The second set of objections to Descartes' Meditations

Mersenne gets right to it, and his first objection is to demand how D knows, at that point in his exposition (meditation 2) where he rejects the existence of bodies, that he has not rejected his own existence?

How does he know, at that point or at all, that a thinking thing is not a body, that each of its actions - thoughts or perhaps "thinkings" - is not nothing but a movement of bodies or parts of his body?

Car comment prouvez-vous qu'un corps ne peut penser, ou que des mouvements corporels ne sont point la pensee meme?

Indeed, how does he know, asks M, that it is not the brain that, by its movements, does the thinking?

D replies correctly that he doesn't actually address that question until the 6th meditation, though he concedes the possibility in the 2nd that he, a thing that thinks, is a body.

And he continues, beginning by quoting himself from the 6th meditation,

"C'est assez que je puisse clairement et distinctement concevoir une chose sans une autre pour être certain que l'une est distincte ou différente de l'autre", etc.

Et un peu apres: 

"Encore que j'aie un corps qui me soit fort etroitement conjoint, neanmoins, parce que, d'un cote, j'ai une claire et distincte idée de moi-meme en tant que je suis seulement une chose qui pense et non étendue, et que d'une autre j'ai une claire et distincte idée du corps en tant qu'il est seulement une chose étendue et qui ne pense point, il est certain que moi, c'est-a-dire mon esprit ou mon âme, par laquelle je suis ce que je suis, est entièrement et véritablement distincte de mon corps, et qu'elle peut être ou exister sans lui".

A quoi il est aisé d'ajouter:

"Tout ce qui peut penser est esprit ou s'appelle esprit."

Mais, puisque le corps et l'esprit sont réellement distinctes, nul corps n'est esprit: donc nul corps ne peut penser.

And then the challenge:

Et, certes, je ne vois rien en cela que vous puissiez nier; car nierez-vous qu'il suffit que nous concevions clairement une chose sans une autre pour savoir qu'elles sont réellement distinctes?

Donnez-nous donc quelque signe plus certain de la distinction reelle, si toutefois on en peut donner aucune.

D considers one might insist on experience as the test whether things can really exist apart and replies it can fail both when the same thing, appearing differently, seems to be two things existing apart in fact and when two things, always experienced together in fact, are on that account mistaken for inseparable.

But this is lame.

The challenge stands.

How can we say what is or what is not, though not actual in our experience -  or anyone's so far as is known -, metaphysically possible?

He seems to believe there is no real alternative and moves on to the next of Mersenne's issues.

Perhaps we should revisit D's discussion of substance and attribute in the 6th meditation, raised in just this connection?

The Objections of Caterus

The first set of objections to Descartes Meditations is by one Johannes Caterus, a priest of Alkmaar in the Netherlands.

In his reply, Descartes rejects the notion that the content (object) of a thought needs no other cause than the thought itself, to wit, the thinker, and reiterates the notion that the cause of the content of a thought must have at least as much reality formally or eminently as the content has objectively, a crucial premise in his most original proof of the existence of God.

No real argument, here, though D's discussion is more astute and more lucid than C's own.

Too, he repeats the more general claim (he never proves it) that any effect requires a cause containing, formally or eminently, at least as much reality as itself.

And he says (with questionable accuracy) that he never appeals to a first cause argument (see his arguments for God as cause of the idea of God in himself and as cause of himself) for the existence of God because he doesn't see how to show the sequence of efficient causes must have a first because it seems each in the series could have a predecessor.

This appears to be an instance of a fallacious, zombie argument often seen advanced in philosophy of religion.

As someone once put it rather fancifully, a train can always have another car.

But this only proves - or illustrates, rather - that there is no largest natural number and not that (which is false) there is an infinite natural number.

As to the spirituality of the self, he claims to be certain that nothing is part of or in him, the thinking thing, of which he does not know.

(Later, toutes les actions d'un esprit, comme serait celle de se conserver soi-meme si elle procedait de lui, etant des pensees, et partant etant presentes et connues a l'esprit, celle-la, comme les autres, lui serait aussi presente et connue, et par elle il viendrait necessairement a connaitre la faculte qui la produirait, toute action nous menant necessairement a la connaissance de la faculte qui la produit.)

And that he finds innate within himself his idea of God.

How do we in fact learn of God?

We are taught.

The cause of the idea of God being in us is just other people.

How the idea developed culturally is a question for anthropology, history, or the history of ideas.

Against C's objection D explains that saying God is the cause of himself means negatively that nothing other than himself causes him and he needs no such cause and positively that his power is so great he causes himself and preserves himself in being from moment to moment.

That is to say, he repeats the claim that C rejected that something can be the cause of itself. 

And claiming we do not find in ourselves the power to conserve ourselves from moment to moment, he further holds the cause of our conservation must be cause of its own (no chain of causes here is possible), since if it can conserve another it must be able to conserve itself.

