Series: A Selective History of 17th & 18th Century Epistemology? (Part 1: Rationalism)
"Of the things which may be brought within the sphere of the doubtful."
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“One of the great historic controversies in philosophy is the controversy between the two schools called respectively 'empiricists' and 'rationalists'.”
As the British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, summarised in The Problems Of Philosophy (1912), “The empiricists—who are best represented by the British philosophers, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume—maintained that all our knowledge is derived from experience; the rationalists—who are represented by the Continental philosophers of the seventeenth century, especially Descartes and Leibniz—maintained that, in addition to what we know by experience, there are certain 'innate ideas' and 'innate principles', which we know independently of experience.”
Between the empirical and rational traditions of philosophy is a question of the nature and limits of knowledge; where they differ is whether knowledge can be known through reason or through experience alone, or if together, then in which order and combination they might be arranged? For instance, what is the limit of reason as a means of obtaining knowledge? And what is the limit of sense perception for the same task? If human reason is the instrument by which we make possible distinctions, and by which we verify knowledge and propositions, who is able to test or benchmark this instrument a priori? And if it casts judgements and scepticism on its own productions, what is the nature and limitation of such criticism? And if reason and the senses are limited altogether, how limited and can we even trust them?
But these philosophical tasks begin with the French philosopher, René Descartes who, out of a desire to “find ground of assurance, and cast aside the loose earth and sand, that I might reach the rock or the clay”, wrote in Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences (1637), as translated by John Veitch, that “Accordingly, seeing that our senses sometimes deceive us, I was willing to suppose that there existed nothing really such as they presented to us; and because some men err in reasoning, and fall into paralogisms, even on the simplest matters of geometry, I, convinced that I was as open to error as any other, rejected as false all the reasonings I had hitherto taken for demonstrations; and finally, when I considered that the very same thoughts (presentations) which we experience when awake may also be experienced when we are asleep, while there is at that time not one of them true, I supposed that all the objects (presentations) that had ever entered into my mind when awake, had in them no more truth than the illusions of my dreams. But immediately upon this I observed that, whilst I thus wished to think that all was false, it was absolutely necessary that I, who thus thought, should be somewhat; and as I observed that this truth, I think, therefore I am (cogito ergo sum), was so certain and of such evidence that no ground of doubt, however extravagant, could be alleged by the sceptics capable of shaking it, I concluded that I might, without scruple, accept it as the first principle of the philosophy of which I was in search.”
For Descartes, and for the rest of philosophy hence, this search for the nature and limits of knowledge begins here, with a phenomenological reduction to the self, to the I, to the ego, which cannot be denied, and where an investigation of everything else, through the senses and the mind, must inherently begin.
Part One of this selective history will cover the Rationalist tradition of this history; Part Two explores the Empiricist tradition and Part Three converges both towards the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, and his famous Critique of Pure Reason (1781), which sought to reconcile both traditions into a transcendental epistemology and metaphysics.
“In the first Meditation I set forth the reasons for which we may, generally speaking, doubt about all things and especially about material things, at least so long as we have no other foundations for the sciences than those which we have hitherto possessed.”
In his Meditations on First Philosophy, in which the existence of God and the immortality of the soul are demonstrated (1641), as translated by Elizabeth S. Haldane, Descartes describes his process of undergoing six meditations on what he knows and does not know, working thoroughly to consider the nature of God and his own nature, given what the limits of his epistemic knowledge might leave him; for instance, as he writes in his first meditation, “How often has it happened to me that in the night I dreamt that I found myself in this particular place, that I was dressed and seated near the fire, whilst in reality I was lying undressed in bed! At this moment it does indeed seem to me that it is with eyes awake that I am looking at this paper; that this head which I move is not asleep, that it is deliberately and of set purpose that I extend my hand and perceive it; what happens in sleep does not appear so clear nor so distinct as does all this. But in thinking over this I remind myself that on many occasions I have in sleep been deceived by similar illusions, and in dwelling carefully on this reflection I see so manifestly that there are no certain indications by which we may clearly distinguish wakefulness from sleep that I am lost in astonishment. And my astonishment is such that it is almost capable of persuading me that I now dream.”
This seed of Cartesian doubt, which Descartes employs at the base of his epistemological journey through his six meditations, begins with the bare premise of self-knowledge and expands outwards, to qualify in small progressions, what can be surely known by our minds, even if we were to be fooled by the premise of a dream.
For instance, Descartes says that this “is possibly why our reasoning is not unjust when we conclude from this that Physics, Astronomy, Medicine and all other sciences which have as their end the consideration of composite things, are very dubious and uncertain; but that Arithmetic, Geometry and other sciences of that kind which only treat of things that are very simple and very general, without taking great trouble to ascertain whether they are actually existent or not, contain some measure of certainty and an element of the indubitable. For whether I am awake or asleep, two and three together always form five, and the square can never have more than four sides, and it does not seem possible that truths so clear and apparent can be suspected of any falsity [or uncertainty].”
When we dream, we may dream of new things, which we have not seen before; in a similar way, an artist invents out of themselves new worlds and images, but nevertheless, the colours of those images are familiar to us and to them; in other words, it is merely the combination in the composite of those elements which breeds novelty. Hence, we might then surmise that there are universal elements or ideas in things, which cannot be fooled into non-existence, but which must remain as the basis of some knowledge in the world, even if we are unsure and doubtful of everything else.
