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Descartes, Scientia and PureEnquiryMark Glouberman aa The University of British Columbia and KwantlenPolytechnic UniversityPublished online: 31 Aug 2011.

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ARTICLE

DESCARTES, SCIENTIA AND PURE ENQUIRY

Mark Glouberman

In Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry, Bernard Williams supplies aninterpretation of Descartes’s Meditations in which the meditator’s cleansweep of initial beliefs is justified by a stance that abrogates all practicalpressures: the stance of pure enquiry. Otherwise, Williams explains, it

would not be reasonable to set many of the initial beliefs aside.Nowhere, however, does Descartes assert that his approach is in thissense ‘pure’. It would of course be preferable if the meditator’s rejection

of all the initial beliefs did not require an abrogation of the conditionsthat govern everyday belief-formation and assessment. I supply areading that accomplishes this. The key to this reading is recognition

that Descartes is a thinker of his time, a time when the pre-modernworldview was being systematically rejected. I show, in this regard, thatwhen Descartes characterizes a belief as ‘uncertain’, this has the

implication that the belief is false. And, certainly, the rational policy,without need for any special stance, is to reject falsehoods.

KEYWORDS: Descartes; Bernard Williams; Pure Enquiry; epistemology;

certainty; truth; modern science

1. ‘EPISTEME’ OR ‘SCIENTIA’?

Many of the words used in modern European languages as labels forcompartments of philosophy trace back to ancient Greek. The other majorundead tongue supplies a few names too. ‘Moral philosophy,’ whoseadjectival part derives from ‘mos,’ the Latin synonym of the Greek ‘ethos,’ ismore frequently inscribed in our syllabi and calendars than is ‘ethics.’Whatever explains epistemology not going by the lexical equivalent from thewestern side of the Adriatic, in the following respect it is a good thing.Forms of the Latin verb ‘scire,’ like those of its English synonym ‘to know,’attach as readily to the proposition that Ed the MC is a square as to theproposition that e¼mc2. But the noun ‘science,’ for which a cognate verb islacking, has a pronounced affinity for the likes of Einstein’s equation.Abstract or conceptual investigators of the latter and of our cognitivedealings with them do not call themselves ‘epistemologists.’ The label theyanswer to is ‘philosopher of science.’ For this, the compression ‘scientia-ist’offers itself as an apt distinguisher.

British Journal for the History of Philosophy 19(5) 2011: 873–886

British Journal for the History of PhilosophyISSN 0960-8788 print/ISSN 1469-3526 online ª 2011 BSHP

http://www.informaworld.com DOI: 10.1080/09608788.2011.599567

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Descartes is often called ‘the father of modern philosophy,’ paternityattributed on the basis that his work turned the discipline in the direction ofknowledge. Michael Dummett sums up the received view (while adding anegative spin to it) in asserting that ‘the foundation of all philosophy [is] notepistemology as Descartes misled us into believing.’1

Descartes’s invention of analytic geometry would have been enough tosave his name from oblivion. But Descartes’s activity did not end with theco-ordinate scheme. He was productive and influential in science proper,coming up, for instance, with an early form of the law of the conservation offorce and doing important work in optics.

Given the life’s work from which this is a sampling, the following questionsare provoked. Are the labours for which Descartes is most celebrated, thephilosophical labours, connected to high-level cognitive activity of the sort inwhich he engaged? Is Descartes, in the sense specified above, a scientia-ist?

I will argue for a strong version of the affirmative: Descartes’s reflectivedealings with truth-directed mentality do not have everyday knowledge astheir primary subject-matter; these dealings are informedat themost basic levelby a suitably abstract reckoning of the content of the higher grade activity.

Given that they come from very prominent parts of the Cartesian corpus,the following two pieces of evidence for the scientia-ist reading are especiallysignificant. The full title of Descartes’s Discourse on Method is: ‘Discours dela methode pour bien conduire sa raison, et chercher la verite dans les sciences.’In the opening paragraph of the Meditations, Descartes has his spokes-person (henceforth, ‘the meditator’) express the objective, thus: ‘to establish[something] in the sciences that was stable and likely to last.’2 In both works,Descartes employs a form of the word ‘science.’ But could he not have endedthe title with ‘chercher la verite’? And could he not have written ‘firm andlasting truths’ and left it at that? From the epistemological perspective, theshorter formulations are tailored exactly to the shape of the enterprise.

