Descartes et Arnauld Les quatriemes objections Andre Sarrazin
Descartes and Arnauld: the Fourth Objections by Andre Sarrazin (2015)
C Riquier, PH 401, Metaphysics
January 6, 2015
André Sarrazin,
Descartes and Arnauld: The fourth objections
The Meditations of 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 reception that would be given to his work, circulated a manuscript through Father Mersenne, to be able to attach the objections that would be made to him and the answers he would have provided. In fact, the first edition completed on August 28, 1641 has only six series of objections and answers. The history of successive editions reveals additions and limits, so during the publication of the French translation of 1647, the fifth objections (those of Gassendi) are placed after the sixth, while the seventh are absent. These variations are, for the study of the fourth objections, unimportant. However, it should be noted that their author, Father Arnauld, also knew the text of the first, 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 Aquinas. 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. The two 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 introducing in his text some changes relating to theology. The current editions, respecting the chronological order, first present the text of the objections and then that of the answers. We have the possibility, probably more didactic, to analyze separately each of the objections and the corresponding answer(s), even if in conclusion it means drawing a common thread of the whole and highlighting 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 commentary on a text is better 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 any more before "let's continue" he writes to reach the first objection: "How from this principle we can conclude that our mind is distinct and separated from the body". Pascal, later, in a geometric spirit, will emphasize that "I think so I am" is not the same 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 uses the terms of the second meditation, He agrees 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 agrees that this does not prove that there is no body, but reaches a first difficulty: Descartes by looking for 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). It 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 Discourse of the Method, published four years earlier, to mount that Descartes was already reasoning in this way and that "the dispute is still in the same terms". How, from the fact that 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 get back to this, that there are only the 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 does not think
Ergo, my soul is entirely and truly distinct from the body and it can exist without it.
However, the majority of the syllogism can be revoked, the knowledge must not only be clear and distinct but still full and complete, "that is, which includes everything that must be known about the thing" (MM, p 325). Arnauld goes on to show that when Descartes, later in his text, presents his knowledge of the body and mind as full and complete, these assertions 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 with; "it only results (from meditations) that I can acquire some knowledge of myself without 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 manifest 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 by considering that a clear and distinct idea implies full and complete knowledge.
Arnauld continuing the analysis of the triangle inscribed in the semicircle poses the problem of knowing what makes it possible to consider as different substances two substances that can only be conceived clearly and distinctly existing one without the other. It is indeed possible to distinguish the rectangular triangle and theorem of Pythagoras by refusing the latter to be in the essence of the first, but nevertheless 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 seems too much to prove and lead to the body being presented only as the vehicle of the mind, man becoming "a living spirit or using the body". (p328)
Arnauld then warns a response 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 rather 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, which means that by abstraction we could only retain this last property, (as we have removed by abstraction the width of the line).
In addition, thought always seems attached to a body and there are variations in the way of thinking combined with variations in the body, asleep in children, extinguished in fools.
Answers and analysis:
The first response to Arnaud'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). Full and complete knowledge is not possible, because this knowledge belongs only to God, 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 for a knowledge that is such that "we do not make it imperfect and criminal" (MM, p 347).
Descartes specifies that, when he said that it was necessary to fully conceive a thing, he heard a knowledge distinct enough to conceive this thing as complete.
The complete thing is defined as a substance, "covered with forms or attributes that are enough to let 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 conducts a distinction between complete and incomplete substance according to whether or not it can survive without being supported by anything 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 reported to the body is incomplete substance.
The attributes by which we know the substance called the body 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 semi-circle is not relevant for three reasons;
The Pythagoras theorem is not a substance or even a thing
We obviously go from the relationship between the square of the sides and the fact that the triangle is rectangular, more difficult from the existence of a right angle to the relationship, so it is enough to clearly distinguish the mind without the body so that the reciprocal is true
We may have no idea of the Pythagoras 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 partner with him... that I compose as one whole with him" (MM p 191). Arnaud's concern here was probably also theological because he did not want to see Descartes' arguments used to support dualistic 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' answer may seem insufficient in the face of Arnaud's requirement of full and complete 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 satisfied, as Saint Thomas says, with 'evening' knowledge, the 'morning' knowledge 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 demonstrated enough in the second meditation" (MM, p349) which can be applied in context to the mind conceived as a distinct and complete thing and to the body conceived as a substance, but also to apply only to the mind. Yet he had to go through the demonstration of God's existence to "be sure 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 here his physics 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 extent. The resulting certainty "is only obtained by abstraction, which leaves of the thing only what the intuitus 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 in the light of the objections that Husserl and Ryle will bring to cite two modern critics would be inappropriate here. We will focus on Leibniz's thought, which refutes the Cartesian assimilation of the body to the extent simply by the obligation of the Cartesians to give movement to matter, which shows "that they tacitly admit that scope is not enough". In this case, the incompleteness of the clear and distinct notion becomes flagrant and reopens the field of properties that can be attributed to the body.