The next day, Descartes began his second meditation, which he describes as giving him some despair: “The Meditation of yesterday filled my mind with so many doubts that it is no longer in my power to forget them. And yet I do not see in what manner I can resolve them; and, just as if I had all of a sudden fallen into very deep water, I am so disconcerted that I can neither make certain of setting my feet on the bottom, nor can I swim and so support myself on the surface. I shall nevertheless make an effort and follow anew the same path as that on which I yesterday entered, i.e. I shall proceed by setting aside all that in which the least doubt could be supposed to exist, just as if I had discovered that it was absolutely false; and I shall ever follow in this road until I have met with something which is certain, or at least, if I can do nothing else, until I have learned for certain that there is nothing in the world that is certain. Archimedes, in order that he might draw the terrestrial globe out of its place, and transport it elsewhere, demanded only that one point should be fixed and immoveable; in the same way I shall have the right to conceive high hopes if I am happy enough to discover one thing only which is certain and indubitable.”
This despair, which follows Descartes throughout his meditations, preempts us in later history, to understand the despair that follows, as an unconscious and sometimes conscious concern, the world of the Enlightenment and beyond. In the Haldane translation, the original Latin deceptor is directly translated to the English deceiver; however, this term is better known as Descartes’ Demon or Evil Genius, who Descartes introduces in his first meditation as a thought experiment, wherein, an evil genius, lesser than God but substantially powerful too, is actively trying to deceive him into deceiving himself.
His response is to double-down on his journey into doubt; as he writes in his second meditation, “I suppose, then, that all the things that I see are false; I persuade myself that nothing has ever existed of all that my fallacious memory represents to me. I consider that I possess no senses; I imagine that body, figure, extension, movement and place are but the fictions of my mind. What, then, can be esteemed as true? Perhaps nothing at all, unless that there is nothing in the world that is certain. But how can I know there is not something different from those things that I have just considered, of which one cannot have the slightest doubt? Is there not some God, or some other being by whatever name we call it, who puts these reflections into my mind? That is not necessary, for is it not possible that I am capable of producing them myself? I myself, am I not at least something? But I have already denied that I had senses and body. Yet I hesitate, for what follows from that? Am I so dependent on body and senses that I cannot exist without these? But I was persuaded that there was nothing in all the world, that there was no heaven, no earth, that there were no minds, nor any bodies: was I not then likewise persuaded that I did not exist? Not at all; of a surety I myself did exist since I persuaded myself of something [or merely because I thought of something]. But there is some deceiver or other, very powerful and very cunning, who ever employs his ingenuity in deceiving me. Then without doubt I exist also if he deceives me, and let him deceive me as much as he will, he can never cause me to be nothing so long as I think that I am something. So that after having reflected well and carefully examined all things, we must come to the definite conclusion that this proposition: I am, I exist, is necessarily true each time that I pronounce it, or that I mentally conceive it.”
In his third meditation, Descartes questions the veracity of qualities, such as extension, motion and substance, and whether they exist in corporeality or merely in his mind, such that he is fooled by believing, in what he takes for granted, notions of temperature and light even. As he writes, “And in regard to the ideas of corporeal objects, I do not recognize in them anything so great or so excellent that they might not have possibly proceeded from myself; for if I consider them more closely, and examine them individually, as I yesterday examined the idea of wax, I find that there is very little in them which I perceive clearly and distinctly. Magnitude or extension in length, breadth, or depth, I do so perceive; also figure which results from a termination of this extension, the situation which bodies of different figure preserve in relation to one another, and movement or change of situation; to which we may also add substance, duration and number. As to other things such as light, colours, sounds, scents, tastes, heat, cold and the other tactile qualities, they are thought by me with so much obscurity and confusion that I do not even know if they are true or false, i.e. whether the ideas which I form of these qualities are actually the ideas of real objects or not [or whether they only represent chimeras which cannot exist in fact]. For although I have before remarked that it is only in judgments that falsity, properly speaking, or formal falsity, can be met with, a certain material falsity may nevertheless be found in ideas, i.e. when these ideas represent what is nothing as though it were something. For example, the ideas which I have of cold and heat are so far from clear and distinct that by their means I cannot tell whether cold is merely a privation of heat, or heat a privation of cold, or whether both are real qualities, or are not such.”
By the third day, Descartes is no longer able to distinguish between the source of phenomena, whether it be noumena or nothing whatsoever, which gives him the impressions of tactility and corporeality, or the pure illusions of his mind, which he alone produces out of nothing, and which God, who is all-powerful and all-good, nevertheless allows him to be deceived by. Cartesian doubt, on the subject of God, never refutes God directly and clarifies that God is not malevolent; however, there is a curious dissatisfaction for the Descartes of the earlier meditations, who questions why a benevolent God would allow him to deceive himself and thus keep him imperfect in the first place, unless it was contingent to some divine structure or unknowable and subtle power over him.
In his fourth meditation, however, Descartes comes to a theological conclusion on the source of his deception, as stemming from the misuse of his free will, and as delivered to him by God who, being perfect and benevolent, will necessarily not deceive him by nature, and so, he must necessarily accept, as a rare fact which he can say to know, that he is the source of the deception himself.
