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D. Morgan Pierce
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Methexis .............................................................................................110Hylomorphism...................................................................................112Substance Ontology ..........................................................................112Veridical Illusion ...............................................................................122Teleological Explanation...................................................................124Homogeneity of Cognition................................................................127Essence and Existence ......................................................................129Causality ............................................................................................130Innate Ideas .......................................................................................142Reference ...........................................................................................147Abstraction ........................................................................................150BIBLIOGRAPHY.............................................................................163
My main inquiry concerned why Descartes was motivated to break with the natural
philosophy of Aristotle and scholasticism; what alteration of philosophic premises
in his scientifi c project made the divergence propitious? Presumably this engendered
the famous Cartesian epistemological turn from ontology to epistemology. These
presumptions now appear to me to be false. Although Descartes intentionally
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abandoned Aristotelianism, he saw nothing defective in pursuing an ontological
account, nor had he deliberately supplanted ontology with epistemology. The
epistemological turn, though unintended by Descartes, was indeed a reality, and in fact
the greatest consequence of Cartesian rationalism was to suppress substance ontology
for the following four centuries.
Methexis
The Platonic approach to scientifi c knowledge built upon the premise that universals
are conceptual truths; although discernment of them may be occasioned upon a
particular instance, once recognized, the necessity one apperceives in the universal is
not by virtue of anything in the instance as such, but by a necessity implicit in bringing
it to conception; the particular that one perceives is existentially contingent, but the
necessity perceived in the structure of the particular is immutability. This is perhaps
the more straightforward sense of Plato’s assertion that the Forms are transcendent.
Mutability of the empirical world had suggested that knowledge of such a world
would render knowledge as transient and unreliable as the objects of knowledge. The
particular as such cannot be an object of knowledge because it is not characterized by
necessity.
⇒
That there is no science of the accidental is obvious; for all science is either of
that which is always or of that which is for the most part.1
The immutability of universals, now characterized as transcendent forms, provide the
only account for scientifi c knowledge of transient things.
⇒
1 Cf, Barnes, Jonathan, editor; The Complete Works of Aristotle, Princeton University Press,
1985; Metaphysics, Volume II, Book E, 2, 1027a20,p. 1622.
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Since, among the things which are, some are always in the same state and
are of necessity (nor necessity in the sense of compulsion but that which
means the impossibility of being otherwise), and some are not of necessity
nor always, but for the most part, this is the principle and this is the cause
of the existence of the accidental; for that which is neither always nor for
the most part, we call accidental.2
The Platonic approach accounted for permanence in empirical knowledge but did
not acquit itself uncontroversially of its concept of participation (methexis); if an object
was knowable because of its participation in transcendent Forms, and knowledge was
primarily of Forms, then this left the impression that the empirical world is not the real
world, a conclusion with which Plato was comfortable. Assume that a horse exists and
is known by its participation in the Form horse; we recognize the horse because of its
affi nity to the Form. But if we recognize that the Form and the horse resemble each
other, then there must be a third thing in virtue of which one has the basis to judge their
similarity, and this may reiterate ad infi nitum.
Consequently Aristotle saw no benefi t in hypothesizing a second order of existence,
one of transcendent Forms, to account for empirical knowledge. To preclude the infi nite
regression of the Third Man Argument, Aristotle needed to posit the immanent presence
of the universal element in the empirical objects themselves. Thus a horse is such
because the form horse constitutes the object in question; otherwise the form has no
existence. He maintained the necessity of the universal in knowledge, supposing with
Plato that universals are the only object of knowledge, but posited that such universals
exist only in sensory particulars, without methexis. Such universals are apprehended
not by intellectual intuition of a separate noetic world but by composition from several
2 Cf, Barnes, Jonathan, editor; The Complete Works of Aristotle, Princeton University Press,
1985; Metaphysics, Volume II, Book E2, 1026b27-33, p.1621.
