by Henry Piper (all rights reserved)
Introduction: An Epistemological Project
At the beginning of the First Meditation of René Descartes (1596-1650), he observes that he had never yet taken the time to consider whether there was any good reason to believe that what he thought he knew was in fact certain or even reliable knowledge. “Several years have now passed since I first realized how numerous were the false opinions that in my youth I had taken to be true, and thus how doubtful were all those that I had subsequently built upon them.” He had long simply accepted what he’d read in books or been told by teachers, parents or priests, without pausing to examine whether any of it was really and certainly true or not; therefore, he lacks any firm foundation on which to establish the reliability of what he thought he knew. Up to now, says Descartes, he had been procrastinating, but now he will “raze to the ground” everything he had so far in his life taken for granted so that he can establish a firm foundation for knowledge, since without such a foundation everything must remain doubtful.
This is what makes Descartes’s undertaking a quintessentially epistemological project: he wants to determine what he can know, whether he can know anything with absolute certainty and, if so, how he can know it. In the course of his meditations, however, he will, as we shall see, establish a fundamental metaphysical doctrine known as Dualism. According to this view, the universe consists of two distinct and independent kinds of reality—material (that is, physical or corporeal or bodily) and non-material (that is, immaterial or spiritual or incorporeal or mental or ideal). We refer to Plato as an idealist because, in his view, there is only one genuine kind of reality, namely ideal―the realm of the eternal unchanging Forms, Ideas and mathematical truths, which make up the realm of Being. The exact opposite of Plato’s view is metaphysical Materialism, espoused for example by Thomas Hobbes, according to which the only reality is material. Thus Descartes, we might say, straddles these two opposed extremes to assert that both material and spiritual reality are real and separate kinds of reality; and in human beings, as we shall see, we experience both, in the form of body and mind.
Note, by the way, that Descartes’s “meditations” are not spiritual or religious in nature, but intellectual. We often think of “meditation” as resting or emptying the mind, but Descartes is doing the opposite: though his “meditation” does require quiet solitude, it does not “turn off” the mind but in fact demands the most rigorous mental reflection and concentrated thought (which is what we ourselves must bring to it).
Metaphysical v. Moral Certainty
Descartes begins Meditation I by observing that nothing he has thought he knew is in fact “indubitable”―not able to be doubted, beyond all doubt. Thus he begins by establishing that nothing is certain, for if there is any doubt about something, by definition we can not be certain about it, whereas for something to be beyond all doubt or indubitable is exactly the same as to be perfectly certain. And this is Descartes’s standard for knowledge: he will refuse to accept that he truly knows something unless it is indubitable, unless he can have no doubt about it.
Recall that Descartes seeks to build a firm foundation for knowledge, so if he begins to accept as true anything that might be the least doubtful then anything he later bases upon it will in turn be doubtful and he’ll be back where he started, with everything in doubt. Thus, Descartes’s insistence on absolute, perfect certainty is vitally important to his quest for knowledge. Descartes refers to this kind of absolute certainty as “metaphysical certainty”; by contrast, “moral certainty” is the term he uses to refer to things he knows practically, but that still cannot count as perfect or absolute knowledge. Thus moral certainty must suffice for daily, practical purposes involving things he cannot in good conscience, so to speak, deny, such as that he has a body so he must feed himself even if he is not metaphysically certain of the body’s existence. But only metaphysical certainty is to be called true knowledge, good enough, in his words, “to establish anything firm and lasting in the sciences.”
The First Step: “Withhold Assent”
So, Descartes’s quest for certain knowledge begins with acknowledging the doubtfulness of everything he had thought he knew, and his first firm step on the quest is to “withhold my assent no less carefully from opinions that are not completely certain and indubitable than I would from those that are patently false.” It is not at all the case that he is convinced that everything he thought he knew is in fact false, indeed even that is presumably more than he can know at present! Rather, to “withhold assent” is merely to hold back from judging anything to be true or false; in other words, to refrain from claiming to know anything at all. To repeat, by doubting everything he is not claiming that he knows that everything is false; rather, he is establishing simply that he does not know, thus all he “knows” is that everything is either true or false, which is to say that he knows nothing for certain.