As he writes, “From all this I recognize that the power of will which I have received from God is not of itself the source of my errors—for it is very ample and very perfect of its kind—any more than is the power of understanding; for since I understand nothing but by the power which God has given me for understanding, there is no doubt that all that I understand, I understand as I ought, and it is not possible that I err in this. Whence then come my errors? They come from the sole fact that since the will is much wider in its range and compass than the understanding, I do not restrain it within the same bounds, but extend it also to things which I do not understand: and as the will is of itself indifferent to these, it easily falls into error and sin, and chooses the evil for the good, or the false for the true […] And inasmuch as it is in this that the greatest and principal perfection of man consists, it seems to me that I have not gained little by this day's Meditation, since I have discovered the source of falsity and error. And certainly there can be no other source than that which I have explained; for as often as I so restrain my will within the limits of my knowledge that it forms no judgment except on matters which are clearly and distinctly represented to it by the understanding, I can never be deceived; for every clear and distinct conception is without doubt something, and hence cannot derive its origin from what is nought, but must of necessity have God as its author—God, I say, who being supremely perfect, cannot be the cause of any error; and consequently we must conclude that such a conception [or such a judgment] is true.”
With this theological foundation, Descartes begins in his fifth meditation to finally rediscover what he knows, such that he writes, “And what I here find to be most important is that I discover in myself an infinitude of ideas of certain things which cannot be esteemed as pure negations, although they may possibly have no existence outside of my thought, and which are not framed by me, although it is within my power either to think or not to think them, but which possess natures which are true and immutable. For example, when I imagine a triangle, although there may nowhere in the world be such a figure outside my thought, or ever have been, there is nevertheless in this figure a certain determinate nature, form, or essence, which is immutable and eternal, which I have not invented, and which in no wise depends on my mind, as appears from the fact that diverse properties of that triangle can be demonstrated, viz. that its three angles are equal to two right angles, that the greatest side is subtended by the greatest angle, and the like, which now, whether I wish it or do not wish it, I recognize very clearly as pertaining to it, although I never thought of the matter at all when I imagined a triangle for the first time, and which therefore cannot be said to have been invented by me.”
Therefore, Descartes exemplifies the Rationalist attitude here: it is not experience which informs us of ideas, but ideas themselves which we may produce out of own minds, such that our mind acts as the first source of knowledge, such that we can verify with our minds things in the world first and by experience second, if at all.
He also attaches a proof of God’s existence here: if the mind cannot conceive of a mountain without it being accompanied by a valley, because a valley is essential to the idea of a mountain, then the mind cannot likewise conceive of existence with God, because God is essential to the idea of existence, and given that we exist, so must God. However, he addresses several sophistries related to the conceivability principle, or the notion that if something is conceivable in the mind, then it must be possible in the world or even possibly existing in the world; otherwise, you would not be able to conceive it. As a response, he doubles-down on the essential nature of God as relating to existence, such that he writes, “For being accustomed in all other things to make a distinction between existence and essence, I easily persuade myself that the existence can be separated from the essence of God, and that we can thus conceive God as not actually existing. But, nevertheless, when I think of it with more attention, I clearly see that existence can no more be separated from the essence of God than can its having its three angles equal to two right angles be separated from the essence of a [rectilinear] triangle, or the idea of a mountain from the idea of a valley; and so there is not any less repugnance to our conceiving a God (that is, a Being supremely perfect) to whom existence is lacking (that is to say, to whom a certain perfection is lacking), than to conceive of a mountain which has no valley. […] But a sophism is concealed in this objection; for from the fact that I cannot conceive a mountain without a valley, it does not follow that there is any mountain or any valley in existence, but only that the mountain and the valley, whether they exist or do not exist, cannot in any way be separated one from the other. While from the fact that I cannot conceive God without existence, it follows that existence is inseparable from Him, and hence that He really exists; not that my thought can bring this to pass, or impose any necessity on things, but, on the contrary, because the necessity which lies in the thing itself, i.e. the necessity of the existence of God determines me to think in this way. For it is not within my power to think of God without existence (that is of a supremely perfect Being devoid of a supreme perfection) though it is in my power to imagine a horse either with wings or without wings.”
In his sixth and final meditation, Descartes ventures to prove the existence of the body on the basis of his imagination which, given that he cannot find any other justification for why he can imagine things in the first place, must explain that there is some other thing, in the world, which allows him to do so: he concludes that it must be his body, which he calls an “extended and unthinking thing, it is certain that I, [that is, my mind, by which I am what I am], is entirely and truly distinct from my body, and may exist without it.” In this meditation, Descartes fleshes out his mind-body dualism; or rather, his concepts of thinking and extended substances, wherein he writes that, “For in truth, when I consider the mind, that is, when I consider myself in so far only as I am a thinking thing, I can distinguish in myself no parts, but I very clearly discern that I am somewhat absolutely one and entire; and although the whole mind seems to be united to the whole body, yet, when a foot, an arm, or any other part is cut off, I am conscious that nothing has been taken from my mind; nor can the faculties of willing, perceiving, conceiving, etc., properly be called its parts, for it is the same mind that is exercised [all entire] in willing, in perceiving, and in conceiving, etc. But quite the opposite holds in corporeal or extended things; for I cannot imagine any one of them [how small soever it may be], which I cannot easily sunder in thought, and which, therefore, I do not know to be divisible. This would be sufficient to teach me that the mind or soul of man is entirely different from the body, if I had not already been apprised of it on other grounds.”
He argues, however, that if his sense-perceptions of qualities, such as the tactility of touch, were so intuitive to his body, such that they produced stronger sensations than the ones he can produce from memory or pure thought, then they must, in some way, resemble the ideas they produce; however, he regresses later in the meditation when he writes that “afterwards many experiences little by little destroyed all the faith which I had rested in my senses; for I from time to time observed that those towers which from afar appeared to me to be round, more closely observed seemed square, and that colossal statues raised on the summit of these towers, appeared as quite tiny statues when viewed from the bottom; and so in an infinitude of other cases I found error in judgments founded on the external senses. And not only in those founded on the external senses, but even in those founded on the internal as well; for is there anything more intimate or more internal than pain? And yet I have learned from some persons whose arms or legs have been cut off, that they sometimes seemed to feel pain in the part which had been amputated, which made me think that I could not be quite certain that it was a certain member which pained me, even although I felt pain in it.”
