Reading Descartes Otherwise

Blind, Mad, Dreamy, and Bad

Kyoo Lee

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780823261253
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Rationalism in Philosophy

Focusing on the first four images of the Other mobilized in Descartes' Meditations—namely, the blind, the mad, the dreamy, and the bad—Reading Descartes Otherwise casts light on what have heretofore been the phenomenological shadows of "Cartesian rationality." In doing so, it discovers dynamic signs of spectral alterity lodged both at the core and on the edges of modern Cartesian subjectivity.Calling for a Copernican reorientation of the very notion "Cartesianism, " the book's series of close, creatively critical readings of Descartes' signature images brings the dramatic forces, moments, and scenes of the cogito into our own contemporary moment. The author patiently unravels the knotted skeins of ambiguity that have been spun within philosophical modernity out of such clichés as "Descartes, the abstract modern subject" and "Descartes, the father of modern philosophy"—a figure who is at once everywhere and nowhere. In the process, she revitalizes and reframes the legacy of Cartesian modernity, in a way more mindful of its proto-phenomenological traces.

SCENE 1

Blind Vision: A Photographic Touch

Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood. … It is possible that I do not even have eyes with which to see anything. But when I see, or think I see (I am not here distinguishing the two), it is simply not possible that I who am now thinking am not something. By the same token, if I judge that the wax exists from the fact that I touch it, the same result follows, namely that I exist. (M, 7:17, 33/2:12, 22)

What corrects the error? The intellect? Not at all; it is the sense of touch. And the same sort of thing must be taken to occur in other cases. (Or, 7:418/2:281–2)

The Enigma of Vision Revisited: By Deviancy

Indeed, “how easy it is to be mistaken” (s’y tromper) (O, 6:147/113), how easy it is to see that truth: “How crystal clear everything would be in our philosophy if only we would exorcise these specters, make illusions or objectless perceptions out of them, brush them to one side of an unequivocal world!”¹ That is, Merleau-Ponty and I fantasize with Descartes, whose “Dioptrics is an attempt to do just that.”²

I SEE TOUCHINGLY—WITH MY HANDS

To have “clear and distinct” perceptions or ideas—to guard ourselves against falsities or fantasies as Descartes recommends—seems relatively easy. Tricky is the attempt itself.

For some evidence, we just need reopen the very First Meditation, where the narrating “I” sets out to tell the story of a life-changing awakening: how, “some years ago,” he realized that he had been blindly accepting a constructed “reality” as true and yet how “enormous” this task of overcoming such epistemological blindness seems to have been to him. So he ended up putting off the project until he really could and should no longer just keep thinking of it, since so much of his lifetime had already gone into undocumented “pondering” (M, 7:17/2:12). He waits while and until there is “time still left for carrying it out” (M, 7:17/2:12), procrastination being part of the project. Somehow, just like writer Virginia Woolf, Descartes seemed to have been “inclined to wait for a clearer head” while “wanting indeed to consider” his “next book.”³ What happens during that time, that in-between period when the project is brewing, somehow formed, deformed, and transformed? How do we understand that arresting glimmer, that awareness of one’s own blindness or blockedness, that nagging thought that keeps our modern mind inactively active?

During that transitory period, just as everyone needs some sort of housing, even when practically living on the street or crashing in a friend’s conference hotel room, a thinker needs to be anchored somewhere, somehow. It is a temporary third space, as Descartes envisaged, between the old building that is being destroyed and a new one that is being constructed (D, 6:22/1:122). An example of such a “third” that I suggest we dwell on in this chapter is a transitory moment of blind vision in Cartesian thought, as obliquely indexicalized at the very start of the First Meditation, together with the first few pages of the Treatise on Light (drafted in 1633) and the Optics (1637), both written during that formative period as a companion piece for the Discourse (1637), all of which, put together this way, show deconstructive tensions in the Cartesian theatre of the mind and the body quite vividly. After all, it is such a quasi-vision of something yet to be clarified and distinguished that enables “reading Descartes otherwise” in the first place. In that regard, this chapter functions as a kind of further stage setup for the following three other “scenes.”

