Continental/Early Modern
Cunning (2009) on Clear and Distinct Perception
Soyo_Kim
2025. 5. 27. 06:55
Cunning, David (2009). Argument and Persuasion in Descartes' Meditations. New York, US: Oxford University Press.
1. The veriety of Readers and the Heuristic Method
The readers of the Meditations will be different in other ways as well. Some will be more confused than others, and many who are confused to a similar degree will be confused in different ways. Some might hold that qualities like color and taste exist in the external world exactly as we perceive them. Some might have ideas of color and taste that do not misrepresent these as existing mind-independently, but still have the confused view that there is such a thing as nonbeing or void. Some might be so confused that they have never had a maximally clear perception, but some who have done enough mathematics or geometry have already had clear and distinct perceptions, even if they would not describe these perceptions as nonsensory, and even if they have never had a clear and distinct perception of an axiom of metaphysics. Some will already be skeptical of the claims that are examined in the First Meditation, and some will assume that these claims are beyond reproach. Some (for example, thinkers like Descartes and Spinoza) will have already emended their intellects and will see that most of the claims advanced from the fi rst-person point of view of the Meditations are either false or incoherent. [7]
For example, he recognizes that some minds are less confused than others. He does hold 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” ( Prin ciples I:73; AT 8A:37). However, some people are less attached to their senses than others, and so it is only most people who have nothing but confused perceptions. Famously, an atheist geometer sometimes has perceptions that are clear and dis tinct. 40 More generally, “the study of mathematics, which exercises mainly the imagination in the consideration of shapes and motions, accustoms us to form very distinct notions of body.” 41 Descartes also allows that skeptics have clear and distinct perceptions. They are not skeptical while having a clear and distinct per ception, and they do not recognize that God exists and is not a deceiver, but they still have clear and distinct perceptions of other things:
I said that the skeptics would not have doubted the truths of geometry if they had truly recognized God, because since those geometrical truths are very clear, they would have had no occasion to doubt them if they had known that whatever is clearly understood is true. Now this last is contained in a suffi cient acquaintance with God, and that is the premise which they do not have ready at hand . (“To Hyperaspistes, August 1641,” AT 3:433, emphasis added)
It is clear why Descartes would think that skeptics have clear and distinct perceptions. First, he holds that clear and distinct perceptions come easily if preconceived opinions and sensory perceptions are not interfering with our thought. 42 In addition, he says of the skeptical argumentation of the First Meditation that “[i]ts greatest benefi t lies in freeing us from all our preconceived opinions, and providing the easiest route by which the mind may be led away from the senses” [29] (“Synopsis of the Following Six Meditations,” AT 7:12). Among skeptics “such a renunciation [as in the First Medita tion] is commonplace” ( Seventh Objections and Replies , AT 7:477), and so it would be surprising if skeptics did not have clear and distinct perceptions. One of the aims of the First Meditation arguments is to lead us from the senses, but in many cases the skeptic is already suffi ciently withdrawn. Descartes holds that most people are so oc cupied with the objects of the senses that they have nothing but confused perceptions their entire lives. He says that “until making [the] renunciation [of belief of the First Meditation], there is virtually no one who ever perceives anything clearly” (ibid.). He would be wrong if he thought that nobody thinks clearly before working through the Meditations , or that nobody overcomes at least some of the habits of childhood. [30]
Although he may encounter difficulty in thinking abstractly, and although he will often revert to thinking in terms of symbols and images, in some cases his pre Meditations conception of a transparent truth will be clear and distinct. [48]
Some readers of the First Meditation have clear and distinct perceptions of transparent truths, and some (and presumably most) do not. For anyone who does have a clear and distinct perception that “two and three added together are five” (AT 7:20), the truth is not doubtable while it is being clearly and distinctly perceived. As we saw at the end of chapter 1, and as Descartes reminds us in the Third Meditation, while we are attending to the “things themselves” (AT 7:36) they cannot be doubted, not even in the face of the skeptical arguments of the First Meditation. Descartes accordingly says that when we do doubt something in the First Medita tion, we are not clearly and distinctly perceiving 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, nevertheless there will be nothing which we may not justly doubt so long as we do not know that whatever we perceive clearly is true. But my careful critic takes “nothing” quite differently. From the fact that at one point I said that there was nothing that we might not doubt—namely in the First Meditation, in which I was supposing that I was not attending to anything that I clearly perceived—he draws the conclusion that I am unable to know any thing certain, even in the following Meditations. [Seventh Objections and Replies , AT 7:460.] [48]