It is clear to Descartes that some passive or active faculty operates in his being somewhere, such that it produces sensations within him, even if he does not want them to, and yet he cannot rely on them but trusts that God is not deceiving him by endowing him with faulty faculties as well. What he then considers is that such that faculties, such as the urge to drink upon the sensation of thirst, is merely the mechanism of the clockwork which he compares to, if it functions, a healthy man and if it has dysfunctions to an unhealthy man; in other words, given that God wants his clockwork of a person to be healthy, such that he endows him with faculties which are meant to signal to him to preserve himself in good health, to avoid harm and so on, then Descartes may conclude that he may trust in his sense-perceptions to lead him to more good than harm, to more truth than deceit.
As he writes, “For because God is in no wise a deceiver, it follows that I am not deceived in this. But because the exigencies of action often oblige us to make up our minds before having leisure to examine matters carefully, we must confess that the life of man is very frequently subject to error in respect to individual objects, and we must in the end acknowledge the infirmity of our nature.”
Descartes concludes his meditations with his theological argument: if God is benevolent, he will not deceive us; if he has endowed us with free will, any deception is caused by our misuse of free will; if he has endowed us with faculties meant to preserve us in good health, any ill-health is caused by our mistreatment of ourselves; and thus God, who offers all these benefits and structures to us, wants us to succeed as his creations and therefore, implicitly guides us to consider our perpetual inadequacies of knowledge, insofar as we are often led astray, and so must take consistent heed to abstaining from sources of self-deception and ill-care.
“Thus the content of the subject must always include that of the predicate in such a way that if one understands perfectly the concept of the subject, he will know that the predicate appertains to it also.”
The German philosopher, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, in addition to this mathematical and metaphysical contributions, stands out in history as a contemporary of Descartes and one of the foremost Rationalists of the 17th Century. Opposed to Descartes’ thinking and extended substances, Leibniz posits that no substance is extended, but rather that everything is made of simple substances known as monads, which are incapable of further division, but which might be aggregated together to form composite substances.
As he explains in paragraph 19 of Monadology (1714), in the translation by Robert Latta, “If we are to give the name of Soul to everything which has perceptions and desires [appetits] in the general sense which I have explained, then all simple substances or created Monads might be called souls; but as feeling [le sentiment] is something more than a bare perception, I think it right that the general name of Monads or Entelechies should suffice for simple substances which have perception only, and that the name of Souls should be given only to those in which perception is more distinct, and is accompanied by memory.”
For Leibniz, everything has a soul so to speak, but only human beings, with the faculty of memory, are able to know themselves beyond their mere substance. In paragraph 64, he describes the human body in this way: “Thus the organic body of each living being is a kind of divine machine or natural automaton, which infinitely surpasses all artificial automata. For a machine made by the skill of man is not a machine in each of its parts. For instance, the tooth of a brass wheel has parts or fragments which for us are not artificial products, and which do not have the special characteristics of the machine, for they give no indication of the use for which the wheel was intended. But the machines of nature, namely, living bodies, are still machines in their smallest parts ad infinitum. It is this that constitutes the difference between nature and art, that is to say, between the divine art and ours.”
Therefore, we might understand sense-perceptions as effects of the innate nature of the monad, who as the soul of a human being, is able to remember such sense-perceptions via faculties whereas other non-human monads, such as animals or inanimate objects who may lack such faculties, are excluded from this experience as mere automata or objects.
As he writes in Section VIII of Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences (1637), “It is indeed true that when several predicates are attributes of a single subject and this subject is not an attribute of another, we speak of it as an individual substance, but this is not enough, and such an explanation is merely nominal. We must therefore inquire what it is to be an attribute in reality of a certain subject. Now it is evident that every true predication has some basis in the nature of things, and even when a proposition is not identical, that is, when the predicate is not expressly contained in the subject, it is still necessary that it be virtually contained in it and this is what the philosophers call in-esse, saying thereby that the predicate is in the subject. Thus the content of the subject must always include that of the predicate in such a way that if one understands perfectly the concept of the subject, he will know that the predicate appertains to it also. This being so, we are able to say that this is the nature of an individual substance or of a complete being, namely, to afford a conception so complete that the concept shall be sufficient for the understanding of it and for the deduction of all the predicates of which the substance is or may become the subject. Thus the quality of king, which belonged to Alexander the Great, an abstraction from the subject is not sufficiently determined to constitute an individual, and does not contain the other qualities of the same subject, nor everything which the idea of this prince includes. God, however, seeing the individual concept, or hæcceity, of Alexander, sees there at the same time the basis and the reason of all the predicates which can be truly uttered regarding him; for instance that he will conquer Darius and Porus, even to the point of knowing a priori (and not by experience) whether he died a natural death or by poison, —facts which we can learn only through history. When we carefully consider the connection of things we see also the possibility of saying that there was always in the soul of Alexander marks of all that had happened to him and evidences of all that would happen to him and traces even of everything which occurs in the universe, although God alone could recognize them all.”