To begin with, we seem able to see readily “how it [vision] happens.”⁴ But how? How do we understand how we see things? By analogy: Descartes is using an indirect means to see how he sees:

Descartes’ blind man provides a good vehicle by which to approach the neglected matter. His appearance, I have said, is unobtrusive. It threatens no great moment. The sheer weight of avoidance makes an indirect approach mandatory. Otherwise, a monumental resistance to self-examination rears its head, takes precedence, and the stop is secreted away. Besides, the blind man’s character—like the gravedigger’s in Hamlet—exemplifies the very experience sought for examination.⁵

Here, self-understanding is theatrically mediated. From the beginning (the First Discourse), in the absence of an alternative medium, the Optic relies on figural devices such as a ball and a blind man’s stick for the “facilitation” (O, 6:83/1:152) of the reader’s understanding of “the action of light” or its “movements” (O, 6:88/1:155). Perceptual beings’ access to refraction and transmission, so goes the argument, is tactile first and foremost rather than visual. More vividly, the Sixth Discourse, titled “Of Vision,” mobilizes a series of figures such as a blind traveler and his cane (O, 6:135–6/105, Fig. 18); a hand and its groping fingers that feelingly extend, touch, and contract (O, 6:142/108, Fig. 19); the dreaming sleepers as well as delusional maniacs (les frenetique) who “often see, or think they see, various objects which … are not actually before their eyes” (O, 6:141/108, trans. revised); those otherwise normal people “whose eyes are infected by jaundice or those who are looking through yellow glass or enclosed in a room where there is no light other than that which enters through such glass” (O, 6:142/110). These pieces of evidence of and from the otherwise merely deviant or abnormal, assembled this way, all point to the Cartesian thesis of universal double vision that is still famous and still frightening: “first of all, it is the soul [l’âme] which sees, not the eye” (O, 6:141/108, trans. revised), just as it is the hand that sees, not the eye, in the case of the blind.

How does a blind person see? By the hand, by its skin, by “the sense of touch,” “the stimulation …, the nerves terminating in the skin all over the body” (P, 8A:318/1:281). In Descartes’ text, broadly speaking at this point, the very machinic or quasi-neurological materialism, devoid of intentional subjectivity, comes to generate, through the extensive “assimilation of vision to touch,”⁶ an “incarnational”⁷ account of the “close interweaving of the body and soul.”⁸ That given, it seems not accidental that, of the five senses, touch, “the least deceptive and most certain” (TL, 11:5–6/1:82), receives the first and longest explanation from him (P, 8A:318–9/281–2) with sight treated at the end (P, 8A:319/1:283). Why is touch more important than sight for this thinker of “clear and distinct ideas,” of reason and the intellect? And what kind, sense, of touch does he highlight? He highlights the foundational touch. What is this skinny but sure ground of perception?

Follow this exchange of thoughts for a moment. Turn to the “ninth and most worrying” point of concern raised in the Sixth Set of Objections: “Owing to refraction, a stick which is in fact straight appears bent in water. What corrects the error? The intellect? Not at all; it is the sense of touch” (Or, 7:418/2:281–282). In other words, is it not touch that corrects the visual error, the trompe-l’œil? To this query, Descartes responds by saying:

When people say that a stick in water “appears bent because of refraction,” this is the same as saying that it appears to us in a way which would lead a child to judge that it was bent—and which may even lead us to make the same judgment, following the preconceived opinions which we have become accustomed to accept from our earliest years. But I cannot grant my critics’ further comment that this error is corrected “not by the intellect but by the sense of touch.” As a result of touching it, we may judge that the stick is straight, and the kind of judgment involved maybe the kind we have been accustomed to make since childhood, and which is therefore referred to as the “sense” of touch. But the sense alone does not suffice to correct the visual error: in addition we need to have some degree of reason which tells us that in this case we should believe the judgment based on touch rather than that elicited by vision. … Thus even in the very example my critics produce, it is the intellect alone which corrects the error of the sense. (Or, 7:438–9/2:296, emphases added)

Note the double flip, or dip, there in the argument. Bear in mind that Descartes’ turn or return to the intellect does not bypass the sense of touch but is mediated and stabilized by it, his point being that (1) if and when “seeing is not believing,” touching should be the basis of the belief instead and (2) such is a natural function of the intellect—something in reason “tells us” that we should, in this case, rely on touch. The raw, inaugural “sense” of touch, “infantile/childish” (Or, 7:438–9/296) as described in the Sixth Set of Replies, is correctively filtered by the discriminating intellect and yet the first is also selectively recovered by the second. To that extent, touch is still present in and even formative of Descartes’ sense of vision, including and especially the inner vision shared by the sighted and the blind, as Descartes’ example of the blind man’s stick points to. On a somewhat hastily generalized reading, many tend to think that Descartes simply intellectualizes perception at the cost of ignoring or distrusting the physical senses, and this is the misperception I am aiming to correct here or at least question; it remains clear and true that, as shown previously, Descartes ultimately resorts to intellectual judgment, not the senses themselves, for determining what to rest on, which makes him irreducibly and ultimately a rationalist. But that is not the focal point of illustration at this point, although it is closely relevant to the discussion that follows, especially the next section. Here, suffice to note that the heliocentric “ocularcentrism”⁹ of Descartes, the hallmark of his rationalism and by extension of the Enlightenment tradition is actually, textually, grounded or mediated that way—in tactility.

