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Descartes on the Dubitability of the Existence of SelfAuthor(s): David CunningSource: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 74, No. 1 (Jan., 2007), pp. 111-131Published by: International Phenomenological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40041029 .

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Descartes on the Dubitability of the Existence of Self

DAVID CUNNING

The University of Iowa

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. LXXIV No. 1, January 2007 © 2007 International Phenomenological Society

In a number a passages Descartes appears to insist that "I am, I exist" and its variants are wholly indubitable. These passages present an intractable problem of interpretation in the face of passages in which Descartes allows that any result is dubitable, "I am, I exist" included. Here I pull together a number of elements of Descartes' system to show how all of these passages hang together. If my analysis is correct, it tells us something about the perspective that Descartes himself thinks we should take in reading the Meditations.

There are a number of passages in which Descartes appears to treat "I am, I exist" as indubitable in a way that other results are not. For example, he says in the Second Meditation that

after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind.1

In the First Meditation he had argued that we can doubt the truths of arithmetic and geometry if we cannot rule out the prospect that our minds are not reliable (AT 7:20-1), but in the Second Meditation he finds that "I am, I exist" is indubitable even in the face of that prospect. The latter is a "firm and immoveable point" (AT 7:24), and "one thing that is certain and unshakeable" (ibid.). There are some passages, however, in which Descartes allows that "I am, I exist" and its variants

1 AT 7:25. A similar passage is in Second Replies, AT 7:145-6. Unless otherwise indi- cated, I use the translations in John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume I, Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press (1985); Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, The Philo- sophical Writings of Descartes, Volume II, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1984); and Cottingham, Stoothoff, Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny, The Philosoph- ical Writings of Descartes, Volume III, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1991). I use "AT" to refer to the pagination in Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, Oeuvres de Descartes, Volumes I-XII, Paris: Vrin (1996).

DESCARTES ON THE DUBITABILITY OF THE EXISTENCE OF SELF 1 1 1



are dubitable.2 Here I pull together a number of elements of Descartes' system to show how all of these passages hang together. In section one I argue that Descartes holds that most of us have a confused materially false idea of self and that as a result we can think our existence confusedly and hence doubt it. In section two I consider a passage in Second Replies in which Descartes appears to state without qualification that it is impossible for us to doubt our own existence. In section three I consider the clear and distinct perception of self that is achieved in the Sec- ond Meditation. I conclude with some remarks on the implications of Descartes' notion of material falsity for the project of conceptual analysis.

I

The most fundamental principles of Descartes' metaphysics include that "what is done cannot be undone," that "he who thinks cannot but exist while he thinks," and that "nothing comes from nothing."3 Des- cartes refers to these alternately as "common notions" and "primary notions."4 Although there is a sense in which these notions are the most evident of all,5 they are still quite dubitable. Descartes writes,

In the case of these common notions, there is no doubt that they are capable of being clearly and distinctly perceived; for otherwise they would not properly be called common notions. But some of them do not really have an equal claim to be called 'common' among all people, since they are not equally well perceived by everyone. This is not, I think, because one man's faculty of knowledge extends more widely than another's, but because the common notions are in conflict with the preconceived opinions of some people who, as a result, cannot easily grasp them. But the selfsame notions are perceived with the utmost clarity by other people who are free from such preconceived opinions.6

2 See for example the Third Meditation, AT 7:35-6, and Principles of Philosophy 1:49- 50, AT 8A:23-4. Some commentators have argued that in the light of these passages there is no coherent account to be reconstructed of Descartes' views on the dubitability of "I am, I exist." See for example Janet Broughton, Descartes 's Method of Doubt, Princeton: Princeton University Press (2002), 185. See also Anthony Kenny, Descartes, A Study of His Philosophy, Bristol: Thoemmes Press (1968), 185; Margaret Wilson (1978), Descartes; New York: Routledge (1978), 37 and 133-5; and Genevieve Rodis-Lewis, "On the Complementarity of Meditations III and V: From the 'General Rule' of Evidence to 'Certain Science'," in Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (ed.), Essays on Descartes' Meditations, Berkeley: University of California Press (1984), 280.

3 Principles 1:49, AT 8A:23-4; Second Replies, AT 7:145-6; and Second Replies, AT 7:135-6.

4 Principles 1:50, AT 8A:24; and Second Replies, AT 7:135-6.

5 In Second Replies, Descartes says that the primary notions of metaphysics "are by their nature as evident as, or even more evident than, the primary notions which the geometers study" (AT 7:157).

6 Principles 1:50, AT 8A:24.

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Here (in Principles 1:50) Descartes says that common notions are dubitable, and in Principles 1:49 he included as a common notion that "he who thinks cannot but exist while he thinks." On Descartes' view, we cannot refrain from affirming a clear and distinct perception while we are having it, but the common notions "are not equally well perceived by everyone."7 If a perception is even the slightest bit obscure, it is possible to doubt it:

So long as we attend to a truth which we perceive very clearly, we cannot doubt it. But when, as often happens, we are not attending to any truth in this way, then even though we remember that we have previously perceived many things very clearly, nonetheless there will be nothing which we may not justly doubt so long as we do not know that whatever we clearly perceive is true.8

Like anything, "I am, I exist" is dubitable in the sense that we can conceive that it is false if we think it confusedly.9 We can be suspicious of its truth if we barely grasp it and if it is "in conflict with [one of our] preconceived opinions," for example that what we know best we know

7 For Descartes' view that we cannot refrain from affirming a clear and distinct perception while having it, see the Fifth Meditation, AT 7:69; Appendix to Fifth Objec- tions and Replies, AT 9A:205; Second Replies, AT 7:144; "To [Mesland], 2 May 1644," AT 4:115-6; Principles 1:43, AT 8A: 21; Anthony Kenny, "Descartes on the Will," in John Cottingham (ed.), Descartes, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1998), 149-52; Charles Larmore, "Descartes' Psychologistic Theory of Assent," History of Philosophy Quarterly 1 (1984), 61-74; and Alan Nelson, "Descartes's Ontology of Thought," Topoi 16 (1997), 163-4.

