The Plain Truth: Descartes, Huet, and Skepticism (review)

Thomas Lennon’s book is an important contribution to Descartes scholarship in that it systematically challenges the standard interpretation of the Meditations, i.e., that Descartes sought to refute skepticism and failed, arguing instead that a notion of intellectual integrity rests at the root of Descartes’s thought. All the while, these aims are accomplished through an analysis of the Censura philosophiae cartesianae by Pierre-Daniel Huet, a skeptic and fierce critic of Descartes.

Beyond introducing Huet and his relationship to Cartesians like Pierre-Sylvain Regis and Nicolas Malebranche, chapter one argues that Descartes’s apparent pride, arrogance, and vanity precipitated Huet’s conversion from supporter to avid critic of Descartes. Chapters two though seven further establish Huet’s concern with Descartes’s pride. But Lennon’s deeper aim, after arguing that the standard interpretation is a relatively late invention solidified by Richard Popkin’s The History of Scepticism, is systematically to unravel the standard interpretation by addressing the cogito, doubt, the criterion of truth, circularity, God, etc. In each chapter, Lennon establishes Huet’s critique of Descartes, places the critique within a larger historical context (Malebranche, Regis, Arnauld, etc.), and evaluates Huet’s position via careful analysis and interpretation of Descartes’s works.

A guiding thread throughout Lennon’s book, as the title suggests, is the plainness of truth, i.e., its obviousness and uncomplicated nature. Lennon argues in chapter three that, contra Huet, the cogito is not an inference but a plain and paradigmatic instance of truth that serves as a model for the certainty of all else. The cogito is true because it is seen to be true and not simply because its denial is a contradiction. Along these lines, Lennon aims in chapters five and six to discount a “label view” of the criterion of truth, which takes the criterion to be a property, such as clarity and distinctness, attached to what is known with certainty. Lennon maintains that the terms ‘clear’ and ‘distinct’ are dispensable and argues for a “model view,” where one must merely attend to and notice what has been implicitly known all along (164).

A model view of truth complicates another guiding theme of Lennon’s book, namely, if truth is “seen,” is it not relative to each thinker? Lennon directly addresses this problem in chapter seven with an analysis of what Descartes calls the “objection of objections,” which states, in brief, that what we conceive and understand is only a fiction of our mind without objective subsistence (184). In light of this, Lennon addresses the nature of ideas, intentionality, and the proof of God’s existence in the Fifth Meditation at length, showing that, for Descartes, there is no method to determine what is clearly and distinctly perceived and that this fact does not necessarily mean that our thoughts are fictions. Rather, it points to a deep notion of fallibility inherent in Descartes’s thought, which, according to Lennon, points to a defensible and honest Descartes in contrast to the vain, prideful, and arrogant Descartes of Huet.

Lennon persuasively argues in chapter eight that the ‘I’ used throughout the Meditations refers to Descartes himself, contending that, while Descartes might believe that his pronouncements are universally true, he does not insist on this because everyone should be his own standard for determining the truth of things (217). This does not entail the relativity of truth, according to Lennon, but requires recognizing that the application of an infallible faculty (our faculty of perceiving truth), which we all share, is itself fallible. The upshot of Lennon’s analysis is that at the root of Descartes’s thought is “an ethics of belief, based on the notion, reported by Cicero, of intellectual integrity,” where we maintain our integrity “when we speak according to our own best lights” (239). Thus, for Descartes, there is no formula or algorithm for finding truth and avoiding error. One does not calculate. Rather, one removes obstacles, looks, and “the truth ultimately is...