We are in a position to understand why the longer formulations might bemore than padding. In the languages that Descartes employs, the Latin ofthe Schools and the French of the day, the synonyms of ‘know’ have thesame wide spread as it does. The employment of the noun ‘science’ is,therefore, pretty much unavoidable given that the cognitive goods of interestare of the laboratory and lecture hall variety. ‘My readers,’ Descartes maybe imagined to think as he dips his quill, ‘are otherwise likely to take what Iwrite too broadly.’

1Frege: Philosophy of Language (London: Duckworth, 1973), 669. Dummett holds issues of

meaning to be foundational. The would-be parricide is in for a surprise, which is why I quote his

assertion.2Cartesian passages in translation are quoted from (and locations specified by volume and page

in) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volumes I and II, translated by J. Cottingham, R.

Stoothoff and D. Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) and Volume III,

also translated by Anthony Kenny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). The Latin

original here is: ‘si quid aliquando firmum & mansurum cupiam in scientiis stabilire.’

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2. ‘. . . TO DEMOLISH EVERYTHING COMPLETELY’3

Central to Bernard Williams’s epistemological interpretation of theCartesian position in Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry4 is, as thetitle proclaims, the idea of Pure Enquiry. The criticism of the idea’srelevance to Cartesian thought is an excellent way of motivating the scientia-ist view.

On first encounter with the opening of the Meditations – the ink is barelydry, and the meditator has already made a clean sweep of ‘[w]hatever I haveup till now accepted’ (II 17) – many will think that they find exaggeration.Williams, along with most interpreters, regards Descartes’s dramatics asphilosophically serious. So do I.

Williams recruits the idea of Pure Enquiry – ‘the undertaking of someonesetting aside all externalities or contingent limitations on the pursuit oftruth’ – to rationalise the meditator’s aggressiveness vis-a-vis his initial stockof beliefs. Descartes, as Williams reads him, therefore accepts the followingconditional. If the mode of enquiry is left unpurified; if, most saliently,practical concerns are not removed from the equation; some, even perhapsmany, of the beliefs with which the meditator starts out will survive thedoubt of Meditation 1, and the move to the cogito will not get into gear.

The idea of Pure Enquiry does the job that Williams assigns to it. But itsuse generates a burning successor problem for the Cartesian position:adoption of the stance has to be justified. Should he fail to supplyjustification, Descartes could not expect his readers to make the reasoningtheir own and retrace the meditator’s steps onwards. Where, however, doesDescartes deliver the goods?

Descartes’s writings contain no straight statement of the idea of PureEnquiry. In my view, the idea belongs only to Williams’s interpretans.Williams would, of course, dispute this. The idea is, he would say, implicit inwords such as these: ‘I have rid my mind of all worries and arranged formyself a clear stretch of free time’ (II 17). Williams had better have morecompelling evidence than this to go on. The quotation, from Meditation 1,can quite naturally be received as merely indicating in a florid manner thatthe enterprise in the offing is a second-order one – a conceptual, sc., not apractical, enterprise.5

Williams is in a very uncomfortable position here. From the perspectiveof his epistemological reading, the stance of Pure Enquiry has to be justified.Otherwise, the Cartesian enterprise cannot get beyond square one. Howunder the circumstances can Williams avoid saying either that Descartessomehow fails to register the justificatory need or that he deliberately omits

3Meditation 1 (II 17).4Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1978. Quotation two paragraphs hence: p. 66.5Williams (34–5) brings a fuller passage from Part Four of the Discourse on Method. Like the

words of Meditation 1, it too will yield by the close to my reading.

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from his presentation what he understands to be crucial to success? Agreed,like the rest of us mortals, Descartes will have suffered the occasional lapse.But Williams regards the idea of the stance as Descartes’s central idea – socentral as to sub-title his book after it. And indeed, the need for Descartes todo what he does not do is (if we accept Williams’s reading) as plain as thenose on his face.6

Under the circumstances, I see no way for Williams to avoid concedingthat it would, as a matter of interpretation, be much better if Descartes’sclean sweep in Meditation 1 did not require an electrified broom. It wouldthen be possible to decline both of the equally unpalatable alternativesserved up just above. ‘But,’ Williams will say, ‘the plain fact is thatDescartes does require the electrified broom. How else to mount the assaulton everyday beliefs?’ The question rests on a mistake. A clean sweep there is.It is a datum. Like the idea of Pure Enquiry, the aggression also belongs,however, only to Williams’s apparatus of interpretation. Like two playingcards neither of which can stand by itself, the pair props each other up: PureEnquiry is brought in to make sense of the aggression; the aggression isregarded as necessitating the appeal to Pure Enquiry. Once the attributionof aggression is blocked, the way is therefore clear for an interpreter totackle the critique of belief in some other manner.

