locke to Descartes,” The Monist 71 (1988): 596-611, and Bertil Belfrage, “Berkeley’s Four Concepts of the Soul (1707-1709),” in Reexamining Berkeley’s Philosophy edited by Stephen H. Daniel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 172-187.2 All references are to T.E. Jessop and A. A. Luce, eds., The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, Ltd., 1948-1957). References to Three Dialogues will be to 3Dx, page number, references to Principles of Human Knowledge will be to PHK and section number.3 I hope it is understood that I am speaking somewhat loosely here, and I do not mean to suggest that Berkeley had nothing to say about spirit in his subsequent works.4 Phillip Cummins, “Hylas’ Parity Argument” in Berkeley: Critical and Interpretive Essays, edited by Colin M. Turbayne (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982).5 See, in particular, Robert Muehlmann, Berkeley’s Ontology (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., Inc., 1992). Others have argued that Berkeley’s understanding of substance is sharply different from a “standard view” held by Descartes and Locke. See for example Stephen H. Daniel, in particular in “Berkeley’s Christian Neoplatonism, Archetypes and Divine Ideas, Journal of the History of Philosophy 39 (2001): 239-58, and “Berkeley’s Stoic Notion of Spiritual Substance” in New Interpretations of Berkeley’s Thought, edited by Stephen H. Daniel (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2008), 203-230, and Genevieve Midgely, “Berkeley’s Actively Passive Mind” in Reexamining Berkeley’s Philosophy, edited by Stephen H. Daniel (Toronto: University of Toronto


Press, Press, 2007), 153-171. For a critical discussion of these claims, see Marc Hight and Walter Ott, “The New Berkeley”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 34 (2004): 1-24.6 For a discussion of this literature, although not a rejection of this claim, see Laurent Jaffro, “Le cogito de Berkeley” Archives de philosophie 67 (2004): 85-111, and Talia Mae Bettcher, Berkeley’s Philosophy of Spirit: Consciousness, Ontology and the Elusive Subject (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2007).7 For a discussion of this issue, see Colin M. Turbayne, “Lending a Hand to Philonous: The Berkeley, Plato, Aristotle Connection” in Berkeley: Critical and Interpretive Essays, edited by Colin M. Turbayne (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 295-310, Richard Glauser, “Berkeley, Collier, et la distinction entre l’esprit fini et le corps, in Berkeley et le catesianisme, edited by Genevieve Brykman (Paris: Le Temps Philosophique: Publications du department de Philosophie Paris X-Nanterre, 1997), 91-116.8 This view has been argued most strenuously by Charles McCracken, “Berkeley’s Cartesian Concept of Mind: The Return through Malebranche and Locke to Descartes” The Monist 71 (1988): 596-610, but see also William Beardsley, “Berkeley on Spirit and its Unity” History of Philosophy Quarterly 18 (2001): 259-278 and Margaret Atherton, “The Coherence of Berkeley’s Theory of Mind”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 43 (1983): 389-399.9 All quotations from Descartes are taken from The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vols. I and II, translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984-5). References will be in the text to CSM, volume and page number.10 “Descartes and Berkeley on mind: the fourth distinction”, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 14 (2006): 437-450.11 Works, VIII, 2612 Works, I, 9613 Thanks to Ken Winkler for getting me thinking about the importance of the first person for Berkeley’s account of mind14 That is, in terms of Walter Ott’s classifications, I am suggesting that what Ott calls the “fourth distinction” is already part of Descartes’ approach to mind.15 An interesting subproblem is that Malebranche is clearly not a candidate since he was willing to speak of a rainbow colored mind.16 The relation between mind and ideas is not then as Tom Stoneham suggests, a pure relation, not constituted by either relata. See Berkeley’s World: an examination of the Three Dialogues (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).17 The account that I have given of Berkeley’s substantial mind is similar to that of Phillip Cummins, with whom I largely agree. I am taking a slightly different approach in emphasizing similarities to Descartes, however. 18 I have faute de mieux introduced a term to describe the phenomenon I take Descartes to be referring to in the passage from the Optics. I want it to be clear that I intend my phrase to be capturing whatever it is to which the Optics passage


refers, rather than, for example, what others might mean in their theories of attention. 19 Walter Ott, op. cit.20 Earlier versions of this paper were read at the June 2008 conference in Prague and at A Berkeley Bonanza conference at Cornell University, May 9, 2009. I am grateful to the audience at both talks for their comments which have enabled me, I hope, to improve this paper.

9.

WHAT KANT COULD REID

PETR GLOMBÍ EK

Kant on common sense

Unfortunately, Thomas Reid features in the general history of philosophy as just one of those incredibly preposterous Scots, who—unable to solve Hume’s riddle concerning the nature of causality—deferred themselves to the opinion of the herd. According to Kant, these Scots misunderstood Hume’s question, which aimed at the possibility of the apriori validity of the concept, not at the fact that the concept of causality is required for all empirical knowledge. What is worse (says Kant), is that their answer to the misunderstood question consisted in explicitly betraying the fundamental value of genuine philosophy. These philosophers, that is, appealed to common sense (“gemeine Verstand”), this peculiar faculty being according to Kant nothing but mass opinion (“ist diese Appellation nichts anders als eine Berufung auf das Urtheil der Menge”). Such appeal consequently means giving up all critical thought—and thus surrendering the very essence of philosophy. Kant appreciates Hume as a true philosopher in contrast to his critics precisely because he recognised the distinction between common sense (understood as the belief of the ordinary man) and critical reason, which keeps the simple naivity of common sense within limits. Beattie is explicitly mentioned as the bad guy at a later stage of the argument, but Reid’s name finds its way onto a list of Hume’s naivest opponents at the very beginning of Kant’s discussion. Such an estimation of Reid can hardly be based on direct knowledge of his work. The bulk of Kant‘s critique turns on the term “common sense”. He translates it as “gemeine Verstand”—literally “common understanding”—and once as “schlichte Verstand”: “ordinary understanding”. As I have already said, he equates it with “Urteil der Menge” (“judgement of the multitude”) contrasting it with the considered and critically-justified judgement of the philosopher. Common sense works as an oracle for

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simple-minded people when they reach the limits of their knowledge and learning. Kant treats it as a fashionable tool used by contemporary “superficial ranters”. In sum, Kant is clearly irritated by the Scottish answer to Humean scepticism. He dismisses it without giving it even a hint of a fair-hearing. He merely sketches the Scottish position as something that is not worth detailed comment, not even a faithful reference. His reader can realistically envisage only two possible explanations of this attitude: i) Kant knew Scottish philosophy only in some very crude and vulgar version and thus felt irritated by its (for him) mysterious popularity, or ii) he was alarmed by the fact that there was a strong rival version of his own critical project, already in circulation, elegantly written and growing in popularity, whereas he had just spent ten years in silence. The first explanation is probably the right one. It seems that Kant knew Reid only via an uncharitable commentary by Joseph Priestley, where we also meet the Kantian unholy trinity of Beattie, Reid, and Oswald—or even, perhaps, he only read a German review of Priestley’s book. But I want to argue in this paper, that Kant had good reason to be agitated by Reid’s philosophy, which he could have known at least from the Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, first published as early as 1764. Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man appeared only in 1785, after the first edition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and even later than the Prolegomena. And the Inquiry itself was translated into German in 1782. Had Kant attentively read Reid’s first book, he could not but see the parallel between Reid’s inquiry and his own project of critical philosophy. We can only guess how he would have reacted and whether reading Reid would have changed anything in the letter of Kant’s “critical” oeuvre. It is well-known that after being appointed to the position of professor at his university, Kant, who had previously spent decades in a consumptive flurry of teaching and publishing, finally rested and for ten years hardly produced any work. This changed when, in 1781, there appeared the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. The following decade saw a new eruption of publishing activity. Ten years later, in 1790, when the third Critique was printed, Kant was now an established authority in German philosophy. It is in the Critique of Judgement that Kant re-introduces the notion of common sense. He puts forward his own notion of common sense in contrast to what he claims to be the traditional one. He uses two terms sensus communis logicus and sensus communis aestheticus the first being, once again, “common understanding”, while the latter is the Kantian

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substitute for the old Aristotelian sensus communis sive fantasia, or imagination. Yes, of course, the product of this faculty of Kantian sensus communis aestheticus consists in appropriation of one’s judgement to the possible judgement of others, hence it seems to imply a certain sense for community. But this appropriation is caused by one’s abstraction from the material side of one’s mental state (i.e. sensation) and focusing on the formal side of the state.

This is accomplished by weighing the judgement, not so much with actual, as rather with the merely possible, judgements of others, and by putting ourselves in the position of everyone else, as the result of a mere abstraction from the limitations which contingently affect our own estimate. This, in turn, is effected by so far as possible letting go the element of matter, i.e., sensation, in our general state of representative activity, and confining attention to the formal peculiarities of our representation or general state of representative activity. Now it may seem that this operation of reflection is too artificial to be attributed to the faculty which we call common sense. But this is an appearance due only to its expression in abstract formulae. In itself nothing is more natural than to abstract from charm and emotion where one is looking for a judgement intended to serve as a universal rule.1

This means that one abstracts from what is particular and purely subjective and attends to what is universal. The Aristotelian philosopher would say that one abstracts from materia cognitionis to arrive at forma sive species intentionalis—to know something is to possess its form, but only in an intentional manner. Kant explains this as an ability to see things as others would see them. What Kant opposes to common sense or common understanding is certainly closer to traditional Aristotelian fantasia than to Shaftesburian sense for community. On sensus communis logicus on the other hand Kant comments in the following way:

Common human understanding which as mere sound (not yet cultivated) understanding, is looked upon as the least we can expect from any one claiming the name of man, has therefore the doubtful honour of having the name of common sense (sensus communis) bestowed upon it; and bestowed, too, in an acceptation of the word common (not merely in our own language, where it actually has a double meaning, but also in many others) which makes it amount to what is vulgar what is everywhere to be met with a quality which by no means confers credit or distinction upon its possessor.2

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Kant explicitly refuses to call this faculty “sense”, since it is a question of judgement: to be able to see something as something is for him a result of judging, not sensing. So what is wrong with this common sense according to Kant? In the last Critique it seems that the problem is merely terminological, since Kant restricts himself to saying that one should not call it “common sense” because it is not a sense but a developed capacity to judge. In the first Critique the story was quite different. He ascribed to the Scots the idea that there are causes and effects out there in the world because that is the opinion of ordinary folk. In the Third Critique, on the other hand, he tries to incorporate the idea that we have an ability to appropriate our particular perception to the idealised perception of others as if they were standing in our shoes, to the traditional Aristotelian concept of imagination, or scholastic concept of sensus communis sive fantasia. The only problem, apart from the misleading term “sense” instead of “understanding” or “judgement”, seems to be the idea that something is true just because people think it so. And, as scholars overwhelmingly agree, this idea most definitely should not be attributed to Thomas Reid, who was an attentive and a critical reader of Hume. Kant himself does not deny any role to common sense. He talks about the principles of “common understanding” as he calls it already in the Introduction to First Critique. Its second section bears the following title: “We have certain notions a priori and common understanding itself is never without them”.3 As an explicit example of such a principle we might cite the principle of subsistence of a substratum under every change. As Kant says in the Third Analogy “not only philosophers but also common understanding accepts” this principle.4 Talking about arguments for dogmatism in the third chapter of the Antinomies of Pure Reason, he mentions the fact that common understanding has no problem in accepting the idea of the unconditioned beginning of all synthesis.5 Just several pages later in the same discussion Kant adds that for practical purposes it is quite usual for common understanding to accept principles that cannot be justified by it. The Problem as Kant states is that not even the most learned person can transgress common understanding. The whole passage explains why empirism is not more popular, when one could expect that “common understanding” should eagerly follow the empirical promise to stay with notions taken from experience and their rational coherence.6 Two more occurences of the contrast of dogmatism and “common understanding” can be found on the last pages of the Paralogisms in the first edition.7


