Descartes concept of the mind


In the course of this essay I will first give an account of Descartes conception of the rational mind as a separate entity to the body, how this conclusion was arrived at by means of the Cartesian method of radical doubt, and finally to examine some criticisms of his theories.

Doubt and certainty

Rene Descartes is considered the founder of modern philosophy. His aim was to apply the methods of geometry to philosophical problems in order to reach a level of certainty unattainable in philosophy up to that point; he wished to put philosophy on the same grounding as science, which was at point making great advances. The starting point was in conceiving a method of scepticism to sweep away the edifice of medieval scholasticism, in an effort to formulate the first principles of thought. Where Newton had established the foundations of physics, Descartes wished to uncover the foundations of philosophy. He proposed to reach the bedrock of certainty through radical doubt:

“I wanted to concentrate solely on the search for truth… and reject as being false everything in which I could suppose the slightest reason for doubt, in order to see if there did not remain after that anything in my belief which was entirely indubitable. […] I rejected as false all the reasonings I had hitherto accepted as proofs. […] I resolved to pretend that nothing which had ever entered my mind was any more true then the illusions of my dreams.” (Discourse 4, Discourse on Method, Descartes)

So we can be mistaken about the world, but not just through passive accident, we must assume it is actively trying to deceive us:

“I shall suppose that there is… some evil demon, no less cunning and deceiving then powerful, who has used all his artifice to deceive me” (First Meditation, The Meditations, Descartes)

This form of radical scepticism was the kernel of Cartesian method, and it was through this method that Descartes proposed to put philosophy on a firm footing. By rejecting any belief he could entertain doubts about he is immediately brought to the conclusion that we cannot be certain of existence of the outside world, we cannot trust our perceptions, we cannot be certain of our bodies, we cant even be certain that we are awake and not dreaming. It seems Cartesian doubt has denied us the possibility of any kind of certainty at all. But Descartes realises that one thing is beyond doubt: the existence of our thoughts.

“… While I decided thus to think that everything was false, it followed necessarily that I who thought must be something; and observing this truth: I think, therefore I am, was so certain and so evident that all the most extravagant suppositions of the sceptics were not capable of shaking it, I judged that I could accept it without scruple as the fist principle of the philosophy I was seeking” (Discourse 4, Discourse on Method, Descartes)

Or to put it more succinctly:

“we cannot doubt our existing without existing while we doubt, and this is the first knowledge we obtain when we philosophise in an orderly way” (Principle VII, The Principles of Philosophy, Descartes)

And so we have arrived at a first principle; the only certainty capable of withstanding the onslaught of radical doubt: Our own minds. Cogito ergo Sum was a revolution in thought as the Copernican revolution was to cosmology. Just as our model of the solar system was turned on its head, and the Earth revealed to move around the sun, so certainty was revealed not to come from above but to be discovered within. By putting the emphasis on the thinking self, the subjective individual, the rational mind, Descartes gave license to those who would question authority, demand proof and the right to think for themselves, thus posing an implicit threat to the authority of the medieval Church. Furthermore the subject-object dichotomy was enshrined at the centre of rational enquiry. The Modern era had begun.

Having reduced philosophy to its foundations Descartes set about rebuilding it, but having denied the certainty of all but consciousness this was to be a difficult task. The only avenue of exploration available was an examination of what was implied by the first principle. To do this we must examine what was meant by Cogito, or thought.

“We hence discover the distinction between mind and body, or between a thinking and corporeal thing. […] By the word thought, I understand all that which takes place in us that we are aware of it; and accordingly, not only to understand, [but] to will, to imagine [and] even to perceive, are here the same as to think. […] The knowledge we have of the mind not only proceeds, and has greater certainty, but it is even clearer then that we have of the body.” (Principles VIII – XI, The Principles of Philosophy, Descartes)

So the world is divided into two substances (hence Cartesian Dualism), the thinking (res cogitans) and the corporeal, (res extensa). Thought is taken to be the sum total of our conscious awareness. We are aware of the totality of our inner experience. Furthermore we know our minds better then our bodies by virtue of the immediacy of the former and the uncertainty of the latter. Being aware of his thoughts without being certain of his body Descartes takes this to mean that the mind is completely independent of the body, in fact superior to it because he can conceive of mind without body, but not body without mind. The self is identified with the mind; for Descartes, I am a thing that thinks, and it is this thinking that defines us as human beings.
And so Descartes concept of the Mind is revealed as being all that follows from the principle of Cogito ergo sum; we can be certain of our minds but we can not be certain of the outside world. The subjective individual is elevated, we are all the masters of our internal domains but this certainty is bought at the expense of knowledge of the objective world. This state of affairs may be robustly described thus:

