On Descartes' Passive Thought

The Myth of Cartesian Dualism

Jean-Luc Marion, Christina M. Gschwandtner

• Editorial: University of Chicago Press
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780226192611
• Categoría: Philosophie
• Categoría: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

On Descartes' Passive Thought is the culmination of a life-long reflection on the philosophy of Descartes by one of the most important living French philosophers. In it, Jean-Luc Marion examines anew some of the questions left unresolved in his previous books about Descartes, with a particular focus on Descartes's theory of morals and the passions.Descartes has long been associated with mind-body dualism, but Marion argues here that this is a historical misattribution, popularized by Malebranche and popular ever since both within the academy and with the general public. Actually, Marion shows, Descartes held a holistic conception of body and mind. He called it the meum corpus, a passive mode of thinking, which implies far more than just pure mind—rather, it signifies a mind directly connected to the body: the human being that I am. Understood in this new light, the Descartes Marion uncovers through close readings of works such as Passions of the Soul resists prominent criticisms leveled at him by twentieth-century figures like Husserl and Heidegger, and even anticipates the non-dualistic, phenomenological concepts of human being discussed today. This is a momentous book that no serious historian of philosophy will be able to ignore.

1

The Existence of Material Things or the “Scandal of Philosophy”

§2. The Sixth Meditation as Aporia

The extreme difficulty of the Sixth Meditation strikes or should strike any reader, whether attentive or uninformed. Moreover, even Martial Gueroult, one of Descartes’ most fastidious interpreters and also someone very convinced about the perfect coherence of the Cartesian arguments, admits, a bit despite himself, that “Meditation VI completes the unfolding of the chain of reasons. It also presents the maximum of complexity; this is something natural for a final reason, which is necessarily the most composite and most difficult of all the reasons.”1 We will see that this is a correct diagnosis but a very surprising explanation; for it is not at all obvious that the final argument would have to present the greatest complexity, because in contrast Descartes makes clear in 1627, “while our experiences of things are often deceptive, the deduction or pure inference of one thing from another can never be performed wrongly by an intellect which is in the least degree rational.”2 Should one not actually expect instead that the final Meditation would benefit from the more solid deductive evidence that all the previously demonstrated truths would in principle assure it? And does not Descartes himself at times at least venture to claim that he has demonstrated the union of soul and body by “arguments . . . as strong as any I can remember ever having read”?3 Now the immense difficulty of the Sixth Meditation cannot be denied if only because it demands from one canonical commentator [namely, Gueroult] all by itself an explanation as long as that of the first five, as if the final move to the last question, that of corporeality, would alter the entire scheme not only of the Meditations but of the entire Cartesian cartage. It is even more surprising that this extreme and intensified particularity has not been taken into account inasmuch as Descartes in his customary frankness did not fail to admit it or even to underline it by any number of quite obvious hints.

Thus he admits that one would gain no benefit from reading the Meditations “if one does not dedicate whole days and even weeks of meditating on the same matters that I have treated.” As such a requirement may seem “quite awful,” Descartes immediately qualifies the assumption of such a rigorous timeframe: “I would say: if one does not take at least the trouble to read the first five Meditations in one breath with my literal response at the end and come up with a summary of the main conclusions in order to be able better to notice what follows.”4 Negatively speaking, corporeality also sometimes seems excluded from what the Meditations demonstrate: “For I draw a comparison between my work in this area [i.e., in metaphysics] and the demonstrations of Apollonius. Everything in the latter is really very clear and certain, when each point is considered separately; but because the proofs are rather long, and one cannot see the necessity of the conclusion unless one remembers exactly everything that has gone before, you will hardly find a single person in an entire country who is capable of understanding them. Nevertheless, because those few who do understand them vouch for their truth, everyone believes them. Similarly, I think that I have fully demonstrated the existence of God and the non-material nature of the human soul.”5 This is a curious omission: Why treat the first five Meditations and the Replies to the Objections as a whole (we know that these were in fact printed and sent to the other objectors together with the Meditations themselves) but leave out the last one, although it was also printed, along with the question of the existence of corporeality?6 And, more generally, why does the title of the Meditations mention only two poles (the mens/mind and God), even though the commentators concur in recognizing three: “three kinds of fundamental existences . . . : the existence of my mind (in Meditation II), the existence of God (in Meditation III), and the existence of bodies (in Meditation VI)”?7 Does the Sixth Meditation have a special status? Must it be excluded from the concise reading of the order of reasoning, from the motus cogitationis that deploys and maintains a sole gaze (a single intuitus) across the deduction of arguments that it brings back to a sole certainty by dint of meditative repetitions? And in this case how will it connect with the first five Meditations? Or is it despite everything instead in line with one continuous argument?8

