Questions for the Second Meditation

2025-1 Descartes

Midterm Study Guide

 

4. In the First Meditation Descartes argues that even if he is being decived about matters that are utterly evident, "I am, I exist" is clearly true. But he also allows that thare are instances in which "I am, I exist" is  dubitable. Discuss. two scuh instances.

Can “I am, I exist” be doubted? Strangely enough, it can. If we think it vaguely, or just in terms of linguistic symbols and not a clear idea, then we can doubt it. Here we discussed the example of being absorbed in a TV show and being asked by a friend if we can doubt “I am, I exist.” Or if we turn our attention to the possibility that we are deceived about matters that are utterly evident to us, it is just as dubitable as 2+3=5. But it is almost indubitable. As soon as we try to employ a First Meditation argument to doubt “I am, I exist,” we are likely to converge on the clear thought that our thinking has to exist if we are to be deceived – at least if we have been reading the Meditations and we have gotten distance from sensory ways of thinking. But Descartes would probably allow that some human beings never have a clear abstract idea of “I am, I exist.”

One such issue is whether or not Descartes thinks that “I am, I exist” is absolutely indubitable in a way that other truths are not. I argue that Descartes holds that there is no truth that we cannot doubt if we are sufficiently confused, whether these be obvious truths of mathematics or “I am, I exist.” Descartes simply thinks that the latter is a relatively easy truth to perceive clearly and distinctly, and that it serves as an outstanding model for the kind of nonsensory truth that is the basis for metaphysical argumentation. But we can still call it into question, for example if our grasp of it is very ephemeral and if we are antecedently committed to the view that things are real to the extent that they are sensible.

Yet apart from everything I have just listed, how do I know that there is not something else which does not allow even the slightest occasion for doubt? Is there not a God, or whatever I may call him, who puts into me' the thoughts I am now having? But why do I think this, since I myself may perhaps be the author of these thoughts? In that case am not I, at least, something? But I have just said that I have no senses and no body. This is the sticking point: what follows from this? Am I not so bound up with a body and with senses that I cannot exist without them? But I have convinced myself that there is absolutely nothing in the world, no sky, no earth, no minds, no bodies. Does it now follow that I too do not exist?

No: if I convinced myself of something' then I certainly existed. But there is a deceiver of supreme power and cunning who is deliberately and constantly deceiving me. In that case I too undoubtedly exist, if he is deceiving me; and let him deceive me as much as he can, he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I think that I am something. So 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.

We can note three additional pieces of evidence for the view that Descartes holds that our perception of our existence is not always clear and distinct.

First, 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” ( Principles I:45, AT 8A:22, emphasis added). A perception of the existence of self does not contain only what is clear if it includes a confused idea of self, and until we clarify our idea of self, the perception is not fully distinct.

Second, Descartes says that the “first and most important reason for our inability to understand with sufficient clarity the customary assertions about the soul and God” is that our ideas of soul and God are “mixed up with ideas of things that can be perceived by the senses” ( Second Replies , AT 7:130–31). A sufficient condition for our not clearly and distinctly understanding assertions about mind is having an idea of mind that is confused.

Third, we might note that it is just obvious that anything that we can perceive with clarity we can also perceive confusedly if our ideas are not in order or if we are not paying attention.

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. However, 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 them. In the AT 7:145–46 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 without thinking them distinctly, and then doubt them.

Descartes is certainly committed to the view that first principles are absolutely indubitable for someone who cannot think them without thinking them clearly and distinctly, and in the AT 7:140 passage he does seem to be allowing that there might be some thinkers who can meditate to that point.

① However, we know from his larger system and from claims that he makes in Second Replies itself that he thinks that generally speaking no (embodied) human being has clear and distinct perceptions exclusively, and that generally speaking there is nothing that we think clearly and distinctly every single moment that we are thinking it. 6 The truth “that we are thinking things . . . is a primary notion,” Des cartes says, but primary notions are not always clearly and distinctly perceived.

The meditator’s pre-Meditations idea of self is extremely confused. It is an idea of a soul-body composite, and part of that idea is an idea of soul that misrepresents souls as physical.

According to Descartes, most of us enter the Meditations thinking that some thing is substantial to the extent that it can be sensed. Therefore, even if we admit that we are grasping something when we think of the “I” in the Second Medita tion, almost none of us would identify it as substantial.