The Problem with the Senses
Here Descartes observes that he has, in his life up to now, relied on the physical senses for knowledge, whether directly from his own direct sensation of the world or indirectly through them to hear of the information reported by others. It is a commonplace that the senses can be deceiving yet it is also easily overlooked how deceiving they are in their very nature. Thus, for example (mine not Descartes’s), when we hold our hand in front of our face, and compare our view of it to our view of a tree in the distance, our eyes clearly show us a large hand and a much smaller tree; and, to be clear, that is exactly what we see, a large hand and a small tree. It is only by virtue of the experience held in our memories that we think we “know” that the tree is “in reality” (i.e., in the physical world) larger than the hand, but this “knowledge” is precisely not what our eyes tell us. Similarly, when we view a glass of water with a straw in it, or a stick in a pool of water, we may observe the straw or stick to (appear to) bend at the water’s surface. What do we see on such an occasion―that is, what do our eyes show us? Clearly, we see a bent straw or stick, even though we “know” that this is just an “illusion” of refracted light; but our eyes do not know this, rather, where our “knowledge” of the matter differs from what our eyes tell us clearly it is a judgment of the mind that is responsible, not the sensation of the eyes.
In general, therefore, the eyes, by nature, convey appearances of physical objects to our brains; they obviously do not convey “reality” itself (whatever that is!). It is frequently said that “appearances can be deceiving,” but it is arguably more accurate to say that appearance by nature constitutes the very essence of deception: appearance simply is what appears and not what is and it is this that our senses convey. This does not mean that our senses are not valuable to us; of course they are, but we must learn how to use them, and this requires experience and judgment, which require the mental processing of the mind.
But Descartes reflects, just because I have been deceived by the senses, and have held many false opinions in the past, can’t I be certain at least of the most basic matters of everyday life here and now, such as “that I am sitting here next to the fire, wearing my winter dressing gown,” etc.? It’s one thing not to know about the size of a distant tree, but surely the things that are close and small are beyond doubt—wouldn’t I have to be insane to doubt the basic reality of my immediate surroundings? And yet, Descartes observes, haven’t we all had the experience of dreaming things, while asleep, that seemed to be absolutely real and beyond doubt at the time we were dreaming them? Consider a dramatic nightmare scenario (my example), in which I am running through the forest chased by a fire-breathing dragon, I come to a cliff and in terror and desperation I leap… and then, dazed and in a cold sweat, I grope about and find that I am in fact―sweet relief!―safely in bed, and the dragon and the forest and the cliff and my running body were none of them (physically) real! But I didn’t know that then, indeed I was running in terror precisely because there was no doubt that the dragon, and its hot breath and its rumbling steps, were very real indeed―even my body was convinced, thus the cold sweat and the disheveled bed sheets and the cries my mother heard me making in my sleep. Note, by the way, that the dragon was “real” but only as an image in my mind—there was a “real” image of a dragon in my mind but I mistook it for an actual physical threat to my life, and in that I was clearly deceived. The deception of the dream consists, in other words, in my mistaking what exists mentally in my mind for what exists materially in the physical world. Here we observe, in other words, two distinct kinds of reality—mental and material—which will lead to Descartes’s Dualism.
The Second Step: “Assume We Are Dreaming”
Since we now realize that even what seems most simple and obvious to us may be dream-like deceptions, we can no longer assume that anything we perceive with the senses is true or real. One may well object, here, that there are certain signs by which we distinguish dreaming from being awake; for example, when I’m awake don’t I detect a longstanding continuity concerning my surroundings, which is not present in dreams? And when I really pause to consider carefully, which I don’t do when I’m dreaming, can’t I be certain that I’m awake now? These are reasonable arguments, and probably strong ones; but remember, “probably certain” is very different from “absolutely certain,” and we cannot easily, if at all, come up with a perfect, airtight argument that would establish that I am now not dreaming. After all, some dreams incorporate long periods of time, at least hours and perhaps longer, even if, upon waking, I discover that little time has passed. And some dreams I may return to for multiple nights, so dreams can have their own continuity. And even if I can distinguish my waking state now from my dreaming state last night, how do I know that my present “waking” state isn’t just another dream, and last night’s dream a dream within a dream?