In fact, Descartes offers at least one hypothesis in order to explain this fracture between the first Meditations and the last. In order to justify that the Second Meditation does not prove that “the soul is really distinct from the body,” but is limited to showing that one can “conceive it without the body,” he underlines that the distinction relies on a conclusion for which the premises are found only “in the Sixth Meditation.” Now, immediately after this comment, he introduces the maybe too celebrated distinction of the two orders of philosophical thought. Moreover, this functions as a hapax legomenon for the entire work: “It should be noted that throughout the work the order I follow is not the order of the subject-matter, but the order of the reasoning. This means that I do not attempt to say in a single place everything relevant to a given subject, because it would be impossible for me to provide proper proofs, since my supporting reasons would have to be drawn in some cases from considerably more distant sources than in others. Instead I reason in an orderly way from what is easier to what is harder (a facilioribus ad difficiliora), making what deductions I can, now on one subject, now on another.”9 Two insights can be drawn from this. First, that according to the order of reasoning the final Meditation offers the exemplary case of difficiliora, of truths that are more difficult to discover, the truths one finds only in the end, despite the fact that or rather because they manifest in turn the final truth at which the entire chain of arguments aims. Second, and especially, that the deduction of these difficiliora can alternatively concern several “matters” and not only one of them. That seems paradigmatically the case in the Sixth Meditation, which in fact treats two quite distinct questions, “the existence of material things and the real distinction between mind and body.”10

A very strange situation indeed is that of the Sixth Meditation, which is defined as an apparently (and maybe really) incoherent project, for even its title announces an obvious duality: “De rerum materialium existentia et reali mentis a corpore distinctione—The existence of material things and the real distinction between mind and body.”11 But it is actually not simply a matter of a title here (as in the First and Fourth Meditations) or of a title that is doubled in order to be explained (as in the Second Meditation, where the nature of the human mind is explained by the fact that its knowledge precedes that of the body, and the Third Meditation, where existence works out a perfection of God’s essence), or even of a double development “sometimes for one matter, sometimes for another” (as in the Fifth Meditation, which inserts the a priori demonstration of the existence of God in the middle of the consideration of the essence of material things, following a double chiasmus of God with matter and of essence with existence). There is an exclusive duality at stake, a contradiction of something that “is absurd,”12 opposing the existence of material things to the real distinction of body and soul. The title or possibly even the body of the text, as we will see, never notes the link between these two questions, or at least never explicitly. This inexplicable juxtaposition all the more raises several questions from the outset.

First, do the “material things” include the “body” or not? Does the body in question, this body that is so specific that what is at stake is in fact and by right nothing less than my body, belong to the realm of “material things” like a little territory in a much larger province, or does it constitute a domain that is irreducibly other and obeys different principles? In short, does this body, my body, count among the “material things” or not? Second, does the first question (the existence of material things) explain the following one (the real distinction between my mind and my body) as a consequence or particular application, or does it instead depend on it, presuppose it, and find its solution only with this latter question? Moreover, one finds an obvious symptom of such an indecisiveness regarding order (anyway, is it in this case a matter of the order of the subject-matter or that of reasoning?) of the Sixth Meditation (and its title) in the summary that the Synopsis gives of it: in the body of the text the existence of material things13 precedes the consideration of the relationship between mind and body,14 while in the summary everything is reversed, because it indicates first the relationship between mind and body (“In sexta denique . . . mentem realiter a corpore distingui probatur—in the Sixth Meditation . . . the mind is proved to be really distinct from the body”) and then, clearly afterward, the existence of material things (“et denique rationes omnes ex quibus rerum materialium existentia possit concludi, afferuntur—and, lastly, there is a presentation of all the arguments which enable the existence of material things to be inferred”).15 In short, one cannot avoid wondering whether the existence of corporeal things is shown after my body in connection with my mind or whether this connection takes its place in the corporeal things that already exist without it? What order, or rather orders, are at stake here, that of reasoning or that of subject-matter?