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particular judgments. This relieves us of a second abstract world of forms, doubles
of the objects in the empirical world, but this eventuates in the tentativeness of any
assertion of universality: validity depends on the soundness of the particular judgments
from which the universal is composed. This is perhaps the sense of Aristotle’s dictum
that forms do not exist in transcendence: the form exists embedded in its instance.
Hylomorphism
Aristotle proposed that perception of the object occurs as the form of the object
impinges directly on the retina; the correspondence of idea and object is due to the
identity of form in the mind and body: hylomorphism. The embodied form in the
object passes as the same but disembodied form in the retina: this self same form that
communicates is termed by Aristotle the sensible species; it is the material by which
the intellect forms knowledge. The sensible species is not merely a modifi cation of
consciousness, because it is quite literally what inheres in the object as its substantial
form. As it is not a modifi cation of consciousness, but the thing itself, misperception
was precluded. The ancients and scholastics were able to adhere to a form of
ontological realism because their account of knowledge rested on epistemic realism;
the object in some way caused the perception of the object to be a copy of the object.
Despite variations this account of perception persisted in that there was no contending
theory to vie with this simplistic notion of mental causation. Ancient skepticism never
formulated a doubt of the existence of the external world. An account of perceptual
delusion was sought in the external conditions of perception, or in the ontological
structure of the object itself, but it was never proposed that the having of sensory
perception was itself a delusion.
Substance Ontology
All empirical things are composite particulars; any particular exists either as a
substance or in a substance. An attribute may determine what a substance is, or trivially
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describe it. If apple determines what its substance is, then the substance is an apple,
where it would sound incongruous to suppose that if the substance were red, that the
substance would be a red, or a redness. If on the other hand all attributes were
like red, then for instance saying that a substance is an apple would describe the
substance, but the substance would not be in itself an apple, well though it would be
apple-ish. The oddness of such expressions does not guarantee the accuracy of our
intuition, which may merely have shaped our linguistic usage to refl ect our habituated
psychological proclivities; the question is whether our language and intuition have
been formed by a real correlate in the object, or whether this linguistic distinction is
purely conceptualistic convention, with no support from the object spoken of. Aristotle
assumes a realist position by adverting that a predicate such as red cannot be a trope,
instantiated in existence, without dependence on an attribute such as apple, as can be
stated to exist without presupposing the existence of red:
⇒
And so one might raise the question whether “to walk” and “to be healthy” and
“to sit” signify in each case something that is, and similarly in any other
case of this sort; for none of them is either self-subsistent or capable of
being separated from substance, but rather, if anything, it is that which
walks or is seated or is healthy that is an existent thing. Now these are
seen to be more real because there is something defi nite which underlies
them; and this is the substance or individual, which is implied in such a
predicate; for "good" or "sitting" are not used without this. Clearly then it is
in virtue of this category that each of the others is. Therefore that which is
primarily and is simply (not is something) must be substance.3
3 Cf, Barnes, Jonathan, editor; The Complete Works of Aristotle, Princeton University Press,
1985; Metaphysics, Volume II, Book Z, 1, 1028a20-29, p.1623.
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Substance is present in the predication of any type of being; every other instance of
being is expressed through its relation to substance. Whatever substance is, it will fulfi ll
the following requirements. It must be something, i.e. have a defi nite characteristic; it
will be a separate entity that supports whatever other things are presented as existing.
⇒
There are many senses in which a thing may be said to "be", but they are
related to one central point, one defi nite kind of thing, and are not
homonymous. Everything which is healthy is related to health, one thing
in the sense that it preserves health, another in the sense that it produces
it, another in the sense that it is a symptom of health, another because
it is capable of it. And that which is medical is relative to the medical art,
one thing in the sense that it processes it, another in the sense that it
is naturally adapted to it, another in the sense that it is a function of the
medical art. And we shall fi nd other words used similarly to these. So,
too, there are many cases in which a thing is said to be, but all refer to
one starting-point; some things are said to be because their substances,
others because they are affections of substance, others because they are
a process towards substance, or destructions or privations or qualities of
substance, or productive or generative of substance, or of things which
are relative to substance, or negations of some of these things or of
substance to itself. It is for this reason that we say even of non-being that
it is non-being. As, then, there is one science which deals with all healthy
things, the same applies in the other cases also. For not only in the case
of things which have one common notion does the investigation belong to
one science, but also in the case of things which are related to one nature;
for even these in a sense have one common notion. It is clear then that
it is the work of one science also to study all other things that are, qua
being.- But everywhere science deals chiefl y with that which is primary,
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and on which the other things depend, and in virtue of which they get their
names. If, then, this is substance, it is of substances that the philosopher
must grasp the principles and the causes. 4
Accordingly substance is a composite of matter and two types of form, substantial and
accidental, out of which only substantial is knowable, while matter and the composite
plus form are knowable anaclitically.