The fact that Descartes is writing to a variety of minds in the Meditations helps us to resolve one further puzzle about the meditator’s arrival at a clear and distinct perception of her existence. The puzzle is that in Descartes’ various discussions of the route by which the meditator arrives at this, there are actually three routes that are described, and it is not clear which one the meditator actually takes. On one route, we have a self-evident intuition of our existence ( Second Replies , AT 7:140); on another, we infer our existence from the claim that we think and the claim that whatever thinks must exist ( Principles I:7, AT 8A:7); on the third, we notice that our act of expressing “I am, I exist” is self-verifying ( Discourse , AT 6:32). [74]
2. Human beings as embodied creatures
With the Meditations , Descartes is offering us a way to neutralize the negative effects of our embodiment, but he is not suggesting that we attempt to overcome our embodiment. That aim is not sustainable, and it is not even desirable. As embodied beings who continue to be embodied even after we are expert metaphy sicians, we will almost never have clear and distinct perceptions, and we will rarely take up the highly detached perspective of the “I” of the Meditations . That is some thing that we do “once in the course of . . . life,” or perhaps “a few hours a year.” 5 I f our refl ections are successful, we will recognize and dismiss confusion, but to do this we will not need to have constant clear and distinct perceptions that inform us of the absurdity of claims that confl ict with them. An expert geometer dismisses as absurd the suggestion that triangles might have fourteen sides, without having to do a precise inspection of his concept of triangle, and presumably he is right to do so. The suggestion that triangles might have fourteen sides is absurd, just like the suggestion that arg farg jarg. Like the former, the latter might seem plausible to a person who is suffi ciently confused, but it is an absurdity, and as such, it does not place any demand on us to declare an epistemic emergency and rush to defeat it with an immediate illustration of our philosophical best. Indeed, as embodied be ings we cannot always count on our ability to do this. Instead, we recognize the prima facie absurdity of the suggestion, and if pressed we can take the detached perspective of the Meditations and once again see its absurdity fi rsthand. We can do the same with respect to any other truths at which we arrive in the Meditations , in cluding the result that God exists and is not a deceiver. If we have a lot of experience at clear and distinct perception, and this is the sort of experience that we get in the Meditations , we acquire a new sense of what is confusion and what is not. We also acquire the resources to confi rm that we are right. [13]
3. Color
An entry point to Descartes’ views on the confusion of the prephilosophical mind is his discussion of what we now know as the secondary-quality idea. A leading proponent of the new mechanistic science, Descartes thinks that our prephilosoph ical ideas of qualities like color are to be abandoned. If we explain natural phe nomena in terms of the extensive qualities that bodies actually have, we will come closer to carving nature at its joints. 2 Descartes is of course not alone in his approach here. Galileo had defended the view that qualities like color and taste are mind dependent in 1623. 3 A Cartesian way of putting the view is to say that “pain and colour and so on are clearly and distinctly perceived when they are regarded merely as sensations or thoughts.” 4 A clear and distinct idea of color does not rep resent color as a mind-independent thing, but our idea of color, or at least our everyday idea of color, does represent it as such. 5 This is because it is materially false, which is to say that it is an idea that provides subject matter for error: “The f i rst 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” ( Fourth Replies , AT 7:231). Descartes says that material falsity “is the falsity to be found in an idea” (AT 7:233). He elaborates with an example:
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 mistake in the abstract, with regard to whiteness itself and its nature or the idea I have of it. ( Conversation with Burman , AT 5:152) [16]
4. Descartes's Voice
[I]t is obvious that the concepts which we had in our childhood were not clear and distinct, and hence, if not set aside, they will affect any other concepts which we acquire later and make them obscure and confused. ( Seventh Objections and Replies , AT 7:518)
In metaphysics by contrast there is nothing which causes so much effort as making our perceptions of the primary notions clear and distinct. Admittedly, they are by their nature as evident as, or even more evident than, the primary notions which the geometers study; but they confl ict with many preconceived notions derived from the senses which we have got into the habit of holding from our earliest years, and so only those who really concentrate and meditate and withdraw their minds from corporeal things . . . will achieve perfect knowledge of them. Second Replies , AT 7:157.