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To continue, in Introduction to Transcendental Logic Kant calls general logic the “kathartikon of common understanding”: logic helps to clarify thinking as such, logic is not just a tool of the special sciences, not even a set of explicit rules for understanding, because logic is concerned with understanding in general, not just in respect to some set of objects.8 This “common understanding” quite naturally, and without any abstruse speculation, follows the path of reason: a sign of it can be seen (according to Kant) in the monotheistic elements in every religion.9 That is perhaps the reason why Kant appeals to “common understanding” and “common human reason” in the Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals. The first part explicitly proceeds on the principles of common understanding, as we can read on its last pages, but also at the end of its Introduction.10 But for Kant the matter of common understanding is simply the matter of customary belief. Common understanding, or common sense, plays no positive role in his philosophy. Kant’s disregard for common sense is expressed clearly enough in the Prolegomena. Inattentive to common practice he devotes himself to a wholehearted pursuit of pure transcendental inquiry with the claim of universal and necessary validity. Unfortunately, his results face persistent objections concerning their empirical or arbitrary character and also some difficulties when it comes to the connection between the abstract and the particular. These questions concern Kant’s table of categories, their connection with possible forms of judgment, rule-following, the nature of so-called “schemas”, as well as other areas of his philosophy.

Reid’s Inquiry into common sense

Reid’s philosophy is, in contrast to Kant’s, naturalistic.11 That is not to say that his philosophy is not, in a way, also transcendental. Reid’s treatment of mind aims to uncover the presuppositions of knowledge and thought. It starts with particular types of mental operation and looks for the conditions of their possiblity. He starts from paradigmatic examples of phenomena that are the subject of his inquiry, and provides an understanding of their nature by uncovering the conditions of their possibility. One might ask whether these conditions of possibility are really a priori, bearing in mind that when one ascribes to a certain inquiry a transcendental character, in the Kantian sense of the term, the conditions should be knowable a priori. Actually, Hume himself seems to have taken Reidian philosophy to be transcendental in the Kantian sense, since his best known critical remark on Reid points out that this philosophy brings us back to innate ideas.12 Innate ideas are here perhaps best understood as

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beliefs one is naturally committed to by any ordinary course of experience, without there being a way of justifying them by any amount of experience. This brings us to the second characteristic justifying the use of the label “naturalism” in connection with Reid. I mean his immediate reference to practice, specifically linguistic practice.13 Reid does not give any argument for his principles having universal and necessary validity independent of our practice. And one can hardly justify treating his philosophy as transcendental in the Kantian sense without demonstrating that the propositions yielded by the inquiry are universal and necessary. Reid does not seem to be worried by this question at all. His only argument for the validity of his principles is based on reference to linguistic practice.14 He confines himself to pointing out that the meaning of the terms in question is the same in all the languages he knows about. Another indication of this can be found in his repeated refusal of hypotheses or conjectures in philosophy. Let us call Reid’s philosophy a transcendental linguistic anthopology. It starts from within: human thought is not interpreted as a deficient mode of divine knowledge. Our notion of mind is relative to its operations, these operations being labeled by active verbs. The meaning of those verbs is established by the practice of human usage. There is no idealised reference to a divine speaker who can use these words to have some transcendent referents or meanings. The meaning of discourse about the mental is namely established by “social life” itself, and by “breeding” as its higher form, as Reid states at the very beginning of his Inquiry.15 Hand in hand with this goes his reminder that the innovations in the philosophy of mind that are accepted by modern philosophers require (highly problematic) innovations in language.16 According to Reid, the only means a philosopher has to uncover the nature of mind is reflection. This should lead to analysis that uncovers the principles of mental operations, and consequently the nature of mind itself, by establishing a system of mental powers. The transcendental character of Reid’s method is also evident in the fact that he finds it natural to start, in the Inquiry, from an analysis of sense perception—just as Kant starts with his “transcendental aesthetic”. In the analysis of perception Reid first singles out what he calls simpleapprehension. This is, according to him, the element common to three mental acts: actual perception of an object (which yields immediate belief in the existence of the object perceived); remembering the object (necessarily accompanied by a belief in its past existence); and the case when one simply thinks of the object or imagines it.17 For Reid, simple apprehension is the result of an analysis of judgement: judgement thus


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precedes simple apprehension. One can therefore say that thought is discursive for Reid. It starts with judgement. Interpretation of judgement consists in its resolution into elements: whereupon the analysis yields principles. But these elements do not occur “separate, to be compounded by us”18. Reid takes this to be a refutation of the empiricist idea that the above-mentioned operations of perception, memory and imagination differ only in degree.19 In his account they are distinct mental operations since they cannot be reduced one to another and they give different kinds of evidence.20 But the crucial point in Reid’s treatment is his reference to nature. By reflection on our perception we recognize that perception irresistibly leads us to believe in the existence of what we perceive. We also recognize that reflection on our thought leads us to believe that every thought must have a subject that thinks which is distinct from the thought itself. The origin of these beliefs seems to be untraceable—they simply arise in thinking beings. What is more, there is no recognizable logic in such inferences. Reid, at least rhetorically, leaves open the possibility that these inferences are based on prejudice,21 but he proceeds as if they were based on nature. If they are, then they are unshakeable:

If this last is the case, as I apprehend it, it will be impossible to shake off those opinions, and we must yield to them at last, though we struggle hard to get rid of them. And if we could, by a determined obstinacy, shake off the principles of our nature, this is not to act (as) the philosopher, but the fool or the madman22

Trying to make the structure of these beliefs more clear, Reid introduces the notion of suggestion. Actually, suggestion is the relation of signification: the relation a sign bears to what it signifies.23 The cardinal example is one of a secondary quality smell. In smelling something we suppose the existence of something with odour. And if a philosopher tells us that smell cannot be found in things themselves, but only in the mind, he is abusing language. For Reid, the idea that we attribute smell to some thing “out there”, not to our mind only, is a paradigmatic example of the exercise of common sense.24 Common sense is exemplified by “a plain man” who is surprised by the philosopher’s proposal of secondary qualities. The situation repeats itself in the cases of other senses. It is always a plain man who stands against the philosopher. For the plain man, the term for a secondary quality signifies a disposition of something external to the mind, whereas for the philosopher it is something internal to the mind. And a sensed quality suggests something by which it is produced. For Reid, to deny this is not simply awkward (by running

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contrary to ordinary belief), but utterly absurd. Here logic comes in: to deny some principle of common sense implies logical absurdity.25 Nevertheless, common sense does not say anything about the inner nature, or structure, of the things producing sensory qualities. Inquiry into this question is the province of philosophy. But the validity of common sense is required for the very possibility of inquiry into the nature of things. Principles of common sense are just what is needed in order to make possible the very determination of p or not-p in particular cases of discovery. One might very well apply the Strawsonian notion of presupposition to explain Reid’s concept of the principles of common sense. Reid’s aim is to uncover the principles of common sense by reflection. To do this he uses the forementioned concept of suggestion:

[W]hen one is learning a language, he attends to the sounds; but when he is master of it, he attends only to the sense of what he would express. If this is the case, we must become as little children again, if we will be philosophers: we must overcome this habit of innattention which has been gathering strength ever since we began to think; a habit, the usefullness of which, in common life, atones for the difficulty it creates to the philosopher in discovering the first principles of the human mind.26

Reflection on the acts of our mind brings to light the relations of suggestion and the principles guiding them, these being principles of the human mind or principles of common sense. By thinking or saying something we presuppose certain principles that usually escape our attention. Reflection makes us aware of them and we realize that they are in fact arbitrary principles (there’s no further justification for them). In consequence we can see to what extent our whole thought is determined by such principles. And this again helps us to understand the nature of the errors of speculative philosophers. That is, we can see philosophical doctrines as the results of aberrations from principles guiding our whole thought and knowledge. The problem of modern idealistic philosophy consists, according to Reid, in its granting these principles the status of a necessary condition for any discovery or even any judgement. If you once fail to follow these principles in some particular case, you then may proceed, by perfectly consistent reasoning, to land yourself in complete obscurity. That is what people call metaphysics. Reid concentrates on idealism since idealism was the most powerful form of metaphysical doctrine he was acquainted with. Reidian common sense is, it seems, natural not only in the normative sense, but also in its opposition to cultivation or higher learning. It is not


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only right, but also vulgar. Learning obviously enables us to depart from common sense. And at least in principle it does not have to be wrong. Nevertheless:

I resolve, for my own part, always to pay a great regard to the dictates of common sense, and not to depart from them without absolute necessity.27

The dictates of common sense are therefore not irresistible in some brute sense. They can be neglected not only by a person literally mad, but also in the course of discovery. The neglection of them is not necessarily wrong, but its incidence is highly unlikely in cases of attentive consistent reasoning. And the possibility of fruitfully abandoning some part of common sense is comprehensible only against the wider background of shared common sense. The connection of the normativity of common sense on the one hand and its vulgarity on the other may also explain why Reid does not worry about excluding the possibility that common sense is just a product of prejudice on our part. The dictates of common sense are normative for us, this normativity is established by our practice and there is no way of discovering whether they are normative an sich. Therefore it hardly matters. Beings with our constitution find dictates of common sense irresistibly normative—and that’s all one can say.

Reid’s notion of common sense

Reid opposes the current technical meaning of the term “sense” to the common meaning. Whereas philosophers mean the faculty of sense perception, the common meaning is different:

In common language ‘sense’ always implies judgment. A man of sense is a man of judgment. Good sense is good judgment. Nonsense is what is obviously contrary to right judgment. Common sense is the degree of judgment that is common to men with whom we can converse and transact business.28

Just several lines later Reid supports his cause with reference to other European languages. His definition of sense actually comes quite close to Kant’s account of the “Scottish” notion of common sense. Sense seems to be the faculty of judgement, and common sense is the degree of that faculty one requires in order to be taken seriously—good sense being the highest degree and nonsense being the result of a serious deficiency in the faculty in question. This is confirmed a few lines later:

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We must have a certain degree of if we are to be subjects of law and government, capable of managing our own affairs, and responsible for our conduct towards others. This is called ‘common sense’, because it is common to all men with whom we can transact business or hold accountable for their conduct.