Among the three instances, form is prior in being to both matter and the composite.
⇒
Therefore if the form is prior to the matter and more real, it will be prior to the
compound also for the same reason. We have now outlined the nature of
substance, showing that it is that which is not predicated of a subject, but
of which all else is predicated. 5
Substrate connotes form, matter, and composite, of which form is the primary
instance; in other words, matter and composite have being only by their dependence
on the form, because form is their determination. Similarly, accidents have being only
through their dependence on substance, as refl ected through the circumstance that the
defi nition of an accident always includes reference to substance, as refl ected through
the circumstance that the defi nition of an accident includes its substance, whereas the
defi nition of a substance does not include reference to its accidents. In consequence
accidents are known only by ad hoc perception; the accident merely exists or merely
does not exist, but since it is not entailed by the essential qualities of a substance the
4 Cf, Barnes, Jonathan, editor; The Complete Works of Aristotle, Princeton University Press,
1985; Metaphysics, Volume II, Book , 2, 1003 a33-b18, p. 1584.
5 Cf, Barnes, Jonathan, editor; The Complete Works of Aristotle, Princeton University Press,
1985; Metaphysics, Volume II, Book Z, 3, 1029a5-9, p. 1625.
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accident cannot be captured in scientifi c knowledge.
Substance is a unity of these factors. The substantial form (i.e., not the mind) functions
to unify the components in such a way that the components metamorphose from an
aggregate to a particular.6 The particulars of which substance is composed cannot exist
except in the substance; the substance abolishes the aggregate of particulars by forming
a unit, e.g. we do not perceive a red in the apple, but a red apple. The red is never
a this in the manner of the substance, apple.
The substance thus has its primacy in its logical sense because it is the entity on
which any other determination of being depends, but in this role substance cannot be
equated with a universal, because substance must be a this while the universal is
common to many:
⇒
While “being” is expressed in so many ways, it is obvious that of these primary
being is the one-is, which signifi es the entity. For when we say of what
quality a thing is, we say that it is good or bad, not that it is three cubits
long or that it is a man; but when we state what it is, we do not say "white"
or "hot" or "three cubits long," but a "man" or a "God." And all other things
are called beings because they are, some of them, quantities of being in
this primary sense, others qualities of it, others affections of it, and others
some other determination of it.7
All other instances of being are such only when they are modifi cations of
substance.8
6 Cf. Scaltsas, Theodore; Substances and Universals in Aristotle's Metaphysics, Cornell
University Press, Ithaca, 1994, p. 4.
7 Cf, Barnes, Jonathan, editor; The Complete Works of Aristotle, Princeton University Press,
1985; Metaphysics, Volume II, Book Z, 1, 1028 b13-19. p. 1623.
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All other types of being can be only as modifi cations of substance, but substance
itself cannot be a universal, in the regard in which apple is true of many substances.
But it appears that, if substance is a composition of nothing but universals, it should be
impossible for substance to be a particular. If the constituents are equally universals, it
should appear just as possible to refer to the substance just as legitimately as a red as
to refer to it as an apple; why not use the nominative form of red and the adjectival
form of apple? If the linguistic preference indicates that the substance is identical with
apple, but not identical with red, then it is necessary to account for this. Supposing
Apple is true of many particulars, and red is true of many particulars, why should
linguistic modifi cation of apple allow it to name the substance in which apple inheres,
but no such modifi cation allows a predicate such as red to name the substance in which
it inheres? If the substance is not identical with red as it is identical with apple, then
does a difference of inherence account for this, considering that basically, apple and
red, being universals, are both incapable of being identical with a particular.
