there are many other things in them; and I tell you, between ourselves, that these
six Meditations contain all the foundations of my physics. But that must not be
spread abroad, i

His biography says he was actively trying to get in touch with esotericists in Europe, along the lines of Freemasons. We know he actually was acquainted with a member of one of them, but that member never revealed the association.

I wonder if the Meditations are related to that, or maybe the experience he had before he invented algebraic geometry.

I take the 'insensibly' to mean that the principles will be accepted as self-evident and natural before they are recognized as a refutation of Aristotle. So, not subconsciously but more like 'unassociated' until fully appreciated. — Paine

Thanks Paine and Fooloso4.

I don't see what you are suggesting as so different from what I was speculating. (Although I do tend to use my own rather idiosyncratic vocabulary in discussing such things.). I interpret "accepted as self-evident and natural" and "become accustomed to his way of thinking" as matters of more subconscious 'intuitive fit' (Or what Kahneman would call type 1 thinking) than of logical reasoning. Though I'm not suggesting it should be looked at in black or white terms of purely subconscious/intuitive vs conscious/logical.

Anyway, I was struck by the use of "insensibly" in light of Descartes seeming focus on developing a foundationalist perspective. It suggested to me an insightful recognition of the potential for having his ideas fly under the radar, to bypass cognitive dissonance in those steeped in Aristotelian thinking, and yet simultaneously uncharacteristic of what I interpret as Descartes' focus on having a logically reasoned view.

BTW, I haven't read any of The Meditations, but this thread has made me much more interested in doing so.

That adds an interesting additional factor.

That adds an interesting additional factor. — wonderer1

He was a fascinating guy, cruising all over Europe doing whatever he felt like doing. Think of him when you use your GPS. He invented the math that engineers use to design them.

Toward the beginning of the fourth meditation Descartes claims:

I infer that God exists and that every moment of my existence depends on him.

Why would Descartes claim that every moment of his existence depend on God? Is this just feigning piety? His sincerity is questionable at the end of the fifth meditation:

... until I became aware of [God] I couldn’t perfectly know anything.

But the first thing he claims to know, prior to his awareness of God, is that he exists.

I think there is more to this, but don't know yet what it is. It seems significant his claim is not simply that God sustains us but must do so from moment to moment.

It seems significant his claim is not simply that God sustains us but must do so from moment to moment. — Fooloso4

It's one of Aristotle's proofs of God that in order for a thing to move, it has to be propelled moment by moment by God. I think we would translate "God" in this case as inertia.

With regard to the question of existence and dependence, in the third meditation Descartes says;

Perhaps I have always existed as I do now. In that case, wouldn’t it follow that there need be no cause for my existence? No, it does not follow. For a life-span can be divided into countless parts, each completely independent of the others, so that from my existing at one time it doesn’t follow that I exist at later times, unless some cause keeps me in existence – one might say that it creates me afresh at each moment.

This argument should be compared to one in the sixth meditation:

Whereas every body is by its nature divisible, the mind can’t be divided. For when I consider the mind, or consider myself insofar as I am merely a thinking thing, I can’t detect any parts within myself.

(emphasis added)

A bit later he says:

... the nature of man as a combination of mind and body ...

We might conclude that by a thinking thing he does not mean that all he is is a thinking thing, but:

Furthermore, my mind is me, for the following reason·. I know that I exist and that nothing else belongs to my nature or essence except that I am a thinking thing.

Is he making a distinction between the nature of man and his own nature? Does his nature extend beyond his human nature?

Descartes' life can be divided but his mind cannot. It would seem that the mind is not dependent on God from moment to moment for the mind is not divided into parts. Is Descartes declaring his independence from both the Church and from God? Or, perhaps, he is declaring the independence of thought itself.