But in fact Reid does not mean by “sense” what Kant means by Urteilskraft (faculty of judgement), nor does his use of the term coincide perfectly with Kantian sensus communis logicus or Gemeine Menschenverstand. Reidian sense is much closer to Kantian Verstand. Actually, for some reason, Reid prefers to talk about “common sense”, although he often (if not usually) means simply the capacity to judge (viz. sense) in general, not the specific degree of this capacity. When he says the word “sense” and its counterparts in other languages “stand for judgment or opinion, and are applied equally to objects of external sense, of taste, of morals, and of the understanding,” we must understand judgment as stating a fact (Kant might say subsuming the object under a concept) whether the object of the judgment is physical (perceived by senses) or ideal (perceived by the understanding). And the traditional metaphor of light, notorious in discussions of the intellect ever since Aristotle’s legendary (and confusing) account in De anima, immediately follows. There is even a second-hand quotation mentioning explicitly the “natural light” in the explanation of common sense in Reid’s chapter on common sense in the Essays.29 In other places Reid talks about a “gift of Heaven” or a “gift of Nature” or a “natural gift”.30 And since he repeatedly insists on the equal distribution of this gift, independent of education, we can hardly identify it with the Kantian notion of judgement, which is by contrast something aquired only by practice. At this point a question suggests itself: If Reid means by “sense” what the Latin tradition meant by “intellectus” and Kant by “Verstand”, what does he mean by “understanding”? The difference is easy to detect:

The laws of all civilised nations distinguish those who have this gift of heaven [common sense] from those who don’t. The latter may have rights that ought not to be violated, but because they have no understanding of their own to direct their actions, the laws arrange for them to be guided by the understanding of others. ·Their lack of common sense· is easily detected through its effects on their actions, through what they say, and even through their physical appearance. When there is a question as to whether or not a man has this natural gift of common sense, a judge or a jury can usually give a very confident answer after a short conversation with him.


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The same degree of understanding that makes a man capable of acting with common prudence in the conduct of life makes him capable of discovering what is true and what is false in matters that are self-evident and that he is clear about in his mind.31

The understanding is the faculty for grasping meaning, comprehending a concept, whereas common sense is the ability to bring an individual under that concept, to judge according to concepts, or to see something as something. Hence when Reid talks about resolving disputes by appeal to common sense, he mentions the principles that are self evident: “every man who has common sense is a competent judge of such principles when he conceives them clearly.”32 The principles are “conceived” and they can be conceived clearly (and by extension they can be conceived “obscurely” of “in a confused manner”). If I am right then these self-evident principles of common sense are not the basic products of common sense, but principles upon which the common sense acts. And they are not conceived or grasped by common sense but by the understanding. They are what Descartes used to call (in scholastic fashion) “aeternae veritates”, eternal truths. According to Reid reasoning makes sense only when both parties agree on these principles. To agree on them is to “give logic what it needs”.33 The appeal to common sense is then an appeal to the ability to apply concepts and principles of (transcendental) logic.34 The understanding/common sense distinction, by the way, easily dissolves the alleged obscurity in Reid’s use of the term “common sense” found by some Reid scholars and aptly expressed by Wolterstorff:

Does Common Sense consist of belief-forming faculties that we all share in common, with a particular principle of Common Sense being one of those shared faculties? Or does Common Sense consist of propositions judged or believed by human beings in common, with a particular principle of Common Sense being some item in that totality of shared beliefs? Or—here’s yet a third possibility—does Common Sense consist of those shared faculties that produce beliefs we all share in common?35

The first part of the first possibility is (roughly) what I propose. Common sense is a certain degree of the ability to judge (aka sense). As for the second possibility: The principles of common sense are not themselves a matter of common sense, since they are not judgements or beliefs in a strict sense, but only presuppositions of beliefs, principles of belief-logic, discovered by reflection. The third possibility is obviously excluded: even an ordinary degree of judgement yields natural disagreement among people.

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We need some details to put Reid’s common sense into perspective. The following quotation shows Reid’s agreement with the tradition:

It is absurd to think that common sense could be in any way opposed to reason. It is indeed reason’s first-born, and just as they are commonly joined together in speech and in writing they are inseparable in their nature. We ascribe to reason two roles, or two degrees to judge concerning self-evident things, and to draw conclusions that are not self-evident from premises that are. The former is the job of common sense its only job. So the whole of common sense coincides with reason; indeed ‘common sense’ is only another name for one branch (or degree) of reason.36

There are two provinces of reason. The second one is inferential reasoning, the first one feeds it with beliefs, judgements or propositions that can be conjoined into chains of inferences. The second one is called ratiocinatio in Latin, the first one is intellectus. Or more exactly, it is the passive intellect, since understanding occupies the place of an active intellect in Reid’s system. The understanding is the supply of concepts and principles applied by common sense in its exercise, namely in judging. In Fregean vocabulary one could say that understanding grasps the sense (Sinn) through which the common sense fixes a reference (Bedeutung). Reid calls the ability of applying concepts “the gift of heaven, and where heaven hasn’t given it no education can make up for that.” It is basic and necessary for reasoning. And just as in Kant, it is reason liberated from common sense what is responsible for ungrounded metaphysical speculation.

A conclusion drawn by valid reasoning from true principles can’t possibly contradict any decision of common sense, because truth will always be consistent with itself. And such a conclusion can’t be confirmed by common sense, because it doesn’t lie within common sense’s jurisdiction.

The two faculties have distinct criteria of evidence. In the case of reasoning it is the “light of truth” based on formal logic and analycity, whereas in the case of common sense or judgment:

When I clearly remember a past event or see an object before my eyes, this commands my belief just as much as an axiom does. But when as a philosopher I reflect on this belief, and want to trace it to its origin, I can’t resolve it into necessary and self-evident axioms or into conclusions that necessarily follow from them. It seems that I don’t have that kind of evidence the kind that I can best comprehend and that gives perfect satisfaction to an inquisitive mind and yet it would be ridiculous to


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doubt, and anyway I find that I can’t doubt. Trying to throw off this belief is like trying to fly ridiculous and impracticable.37

It is just this feeling of discomfort which motivates metaphysical speculation.38 But with regard to the distinction of common sense based on understanding, as opposed to reason, one knows that “knowledge of what really does or did exist comes though another channel one that is open to those who cannot reason.”39

Conclusion

“By the mind of a man, we understand that in him which thinks, remembers, reasons, wills.” 28

“Again, if it should be asked, What is mind? It is that which thinks. I ask not what it does, or what its operations are, but what it is. To this I can find no answer; our notion of mind being not direct, but relative to its operations.” 29

Our notion of the mind is relative to its operations, these operations being thinking, remembering, reasoning and willing. Will, reason, memory and thought are then principal attributes of mind. By inquiry into the nature of these operations we learn about the nature of mind itself and it is the only way in which we can learn what mind is. To understand Reid’s procedure we might use a notion employed by Peter Strawson, namely presupposition. This notion is particularly apposite when it comes to the best known concept of Reid’s philosophy, namely common sense. Reid’s investigation into the nature of mind is that of a linguistic philosopher and his method consists in a transcendendal inquiry. He starts by bringing to our view particular acts of mind, taking them for granted as facts, and then looks for their necessary conditions. His examination starts with expressions we use when talking about mental states and acts. His main interest concerns their presuppositions: he points out that the man who talks about certain mental operations takes for granted certain other facts which are rarely, if ever, explicitly mentioned. They are what are most familiar, nevertheless they mostly escape our notice. According to Reid, it is our language what pushes us to make such presuppositions. Or in other words, only having the language we have, with presuppositions he would like to bring to light, can we come to a comprehensive view not only of the world surrounding us but also of our mental operations and—through them—to a full-blooded notion of our mind. The notion of mind seems to be embedded in our language—not as a linguistic construct, since it is not arbitrary in the

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sense of being posited at will, but as something we cannot deny an existence to once we are reminded of our use of words for the mental. And exactly the last presuppositions of our discourse about the mental are what Reid calls “principles of common sense”. Reid’s philosophy thereby combines essential elements of what we know as Kantian transcendental investigation with Humean down-to-earth naturalism.40 His search for the first principles of knowledge and thought in general takes the path of a transcendental argument along the lines made famous by Kant. But, at the same time, Reid never loses sight of the fact that the subject of his examination is a contingent natural phenomenon. Not only that. Reid seems to be very well aware that even his own method inevitably follows the dictates of these presuppositions, guiding his own thought and talk. His basic and strongest argument for the validity of his inquiry is his reference to the fact that the phenomena he is talking about are common to all languages. A vivid example of this is seen in Reid’s rejection of induction in this context and his strenuous refusal to indulge in conjectures. This shows that he is not seeking empirical discovery, which constructs hypotheses on the basis of induction from particular observed cases. Equal testimony to Reid’s position is his humble acknowledgment that the principles of common sense may, upon further inquiry, be revealed to be principles of our constitution only: principles of our contingent nature. Nevertheless we cannot but stick to them, we cannot but agree with them as their denial would be unthinkable. This centrality of the first person plural perspective is what makes Reid more than a distinguished rival to Kant. Just like Kant he follows the path of transcendental inquiry with the aim of refuting scepticism and of throwing light on the nature of mind and knowledge. But in contrast to Kant, Reid has learned a lesson from Hume. Yes, the story can be reversed. Not only is it not true that Reid has missed Hume’s point, as Kant tried to convince us. It is Kant who—in opposition to Reid—has missed the chance of turning transcendental philosophy from metaphysics to transcendental anthropology. Reid would probably not be quite as rude as Kant was about him, but he would have been no less justified than Kant in saying what was said about him in Prolegomena:

But Hume suffered the usual misfortune of metaphysicians, of not being understood. It is positively painful to see how utterly his opponents [...] missed the point of the problem; for while they were ever taking for granted that which he doubted, and demonstrating with zeal and often with impudence that which he never thought of doubting, they so misconstrued his valuable suggestion that everything remained in its old condition, as if nothing had happened.41


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Notes This text was written as a part of the grant project “The Claim of Common Sense”, GA AV R, . KJB900090704. 1 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, §40, (Wilder Publications, 2008), 578 (emphasis mine). Original text in Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urtheilskraft, in: Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften. (Berlin: Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1900-), vol. 5, 294 2 Ibid. 3 “Wir sind im Besitze gewisser Erkenntnisse a priori, und selbst der gemeine Verstand ist niemals ohne solche.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B3 (hencefort I shall refer to Kant’s first Critique by pagination of the first (A) and second (B) edition). 4 “Ich finde, daß zu allen Zeiten nicht bloß der Philosoph, sondern selbst der gemeine Verstand diese Beharrlichkeit als ein Substratum alles Wechsels der Erscheinungen vorausgesetzt haben und auch jederzeit als ungezweifelt annehmen werden, nur daß der Philosoph sich hierüber etwas bestimmter ausdrückt, indem er sagt: bei allen Veränderungen in der Welt bleibt die Substanz, und nur die Accidenzen wechseln.” A184/B 227 5 “Der gemeine Verstand findet in den Ideen des unbedingten Anfangs aller Synthesis nicht die mindeste Schwierigkeit, da er ohnedem mehr gewohnt ist, zu den Folgen abwärts zu gehen, als zu den Gründen hinaufzusteigen, und hat in den Begriffen des absolut Ersten (über dessen Möglichkeit er nicht grübelt) eine Gemächlichkeit und zugleich einen festen Punkt, um die Leitschnur seiner Schritte daran zu knüpfen, da er hingegen an dem rastlosen Aufsteigen vom Bedingten zur Bedingung, jederzeit mit einem Fuße in der Luft, gar kein Wohlgefallen finden kann.” A497/B495 6 See B500-502. 7 A385 and A390. 8 “[Logik] hat also empirische Principien, ob sie zwar in so fern allgemein ist, daß sie auf den Verstandesgebrauch ohne Unterschied der Gegenstände geht. Um deswillen ist sie auch weder ein Kanon des Verstandes überhaupt, noch ein Organon besondrer Wissenschaften, sondern lediglich ein Kathartikon des gemeinen Verstandes.” A53/B77-78 9 “Diese höchste Ursache halten wir denn für schlechthin nothwendig, weil wir es schlechterdings nothwendig finden, bis zu ihr hinaufzusteigen, und keinen Grund, über sie noch weiter hinaus zu gehen. Daher sehen wir bei allen Völkern durch ihre blindeste Vielgötterei doch einige Funken des Monotheismus durchschimmern, wozu nicht Nachdenken und tiefe Speculation, sondern nur ein nach und nach verständlich gewordener natürlicher Gang des gemeinen Verstandes geführt hat.” A590/B618 10 Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften. (Berlin: Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1900-), vol. 4, 392 and 404-405. 11 For a detailed account see Peter Bauman, “The Scotish Pragmatist? The Dilemma of Common Sense and a Pragmatist Way Out”. Reid Studies 2, 2 (1999), 47-58