“We are each and all of us separately and individually shut off from any External World which may or may not exist; and which is in any case necessarily and for ever hidden behind an impenetrable Veil of Appearance.” (P. 15, David Hume, Philosopher of Moral Science, Anthony Flew)

In fact, the self as conceived by Descartes, composed of a thinking substance, but thinking of the outside world brings to mind Aquinas’ view of the soul as a substance existing at the boundary of this world and the next:

“The powers of our understanding do not proceed from the essence of the soul in so far as it is united to the body, but rather in so far as it stays free of the body and is not entirely bound to it.” (De Ver.13.4)

The world outside the mind

According to Descartes, more then simply being certain of the existence of our thoughts, we can in fact be certain that some of our thoughts are true:

“I judged that I could take it for true that the things we conceive very clearly and very distinctly are all true” (Discourse4, Discourse on Method, Descartes)
“We never err unless we judge of something which we do not sufficiently apprehend” (Principle XXXIII, The Principles of Philosophy, Descartes)


This turn of reasoning is crucial for Descartes because it rescues us from solipsism; if we could never rely on our faculty of reason, we could never form reliable judgements about the outside world or the people in it, we would be alone inside our minds. However his conclusion is supported only by citing a perfect God, bestower of perfect reason:

“All which we clearly perceive is true, and we are thus delivered from the doubts above proposed… Knowledge given to us by god can never compass any object which is not true… For God would have merited the appellation of a deceiver if he had given us this faculty perverted.” (Principle XXX, The Principles of Philosophy, Descartes)

The necessity of the divine as a link between thought and extension is proposed explicitly:

“1. The grounds on which the existence of material things may be known with certainty… Since God cannot deceive us, for this is repugnant to his nature… we must conclude that there exists a certain object… possessing all those properties which we clearly apprehend to belong to what is extended. And this extended substance is what we call Body or Matter” (Principle I, The Principles of Matter, Descartes)

Descartes has reasoned from the certain existence of our minds to the certain existence of the outside world, but only by proposing what amounts to a second foundation stone of his philosophy, as essential and irreducible as cogito ergo sum: That there exists a perfect God.

God, the hidden axiom
Given the centrality of God to Descartes reasoning about the existence of the outside world, it is necessary to examine his proofs of a perfect being. Two distinct proofs are offered in both the Meditations and the Principles of Philosophy. The first is a variation on the ontological proof, which had originally been argued by medieval scholastic Anselm. In its simplest form it can be stated thus:
1. God is perfect, and has all the qualities associated with perfection
2. Existence is more perfect then non existence
3. God exists
Objections to this proof abound. First among them is considering existence to be a property of things, as if things could have the property of not-existing. This objection is stated memorably by science writer Paul Davies:

“I can meaningfully talk about having five little coins and six big coins in my pocket, but what does it mean to say that I have five existing coins and six non-existing coins?” (The Mind of God, Paul Davies)

Secondly, can we know that existence is more perfect then its’ opposite? One has to exist in order to even ask the question. Thirdly, the logic seems to hold out the possibility of all manner of perfect objects popping into being, simply on the basis that I deem their existence to be necessary; A perfect table, a perfect government, a perfect proof of the existence of God. Anselms proof was subsequently criticised by Aquinas, but was reformulated by Descartes in the fifth meditation so as to side step this last objection. His ontological proof posits the necessary existence of God by virtue of the “Clear and Distinct” idea we have of Him:

“I cannot conceive God without existence, it follows that existence is inseparable from him, and hence that he truly exists; not that my thought can make this be so, or that it imposes any necessity on things, but, on the contrary, because of the thing itself, namely, the necessity of the existence of God determines my thought to conceive in this way. That is to say I am not free to conceive a God without existence, that is to say a supremely perfect being devoid of supreme perfection, as I am free to imagine a horse with or without wings” (Fifth meditation, The Meditations, Descartes)

So this formulation applies only to God, because God alone has placed the idea of Himself inside his creation. This proof may work, but only when we accept that God as given before we start reasoning about Him. In his attempt to insulate himself from criticism Descartes has tied himself in a Gordian knot of circular logic.