 

5. In the Second Meditation Descartes asserts "I am, I exist" and says that he is a thinking thing. Is he in a position to assert with confidence with confidence what kind of thing he is? Is the argumentation of the Second Meditation consistent with the view that finite thinking is part of the thinking of a larger mind? Discuss.

I argue that he is not attempting to show that minds are immaterial or that they are substances. I then consider the infamous “argument from doubt” that Descartes offers in Discourse on the Method and else where. Descartes does intend this argument to generate the result that minds are immaterial substances, but the argument does not appear in the Second Meditation. The argument is successful if we allow Descartes some assumptions about substances and attributes that he thinks are intuitive upon reflection, but these as sumptions are not clear to the Second Meditation meditator.

If Descartes takes himself to have shown that his mind is exclusively a thinking thing, he is of course mistaken. He might be able to doubt the existence of all bodies while still being certain of the existence of his mind, but that by itself does not entitle him to conclude that his mind is immaterial.

One of the reasons that Descartes does not prove that mind is immaterial in the Second Meditation is that he is not in a position to run the test by which it is established that mind is immaterial. He writes: 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.

Without a clear and distinct idea of body, he cannot compare his idea of mind to an accurate idea of body to see if, perhaps unexpectedly, they are ideas of the same thing...“I deny that I in any way presupposed that the mind is incorporeal [in the Second Meditation]; though later on, in the Sixth Meditation, I did in fact demonstrate as much.”

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 “only an abstraction from material things.” 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 medi tator doing exactly this in the Second Meditation. As we have seen, he holds that our confused pre- Meditations idea of self is an amalgam of an idea of mind and other ideas. In the Second Meditation, the meditator considers his pre- Meditations idea of self and “subtract[s] everything that is capable of being weakened” (AT 7:25). He restricts his thought to things whose existence he cannot doubt, and all he is left thinking of is mind. He abstracts an idea of mind from his pre- Meditations idea of self.

He does not use the word substance (or any of its variants) in the Second Meditation; he uses the more general res . However, he also uses the term res in his Sixth Meditation proof of the real distinction between mind and body, and there he is concluding that mind is a substance. 

According to Descartes, most of us enter the Meditations thinking that some thing is substantial to the extent that it can be sensed. Therefore, even if we admit that we are grasping something when we think of the “I” in the Second Medita tion, almost none of us would identify it as substantial. We may take it to have more being than (for example) air, and so more than a “mere nothing,” but as something that we cannot sense, we would not take it to be much. Even if we do happen to report that we know or grasp that “the ‘I’ is a substance,” that does not mean that we are thinking of the “I” as a substance in the strict sense—as some thing that is ontologically independent. We might just be thinking the words. If we suppose (as Descartes thinks most of us do) that substance is limited to that which is corporeal and sensible, our judgment that the “I” is a thinking substance would amount to the not-clear-and-distinct judgment that the “I” is a thinking corporeal thing.

In the Second Meditation Descartes is clearly not in a position to move from the fact that he is not aware of his mind as material to the conclusion that it is not material. For one, he is not in possession of the requisite clear and distinct ideas.

Is the argumentation of the Second Meditation consistent with the view that finite thinking is part of the thinking of a larger mind?

Yes. Because substance is commonly understood as something that does not depend on other things, one might raise a worry that how can we know our thinking (which is finite) is just part of infinite thinking and thereby our thinking is not a substance at all. Descartes's response to this is that he has never endorsed the view that thinking is a substance in the second Meditation.

 

6. At the end of the Second Meditation Descartes asks us to think about a sensuous piece of wax. How is reflection on the idea of was supposed to restore confidence in "I am, I exist"? How is reflection on the idea of wax supposed to help to set up the Third Meditation argument for the existence of God?