3. THE PRINCIPLE OF DOUBT

The key to the scientia-ist reading can be supplied by applying themicroscope to the principle that governs the critique of belief in Meditation1; the very principle that Williams recruits the idea of Pure Enquiry toexplain. The Principle of Doubt (as it may be called) is enunciated in thefollowing paragraph.

Reason now leads me to think that I should hold back my assent fromopinions which are not completely certain and indubitable just as carefully as I

do from those which are patently false.(II 17)

6Apart from using homespun analogies such as the analogy of the fungus (54–5), Williams

attempts in a deeper way to justify the stance of Pure Enquiry. To the task, he brings (65ff.)

what he calls ‘the absolute conception of reality.’ What Williams says in this regard is quite

curious, however. The absolute conception, he writes, ‘will, I hope, emerge in the course of the

study’ (66). This immediately follows the assertion that the absolute conception ‘helps to

motivate Pure Enquiry’ (ibid.). If X is part of Y’s motivation, would not the proper course be to

bring X directly to bear to explain Y’s character, the more so when Y is problematic? Those

acquainted with Williams’s work will know that he has an independent interest in the absolute

conception. See for instance ‘Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline,’ Philosophy, 75 (2000):

477–96. By discussion’s end, the reader acquainted with Williams’s book will see that the fungus

analogy is disanalogous in the key respect. To restore the analogy, capsules of dioxin (all

poisonous) would need to be substituted for mushrooms (some edible).

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As it would be read and understood by the uncommitted philosophicalreader, the principle is quite resistible. No one would automatically accuse aviolator of being deficient in rationality. A more compelling version wouldrun as follows:

Reason leads me to think that I ought just as carefully to hold back my assentfrom opinions which are very far from being certain and indubitable as from

those which are manifestly false.

Much that is ordinarily believed would, however, withstand this attack.Without accusing Descartes of begging the question, interpreters musttherefore explain on what grounds he states ‘not entirely certain,’ not only‘entirely (or nearly entirely) not certain.’

The usual defensive line here is the one that Williams fortifies. The reasonthe Principle comes across on first encounter as problematic is that while therational among us would agree that in the face of massive grounds for doubtin the truth of a proposition disbelief is indicated, the attitude does nottranspose when massive positive evidence (and no negative evidence) for theproposition is to hand. In other words, it is the massiveness of the negativeevidence that sustains rational agreement. Where the contra-indications areminimal to negligible, the Principle seems not in the least binding.

Descartes is, it is claimed, shifting to the impractical stance. The objectiveof Pure Enquiry cannot be to achieve the whole truth. That is a divineprerogative. But the objective is at least to achieve nothing but the truth.Such being the case, the slightest possibility of falsehood is a sufficientground for disbelief. If belief would not be suspended under the (practical)pressures of the quotidian, it means that falsehood is good enough forpractical purposes – as sometimes it is.

Now, look again at the Principle. According to Descartes uncertaintiesshould not be assented to. They should not be assented to just as falsehoods,‘manifest’ falsehoods at that, are not assented to. Why is belief withheldfrom the latter? Because they are false. I contend that when Descartes saysthat uncertainties or dubitables should be rejected just as falsehoods are, hemeans exactly what he says. He is not saying only that the same responsegiven to the latter should be given to the former. He is saying that theresponse should be given for the same reason. And what, again, was thatreason? That reason was their falsehood. If it is the case that the sameresponse to the uncertainties should be given for the same reason, theimplication is clear: the uncertainties are false. Otherwise, the same responsewould be given for some other reason.

The linkage of uncertainty with falsehood is the axiom of the presentreading. Be the reading’s liabilities as may be, the following gain is plain. Toelicit agreement that falsehoods should be disposed of, it is not necessary toget a person to shift to a special stance. The rejection of falsehoods is astraight (or a straight enough) dictate of reason. Despite appearances, the

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Principle of Doubt does not therefore trample the distinction betweenpropositions about which the subject is, on the evidence, massively in doubt,and propositions in respect of which the grounds for doubt are vanishinglysmall. For Descartes, there is no distinction. This does not mean that forDescartes there are no differences. Obviously, there are. As it is, theargumentation that Descartes supplies is designed to show that thedifferences are not distinctions. It is designed to show that the differencesare not as sharp as they initially seem.7

Descartes’s critique is aimed at truth. His underlying view is that thebeliefs subjected to scrutiny are not true. Since any rational person wouldagree that achieving truth requires rooting out falsehood, Descartes’sobjective is directly secured. As I read it, the method of doubt, in Meditation1, is designed not to ensure truth by suspending belief on all that is notknown to be true. It is designed to ensure truth by rejecting all that is knownto be false.