The second proof (though it appears first in the meditations) rests on our innate concepts of infinity and perfection:

“I must conclude… that God exists; for, although the idea of substance is in me, for the very reason that I am a substance, I would not, nevertheless have the idea of an infinite substance, since I am a finite being, unless the idea had been put in me by some substance that was truly infinite.” (Third meditation, The Meditations, Descartes)

“XIV. That we may validly infer the existence of God from necessary existence being comprised of the concept we have of him. When the mind reviews the different ideas that are in it, it discovers what is by far the chief among them – that of a Being omniscient, all-powerful, and absolutely perfect. […] From [the minds] perceiving necessary existence to be comprised in the idea which it has of an all-perfect Being, it ought manifestly to conclude that this all perfect Being exists” (Principle XIV, The Principles of Philosophy, Descartes)

So the finite cannot conceive of the infinite, the imperfect cannot give rise to the perfect. This rests on the principle that the lesser cannot be the cause of the greater. But this principle seems counterintuitive on two counts: Firstly, in a world where effects are always lesser then their causes it is impossible to imagine any progress or positive change. The world would wind down in a spiral of entropy. A descent to barbarism would be ensured. In fact looking back across the vista of history one would be presented with a story of the ever increasing perfection of Man, as long as we read the story backwards. A cursory reading of any history book should be sufficient to refute this. Secondly one is presented with the task of identifying the greater, or more perfect, or more infinite of any two possibilities, where one is the cause of the other. Can our fallible minds really know that the child is less great then the parent? That the Pyramids are less infinite then their architect? Or that a scientific theory is less perfect then the Scientist who proposes it?
If these examples seem odd it may be for a good reason. Do we really have a coherent idea of what words like “infinity” or “perfection” actually mean? Certainly we use them all the time, but we use words like mermaid and unicorn all the time too so we cannot immediately infer that these words refer to anything outside of our minds, after all we cannot point to any object we encounter in everyday life that is either infinite or perfect, unless we are conversing in hyperbolae. However I can say that I have an idea of infinity, in the sense that however large a number I am presented with, I can always imagine a larger one simply by adding 1 to it. But this is not the same as me internalising the infinite calculation of Pi, or perceiving the felt difference between living in an infinitely large universe as opposed to living in one that is merely incomprehensibly large. Rather then having an understanding of infinity or perfection in themselves perhaps we actually have an understanding of how things can increase or improve, and the labels we give to the theoretical endpoint of these trends are Infinity and Perfection. Having and using words like this does not guarantee that we perceive their nature fully, any more then a detailed knowledge of physics is required before we can discuss the nature or existence black holes.
Perhaps most jarring of all in the above proof however is Descartes assertion that the first concept we find in our minds when we review its contents is “that of a Being omniscient, all-powerful, and absolutely perfect.” Having subjected all of his preconceptions to radical scepticism, it appears that the idea of God has survived. We are suddenly a long way from the “malicious demon” of doubt. For Descartes, we cannot doubt God, no more then we can doubt the cogito. Disbelief is simply not an option. Yet this appears to flatly contradict an earlier statement:

“We reject all of which we can entertain the smallest doubt, … we easily indeed suppose that there is neither God, nor sky, nor bodies” (Principle VII. The Principles of Philosophy, Descartes)

If the idea of a perfect being is innate, in the way he proposes, how is it possible to doubt it, as he does in the above passage? The truth is prosaic: God cannot be an innate concept, otherwise all people would share a conception of Him. There could be no atheists, in fact there would in all likelihood be a single world religion, in the same way that there is some thing like universal agreement on geometry and mathematics, i.e. on subjects that deal with concepts that really are innate, like shapes and numbers. As Descartes later writes:
“We deceive ourselves only when we form judgements about anything insufficiently known to us” (Principle XXXIII, The Principles of Philosophy, Descartes)

Given that our innate ideas appear to us as clear and distinct it is impossible for us to deceive ourselves about them. It follows that we could not have disagreements about the existence or nature of God while we share an innate idea of Him.
The unavoidable conclusion is that Descartes was simply mistaken about what ideas were innate. In retrospect this is not entirely surprising. Descartes wrote within a particular cultural context, as we all do. As a Catholic, denying the inerrant truth of the bible was a sin. Galileo and Copernicus before him had run afoul of the church authorities. Even writing in a liberal, protestant country like Holland was no guarantee that he was free to say as he pleased, so one might argue that Descartes failures are attributable entirely his inability to transcend the assumptions of his time. However this view is not in itself sufficient, given that questioning the existence of our bodies (or the sky) was a radically counter intuitive idea for the time (or any other time perhaps). Whatever else we can say about him, Descartes was not afraid of challenging our hitherto unquestioned assumptions.
Of course this argument of cultural relativity can be reversed: perhaps our criticisms of the proof of God only appear valid because we live in a time where the common assumption is against the existence of the divine rather then for it. But this argument doesn’t have the force it appears to. It’s worth noting that in the 400 years since Descartes lived, there was never a period where the existence of the mind was seriously questioned. There are some things that it is simply not possible to take a culturally relative attitude towards without immediately becoming incoherent: numbers, shapes, the existence of thoughts. The fact that there is a coherent discourse questioning the divine disqualifies it from this category of innate concepts.
But regardless of cultural context there is a more fundamental cause of his mistake that must be investigated.