Recall that Descartes does not affirmatively assert that he really is dreaming now and that everything is therefore false; indeed, we have noted that he is not asserting definitely that anything is necessarily false. Thus he, and we, can be morally certain that this is not a dream and thus that what we see is not a complete deception and totally unreal; but since we can give good arguments for that, but not perfect, metaphysically certain arguments that we are not dreaming, there remains some small doubt that we are truly awake, and that small doubt means that we must assume we are dreaming, “for the sake of argument,” as Descartes says, so that we cannot be deceived.
The Third Step: “The Evil Genius”
So Descartes considers the nature of dreams, and considers what seems obvious, for example that “the things seen during slumber are, as it were, like painted images, which could only have been produced in the likeness of true things, and that therefore, at least these general things―eyes, head, hands and the whole body―are not imaginary things, but are true and exist.” And finally it seems certain, does it not, “whether I am asleep or awake, 2 plus 3 make 5, and a square does not have more than 4 sides.” But is this really so certain?
Descartes is suggesting here that if there were a God, as many people believe, who is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent (all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good), He would never deceive us as to things as basic and simple as this, would He? And yet, this is not at all clear, since we clearly are deceived about many things, and if it were contrary to God’s goodness to deceive us, why would we ever be deceived about anything? And, we should note, the same is true if there is no God: since we clearly allow ourselves to be deceived by many things in nature, what is there to prevent us from being deceived about everything? So Descartes recognizes that he must “withhold assent” even from the most simple and basic apparent truths, for it might even be, mightn’t it, that rather than “the author of the universe” being a good God, perhaps rather all creation, including my own consciousness, is the work of some “evil genius” who specifically intends to deceive us about everything.
“Accordingly,” writes Descartes, “I will suppose not a supremely good God, the source of truth, but rather an evil genius, supremely powerful and clever, who has directed his entire effort at deceiving me.” Remember, Descartes is merely “supposing” this. He does not think, in fact, that this is what’s happening; however, he cannot be absolutely, metaphysically certain that it is not. The movie The Matrix is based on precisely this scenario: all the characters have been kidnapped by “the matrix”—the “evil genius” that totally controls everyone’s consciousness such that the entire lives of everyone are in fact merely dream-like illusions created by the matrix to maintain total control of everything. The movie’s immense and lasting popularity is a testament, at least in part, to the plausibility of this very scenario. Indeed, we can all appreciate how advertisers and politicians and the corporations that own the major communications media are able to use the power of images to manipulate us into thinking and doing what they want us to think and do; evidently, they do not exert total control of our minds, but they are trying, and they are probably a lot more successful at controlling us than any of us would like to believe. So, the basic principle of the evil genius is not nearly as far-fetched as it may at first seem.
Conclusion of Meditation I: No Knowledge, but also No Error
So Descartes supposes this epistemological “worst case scenario,” we might say, just as he assumes he is dreaming, to assure that, “even if it is not within my power to know anything true, it certainly is within my power to take care resolutely to withhold my assent to what is false.” In other words, at the end of Meditation I Descartes has realized that there is no certain basis even for any possibility of true, metaphysically certain knowledge.
On the other hand, he has also developed a method to prevent his ever being deceived into thinking that he knows something concerning which there is any basis for doubt: as long as he continues to take the three steps above—withhold assent, assume he is dreaming and suppose that an “evil genius” is controlling his thoughts—he will remain aware that any item of presumed knowledge may be an invention of the evil genius and thus an intentional deception. The bad news in this is that he will apparently be prevented from attaining any metaphysically certain knowledge, but the good news is that he will never fall into the error of accepting as true anything concerning which there may be even the slightest doubt.
Moreover, as he moves forward into the second meditation, with his radical doubt of everything in place, he can be assured that anything he does find himself able to know will be absolutely indubitable. In other words, if he can possibly find something that even the evil genius could not fool him about he can be assured that he will have achieved some beginning of metaphysical certainty.
Meditation II: The “Archimedean Point”
So Meditation I is effectively a preparation for the pursuit of knowledge, which doesn’t truly commence until Meditation II. In Meditation I, Descartes has established an epistemological method known as “radical doubt”—the doubting of everything. As we have seen, though this method has left him, on the one hand, totally without knowledge, on the other hand he has devised a method to avoid all possibility of error. In other words, as long as he remains resolute in withholding assent to what is false he will never fall into the common trap of thinking he knows something that he does not know or even something that might be false.