8 Seventh Objections and Replies, AT 7:460, emphasis added. See also Fourth Replies, AT 7:245-6.

9 Descartes nowhere offers a definition of dubitability, and so his account of dubitability must be reconstructed from the passages in which he speaks of things as dubitable. Here I am appealing to the Seventh Objections and Replies passage as partial evidence for the view that Descartes holds that a proposition p is dubitable iff we can think p confusedly and conceive that ~/?. Similar passages are in Fourth Replies, AT 7:245-6; the Third Meditation, AT 7:36; and Principles 1:50, AT 8A:24. We can rule out in advance an alternative account according to which Descartes holds that a proposition p is dubitable iff it is possible for someone to clearly and distinctly perceive that ~p: Descartes nowhere speaks of clearly and distinctly perceiving nega- tions, but more importantly, his view on the will-compellingness of clear and distinct perceptions entails that a clear and distinct perception that ~p would be an indubitable perception that ~/?, and presumably Descartes does not hold that what it is to doubt something is to affirm with certainty that it is false. To doubt something that is true, our perception of it must be at least somewhat confused; and of course the same has to apply in cases in which we doubt something that is false. In Appendix to Fifth Objections and Replies Descartes says that "before we can decide to doubt, we need some reason for doubting" (AT 9A:204). Accordingly, we doubt a thing in circumstances in which we perceive it confusedly and affirm something else that conflicts with it.

DESCARTES ON THE DUBITABILITY OF THE EXISTENCE OF SELF 1 13



through the senses.10 We can conceive that it is false if we barely grasp it and if we are among "those who like to contradict just for the sake of it."11 We can conceive that it is false if we barely grasp it and if we take seriously the possibility that our minds are not reliable.

One scenario in which we perceive our existence confusedly is that in which we have a confused idea of self. Descartes identifies a

perception [as] 'distinct' if, as well as being clear, it is so sharply separated from all other perceptions that it contains within itself only what is clear.12

If our idea of self is confused, our perception of the existence of our self is constituted in part by a confused idea.13 This perception can be made more distinct if we clarify our idea of self, but until we do it is dubitable:

It is clear that we do not have this kind of [absolute] certainty in cases where our perception is even the slightest bit obscure or confused; for such obscurity, whatever its degree, is quite sufficient to make us have doubts in such cases.14

Descartes holds that most of us have an idea of self that is confused:

All our ideas of what belong to the mind have up till now been very confused and mixed up with the ideas of things that can be perceived by the senses.15

He adds that

This is the first and most important reason for our inability to understand with sufficient clarity the customary assertions about the soul and God.16

One of the reasons that we do not clearly and distinctly understand some of the (presumably true) assertions about mind is that our idea of mind is confused. A sufficient condition for having a confused perception that X is A is having an idea of X that is confused.

10 The Second Meditation, AT 7:29-30. 11 Second Replies, AT 7:157. 12

Principles 1:45, AT 8A:22, emphasis added. 13 Here I am referring to Descartes' view that a judgment is the affirmation by the

will of an idea that is had by the intellect. See for example the Fourth Meditation, AT 7:56-8; and Principles 1:34-38, AT 8A:18-9.

14 Second Replies, AT 7: 145. 1 5 Second Replies, AT 7: 1 30- 1 . 16 AT 7:131.

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Descartes offers a detailed account of how we come to have ideas of mind and God that are "mixed up" with ideas of sensible things. First, he says that as a result of paying so much attention to the sensible bodies on which we depend for survival, we ignore things that we cannot sense and assume that they are nothing at all.17 We assume that whatever is real is sensible, and our ideas of mind and God pay a heavy price. If we regard mind or God as real, we conceive them as sensible:

many people's understanding of substance is still limited to that which is imaginable and corporeal, or even to that which is capable of being perceived by the senses. ...[TJhey suppose that nothing can subsist unless it is a body, and that no body can subsist unless it can be perceived by the senses.18

Another reason that we come to conceive of mind and God as sensible is that our standard way of thinking of any object is to think of it as a sensible thing.19 A childhood focus on our bodily needs is a focus on the sensible bodies that meet them, and as a result we do not become proficient at thinking of other kinds of thing:

our mind is unable to keep its attention on things without some degree of difficulty and fatigue; and it is hardest of all for it to attend to what is not present to the senses or even to the imagination.20

If it is extremely difficult for us to conceive of things that cannot be sensed, almost everything that we do conceive we will conceive as

17 See for example Principles 1:71. Descartes writes that "since the mind judged everything in terms of its utility to the body in which it was immersed, it assessed the amount of reality in each object by the extent to which it was affected by it. As a result, it supposed that there was more substance or corporeality in rocks and metals than in water or air, since it felt more hardness and heaviness in them. Indeed, it regarded the air as a mere nothing, so long as it felt no wind or cold or heat in it" (AT 8A:36). See also The World, chapter four, AT 11:21; and Principles 11:10-22, AT 8A:45-52.

18 Principles 1:73; AT 8A:37.

19 See also E.M. Curley, "Analysis in the Meditations: The Quest for Clear and Dis- tinct Ideas," in Rorty 1984, 156-62; Gary Hatfield, "The Senses and the Fleshless Eye: The Meditations as Cognitive Exercises," in Rorty 1984, 70-1; and Stephen Menn, Descartes and Augustine, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1998), chapter 6.

20 Principles 1:73, AT 8A:37. Descartes goes on to say that most of us are very attached to our senses and that "since... there is nothing whose true nature we perceive by the senses alone, it turns out that most people have nothing but confused perceptions throughout their entire lives" (AT 8A:37).




sensible. In particular, we will conceive of mind and God as sensible, even though they are not.21

Descartes does not think that we are thinking of mind or God if we just have an idea of a sensible thing. He says to Gassendi,

This is a thought which is worthy of you alone, O Flesh. For if anyone thus represents God, or the mind, to himself he is attempting to imagine something which is not imaginable, and all he will succeed in forming is a corporeal idea to which he falsely assigns the name 'God' or 'the mind'. A true idea of the mind contains only thought and its attributes, none of which is corporeal.22

Descartes presumably should say that an idea is not of God or mind if it is an idea of a sensible thing. It is instead an idea of a sensible thing. A "true idea of mind," as Descartes puts it, is not an idea of a thing that is sensible. In between a true idea of mind and an idea that is falsely assigned the name 'mind' is an idea that is of mind, but that is confused. Descartes says that our ideas of mind and God "have been very confused and mixed up with ideas of things that can be perceived by the senses." A true (or clear and distinct) idea of mind does not represent mind as material, but as result of our embodiment this idea is run together, and tightly associated, with ideas of sensible things.

