The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (13 page)

What alternative is there? One radical alternative is to be found in a vision of physical reality as itself making sense (the ‘reenchantment’ of the world) and a concomitant vision of us, who aspire to make sense of physical reality, as being ourselves a part of it, as aspiring in effect to become participants in its own sense-making. This makes the relation between us and physical reality akin to the relation between a new member of a linguistic community and the community as a whole. It also replaces the idea that making sense of physical reality consists in representing it by the idea that making sense of physical reality consists in actively expressing the sense that it itself already makes. We shall see many variations on this theme in what is to come. In particular we shall see one very distinctive variation on it in the next protagonist, Spinoza.
⁴¹

Spinoza is a post-Cartesian philosopher.
⁴²
This of course means more than that he succeeds Descartes. It means that many of his problems and
questions are Cartesian problems and questions, even when his doctrines are not Cartesian doctrines, and that his own philosophy is shaped in ineliminable ways by his borrowing, developing, applying, amending, challenging, and rejecting what Descartes passes on to him. It is a measure of Descartes’ greatness that there should be any such thing as post-Cartesian philosophy in this sense.

1
Perhaps he took it to be beyond doubt that he existed (see §3), but it is a contingent truth that he existed.

2
For discussion of how the former pursuit assumes the form of the latter see Williams (
1978
),
Ch. 2
. For Descartes’ use of the term ‘
scientia
’, see
Replies
, VII: 141, and the translators’ n. 2.

Note: throughout this chapter, I use the following abbreviations for Descartes’ works:
Correspondence
for Descartes (
1991
);
Discourse
for Descartes (
1985b
);
Meditations
for Descartes (
1984a
), and
First Meditation
,
Second Meditation
, etc. for its separate parts;
Passions
for Descartes (
1985d
);
Principles
for Descartes (
1985c
);
Replies
for Descartes (
1984b
); and
Rules
for Descartes (
1985a
), and
Rule One
,
Rule Two
, etc. for its separate parts. Page references are to the edition by Adam and Tannery as indicated in the margins of these works, with Roman numerals representing volume numbers and Arabic numerals representing page numbers.

3
See
Replies
, VII: 144–146; and cf.
Meditations
, VII: 69. These remarks should become clearer in §3. Note: I do not claim that
all
the indubitable truths to which Descartes attended were truths about how things must be, in this strong sense. Again (cf. n. 1) there is an issue about his own existence. I claim only that, where the indubitable truths to which he attended were of this kind, their indubitability depended on that fact. (For an especially striking example see
Meditations
, VII: 25, the pair of sentences beginning ‘But there is a deceiver…’.)

4
For more on the relations between Descartes and his predecessors see Williams (
1978
), pp. 137–138; Cottingham (
1986
), pp. 4–6; and Ariew (
1992
). Husserl, in Husserl (
1995
), §10, complains about ‘how much scholasticism lies hidden, as unclarified prejudice, in Descartes’
Meditations
.’ (We shall return to Husserl’s criticisms of Descartes in
Ch. 17
, §3.) Heidegger echoes the complaint in Heidegger (
1962a
), p. 46/p. 25 in the original German.

5
For more on Descartes’ use of the term ‘intuition’, see §4.

6
Such reservations, in any case, have a largely non-Cartesian motivation.

7
Just before this passage Descartes gives his own explicit definition of ‘metaphysics’, which I think conforms well with my own use of the term in application to him. He defines it as ‘the first part of philosophy …, which contains the principles of knowledge, including the explanation of the principal attributes of God, the non-material nature of our souls and all the clear and distinct notions which are in us’ (ibid.). The rest of this chapter should help to clarify the various elements in this definition.

For the idea that the overall attempt to make sense of things can properly be pursued for its own sake, see Cooper (
2002
), pp. 59–60. Jonathan Bennett, in Bennett (
2003
),
Ch. 20
, attributes an ulterior motive to Descartes, of which he thinks Descartes himself may have an insecure grasp: he sees Descartes as ultimately seeking
peace of mind
, and he thinks that, if there were a pill that would give Descartes this peace of mind, he might just as well take it. There are passages that support this view: see e.g. the passage from
Replies
, VII: 145, quoted in Walker (
1989
), p. 46. (I mention this quotation by Ralph Walker because he corrects the original translation. He replaces ‘alleged “absolute falsity”’ by ‘absolute falsity’.) Nevertheless, Bennett’s view seems to me to downplay Descartes’ concern with self-understanding. Insofar as there
are
ulterior motives in Descartes’ overall attempt to make sense of things – and it should be noted that such motives do not preclude his making the attempt for its own sake as well – they are motives that he himself occasionally acknowledges, for instance in
Discourse
, VI: 61–62, where he refers to ‘a practical philosophy which might replace the speculative philosophy taught in the schools’ and says that ‘through this philosophy we could … make ourselves, as it were, the lords and masters of nature.’

8
Both views will receive further discussion: see
Ch. 10
, §1, and
Ch. 12
, §6, respectively.

9
Cf. in this connection Wittgenstein (
1967a
), Pt I, §183 (although the very last sentence of that section stands in interesting tension with what Descartes says about believing what is true and pursuing what is good (see
Meditations
, VII: 57–58)).