To remain resolute in this method requires that he continually assume he is dreaming and continually suppose an evil genius is controlling his consciousness. It is thus that we begin Meditation II, with Descartes wondering whether anything can be known under these conditions. As he is doubting everything, Descartes is forced to begin with certain knowledge of nothing at the start, except “perhaps just the single fact that nothing is certain.” Thus his first task is to consider whether anything at all might be known with certainty even if the evil genius is there to bedevil him. He observes that “Archimedes sought but one firm and immoveable point in order to move the earth from one place to another. Just so, great things are to be hoped for if I succeed in finding just one thing, however slight, that is certain and unshaken.” Archimedes (c. 287-212 BC) was the famous Greek thinker and engineer who mastered the use of various forms of leverage to accomplish great feats of engineering with minimal exertion of force; thus, Descartes expects that if he can achieve some “Archimedean point” of knowledge this might serve as a point of leverage for the foundation of knowledge generally; it might serve as a “crack in the door” (my term) of radical doubt, so to speak, which could then lead to the further “opening” of knowledge. The point of the method of radical doubt, which is effectively the basis for the modern scientific method, is that by focusing our energies so as to rule out falsity we can rely the more surely on the knowledge we obtain and the more sure it will be as a foundation for further knowledge.
What Then Can I Know?
As he proceeds, Descartes reviews the rejection he has undertaken of all that he previously had thought including even that he has a body and bodily senses: it could all be an illusion. And he asks, “Am I so tied to a body and to the senses that I cannot exist without them?” He reflects, “I have persuaded myself that there is absolutely nothing in the world: no sky, no earth, no minds, no bodies. Is it not the case that I too do not exist? But doubtless I did exist, if I persuaded myself of something.” But, he wonders, couldn’t this all just be part of the illusion created by the evil genius? But even then, he realizes, “there is no doubt that I exist if he is deceiving me.” Thus, although we are unable to be certain of anything because of the method that culminates at the end of Meditation I, where Descartes undertakes to maintain the assumption that “I am being deceived,” yet even if I am being deceived, we cannot escape the realization that “I am” precedes the deception―that the deception cannot be without presupposing that I am, thus “I am” must certainly be true even if everything else is a deception.
The argument that sums up this realization, Descartes’s first truth, is the famous, “I think; therefore, I am” (in the original Latin, “cogito ergo sum”). Note that this constitutes the attainment of an item of knowledge since it moves from one proposition, which is unassailable in itself, namely “I think,” to a different proposition, a conclusion drawn from that first proposition, “I am” or “I exist.” Note further that the proposition “I think” is indeed unassailable―it cannot be denied―because we have been thinking throughout the meditations, even when what we have been thinking turned out to be deceptive. Thus, as noted above, in my dragon dream the dragon was “real” in the sense that I did think that a dragon was chasing me—that is, I thought a physical dragon was chasing me. I now know, of course, that there was no physical (material) dragon, which makes me aware of the difference between the mental process of thought and the material existence of bodies. My thinking is clearly real: there is no doubt that I thought I saw a dragon. In this case, however, the (physical) dragon itself turns out to have been an illusion. And at this point in Meditation II there is no sure reason to believe that any physical things are real. Note that it is a very big deal to have gone from knowing nothing to now knowing that “I exist”; on the other hand, merely to know that I exist is in itself a very small thing—as small, indeed, as a “point;” but Descartes does not know anything about what this “I” might be.
A Thinking Thing
With the establishment of his “Archimedean point”―his first slight opening of, as I put it, a “crack-in-the-door” of knowledge―Descartes now knows one thing, namely “I am, I exist.” This constitutes a momentous advance epistemologically, since he has gone from knowing nothing to knowing something, thus establishing that knowledge as such is at least not totally impossible; however, this item of knowledge, in itself, is not as great as it may seem, for the “I” whose existence Descartes is now certain of is not the “self” of the Frenchman “René Descartes” he has come to know, sitting in his winter robe by the fire; rather, he knows nothing about what this “I” might refer to: to repeat, he knows that “I” exists, but he knows nothing about what “I” is.