‘Known to be false.’ Known by whom? Obviously, those to whom the textis addressed, viz., anyone who fits the description of the meditator, do notinitially know this. The argument is designed to bring them into that state.

4. CERTAINTY AND TRUTH

The Meditations puts the idea of certainty at its centre. Is this not anepistemological idea, outside the semantic circle to which truth belongs? Thequestion is not susceptible of an easy answer. Undeniably, the idea ofcertainty is vital in Descartes’s treatment. The Principle of Doubt can berecast as a principle of certainty: believe only what is certain. But althoughcertainty and truth are not identical, Descartes links the two very closely.The search for truth is prosecuted as a search for certainty.8 The logicalcharacter of Cartesian certainty I shall take a few baby steps towardsclarifying presently. A crucial piece of the puzzle here is the cogito. It is notonly the first certainty but also the first exemplification of the Cartesiannotion of truth.

If what I say here is right, for Descartes issues of meaning and truth areprimary, and issues of knowledge secondary. True, Descartes does not work

7The argumentation concerning normal and abnormal sense-perceptual states is an important

(and much misunderstood) instance. See ‘The Structure of Cartesian Scepticism,’ The Southern

Journal of Philosophy, XXI (1983): 343–57.8It would generally be admitted that certainty entails truth. As I see it, in Descartes’s hands the

two notions are mutually entailing. Some of this will emerge in the sequel. Williams (36) asserts

the following: ‘we constantly want the truth about various matters, but hardly ever demand

[certainty].’ This he regards as a ground for questioning the rationality of Descartes

prosecution of the search for truth as a search for certainty. Williams’ solution here we know:

Descartes’s Enquiry is Pure. But if uncertainty entails falsity, Williams is solving a non-existent

problem.

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out his concern with meaning and truth in the mode of a latter-dayphilosopher of language. His idiom sounds to us epistemological: certainty,indubitability, etc. In and of itself, this proves nothing. For Descartesoperates in the terms of his time. There might be more here, however, thanjust a difference of vocabulary. As we begin to get a better handle on whatDescartes is up to, the following question starts to form: is Descartes aphilosopher at all? He might, in crucial respects, be seen as an ideologue ofthe rising science, not of course as a mere publicist or propagandist, but asone striving to make a case in abstract terms that will guard the nascentactivity from succumbing to initial resistance. Not that Descartes woulddeny that he is a philosopher. The full title of the central Cartesian workthat we call the Meditations has in it the phrase ‘. . . on first philosophy’ (II17). But in so describing himself, he would be using ‘philosopher’ with thecontemporary meaning, and that might easily be something like ‘reflectiveintellectual operating at a high level of abstraction and aiming for a unified,or at least integrated, view.’ One who fills this bill could well be, in thepreceding sense, an ideologue too.

What, now, is an appropriate logic for certainty and its cognates?Working on the side of uncertainty, let me offer a structural parallel.Consider the idea of not being in Boston. This has a yes/no logic. Assumethat A is not in Boston and that B is not in Boston. It makes no sense to saythat A is less not in Boston than is B. Yet, it makes perfect sense to say thatA is closer than B is to Boston, and hence, by very slight extension, that A iscloser to being in Boston than B is. Uncertainty (whatever it is, and it is atleast connected inextricably to untruth) is a deviation from truth. Sinceuncertainty has degrees (one can be more uncertain in regard tosome proposition than in regard to another), claims of uncertainty,spelled out in respect of degree, can also give a measure of how far offthe truth is. A very uncertain proposition is as untrue as a nearly certainone. For truth, like being in Boston, is yes/no. But the very uncertainproposition is farther from certainty than the nearly certain (¼the much lessuncertain) one is. By parity, if A is in New York and B is in Miami, then,though A is exactly as much not in Boston as B is, A is closer than is B tobeing in Boston.

I have no intention of mounting a defence of this ‘logic,’ either for notbeing in Boston or for being uncertain. That it does not seem on the face ofit unintelligible suffices for our interpretive needs. The vital point is thefollowing. With regard to everyday belief, Descartes’s position on certainty,couched in modern typological terms, is eliminativist. In establishing thateveryday beliefs are uncertain, Descartes is establishing that they are (atbest) approximations to truth, in the way that, say, the values generated bythe formulae of Newtonian mechanics approximate those of relativitytheory. (For our everyday purposes, it is much easier to use the former,which are good enough as guides to choice and action; even, given the costsof doing the exact calculations, better.)