I think we would translate "God" in this case as inertia. — frank

I see how the ideas of causes of motion can serve as a metaphor. Descartes is addressing why things appear to continue to exist from one moment to the next

For because the entire span of one’s life can be divided into countless parts, each one wholly independent of the rest, it does not follow from the fact that I existed a short time ago that I must exist now, unless some cause, as it were, creates me all over again at this moment, that is to say, which preserves me. For it is obvious to one who pays close attention to the nature of time that plainly the same force and action are needed to preserve anything at each individual moment that it lasts as would be required to create that same thing anew, were it not yet in existence. Thus conservation differs from creation solely by virtue of a distinction of reason; this too is one of those things that are manifest by the light of nature. — ibid. page 33

This equation between creation and persistence is what I am trying to wrap my head around. Is this to say that, unlike Aristotle's understanding of properties that can be predicated to a specific subject (which persists for some finite period), substance is a set of conditions which a 'distinction of reason' can view in a different light?

This equation between creation and persistence is what I am trying to wrap my head around. Is this to say that, unlike Aristotle's understanding of properties that can be predicated to a specific subject (which persists for some finite period), substance is a set of conditions which a 'distinction of reason' can view in a different light? — Paine

I'm just spit-balling, but that passage you quoted has the same reasoning as one of Aristotle's proofs of God, so I'm guessing that this kind of thinking was just part of his world. Maybe @Manuel could comment?

Speaking of that, a reading of Aristotle's proofs of God would be fun, wouldn't it?

I was hoping to say there is a startling difference between Descartes and Aristotle. I will think about how to present the idea more clearly than the gestures presented so far. I have a large measure of uncertainty in these matters.

Which statement from Aristotle are you thinking of in this regard?

I was going to try to answer you, but I fell down a rabbit hole of comparing Newton's ideas of motion to Descartes'. Apparently Newton didn't like the fact that Descartes put God outside of the world. This is reminding me of the way Aristotle's Prime Mover is outside the world.

The big shift from Descartes to Newton is inertia. Descartes still had the Aristotelian idea that a moving object has to be continuously propelled by a "mover." This meshes with the idea that creation and preservation are the same thing.

I'll have to come back to this. Too tired. :yawn:

Not particularly much to say. Desmond Clarke, who has written a very thoughtful interpretation of Descartes, says that:

"Descartes is, at best confused about what substances are. Secondly. he consistently argues that we have no independent knowledge of substances apart from knowing their properties."

This equation between creation and persistence is what I am trying to wrap my head around. — Paine

@frank

For Aristotle to be is to persist.

According to Joe Sachs' article "Aristotle: Metaphysics" in the IEP:

Aristotle formulates the latter, the kind of being that belongs to a thing not by happenstance but inevitably, as the “what it kept on being in the course of being at all” for a human being, or a duck, or a rosebush. The phrase to en einai is Aristotle’s answer to the Socratic question, ti esti? ... Stated generally, Aristotle’s claim is that a this, which is in the world on its own, self-sufficiently, has a what-it-always-was-to-be, and is just its what-it-always-was-to-be.

On the face of it, Descartes rejects this. A living being is a created and always dependent being. But in "Principia Philosophiae" he says:

It seems clear to me that the general cause is no other than God himself. In the beginning he created matter, along with its motion and rest; and now, merely by regularly letting things run their course, he preserves the same amount of motion and rest in the material universe as he put there in the beginning.

·(Part ll, Article 36)

Here he claims that God is the cause of things coming to be, but rather than saying that God is the cause of their persisting he says that God lets things run their own course. No claim is made about God keeping things in existence.

His first law of motion (or nature) follows:

The first of these laws is that each simple and undivided thing when left to itself always remains in the same state, never changing except from external causes.

(Article 37)

In order to avoid confusion, Aristotle and Descartes do not mean the same things when they use the term 'motion'. Aristotle means more broadly any kind of change. The underlying problem is, how can something change and remain the same thing?

Descartes means:

A piece of matter or body moves if it goes from being in immediate contact with some bodies that are regarded as being at rest to being in immediate contact with other bodies.

(Article 25)

As we see with the wax, while it undergoes change something remains the same. It remains the same wax, which is known by the mind. The wax persists. All of the changes it undergoes are the result of external causes.