This he now turns to, and he reflects that there are many things he has become accustomed to associating with “I,” such as “I am a man.” But what then is a man? Traditionally it has been said that a “man” is a “rational animal,” but what is an “animal” and what does it mean to be “rational.” In short, all the things he has heretofore taken for granted about himself have no real foundation in genuine knowledge, indeed such things may not exist at all, since everything about himself may still be the concoction of the evil genius. We must not forget that, just because we now know one little thing does not mean that we know anything else, thus we could still be living “in the matrix,” so to speak.
Then he considers the idea of the “soul,” but surely this is the most mysterious thing of all, invisible as it is―“But as to what this soul might be, I either did not think about it or else I imagined it a rarefied I-know-not-what, like a wind, or a fire, or ether, which had been infused into my coarser parts.” He goes on to add, however, “But as to the body I was not in any doubt.” In other words, though we know from Meditation I that bodies, as perceived by the physical senses, are very much subject to doubt even as to their bare existence, still bodies seem very real to us, they seem more real than anything else; we often think of reality itself as precisely referring to physical objects that we can actually see which is why we say, “seeing is believing,” because, if we “see” it, it must be “real.”
We should already have learned, from Plato, that what is “real” is very much in doubt. In fact, as we have seen, Plato asserts positively that physical bodies are not real, but Descartes does not say that, in fact he at all times remains very interested in physical bodies and turns to them time and again even if Meditation I has left them uncertain. So Descartes now turns to the idea of “body” to consider whether the “I” that he now knows to exist has anything in common with it: is the “I” of “I exist” anything like a body? He reflects that a body, as such―that is, the essence of a body, what makes any body a body―involves certain qualities: all bodies have physical boundaries, a shape, they are in some one place at one time and they can be moved from one place to another if a force is exerted upon them and, perhaps most obvious of all, bodies can be observed with the senses: even if very small, or very far away, any body, as a body, can at least in principle be seen, touched, smelled, tasted and heard by one or all of the five physical senses, because a physical body by definition consists of physical matter and thus can be perceived by the physical senses. We may need a microscope to assist our sense of sight to see the small body, or a telescope to assist our eyes to see the far away body, or an x-ray machine to see a kind of “light” that our eyes are not equipped to perceive, etc.; but what makes bodies and other natural phenomena part of the physical world is that they are visible, or with some technical assistance can at least in principle be made visible.
The question now is, is the “I” that Descartes now knows must necessarily “exist” itself visible: does it have anything in common with what he can understand a body to be? The answer is, of course, no: the “I” cannot be a body. Even though, for example, I have thought I sensed many things, such as the fire-breathing dragon, yet I know that I didn’t need a body to do that―it was merely a kind of thought. And it is this alone, namely thought, that is the only thing that, upon serious reflection, must necessarily belong to the “I” that necessarily exists. Thought, and thought alone, is essential to what the “I” is: “thought exists; it alone cannot be separated from me.” Thus Descartes can conclude, “I am therefore precisely nothing but a thinking thing…. Yet I am a true thing and am truly existing; but what kind of thing? I have said it already: a thinking thing.”
What is the Meaning of “Thinking Thing”?
What more can be known about this “I”? We first determined that it exists, and now we know that it is nothing but a “thinking thing.” To be sure, “thinking” includes a wide range of different sorts of activities; thus Descartes says, “But what then am I? A thing that thinks. What is that? A thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, and that also imagines and senses.” Notably, however, recall that all these apparently diverse activities are nothing more than different “modes of thought” (as Descartes will put it in Meditation III); that is, even when I say I “sense” some physical object, that does not mean that a physical object actually exists outside of me. There may be such an object, but there also may not be, because I have not discovered a way to be certain that I’m not dreaming now or deceived by an evil genius.
So I think I see these printed words on a material piece of paper, and it is true that I think that; but the content of my thought, namely the physical paper itself, may not exist as what I think it is, that is, physical. Again, the paper does exist in my imagination, which is the term simply for that power of the mind that records and plays images, so to speak, of what seem to be physical objects. In other words, I automatically assume that the images I see (or hear, touch etc.) with my five senses are images of some physical objects that cause the images through my senses; however, I cannot be sure that there is in fact any physical object at all as my senses have often deceived me, as have my dreams, hallucinations, mirages and the like. In short, there is a radical difference between the thinking of something, and the thing itself that is thought; the thing might have an existence outside of me, but then again it may just be a part of the thinking itself. As Descartes sums it up, in his dream “I now see a light, I hear a noise, I feel heat. These things are false, since I am asleep [i.e. there is no physical light, etc.] Yet I certainly do seem to see, hear and feel warmth. This cannot be false. Properly speaking, this is what in me is called ‘sensing.’ But this, precisely so taken, is nothing other than thinking.” In other words, the things we seem to see are in fact merely thoughts in the mind, and whether these thoughts or images are caused by physical things outside the mind is something that I can not be certain of.
