Johnsen on Meditation I-II

7/29/2019 Johnsen on Meditation I-II

1/7

Meditation I

Now, the best way to get secure knowledge of reality is first to get used to doubting

everything, especially things concerning bodies. I had seen many ancient writings

by the platonists and the sceptics on this subject, and didnt fancy re-heating that

old cabbage, but I had to devote a whole Meditation to it. And I would like myreaders not just to whip through it briskly but to spend several months (or at least

weeks) considering the topics dealt with, before proceeding to the other

Meditations.

Descartes,Replies to Objections II

My topic is not the topics dealt with in Meditation I, but Descartess ways of dealing

with them. My central focus will be on a deeply motivated, highly consequential and

apparently unnoticed midstream shift in his mode of argumentation, but I shall begin at

the beginning in order to note two stark peculiarities of what appears in his early stage-

setting.

Having noted that certain beliefs he had held early in life were false, and that he had

relied on them in acquiring further beliefs, Descartes concludes that all of his currentbeliefs are under a cloud of suspicion: it seems that any one of them may have inherited

the infection, and be false. Here we have immediately the first peculiarity: ifall of his

current beliefs are suspect, then his current beliefthat certain of his earlier beliefs were

false is suspect. Perhaps he has neverheld any false beliefs, and has insofarno basis for

concern about his current beliefs. Yet Descartes simply ignores this elementary point,

and proceeds.

Having concluded that all of his current beliefs are suspect, he proposes to subject

them to a comprehensive review, in the hope of identifying some that are completely

certain and indubitable, and therefore suitable as foundations for his future investigations.

He proposes to carry out this review by examining the "sources" of his beliefs and, if a

source is found to be less than perfectly reliable - found to yield so much as a single false

belief - refusing to rely henceforth on any belief acquired from it.

In the event, he examines only one source - his senses - since, he says, all the beliefs

he had thitherto accepted as "most true" had been derived from them. His examination

consists simply of noting that his senses have sometimes deceived him - yielded false

beliefs - and he concludes, therefore, that any belief acquired through his senses is

doubtful, so that he should not rely henceforth on any such belief.

And here we have the second peculiarity. Leaving aside exotic "possibilities" that he

obviously does not have in mind, any occasion on which Descartes had concluded that

his senses had deceived him would quite certainly have been one on which he had relied

on otherbeliefs acquired through his senses in arriving at that conclusion. Yet once

again, he simply ignores the obvious difficulty.

He faults the argument instead on the grounds that his senses having sometimes

deceived him about very small or distant things does not show that every belief he has

acquired through his senses is doubtful. He has many such beliefs that it would be

impossible (would be possible only if he were insane) for him to doubt, ones about which

he could not possibly think his senses might be deceiving him, for example, that he is

now sitting by the fire, wearing a dressing gown, and holding a piece of paper in his

hand.


2/7

At this point he advances his famous Dream argument, in which he attempts again to

show that every belief acquired through his senses is doubtful. Although this argument is

universally spoken of as the Dream argument of Meditation I, I shall argue that it is but

the first of two dream-centered arguments to be found there. As we turn now to consider

them, we should note that neither they nor their successors are, strictly speaking, attacks

on his senses. Rather, they are arguments in which he considers the possibility that thoseof his beliefs that seem to have been acquired through his senses may actually have been

acquired via some entirely different route, and I shall therefore refer to them hereafter as

empirical beliefs, rather than beliefs acquired through the senses.

Descartes offers the first Dream argument in response to his contention that it would

be impossible, when having experiences like his present ones, to doubt such beliefs of his

as that he is sitting by the fire and holding a piece of paper in his hands. He now scoffs at

that contention, citing what he takes to be the obvious fact that he has often, while lying

undressed in bed, had dreams whose apparently sensory contents were indistinguishable

from his current experiences, and noting that on those occasions he had falsely believed

just such things about his immediate surroundings. He goes on to say that there are no

sure signs by which he can distinguish waking from dreaming states, so that he has noreason to believe that he is now awake rather than asleep and dreaming or, therefore, that

his current beliefs about his immediate surroundings are true. His argument can be put as

follows: In some dreams I have had while lying undressed in bed I have had experiences

indistinguishable from those I am now having, and consequently formed false beliefs

about my immediate physical surroundings; further, any sensory experiences I could have

while awake, I could equally well have while dreaming, and I would acquire the same

beliefs in both cases; hence every empirical belief I now have is doubtful, since it may

have been acquired in a dream.