Descartes claim here is the reverse of what he argues in the passage cited in the Meditations:

it does not follow from the fact that I existed a short time ago that I must exist now, unless some cause, as it were, creates me all over again at this moment, that is to say, which preserves me. — ibid. page 33

According to the law of motion, things remain the same unless there is a external cause, but in the Meditations it is only the result of an external cause, namely, God, that things are preserved. In the case of the wax Descartes identifies the external cause of change, but he has not identified the external cause that would cause him and everything else to cease existing if not for God.

It seems to me that this is a critical omission. It is not enough to simply rely on the Scholastic notion of of contingent beings. If we are to accept that at each moment the existence of anything and everything is threatened by extinction, there must be some external cause that threatens their existence.

:up:

t seems to me that this is a critical omission. It is not enough to simply rely on the Scholastic notion of of contingent beings. If we are to accept that at each moment the existence of anything and everything is threatened by extinction, there must be some external cause that threatens their existence. — Fooloso4

Thanks for the excellent overview of the inconsistencies and I agree that something is missing. For myself, the peculiar idea is not so much a threat of extinction by external causes as what the equivalence between creation and persistence means as:

For it is obvious to one who pays close attention to the nature of time that plainly the same force and action are needed to preserve anything at each individual moment that it lasts as would be required to create that same thing anew — ibid. page 33

If the equivalence is to be possible, it will have to replace the way potential and capacity are ascribed as belonging to a being rather than existing by themselves:

It is evident that even of the things that seem to be substances, most are capacities, whether the parts of animals (for none of them exists when it has been separated, and whenever they are separated they all exist only as matter) or earth, fire, and air (for none of them is one, but instead they are like a heap, until they are concocted and some one thing comes to be from them). — Aristotle. Metaphysics, 1040b5, translated by CDC Reeve

This touches on your comments regarding human nature. It seems to me that when you say:

Descartes' life can be divided but his mind cannot. It would seem that the mind is not dependent on God from moment to moment for the mind is not divided into parts. — Fooloso4

that you think Descartes is assuming the 'mind' is a capacity of a being in the Aristotelian sense, where creatures bring with themselves some measure of the causes of their existence. While the Sixth Meditation has Descartes returning to the world of the senses with some measure of trust he withheld during the Third, what is meant by the indivisibility of 'mind' is still completely contingent on observing:

For when I consider the mind or consider myself insofar as I am merely a thinking thing, I can’t detect any parts within myself.

(emphasis mine}

It looks like the connection between 'life' and 'existence' is going to require a lot more work when the guy says:

I rightly conclude that my essence consists entirely in my being a thinking thing. And although perhaps (or rather, as I shall soon say, assuredly) I have a body that is very closely joined to me, nevertheless, because on the one hand I have a clear and distinct idea of myself, insofar as I am merely a thinking thing and not an extended thing, and because on the other hand I have a distinct idea of a body, insofar as it is merely an extended thing and not a thinking thing, it is certain that I am really distinct from my body, and can exist without it. — ibid. Sixth Meditation, page 51

@Manuel @frank @Janus @Paine@wonderer1

The picture of a metaphysical “will” (largely uncontested still) is that intention is a human process or ability to create meaning in language or take a certain action. That we internally choose what we mean and decide our actions.

Descartes, in paragraph 10 of the 4th Meditation, puts it as “The will is simply one’s ability to do or not do something.” I read in this that we don’t just do “anything”, but that, in a real situation, there is an expected act (“acceptance or denial, or for pursuit or avoidance”), and we can do the expected thing (the “something”), or not do it: excuse ourselves, beg off, take a stand. The options of what action to take are not inside us, only the decision of which of those available to us do we decide to do (or to do nothing). This why “intention” is not inside us as well.

So our “free will” is not: doing anything we “intend”. We are “determined” in the sense that “anything” is not (usually) open to us. What makes a movement an “act” is its place in a situation. You call a ball or a strike. Descartes calls this being “present[ed] with a candidate”. Our freedom is that, when we are presented with the possibilities in a context, “we have no sense that we are pushed one way or the other by any external force.” So our will may very well be impinged, and our freedom is not about unfettered internal agency; as Descartes puts it, “I can be free without being inclined both ways.” The will is not having every option open (being “indifferent” he says), but having a will, an inclination, passion, desire, wish; Descartes focuses on acting on principle or knowledge, but the picture is that we are partial (made whole in the act Emerson says), personal, not simply intellectual, rational.