The Ball of Wax
At this point, though things about “I,” which he now associates with the word “mind,” are considerably more clear than before, Descartes reflects that it still seems, even at this point in his meditations, that corporeal (bodily, that is, physical or material) objects “are much more distinctly known than this mysterious ‘I,’ which does not fall within the imagination [that is, which is not thought as “visible” to the “senses.”].” So Descartes permits himself to consider something very simple, which seems utterly non-mysterious on the face of it—a ball of beeswax. He previously considered the essence of what it means to be a “body,” which led him to be able to conclude that the “I” is nothing but a “thinking thing”; but now, rather than consider bodies in general or the essence of body, he will instead just meditate on this single, particular body to see what he might learn. What could me simpler than that?
To begin, we might ask ourselves, how do I even know that this thing is a piece of wax? But could this be any easier? Surely I know it is wax because it looks like wax, it feels like wax, it makes the sound wax makes when struck, it smells like wax and even presumably tastes like wax―in short, using one or another of the five senses, I perceive this thing to be nothing other than a simple piece of wax.
But then Descartes takes the wax near the fire, and what happens but that every one of the sensible properties by which I thought I “knew” what this object was changes totally. Let’s consider the sense of sight in particular according to which we thought the wax was wax because it looked like wax. At first the wax is an opaque object, one through which no light can pass; we all know that wax has this appearance from looking at candles. But when the wax is melted, what occurs but that the wax now is as transparent as glass or water; in other words, the visual appearance, which is all my eyes see (and which is thus the image in my imagination, my mental thought of the wax), is exactly the opposite of what it was before when I used my eyes, as I then thought, to identify the wax as wax.
Consider what we think when we look at a wall and a window (my example). We look at the wall in our room and can easily identify the wall as the wall because it is opaque (we say. “that is the wall”); by contrast, when we look at the window, we identify it as the window because it is not opaque but transparent. We would never mistake the wall for the window or the window for the wall because their appearances are totally opposite to one another, one opaque and the other transparent, so we can immediately see that the wall is not the window and the window is not the wall. But wait a minute: in the case of the wax, isn’t it true that I’m saying that the opaque object and the transparent object are not two different things but rather one thing? As Descartes says, “whatever came under the senses of taste, smell, sight, touch, or hearing has now changed; and yet the wax remains,” i.e. all the sensible appearances of the wax are now different, and yet “no one denies” that the same wax remains. How can this be when in the case of wall and window, the perception of opposite sensible qualities led me to identify two different things?
Perhaps what’s going on here, suggests Descartes, is that I am observing the wax with my physical senses, through my imagination, including all the steps in the transition of the wax from opaque to transparent, whereas there is no such transition between wall and window, thus making them totally separate appearances: “Is it what my imagination shows it to be: namely, that this piece of wax can change from a round to a square shape, or from the latter to a triangular shape?” But Descartes denies that this could be happening. He says, “Not at all; for I grasp that the wax is capable of innumerable changes of this sort, even though I am incapable of running through these innumerable changes using my imagination.” In other words, if I were able to see the transition of the wax with my physical sight, and thus hold the intermediate images in my imagination, I would have to be able to see, and to have in my imagination, an “innumerable,” that is numberless or infinite number, of distinct phases of the wax’s transition. In other words, we might assume that I retain in my memory the series of intermediate mental perceptions, based on sense images, representing the transitional steps I observed as the wax changed from opaque to transparent; by so doing, I might be able to identify the opaque and transparent forms of wax as the same thing by stringing all these intermediate sense images together in my mind. However, Descartes argues that this is impossible, since this procedure would require me to hold in my mind an innumerable, or infinite, series of images, which would be impossible. Moreover, even if I could hold innumerable images in my mind at the same time I would still be relying ultimately on my mind, and not my senses, to make the connection; but Descartes argues that my perception of the wax as wax is not based on the senses at all: “I do not grasp what the wax is through the imagination; rather, I perceive it through the mind alone.” By saying “mind alone,” Descartes asserts that it is only the work of the mind to know what this wax is, thus that the senses are utterly useless and irrelevant in obtaining this knowledge: “I need to realize that the perception of the wax is neither a seeing, nor a touching, nor an imagining. Nor has it ever been, even though it previously seemed so; rather, it is an inspection on the part of the mind alone.”