Descartes takes this second argument to show, and remedy, the inadequacy of his first;

some of his false empirical beliefs have notbeen about very small or distant objects, but

about his immediate physical surroundings. Oddly, however, he never explicitly notes

the obvious fact that this argument also fails - that the truth of its premise does notsuffice

to render each of his empirical beliefs doubtful. In particular, it does not render doubtful

his belief that he has a body. Note exactly how he frames hisfactual claims about some

of his past experiences: "How often, asleep at night, am I convinced of just such familiar

events - when in factI am lying undressedin bed!" Here Descartes is still thinkingentirely in terms of flatfooted common sense, writing about perfectly ordinary dreams he

has had while sleeping undressed in bed. Not only does the hypothesis that he is now

having yet another ordinary dream not undermine his belief that he has a body, but it

entails that he has one, along with much else: that he is sleeping, that he has often in the

past awakenedfrom dreams and found himselflying undressedin his bedduring some

night, and so forth. A host of his current empirical beliefs are not put in doubt by this

argument.

Rather than pointing out the obvious failure of his second argument, however,

Descartes immediately offers a third, which is quite puzzling. Why offer a third

argument, when he has found no fault with his second? But it would be unproductive for

us to speculate about the answer to that question in light of the content of his third

argument. Before considering it, however, we need to note the strong textual evidence

that it is a distinct argument.


3/7

In introducing it, Descartes begins a new section (the sixth of twelve numbered

sections of Meditation I), and for the first time makes no factual claims (comparable to

his earlier claims that he hadsometimes made perceptual errors, and that he had

sometimes, while lying in bed, had dreams that were indistinguishable from waking

experiences). Rather, he now asks us to suppose that various things are the case. Here is

the original Latin text, which I provide simply to let the reader see that its internalpunctuation consists entirely of commas, which suggests, at least, substantial unity:

Age ergo somniemus, nec particularia ista vera sint, nos oculos aperire, caput

movere, manus extendere, nec forte etiam nos habere tales manus, nec tale totum

corpus; .Here is a reasonable translation:

Let us suppose then thatwe are dreaming, and thatall these particulars - that we

have our eyes open, that we are moving our head, extending our hands, and so forth

- are false, and, indeed, thatwe do not even have hands or such a body at all.

Jonathan Bennett divides Descartes's sentence into two, but gets its content exactly right:

Suppose then that I am dreamingit isnt true that I, with my eyes open, am

moving my head and stretching out my hands. Suppose, indeed that I dont evenhave hands or any body at all.

The unity I want to underscore, and that Bennett preserves, is that Descartes is here

proposing that we make a tripartite supposition - that he is dreaming, that he does not

have his eyes open and so forth, and thathe does not even have a body.

This unity is destroyed in some well-known translations. Haldane and Ross, for

example, divide his thought as follows:

Now let us assumethat we are asleep and that all these particulars are but falsedelusions; and let us reflectthatpossibly neither our hands nor our whole body are

such as they appear to us to be.

Cottingham has this:

Suppose then that I am dreaming, and that these particulars are not true.Perhaps, indeed,I do not even have such hands or such a body at all.

In these translations Descartes is represented as oddly conjoining two very different sorts

of things in his single sentence: he first asks us to assume or suppose that one thing is

true, and certain others false, and then endorses the idea that a third, quite different, thing

ispossible. In short, he is portrayed as writing, "Suppose that p is true and q false. It is

possible that r is true." The text offers no justification whatever for such a bifurcated

reading.

Such mistranslations would be serious enough even if the issue at hand were only the

correct understanding of this passage, but it is much more serious than that: the shift that

they obscure is pivotal in Descartes's exposition, and deeply motivated. In each of his

first two arguments, where he makes the factual claims we noted, he concludes that a

genuine possibility exists: in the first, that a current empirical belief of his may be

mistaken; in the second, that his current apparently sensory experience may actually be a

dream experience. In the present passage he does neither. He makes nofactual claims,

and does not claim that the hypothesis that he does not have a body ispossible; rather, he

asks us to suppose that the latter is true. (We shall temporarily defer considering the

objection that supposing it true presupposes thinking it possible.)