According to Descartes, our pre-philosophical idea of mind is very confused. It in fact has much in common with what Descartes treats as the paradigmatic case of a materially false idea - the sensory idea. Descartes defines material falsity in Fourth Replies:

The first point is that certain ideas are materially false. As I interpret this claim, it means that the ideas are such as to provide subject-matter for error. (AT 7:231)

What it is for an idea to provide subject-matter for error is not exactly clear, however. Descartes says that material falsity "is the falsity to be found in an idea" (AT 7:233). He elaborates:

Even if I do not refer my ideas to anything outside myself, there is still subject- matter for error, since I can make a mistake with regard to the actual nature of the ideas. For example, I may consider the idea of colour, and say that it is a thing or quality; or rather I may say that the colour itself, which is represented by this idea, is something of the kind. For example, I may say whiteness is a quality; and even if I do not refer this idea to anything outside myself - even if I do not say or suppose that there is any white thing - I may still make a

21 See also Fifth Replies, AT 7:365; Second Replies, AT 7:130-1; "To Mersenne, July 1641," AT 3:393-4; "To Hyperaspistes, August 1641," AT 3:430; and "To Clersel- ier, February 1645," AT 4:187-8.

22 Fifth Replies, AT 7:385.

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mistake in the abstract, with regard to whiteness itself and its nature or the idea I have of it...23

If an examination of our idea of cold reveals that coldness is a thing or quality, when coldness is not a thing or quality, then our idea of cold mischaracterizes coldness. Descartes thinks that most of us have an idea of cold that is misrepresentative in this way. This idea of cold

leads me to judge that the idea of the sensation of cold represents some object called 'cold' which is located outside of me....24

Our sensory ideas, Descartes says, "represent non-things as things."25 They lead us to judge that (for example) coldness is "something positive which exists outside my sensation."26 They represent items that do not exist mind-independently as items that do.27

Descartes thinks that strictly speaking a sensation is a mode of mind. A true idea of a sensation represents it as such:

pain and colour and so on are clearly and distinctly perceived when they are regarded merely as sensations or thoughts.28

23 Conservation with Burman, AT 5:152. Note that Descartes indicates that the expres- sion 'even if I do not refer this idea to anything outside myself is to be understood as 'even if I do not say or suppose that there is any white thing'. In the larger passage he is pointing out that the material falsity of an idea (of X) is independent of whether or not X actually exists.

24 Fourth Replies, AT 7:234-5. 25 The Third Meditation, AT 7:43. 26 Fourth Replies, AT 7:234. Descartes is not offering a definition of material falsity in

the Third Meditation when he says that materially false ideas represent non-things as things. Instead, he is expounding one of the ways in which sensory ideas provide the subject-matter for error: they represent non-things as things in the sense that they represent things that do not exist mind-independently as things that do exist mind-independently. Ideas - even sensory ideas - can provide subject-matter for error in other ways, as Descartes reveals when he says that ideas of appetite (for example, thirst) are materially false in that they lead us to pursue or avoid items that we should not (Fourth Replies, AT 7:234). Descartes' definition of material falsity - what he "means [in saying that] certain ideas are materially false" (emphasis added) - is that "the ideas are such as to provide subject-matter for error."

27 See also Principles 1:66-71, AT 8A:32-6; and The World, AT 1 1:3. 28

Principles 1:68; AT 8A:33. Similar passages are in Principles 1:66, AT 8A:32; and Principles 1:70, AT 8A:34-5. See also Alan Nelson, "The Falsity in Sensory Ideas: Descartes and Arnauld," in E. Kremer (ed.), Interpreting Arnauld, Toronto: Uni- versity of Toronto Press (1996), 19, 23-6; Nelson 1997, 166; Samuel C. Rickless, "The Cartesian Fallacy Fallacy," Notts 39 (2005), 315-7; and Katherine J. Morris, "Intermingling and Confusion," International Journal of Philosophical Studies 3 (1995), 290-7.




Our idea of cold - our pre-philosophical idea of cold - is materially false. It provides subject-matter for error in that an examination of that idea delivers the result that the sensation of cold exists extra-mentally, when in fact it does not. Descartes traces the falsity in this sensory idea to our unreflective childhood supposition that objects are just as we perceive them:

all of us have, from our early childhood, judged that all the objects of our sense-perception are things existing outside our minds and closely resembling our sensations, i.e. the perceptions that we had of them. Thus, on seeing a colour, for example, we supposed we were seeing a thing located outside us which closely resembled the idea of colour that we experienced within us at the time.29

As children, we judge correctly that the extensive qualities of bodies have a mind-independent existence, but in addition we make the hasty judgment that all of the other qualities that we perceive to be in bodies exist mind-independently as well.30 The falsity in a sensory idea is the result of something that we do. Descartes' account of material falsity thus parallels the account of error that he offers in the Fourth Medi- tation:

if we frequently have ideas containing some falsity, this can happen only because there is something confused and obscure in them, for in that respect they participate in nothingness, that is, they are in us in this confused state only because we are not wholly perfect. And it is evident that it is no less contradict- ory that falsity or imperfection as such should proceed from God than that truth or perfection should proceed from nothingness.31

29 Principles 1:66. AT 8A:32.

30 Principles 1:71, AT 8A:35-6. Descartes writes that "In our early childhood the mind was so closely tied to the body that it had no leisure for any thoughts except those by means of which it had sensory awareness of what was happening to the body....[T]he mind had various sensations corresponding to the different areas where, and ways in which, the body was being stimulated, namely what we call the sensations of tastes, smells, sounds, heat, cold, light, colours and so on - sensations which do not represent anything located outside of our thought. At the same time the mind perceived sizes, shapes, motions and so on, which were presented to it not as sensations but as things, or modes of things, existing (or at least capable of existing) outside of thought, although it was not yet aware of the difference between things and sensations. The next stage arose when the mechanism of the body, which is so constructed by nature that it has the ability to move in various ways by its own power, twisted around aimlessly in all directions in its random attempts to pursue the beneficial and avoid the harmful; at this point the mind that was attached to the body began to notice that the objects of this pursuit or avoid- ance had an existence outside itself. And it attributed to them not only sizes, shapes, motions and the like, which it perceived as things or modes of things, but also tastes, smells, and so on, the sensations of which were, it realized, produced by the objects in question."