Natures:

In the sixth meditation Descartes touches on the concept of nature:

... I have been using ‘nature’ ... to speak of what can be found in the things themselves

and:

For the term ‘nature’, understood in the most general way, refers to God himself or to the ordered system of created things established by him. And my own nature is simply the totality of things bestowed on me by God.

So, what is his own nature? On the one hand:

I know that I exist and that nothing else belongs to my nature or essence except that I am a thinking thing

but on the other:

... the nature of man as a combination of mind and body ...

If nature is what is essential and in the things themselves, and among the things bestowed on him by God is his body, then it would seem that the nature of the self is to be both mind and body.

And yet he says:

I am really distinct from my body, and can exist without it. — ibid. Sixth Meditation, page 51

The nature of time:

For it is obvious to one who pays close attention to the nature of time that plainly the same force and action are needed to preserve anything at each individual moment that it lasts as would be required to create that same thing anew, were it not yet in existence. — ibid. page 33

Given the importance of this claim about the nature of time, it is surprising that he does not say more. There is, however, a couple of brief comments about time keepers, that follows the same pattern of seemingly contradictory claims.

A badly made clock conforms to the laws of its nature in telling the wrong time.

but:

... a clock that works badly is ‘departing from its nature’

This is resolved by noting that in the first case he is talking about the nature of a particular clock, a badly made one, while in the second he means the nature of clocks, that is, what it is to be a clock.

Is time itself like a badly made clock? Even a good craftsman, let alone a perfect one, would not make something that required his continued support it at every moment in order to work. Either what God has made is badly made and its nature is to work badly, or the argument for the nature of time as discreet moments is badly made.

In that case there must be something wrong with the argument for discreet moments of time. Why would Descartes make it then? The argument was made in response to two possibilities:

If I had derived my existence from myself, I would not now doubt or want or lack anything at all; for I would have given myself all the perfections of which I have any idea. So I would be God.

and:

Perhaps I have always existed as I do now. In that case, wouldn’t it follow that there need be no cause for my existence?

If his argument is bad then either one or both of these possibilities cannot be ruled out. It would follow that God is not in control from moment to moment. As I was reminded by Paine, the phrase 'knowledge is power', which is commonplace today, was new at that time. Man exerts his control over what God made through the conquest of nature.

Descartes has proposed that the nature of the self is both singular and composite. Just as the nature of man or clocks is not the same as the nature of a particular man or a clock, the nature of thinking is not the same as the nature of a particular thinking thing such as Descartes.

Although Descartes isolates himself in his room, as a thinking thing he is not isolated. As a thinking thing he is connected to thinking itself, that is to say, to what is thought not just by him but other thinking beings before and after him. The nature of thinking is something we do together, a joint project, something that occurs between human beings. The thinking self is not just the individual but thinking itself, which is by its nature public.

The nature of thinking is not limited by the span of a lifetime. For thinking itself time is not moment to moment. It is a collaborative effort across time periods. Descartes was not primarily concerned with the past, however, but rather the present and future. More specifically, with his project for the perfectibility of man, which takes place over lifetimes.

Thinking for Descartes is not fundamentally contemplative or meditative but constructive. Thus he sought foundations on which to build. Although a lot of attention is paid to his epistemology it was groundwork for a science that would change the course of nature.

Our freedom is that, when we are presented with the possibilities in a context, “we have no sense that we are pushed one way or the other by any external force.” So our will may very well be impinged, and our freedom is not about unfettered internal agency; as Descartes puts it, “I can be free without being inclined both ways.” The will is not having every option open (being “indifferent” he says), but having a will, an inclination, passion, desire, wish; Descartes focuses on acting on principle or knowledge, but the picture is that we are partial (made whole in the act Emerson says), personal, not simply intellectual, rational. — Antony Nickles

I mostly agree with this interpretation, though Descartes does mention that sometimes we are not compelled one way or another, he also mentions that (as per Chomsky's highlight of Descartes, which Descartes actually says) we are inclined to do or say such and such in a specific situation X, but we are not compelled to do so.