10
Some people would insist on using the word ‘may’ in such a context, rather than the word ‘can’, to emphasize that what is in question is a kind of permissibility. So be it: permissibility itself is still a kind of possibility.

11
Cf. Williams (
2006c
), p. 240. Another relativization worth noting is the relativization to effort: there are some things that I can doubt only with a certain degree of effort. Cf. the final paragraph of
First Meditation
; cf. also Hume (
1978a
), p. 269. But this does not help Descartes, for the simple reason that a genuine sceptic, against whose assault he is trying to protect his edifice, is always liable to apply the requisite effort.

12
I use ‘beyond doubt’ and ‘indubitable’ synonymously.

13
The reference to clarity is thus pleonastic: distinctness entails clarity (ibid.).

14
In all three of these passages Descartes avers that, but for some guarantee which he believes he can provide (see below), it is an open question whether that which is clearly and distinctly perceived to be true is in fact true. (In the first passage the verb he uses is ‘conceive’ rather than ‘perceive’, and he talks of ‘ideas’ rather than ‘perceptions’, but the point is the same.)

15
Contra
Jonathan Bennett: see Bennett (
1998
), §VI.

16
For Descartes’ very broad conception of ‘thinking’, see
Principles
, Pt One, §32.

17
Note that Descartes has another argument for the existence of God: see
Meditations
, VII: 65–67. (In
Replies
, VII: 120, he claims that ‘there are only two ways of proving the existence of God.’)

18
We shall return to the relations between relativized modalities and unrelativized modalities in Chs 9 and 10. See §§4 and 3 of those chapters, respectively.

19
In this respect I am less charitable to him than Jonathan Bennett, who tries but fails, in my view, to justify the circumspection: see Bennett (
1998
), §VII. In other respects, I should emphasize, I am greatly indebted to Bennett’s excellent essay. (Also very helpful is James Conant (
1991
), pp. 115–123, though in various respects I am
more
charitable to Descartes than Conant is.)

20
See Moore (
2002b
). And see
Ch. 10
, §3, for discussion of a similar idea in the later work of Wittgenstein.

21
For excellent discussions of the Cartesian Circle, see Williams (
1978
), pp. 189–204; Cottingham (
1986
), pp. 66–70; Loeb (
1992
); van Cleve (
1998
); and Bennett (
2003
), §149.

22
Cf. Hume (
1975a
), pp. 149–150.

23
That James refers to the will here rather than the intellect is noteworthy in the light of Descartes’ theory of error (see §4). Cf. Bernard Williams’ reference to ‘wilful obstinacy’ in Williams (
2006c
), p. 244. Cf. also Spinoza (
2002a
), ¶77.

24
But intuition is not confined to such metaphysical principles, nor yet to necessities. Descartes includes, among the examples of truths of which he has an intuition, that he exists. Note that he also acknowledges a third kind of perception, which he calls ‘imagination’ (
Principles
, Pt One, §32).

25
Descartes himself emphasizes similarities between intuition and sensory perception in
Rules
, X: 400–401. Cf. Kurt Gödel’s celebrated comparison of mathematical intuition with sensory perception in Gödel (
1983
), pp. 483–485.

26
The idea that intuition, rather than sensory perception, reveals the nature of physical reality is a dominant theme of Hatfield (
2002
). See also Loeb (
1990
).

27
Cf. in this connection Descartes’ pervasive use of the metaphor of light. He often says that what we intuit is manifest to us by ‘the natural light’ or ‘the light of nature’ (e.g.
Meditations
, VII: 41), and what is manifest to us by the natural light is supposed to help us see how the natural light makes things manifest to us. For further discussion of Descartes’ use of this metaphor, see Derrida (
1982d
), pp. 266–267, and Ayers (
1998
), esp. p. 1014.

28
Cf. van Cleve (
1998
), §X; and see the reference to Stephen Leeds in his n. 58. Cf. also Quine (
1969b
), p. 71, where Quine insists that we can understand ‘the link between observation and science’ by using ‘information … provided by the very science whose link with observation we are seeking to understand.’ If ‘observation’ is understood as including clear and distinct perception, and if ‘science’ is understood cognately with ‘
scientia
’ (see above, n. 2), then Descartes would agree. For a demurral, see Nietzsche (
1967c
), §486. And for a profound recoil from any such naturalism, see
Ch. 17
.

29
As I remarked in n. 17, Descartes has another argument for the existence of God. That argument, which is often called ‘the ontological argument’, has found surprising appeal of its own among analytic philosophers: see e.g. Russell (
1998
), p. 60, and Murdoch (
1993
),
Ch. 13
.

30
Cf. Thomas Baldwin (1988), p. 36, where he explicitly compares this kind of argument with Descartes’ argument.

31
For an interesting exchange on this argument, see Brewer (
2004
) and Stroud (
2004
).

32
For a fuller discussion of the connections between them, with specific reference to Wittgenstein, see Moore (
2011
).

33
I do not mean to suggest that it is different only in this respect. Another important difference is that, whereas Descartes argues that he must grant the existence of something infinite if he is to explain how he has his idea, Nagel argues that we must grant the existence of something infinite if we are so much as to characterize our idea. As regards explaining how we have our idea, Nagel takes seriously the possibility that this is something we cannot do (Nagel (
1997
), p. 76).