31 Discourse on the Method, Part Four, AT 6:38-9.

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None of the ideas that God implants in a human mind is false intrinsically.32 A clear and distinct idea of color represents color as mind- dependent, but as a result of our habitual supposition that color is mind-independent, that idea has been run together, and tightly associated, with the idea of mind-independent existence.33 Like an idea of mind that is mixed up with ideas of sensible things, a materially false idea of a sensation is mixed up with other ideas, and it would not be an idea of that sensation if it were just an idea of a mind-independent thing. It has "something positive as its underlying subject, namely the actual sensation involved."34 It is in some sense a composite of a true idea of the sensation and predicates that do not pertain to the sensation. It is an idea that "is referred to something other than that of which it is in fact the idea."35 It is a true idea of a sensation that is so tightly associated with predicates that do not pertain to the sensation that an examination of our idea of the sensation will yield a result that is false.

Descartes certainly privileges the sensory idea as the paradigm of material falsity, but he takes other ideas to be materially false as well. He writes,

[A]s for the confused ideas of gods concocted by idolaters, I see no reason why they too cannot be called materially false, in so far as they provide the subject- matter for false judgements.36

He adds that material falsity admits of degrees and that an idea is more or less materially false as a function of the extent to which it provides subject-matter for error:

ideas which give the judgement little or no scope for error do not seem as much entitled to be called materially false as those which give great scope for error.37

32 See also Nelson 1996, 23-6, and Dan Kaufman, "Descartes on the Objective Real- ity of Materially False Ideas," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 81 (2000), 402. As a result of our hasty judgments and also our embodiment, some of our ideas become confused, but we can restore even the most recalcitrant of these - for example ideas of sensations that incline us to pursue or avoid what we should not. (See for example The Sixth Meditation, AT 7:89-90). Some commentators have argued that Descartes holds that sensory ideas are confused intrinsically. See for example Wil- son 1978, 105-16; and Jill Buroker, "Descartes on Sensible Qualities," Journal of the History of Philosophy 29 (1991), 585-611.

33 See also Principles 1:71, AT 8A:35; and Nelson 1997, 168-9. 34 Fourth Replies, AT 7:234. Note that Descartes holds that everyone has innate ideas

of God and mind that serve as the "underlying components" of our confused ideas of mind and God. See for example Third Replies, AT 7:183-9; Second Replies, AT 7:136-7; and Fifth Replies, AT 7:375.

35 Fourth Replies, AT 7:233. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid.

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Confused ideas that are made up at will do not provide as much scope for error as ideas of color and cold, which we do not notice that we have assembled, and "the greatest scope for error is provided by the ideas which arise from the sensations of appetite."38 One possible explanation for Descartes' emphasis on the material falsity of sensory ideas over that of our pre-philosophical ideas of mind and God is that, as a result of our embodiment and our attention to self-preservation, our clear and distinct ideas of sensations have been more tightly wed to predicates that do not apply to them. The task of correcting materially false sensory ideas also has a kind of urgency, in that these ideas lead us to err in a way that threatens our very survival. For example, a patient with dropsy might die if he accepts the deliverances of his materially false idea of thirst.39 More generally, the research that will help us to understand the workings of the human body, and to learn how to treat it, will not be completed if we do not abandon the bad predicates of Aristotelian science.40

II

In this section I want to consider an objection. In Second Replies there is a passage in which Descartes appears to state that "I am, I exist" and its variants are not dubitable in any circumstances. He writes,

Now some of these perceptions are so transparently clear and at the same time so simple that we cannot ever think of them without believing them to be true. The fact that I exist so long as I am thinking; or that what is done cannot be undone, are examples of truths in respect of which we manifestly possess this kind of certainty. For we cannot doubt them unless we think of them; but we cannot think of them without at the same time believing they are true, as was supposed. Hence we cannot doubt them without at the same time believing they are true; that is, we can never doubt them. (AT 7:145-6)

Here Descartes appears to state unequivocally that we cannot think "I exist so long as I am thinking" without believing that it is true and so can never doubt it.

The first thing to note about this passage is that Descartes does not in fact say in it that "I exist so long as I am thinking" and other simple

38 Fourth Replies, AT 7:234. 39 Ibid. 40 One of Descartes' aims is to replace the bad concepts of Aristotelian science with

the concepts of the new mechanistic science, and a recognition of the confusion of our current ideas of sensible qualities is crucial to this end. See Principles of Philos- ophy, preface to the French edition, AT 9B:5-9; "To Princess Elizabeth, 21 May 1643," AT 3:665-8; "To Regius, January 1642," AT 3:491-2; and "To Princess Elizabeth, 28 June 1643," AT 3:690-1.

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truths are indubitable. Instead, he says that some of our perceptions of these truths are so transparently clear that we cannot have them without believing their truth. At the end of the preceding paragraph, he specifies the perceptions that he has in mind - "the clear perceptions of the intellect" as opposed to perceptions that involve the senses (AT 7.145).41 In Principles 1:49-50 (cited at the beginning of section one) he included "what is done cannot be undone" and "I exist so long as I am thinking" as examples of common notions that can be doubted if we perceive them confusedly. Here he says of these same notions that some of our perceptions of them are indubitable.42 He is not talking about the indubitability of particular truths, but about the indubitability of some of our perceptions of these truths.

Descartes does indeed single out "I exist so long as I am thinking" and "what is done cannot be undone" as unique in the passage. How- ever, he is not singling them out as wholly indubitable. He is instead distinguishing them from truths that cannot be clearly and distinctly perceived on their own. As he says,

There are other truths which are perceived very clearly by our intellect so long as we attend to the arguments on which our knowledge of them depends.... (AT 7:146)

Descartes is certainly right to think that there are truths whose truth is not fully evident if we are not also aware of our reasons for accepting

41 Descartes adds here that "if there is any certainty to be had, the only remaining alternative is that it occurs in the clear perceptions of the intellect and nowhere else" (AT 7:145). There are three passages in Descartes' corpus which might appear to reflect the view that some non-intellectual perceptions are clear and distinct. One is in Second Replies, in which Descartes says that a person with jaundice perceives snow "just as clearly and distinctly as we do when we see it as white" (ibid.). This passage is at best neutral on the question of whether or not perceptions of snow are actually clear and distinct; indeed, the passage comes immediately before Des- cartes' claim that if there is any certainty to be had it occurs in the clear and distinct perceptions of the intellect and nowhere else. The second passage is in First Replies, in which Descartes says that just as we can clearly and distinctly perceive part of a chiliagon if we focus our attention, we can clearly and distinctly perceive a portion of the sea (AT 7:113). This passage can be read as reflecting the Second Meditation view that we can clearly and distinctly perceive a body so long as we focus our attention on those aspects of the body that are perceived by the intellect alone (AT 7:30-1). Given the weight of the Second Replies passage, this is how it should be read. The same reading applies to the passage in Conversation with Bur- man, AT 5:160. For a contrary view see Rickless 2005, 315-7.