흔히들 모든 것 중에서 가장 판명하게 파악된다고 믿는 것을 고찰해보자. 물론 우리가 만지고, 우리가 보는 물체들이다. 물체들 일반이 아니라 특수한 물체이다. 일반적인 지각들은 상당히 더 혼동되기 마련이기 때문이다. 이 밀랍을 예로 삼아보자. 이것은 방금 벌집에서 꺼낸 것이다. 아직도 모든 꿀맛을 잃지 않고 있다. 본래 꽃의 향기를 어느 정도 간직하고 있다. 색, 형체, 크기도 뚜렷하다. 단단하고, 차갑고, 쉽게 만져지고, 손마디로 두드리면 소리를 낼 것이다. 요컨대, 어떤 물체가 가능한 한 판명하게 인식되기 위해 필요하다고 보이는 모든 것이 이 밀랍에 있다. 그런데 보라. 말하는 동안 불에 가까이 가져가니 남은 맛은 사라지고, 향기는 날아가고, 색은 변하고, 형체는 없어지고, 크기는 늘어나고, 액체로 되고, 뜨거워지고, 거의 만질 수도 없고, 또 지금은 두드려도 소리를 내지 않는다. 여전히 동일한 밀랍이 그대로 남아 있다는 것인가? 그대로 남아 있음을 시인해야 한다. 아무도 부정하지 않고, 아무도 달리 여기지 않는다. 그러면 밀랍에서 그처럼 판명하게 파악된 것은 무엇이었나? 확실히 내가 감각으로 닿았던109 것 중에는 아무것도 없다. 미각, 후각, 시각, 촉각 또는 청각으로 감지한 것은 모두 지금 바뀌었고, 밀랍은 그대로 남아 있기 때문이다.

아마도 그것은 내가 지금 사유하고 있는 것, 즉 밀랍 자체는 꿀의 그 단맛도, 꽃의 그 향기도, 그 흰 빛깔도, 형체도, 소리도 아니라, 조금 전의 이 양상들이 지금은 다른 양상들을 보이며 나에게 나타난 물체였다. 그러나 내가 이렇게 상상하는 그것은 정확하게 무엇인가? 주의하자. 그리고 밀랍에 속하지 않는 것들을 제거하면서110 남아 있는 것을 보자. 분명 연장되고, 유연하고, 가변적인 것 외에 아무것도 없다. 그러나 유연한, 가변적인, 이것은 무엇인가?111 이것은 이 밀랍이 원형에서 사각형으로 또는 사각형에서 삼각형으로 변할 수 있다고 내가 상상하는 것이 아닌가? 전혀 아니다. 왜냐하면 나는 밀랍이 이런 종류의 무수한 변화를 받아들일 수 있다고 파악하지만, 내가 상상하면서 그 무수한 것들을 통람할 수도 없고, 따라서 이 파악은 상상능력에 의해 완수되지도 않기 때문이다.112 연장된, 이것은 무엇인가? 밀랍의 연장 자체 또한 알려지지 않은 것이 아닌가? 왜냐하면 밀랍이 녹으면 연장은 커지고, 끓으면 더 커지며, 열이 증가하면 다시 더 커지기 때문이다. 그리고 이 밀랍 또한 내가 일찍이 상상하면서 포괄했던 것보다 더 많은 다양성을 연장에 따라 받아들인다고 여기지 않고서는, 나는 밀랍이 무엇인지를 올바로 판단하지 못할 것이기 때문이다. 그러므로 나는 이 밀랍이 무엇인지를 상상조차 못한다는 것, 오히려 정신에 의해서만 지각한다는 것을 용인하는 일만 남아 있다. 나는 이 특정한 밀랍을 말하고 있다. 왜냐하면 밀랍 일반에 대해서는 더욱 분명하기 때문이다. 그러나 정신에 의해서가 아니면 지각되지 않는 이 밀랍은 도대체 어떠한 것인가? 물론 그것은 내가 보는 것, 내가 만지는 것이고, 내가 상상하는 것과 동일한 것이며, 요컨대 내가 처음부터 그것이라고 여겼던 것과 같은 것이다. 그런데 주의해야 하는 것은, 그 밀랍의 지각은 시각도 촉각도 상상력도 아니라는 것, 전에는 그렇게 보였다고 해도 결코 그렇지 않았다는 것, 오히려 그것은 정신만의 통찰이라는 것, 그리고 이 통찰은, 내가 이것을 구성하는 것들에  덜 주의하느냐 더 주의하느냐에 따라, 이전처럼 불완전하고 혼동될 수도 있고 지금처럼 명석하고 판명할 수도 있다는 것이다.