This marks a permanent shift in Descartes's mode of argumentation; he never says that


4/7

either of his remaining "skeptical" hypotheses - that God is deceiving him, and that an

Evil Demon is doing so - is possible. That claim is readily documented, as we shall see,

but I want now to go further, to propose aprincipled explanation for this shift, namely,

that he believes himself to have in hand an a priori demonstration of the necessary

existence of a supremely perfect being who created him and would not allow him to be

massively deceived.Everyone recognizes that Descartes counts himself as massively deceived on the

supposition that there is no physical universe, but I shall argue that he also does so on the

supposition that he has no body. Let us be clear about exactly what Descartes does, and

does not, suppose here. In the first Dream argument he had concluded, on the basis of

entirely commonsensical considerations, that he mightbe having yet another ordinary

dream. He now supposes that he is dreaming, and supposes in addition only that he does

not have a body. He does notsuppose, for example, that there is no world of the sort he

thinks he inhabits, or that his life has been one long dream, or, most importantly, that he

has losthis body. He simply supposes that he is unembodied.

This supposition has dramatic consequences. Consider first Descartes himself. If he

has no body, then, although he seems to himself to be leading a life quite like those ofother people in most respects, he has in fact never seen, heard, touched, smelled or tasted

anything, since he has no sense organs; he has never read or written anything, eaten

anything, conversed with anyone, embraced or struck anyone, lain dressed or undressed

in bed - has never so much as drawn a breath. Consider next other people. Without

exception, they behave toward him just as they behave toward one another: they appear

to shake his nonexistent hand, for example; they keep up their ends of what appear to be

conversations with him; passersby notice nothing unusual about these apparent

conversations, and occasionally adjust their paths to avoid colliding with his nonexistent

body; and so forth. Finally, consider various bits of the non-human world: his clothing

moves as though covering his nonexistent body as he appears to walk; ragamuffins'

snowballs disintegrate when they appear to him and others to hit his face; shadows -

including shadows of what appear to him to be his bare hands and head - accompany him

on sunny days; soft earth takes the shape of footprints where he appears to have stepped;

pieces of paper rend themselves in midair when he appears to be tearing them; his pen

inscribes words on paper as though guided by what appears to be his hand; .

This supposition is utterly mad. It includes both massive deception on his part, and

something like a mirror image of his later supposition that though there appears tohim to

be a physical world, there is in fact none; taking a good deal of poetic license, one might

say that the entire world is massively deceived, that it appears to the entire world that

there is a physical Descartes, though there is in fact none.

I submit that on this mad supposition Descartes would have counted himself massively

deceived, and for just that reason would have considered it impossible; God would not

allow him to exist in such a state, any more than he would allow him to exist in a state of

massive deception about the existence of a physical world. Thatis why he doesnotsay

that it is possible that he has no body.

Let us return , then, to the question why he offers a second dream argument, when he

has found no fault with the first, and ask as well what thepointis of supposing that he has

no body. The answers to these questions are fairly obvious. To suppose that he is an

unembodied dreamer is to suppose, of course, that dreaming does not require having a


5/7

body, and the point of making that supposition is precisely to block the obvious inference

we noted in faulting his first dream argument - the inference from his dreaming to his

having a body. With this second dream argument Descartes takes a significant step

beyond the first toward reaching his target: the conclusion that every empirical belief of

his is doubtful.

Of course he attacks this argument as well, by contending that its (suppositional)premise does not yield the conclusion that every empirical belief of his is doubtful. The

supposition that he does not have a body does not render doubtful, he says, his empirical

beliefs that eyes, hands, heads, and entire bodies exist; indeed, he says he has good

reason to retain those beliefs, namely, that many of his sensory experiences would have

to have been patterned on such objects. Given our interests, we need not rehearse the rest

of his argumentation in this vein, but simply note its eventual dnouement, namely, that

the following belief is notrendered doubtful: that certain very simple and universal things

must exist in order to provide the "raw materials" that even the most powerful

imagination would require in order to provide him with any images at all. Among these

he counts color, corporeal nature, extension, shape, place and time.

At this point Descartes launches an entirely new line of thinking that promises torender doubtful even that one surviving belief (or set of beliefs - one for each of the

simple and universal sorts of things he thinks must exist). He considers first the

hypothesis that God is completely deceiving him about the existence of a physical world

and, second, the hypothesis that a powerful Demon is doing so. Our interest in these

hypotheses lies solely in the fact that he never says that either is possible. He introduces

the first byposing a question:

How do I know that [an all-powerful God who made me to be the sort of creature

that I am] hasnt brought it about that there is no earth, no sky, nothing that takes

up space, no shape, no size, no place, while making sure that all these

things appear to me to exist?