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12 David Hume in a letter to Hugh Blair, reprinted in Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind and the Principles of Common Sense Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 256. 13 Cf. Keith Lehrer, “Reid, Hume and Common Sense”. Reid Studies 1, 2 (1998), 15-26. 14 Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, 13; cf. Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, in: W.Hamilton, ed., The Works of Thomas Reid, Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1999, vol. 1) I, i. 15 Thomas Reid, An Inquiry,13 16 Thomas Reid, Ibid, 13-14 17 Thomas Reid, Ibid, 27 18 Thomas Reid, Ibid, 29 19 Thomas Reid, Ibid, 30 20 Thomas Reid, Ibid, 31-32 21 “prejudices of philosophy or education, mere fictions of the mind, which a wise man should throw off as he does the belief of fairies”. Thomas Reid, An Inquiry, 37. 22 Thomas Reid, An Inquiry, 37. 23 “What we commonly call natural causes might, with more propriety, be called natural signs, and what we call effects, the things signified.” Thomas Reid, An Inquiry, 59. 24 Thomas Reid, An Inquiry, 39. 25 Thomas Reid, Ibid, 54. 26 Thomas Reid, Ibid, 57. 27 Thomas Reid, Ibid, 39 28 Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man VI, ii, 421b. 29 Thomas Reid, Essays VI, ii. 30 Thomas Reid, Essays, especially VI, ii, passim. 31 Thomas Reid, Essays, VI, ii 32 Thomas Reid, Essays, ii 33 Cf. Thomas Reid, Essays, VII, iv: “A clear listing and explanation of the principles of common sense is one of the chief things that logic should provide.” 34 For a detailed account of Reid’s logic see Emily Michael, “Reid’s Critique of Scottish Logic of Ideas”, Reid Studies 2, 2 (1999), 3-18. 35 Nicholas Wolterstorff, Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001), 219. Cf. Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Reid on Common Sense”. in Terence Cuneo and Rene van Woudenberg, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Reid, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003, 77-100. 36 Thomas Reid, Essays, VI, ii, 425 37 Thomas Reid, Essays, II, xx. Cf. Thomas Reid, Essays, II, v: “It is one thing to have an immediate conviction of a self-evident axiom, and another thing to have an immediate conviction of the existence of what we see. But the conviction is equally immediate and equally irresistible in both cases. No man thinks of looking


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for reasons to believe in what he sees; and we trust our senses just as much before we are capable of reasoning as we do afterwards. . . . The constitution of our understanding causes us to accept the truth of a mathematical axiom, regarding it as a first principle from which other truths can be deduced but isn’t itself deduced from anything; and the constitution of our power of perception causes us to accept the existence of what we clearly perceive, regarding it as a first principle from which other truths can be deduced but isn’t itself deduced from anything.” or “the first principles of natural philosophy are of a quite different nature from mathematical axioms. They have not the same kind of evidence, nor are they necessary truths, as mathematical axioms are. They are such as these: that similar effects proceed from the same or similar causes: that we ought to admit of no other causes of natural effects, but such as are true, and sufficient to account for the effects. These are principles, which, though they have not the same kind of evidence that mathematical axioms have, yet have such evidence, that every man of common understanding readily assents to them, and finds it absolutely necessary to conduct his actions and opinions by them, in the ordinary affairs of life” (Thomas Reid, Essays, I, ii, 231).38 Thomas Reid, Essays, II, ii: “It’s not surprising that the pride of philosophy should lead some philosophers to invent empty theories in order to account for this knowledge”. 39 Ibid. 40 For an alternative account of the Reid-Kant relationship cf. T.F. Sutton, “Scottish Kant?”. In: Melvin Dalgarno and Eric Mathews, eds., The Philosophy of Thomas Reid. (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), 159-192 41 Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (Whitefish: Kessinger, 2005), 5. Original text in: Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften. (Berlin: Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1900-), vol. 4.

10.

METAPHYSICAL EGOISM AND ITS VICISSITUDES

MIRAN BOŽOVI

Although it is George Berkeley who is usually said to have constructed perhaps the most fantastic of all metaphysical systems in the history of philosophy, nevertheless a few years before his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous an even bolder and more astonishing metaphysical theory was developed in France by the so-called égoïstes. In the eighteenth century French, the term égoïsme was used not only in the ethical sense, that is, to describe the selfish, self-centered behavior of those who think and speak only of themselves and believe themselves to be more important than other people, but also in the metaphysical sense, that is, to denote the extremist view that only oneself exists.1

Relatively little is known about the egoist philosophers who only briefly appear on the philosophical scene in France. As we shall see, there are good reasons for this. The egoists are thinkers who are not very likely to intervene into debates taking place on the philosophical scene. Strongly convinced that human thought simply cannot hit upon an idea that would not be simultaneously had by themselves, the developments on the philosophical scene could hardly be of any interest to them. Furthermore, they cannot be expected to try to win anyone over to their philosophical beliefs and they therefore spread their philosophy neither in writing nor by word of mouth. Their absence from the philosophical scene and their silence about their own philosophical beliefs were imposed on them by those very beliefs. The moment they wrote down their philosophical beliefs, the moment they started persuading others of their truth, they would already betray them. This, in short, is a philosophy that knows no books, no lectures, no teachers, no disciples, and no followers. One of their contemporaries, Thémiseul de Saint-Hyacinthe, who claims to have met "one or maybe two" of these extravagant philosophers, observes that

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they believe in their metaphysics "only when they speak about it."2 The truth is, most likely, even more unsettling; that is, not even when they spoke about it did they believe in their metaphysics. Isn't the fact that they spoke (and wrote) about their metaphysics at all, an unmistakable sign that they did not entirely believe in it? Yet, if the egoists themselves did believe in their own metaphysics, we most likely would not know about it, and the history of philosophy would be deprived of its probably most colorful and truly unique character, that is, a thinker who, as the subject of all the modifications of human thought, has been thinking the thoughts of all philosophers and who thus by himself embodies the entire history of philosophy.

All our knowledge of these enigmatic and elusive thinkers is based on second-hand accounts; everything we know about their "new metaphysics" is limited to a few scanty and rare observations contained in lesser known philosophical and literary works of their contemporaries, such as Flachat de Saint-Sauveur, Andrew Michael Ramsay, Thémiseul de Saint-Hyacinthe, Denis Diderot, Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, and so forth, describing their—real or imaginary—encounters with the egoist thinkers and oftentimes openly mocking their extremist position. In the eyes of their contemporaries, the metaphysical egoists were considered "the most extravagant of philosophers,"3 and their metaphysics was labelled "a sort of insane Pyrrhonism,"4 "a philosophical delirium,"5 and even one of "the periodical diseases"6 of the mind.

A typical example of such an encounter can be found in Diderot's early philosophical work La Promenade du sceptique. In this undeservedly forgotten work, written in 1747 and first published in 1830, Diderot stages a series of dialogues between the narrator and the representatives of various philosophical schools of the period, such as the Pyrrhonists, atheists, deists, Spinozists, and so forth. In one of the dialogues, Diderot presents an eccentric sage who, he says, is one of those

people who, each alike, maintain themselves to be alone in the world. They acknowledge the existence of one sole being alone; but they themselves are that thinking being: since all that occurs within us is nothing but an impression, they deny that there may be anything else but themselves and these impressions; thus they are, at one and the same time, both lover and mistress, father and child, the bed of flowers and the one who tramples upon it.7

This sage boasts to his interlocutor (that is, to Diderot's narrator) that

he is able to demonstrate that the latter exists only in his mind; he says: "I am today the person I wish to be, and I shall show to you that I, perhaps,

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am your very self, and that you are nothing,"8—that is, nothing outside the sage's mind. In the eyes of this sage, then, his interlocutor is but one of "the ideas which refer to nothing" outside his mind. If the sage's interlocutor found himself faced with such a demonstration, he would, no doubt, have to think of himself as an idea contained in the mind of another, and of his own fleeting existence as consisting not in his thinking but rather in his being thought of by another. Not only is his interlocutor nothing outside the egoist's mind—all beings inhabiting his world, including their thoughts and actions, and including the world itself, are nothing outside his mind; in short, the egoist himself, that is, his mind, is literally everything there is. Disappointingly, at this point, Diderot abruptly ends the dialogue before the eccentric sage is able to prove his extravagant metaphysical theory, and goes on to present some other, even more obscure metaphysicians.

Although it may well be the case that the egoists themselves never existed outside the minds of the eighteenth-century thinkers—the egoists themselves may have been nothing other than ideas in the minds of their contemporaries—Berkeley was, by his early critics, often characterized as an egoist.9 Even as late as 1769 we find Berkeley associated with this extremist position in Diderot's Le Rêve de d'Alembert, although the immaterialist sage, of course, never believed he was "alone in the world" or the only existent being, as the materialist sage would have us believe.10

1 “Alone in the world”

The following passage from Flachat de Saint-Sauveur's work Pièces fugitives d'histoire et de littérature anciennes et modernes, published in 1704, neatly captures the spirit of the egoist metaphysics. In the passage, Saint-Sauveur is summarizing a book entitled Projet d'une nouvelle métaphysique, by a certain Jean Brunet, which was published in Paris a year before. Brunet's book, which has since been lost, is the only treatise on the egoist metaphysics ever written, and Brunet himself the only thinker known to have held the egoist belief:

M. Brunet … at the same time puts forward to us a new type of

philosophy; he has—if one choses to believe it—elevated metaphysics to a degree of sublimity which it has never attained: his Projet d'une nouvelle métaphysique had initially been propounded at the gatherings of M. l'abbé de Cordemoy, and was thereafter published by the widow Horthemels. M. Brunet, however, being discontented not only with one of the members of this assembly, but also with the poor sales of his work, is today endeavouring to turn his system to profit through our Journal. M. Brunet,

