I would like to show three things here, the first two of which can be considered together and the third of which emerges from them. First, I want to show that there is a structure and purpose akin to fables in early moments of Descartes’ texts throughout his career; second, that this structure and purpose mean that the method he developed is neither as simple nor as pure as he claimed; and third, that, with these first two readings of Descartes’ philosophy at hand, the mind’s faculties are reformed thanks to the imagination, which is itself a faculty.
Cottingham (1988) describes Descartes’ method succinctly when he writes that it “consists in breaking a problem down and taking it back to its simplest essentials, until we arrive at propositions which are simple and self-evident enough to serve as reliable ‘principles’ or starting points, from which the answers to the questions that perplex us may eventually be deduced” (Cottingham 1988, p. 36). Descartes developed this method in imitation of mathematics , especially geometry and what will become, through him, algebra , where knotty problems are resolved through a process of simplification until the essential points are revealed and the solution clear. One of his major contributions to philosophy is the generalization of this method, known as analytic reduction or analysis , beyond mathematics proper, into all scientific pursuits, including metaphysics.
However, Descartes did not develop this method in a vacuum , but in explicit distinction from the investigative methods dominant in at least the universities of the time. In particular, it was developed against what in mathematics is called the synthetic method, a method Descartes associates with syllogisms . Whereas a synthesis operates via “assumed abstract objects and statements about them, and, by a series of steps conventionally admitted to be valid, arrived at a desired conclusion ” (Jones 1986, p. 66), a syllogism’s conclusion emerges from previously accepted premises . Neither approach is acceptable for Descartes because he wants to be able to claim that his scientific knowledge is clear and distinct precisely because it does not emerge from assumptions or premises not arrived at from an analytic reduction.
He wants to be able to claim to have shown to himself clear and distinct ideas as concerns the truth of the world . He needs to be able to make such a claim, and thus to be able to show others how they can show such things to themselves, despite and because he himself came across it by chance and not by method (see CSM I, p. 112; AT VI, p. 3). Descartes begins many of his texts—in particular the Discourse on Method, the Meditations on First Philosophy, and the Principles of Philosophy—by saying we should take note of facts such as, at a distance , a square tower can appear round. If the world is sometimes deceptive, it is dubitable, and there would seem to be no escape from this doubt , especially if “All teaching and all learning through discourse proceed from previous knowledge ” (Aristotle 1981, 71a) when this previous knowledge would itself be based on deceptive, dubitable sensation .1 Thus, Descartes’ search is for a method that will allow for correcting some of the errors involved with synthesis and syllogism.
However, he runs into the problem of justifying this new method. Indeed, the question at hand in much of Descartes’ project is how any method is justified. On the one hand, it might appear as though utility could be a satisfactory explanation. On the other, this explanation works on the assumption that a method has already been deployed because, to judge something as useful, a method must have already been used in order for its utility to be discovered. What is at stake in Descartes is how anyone can inaugurate a new method. Doing so requires a shift in thinking , in the most basic standards of what even constitutes thinking . Thus, it is impossible for Descartes, for the most part and in most of his works, to engage in the syllogistic or synthetic reasoning of the universities of his day. One cannot inaugurate a new method through an old one, at least not when the methods at hand are fundamental for all education . Some technique other than that of logic , of proofs , premises , and conclusions is required.
In at least three crucial moments throughout Descartes’ career, he has recourse to an interesting choice of technique: the fable. In the beginning of The World, or a Treatise on Light, the Discourse, and in a late portrait made of him, Descartes (or a book he holds in the portrait) refers to his work (or to the world itself) as a fable. In the context of the pedagogical reorientation at the heart of the Cartesian project, ‘fable’ is not just one literary genre among others. It is a genre with pedagogical intent embedded within it in a way other genres do not necessarily have. It also cannot be forgotten that the fable is a literary genre , and is thus associated with the imagination. That Descartes has recourse to an imaginative, literary technique to launch his new method should not be dismissed too easily. Rather than engaging the reader directly in how he can justify his method—an impossible task when the method is at the heart of justification itself—Descartes focuses on how he can get his reader into his method. Doing so is accomplished through the fable, through telling a story that draws the reader into his way of thinking such that he or she begins thinking along with Descartes, begins deploying this method on his or her own. Thus, utility is not a justification for the method until after the reader has already been immersed in the method. The new method is set to work by the imaginative act involved in telling a fable, and this new method becomes the operation of a new kind of pedagogy that Descartes is interested in developing—one of a self-instruction that involves no assumptions (save, of course, that of the fable’s story).
The third thing I hope to show, that the mind’s faculties are reformed through the faculty of the imagination, emerges from these first two points in that the mind is that which applies the method, or is that which does the thinking along with Descartes. It is not that there had never been thinking prior Descartes or that there were no minds at all. Rather, it is that the thinking and the methods for what was considered proper thinking were problematic and the minds formed by this thinking and method were in fact malformed or deformed. What was malformed or deformed, then, was the mind’s faculties. Yet these faculties are what engage in thinking , which means they are to reform themselves in Descartes’ reformation of the mind and the method it will use to gain clear and distinct ideas about the world. Through the fable, Descartes engages the faculty of the imagination to begin this reformation . Among the faculties to be reformed by the imagination and through the fable will of course be the will, which is considered infinite . However, at least in the Sixth Meditation , the imagination is considered finite because it is dependent on finite perceptions , which would seem to make it impossible for it to reform the infinite will (see CSM II, p. 54–55; AT VII, p. 79). The use of the fable as an imaginative technique to inaugurate the method used by the mind, however, shows that the imagination cannot be considered purely finite . Indeed, Descartes’ fables ask the reader to imagine the world as other than how it appears such that the mind’s faculties, including the will, can take up this new world through his method. This dynamic shows that the faculty of the imagination is neither precisely finite nor precisely infinite but is rather what I will call transfinite , moving between the finite and the infinite . The imagination, through the fable, exceeds limits it will set for itself in the reformation of the faculties established by the method of...