This section is important for two reasons. Firstly, Leibniz makes an essential Rationalist claim in positing that, if one wholly understands the concept of a subject, it is necessarily possible to know all predicates and their effects onto that subject, such that experience is not inherently necessary to knowing a subject; secondly, Leibniz describes how a monad experiences sense-perceptions as a result of a quasi-determinism, wherein it is codified into the eternal nature of that monad, as ordained by the design of God, to have experienced that particular experience as part of its existence as a series of successive states of being—although Leibniz argues that this is compatible with free will, given that it is only within our nature, but that we must nevertheless act within our nature, which is unique to ourselves and which only God knows in its eventual line of fate, which he describes in paragraph 53 of Monadology (1714) as his well-known concept of our world being the best of all possible worlds which God could have and has created: “Now, as in the Ideas of God there is an infinite number of possible universes, and as only one of them can be actual, there must be a sufficient reason for the choice of God, which leads Him to decide upon one rather than another.”
Hence, the monad of Alexander, which controls the automata of the body of Alexander, is destined as part of its monadic nature as the monad of Alexander to experience the life of Alexander, such that if you could somehow comprehend the complexity of the monad of Alexander, you would necessarily be able to know his life via a rationalist process of thought. It should be noted, however, that Leibniz does not subscribe to a interactive mind-body dualism like Descartes, but considers the monad of the mind to be metaphysically-different from the monad of the body, although inevitably both mind and body for Leibniz are consisting of the same innate monadic substance.
But even if Alexander is a composite, he is nevertheless a unity of simple substances or monads. In his letter, dated 30th April, 1687, to the French philosopher, Antoine Arnaud, Leibniz writes, “Our mind sees or conceives of certain true substances which have certain modes. These modes involve relations to other substances whenever the mind finds occasion to join them in thought and to make one name stand for the whole assembly of these things, which name shall serve as a means of reasoning; but we must not make the mistake of thinking that they are substances or veritably real beings. This position can be held only by those who go no farther than appearances, or else by those who consider as realities all the abstractions of the mind and who conceive number, time, place, motion, form and sensible quality as so many beings by themselves. I, on the contrary, hold that philosophy cannot be restored in a better way nor better reduced to precision than by recognizing substances or complete beings endowed with a true unity in which different states succeed. All the rest are to be considered only as phenomena, abstractions or relations. Nothing will ever be found fitted to constitute a true substance out of several beings by means of aggregation; for example, if the parts which fit together for a common design are more appropriate to constitute a true substance than those which are in contact, all the officials of the India Company in Holland would constitute a real substance better than would a pile of stones. But such a common design—what is it but a resemblance, or rather an arrangement of actions and passions, which our mind sees in different things? If this unity by contact should be preferred as the most reasonable hypothesis, other difficulties would be found: the parts of solid bodies are perhaps united only by the pressure of surrounding bodies and by their own pressure, and in their substance they may have no more union than a pile of sand arena sine calce. […] These are all fictions of the mind, and so far as we do not discern what is truly a complete being, or indeed, a substance, we shall have no resting place, and through this distinction of substances alone is there a means of establishing stable and real principles. In conclusion, nothing should be considered certain without a basis. It is therefore for those who speak of beings and substances without a real unity to prove that there is more reality than that which has just been spoken of; and I am awaiting that concept of a substance or of a being which can include all those things and in accordance with which, parts and perhaps even dreams may some day pretend to reality”.
Unlike Descartes, who believed that sense-perceptions were possibly illusions of the mind, and that one must resurrect their claims of knowledge through a basis of doubt, Leibniz encourages us to discover a concept of unity which would reveal to us what is true and false, given that aggregations of subjects and senses cannot produce the real thing to us, insofar as it can be perceived differently by the aggregative perceptions and circumstances of others and other things, although it is important to note that causation only occurs within the subject itself and cannot be caused by others, according Leibniz, who believed that we are responsible, so to speak, for our own respective causation as part of the innate nature of our monadic substance.
In a later letter, dated 6th October, 1687, also to Arnauld, he further explains “that it is the animated substance to which this matter belongs that is really a being, and the matter which is understood as the mass in itself is only a pure phenomenon or appearance, as well-founded, however, as is space and time. It has not even those precise and determined qualities which can enable it to pass as a determined being, as I have already indicated in what precedes, because figure itself, which is the essence of a limited extended mass, is never, strictly speaking, perfectly determined in the state of nature because of the actually infinite division of the parts of matter: there is never a globe without inequalities, never a straight line without an intermingling of curves, never a curve of a certain finite nature without an intermixture of some other, and this is as true in small portions as in large, so that far from the figure being a constitutive element in the body, it is not a quality at all real and determined outside of the thought. Never can an exact surface be assigned to any body as could be done if there were atoms; I can say the same thing of size and of motion, namely, that these qualities or predicates are phenomena like colors and sounds, and although they involve a more distinct knowledge they cannot hold up under a final analysis. Consequently extended mass, when considered without entelechies, that is, as consisting only in those qualities of size and motion, is not a corporeal substance but a wholly pure phenomenon like the rainbow.”
If there are illusions, such that our knowledge of the world is deceived by the illusions of extension and other qualities, Leibniz posits that we must treat everything as an aggregation of such qualities unless we are able to find the monadic sources which consists of such objects.
“In this last case, there are men lunatic enough to believe, that even God himself takes pleasure in harmony; and philosophers are not lacking who have persuaded themselves, that the motion of the heavenly bodies gives rise to harmony—all of which instances sufficiently show that everyone judges of things according to the state of his brain, or rather mistakes for things the forms of his imagination.”
Similar to Leibniz, the Dutch philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, rejected the Cartesian notion of thinking and extending substances in favour of a singular substance: for Spinoza, everything is made of the infinite and one substance of God.
