Lost Souls: The Philosophic Origins of a Cultural Dilemma

Chapter Two Descartes’ Revisions of the Line

Chapter Two Descartes’ Revisions of the Line 1. Platonic Themes A. Knowledge versus Belief The first Meditation reminds us that opinion is less than knowledge, and that the beliefs surveyed—in everyday life and science—are opinion only: “[R]eason already persuades me that I ought no less carefully to withhold my assent from matters which are not entirely certain and indubitable than from those which appear to me manifestly to be false, if I am able to find in each one some reason to doubt, this will suffice to justify my rejecting the whole.”1 Belief is less than knowledge, because casual assent to received “truths” is no substitute for the inspection—the intuition—of ideas set before the mind.2 This is Descartes’ standard, as it was Plato’s: we take the measure of things by looking up the divided line to essences or Forms known with certainty, not down the line to the objects and enthusiasms of popular belief. The myth of Cartesian skepticism starts here, in Descartes’ method of universal doubt. Wanting to distinguish knowledge from belief, he exaggerates the difference between them, as when he insists that all our beliefs about contingencies could be false. We wrongly infer that Descartes doubts the truth of most ideas we have of the world: typically, they are true contingently if at all. This misconstrues Descartes’ aim. He requires that we distinguish beliefs about contingencies—they may be mistaken—from necessary truths—their negations are contradictory. His skepticism is heuristic only. For opinions are often reliable. They are innocuous, unless confused with knowledge. The apparent skepticism of 15 16 LOST SOULS the first Meditation is staged: systematic doubt emphasizes the distinction —graphic in the divided line—between knowledge and opinion. B. Mind-Body Dualism The difference of knowledge and opinion parallels the contrast between knowing mind and perceiving body. Like knows like, implying that mind inspects eternal ideas, grasping their content without distortion , when isolated from bodily effects. Compare data seen or heard. They vary with changes in eyes or ears, implying that the instability of perceptual judgments is an effect of body’s instability. Dualism, for Descartes and Plato, is a strategy that makes knowledge possible. Minds liberated from bodies can have rational intuition and knowledge . Minds coupled to bodies are distorted and distracted. They perceive and believe, but cannot know. The duality of thinking mind and body is one of four ways that body is traditionally set apart from a significant human activity or condition . Life, morality, and immortality are also said to have bases distinct from body. Descartes’ dualism provides for three of these at once. The separability of thought and body implies immortality, because body’s corruption doesn’t affect the mind,3 and because Descartes assumes that a mind knowing eternal essences is also eternal. More, he affirms (see below) that the self-valorizing thinker is the highest good, other things being good or bad because of their effects on it. Live and let live—in the style of Mill’s On Liberty—is the principle underlying the ethical theory this view promotes. Only the duality of body and its animating principle is unaffected by the duality of thought and body. For Descartes was not a vitalist. Body, including all its states and activities , is, he says, a mechanical system.41 2. Four Alterations: Descartes Amends Plato’s Figure in These Critical Ways A. Imaginings and Material Particulars Merged as Empirical Differences Plato distinguished images from the physical objects that are their causes, as images on the walls of a cave are cast by statues carried before a fire. Descartes reduces these two to one. The wax experiment of the second Meditation emphasizes the shifting appearances of the DESCARTES’ REVISIONS OF THE LINE 17 sensible world.5 Explaining one set of images (those on the cave walls) by referring them to physical objects (carved figures) makes no deep ontological point if the figures too are altered by heat or pressure. Everything below the line is a more or less ephemeral appearance. We look elsewhere for its stable foundation. B. Forms Replaced by Geometricals Plato divided the area above the line into two parts: mathematicals and the Forms. Forms are instantiated in myriad primary and secondary properties (impenetrability, weight, color, and sound, for example). Descartes proposed that qualitative differences reduce to the spatial properties of figure, magnitude, and motion. This eliminates the qualitative...