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therefore, establishes as a fundamental principle that he alone exists in the world; that his thought is the cause of the existence of all creatures; that when, to the misfortune of the human race, he ceases to think of these creatures, they are annihilated. Thus this new creator of nothing is the maker of all things and, once they are made, he either preserves them or else reduces them to nothing, just as he pleases. This total destruction comes easily to him, since all he has to do in order for things to cease existing is to no longer think of them. It is thus in the interest of all of us—so long as we exist—that the all-powerful M. Brunet should keep on thinking; when he begins to sleep, I am gripped by a mortal apprehension that the entire human species, including myself, one of the least of individuals, may be returning into nothingness… M. Brunet, if it may be believed, is not even convinced of the existence of his own body; his thought is the only thing which truly exists. He has sometimes been asked whether, if he were to be beaten with sticks, he would be convinced by this sensory experience that there were both sticks and people which existed. To this tiresome objection he replies by saying that such a trial would give him great pain; however, the people and the sticks would not for this reason exist, since all these things would not exist unless he were thinking of them. … I know of no-one before him having set forth such opinions. Spinoza, indeed, acknowledged only one substance in nature, but it was one of which he considered himself to be merely a modification, unlike the philosopher Brunet, who believes himself alone to be the whole of nature.11

The radical nature of Brunet's "new metaphysics" is perhaps best

understood against the background of Berkeley's (subsequent) spiritualist pluralism. The main difference between the two metaphysical theories is this: Although Berkeley denies the existence of material substance, there are nevertheless "other spirits" outside his own mind, that is, a plurality of created finite spirits like himself, and one uncreated infinite spirit, that is, God. For the egoist thinker, on the other hand, there is absolutely nothing outside his own mind: not only are there no bodies, there is also no other, created or uncreated, finite or infinite, spirit besides his own; everything that exists, including other spirits, exists solely in his mind. Furthermore, while according to Berkeley only some of our ideas (i.e., ideas of the imagination) are caused by ourselves—the "ideas of sense" are not caused by us or dependent on our will: it is God that produces them in us—the egoist, by contrast, believes that he himself is the immediate cause of all modifications of his own mind. That is to say, not only does everything that exists exist only in the egoist's mind, but moreover, everything that exists actually exists in the egoist's mind by his own will. The egoist, whose "thought is the cause of the existence of all creatures," is thus the


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only being who exists, or in the words of Saint Hyacinthe, "he alone is the whole universe."12

To see just how unbearable this kind of belief must have been for the egoist thinker himself, it is, perhaps, enough to take a quick look at the novel La Secte des Egoïstes by the modern French writer and playwright Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt.13 Its main character, the egoist philosopher Gaspard Langenhert, so firmly believes in the egoist metaphysics that he, first, literally blinds himself and then goes on to take his own life—as a direct result of this metaphysical theory. (The novel is not entirely fictional; it is, in fact, a fictionalized biography of an early eighteenth-century Dutch philosopher of the same name, presumably himself, besides Brunet, one of the so-called Parisian egoists; although numerous details are clearly invented, the metaphysical framework of the novel faithfully follows the egoist doctrine.)

The novel, set in early eighteenth-century Paris, portrays the egoist philosopher's vicissitudes in his interaction with the people who, he believes, exist only in his mind. The people, and the world they inhabit, exist only because he is thinking of them. He created them in his thought or imagination by a mere act of will. He thus, understandably, takes himself to be nothing less than a God of his universe and acts accordingly (for example, while reading the Gospels in the New Testament of the Bible, he is convinced that he is reading his own notes). The people around him soon begin to act—jokingly—in accordance with his belief that they themselves are nothing other than creations of his thought or fictions of his imagination and that they are entirely dependent on his will (for example, they beg him not to fall asleep as they would then cease to exist, and so forth). Furthermore, some of them even learn to exploit his belief in his own omnipotence to their advantage: thus, for example, a shopkeeper is able to sell him the entire contents of his shop as Langenhert is convinced that it is as a result of his own will that the salesman appears before his eyes with the merchandise. With his unorthodox ideas, he soon becomes a celebrity in the fashionable literary and philosophical salons throughout Paris. Of course, neither the salons nor his interlocutors really exist (nor, for that matter, does Paris, France or the entire universe)—they all exist only in his mind. He has created the salons and the people in them who often contradict him, not so much because he got weary of living in the completely deserted universe where nobody and nothing existed apart from himself, but mainly because he wanted to put his metaphysical theory to the test. This, by the way, is also his answer to the most common objection raised by his interlocutors, namely: if his interlocutors exist solely as modes of his thought or fictions in his imagination and are

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therefore completely dependent on his will—how is it possible, then, for them to contradict him and oppose his ideas? Why does he take their objections seriously and why does he even bother answering them? By answering the objections of his interlocutors, Langenhert of course believes that he is only conversing and arguing with himself, that is, ruminating in his head about his own metaphysics. Eventually, the people grow tired of him and his persistent belief that everyone around him is nothing other than a fiction of his imagination. Realizing that he no longer enjoys the respect of his creatures (the respect he believes he deserves as their Creator), he decides to punish them by stripping them of their visual existence. Since he is unable to strip the people and objects around him of their visual existence by simply willing them to become invisible—no matter how strongly he willed such, the people and objects kept their visual existence and he still saw them—he ends up blinding himself by scratching out his own eyes. Obviously, the only way for Langenhert to strip people and objects of their visual existence by his own will was to strip himself of his sight: the people and objects now became invisible because he no longer saw them. Since the "invisible" people still do not take him seriously (he is still able to hear their mocking voices in the dark) and since he now finds also the tangible existence of the "invisible" objects annoying (oftentimes he bumps against the walls or pieces of furniture, injuring himself; thereupon, he first regrets that he has incarnated himself, and then, to his great relief, he remembers he has been wise and far-sighted enough to have created medical doctors as well; he also congratulates himself for having created opium, a substance that, as he says, "makes the universe bearable," and so forth), he decides to strip them of their tangible existence as well, that is, to annihilate them completely—and he is only able to bring that about by annihilating himself. That is to say, since he is clearly unable to annihilate the tangible world and the people in it by the power of his will—the tangible world obviously did not cease to exist when he ceased thinking of it—he understandably chooses the only alternative available, that is, he sacrifices his own life in the belief that in this way he will also be able to do away with the hated creation: since everything exists only in his mind, the moment he ceases to exist, the world and the people in it will also cease to exist.

Another striking example of the egoist metaphysics at work can be found in Leo Tolstoy's early novel Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth. Nikolenka, the hero and narrator of this largely autobiographical novel, says that in his boyhood he had toyed with several different metaphysical


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theories, but none had left him more enthusiastic than the theory he calls "skepticism," which he sums up as follows:

I imagined that, besides myself, nothing and no one existed in the

whole world, that objects were not objects but images, which appeared only when I turned my attention to them, and that as soon as I ceased thinking of them these images disappeared.14 What Nikolenka calls "skepticism" is clearly nothing other than

egoism: the only thing that exists is himself and his thoughts, that is, his own mind and ideas in it; the "objects" making up the world exist only because he is thinking of them; the moment he ceases to think of them, they are annihilated, and so forth. Even though the consequences of his commitment to the egoist metaphysics were nowhere near as fatal for the young Nikolenka as they were for Langenhert, he nevertheless openly admits that at one time his new-found metaphysical theory brought him to "a condition bordering on madness"; he describes his condition in these words:

There were moments when, under the influence of this idée fixe

[namely, that "objects" pop into and out of existence as he begins to, and ceases to, think of them], I reached such a stage of lunacy that sometimes I would look quickly in the opposite direction, hoping to catch nothingness (néant) unawares while I was not there.15 Since Nikolenka believes that the existence of "objects" making up the

world consists in their being perceived or thought of by him, this means that the world does not exist where he does not perceive it; in short, there should be "nothingness" behind his back. That which drove Nikolenka to the brink of madness, was the fact that he could never see that the world actually was not there. As he says, he was rapidly turning round, hoping to catch a glimpse of "nothingness" where he was not, that is, where he was not perceiving the world. In accordance with his metaphysical theory, the world should not be there, that is, the world should not exist when he was not perceiving it; during the intervals between his perception of it the world should go out of existence. The insurmountable difficulty for the young Nikolenka was that there was absolutely no way for him to make sure that the world actually did go out of existence when he was not perceiving it. There is clearly something self-defeating in Nikolenka's attempts to see a leak in reality or a crack in the universe: in order to find out if the "objects" have really gone out of existence during the intervals between one's perception of them, one should, of course, not rely on

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perception itself. No matter how hard he tried, he could never whirl around fast enough to see the "nothingness": since the existence of the world consists in its being perceived by him, the world was, of course, always there whenever he turned round. On account of his "skepticism" Nikolenka thus finds himself in a condition that is, perhaps, even more unbearable than the condition of a certain patient mentioned by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his Phenomenology of Perception, who was constantly turning round in order to see if the world behind him was really there:16 but whereas Merleau-Ponty's patient merely doubts whether the world behind him exists—and all he has to do to reassure himself that the world behind him is still there is to turn round and look back whenever the doubt arises in his mind—Nikolenka's "madness" is that he believes that the world behind him does not exist, yet there is absolutely no way for him to make sure that the world really isn't there.

2 “We are a part of a thinking being, of which some thoughts ... constitute our mind”

The main problem with Brunet's Projet d'une nouvelle métaphysique—which is not the only eighteenth-century work on the philosophy of immaterialism to have dematerialized—is not whether it ever existed outside its author's mind, but rather in its very existence in its author's mind. In Saint-Sauveur's review, Brunet's Projet is said to have existed in the form of a slim, printed volume, that did not sell well in spite of the fact that it had been promoted by its author in his public lectures, and so forth. According to the metaphysical theory expounded in the book, all these events, that is, the writing, printing, selling, promoting—and even Saint-Sauveur's reviewing of the book—had unfolded solely in the mind of its author, that is, in Brunet's mind. Andrew Baxter, one of the early critics of Berkeley's Principles, has maintained, in his Enquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul (1733), that Berkeley's writing and publishing his books must have been self-defeating, since, for him, writing, printing, and books were mere "ideas, or dreams."17 While Berkeley made use of these "ideas," that is, writing, printing, and books, simply in order to communicate his thoughts to other spirits like himself who he believed existed outside his mind, there was indeed something self-defeating in Brunet's writing and publishing his book in order to communicate his thoughts to other minds who he believed existed only in his mind, that is, to the minds who were themselves creations of his thought, produced in his mind, no less than the ideas making up his book. Shouldn't the one who intended to communicate one's own ideas to other modes of one's thought be expected to act


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differently? For example, like the hero of Patricia Highsmith's short story entitled The Man Who Wrote Books in His Head.18 This brilliant short story features a young would-be novelist whose first novel was rejected by several publishers because of unclear theme, unconvincing characters, artificial dialogues, and so on. Thereupon, he decides that he is going to get his next novel exactly right even before putting a single word on paper, that is, already in his thoughts. So he spends weeks and months at his desk thinking about the story, characters and dialogues; he pictures the characters clearly in his mind, with all their thoughts, feelings, and appearance down to the smallest details. In all that time he has, of course, written nothing. "I can write my books later," he rationalizes the apparent lack of his literary productivity to his wife. "The important thing is to think them out." Once the novel is done in his head, it's only going to be a matter of a month or two to put it to paper. After a year, when the book is completed in his head and he finally sits down to type it out, it dawns upon him that the proces of actually writing the book is a pure waste of time: after all, the novel is completed in his head, he has memorized it in its entirety and could recall any passage from it at will—why, then, write it at all? Would not the next many weeks he'd need to type the book out be better spent in thinking out another novel? And this is precisely what happens. The next day he starts working on the second novel, and after a year, when it is finished in his head, he, again, finds the idea of putting words he knew by heart onto several hundreds of pages absurd; and so he goes on to think out his third novel, and so on until his death. In the end, he dies believing that he has written fourteen books and created no less than one hundred and twenty-seven characters. "Writing"—and "reading"—books "in his head" is not the only solipsistic theme in the story; for example, on his death-bed, the novelist even buries himself in his thoughts next to Tennyson in Poet's Corner at Westminster Abbey, and goes on to deliver a eulogy at his own funeral praising his own literary achievements and describing himself, most appropriately, as a "monument to human imagination."