[I]l me semble que c'est une chose de soi evident, et qui n'a pas besoin de preuve, que tout ce qui existe est ou par une cause, ou par soi comme par une cause .  .  .  . par une surabundance de don propre puissance, laquelle ne peut etre qu'en Dieu seul[.]

Clear and distinct, obscure or confused

Crucial to the Cartesian epistemology.

So what are they?

Bluff?

Anyway.

The 3rd meditation, among other things, advances 2 proofs of the existence of God of which the first is the more novel, though both rely on the principle that the whole cause of something must contain "objectively or eminently" as much reality as its effect.

The 4th meditation echoes ancient skeptical themes about schooling oneself to withhold judgement regarding what is uncertain lest we believe what is false.

The 5th contains a defense of the ontological proof and claims knowledge of God's existence and veracity are foundational to the sciences, licensing continued confidence in things whose clear and distinct proofs are recalled but no longer before our minds.

Still a circle.

There are many nods to Plato in the Meditations, including reference to the doctrine of reminiscence which D does not literally accept and reference to the immutable and eternal essence of the triangle which he does literally espouse.

Elsewhere I have read that Schoolmen reconciled Platonic realism with Aristotelian conceptualism by locating the Ideas as concepts in God's mind.

D is absolutely drenched in scholastic learning.

Med 6. The argument that we cannot imagine a chiliagon - or its thousand sides - is bogus.

I can't perceive the difference between a chiliagon and a myriagon.

Does that mean I can't perceive either?

That we cannot perceive their sides?

No.

The famous possibility argument:

[B]ecause I know that all things which I apprehend clearly and distinctly can be created by God as I apprehend them, it suffices that I am able to apprehend one thing apart from another clearly and distinctly in order to be certain that the one is different from the other . . . .

[J]ust because I know certainly that I exist, and that meanwhile I do not remark that any other thing necessarily pertains to my nature or essence, excepting that I am a thinking thing, I rightly conclude that my essence consists solely in the fact that I am a thinking thing. . . .

[B]ecause, on the one side, I have a clear and distinct idea of myself inasmuch as I am only a thinking and unextended thing, and as, on the other, I possess a distinct idea of body, inasmuch as it is only an extended and unthinking thing, it is certain that this I [that is to say, my soul, by which I am what I am], is entirely and absolutely distinct from my body, and can exist without it.

The argumentative philosopher

In the Meditations, Descartes offers a multitude of arguments employing surprising premises to reach remarkable conclusions, epistemological or ontological.

Like everybody else who is generally not persuaded, nearly all of his arguments strike me as unsound, some egregiously so, and some involving equivocations at least some of which cannot have been genuinely inadvertent.

But the ideas are fascinating and the arguments absorbing, and never does the author attempt to bully us by appeals to authority: his own, that of science, that of the best minds, or of what "we, today" of course know.

Reading the French version with the objections and replies, GF 328, Paris, 1979.

The possibility argument

Suppose it is true that if the soul is possibly immaterial it is necessarily so.

Still, there seems to be an equivocation between the soul being conceivably immaterial and it being possibly so.

There is a difference between epistemic and objective possibility.

The former may reflect crucial ignorance that, if remedied, would both preclude it and exclude the latter.

If the case may be such then to invoke the former to prove the latter is begging the question.

But it may be replied that the alleged difference pertains to a posteriori possibility - physical, psychological, or technical possibility, say, - of the bounds of which one may well be ignorant.

But metaphysical possibility, a priori possibility, which is what is at issue here?

Really?

What are you, anyway?

Three notions are regularly played with in popular, mid-level, and higher, academic culture.

1.     In the tradition of Plato and Descartes, you are your soul and your soul = your mind = your spirit = your intellect, a single non-material whatnot existing continuously over a span of time.

2.     In the tradition of Locke, anything that has your memories and your mental traits is you, though these change in varying degrees over time, anyway.

3.     In the materialist tradition, your body or at any rate your central nervous system is you.

As to the first, think Being Human.

As to the second, think Oblivion, Warehouse 13, or Eureka.

[And note that, for the attentive, Oblivion at least contains the refutation of this conception of personal identity.]

As to the third . . . . well, maybe you don’t see that a lot, in pop culture.

Can’t think of anything just now, anyway.

But that’s certainly the idea behind efforts to cryogenically preserve dead bodies until the day medical science is able to restore them to life.

Cryonics

Restore whom to life?

Why, himself, of course. Whosever body that is.

For any variant of materialism, a dead person is a dead body, and the latter is like a broken toaster.

Depending on how bad things are and on the available skills and resources, sometimes a toaster can be fixed and become fully functional, again.

A witty science fiction writer could make a very amusing Whozzat? story with such ingredients, playing these ideas off against each other.

As to materialism, the eliminative kind has the virtue of doing frankly what the reductive variety does surreptitiously.

That is, they both deny the data (pun intended) of experience.