42 Descartes does say (in the Second Replies passage) that the two common notions are "truths of which we manifestly possess this kind of certainty." Given that he takes the truths to be dubitable, he is not saying that we always have such certainty about them, but that such certainty is within our capability.

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them. In the AT 7:145-6 passage, he is not making the point that the "simple" truths are absolutely indubitable. Instead, he is making the point that part of their simplicity consists in the fact that, unlike the conclusions of arguments, it is within our capability to clearly and distinctly perceive them without clearly and distinctly perceiving anything else - for example, premises from which they are inferred. Still, it is possible for us to think them confusedly and then doubt them.

Descartes thinks that there are many circumstances in which we can doubt "I am, I exist." We can doubt it if we think it confusedly as a result of having a confused materially false idea of self. We can also doubt "I am, I exist" if we think it by attending to linguistic symbols that stand in for it. Descartes writes,

it is very seldom that our concept of a thing is so distinct that we can separate it totally from our concept of the words involved. The thoughts of almost all people are more concerned with words than with things....43

As we have seen, Descartes thinks that it is extremely difficult for us to sustain the kind of attention that is required for having a clear and distinct perception. It is much easier for us to take the short-cut of thinking imagistically. In attempting to think of infinitude, for example, we might instead think of a string of symbols that stands in for our idea of infinitude.44 Or, we might confusedly perceive the proposition "whatever thinks exists" when

it is put forward without attention and believed to be true only because we remember that we judged it to be true previously.45

According to Descartes, much of human behavior takes place without being guided by thought:

a very large number of the motions occurring inside us do not depend in any way on the mind. These include heartbeat, digestion, nutrition, respiration when we are asleep, and also such waking actions as walking, singing, and the like, when these occur without the mind attending to them.46

The habitual use of language is no exception. The reason why an animal can speak is that, without any accompanying mental activity, its animal spirits can cause its body to make the relevant noises, but our

43 Principles 1:74, AT 8A:37.

44 See for example Second Replies, AT 7:141-2. 45

Appendix to Fifth Objections and Replies, AT 9A:205. 46 Fourth Replies, AT 7:229-30.

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animal spirits can cause bodily movements as well.47 If "the thoughts of almost all people are more concerned with words than with things," and if we can use language without confronting the ideas to which that language is tied, we can entertain the possible falsity of a lot of things even if their falsity is strictly speaking incoherent.48

Another circumstance in which we can doubt "I am, I exist" is that in which we take seriously the possibility that our minds might be deceived about matters that are most evident to us. In the Third Medi- tation Descartes reiterates the view that we cannot doubt a clear and distinct perception while having it:

when I turn to the things themselves which I think I perceive very clearly, I am so convinced by them that I spontaneously declare: let whoever can do so deceive me, he will never bring it about that I am nothing, so long as I continue to think I am something; or make it true at some future time that I have never existed, since it is now true that I exist; or bring it about that two and three added together are more or less than five, or anything of this kind in which I see a manifest contradiction. (AT 7:36)

However, when we turn our attention away from a clear and distinct idea and consider instead the prospect that we might be deceived about matters that are most evident to us, we can doubt any of our beliefs.49 In the First Meditation, Descartes had argued that the truths of arith-

47 See also "To the Marquess of Newcastle, 23 November 1646," AT 4:573-5; and The Passions of the Soul 1:50, AT 1 1:368-9. Such a view is not unusual among early moderns. See for example John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P.H. Nidditch, Oxford, Clarendon Press (1975), II.ix.10, 147; and Ralph Cud- worth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: F. Fromann Verlag (1964), 157-9. See also David Cunning, "Systematic Divergences in Malebranche and Cudworth," Journal of the History of Philosophy 41 (2003), 351-2; and David Cunning, "Agency and Consciousness," Synthese 120 (1999), 271-94.

48 See also Bertrand Russell, "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism," Logic and Know- ledge, ed. R.C. Marsh, London: Allen & Unwin (1956), 185. He writes, "In very abstract studies such as philosophical logic, ... the subject-matter that you are supposed to be thinking of is so exceedingly difficult and elusive that any person who has ever tried to think about it knows you do not think about it except perhaps once in six months for half a minute. The rest of the time you think about the symbols, because they are tangible, for the thing you are supposed to be thinking about is fearfully difficult and one does not often manage to think about it. The really good philosopher is the one who does once in six months think about it for a minute. Bad philosophers never do." See also David Cunning, "Semel in Vita: Descartes' Stoic View on the Place of Philosophy in Human Life," Faith and Philosophy (forthcoming).

49 AT 7:36. Descartes writes, "And whenever my preconceived belief in the supreme power of God comes to mind, I cannot but admit that it would be easy for him, if he so desired, to bring it about that I go wrong even in those matters which I think I see utterly clearly with my mind's eye." For a discussion of this kind of "meta- cognitive" doubt, see Lex Newman and Alan Nelson, "Circumventing Cartesian Circles," Nous 33 (1999), 370-404.




metic and geometry are dubitable in the face of the prospect that we might be deceived about matters that are most evident to us.50 In the Third Meditation he says that until we know that God has created us with reliable cognitive faculties we "can never be quite certain about anything else" (AT 7:36). As in other circumstances, in the Third Medi- tation we are able to doubt our own existence.51

Ill

Early in the Second Meditation Descartes' meditator has a clear and distinct perception of his existence. Immediately thereafter he reverts to thinking of his self as a thing that is sensible and material. This is not