Both, the novelist and Brunet, "create" only in their minds. Unlike the novelist who simply conjures up his characters, Brunet, whose "thought is the cause of the existence of all creatures," believes he is literally creating the spirits or minds that are going to inhabit his egoist universe. Although they both create only "in their heads," Brunet gives the ideas making up his new metaphysical theory the form of a book, that is, in his mind, he puts his ideas down on paper, has the manuscript published and the book put on sale and even reviewed, whereas the novelist skips all these unnecessary, "external" formalities even in his mind, although in his mind,

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he could easily have each of his novels "published"; moreover, in his mind, each of his novels could have easily become a bestselling book, and so forth. The novelist thus finds it unnecessary to commit his thoughts to paper not only in the external world but also in his head. Not even in his mind does he try to achieve with any of his subsequent novels that which he has failed to achieve with his first novel in the external world; does not this fact prove that he is not simply insane, but rather consistent in his egoist attitude? To him, putting his thoughts down on paper in his mind, or even "publishing" the novels in his head, is unnecessary simply because, trapped in his little egoist universe, he has decided he was going to be their only "reader." In order for him to be able to "read" his novels, he clearly does not need to commit them to paper in his mind or give them the shape of a book "in his head" (in the story, we see him "reading" not only the novel he is currently working on, but also "browsing in his past work which he knew by heart," smiling and murmuring contentedly at some particularly clever turns of the phrase or delightful characterizations). And just as the novelist has no difficulties "reading" his novels—although none of them was committed to paper in his mind—should not also Brunet's readers be able to "read" his Projet d'une nouvelle métaphysique even though it did not exist in his mind in the form of a handwritten document or a printed book? After all, the egoist philosopher "created" his "readers" in the same way the novelist created the characters in his novels, that is, "in his head" or mind, and they therefore do not differ in their ontological status from the work they are "reading." Isn't the fact that Brunet stages this elaborate and entirely unnecessary charade and gives his Projet d'une nouvelle métaphysique the form of a printed book, an unmistakable sign that he himself does not sincerely believe that his readers exist only in his mind, i.e. that other minds are nothing other than modes of his thought or "ideas which refer to nothing" outside his mind? Does it not seem, then, that the egoist philosopher himself is not totally convinced of the "fundamental principle" of his own metaphysical theory "that his thought is the cause of the existence of all creatures"? In short, isn't the very existence of Projet d'une nouvelle métaphysique in the form a book in the mind of its author contrary to the metaphysical theory expounded in it?

If we change the perspective and look into the egoist's mind from the reverse angle, that is, from the point of view of the thinking being inhabiting the egoist's mind, Brunet's metaphysical theory does not seem to fare any better. Given the egoist ontology according to which I am nothing other than a mode of the egoist's thought, one only has to ask the obvious question: if I inhabit the mind of someone else, if, in short, I am but one idea in that mind—what about ideas in my own mind? Who is the


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real subject of ideas in my mind? Who is the one thinking my thoughts: is it me, or, perhaps, the one who is thinking of me? While I normally think of myself as an autonomous thinking being, while I, no doubt, believe that the ideas in my mind are possessed by me, the egoist would have me believe that the ideas arising in my mind are his, not mine—he is their subject, not me. In the egoist universe, where I am nothing other than a mode of the egoist's thought, it is not I myself who thinks my thoughts; it is, rather, the egoist who thinks within me or through me. Let us recall, by way of example, Diderot's eccentric sage, mentioned at the beginning, who believes himself to be the only existing being in the universe, while all other beings (including, of course, Diderot's narrator) exist merely as ideas in his mind, that is, as modes of his thought which are entirely dependent upon his will.19 Firmly believing that his thought is the cause of the existence of all beings, this sage is convinced that the Roman poet Virgil and the first Roman emperor Augustus are nothing other than "ideas which refer to nothing" outside his mind; both Virgil and Augustus exist only because he thinks of them. Accordingly, he claims to be the author both of Augustus's political achievements and of the ideas constituting Virgil's Aeneid. Strictly speaking, it was not Virgil who composed The Aeneid; it was, rather, the egoist philosopher himself who created, in his thought, both Virgil and "his" epic; and the same holds true also for Augustus and "his" political achievements.

In his Encyclopédie article "Égoïsme," which deals with the ethical egoism, de Jaucourt criticises Montaigne for constantly boring his readers "with his inclinations, his fantasies, his maladies, his virtues, and his vices," instead of drawing his examples from history, and says that a writer should be allowed "to speak of himself only insofar as the matter under discussion demands it,"20 for example, when he is defending his own ideas, actions, and so forth. In the case of metaphysical egoist, dealt with in d'Alembert's article "Égoïstes" in the adjacent column, an advice of this sort is of course entirely futile. Metaphysical egoist, even if he wanted, could speak about nothing other than himself. Even when his examples are coming from the remotest past, even when he speaks of thoughts and actions of others, metaphysical egoist speaks only of himself. When Diderot's extravagant metaphysician speaks of Virgil's poem and Augustus's politics, he is in fact speaking of his own thoughts and his own actions; that is, he is citing fragments from his own vast biography: since Virgil and Augustus are creations of his thought and they therefore exist only as modifications of his mind, it was, of course, the egoist himself who has spent several years as Virgil writing The Aeneid in his thought, and as Augustus ruling the Roman Empire in his thought. Not only Virgil's

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and Augustus's presumed biographies, but biographies of all those persons who ever inhabited the egoist's world, including the history of that world from its creation onwards, are nothing other than his own biography. Egoist's biography could thus perhaps be likened to Diderot's "great scroll" in Jacques the Fatalist, on which everything that ever happens to anyone in the world is already written,21 or to Leibniz's book of destinies in Theodicy: as we read in the concluding paragraphs of Theodicy, such a book can be found in each of the possible worlds as the "history of this world" or "book of its destinies," that is, the destinies of all those persons contained in that world whose history is this book.22 While the "book of destinies" in Jacques the Fatalist and the one in Theodicy are clearly entities distinct from the persons whose destinies they are describing, as well as from the readers (strictly speaking, none of the two books has an author, and only Leibniz's one has a—single—reader, i.e. God), the metaphysical egoist himself (or his mind) literally is such a "book of destinies." The egoist's mind could thus, perhaps, even more readily be likened to another of Diderot's concepts, namely to the concept of the paradoxical book that "reads itself," that is, the book that is simultaneously reader and text. This concept is used by Diderot in Éléments de physiologie, his last work, to illustrate the mechanism of memory; having likened the soft substance of the brain, which he says should be regarded as "a mass of sensitive and living wax," to a book ("Here is the book"), Diderot asks: "But where is the reader?" and answers: "The reader is the book itself," that is, the "sensing, living, and speaking book."23 Isn't the mind of the metaphysical egoist precisely such a "sensing, living, and speaking book" of destinies, or history of the world, which not only "reads" but also writes "itself"?

Strictly speaking, when Virgil—who exists solely as a mode of the egoist's thought—came up with any one of the ideas constituting TheAeneid, it was, in truth, the egoist philosopher who came up with that idea. In this regard, the egoism clearly resembles Spinozism. In Spinoza, where, as minds, we are nothing other than ideas in the infinite intellect of God, the true subject of all our thoughts is God. Since "the human mind is a part of the infinite intellect of God," the ideas that occur in our mind are at the same time modifications of God's mind. Therefore, Spinoza concludes, "when we say that the human mind perceives this or that," we are, in fact, saying that "God ... has this or that idea."24 That is to say, the true seat of the ideas that arise in our mind is God's infinite intellect itself. Or, as Spinoza had already put it in his early Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect: "we are a part of a thinking being, of which some thoughts ... constitute our mind."25 In this regard, Pierre Bayle seems to have been


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right in seeing Spinoza's God, in his Dictionnaire historique et critique, as "the subject of all the modifications of thought,"26 or a being "modified at the same time by the thoughts of all mankind."27 As Spinoza himself anticipates in the Corollary to Proposition 11 of Part II of the Ethics, his readers will be reluctant to renounce their status of autonomous knowing subjects and admit that all their ideas occur within God's infinite intellect of which their mind is a "part"; that is, he expects his readers to dispute his view that they are not themselves the true subjects of ideas occurring in their minds, but that God is. However, whereas Spinoza may have managed to persuade some of his readers that, as minds, they (including, of course, the author of the work they were reading, i.e. Spinoza himself) were nothing other than ideas in the infinite intellect of God, the egoist philosopher, by contrast, is unlikely to succeed in convincing us that he himself is the thinking being "of which some thoughts ... constitute our mind," that is, the intellect or mind whose modifications we are, and that we therefore owe our existence to his thinking of us. While for Spinoza I also exist outside God's infinite intellect, namely as a body or a mode of extension, there is no reality outside the egoist's mind corresponding to the idea the egoist has of me. In short, as the idea God has of my body, I am, on Spinoza's account, the idea of "a singular thing which actually exists,"28 whereas according to the egoist metaphysics, I am but an idea in the egoist's mind, an idea which, in the words of Diderot's egoist sage, "refers to nothing" outside his mind.