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The position is eliminativist. Though Descartes doesn’t have this label athis disposal, several passages support its application. One of these is locatedin the Meditations itself, though in the Synopsis rather than in the text’smain body. Descartes explains what is in the offing:

In the First Meditation reasons are provided which give us possible grounds

for doubt about all things, especially material things, so long as we have nofoundations for the sciences other than those which we have had up until now.

(II 9)

The implication? Once we have the foundations, the reasons for doubt willno longer affect the self-same things. This could only be the case, however, ifsome substantial change is wrought in those things by the availability of thefoundations. It is like Frege’s logical basis for arithmetic. Had Frege’sproject succeeded, the arithmetical propositions derivable from Peano’saxioms would have been put on a different basis. For being so put, theirtruth grounds (and hence meanings) would have been affected. ‘2þ 2¼ 4’would, that is, have been understood differently.9

In Part two of the Discourse on Method, Descartes had explicitly said thislast.

But regarding the opinions to which I had hitherto given credence, I thought Icould not do better than undertake to get rid of them, all at one go, in order toreplace them afterwards with better ones, or with the same ones once I had

squared them with the standards of reason.(I 117)

The main upshot is that the Cartesian move from uncertainty to certainty isa move from one set of world-representing propositions to another. Thecontents of the two sets are disjoint. It follows that no uncertain propositioncan become certain, just as no false proposition can become true. The samewords may of course be used to express a proposition that the meditatoraccepts once he has achieved certainty as he used to express what heregarded as true at the start. But the meaning of the words has changed inthe course of the transition, and that change is bound up internally with theshift from uncertainty to certainty.

5. CHILDHOOD AND FALSEHOOD

Persuasive support for the approach can be had by carefully examining thefirst sentence of the body of the Meditations.

9In Rule 4 of the Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Descartes speaks of ‘a kind of

mathematics quite different from the one which prevails today,’ the one that deals with what

he calls ‘bare numbers and imaginary figures’ (I 18). The different kind he refers to as ‘true

mathematics’ (I 19).

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Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I hadaccepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of thewhole edifice that I had subsequently based on them.

(II 17)

On the Pure Enquiry approach, the sentence is highly problematic. The claimcannot be that because of fallibility each of us is under a rational obligationto scour his or her beliefs; the claim cannot be that because Descartesacknowledges the capacity to err to be an inexpungeable feature of thehuman condition, while theMeditations, by its end, has discharged whateverrational obligation is here being motivated. It might be replied that until thenature of the fallibility is better understood, a reason does exist for enteringinto the investigation. But in that case, the investigation would have to berepresented not as a search for truth but as an enquiry into our workings asformers of beliefs. Such an investigation, as a dispassionate reflective one,makes perfect sense quite apart from whether we are infallible. One mightlike to know, for instance, the nature of (infallible) God’s cognition.

The enquiry is not a purely intellectual one. To pin down the existentialbasis, notice a further problem in the opening. The meditator recalls hisyounger days. It is easy to pass over these backwards-directed remarks asmere mise-en-scene. So far as the epistemological reading of Descartes goes,it is in fact necessary to pass them over in this way. For two reasons, thewords are hard to make sense of from the epistemological perspective. Thefirst reason concerns ‘childhood.’ The second concerns ‘falsehood.’

Is the project a conceptual version of what is done by developmentalpsychologists – a comparison and contrast of the specifics of beliefformation of children and of adults? That would void it of critical interest.The fact that children and adolescents are (as they certainly are)incompetent belief formers has no critical potential in regard to a personwho has left those conditions behind. Now that I have adult teeth, caries ofthe sort to which the milk teeth that fell out long ago were susceptible are athing of the past. The need has passed to take preventive or prophylacticmeasures against them. Similarly, having put away childish and adolescentthings, I am no longer the belief former that then I was. That is not to saythat belief formation is for me problem-free. It is to say that such problemsas I have are different, and need to be dealt with on their own terms.