Yet there is more: After these two ambiguities regarding the connection between the two questions broached by the Sixth Meditation, there are two other uncertainties, each concerning one of the two terms and producing two further difficulties. The third difficulty concerns the relationship of mind to body: Is the issue one of establishing their distinction or rather their union? For the texts seem to limit themselves to juxtaposing one and the other without any transition: “mentem realiter a corpore distingui probatur; eandum nihilominus tam arcte ille esse conjunctam, ut unum quid cum ipsa componat, ostenditur—the mind is proved to be really distinct from the body, but is shown, notwithstanding, to be so closely joined to it that the mind and the body make up a kind of unity.”16 Besides, it is not a question only of comprehending how (or whether) the distinction agrees with the union, but whether Descartes attempts to establish the same thing with the distinction that governs the Sixth Meditation as what he will definitely call the “union of the soul with the body” in 1643.17 In short, is the point to establish a distinction between soul and body (subject to determining whether it arises from material things or not) or rather a union? And if both have to be maintained, what union and what distinction can one establish between the union and the distinction of the soul and the body?18

The fourth difficulty amounts to demanding whether the proof for the existence of material things really has true value as proof in Descartes’ eyes, in the sense in which the Second and Third Meditations (reinforced by the Fifth) had demonstrably established the ego’s and God’s existence. In fact, the Synopsis uses an entirely surprising and ambiguous formulation: “And, lastly, there is a presentation of all the arguments which enable the existence of material things to be inferred. The great benefit of these arguments is not, in my view, that they prove what they establish—namely that there really is a world, and that human beings have bodies and so on—since no sane person has ever seriously doubted these things. The point is that in considering these arguments we come to realize that they are not as solid or as transparent (perspicuas) as the arguments which lead us to knowledge of our own minds and of God.”19 One can probably underplay the surprise by reflecting on the fact that already in the Second Meditation it is only a matter of establishing that the existence (and the essence) of the mind is known better (notior) than that of the body; and that in the Third Meditation it is a matter of establishing that the perception of the infinite precedes (prior quodammodo in me) my own. All the same, nowhere else did Descartes ever declare one of his proofs (and what is more, the proof of existence) to lack in evidence and certainty or even to be useless: there are thus not three proofs of existence that are equal or three proofs of an equal existence. Is this a rhetorical precaution of apparent modesty, of negligence in a last-minute text? Or does Descartes here, frank as he almost always is, say exactly what he wants to say and really thinks? And in that case, in what sense does the final demonstration of existence, that of “material things,” really suffer from a theoretical weakness? And what sort of weakness?

The longest and subtlest expositions of the Sixth Meditation, even the masterpieces that are the most systematic (Gueroult) or analytical (Ryle and innumerable others following him), do not lead to anything, but aggravate the confusion, because they do not seriously identify these difficulties and do not confront them: namely, (a) the equivocal nature of body, (b) the order between the question of the existence of the world and that of the connection between my body and my mind, (c) the distinction or the union of the union and the distinction, and, finally, (d) the certainty of the proof of the existence of material things. I will here attempt to name them so as possibly to manage to think them.

§3. Kant’s Critique

The final difficulty of all the ones just enumerated, which in retrospect garners the greatest attention, is the one that concerns the certainty of the proof of the existence of material things. Strangely enough, it raises no serious objection from the main examiners of the Meditations, who instead focus on the distinction between mind and body. In a sense, after the Sixth Elucidation that Malebranche added to the second edition of his Search After Truth (in 1678), one must wait quite a bit, namely, for more than a century, for someone to call this into question. In a famous note in the Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason (1787), Kant calls the proof for the existence of material things “outside of us”—as Descartes was most probably the first to formulate it—into question explicitly.

First of all it is an indirect questioning that occurs within a larger framework of a “new refutation of psychological idealism, and a strict proof (the only possible one, I believe) of the objective reality of outer intuition. No matter how innocent idealism may be held to be as regards the essential ends of metaphysics (though in fact it is not so innocent), it always remains a scandal of philosophy and universal human reason that the existence (Dasein) of things outside us (from which we after all get the whole matter for our cognitions, even for our inner sense) should have to be assumed merely on faith, and that if it occurs to anyone to doubt it, we should be unable to answer him with a satisfactory proof.”20 Yet this calling into question quickly becomes direct when in the “Refutation of Idealism,” which already in the second edition of the Critique interrupts the course of the “Postulates of Empirical Thinking in General,” Kant clarifies: “Idealism (I mean material idealism) is the theory that declares the existence (Dasein) of objects in space outside us to be either merely doubtful and indemonstrable, or else false and impossible; the former is the problematic idealism of Descartes [Cartesius], who declares only one empirical assertion (assertio), namely I am, to be indubitable; the lat...