The egoist philosophy thus seems to be an idealist reworking of the Spinozist metaphysics. The egoist takes himself to be the only substance there is; thought, which is the cause of the existence of all beings and includes within itself everything that exists, is his one and only attribute; beings inhabiting the egoist universe thus exist merely as modes of the egoist's thought or as ideas in his mind, and so forth. If Brunet's lost book on the egoist metaphysics were ever discovered, it would most likely read as an idealist version of Spinoza's Ethics where everything that in Spinoza's eyes holds true for God would hold true for the egoist sage himself; for example, Spinoza's Proposition 15 of Part I of the Ethics: "whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God" would read: "whatever is, is in me, and nothing can be or be conceived without me"; and Spinoza's Corollary to Proposition 11 of Part II that "the human mind is a part of the infinite intellect of God" and that "therefore, when we say that the human mind perceives this or that, we are saying nothing but that God … has this or that idea" would no doubt read: "the human mind is a part of my intellect" and "therefore, when we say that the human mind perceives this or that, we are saying nothing but that I ... have

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this or that idea," and so forth. The egoist sage, in short, would come to occupy the place of Spinoza's God. If asked how he knows he is God, the egoist philosopher could, no doubt, say the same thing as Jack, the character in Ruling Class (Peter Medak, 1972), who suffers from delusions of grandeur and takes himself to be God: "Simple. When I pray to Him, I find I'm talking to myself." Thus, the lesson Brunet's readers learned from his Projet d'une nouvelle métaphysique was not unlike the one Nicolas Malebranche, in his Méditations chrétiennes et métaphysiques (1683), learned from Christ's words: "Without me you would think of nothing, see nothing, and conceive of nothing. All your ideas are contained within my substance, and all your knowledge belongs to me."29

3 “Anguish of perceivedness”

While, on the one hand, philosophers of the Western tradition, in which the human mind was typically considered to be a pure thinking thing, were still willing to contemplate the idea that the existence of the world and the people in it depends on their thinking of them, they have shown, on the other hand, extreme reluctance to entertain the idea that their own existence and the existence of the world they inhabit might consist in their being thought of by others. That is, they were prepared to think of their thought as the cause of the existence of other beings, but not of themselves or their own existence as being caused by others' thought. The very thought that they themselves might be a mere idea in the mind of another filled them with unease and anxiety. An example of the typical attitude towards the idea that one's mode of existence may be that of a mode of another man's thought can be found in Jorge Luis Borges's short story entitled The Circular Ruins. Very briefly, when a character who inhabits another man's dream discovers that he has been created in thought and that his existence is being dreamt by another, he exclaims: "To be not a man, but the projection of another man's dream—what incomparable humiliation, what vertigo!" Not long afterward, the dreamer himself comes to realize "with relief, with humiliation, with terror" that he, too, is a mere appearance and that another man is dreaming him.30 It would be virtually unthinkable for a mind that takes itself to be a pure thinking substance, which derives its existence from cogito, to think of itself as a mere mode of thought, as an idea contained in the mind of another. While I am fully aware that I think and that I exist, nothing in my experience seems to suggest, let alone supports, the view that, as a mind, I am "a part of a thinking being" and that it is not I myself who thinks but the egoist who thinks within me, that is, the view that what constitutes my mind are not


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my own thoughts but the thoughts of another, and that I therefore exist, not because I think, but because I am being thought of by another.

In Asian philosophy the attitude towards the idea that one's existence might be dreamt by another, seems to have been rather different. For example, Master Zhuang, the narrator of the famous butterfly dream story, seems completely unperturbed by the idea that, in the dream, he might have really been a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuang Zhou.31 He simply says he does not know whether, in the dream, there was Zhuang Zhou dreaming he was a butterfly or whether there was a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuang Zhou. Unlike the thinkers of the Western philosophical tradition, the Daoist sage does not seem to value the experience of "the dreamer" more than that of "the dreamed one"; to him, there is no difference in reality or authenticity between the two, they both seem to be equally genuine. Just as the Daoist sage shows no special liking for life over death and does not think death to be worse then life; just as he does not see dreaming as less real than being awake, so too he views the experiences of "the dreamer" and "the dreamed one" as equally authentic.

Despite great reluctance shown by philosophers to think of themselves as modes of other people's thought, there was nevertheless a thinker who believed himself to be nothing other than an idea contained in the minds of others; that is, besides the extravagant sage who believed that the world and the people in it existed only because he thought of them, there was also a thinker who believed that he himself existed only because others thought of him, and that the moment others ceased to think of him he would cease to exist. A vivid and very moving description of a life given from the point of view of the idea contained in the minds of others—that is, a first-hand account of a life literally led as a mode of other people's thought—can be found in the autobiography of the late twentieth-century French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, whose professional life, sadly, came to an abrupt end in 1980 when, for no apparent reason, he murdered his spouse. He confessed to the murder, but was found not guilty by reason of insanity. In his posthumously published autobiography, Althusser writes that for most of his life he was haunted by "the phantasy of not existing,"32 that is, he believed he "did not really exist,"33 or more precisely, he believed he existed merely as a fiction in the imaginations of others, as an idea in their minds. He considered his existence in the minds of others to be the result of his own "artifice and deceit."34 Although the "artifice and deceit" through which he concealed his nonexistence from others seemed to have worked admirably—through his numerous books, he did succeed in making his readers believe in his existence; as a matter of fact, hardly anyone, except himself, ever doubted his existence—he

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nevertheless lived in constant fear that others would see through his ruse and expose him as "a worthless person who only existed through artifice and deceit,"35 as "a creature of artifice, a non-being,"36 that is, realize that he exists only in their minds. Believing himself to be a being that exists only because others think of him, Althusser would, no doubt, readily agree with Brunet and Langenhert that it was their thought which was the cause of his existence. It was not until he started toying with the idea of committing suicide (he attempted suicide on several occasions) that Althusser fully realized all the implications of his modal status. His very thought of taking his own life seems to have stemmed from his precarious ontological status; he writes: "I wanted at all costs to destroy myself because I had never existed."37 And therein, that is, in his ontological status as a mode of other people's thought, lies also the final clue to understanding the tragic death of his wife.38 For, how is one whose existence consists in one's being thought of by others, one who believes oneself to be an idea contained in the minds of others, in short, one whose esse is percipi, to take one's own life? Here, the only course of action left open to Althusser seems to have been the one pursued by O, the "object" in Samuel Beckett's Film in his "search of non-being"39—that is, to flee the perception of others. Thus, the tragic death of the one person who most firmly believed in his existence, the person whose thought he believed to be the main cause of his existence, the person who, through her thought, contributed most to his existence, was, in his eyes, perhaps, nothing other than an attempt to flee from perception of those in whose mind he believed he existed, nothing other than a step in his "search of non-being," that is, an act similar to O's systematic suppression of all sources of extraneous perception in Film. Clearly believing that for him, to exist is to be perceived, O (played in the film [Alan Schneider, 1965] by Buster Keaton) attempts, in his "search of non-being," to escape all extraneous—that is, animal, human, and divine—perception by methodically eliminating, from his surroundings, all subjects of perception, first and foremost the perceiving "eyes": after he has hidden himself from the curious gaze of the passers-by in the street by shutting himself in his room, O draws the curtains and covers the mirror with a rug; he throws out the cat and the dog; he tears a print of God from the wall and destroys it; he covers the parrot in its cage and the goldfish in its bowl with a coat; he tears up the photographs of himself (in the photographs showing him at various ages, from early childhood to adulthood, it is, as a rule, always the others who are gazing at him, which, no doubt, further reinforces his belief that he has always existed only because he was perceived); after removing the last source of extraneous perception from the room, he feels his own pulse on


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the wrist, as if he wanted to check whether he has managed to come any closer to "non-being," and so forth. Even the agony Althusser must have felt in attempting to take his own life could, perhaps, best be described as "anguish of perceivedness,"40 that is, the feeling experienced by O who, wherever he directs his gaze, everywhere he sees "eyes" looking back at him: it is not only the people in the street and the pets in the room who are gazing at him; moreover, the two holes in the headrest of his rocking chair, the eye-like buttons on the back of the folder containing the photographs, and even the bright spot—that is, the blank rectangle revealed on the wall by the removal of the print of God—also seem to be returning his gaze. The "anguish of perceivedness" is the exact opposite of the "mortal apprehension" Saint-Sauver feigns he feels whenever the "all-powerful" Brunet "begins to sleep," that is, whenever the egoist philosopher ceases to think: while Saint-Sauveur shudders at the thought that he might be left unthought of by the egoist philosopher, that is, while he is horrified at the prospect of remaining unperceived, O and Althusser, by contrast, are clearly terrified by their being perceived. The ominous metaphysical stratagem behind Althusser's "suicide" thus appears to have been simply the obverse of Langenhert's "annihilation" of the world: just as it was through his self-destruction that the egoist sage was able, in the end, to achieve the destruction of the world and the people in it who he believed existed solely in his mind, so it would have been through the destruction of others, that is, those in whose mind he believed he existed, that Althusser would have been able to achieve his self-destruction.

Notes 1 A clear-cut distinction between the two meanings of egoism can be found, for example, in Diderot's and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie: while de Jaucourt's article on "Égoïsme" deals with ethical egoism, d'Alembert's article on "Égoïstes" is concerned with metaphysical egoists. See Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, eds., Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 17 vols. (Paris: Briasson, 1751-65), 5: 431. 2 Thémiseul de Saint-Hyacinthe, Recherches philosophiques sur la nécessité de s'assurer par soi-même de la vérité, sur la certitude de nos connoisances et sur la nature des êtres (London: Jean Nourse, 1743), 95. 3 Diderot and d'Alembert, eds., Encyclopédie, s.v., "Égoïstes," 5: 431b. 4 Andrew Michael Ramsay, Les Voyages de Cyrus avec un Discours sur la Mythologie, ed. Georges Lamoine (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2002), 199. 5 Ibid., 132. 6 Ibid., 200.

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7 Diderot, La Promenade du sceptique, in Œuvres, 5 vols., ed. Laurent Versini (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1994-97), 1: 105. 8 Ibid. 9 The reasons that led Berkeley's early critics to associate him with egoism were first studied in detail by Harry M. Bracken in his Early Reception of Berkeley's Immaterialism: 1710-1733 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1965), 18-23; and, more recently, by Sébastien Charles in his Berkeley au siècle des Lumières: Immatérialisme et scepticisme au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: J. Vrin, 2003), chapter 2 of part I. The most extensive treatment of the egoists themselves can be found in Jean-Robert Armogathe's unpublished "mémoire de maîtrise" Une Secte-fantôme au XVIIIe siècle: les Egoïstes (Paris, 1970). 10 See Diderot, Le Rêve de d'Alembert, in Œuvres, 1: 620. For more on Diderot's associating Berkeley with egoism, see Jean Deprun, "Diderot devant l'idéalisme," Revue internationale de la philosophie 148-149 (June 1984), 67-76, and Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, Diderot ou la philosophie de la séduction (Paris: Albin Michel, 1997), 129-47. 11 Flachat de Saint-Sauveur, Pièces fugitives d'histoire et de littérature anciennes et modernes (Rouen and Paris: Pierre Giffart, 1704), 356 et sq.; quoted in Lewis Robinson, "Un Solipsiste au XVIIIe siècle," L'Anée philosophique 24 (1913): 19-20. 12 Saint-Hyacinthe, Recherches philosophiques sur la nécessité de s'assurer par soi-même de la vérité, sur la certitude de nos connoissances et sur la nature des êtres, 94. 13 Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, La Secte des Égoïstes (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994). 14 Leo Tolstoy, Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth, trans. Michael Scammell (New York: The Modern Library, 2002), 198; I owe this example to Robert J. Fogelin, Berkeley and the Principles of Human Knowledge (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 147. 15 Ibid. 16 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 25 and 418-19. 17 Andrew Baxter, An Enquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul, second edition (London, 1737), vol. 2, 271. 18 Patricia Highsmith, The Man Who Wrote Books in His Head, in Slowly, Slowly in the Wind (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 9-15. 19 See Diderot, La Promenade du sceptique, 1: 105. 20 Diderot and d'Alembert, eds., Encyclopédie, s.v., "Égoïsme," 5: 431a. 21 See Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist, trans. Michael Henry (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 25. 22 Leibniz, Essais de Théodicée, ed. J. Brunschwig (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1969), 361. 23 Diderot, Éléments de physiologie, in Œuvres, 1: 1289. 24 Spinoza, Ethics, in The Collected Works of Spinoza, trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 456.