He introduces the second by supposing a demon to exist:

I shall suppose that some malicious, powerful, cunning demon has done all he can

to deceive me . I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes,

sounds and all external things are merely dreams that the demon has contrived as

traps for my judgment. I shall consider myself as having no hands or eyes, or flesh,

or blood or senses, but as having falsely believed that I had all these things.

But, one might object, in this posing and supposing doesn't Descartespresuppose the

possibility that he is being massively deceived by God or a Demon? and earlier, in

supposing that he had no body, didn't he presuppose the possibility of his having none?

If the answers to these questions are affirmative, then in each case he presupposes

something flatly incompatible with what he believes himself to have proven - the

necessary existence of a perfect God who would not allow him to be massively deceived.

Let us suppose, then, that Descartes was "bracketing" the questions of these hypotheses'

possibility, and ask what he might hope to accomplish by examining them.

The first case is of little interest, since even if it is possible that he has no body, that

possibility does not put into doubt all of his empirical beliefs; in particular, it does not

render doubtful his belief that reality comprises various simple and universal things.

The deceiving God and Demon cases are, however, quite another matter; these

hypotheses do have the consequence that every empirical belief of his is doubtful. But


6/7

unless at least one of them is possible, Descartes's reflections on these, too, are of

questionable interest. The challenge he needs to address is this: I grant that ifit is

possible that God or a Demon is maximally deceiving me, then every empirical belief of

mine is rendered doubtful, but why should I suppose that it is possible? The trouble is, of

course, that he thinks it is notpossible.

The upshot of our considerations is that Descartes simply ignores two obviousobjections to his early exposition, and later supposes to be true two hypotheses he

believes to be necessarily false, and leaves open the truth of a third. I long hypothesized,

on the basis of the first of these phenomena, that Descartes's intent at the outset of

Meditation I was principally to seduce his readers into joining in his project, so that he

was concerned only with the persuasiveness, rather than the cogency, of his reflections.

But we now see that neither can he have regarded his later arguments as cogent. In

short, it appears that, with the exception of the first dream argument, where he simply

concludes that he may be having an ordinary dream, Meditation I may in its entirety be

nothing more than an attempt to persuade his readers to join him in his quest for absolute

certainties. If so, it has certainly been wildly successful, but Descartes's serious work

comes later; Meditation I might have been omitted from theMeditations without the lossof anything of philosophical significance.

*****************

Since Descartes never says that the Demon hypothesis is possible, philosophers who

think one or another such hypothesis is possible should refrain from counting any

skeptical arguments that might stem from such a view as a form of "Cartesian

skepticism."

Descartes's Strategy and Exposition

As I read Meditation I, Descartes is at pains not to say it is possible that he lacks a

body or is being massively deceived by God or a Demon, since to do so would contradict

what he takes himself to have demonstrated, which demonstration he will provide his

readers in subsequent Meditations. But why then does he suppose two of them

(alternately) to obtain, or leave open the question whether God is deceiving him? These

are not philosophical, or even textual, but psychological or strategic questions, which

there is little point in speculating about. However, several things are worth noting.

Descartes had hoped to identify some absolutely certain and indubitable truths, and

thought he had done so when, in Meditation II, he argued that there were many things

about which even his envisaged Demon could not be deceiving him, beginning with his

own existence as a thinking thing.


7/7

Descartes, Ren,Replies to Objections II. Translation by Jonathan Bennett online at

www.earlymoderntexts.com.

See, for example, Barry Stroud's account of Meditation I, where he says that withthis second argument Descartes has "lost the whole world."

Bennett's translation of theMeditations can be found at www.earlymoderntexts.com.

Regrettably, I am innocent of all but the most elementary Latin; my suspicions

about the translations were aroused entirely by the oddity of these conjunctions. I

thank my colleagues Gregory Brown and, especially, Helen Hattab for

enlightenment and assistance regarding the text.

It is worth noting an unmentioned difficulty here: surely, if Descartes's dream images are

to bepatterned on real objects, it is not enough that those objects exist, or even that his

dream images resemble them; at a minimum, he must have become aware of them and

their relevant featuresin some fashion, which would seem to require that he have somesort of perceptual/receptual capacity.

Johnsen on Meditation I-II

Documents

Transcript of Johnsen on Meditation I-II