50 There is a debate in the literature about whether or not the First Meditation meditator clearly and distinctly perceives the truths of mathematics and geometry. Some commentators have argued that the beliefs of the First Meditation meditator are "from the senses or through the senses" (AT 7:18) and thus that he does not have any clear and distinct perceptions. (See for example Harry Frankfurt, Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen, Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc. (1970), 62-4; Charles Larmore, "Scepticism," in Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers (eds.), The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, Volume II, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1998), 1166-8; and Rickless 2005, 323-4. An important text here is the Second Replies passage (AT 7:145) in which Descartes says that certainty in the strict sense is not had through the senses but through the intellect.) Other commentators have argued that in the First Meditation the truths of mathematics and geometry are "transparent" and "evident" and thus that they are clearly and distinctly perceived. (See for example Georges Moyal, "A Brief Note on Clarity and Dis- tinctness in Descartes' First Meditation," Studia Leibnitiana 31 (1999), 91-8; and Norman Kemp Smith, New Studies in the Philosophy of Descartes, London: MacMil- lan & Co. (1963), 272.) The correct view is that it is a mistake to take sides on the issue. Descartes is explicit that he is writing the Meditations for a variety of minds {Seventh Replies, AT 7:482; First Replies, AT 7:120). We take the first-person point- of-view in an attempt to come to see the truth for ourselves {Appendix to Fifth Objec- tions and Replies, AT 9A:208), but not all meditators begin at the same epistemic position. If the meditator is an atheist geometer, or if he has "form[ed] very distinct notions of body" as a result of his "study of mathematics" ("To Princess Elizabeth, 28 June 1643," AT 3:692), he might have clear and distinct perceptions of the truths of mathematics and geometry and then doubt them after turning his attention instead to the prospect that he is deceived about matters that are most evident to him. Such a meditator might indeed be committed to the empiricist view that there is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses, and his first-person reasoning might reflect this commitment, but that of course does not mean or even suggest that all of his beliefs are either from or through the senses. The Second Meditation realization (AT 7:31) that our perceptions of bodies have always involved an act of purely mental scrutiny bears out that the commitment is false. The First Meditation meditator is not yet a Cartesian, and he reasons accordingly.

51 There still remains the question of why we cannot refrain from affirming our existence in the face of the prospect of hyperbolic doubt at the start of the Second Meditation. Below I argue that Descartes holds that if we carefully consider the prospect that we might be deceived about matters that are most evident to us, we form a clear and distinct idea of self and have a clear and distinct perception of the existence of self.

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surprising. Descartes holds that the habits that stem from our embodiment are such that it is very difficult for us to have a clear and distinct perception, and that if we do we almost immediately revert to thinking that is confused:

In later years the mind is no longer a total slave to the body, and does not refer everything to it. Indeed, it inquires into the truth of things considered in themselves, and discovers very many of its previous judgements to be false. But despite this, it is not easy for the mind to erase these false judgements from its memory; and as long as they stick there, they can cause a variety of errors. For example, in our early childhood we imagined stars as being very small; and although astronomical arguments now clearly show us that they are very large indeed, our preconceived opinion is still strong enough to make it very hard for us to imagine them differently from the way we did before.52

Descartes thinks that we revert to habitual ways of thinking even after we have done a lot of philosophical work and appreciate that those ways of thinking are to be abandoned. At the start of the Second Meditation we are practically guaranteed to revert to a pre- Meditations way of thinking. Descartes thus works to make sure that we do not erroneously conclude on the basis of our materially false idea of self that the thing whose existence we have just established is sensible and material. If we do, we will "be making a mistake in the very item of knowledge that I maintain is the most certain and evident of all" (AT 7:25). If we conclude that we exist, but appeal to our pre-philosophical idea of self to unpack what it is that thereby exists, we will conclude that the thing that exists is material and sensible. We are therefore instructed to restore our confused perception of our existence to a perception that is clear and distinct:

I will therefore go back and meditate on what I originally believed myself to be, before I embarked on this present train of thought. I will then subtract anything capable of being weakened, even minimally, by the arguments now intro- duced, so that what is left at the end may be exactly and only what is certain and unshakeable. (AT 7:25)

What remains at the end of this process is "exactly and only what is certain and unshakeable," and so the perception that we had at the start of the process is somewhat confused. We target the First Meditation skepti- cal arguments on our pre- Meditations idea of self until we are no longer affirming the existence of something sensible and material when we affirm our existence.53 We strip our pre-Meditations idea of self of the ideas of

52 Principles 1:72, AT 8A:36-7. See also The World, chapter six, AT 11:35; preface to the Meditations, AT 7:9; Fourth Replies, AT 7:231; and Second Replies, AT 7:164.

53 See also Broughton 2002, 120-1; Menn 1998, 245-7; and Frankfurt 1970, 119-20.




sensible things that are tightly associated with it, and we are left with a clear and distinct idea of mind, and a clear and distinct perception of our existence (at AT 7:27). We are doing the same thing at the start of the Second Meditation, although the resulting clear and distinct perception is more momentary. We suppose that "there is absolutely nothing in the world, no sky, no earth, no minds, no bodies" (AT 7:25), and we are thereby left with a clear and distinct perception of our existence.54

Immediately after arriving at a clear and distinct idea of mind, Des- cartes appears to claim that he thereby knows that he is an immaterial thing. He says,

At present I am not admitting anything except what is necessarily true. I am, then, in the strict sense only a thing that thinks. (AT 7:27)

A bit later in the Meditation he makes clear that he is being more careful:

And yet may it not perhaps be the case that these very things which I am supposing to be nothing, because they are unknown to me, are in reality identical with the T of which I am aware? I do not know, and for the moment I shall not argue the point, since I can make judgements only about things which are known to me. (Ibid.)

One of the reasons that Descartes does not prove that mind is immaterial in the Second Meditation is that he is not a position to compare a clear and distinct idea of mind with a clear and distinct idea of body to see what mind and body have in common.55 If he had addressed the question of whether or not thinking is material, his meditator would have compared his clear and distinct idea of mind to the confused idea of body that he brought to the Meditations, and we do not subtract the excess elements from this idea until the end of the Second Meditation.56 Descartes makes explicit in the Second Meditation that he does not establish therein that mind is immaterial, and he is clear in other texts as well:

54 See also Principles 1:7, AT 8A:7. 55 In "To Mersenne, 21 January 1641," Descartes writes that "To say that thoughts

are merely movements of the body is as perspicuous as saying that fire is ice, or that white is black; for no two ideas we have are more different than those of black and white, or those of movement and thought. Our only way of knowing whether two things are different or identical is to consider whether we have different ideas of them, or one and the same idea..." (AT 3:285). See also "To [De Launay], 22 July 1641," AT 3:421.

56 One of the reasons that Descartes does not compare a clear and distinct idea of mind to a clear and distinct idea of body at the endot the Second Meditation is presumably that he has other tasks that he sees as more pressing. For example, in the Third Medi- tation he says that "as soon as the opportunity arises I must examine whether there is a God, and if there is, whether He can be a deceiver" (AT 7:36).

