Descartes's response to the Fourth Objections Andre Sarrazin
Descartes and Arnauld: The Fourth Objections
C Riquier, PH 401, Metaphysics
January 6, 2015
André Sarrazin,
Descartes and Arnauld: The fourth objections
The Meditationes de Prima Philosophia, in quibus Dei existentia et animae humanae immortalitas demonstrantur usually known as Meditations were completed in the first half of 1640, and Descartes, concerned about the welcome that would be reserved for his work, circulated a manuscript through Father Mersenne, to be able to attach the objections made to him and the answers he would have provided. In fact, the first edition completed on August 28, 1641 contains only six sets of objections and answers. The history of successive editions shows additions and entrenchments, so when the French translation of 1647 was published, the fifth objections (those of Gassendi) are placed after the sixths, while the seventh are absent. These variations are, for the study of the fourth objections, irrelevant. However, it should be noted that their author, Father Arnauld, also knew the text of the first ones, which Descartes, via Mersenne, had communicated to him. They are due to J. de Kater, a Dutch Catholic priest, and are based on the positions defended by Suarez and Saint Thomas d'Aquin. Descartes responds in particular to the problem posed by the proposal to consider God as a cause of himself, because any cause can be considered as a limitation. The second objections are probably due to Mersenne himself and the third are from Hobbes. Both did not strongly attract Descartes' attention. It is only with those of Arnauld that he "then thinks he can present everything to the doctors of Sorbonne" (MM, p 15), after having introduced in his text some changes relating to theology. The current editions, in chronological order, first present the text of the objections and then that of the answers. We have the possibility, probably more didactic, to analyze each of the objections and the corresponding answer(s) separately, even if it means in conclusion to identify a common thread of the whole and to highlight the coherence of the thinking of the two interlocutors. Arnauld himself ordered his objections according to his role as a philosopher or theologian, it is this presentation that we will keep.
I. Philosophical objections.
The comment of a text is better understood for those who can consult it, there will be a wide call for quotations. Arnauld's objections begin with a reference to Saint Augustine who had already noticed in "the second book of free will chap 3" that, even if there is a je ne sais quoi that always deceives you, "it is probably that I am, if he deceives me", thus anticipating the discovery of the certainty of the Cartesian cogito. Arnauld does not explain further "continue" he writes to reach the first objection: "How can we conclude from this principle that our mind is distinct and separated from the body". Pascal, later, in a geometric spirit, will emphasize that "I think therefore I am" is not the same thing in the spirit of Saint Augustine and Descartes, this being "a word for adventure" for one, and a "firm and sustained principle for the other" carrying "an admirable sequence of consequences".
I.1 Exclude the body from the essence of the thing that thinks.
Objections:
Arnauld takes up the terms of the second meditation, He grants that we can doubt the existence of bodies and even his own and yet convince ourselves to be something: "this truth always remains: I am something, and therefore I am not a body" (MM, p323), indeed if I were one I would doubt myself. He concedes that this does not prove that there is no body, but arrives at a first difficulty: Descartes in seeking who he is thinks that "this notion and knowledge of myself, thus precisely taken, does not depend on things whose existence is not yet known to me" (MM, p322). This is certain, but it is only a reason to exclude "these things" according to the march of reasoning, not yet according to the "truth of the thing" (MM, p323).
Arnauld then used the Discours de la méthode, published four years earlier, to point out that Descartes was already reasoning this way and that "the dispute is still on the same terms". How, from what Descartes does not know anything else that belongs to his essence, "it follows that there is also nothing else that indeed belongs to him" (MM, p 324). He explains that he did not find in the second meditation an answer to his question because "he has a heavy and rude mind", but he thinks he found it in the sixth where the notion of a clear and distinct idea appears. He quotes, for example, "we must always come back to this, that only things that I conceive clearly and distinctly (clear and distinct percipio) that have the strength to persuade me entirely" (MM, p. 165). Arnauld shows that Descartes' thought is built according to the following syllogism:
I have a clear and distinct idea of what I am a thing that thinks and not extended
I have a clear and distinct idea of what the body is an extended thing and that doesn't think
Ergo, my soul is entirely and truly distinct from the body and it can exist without it.
However, the major of syllogism can be revoked, knowledge must not only be clear and distinct but also full and complete, "i.e. which includes everything that must be known of the thing" (MM, p 325). Arnauld continues by showing that when Descartes, further in his text, presents his knowledge of the body and mind as full and complete, these statements can also be revoked in doubt. He specifies by showing that it is not necessary to go so far as to think that "every body was spirit" (MM, p 325), the genre that can be heard without the species. He concludes his first objection by; "it only follows (from meditations) that I can acquire some knowledge of myself without the knowledge of the body, but that this knowledge is complete and complete, so that I am assured that I am not mistaken, when I exclude the body from my essence, it is not yet clear to me." (p 326).
Arnauld will continue his demonstration with a geometric argument. Anyone who thinks that the triangle inscribed in a circle and whose base is a diameter of the circle necessarily has a right angle, will say that he has a clear and distinct vision of this triangle, but he could deny that the square of its base is equal to the sum of the squares on its sides by calling on the omnipotence of God to make such a rectangular triangle. This one would make the same mistake as Descartes in considering that a clear and distinct idea implies full and complete knowledge.