Consider another example of my own (via David Hume). Imagine a strip of paint chips which feature a gradual transition of colors from blue through various purples to red. As typical of such strips, it shows a regular transition such that each step, from blue to red, represents a consistent and gradual change from the preceding one so that a wide variety of shades, from very blue purple to equally red and blue to very red purple, is represented. Now let’s say I take this strip, carefully cut out one of the middle purples and put the strip back together seamlessly, so you can’t tell I’ve altered it. If I show it to someone, what will she see? If she looks carefully, she’ll “see” that there’s a shade missing, since there will be a clearly “visible” gap between two of the chips. But wait: will she see the missing shade—is the gap really visible to her eyes? In fact, of course, the missing color is precisely what she does not see, even though in a sense it might be the most obvious color of all! In other words, it would not be her eyes, nor any image from her eyes in her imagination, that “sees” the missing color; rather, here awareness of the missing color would have to be “a perception of the mind alone.”
Conclusion to Meditations I and II: The Cartesian Dualism of Mind and Body
In Meditation I, Descartes lays the groundwork for his epistemological project by which he seeks to learn what, if anything, he can know with perfect, metaphysical certainty, and how he can know it. He acknowledges that he has held many false opinions in the past, and that even today his senses frequently deceive him and in fact are always showing him only appearances and not reality itself. And he goes on to acknowledge that everything he thinks he knows or observes might be a total illusion, like those in his dreams, or like hallucinations created by an evil genius, as if his consciousness were just a blank movie screen on which the evil genius is projecting images that represent nothing real. We all know that the images of dreams and movies can seem very real indeed, so how can we be certain we aren’t in a dream or a movie right now?
Thus Descartes, by assuming this “worst-case-scenario” according to which no knowledge at all would seem to be possible, has at least found a way never to fall into the error of thinking something is real or true that may turn out not to be. But on further reflection, in Meditation II he discovers an “Archimedean point,” a single, infinitesimal “point” of knowledge, a crack in the door of knowledge, so to speak, that must be true even if an evil genius is controlling his mind: “I think, therefore I exist.” But his knowledge is still meager, in that he knows only that “I am” and nothing about what the “I” might be.
But Descartes has accomplished more than just an epistemological breakthrough here—he has done more than just establish that metaphysically certain knowledge is possible. For, in addition to this admittedly notable achievement, he claims also to have discovered something metaphysical, that is, something about the nature of reality itself. Specifically, his path to knowledge, as he has followed it, has proceeded through the total isolation of the mind from the body, implying that these two entities, mind and body, are in fact utterly independent of each other and thus utterly separate.
This viewpoint is not technically complete until Meditation VI, where Descartes will present an argument that he claims establishes, with metaphysical certitude, that the physical world does in fact exist. With this proof that the physical world of “extension” in space is real in itself, but a reality entirely separate from the mental world of thought, Descartes establishes the metaphysical doctrine known as “mind-body Dualism,” or “Cartesian Dualism.” But the basic outline of this view is complete in Meditation I where we are reminded of the seeming reality of dreams; for recall that in our dreams we experience a whole and complete world, so to speak, complete with a limitless range of seeming physical pleasures and pains, joys and fears, yet none of it is in fact physically real—its reality is in fact purely mental. Thus, again, how can we be absolutely certain that the “physical realities” we seem to be experiencing now are really as they seem? On the contrary, it is very clear that nothing we ever experience is really quite what it seems to be.
Thus, even in Meditation I we learn that there is no evident limit to what the mind is capable of. This is why Descartes’s metaphysical Dualism is indeed plausible: whatever reality bodies may have, their “reality” does not appear necessarily to depend on anything physical or material.
Descartes Meditations III-VI: Proofs of the Existence of God and of Corporeal Things
by Henry Piper (all rights reserved)
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https://profpiper.blogspot.com/p/descartes-meditations-iii-vi-proof-of.html
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