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I deny that I in any way presupposed that the mind is incorporeal [in the Sec- ond Meditation]; though later on, in the Sixth Meditation, I did in fact demon- strate as much.57

He does not conclude in the Second Meditation that he is an immaterial thing.58

He does however say there that he is in the strict sense only a thing that thinks. Outside of the Meditations he explains what he means by this:

I said in one place that while the soul is in doubt about the existence of all material things, it knows itself praecise tantum - 'in the strict sense only' - as an immaterial substance; and seven or eight lines further down I showed that by the words 4in the strict sense only' I do not at all mean an entire exclusion or negation, but only an abstraction from material things; for I said that in spite of this we are not sure that there is nothing corporeal in the soul, even though we do not recognize anything corporeal in it. Here my critic is so unfair to me as to try to persuade the reader that when I used the phrase 'in the strict sense only' I meant to exclude the body, and that I thus contradicted myself afterwards when I said that I did not mean to exclude it.59

Here Descartes uses some technical terminology; he says that Gas- sendi has understood him as excluding body from mind in the Second Meditation. Descartes reports that in fact he does not do this in the Second Meditation, for excluding body from mind is tantamount to

showing that mind is immaterial. In the Second Meditation he intends

57 Seventh Objections and Replies, AT 7:492, emphasis added. See also Second Replies, AT 7:129; Third Replies, AT 7:175; Fifth Replies, AT 7:355, 357; "To Mersenne, 24 December 1640," AT 3:266; and the Fourth Meditation, AT 7:59. In "Synopsis of the following six Meditations," Descartes says that in the Second Meditation he forms "a concept of the soul that is as clear as possible and is also quite distinct from every concept of body" (AT 7:13). Given the weight of the other passages, Descartes is not saying here that in the Second Meditation we notice that our concept of soul is distinct from our concept of body, just that it is distinct from it.

58 A number of commentators take Descartes to be concluding that he is an immaterial thing in the Second Meditation. See Norman Malcolm, "Descartes' Proof That His Essence is Thinking," The Philosophical Review 74 (1965), 326; Dugald Mur- doch, "Exclusion and Abstraction in Descartes' Metaphysics," Philosophical Quar- terly 43 (1993), 51-2; and Wilson 1978, 197. One of the reasons why commentators defend this view is that in the part of the Discourse that parallels the Second Medi- tation Descartes does pretty much the same thing that he does in the Second Medi- tation, and in that part of the Discourse he concludes that mind is incorporeal. There is no question about whether or not Descartes concludes that minds are immaterial in the parallel section of the Discourse. He draws the conclusion expli- citly in the Discourse itself (AT 6:32-3), and in a commentary on the passage he reports that that is what he is doing ("Preface to the Reader," AT 7:8). One reason why Descartes proceeds so differently in the more autobiographical Discourse is that in the Meditations he is assuming that at the start of inquiry his readers have very confused ideas of mind and body.

59 Appendix to Fifth Objections and Replies, AT 9A:215.




"only an abstraction from material things." This is a process in which a composite idea is sifted for one of its parts:

This intellectual abstraction consists in my turning my thought away from one part of the contents of this richer idea the better to apply it to the other part with greater attention. Thus, when I consider the shape without thinking of the substance or the extension whose shape it is, I make a mental abstraction.60

If an idea has different parts or contents, we might isolate one of these contents and think of it separately from what remains of the larger idea. Descartes has the meditator doing exactly this in the Second Meditation. His pre- Meditations idea of self is a composite of an idea of mind and ideas of sensible things that are tightly associated with it; he considers this idea and "subtracts] everything that is capable of being weakened." He restricts his thought to things whose existence he cannot doubt, and all that he is left thinking of is mind. He abstracts an idea of mind from his pre- Meditations idea of self.61 He does not yet have a clear and distinct idea of body with which to compare it, so he does not conclude that thinking is immaterial.62

Funny though it may sound, when we are attempting to resolve the larger interpretive problems of the Cartesian corpus we need to bring confusion to the debate, or at least to give confusion a place at the table. Whether we are worried about the Cartesian position on the dubitability of "I am, I exist," or about another problem - for example that of the Cartesian Circle - it is imperative that we be sensitive to the datum that Descartes holds that many notions are confused that are not recognizably so at the start of inquiry. In attempting to solve the problem of the Cartesian Circle, for example, we can note that in

60 "To Gibieuf, 19 January 1642," AT 3:475. See also Rules for the Direction of the Mind, AT 10:413, 441. Descartes also refers to another kind of abstraction in Rules for the Direction of the Mind - a process of moving from the particular to the more general (AT 10:458). He is not performing abstraction in this sense in the Second Meditation. He is not generalizing from the meditator's confused idea of self to a more general version of that idea.

61 Some commentators have argued that Cartesian abstraction is just Cartesian exclusion without the guarantee of divine veracity. See Malcolm 1965, 326; and Murdoch 1993, 52.

62 See also 'To [Mesland], 2 May 1644," AT 4:120. We might worry that if the meditator has a confused idea of body at the start of the Second Meditation, there is no guarantee that when he denies the existence of all bodies he will be left with a clear and distinct idea of self. By denying the existence of what he confusedly takes to be body, he might strip his pre- Meditations idea of self of his pre- Meditations ideas of body, but not strip it of a clear and distinct idea of body, and so not be left with a clear and distinct idea of mind. However, at the end of the Second Meditation Des- cartes argues that our confused pre- Meditations idea of body includes a clear and distinct idea of body.

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the First Meditation the meditator thinks a lot of things that are false or incoherent: that all of our beliefs are either from or through the senses, that it is possible that God is a deceiver, and that an evil demon might be deceiving us if God is not. Like any philosopher, the meditator might think all kinds of things at the start of inquiry, but that he will later abandon after he has carefully examined his pre-reflective conceptions and commitments. He arrives at the considered result that S is not P; he does not then count it as an objection to this result that before he gave it any thought it seemed that S might be P. The meditator of the Meditations arrives at a new standard of distinctness in the Second Meditation, and premises that meet this standard entail that God exists. The confusions that the meditator brought to the Meditations, and the materially false ideas that are among them, do not compete.63