As he writes in his Proof for Proposition VIII in Part II of his famous Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order (1677), “There can only be one substance with an identical attribute, and existence follows from its nature (Prop. vii.); its nature, therefore, involves existence, either as finite or infinite. It does not exist as finite, for (by Def. ii.) it would then be limited by something else of the same kind, which would also necessarily exist (Prop. vii.); and there would be two substances with an identical attribute, which is absurd (Prop. v.). It therefore exists as infinite. Q.E.D.”
In the preface to Part IV of Ethics, he also mentions his famous phrase, Deus sive natura, or “God or nature”, because for Spinoza, “For the eternal and infinite Being, which we call God or Nature, acts by the same necessity as that whereby it exists. For we have shown, that by the same necessity of its nature, whereby it exists, it likewise works (I. xvi.). The reason or cause why God or Nature exists, and the reason why he acts, are one and the same. Therefore, as he does not exist for the sake of an end, so neither does he act for the sake of an end; of his existence and of his action there is neither origin nor end. Wherefore, a cause which is called final is nothing else but human desire, in so far as it is considered as the origin or cause of anything. For example, when we say that to be inhabited is the final cause of this or that house, we mean nothing more than that a man, conceiving the conveniences of household life, had a desire to build a house. Wherefore, the being inhabited, in so far as it is regarded as a final cause, is nothing else but this particular desire, which is really the efficient cause; it is regarded as the primary cause, because men are generally ignorant of the causes of their desires. They are, as I have often said already, conscious of their own actions and appetites, but ignorant of the causes whereby they are determined to any particular desire.”
Between each of the Rationalists is a belief in the omnipotence of God, for whom existence descends and is maintained by; however, Spinoza maintains in his Note to Proposition XXIX in Part I, that “Before going any further, I wish here to explain, what we should understand by nature viewed as active (natura naturans), and nature viewed as passive (natura naturata). I say to explain, or rather call attention to it, for I think that, from what has been said, it is sufficiently clear, that by nature viewed as active we should understand that which is in itself, and is conceived through itself, or those attributes of substance, which express eternal and infinite essence, in other words (Prop. xiv., Coroll. i., and Prop. xvii., Coroll. ii) God, in so far as he is considered as a free cause. By nature viewed as passive I understand all that which follows from the necessity of the nature of God, or of any of the attributes of God, that is, all the modes of the attributes of God, in so far as they are considered as things which are in God, and which without God cannot exist or be conceived."
In other words, unlike Descartes and Leibniz, the God of Spinoza is completely merged with the world itself, and does not exist as incorporeal substance, but as a corporeal and real substance too. For Spinoza, nature and thus God has two sides: the active side as natura naturans and the passive side as natura naturata, which together encompass the universal, transcendent and yet deterministic view of nature from Spinoza. In the active side, nature is dynamic and transcendent and changing; in the passive side, nature is eternal and universal and deterministic; Spinoza believes that God cannot interfere with the natural order of things—or rather, that God cannot contradict the nature of nature itself, and so God is restricted by the laws of nature too.
Focusing on his epistemology though, Spinoza writes in Note II of Proposition XL from Part II, “From symbols, e.g., from the fact of having read or heard certain words we remember things and form certain ideas concerning them, similar to those through which we imagine things (II. xviii. note). I shall call both these ways of regarding things knowledge of the first kind, opinion, or imagination. […] From the fact that we have notions common to all men, and adequate ideas of the properties of things (II. xxxviii. Coroll., xxxix. and Coroll. and xl.); this I call reason and knowledge of the second kind. Besides these two kinds of knowledge, there is, as I will hereafter show, a third kind of knowledge, which we will call intuition.”
According to Spinoza, imagination is the only source of deception in human knowledge, such that we must rely on reason or common notions and intuition as mitigating influences against runaway imagination to have true knowledge of things. As he writes in Proposition XVI from Part II, “Knowledge of the first kind is the only source of falsity, knowledge of the second and third kinds is necessarily true.” Spinoza considers imagination to be the source of falsity because we have attributed the determination of true and false to the second and third kinds of reason and intuition; hence, self-deception originates from an easy dependence on imagination and opinion instead of the effort of reason and intuition.