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25 Spinoza, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, in The Collected Works of Spinoza, 33. 26 Pierre Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary, trans. Richard H. Popkin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), art. "Spinoza," rem. N, 308. 27 Ibid., 311. 28 Spinoza, Ethics, 456. 29 Nicolas Malebranche, Méditations chrétiennes et métaphysiques, in Œuvres complètes, 20 vols., ed. André Robinet (Paris: J. Vrin, 1972-84), 10: 125. 30 Jorge Luis Borges, The Circular Ruins, in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), 96-100. 31 The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 49; for interpretation of the butterfly dream, I rely on Hans-Georg Moeller, Daoism Explained: From the Dream of the Butterfly to the Fishnet Allegory (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 2004), 44-55. 32 Louis Althusser, The Future Lasts Forever, trans. Richard Veasey (New York: The New Press, 1993), 227. 33 Ibid., 58, 89, and 210. 34 Ibid., 93 and 143. 35 Ibid., 144. 36 Ibid., 89. 37 Ibid., 277. 38 See ibid., 276-77 and 283. 39 Samuel Beckett, Film, in The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), 163. 40 Ibid.

CONTRIBUTORS

Margaret Atherton is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She has authored and edited a range of books on both early-modern philosophy and the philosophy of perception, including Berkeley's Revolution in Vision (1990), Women Philosophers of the Early Modern Period (1994), and Looking into Pictures (2003).

Miran Božovi is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is the author of An Utterly Dark Spot: Gaze and Body in Early Modern Philosophy (2000) and editor of Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings (1995).

Petr Glombí ek lectures on philosophy at Ostrava University, and he is a research fellow at the Philosophy Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. He is the author of articles on a range of subjects from Descartes to Wittgenstein, and he is co-translator of the Czech critical edition of Descartes' writings.

Boris Hennig is currently a research fellow at Humboldt Universität in Berlin, having also taught at Pittsburgh University. He is the author of a number of articles on themes such as causality and Cartesian conscientia.

James Hill lectures in philosophy at Charles University in Prague, and is a research fellow at the Philosophy Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. He is the author of a number of articles on early-modern philosophy, concentrating in particular on the epistemology of Locke and Descartes, and he is currently preparing a monograph on Descartes' method of doubt.

Nicholas Jolley is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of many books on early-modern philosophy, including Leibniz and Locke: A Study of the New Essays on the Human Understanding (1984), The Light of the Soul: Theories of Ideas in Leibniz, Malebranche and Descartes (1990), and most recently Leibniz(2005).

Contributors170

Jan Palkoska lectures in philosophy at Charles University in Prague, and is a research fellow at the Philosophy Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. He is the author of several articles on early-modern philosophy, and of the monograph Substance and Intelligibility in Leibniz’s Metaphysics (2010).

G.A.J. Rogers is the Founder-Editor of the British Journal for the History of Philosophy and the author and editor of some twelve books on seventeenth-century philosophy and many related articles. His most recent collection, edited with Tom Sorrell and Jill Kraye, is Insiders and Outsiders in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (2010).

Anthony Savile is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at King’s College London. Among his many publications are Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, an Orientation to the Central Theme (2005), and Leibniz and the Monadology (2000).

INDEX

d'Alembert, Jean Le Rond 150 Althusser, Louis 6, 163-165, 167n. animals 4, 86, 97, 106-111 Antony, Mark 97 Aquinas, Thomas 15, 16, 26n. Aristotle 86, 103, 128n., 133, 134,

140 Armogathe, Jean-Robert 166n. Arnauld, Antoine 66, 67, 73, 77n. atheism 45, 55, 56, 58, 84-86, 95n.,

150 Ayers, Michael 112n.

Bacon, Francis 82, 83 Bauman, Peter 145n. Baxter, Andrew 156, 166n. Bayle, Pierre 160, 167n.Beardsley, William 128n. Beattie, James 131, 132 Beckett, Samuel 164, 167n. Belfrage, Bertil 127n. Bennett, Jonathan 104, 105, 113n. Berkeley, George 1, 2, 4, 5, 6n.,

42n., 81, 115-129n., 149, 151, 152, 156, 166n.

Bettcher, Talia Mae 128n. Bonaventure 16, 26n. Bond, James 19, 20 Borges, Jorge Luis 162, 167n. Bracken, Harry M. 166n. Broughton, Janet 42n. Brunet, Jean 151-153, 156-158, 161,

162, 164, 165 Brykman , Genevieve 128n.

Cambridge Platonists 2, 4, 81-84, 87, 91, 94

Castor and Pollux (thought experiment) 100-103

Charles, Sébastien 166n. Chaung Tzu 167n. common sense 4, 5, 97, 106, 110,

112, 131-135, 137-146n. conscientia 2, 15-18, 24, 26n. consciousness 2, 3, 7-10, 12, 15, 17,

18, 22-26n., 41, 42n., 64, 77n., 86 ,89, 99, 100, 102, 108, 109, 112, 117, 124, 125, 127, 128n.

Cudworth, Ralph 4, 82, 84, 86, 87, 91, 93

Cummins, Phillip 127n., 128n. Curley, Edwin 34, 42n., 166n.

Daniel, Stephen H. 127n. Deprun, Jean 166n. Descartes, René; 1-12, 15-27n., 29-

43n., 45, 58, 59, 63-70, 73, 76n.-79n.

Diderot, Denis 5, 150, 151, 159-161, 165n., 166n.

egoism/egoist 5, 6, 149-155, 157-162, 165, 166n.

Epicureanism 32, 40, 42n., 84, 94

Finkelstein, David 26n. Fogelin, Robert J. 166n.

Gassendi, Pierre 19, 33, 37, 64, 69, 76n.

Glauser, Richard 128n. God 3, 4, 6, 21, 23, 25, 27n., 30n.,

31-36, 40, 42n., 43n., 45-49, 51-58, 60n., 63-65, 67, 68, 70, 72-74, 77n., 85, 88-93, 95n., 105, 109, 110, 113n., 119, 152, 153, 160-162, 164, 165; deceiving

Index 172

God argument 7, 8, 18, 21, 25, 31-36, 39, 42n.; vision in God 63, 64, 67

Gueroult, Martial 43n.

Hartley, David 93 Hatfield, Gary 33 Highsmith, Patricia 157, 166n. Hight, Marc 128n. Hill, James 26n. Hobbes, Thomas 1, 2, 31, 40, 82,

84, 87, 121 Hume, David 1, 5, 81, 131, 132,

134, 135, 144, 146n.

idea 5, 10, 14, 21-23, 25, 27n., 45-61n., 63-79n., 82-85, 88-93, 95n., 100, 104, 105, 107-109, 113n. 115-118, 120-128n., 135, 146n., 149, 151-164, 166n.

infinity/infinite 3, 23, 42n., 46-49, 51, 52, 54-58, 60n., 66-70, 72, 74, 78n., 91, 152, 160, 161

innate ideas/notions 4, 82, 84, 88, 95n., 135

intellect; 3, 8, 30-35, 38, 40-43n., 46-49, 51-58, 60n., 61n. 66, 74, 76n., 140, 142, 160, 161, 167n. divine intellect 46-48, 51-54, 56, 58, 60n., 61n., 66, 64

intellectio, pura 27n. intention 13-19, 22, 73, 83, 94, 133

Jaffro, Laurent 128n. de Jaucourt 159, 165n. Jolley, Nicholas 4, 71, 76n.-79n.

Kosman, Aryeh 42n.

Langenhert, Gaspard 153-155, 64, 165

Lehrer, Keith 146n. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 1, 42n.,

76n.-79n., 108, 160, 166n. Locke, John 1, 4, 55, 81-85, 87-

95n., 97-113n., 127n., 128n.

Lovejoy, A.O. 93

Malebranche, Nicolas 1, 3, 4, 63-79n., 127n. 128n., 162, 167n.

materialism 82-84, 91, 94, 104, 106, 108, 151, 156, 166n.

matter 1,11, 20, 32, 33, 46, 47, 50, 51, 58, 59, 61n., 64, 65, 68, 78n., 83, 85-87, 89-94, 98, 101, 103, 105-113n., 116, 118

McCracken, Charles 120, 127n., 128n.

McDowell, John 54 Medak, Peter 162 memory 5, 89, 100, 137, 143, 160 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 156, 166n. Mersenne, Marin 22 method of doubt 3, 29-36, 38-42n. Midgely, Genevieve 127n. Moeller, Hans-Georg 167n. Montaigne, Michel 43n. 153 More, Henry 4, 82, 84-87, 91, 93,

94, 106, 107, 113n. Muehlmann, Robert 127n.

Nagel, Thomas 35, 42n. naturalism 5, 59, 135, 136, 144 Newton, Isaac 92, 93 notion 30, 31, 35, 37, 38, 40-43n.,

82, 84, 90, 113, 134, 136; common notions; 30, 35, 37, 38, 41n.; primary notions 30, 31

Norris, John 81, 106

Ott , Walter 121, 122, 127, 128n., 129n.

perception 5, 9, 11, 17-21, 31, 36, 39, 40, 45, 66, 67, 76n., 78n., 86, 88, 89, 92, 94, 97-100, 104, 110, 125, 126, 134, 136, 137, 139, 147n., 155, 156, 164, 166n.

Plato 86, 128n. Popkin, Richard H. 167n. Priestley, Joseph 132 Pyrrhonism 150

Essays on the Concept of Mind in Early-Modern Philosophy 173

Ramsay, Andrew Michael 150, 166n.

Reid, Thomas 5, 81, 131-147n. res cogitans 1, 2, 29, 38, 39, 41,

43n. Robinson, Lewis 166 Rödl, Sebastian 7, 9-26n.

Saint-Hyacinthe, Thémiseul de 149, 150, 153, 165n., 166n.

Saint-Sauveur, Flachat de 150, 151, 156, 165, 166n.

Sartre, Jean-Paul 34, 42n. Schmitt, Eric-Emmanuel 153, 166n. scholasticism 2, 15, 16, 34, 40, 46,

104, 134, 141 Silhon, Jean de 43n. soul 2, 4, 21, 34, 43n., 66, 67, 71,

75n.-79n., 82-90, 92, 94, 95n., 98, 100-106, 108, 110, 111, 116, 122, 123, 125, 127n., 156, 166n.

Spinoza, Benedict 3, 6, 45-61n., 81, 152, 160-162, 166n., 167n.

spirit 1, 2, 38, 90, 97, 105, 111, 113n., 115-118, 123, 124, 127, 128n., 151, 152

Stillingfleet, Edward 92, 98, 106, 109-111

Stoneham, Thomas 128n. Suárez, Francisco 16 substance 1, 2, 4, 5, 30, 41, 46-49,

51-61n., 63, 68, 76n., 82, 84-94, 98, 99, 101-105, 108, 109, 112n., 113n., 115-124, 126, 127n., 152, 154, 160-162

Sutton, T.F. 147n.

Tolstoy, Leo 154, 166n. transcendental 75, 135, 136, 141,

143, 144 Tschirnhaus, Ehrenfried Walther

von 48-52, 54, 58, 60n., 61n. Turbayne, Colin M. 127-128n.

Walter of Bruges 16, 26n. Whichcote, Benjamin 82 Winkler, Kenneth 128n. Wolterstorff, Nicholas 141, 146n.

Zhuang Zhou (see Chaung Zhu)

Essays on the Concept of Mind in Early-Modern Philosophy

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