"In Idea, a thousand nameless Joys": Secondary Qualities in Arnauld, Locke, and Haywood's Lasselia

"In Idea, a thousand nameless Joys":

Secondary Qualities in Arnauld, Locke, and Haywood's Lasselia

Cartesian dualism is articulated as a particular kind of conundrum in Descartes' Sixth Meditation (1640), where he advances the proof that "I have a body." Here, the incompatibility of Descartes's "I" and his body assumes its most impacted, most aggravated, and, paradoxically, its most resolvable and irresolvable form when Descartes narrates the event of perception:

Nature . . . teaches me . . . that I am not merely present in my body as a sailor is present in a ship, but that I am very closely joined and, as it were, intermingled with it, so that I and the body form a unit. If this were not so, I, who am nothing but a thinking thing, would not feel pain when the body was hurt, but would perceive the damage purely by the intellect, just as a sailor perceives by sight if anything in his ship is broken. Similarly, when the body needed food or drink, I should have an explicit understanding of the fact, instead of having confused sensations of hunger and thirst. For these sensations of hunger, thirst, pain and so on are nothing but confused modes of thinking which arise from the union and, as it were, intermingling of the mind with the body.¹

In this passage, Descartes maintains his commitment to the difference between extended (divisible, hence imperfect) body and unextended (indivisible, hence divinized) mind. But at the same time, he concedes the "confused sensations," the "confused modes of thinking," the "union," and the "intermingling" which transpire when, for example, he feels hunger. Rather than incarnating a mind-body split that would, so to speak, cut through Descartes himself, he is compelled by sensations like thirst, pain, or desire to reject the hypostatized figure of rationality modeled by the sailor in his ship. Yet as the Sixth Meditation proceeds, Descartes revises his account of the intermingling of mind and body which accompanies either sensations like hunger or "sensory perceptions about things located outside us." This is so not simply because a person mistakes things like the real size of the star that she perceives as "the flame of a small light,"² but also because the insight proven, for Descartes, by the star—that its truth can be adjudicated only by the intellect—applies equally to a person's perception of her own body. For Descartes, movement that stimulates the body ultimately bears "no likeness"³ to feelings which result inside the brain, a discrepancy he vividly illustrates in Principles of Philosophy (1644): "A sword strikes our body and cuts it; but the ensuing pain is completely different from the local motion of the sword or the body that is cut—as different as colour or sound or smell or taste."⁴ Even in this maximally entangled scene of intermingling, the mind might indeed behave like a sailor in a ship when it judges the truth of external objects; Descartes divorces "ensuing" ideas from sensory stimulation which cuts into the matter of the body itself.

A close reader of Descartes, John Locke makes the anti-Cartesian argument that ideas enter the mind only through the medium of the body.⁵ (However immaterial it may be, Locke's mind harbors no innate ideas of divinity.) Yet Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) recurs to the Cartesian example of the sword when Locke likewise invokes the swath of aesthetic sensations remote from the "insensible particles of matter" that move a person to perceive color or sound or smell or taste: "It being no more impossible, to conceive, that God should annex such Ideas to such Motions, with which they have no similitude; then that he should annex the Idea of Pain to the motion of a piece of Steel dividing our Flesh, with which that Idea hath no resemblance."⁶ In the following essay, I pursue the...