As he remarks in his Appendix to Part I, “For example, if a stone falls from a roof on to someone's head, and kills him, they will demonstrate by their new method, that the stone fell in order to kill the man; for, if it had not by God's will fallen with that object, how could so many circumstances (and there are often many concurrent circumstances) have all happened together by chance? Perhaps you will answer that the event is due to the facts that the wind was blowing, and the man was walking that way. "But why," they will insist, "was the wind blowing, and why was the man at that very time walking that way?" If you again answer, that the wind had then sprung up because the sea had begun to be agitated the day before, the weather being previously calm, and that the man had been invited by a friend, they will again insist: "But why was the sea agitated, and why was the man invited at that time?" So they will pursue their questions from cause to cause, till at last you take refuge in the will of God—in other words, the sanctuary of ignorance. So, again, when they survey the frame of the human body, they are amazed; and being ignorant of the causes of so great a work of art, conclude that it has been fashioned, not mechanically, but by divine and supernatural skill, and has been so put together that one part shall not hurt another. Hence anyone who seeks for the true causes of miracles, and strives to understand natural phenomena as an intelligent being, and not to gaze at them like a fool, is set down and denounced as an impious heretic by those, whom the masses adore as the interpreters of nature and the gods. Such persons know that, with the removal of ignorance, the wonder which forms their only available means for proving and preserving their authority would vanish also. […] Everything which conduces to health and the worship of God they have called good, everything which hinders these objects they have styled bad; and inasmuch as those who do not understand the nature of things do not verify phenomena in any way, but merely imagine them after a fashion, and mistake their imagination for understanding, such persons firmly believe that there is an order in things, being really ignorant both of things and their own nature. […] Further, as things which are easily imagined are more pleasing to us, men prefer order to confusion—as though there were any order in nature, except in relation to our imagination—and say that God has created all things in order; thus, without knowing it, attributing imagination to God, unless, indeed, they would have it that God foresaw human imagination, and arranged everything, so that it should be most easily imagined. If this be their theory, they would not, perhaps, be daunted by the fact that we find an infinite number of phenomena, far surpassing our imagination, and very many others which confound its weakness. But enough has been said on this subject. The other abstract notions are nothing but modes of imagining, in which the imagination is differently affected: though they are considered by the ignorant as the chief attributes of things, inasmuch as they believe that everything was created for the sake of themselves; and, according as they are affected by it, style it good or bad, healthy or rotten and corrupt. […] Whatsoever affects our ears is said to give rise to noise, sound, or harmony. In this last case, there are men lunatic enough to believe, that even God himself takes pleasure in harmony; and philosophers are not lacking who have persuaded themselves, that the motion of the heavenly bodies gives rise to harmony—all of which instances sufficiently show that everyone judges of things according to the state of his brain, or rather mistakes for things the forms of his imagination. […] It is commonly said: "So many men, so many minds; everyone is wise in his own way; brains differ as completely as palates." All of which proverbs show, that men judge of things according to their mental disposition, and rather imagine than understand: for, if they understood phenomena, they would, as mathematicians attest, be convinced, if not attracted, by what I have urged. We have now perceived, that all the explanations commonly given of nature are mere modes of imagining, and do not indicate the true nature of anything, but only the constitution of the imagination; and, although they have names, as though they were entities, existing externally to the imagination, I call them entities imaginary rather than real; and, therefore, all arguments against us drawn from such abstractions are easily rebutted. […] Such are the misconceptions I have undertaken to note; if there are any more of the same sort, everyone may easily dissipate them for himself with the aid of a little reflection.”
This dissipation occurs when we remember that imagination is contingent, but not necessary, as a source and kind of knowledge. As he writes in Corollary I of Proposition XLIV from Part II, “Hence it follows, that it is only through our imagination that we consider things, whether in respect to the future or the past, as contingent.” and follows by offering an example in his Note to the same proposition, “Thus, let us suppose that a child yesterday saw Peter for the first time in the morning, Paul at noon, and Simon in the evening; then, that today he again sees Peter in the morning. It is evident, from II. Prop. xviii., that, as soon as he sees the morning light, he will imagine that the sun will traverse the same parts of the sky, as it did when he saw it on the preceding day; in other words, he will imagine a complete day, and, together with his imagination of the morning, he will imagine Peter; with noon, he will imagine Paul; and with evening, he will imagine Simon—that is, he will imagine the existence of Paul and Simon in relation to a future time; on the other hand, if he sees Simon in the evening, he will refer Peter and Paul to a past time, by imagining them simultaneously with the imagination of a past time. If it should at any time happen, that on some other evening the child should see James instead of Simon, he will, on the following morning, associate with his imagination of evening sometimes Simon, sometimes James, not both together: for the child is supposed to have seen, at evening, one or other of them, not both together. His imagination will therefore waver; and, with the imagination of future evenings, he will associate first one, then the other—that is, he will imagine them in the future, neither of them as certain, but both as contingent. This wavering of the imagination will be the same, if the imagination be concerned with things which we thus contemplate, standing in relation to time past or time present: consequently, we may imagine things as contingent, whether they be referred to time present, past, or future.”
Therefore, if imagination must treat its derived knowledge as contingent, it is reason that considers its knowledge as necessary, such as he describes in Corollary II to the same proposition, “It is in the nature of reason to perceive things under a certain form of eternity (sub quâdam æternitatis specie).” For instance, ideas are either affirmed or negated by the possibility of their conception in our minds, such that the conception of a triangle is only possible if it is possible to imagine the idea of a triangle in the first place and that it is hence necessary to do so as a preluding action to conceiving of a triangle as well. Spinoza remarks that we must differentiate between the ideas of triangles and the images of triangles, because the imagination of images is described by Spinoza as a physical act, whereas ideas and their conception are mental and necessary to the formation of adequate ideas against inadequate ideas, which Spinoza also argues that the former is the more valuable to seek and necessary for the living of an active life in the affinity of natura naturans.
In Definition I of Part III, he explains the two as: “By an adequate cause, I mean a cause through which its effect can be clearly and distinctly perceived. By an inadequate or partial cause, I mean a cause through which, by itself, its effect cannot be understood.”
When we partake in activities involving more than one object, such that we are affected to the point of being affected by another, and not by ourselves, we enter a passive state instead of an active one, as how he describes in his Proof of Proposition LVI from Part III, “Pleasure and pain, and consequently the emotions compounded thereof, or derived therefrom, are passions, or passive states (III. xi. note); now we are necessarily passive (III. i.), in so far as we have inadequate ideas; and only in so far as we have such ideas are we passive (III. iii.); that is, we are only necessarily passive (II. xl. note), in so far as we conceive, or (II. xvii. and note) in so far as we are affected by an emotion, which involves the nature of our own body, and the nature of an external body. Wherefore the nature of every passive state must necessarily be so explained, that the nature of the object whereby we are affected be expressed. Namely, the pleasure, which arises from, say, the object A, involves the nature of that object A, and the pleasure, which arises from the object B, involves the nature of the object B; wherefore these two pleasurable emotions are by nature different, inasmuch as the causes whence they arise are by nature different. […] For by luxury, drunkenness, lust, avarice, ambition, &c., we simply mean the immoderate love of feasting, drinking, venery, riches, and fame. Furthermore, these emotions, in so far as we distinguish them from others merely by the objects wherewith they are concerned, have no contraries. For temperance, sobriety, and chastity, which we are wont to oppose to luxury, drunkenness, and lust, are not emotions or passive states, but indicate a power of the mind which moderates the last—named emotions.”