63 See Principles 1:75-76. Descartes writes, "In order to philosophize seriously and search out the truth about all the things that are capable of being known, we must first of all lay aside all our preconceived opinions, or at least we must take the greatest care not to put our trust in any of the opinions accepted by us in the past until we have first scrutinized them afresh and confirmed their truth. Next, we must give our attention in an orderly way to the notions that we have within us, and we must judge to be true all and only those whose truth we clearly and distinctly recognize when we attend to them in this way. When we do this we shall realize, first of all, that we exist in so far as our nature consists in thinking; and we shall simultaneously realize both that there is a God, and that we depend on him, and also that a consideration of his attributes enables us to investigate the truth of other things, since he is their cause. Finally, we will see that besides the notions of God and of our mind, we have within us knowledge of many propositions which are eternally true, such as 'Nothing comes from nothing'.... When we contrast all this knowledge with the confused thoughts we had before, we will acquire the habit of forming clear and distinct concepts of all the things that can be known.... [I]t is quite unworthy of a philosopher to accept anything as true if he has never established its truth by thorough scrutiny; and he should never rely on the senses, that is, on the ill-considered judgements of his childhood, in preference to his mature powers of reason" (AT 8A:38-9). Some commentators (for example Nelson and Newman 1999) are committed to the view that Descartes holds that we cannot once and for all dismiss hyperbolic doubt as a confusion until we have a (Fifth Medi- tation) self-evident intuition of God's existence and veracity. This is not Descartes' view. (See also First Replies, AT 7:120, Second Replies, AT 7:163-4, and First Replies, AT 7:136, where Descartes is clear that he offers multiple arguments for the existence of God because meditators who do not follow one such argument might follow one of the others; and also "To Regius, 24 May 1640," AT 3:64-5.) A complete discussion of the problem of the Cartesian Circle is of course beyond the scope of this paper. However, the solution proposed here has Descartes engaging the good-sense philosophical practice of analyzing pre-reflective conceptions and commitments and abandoning the provisional and less clear in favor of the more clear. Descartes is supposing that once we are intellectually mature, we continue to reject the unclear. If a meditator does not do this, or if he forgets all that he has learned and reverts to taking seriously First Meditation hypotheses, that is a problem for him, but not for Descartes.




IV

In The Search After Truth, Nicholas Malebranche calls attention to the difficulties that the (dualist-minded) metaphysician encounters in instructing a person who has an inaccurate idea of soul. For example, if the person asks the metaphysician whether or not souls are immortal, the correct answer to the question is 'no' if the person conceives of soul as a sensible thing. Malebranche concludes that the metaphysician should refrain from answering the question at all:

If in questioning them we recognize that their ideas do not agree with ours, it is useless to answer them. For what do we reply to a man who imagines that a desire, for example, is nothing but the movement of spirits; that a thought is but a trace or image of objects where spirits have formed in the brain; and that all reasonings of men consist only in the different placement of certain tiny bodies diversely arranged in the head? To answer him that the soul, taken in the sense that he understands, is immortal, is to deceive him, or to make your- self ridiculous in his mind. But to answer him that it is mortal is in a sense to confirm him in an error of very great consequence. We must therefore not answer him, but only try to make him retreat into himself, in order that he may receive the same ideas as we....64

Descartes faces a (somewhat) similar problem in the Second Medi- tation. We enter the Meditation with a confused idea of self, an idea that provides subject-matter for error. Our prospects for engaging in productive philosophical inquiry hinge on our ability to prune this idea of ideas that have become attached to it. We revert to our confused ideas with ease, and Descartes is there to help us at every turn.

For Descartes, our existence is just as dubitable as anything else. None of this is to suggest, however, that Descartes thinks that we would iden- tify our existence as dubitable in all circumstances in which it is dubitable. In the same way that we have bad pre-philosophical sensory ideas, and bad pre-philosophical ideas of mind and God, we are not always in possession of the best standard of distinctness. For example, in the First Meditation we might report that our sensory perceptions are so distinct that it is impossible that they are not veridical (AT 7:18-9), and we would be wrong. Or, we might proceed like those who "have never taken sufficient care to distinguish the mind from the body" -

64 Nicholas Malebranche, The Search After Truth, Thomas M. Lennon and Paul J. Oscamp (trans, and ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1997), VI.ii.7, 492. See also II.ii.8, 157. There Malebranche writes, "it is extremely rare for those who meditate seriously to be able to explain well the things upon which they have meditated. Ordinarily they hesitate when undertaking to speak of these things, because they have scruples about using terms that raise a false idea in others. Being ashamed to speak simply for the sake of speaking, ...they have great difficulty in finding words to express unusual thoughts well."

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Although they may have put the certainty of their own existence before that of anything else, they failed to realize that they should have taken 'themselves' in this context to mean their minds alone. They were inclined instead to take 'themselves' to mean only their bodies....65

We might even have the thought that if an evil demon is deceiving us we must exist, but have it cold and out of context, without having "philosophize[d] in an orderly way" and without having a clear and distinct perception.66 Like many of our epistemic deficiencies our poor standard of distinctness is traceable to our embodiment. Speaking of our pre-philosophical idea of color, Descartes writes,

this [namely, that color exists mind-independently] was something that, because of our habit of making such judgements, we thought we saw clearly and distinctly - so much so that we took it for something certain and indubitable.67

In childhood, our embodiment is so pronounced that we never stop to evaluate the false judgments that we make about bodies. We later assume that the reason why these judgments have stood the test of time is that they are unimpeachable:

Right from infancy our mind was swamped with a thousand such preconceived opinions; and in later childhood, forgetting that they were adopted without sufficient examination, it regarded them as known by the senses or implanted by nature, and accepted them as utterly true and evident.68

As we work through the Meditations, we are impressed by a new standard of distinctness - a standard to which our pvQ-Meditations standard of distinctness pales in comparison. According to Descartes, it is imperative that we make this epistemic progress. If we do not, we will not be in a position to see our pre-philosophical ideas and the propositions that include them for the confusions that they are. We will continue to analyze concepts that misrepresent their objects, and we will mistakenly regard our results as sound.69

65 Principles 1:12, AT 8A:9, emphasis added.

66 The quotation is from Principles 1:7, AT 8A:7. 67

Principles 1:66, AT 8A:32. See also Principles 1:70, AT 8A:34-5. 68

Principles 1:71; AT 8A:36. 69 I am grateful to three anonymous referees of this journal for comments on an earlier

version of this paper. I am also grateful for comments from participants at the 2005 Central Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, where I presented a version of the paper. The paper also benefited from discussions that I had with John Carriero, Daniel Garber, Diane Jeske, Gregory Landini, Michael Mulnix, Alan Nelson, and Tad Schmaltz. Finally, I would like to acknowledge generous fellowship support from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2004-5) and the UCLA Clark Library/Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies (Fall 2004).




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