‘Descartes,’ a sympathetic reader might interject, ‘is just saying that whenwe glance back to our youth and appreciate how ineffective our beliefforming capacities were then, it might occur to us that we might not be soeffective now.’ Ignoring the fact that the second ‘might’ is pretty toothless,this sounds more reasonable. But it is still not reasonable enough. Is notappeal to the childhood state entirely unnecessary to support the appercu?What mature person would not be aware is that his or her life as a maturebelief former is no picnic? The plain fact, then, is that this whole line ofconstrual does not fit what Descartes writes. The meditator refers to the

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‘edifice based on falsehoods that were accepted as true in childhood.’The earlier beliefs, it seems, are still active, cognitively speaking. ‘What,’ onemight ask, ‘could Descartes mean by this? I believed (say) that there was atooth fairy. What did I base on that fairy story that remains now that I canhandle the tooth?’

The project is supposed to be compelling, and not just to the learned.Read thus, what Descartes says would compel no one, least of all thelearned. What then is Descartes saying? The ‘childhood’ to which referenceis being made has to be understood situationally and historically, notbiologically. The childhood in question is a cultural childhood.10 It is theway of thinking that prevailed before the advent of modernity; specifically,before the emergence of the modern scientific way. ‘When we were young’effectively means ‘before we began to think of the world as we now do.’ Sothe pronouns and pronominal phrases that pepper the opening of theMeditations do not have a completely general application, in the way thatthey would if the project were, in the modern sense, philosophical. ‘Someyears ago,’ to take one instance, means, roughly, ‘some years before the startof the seventeenth century.’ Socrates, who questioned his own knowledge,could not have spoken the meditator’s words as his own.

Now the mentioned pre-modern way of thinking is not just a way ofthinking that could lead to false beliefs. Any way could do that. It is a waythat did lead to false beliefs, indeed on a continental scale. The world intowhich Descartes had been born was in the grip of a grand illusion, itsinhabitants on the receiving end of a mass hallucination. This historical factexercises an influence on the text, since when Descartes speaks ofuncertainties he is speaking (as I have explained) of falsehoods. But theinfluence of the history is almost necessarily missed by epistemologicalinterpreters, for whom the question has to be: how is it to be ensured thatbeliefs are true? and not: how are false beliefs to be eliminated?

The Principle of Doubt is a negative principle. Its language is monitoryand ominous: ‘hold back assent,’ ‘not entirely certain and indubitable,’‘patently false.’ Dispassionate second-order researchers would never set outin a state of high anxiety. They are driven by free-floating curiosity(‘wonder’) about how things are. Why begin negatively? It is not, one hopes,just a matter of authorial temperament.11 The answer is heaving into view. InDescartes’s time, the vultures were circling the body of what had passed forknowledge; what had been taken as true. The old emperor was proving tohave been ‘naked,’ though he had seemed to his subjects (and continued to

10It is common for colonisers to represent the colonised as child-like or immature or infantile.

The ‘modern’ project is a project of colonial conquest relative to the pre-modern one. So

Descartes’s choice of language is natural enough.11For some relevant remarks on Descartes’s super-cautiousness, see Williams, 18. I would turn

the usual view on its head here and enter the mild paranoia to explain away what looks like the

epistemological scepticism of the Meditations – the view, so central to epistemological readings,

that we lack knowledge because certain things, e.g. dreaming, are logical possibilities.

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many to seem) to be ‘dressed in purple’ (Meditation 1 [II 18]). The oldempire, that is, was proving to have been a house of cards: jokers rather thanlegitimate kings and queens. Deposition and the installation of a new regime,or perhaps a great instauration, were in order. So it is not for Descartes justthat we all of us tend to believe things that we ought not to believe. Descartesis saying that the beliefs formed by the received methods are objectionable.This is not as general a claim as first appears. It has a specific real-worldreference.

6. THREE FRAMES

Rather than refining the logical/conceptual treatment of Cartesian certainty,I shall end the discussion along a less-demanding route. Working fromhistorical and contextual considerations, I shall explain the real-worldproblem that Descartes faced and describe how he rose to the challenge. Itwill come together at the cogito.

Three separate ways of thinking influence Descartes: the Aristotelian wayof thinking; Montaigne’s way; the way of thinking of nascent (modern)science, as Descartes understands it.

A full discussion of the ideas that define or constitute the ways is‘something I could . . . never manage’ (II 17). I will therefore comment onemblems of the three ways, architectural emblems: Chartres Cathedral; theCathedral of Florence; the Buckminster Fuller’s Geodesic Dome.