However, between passivity and activity, the latter motivates us to subsistence and moderation, such that desires and pleasures, when arising from the faculty of reason within the self so as to produce adequate ideas and activity, instead of merely being acted upon by another body so as to produce inadequate ideas and passivity, transitions “man from a less to a greater perfection.”
“Yes, God is everywhere, or rather everything is in God, and the world, however large we imagine it, can neither equal nor be compared to Him. This is incomprehensible, I agree, but that is because the infinite surpasses us. What then, Aristes!”
The final thinker in Part 1 is the French philosopher, Nicolas Malebranche, who wrote in the lineage of Descartes, but disagreed with Descartes that the mind could be clearly understood at all. For Malebranche, both the movements of the body and even the mind are inconceivable to us, insofar as there is no sensible connection he can see between them, and thus he appeals to an insensible connection: that as desires mediated by the infinite authority of God.
As he wrote in The Search after Truth and Elucidations (1674–1675), as translated by Thomas M. Lennon, “For, even assuming that our volitions were truly the motor force of our bodies (although this seems incomprehensible), how is it conceivable that the soul should move the body? Our arm, for example, is moved only because spirits swell certain of the muscles composing it. Now, in order for the motion that the soul impresses on the spirits in the brain to be communicable to those in the nerves, and thence to others in the muscles of our arm, the soul's volitions must multiply or change proportionately to the almost infinite collisions or impacts that would occur in the particles composing the spirits; for bodies cannot by themselves move those they meet, as I feel I have sufficiently shown. [...] Thus it is evident that the soul could not move its arm, even if it had the power of determining the motion of the animal spirits in the brain. [...] The same is true of our faculty of thinking. We know through inner sensation that we will to think about something, that we make an effort to do so, and that at the moment of our desire and effort, the idea of that thing is presented to our mind. But we do not know through inner sensation that our will or effort produces our idea. We do not see through reason that this could happen. It is through prejudice that we believe that our attention or desires are the cause of our ideas; this is due to the fact that a hundred times a day we prove that our ideas follow or accompany them. Since God and His operations contain nothing sensible, and since we sense nothing other than our desires preceding the presence of ideas, we think there can be no cause of these ideas other than our desires. But let us take care. We do not see in us any power to produce them; neither reason nor the inner sensation we have of ourselves tells us anything about this.”
However, even if cannot understand the nature of our minds and bodies, Malebranche does not persuade us to abandon any search for knowledge or any basis for knowing at all, given that in Dialogue III between Aristes and Theodore from his Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion (1688), as translated by David Scott, he writes: “But to know is to have a clear idea of the nature of the object, and by light and evidence to discover its particular relations. I know the parts of extension clearly because I can see their relations evidently. I see clearly that the sides of similar triangles are proportional, that there is no plane triangle whose three sides do not equal two right angles. I see truths or relations clearly in the idea or archetype of extension. For that idea is so luminous that it is by contemplating it that geometers and good physicists are made; and it is so fertile in truths that all minds together will never exhaust it. The same is not true of my being. I have no idea of it, I do not see its archetype. I cannot discover the relations of the modifications affecting my mind. In turning inward I cannot recognize any of my faculties or capacities. The inner feeling I have of myself teaches me that I am, that I think, that I will, that I feel, that I suffer, etc., but it does not let them know what I am, the nature of my thought, of my will, of my feelings, of my passions, of my pain, nor the relations all these things have to each other. For, once again, not having an idea of my soul, and not seeing its archetype in the divine Word, in contemplating it I can discover neither what it is nor what the modalities are of which it is capable, nor finally what the relations are between its modalities, relations which I sense vividly without knowing them but which God knows clearly without sensing them. All this is the case, my dear Aristes, because, as I have already said, I am not a light unto myself, because my substance and modalities are but darkness, and because for many reasons God has not found it fitting to reveal to me the idea or archetype which represents the nature of spiritual beings. For were my substance intelligible, of or in itself, were it luminous, were it capable of enlightening me, as I am not separated from myself, in contemplating myself I would certainly see that I am capable of being affected by certain sensations I have never experienced and of which I shall perhaps never have any knowledge. I would have had need of a concert to know the sweetness of harmony, and although I had never tasted a particular I would be able, I do not say to sense, but to know with evidence the nature of the sensation it excites in me. But as we can know the nature of beings only in Reason which contains them in an intelligible manner, and although I can sense myself only in myself, it is only in Reason that I can discover what I am and the modalities of which my nature is capable. And a fortiori it is only in Reason that I discover the principles of the sciences and all the truths capable of enlightening the mind.”
Hence, Malebranche believes that each individual is able to process the pure ideas of God as sensations, such that your certainty of sensations is a unique manifestation of the pure idea delivered by God unto your senses, but which remains wholly your own certain sensation. Nevertheless, this is oriented through the faculty of reason, which sorts through the bare sensations into a certain perception, albeit ordained by the cause of God—in Part Two of this series, Locke will be shown to give a similar cosmological argument.
Copyright © Thomas J. Pellarin, 2022. All rights reserved.
AMAZING, lovely lovely run down of Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza - diving right into part 2!!