The rest of the Second Meditation is an attempt to uproot the thought that the kinds of things that we know best are sensible bodies. Descartes discusses a thought experiment with a piece of wax – in an effort to exhibit to us (from our first-person point-of-view) that we don’t know the sensory features of bodies hardly at all, and that we know best is abstract features like extension, flexibility, and changeability.

We also notice that our idea of body is abstract, and not a picture or image, because the number of sizes and shapes that the wax is able to take cannot be captured in an image. Like the certainty of “I am, I exist” (when we are thinking it carefully), the certainty we have when we consult our idea of body does not compare to the certainty that we had about things prior to the Second Meditation.

Note also that in the wax discussion Descartes says that part of what we know about bodies is not known via the senses at all – but is grasped by an “act of purely mental scrutiny.” This contradicts a claim in the First Meditation – a claim that probably seemed true at the time from the point-of-view of Descartes’ reader. But it contradicts the claim that the beliefs that we have accepted as most true “are acquired from our through the senses.” Descartes is contending that we notice in the Second Meditation that there are aspects of our beliefs about bodies – nearly infinite flexibility and changeability – that are not acquired through the senses at all. 

Descartes offers the wax analogy to show that our minds are not the only things that we conceive that are insensible and real. If we appreciate this, we will be less likely to call into question the results of the first half of the Second Meditation. We will also be less likely to reject any future argumentation that employs nonsensory metaphysical axioms or that supposes that we have ideas of things that are nonsensible and real. The meditator makes a significant amount of epistemic progress in the Second Meditation, but he is still very far from being a Cartesian.

Descartes very appropriately selects our idea of extension. Here he is a teacher through and through. He begins by offering us an idea on which it is easy for us to focus, especially after the diffi cult work of the fi rst half of the Medita tion—an idea of an extended object that has “the taste of . . . honey[,] . . . the scent of the fl owers from which it was gathered[,] colour, . . . cold[ness]” (AT 7:30). In so doing, he is holding constant the epistemic position of his reader. Bodies do not have color or scent in the way that the meditator imagines, so the piece of wax is a f i ction. 51 Descartes considers it because “general perceptions are apt to be some what more confused” than particular ones, again refl ecting the reasoning of the meditator, as the Cartesian view is that general perceptions are more clear than particular ones.

Once Descartes has our attention, he shows us a component of our idea of wax that he expects we will admit is very distinct but just as (in)tangible as our idea of mind. First, we consider the particular piece of wax with its color, taste, tempera ture, and scent. Then we think of it in a way that (Descartes expects) will lead us straight to an abstract idea that we will recognize as not ephemeral:

But even as I speak, I put the wax by the fire, and look: the residual taste is eliminated, the smell goes away, the colour changes, the shape is lost, the size increases; it becomes liquid and hot; you can hardly touch it, and if you strike it, it no longer makes a sound. But does the same wax remain? It must be admitted that it does; no one denies it, no one thinks otherwise. So what was it in the wax that I understood with such dis tinctness? Evidently none of the features which I arrived at by means of the senses; for whatever came under taste, smell, sight, touch, or hearing has now altered—yet the wax remains. (AT 7:30)

Descartes offers no argument here. He supposes that the meditator will not say that a piece of wax consists in color, taste, and shape alone. He quite reasonably supposes that “no one denies it, no one thinks otherwise.” If Descartes is right, the meditator will admit that a piece of wax has something in addition to these and that persists when they change: “take away everything which does not belong to the wax, and see what is left . . . [is] merely something extended, flexible, and changeable” (AT 7:31).

Presumably Descartes is so confident that the meditator will admit to this because he holds that clear and distinct perceptions are will-compelling and that the thought experiment with the wax makes the meditator arrive at the clear and distinct idea of extension that is a component of any idea of a sensible object. The meditator notices the overwhelming vividness of his perception (1) that a body is more than just its changing sensible qualities, and (2) that it is flexible and changeable in ways that he cannot picture or imagine.