Arnauld continuing the analysis of the triangle inscribed in the semicircle raises the problem of knowing what makes it possible to consider as different substances two substances that can be conceived only clearly and distinctly existing one without the other. It is indeed possible to distinguish rectangular triangle and Pythagorean theorem by refusing the latter to be in the essence of the first, but having a clear and precise idea of the two objects. How can we say that we know the nature of the mind better than that of the triangle? Sticking to the clear and precise vision moreover seems to prove too much and lead to the body being presented only as the vehicle of the spirit, man becoming "a living spirit or using the body". (p328)
Arnauld then warns an answer to the objection that would say that the body is not absolutely excluded from the essence of being, but only as it is a thing that thinks, because it would lead to presenting "the idea I have of myself as incomplete and imperfectly conceived"
Arnauld illustrates his thinking with a geometric example of quite complex use: The line for surveyors is a length without width, although there is no length without width. Some might think that the thing that thinks has the common properties of extended things plus the particular property of thinking, so that by abstraction we could only retain this last property, (as we have by abstraction removed the width at the line).
In addition, thought always seems attached to a body and there are variations in the way of thinking combined with the variations of the body, asleep in children, extinguished in madmen.
Answers and analysis:
The first answer to Arnauld's objection is simple, "none of the things without which a thing can be, is understood in its essence" (MM, p 345), and to make a real distinction between two things it is enough that "each of them is conceived without the other fully, or as a complete thing" (MM, p346). A full and complete knowledge is not possible, because this knowledge belongs only to God alone, and even if we had it on an object, we would have no way of knowing that our knowledge is complete if God did not reveal it to us.
To make a distinction between two things, it is simply necessary to have knowledge that is such that "we did not make it imperfect and criminal" (MM, p. 347).
Descartes specifies that, when he said that a thing had to be fully conceived, he meant a knowledge distinct enough to conceive that thing as complete.
The complete thing is defined as a substance, "coated with the shapes or attributes that are sufficient to make me know that it is a substance" (MM, p347). If we strip the substance of the attributes that make it known to us we destroy all the knowledge we have of it, Descartes then makes a distinction between complete and incomplete substance depending on whether or not it can subsist without being supported by something else or whether it is a whole or a part of a whole. In the first sense there is only God who is complete substance, for the second he gives the example of the hand which, alone is complete substance, but which related to the body is incomplete substance.
The attributes by which the substance called body is known make it possible to consider it as a complete substance.
Arnauld's proposal, "the body is to the mind what the genus is to the species", is fought because the mind can be thought without the body and the species cannot be thought without the genus.
The example of the triangle inscribed in a semicircle is not relevant for three reasons;
Pythagoras' theorem is not a substance or even a thing
We are obviously going about the relationship between the square of the sides and the fact that the triangle is rectangular, more difficult of the existence of a right angle to the relationship, so it is enough to clearly distinguish the mind without the body for the reciprocal to be true
We may have no idea of the Pythagorean theorem but we cannot a priori deny that this relationship exists, because we conceive that there must be a certain proportion, however "in the concept of the mind nothing is understood of what belongs to the body" (MM, p 350)
Descartes refutes the idea that his argument would prove too much. He recalls the sixth meditation where he had taken care to mention that "I am not only housed in my body, as well as a pilot in his ship, but in addition to that, that I am very closely associated with him... that I compose as one whole with him" (MM p 191). Arnauld's concern here was probably also theological because he did not want to see Descartes' arguments used to support dualist heresies.
The geometric image of the line seems to him to differ too much from the problem. As for fools and children, the ability to think is prevented by the organs of the body, and it does not follow that it is produced by them, but the close connection of mind and body, "which we experience every day" (MM, p 353) can cause confusion.
Descartes' response may seem insufficient in the face of Arnauld's requirement for full knowledge. But the latter is impossible by definition. If we had by chance a full and complete knowledge of a thing, we would not know that we have this knowledge, which is only possible to God. We must be content, as Saint Thomas says, with 'evening' knowledge, that of 'morning' being reserved for the creator. Descartes does not specify in his answer that his definition of the body as a substance appeared only in the sixth meditation, he uses an ambiguous formulation: "As I think I have sufficiently demonstrated in the second meditation" (MM, p349) which can be applied in the context to the mind conceived as a distinct and complete thing and to the body conceived as a substance, but also apply only to the mind. Yet he had to go through the demonstration of God's existence to "be certain that one (of the two things) is distinct or different from the other, because they can be posed separately at least by the omnipotence of God" (MM, p185).
Descartes also defends his physique based on clear and distinct ideas. When he says that by stripping the substance of his attributes we would move away from knowledge, he seems to go against his analysis of the piece of wax in the second meditation and the stone in Article XI of the principles of philosophy. In these two moments he strips a substance of its accidental attributes to discover the substantial attributes, those that make the thing what it is, in the case of the body, figure and extended. The resulting certainty "is obtained only by abstraction, which leaves of the thing only what the intuitive can assume for its object". The clear and distinct vision combined with methodical reasoning is enough to build a physics. Arnauld's requirement would make it impossible.
Can we then be satisfied with the Cartesian response? Judging it against the objections that Husserl and Ryle will bring to cite two modern critics would be inappropriate here. We will dwell on Leibniz's thought, which refutes the Cartesian assimilation of the body to extent simply by the obligation of Cartesians to give movement to matter, which shows "that they tacitly admit that extent is not enough". In this case, the incompleteness of the clear and distinct notion becomes obvious and reopens the field of properties that can be attributed to the body.