5. The Aim of Descartes's Project
Very generally, Descartes’ aim in the Meditations is to guide his meditator to the clear and distinct perceptions that entail his metaphysics. [38]
Descartes takes us to be extremely confused before working through the Medita tions . We think by way of terms and conceptions that misrepresent their objects; we encounter great diffi culty thinking abstractly; we are inclined to reject what con f l icts with our current commitments. In spite of all of this, Descartes is committed to teaching us his system. One reason for his confidence is that he assumes that, no matter how confused we are, we are compelled to see the truth of clear and distinct perceptions: “Admittedly my nature is such that so long as I perceive something very clearly and distinctly I cannot but believe it to be true.” Even if Descartes’ reader is a disciplined skeptic, he will affi rm clear and distinct perceptions while he is having them and so will “surrender” to Descartes’ view ( Second Replies , AT 7:136). But none of Descartes’ readers will surrender to Descartes’ view at the start of inquiry. Once we begin to have clear and distinct perceptions, however, we will see that our pre- Meditations commitments do not compare. When our clear and distinct perceptions and their implications confl ict with these commitments, we will revise the less distinct on the basis of the more distinct: [41-42]
In order to philosophize seriously and search out the truth about all the things that are capable of being known, we must first 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 fi rst scrutinized them afresh and confi rmed 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 contrast all this [clear and distinct] knowledge with the confused thoughts we had before, we will acquire the habit of form ing clear and distinct concepts of all the things that can be known. ( Principles I:75, AT 8A:38–39)
What Descartes is describing here is not unfamiliar. We often engage in reflection about a particular matter and entertain views at the start of inquiry that we later reject in the light of our progress. That we do not have the right view at the start of inquiry is what necessitates investigation, and, in a manner of speaking, things may get worse before they get better. Matters become clearer, however, and there are things whose truth we recognize. These may be geometrical truths, or they may be truths of metaphysics: [42]
[W]e recognize that this world, that is, the whole universe of corporeal substance, has no limits to its extension. For no matter where we ima gine the boundaries to be, there are always some indefi nitely extended spaces beyond them. ( Principles II:21, AT 8A:52)
[W]e recognize that it is impossible for anything to come from nothing. ( Principles I:49, AT 8A:23)
When matters do become clear, we do not reject the considered view at which we f i nally arrive just because, before we really thought about it, a competing view seemed plausible. If Descartes is right, we reverse our prerefl ective cognitive habits by leveraging more perspicuous results against them. 76 When we think things through, we come to see a number of propositions as clearer and more obvious than the ones that we affi rmed before. We will reject many of the latter, but we must begin at our state of confusion, inattention, and resistance. [43]
6. our perception of our existence is not always clear and distinct
For now, 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 [69-70]
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 percep tion is not fully distinct.
Second, Descartes says that the “first and most important reason for our inability to understand with suffi cient clarity the customary asser tions 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 suffi cient 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 per ceive confusedly if our ideas are not in order or if we are not paying attention.
Early in the Second Meditation the meditator reverts from a clear and distinct perception of his existence to a somewhat confused perception of his existence. The latter is like a perception that God exists, in circumstances in which God is con ceived as a perfect and infi nite corporeal being. Such a perception is not true in the Cartesian sense in which truth is a matter of the conformity of thought with reality, and so is not clear and distinct. Nor is a perception of the existence of a sensible and therefore corporeal “I.” But we can target the First Meditation skeptical arguments on our pre- Meditations idea of self until we are no longer affi rming the existence of something sensible when we affi rm our existence. 2 We strip our pre- Meditations idea of self of the ideas of 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 momen tary. 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 non sensory perception of “I am, I exist.” We can easily lose this clear and distinct per ception, however, in the same way that we can revert from a clear and distinct perception of an obvious truth of mathematics. [70]
7. Wax
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, fl exible, and changeable” (AT 7:31). Presumably Descartes is so confi dent 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 fl exible 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. [97]
8. Cogito