Focus on the orientation of each. The orientation of Chartres is upwards.The soaring and tapering spires draw the eye towards the heaven. Thetortured elongation of the human figures depicted on the stone panels of theCathedral is a plastic version of the same stress on spiritual destiny,understood in Christian eschatological terms. Everything, that is, iscalibrated and judged in relation to a position up above. The origin, the{0,0,0}-point, of the co-ordinate scheme relative to which everything islocated is situated at God. The Cathedral of Florence, capped by a dome,shifts the orientation. The eye is drawn down to the earth from the cupola’sapex. The goings-on on terra firma (inclusive of the creedal ones) become thefocus of attention.12 Buckminster Fuller’s construction has no orientation,or, perhaps, is oriented in all directions. There is no privileged position. Theeye is drawn nowhere. The {0,0,0}-point can be situated anywhere.

The structures are emblematic of three historically influential worldviews,each of which has an associated metaphysic (to be more accurate: in the caseof the middle one an anti-metaphysic – which is why I did not in its regardlocate a {0,0,0}-point). I have named names. Now a bit of elaboration.

12The Dome of the Florence Cathedral was designed by Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446). One

of the most important architects of the Italian Renaissance, Brunelleschi is well known for

specifically civic structures.

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The worldview associated with Aristotle13 has several features that clashhead-on with Descartes’s position. The irreducible (‘metaphysical’) dualityof form and matter is one; the adjustment of the view of the structure of theworld to human sense-perception, another. Both are attacked in theMeditations.

In its mechanism and details, the wax experiment of Meditation 2 is achallenge to interpret. But if we bear in mind the needs of science (asDescartes saw them), the experiment, so far as its gross character is con-cerned, falls smartly into place. Aristotle’s natural principles are qualitative;should some features of the world submit to quantitative expression, that isfortuitous. Descartes is committed to the full mathematisability of the world.If this commitment rests on more than hope, it has to be proven that thematerial occupiers of space do not interfere with the application of structuresof the sort that (pure) mathematicians work with. The identification ofmatter with extension delivers (i.e., is regarded as delivering) what is neededhere to ensure the status of mathematics as the language of nature.14

The attack on the senses as ‘a basic principle’ (II 17) of belief formation inMeditation 1 is more transparently connected to the business of orientation,though the coarseness of the senses might also foster the mistaken view ofmatter as finitely divisible. The connection is implicit in Descartes’sassertion that ‘the senses . . . deceive us concerning things which are verysmall or in the distance’ (ibid.). All sense-perception involves ‘things’ whichare displaced from the perceiver; the middle-sized ones as much as the smallones, the ones close by as much as the ones far off. Sense-based cognitionhas this displacement as a structural feature; a feature that cannot thereforebe overcome without leaving the senses for something else. And the deeperclaim is that the Aristotelian view, like Chartres, essentially involves thisfeature.

Descartes’s evil genius can, thus, be loosely identified with a personage offlesh-and-blood. One of Chartres’s stone reliefs depicts a lecture hall in aseminary. Contrary to expectation, the assembled are not studying the Bible.They are listening to a reading of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics. TheCorpus Aristotelicum, as filtered through scholasticism, can therefore beidentified as, from Descartes’s perspective, the Satanic Verses.15

13The association I speak of is forged by the formative thinkers of early modernity. Whether it

passes off, a forgery is another question. The chief point for here is that Aristotelian thought is

seen to promote one reference frame as privileged.14Kant, whose general thinking is more Aristotelian than Descartes’s but who is equally

committed to science, tries to achieve the same result in a different way. But the argument in the

Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science for the mathematisability of space assumes in the

end what it aims to prove. See ‘The Distinction Between ‘‘Transcendental’’ and ‘‘Metaphysical’’

in Kant’s Philosophy of Science,’ The Modern Schoolman, LV (1978): 357–85.15A contemporary verbal report by Walter of Wimborne, the chief classicising monk in

thirteenth century England, is even more revealing here. Walter inspired the others. ‘And what

was his own inspiration? In a commentary, Walter gives his idea of heaven and that for which

he prays. The image he chooses is that of listening among the blessed to a reading from the

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Descartes enters the scene only after a considerable thaw had occurred.Bacon, Descartes’s senior by nearly a generation, roundly attackedAristotle. Descartes’s contemporary Hobbes let off many volleys. But themain Weltanschauung after the Aristotle-based one was, as I signalled, noton a par with the Aristotle-based one. The Humanism of the Renaissancefocussed on human reality. It did not do so by way of saying that men andwomen are more important than God, or the earth more central than theheavens. It did so because of an intense interest in men and women. Lookpast the Cathedral at Florence, and you might come to Brueghel’s paintingsof potato-like men and women, near to the ground, their clothing aside notmuch different than domestic animals, engaged in the myriad down-to-earthactivities that men and women engage in.16

Philosophy is generality-hungry. So, qua philosopher, Descartes cannotstop with Montaigne, who is representative of no one but himself. Themeditator asks the same large question as does Montaigne: ‘Que scais-je?’But where, for Montaigne, ‘Distinguo is the most universal member of mylogic,’17 the meditator comes forward as Everyman.