The limits of Rationality

From the beginning the Cartesian project has proposed the examination of the mind with the mind. This self reflection essentially conflates the subject with the object; no sooner has the subject-object relation been defined then Descartes attempts to fold it back on itself. We have no option but to think with thoughts, and when considering the mind, we have no option to think about thoughts. The risks of falling into an infinite loop of self reference are startling. You cant use a hammer to hammer itself, you cant use a pen to write on itself, you cant even use the eye to properly see itself, so why should the mind be able to think about itself? The fact that it is possible at all is remarkable. The idea that it would be an inerrant process is far fetched indeed.

Limits of cogito

As we have seen, Descartes finds certainty in the existence of thoughts. But his formulation of this position, I think, therefore I am, raises an obvious objection: Is Descartes overreaching by reasoning from the existence of thought to the existence of the self?

“’I think’ is his ultimate premises. Here the word ‘I’ is really illegitimate; he ought to state his ultimate premises in the form ‘there are thoughts’. The word ‘I’ is grammatically convenient, but does not describe a datum… He nowhere proves that thoughts need a thinker.” (History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell)

However Bernard Williams points out that thought cannot simply be said to exist without context or without some thing that feels like an “I”:

“The only coherent way of conceiving a thought happening is to conceive of thinking it… there is no way of conceiving of such events happening, but happening elsewhere” (P100, Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry, Bernard Williams)

Perhaps there is a middle way between these objections and counter objections. Thoughts must belong to a self in order for them to be felt, but we cannot infer from this anything about the nature of that self. Specifically, it does not follow from this that we are aware of all of our mental experiences, that our inner states are always present and explainable to us, or even that the self has any kind of essence or continuous presence. In short, when we take this minimal view of cogito and its implications we are left with a position that is at least compatible with Humes bundle theory of self:

“When I enter most intimately into that which I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception” (p252, A Treatise on Human Nature, David Hume)

For all his scepticism, Hume never doubts the existence of those perceptions, he simply questions what they are supposed to add up to. So perhaps I can infer from my thoughts that I am, but I cannot infer what I am.

The Ghost in the Machine

This view is contrary to Descartes of course. For him many truths can be divined from the certainty of res cogitans. Mind is more immediately real then the body, entirely separate to it, perhaps even immortal. The body by contrast is the source of our unreliable perceptions, uncertain and untrustworthy.

“I thereby concluded that I was a substance, of which the whole essence of nature consists in thinking, and which, in order to exist needs no place and depends on no material thing; so that this ‘I’… is entirely distinct from the body… even if the body were not, it would not cease to be all that it is.” (Fourth Discourse, Descartes)

Descartes believes he can imagine mind without body, but not body without mind, which, it seems can exist free floating in the ether, because there is no evidence to suggest that thought requires extension. But the ability to doubt the body is no guarantee that the mind can exist alone; absence of evidence of not evidence of absence. If we accept this, then the existence of disembodied thought is a subject on which we must remain agnostic. Otherwise we are presented with the mind/body problem: How do minds interact with bodies if they are radically different substances? This has been a central problem in philosophy for centuries, and Descartes own solution was as fanciful as it was odd: thought and extension interact through the pineal gland in the brain. Of course, specifying the location does nothing to specify the nature of the interaction. Subsequent Cartesians posited the two clocks theory, that mind and the world are identical without interaction, in the way that two clocks may show the same time, without being connected to each other. None of this gets us closer to a satisfying resolution. Either mind is separate, or it interacts with the brain. This circle cannot be squared.


Conclusion
In the course of this essay I have given an account of Descartes concept of the mind; how he arrived at it, and what he believed it implied about our relationship with the world and with God. I have also attempted a critical examination of these ideas. It is my contention that Descartes search for certainty was noble and sincere, his urge to build philosophy from the ground up was well intentioned, but ultimately his methods didn’t reveal as much as had hoped. He found certainty in thought, but without God, cogito is a dead end. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, we see how little is achieved once his problem was solved.

The philosophy of Rene Descartes proved massively influential to both Continental Rationalism, which it begat, and to British Empiricism, which arose largely in reaction to it. European philosophy was dominated for centuries by the questions posed by Descartes about the nature of the mind, and how we come to know that we know, arguably until Existentialism changed the central question from “what can I know?” to “what is it to exist?” Outside of philosophy, Descartes world view is still a cornerstone of the modern mind. For better or worse, the Cartesian preoccupations with certainty, doubt, and the duality of mind and matter remain with us today.