An example of something that we often perceive confusedly but that we sometimes perceive clearly and distinctly is the existence of our minds. We think this con fusedly early in the Second Meditation, after our initial clear and distinct percep tion of it, and again in the middle of the Second Meditation, at the start of the discussion of wax. In a similar and related case, we confusedly perceive the propo sition “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 previ ously” ( Appendix to Fifth Objections and Replies , AT 9A:205). In the fourth para graph of the Third Meditation the meditator includes cogito-variety results with the truths of mathematics and geometry as things that he can doubt if he does not know that God exists. He cannot doubt his existence in a circumstance in which he has a clear and distinct perception of his existence—for example, at the start of the Second Meditation, when he carefully doubts the existence of all bodily things and thereby arrives at a clear and distinct perception of “I am, I exist.” [106]
9. Cartesian Circle
One way to recognize the truth of a clear and distinct perception is to have the per ception and then conclude from the premise that clear and distinct perceptions are true that that perception is true. But a Descartes-endorsed alternative is to recog nize the truth of a given clear and distinct perception and then recognize as i ncoherent the suggestion that our minds might be mistaken about it. That is, we recognize the truth of a given clear and distinct perception in the same way that we recognize that God exists, and then we dismiss hyperbolic doubt if and when it is raised. In effect, we recognize the truth of our perception, ignore some incoherent mumblings, and that is that. Descartes is not really overcoming hyperbolic doubt in the Meditations , because it never was anything to begin with. He is simply establish ing the existence of God and other results that are just as clear. In the same way that there is no Spinozistic Circle even though Spinoza considers and then rejects what he takes to be the confused possibility that there exists a deceiving God; there is no Cartesian Circle unless we attribute to Descartes views that he himself rejects, and that he rejects on much better grounds than the grounds on which he initially accepted them. 3 If at some point we were not able to say that we just recognize things as true, we would not be able to put forward any views, including the view that there might be a deceiving God. But if we are able to put forward views, as we do in the First Meditation and beyond, the relevant question is about which views and claims are most evident and which are (perhaps upon refl ection) confused or incoherent. [123]
Neither of the Third Meditation arguments includes the premise that God exists and guarantees the truth of clear and distinct perceptions. Nor is the premise a constituent of the Fifth Meditation argument. Early in the Meditation, Descartes does appear to be relying on the “already amply demonstrated” truth rule (AT 7:65), but he is not. He reports that he clearly and distinctly perceives geometrical properties and expects that if his clear and distinct perceptions of these guarantee their truth, his clear and distinct perception of God’s existence should provide a “basis for another argument to prove the existence of God” (ibid.). However, he adds, “even if I had not demonstrated this, the nature of my mind is such that I cannot but assent to these things, at least so long as I clearly perceive them” (ibid.). He then reveals that he is not depending on the truth rule for Fifth Meditation results: “even if it turned out that not everything on which I have meditated in these past days is true, I ought still to regard the existence of God as having the same level of certainty as I have hitherto attributed to the truths of mathematics” (AT 7:65 66). Descartes himself does not think that the results of earlier Meditations are to be abandoned. Here he is assuming that some meditators did not grasp the argu mentation of the Third Meditation, and accordingly he expects that some Fifth Meditation readers would judge the results of previous Meditations to be question able. 2 [144]
A final problem for the view that an immediate self-evident intuition of God’s existence is required to dispel hyperbolic doubt is that, given his views on embodi ment, there is no reason to think that Descartes would allow that a fi nite mind could train itself to have immediate clear and distinct perceptions of anything. On the Nelson-Newman view, a fi nite mind is able to neutralize hyperbolic doubt (whenever it comes up) by having an immediate self-intuition of God’s existence and nondeceiverhood. As we have seen, however, Descartes holds (and very reason ably so) that our brain processes and other bodily processes are able to function fairly autonomously and make us have sensings and imaginings that are not clear and distinct. If we have clear and distinct perceptions only rarely, and if we cannot anticipate all of the ways that our neural pathways will affect our thinking, and if the power of the mind is sometimes worn down, we cannot always have clear and distinct perceptions at will, and we cannot forge a guaranteed cognitive route from the thought of hyperbolic doubt to a self-evident intuition of God’s existence. This is presumably the reason why Descartes insists that the atheist geometer can never have an indubitable grasp of results in geometry ( Second Replies , AT 7:141). If the atheist could achieve the same kind of mastery of a particular geometrical result that Nelson and Newman insist the meditator needs to achieve with respect to God’s existence, doubt about that result would be impossible for the atheist. But for the atheist any result is doubtable (ibid.). Descartes thus appears to be thinking that no fi nite mind can train itself in such a way as to be able to have guaranteed and immediate clear and distinct perceptions. Instead, we evolve from a position where we take skeptical concerns to be prima facie plausible, to a position where we rec ognize them as the suspect confusions that they are, and if necessary work up rig orous arguments to refute them. [151]