Descartes steps into this vacuum of general structure. The philosophicaldistillation of his new structure is the cogito. Though the underlyingphilosophy is hard, the main point for here is easy. Sense-perceptioninvolves, structurally and hence irremediably involves, the (spatio-temporal)displacement of subject from object described earlier. The meditator’s accessto himself is clear of such displacement: the subject and object coincide; theyare one and the same. Unlike the moon, my mental conditions have nobacksides. My mental conditions could not engage in the adolescent activityof mooning. Every feature of them (on Descartes’s understanding) is as fullyavailable as any other. Or, to employ the meditator’s words, it can never bethat my mental conditions are, for me, ‘very small or in the distance’ (II 17).

Of course, my knowledge of myself is not my knowledge of the world. Butthe next Cartesian move here is plain. It is captured by this proportionality:

God : physical world :: individual subject : self

heavenly throne. The book . . . ? It was Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics’. It is one thing to have

Chartres’s master expounding Aristotle. Here we have Aristotle schooling the Almighty himself!

(The quote is from A. Murray, ‘Confession as a historical source in the thirteenth century,’ in

The Writing of History in the Middle Ages, edited by R.H.C. David et al. [Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1981] 32.) No wonder Descartes complains about those who ‘confound Aristotle with the

Bible’ (Letter of 31 March 1641 [III 177]).16There is a whole palette of Brueghels. Take this as a collective reference – especially to the two

Pieters. Note that the secular content of the Brueghel canvases is not a rejection of religion.

Plastic representations of that sort were discouraged in Protestant Europe. The human content

of the religious art of the Italian Renaissance makes the same general point in paint and stone.17Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, translated by Donald M. Frame

(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965) 252.

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‘God,’ as the Augustinian formula has it, ‘is a circle whose center iseverywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.’ Or, in standardphilosophy-of-religionese: God is everywhere and everywhen. Or, architec-turally: an infinitely large Buckminster Fuller’s Dome! God, then, is asubject of cognition who, in respect of the world as a whole and the goings-on therein, is in the optimal condition that a subject such as the meditatoroccupies only with respect to his or her self. ‘[H]e on whom I depend haswithin him all those greater things, not just indefinitely and potentially, butactually and infinitely’ (Meditation 3 [II 35]). So while it is true that God,being maximally benevolent, is not a deceiver, it is also true, and moreimportant for the Cartesian project, that God’s cognitive condition makesconcrete sense of the very idea of a frameless grasp of the objective world.For unless that idea makes sense, God has nothing to guarantee.

7. RELATIVITY AND ABSOLUTIVITY

Leaving the issue of the logic of Cartesian certainty and uncertainty in aninchoate state, I took the roadmore travelled by.Thismuch at least cannowbeadded about the less trodden path: the semantics of the Aristotelian view areunequal to the Cartesian notion of truth.18 Less allusively: the move toCartesian truth, the move that Descartes presents as that from uncertainty tocertainty, requires a fundamental change. The kind of relativity that is astructural feature of sense-perceptual contact with things has to be eliminated.

With the schematic history under our belts, we can now see clearly thatthe stance of Pure Enquiry is irrelevant to the Principle of Doubt’s (measureof) validity. The reason for rejecting the initial beliefs is that they bear theindelible marks of that relativity. Because they do, the objective world, asrepresented by them, is misrepresented. That view of the world has to bereplaced. The achievement of what Descartes calls ‘certainty’ from the initialcondition of uncertainty is the replacement.

The intellectual labours reported in the Meditations are modelled on theevents of a night, the night of 10 November 1619, that Descartes passed in astove-heated room, a poele, in the town of Ulm, in Bavaria. The poele, then,asks to be identified as the obstetric ward of Cartesianism. Ulm’s mostfamous native son, born there on 14 March 1879, is none other than AlbertEinstein. It emerges, then, that Descartes’s framelessness – or, as it mightalso be called, his theory of absolutivity – originated in the same place as didEinstein’s theory of relativity.

The University of British Columbia and Kwantlen Polytechnic University

18In the Principles of Philosophy, Part One, 59 (I 212), Descartes ‘analyses’ the basic Aristotelian

terms of metaphysical analysis – genus, species, differentia, property, accident – so that they

come out as abstractions.

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