We could be talking to a friend about a basketball match (for example) and we would know what topics are relevant to the conversation. But if I want to, I could perfectly well begin to talk about the political situation in Argentina, which is not relevant to the conversation, nor are we usually inclined to do such things, but we can do them, if we so decide to do so.



You have such mastery of the text that one feels intimidated in saying much, if anything.

That passage about a particular nature was perplexing, for he discusses, as you mention two uses of the word "nature", one being broader than the other. The more narrow sense refers to (as I take it now) human nature, a combination of body and mind. The other use of "nature" refers to the whole world. It sounds like an artificial distinction, as if we are somehow removed from the world.

But even "soul" stuff would have to be part of the world in some way, otherwise these distinctions don't make sense.

What's interesting to note, is that despite his famous dualism, he does mention the relation of the brain with the soul. Of course, most of us have heard about the famous "pineal gland", but the general point is that Descartes account of the mind and the body was quite naturalistic, for his time.

The frequent mockery he gets from neuroscientists or just scientists in general is very unfair and ignorant.

The example of the clock is illustrative, for he thinks that bodies, including human bodies, are similar to clocks, just more complex. On this he turned out to be quite wrong, as history would show, but his intuitions were quite sensible.

I don't have a general comment on temporality here, just commending you for your impressive contributions.

You have such mastery of the text — Manuel

Nah. I make it up as I go along. Seriously. Of course it is based on what is found in the text, but the connections are things I am working out as I write.

you mention two uses of the word "nature" — Manuel

As I understand it there is distinction is between a particular nature of something and the nature of a kind of thing. In both cases the nature of something is what it is to be that thing, its essence (esse, to be). The nature that is particular to Descartes and the nature shared by human beings. There is the nature of this poorly made clock, which is by its nature unreliable, and the nature of clocks in general, which is to be a reliable time keeper.

Descartes also uses the term to refer what God has created, the natural world.

The example of the clock is illustrative, for he thinks that bodies, including human bodies, are similar to clocks ... On this he turned out to be quite wrong — Manuel

But not completely wrong. The details of his biomechanics might be wrong, but much has been gained by seeing the body as a mechanical system.

Nah. I make it up as I go along. Seriously. Of course it is based on what is found in the text, but the connections are things I am working out as I write. — Fooloso4

You coulda fooled me. In any case they have been fantastically helpful.




In effect, it seems merely a point of emphasis on something particular (this specific clock, this specific human being) or something broad (clocks and human beings). Something seems off, just a little, maybe it's our modern way of understanding, but in contemporary (scientific) understanding, you gain knowledge of general things (human beings) by studying - in principle - one person.

In practice we need much more.

But not completely wrong. The details of his biomechanics might be wrong, but much has been gained by seeing the body as a mechanical system. — Fooloso4

As an example of human anatomy, it can be a useful heuristic.

But in terms of physics, or the way the world works, it was way off the mark. I mean, it was very intuitive and coherent, and everyone believed in it until Newton demolished it, to his surprise and lament.

You coulda fooled me. — Manuel

Although I had read Descartes before, I think it has more to do with developing interpretive skills. Reading between the lines of philosophers who want to be read that way, and so write accordingly.

we are inclined to do or say such and such in a specific situation X, but we are not compelled to do so. — Manuel

Yes, we of course can act however we like—the only thing “compelling” us would be our customary responses. We don’t even “decide” to agree or act appropriately most of the time. An inappropriate action may not even register as a response (unless a form of rejection); it may not do anything in light of the situation (just an engine idling Wittgenstein will say PI#132); it may not even be considered an act. Something out of place does bring up the question, “Did you intend to…?” And here the workings of “intention” are now clear without being metaphysical. We have ordinary criteria to judge whether something is or is not a certain practice, we don’t make it one with our “will”.

Thank you for your continued interest.