For Celia Wolf-Devine,¹⁰ for instance, the passage cited exemplifies how the Meditations and Descartes’ subsequent views on vision begin to erase the sense of touch decisively in favor of intellectual judgment. I cannot disagree entirely; again, the residual point that interests me further and that I am trying to recuperate after Descartes is that the Cartesian judgment, the reflective consciousness of the Cartesian ego, is still based on a sense of touch, which prosthetically animates—activates, filters, and shelters—it. Such a foundational in-built-ness, interactivity, and extensivity of tactility, all its life seems intrinsic to and even generative of his theory of vision that suffers from “some serious unclarities and inner tensions.”¹¹ What are the ambiguities, and why? Wolf-Devine locates the issue this way: “Unfortunately, his zeal to provide a unified cerebral image of the object led Descartes into unfounded and erroneous physiological speculations as well as on a more subtle level, leading him to see the eye as functioning like a camera”¹² and “the senses as yielding simple snapshots.”¹³ I almost fully agree, as I will explain more fully in the section where I discuss that “camera” notion, but why is it an “unfortunate” analogy? I must address that issue first. For I am inclined to see it rather as a magical link, almost prophetic. In fact, those internal ambiguities captured by Descartes’ inner camera seem telling, more precise than mere metaphors or mess, something other than an avoidable misfortune.

MY VISION DOUBLES IN THE INSTANTANEITY OF THE COGITO

What sense, more specific sense, should we make of this tactile elsewhereness of Cartesian vision? The seemingly strange thesis, to repeat, is that it is not the eye that sees but the soul; in the case of the blind man, what sees is his hand that holds the stick, with which the soul is somehow networked, as Descartes was trying to prove. If we follow Descartes at least that far, it does appear that not only do we see, but we also, more precisely, perform an act of seeing, seeing ourselves see, which itself is an irreducible act of the muscled mind. What I am trying to discern in turn, in and with Descartes, is not exactly or only the second-order awareness or a transcendental perspective in infinite regress or in its manifold drifting or unfolding. Descartes, the proto-phenomenologist, has yet to meet Kant, Hegel, Husserl, or Heidegger (none of whom will appear in this chapter, which has little room for such important extras). More simply, what I am seeking to bring to the surface is a sense, yet to be made more legible, of multiple, materially horizontal intertwinements of perceptual apparatuses and events, which Merleau-Ponty also stresses when describing the mechanism of Cartesian reflection, namely, how the Cartesian “vision doubles” in the instant(aneity) of the cogito:

The body is both the soul’s native space and the matrix of every other existing space. Thus vision doubles. There is the vision upon which I reflect; I cannot think it except as thought, the mind’s inspection, judgment, a reading of signs. And then there is the vision that actually occurs, an honorary or established thought, collapsed into a body—its own body, of which we can have no idea except in the exercise of it, and which introduces, between space and thought, the autonomous order of the composite of soul and body. The enigma of vision is not done away with it; it is shifted from the “thought of seeing” to vision in act.

Still, this de facto vision and the “there is” which it contains do not upset Descartes’ philosophy. Since it is thought united with a body. …¹⁴

Vision in act: The occurrence of vision and the exercise of it are inseparably simultaneous. More intriguingly in my view, as Merleau-Ponty also points out, the exercise falls/folds back into the body, “the soul’s native space,” almost wrapping the body back instantly, vibratingly weaving it with its background to the effect of creating a multilayered context and interplay of seeing, perceiving, and knowing. I reflect upon the vision that occurs in, nay, “into,” a body, as it were. Mutually folded in, seeing and the seer, thus incorporated, become each time a “chiasmic”¹⁵ envelope of beings:

What there is then are not things first identical with themselves, which would then offer themselves to the seer, nor is there a seer who is first empty and who, afterward, would open himself to them—but something to which we could not be closer than by palpating it with our look, things we could not dream of seeing “all naked” because the gaze itself envelops them, clothes them with its own flesh. …

The classical impasses … the difficulties that they may present when confronted with a cogito, which itself has to be re-examined. Yes or no: do we have a body—that is, not a permanent object of thought, but a flesh that suffers when its wounded, hands that touch? We know: hands do not suffice for touch—but to decide for this reason alone that our hands do not touch, and to relegate them to the world of objects or of instruments, would be, in acquiescing t...