If Descartes is right that the meditator arrives at a clear and distinct idea of ex tension after subtracting the sensible qualities from wax, and if he is right that clear and distinct ideas are as vivid as he says they are, the meditator will admit that he has arrived at an idea that is extremely distinct but not of an object that can be sensed. He will be overwhelmed by his clear and distinct perception, and he will look back at it to ask “what [it] was . . . in the wax that I understood with such dis tinctness.” Although he cannot sense or imagine something so general as a thing that is “capable of countless changes” (AT 7:31), he has the idea nonetheless. If he grants that he has this fi rm a grasp of extension and fl exibility, he will grant that he grasps mind just as well, and he will no longer suspect that he does not know it. He will affi rm that his grasp of extension is distinct, though not in the pre- Meditations sense, for his experience is that that is not the sense in which he grasps extension. In the wax analogy, Descartes is being a teacher. To make clear a point that his student does not understand, he makes a point that he knows his student will understand and then explains the fi rst in terms of the second.

[I]f I judge that the wax exists from the fact that I see it, clearly this same fact entails much more evidently that I myself exist. It is possible that what I see is not really the wax; it is possible that I do not even have eyes with which to see anything. But when I see, or when I think I see (I am not here distinguishing the two), it is simply not possible that I who am now thinking am not something . (AT 7:33, emphasis added)

The argument here is that, for each thing that we know about the nature of body, we know something about the nature of the mind that knows it, but we know other things about mind as well. For Descartes, there are two senses in which mind is better known than body. This is not surprising given the placement of the above passages at the end of the Second Meditation. Descartes is writing them in a context in which his meditator has a weak grasp of the fact that he knows his mind very distinctly. To ensure that his will “may more readily submit to being curbed” (AT 7:30), Descartes attempts to neutralize its pre- Meditations momentum. He attempts to offer a multipronged case for the view that mind is known distinctly. The two senses in which mind is better known than body are interconnected—we have a proof of the existence of mind for every feature of mind that we know, and we know more features of mind than of anything else. 58 Descartes is a teacher in defending the view that mind is better known than body, and in doing so at the end of the Second Meditation. The meditator had diffi culty arriving at a clear and distinct idea of mind, and after he did, he had to be shown in numerous ways that mind is not nothing. When his concentration slipped, he was offered a heuristic analogy, but his grasp of this was precarious as well. Descartes argues that mind is better known than body as part of a continued effort to keep the meditator’s will from going in its normal direction.

By the end of the Second Meditation, the meditator is in a much better position to confront the Third Meditation arguments for the existence of God than he would have been had he confronted them at the start of the Meditations . With the result that his insensible mind exists, and also the result that our clearest idea of body is an idea of something that is insensible, he is prepared to take seriously that we have ideas of things that are not sensible but are still real. The meditator will still have to work very hard, but if he has meditated carefully and repeatedly, and if he has reg istered the results of the Second Meditation to memory, he will be more likely to converge upon the idea (that Descartes insists he has) of an insensible being that is infinitely real. The meditator will not refuse to believe that he could have such an idea, and if he encounters it himself from the first-person point of view, he will allow that it is actually there before his mind.

The end-of-the-Second-Meditation meditator is also in an improved epistemic position by virtue of his enhanced ability to recognize the truth of nonsensory primary notions, and these will be among the premises of the Third Meditation. The meditator has thought very carefully upon the fact that underlying all sensible bodies is something that is extended, flexible, and changeable, and he appreciates that he does not know this through his senses. He also recognizes the existence of his insensible mind. He recognizes truths that are not known through the senses, and he recognizes that these truths are much more clear and obvious than the claims that he was putting forward in the First Meditation. Now he can proceed to build his metaphysical edifice. His epistemic progress will still be slow and gradual and error-ridden, however, as he will sometimes revert to confused ways of thinking, and then be insistent that they are the paradigm of rationality. At some point the meditator will be able to see confusion for what it is, but “[p]rotracted and repeated study is required to eradicate the lifelong habit of confusing things related to the intellect with corporeal things, and to replace it with the opposite habit of distinguishing the two” ( Second Replies , AT 7:131). Some thinkers might be able to do this fairly quickly, but (to his credit) Descartes does not specify the line that marks the exact amount of reflection that is needed to get confusion behind us. We will not have clear and distinct perceptions always, though we can work these up if necessary, and over time we will develop new cognitive habits that will replace the habits that guided the judgments of our past. If we refl ect suffi ciently, and pre sumably the requisite amount of time will vary from person to person, we will come around to the new Cartesian paradigm and see the claims of the old paradigm and the skeptical worries that they make possible as confusions that are wholly lacking in motivation.