Furthermore, predications can be made of the ultimate substratum, i.e. the matter,
or of the substance, i.e. composite of substantial form and its matter. Matter as such
has no characteristic, so why does it need to be compounded with form to constitute
substance? Inasmuch as matter is a lack of characteristic, how can matter contribute
anything to substance? If a form were substance, then there would be only one
substance for every form, as is the case in Platonism. However, many things instantiate
a form; presumably the embodiment of the same form in indefi nite matter accounts for
the plural instantiation of one and the same form. The substantial form, being common
to many substances, cannot be what makes the substance a separate this, while the
matter of the substance, being as such indefi nite, cannot individuate by itself because it
imports no characteristic to separate it from other substances.
8 Cf, Barnes, Jonathan, editor; The Complete Works of Aristotle, Princeton University Press,
1985; Metaphysics, Volume II, Book Z, 1, 1020b11-12, p. 1611.
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Logically regarded, substance must be that of which all other things are predicated; for
instance, as apple is predicated of something, the something should be substance
more strongly that apple, because it receives apple as predication. This something
would then be the primary instance of substrate, because it receives all predications but
is not itself predicated of anything. In its primary instance substrate is matter, prima
materia, because matter is that which in itself has absolutely no determination; it alone
underlies all predications. This appears to make sense, because, whereas red can be
predicated of an individual apple, red cannot be predicated of the Form apple, for that
would entail that all apples are a priori red. However, the material substrate, of which
all things are predicated, is, therefore, in itself nothing. Not even spatial dimensions or
weight characterize matter per se, because they as well are merely predicated of matter.
Since however matter once stripped of its predications is not even a particular thing,
it is impossible that it should be substance, because substance performs the function
of giving unity to the manifold of the object’s qualities; substance must therefore
be a separate this here, but as matter has no per se characteristic, it is incapable of
providing unity and separation. Substance must be a separate this here :
⇒
There are several senses in which a thing may be said to be, as we pointed
out previously in our book on the various senses of words; for in one
sense it means what a thing is or a “this”, and in another sense it means
that a thing is of a certain quality or quantity or has some other predicate
asserted of it.9
Matter cannot exist separately because no determination marks it off from anything
else.
9 Cf, Barnes, Jonathan, editor; The Complete Works of Aristotle, Princeton University Press,
1985; Metaphysics, Volume II, Book Z, 1, 1028a10-13 p. 1623.
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⇒
And so one might raise the question whether “to walk” and “to be healthy”
and “to sit” signify in each case something that is, and others some
determination of it. And so one might raise the question whether “to walk”
and “to be healthy” and “to sit” signify in each case something that is,
and similarly in any other case of tis sort; for none of them is either self-
subsistent or capable of being separated from substance, but rather, if
anything, it is that which walks or is seated or is healthy that is an existent
thing. Now these are seen to be more real because there is something
defi nite which underlies them; and this is the substance or individual,
which is implied in such a predicate; for “good” or “sitting” are not used
without this. Clearly then it is in virtue of this category that each of the
others is.10
Inasmuch as pure matter cannot be a this here, it cannot be individual; it therefore
cannot be the principle of individuality for a substance. As some per se characteristic
must constitute the substrate as substance, it appears that in some way the substantial
sense of substrate must be either form, or a composite of form and matter.
⇒
We have now outlined the nature of substance showing that it is that which
is not predicated of a subject, but of which all else is predicated…The
statement itself is obscure, and further, on this view, matter becomes
substance. For if this is not substance, it is beyond us to say what else
is. When all else is taken away evidently nothing but matter remains. For
of the other elements some are affections, products, and capacities of
10 Cf, Barnes, Jonathan, editor; The Complete Works of Aristotle, Princeton University Press,
1985; Metaphysics, Volume II, Book Z, 1, 1028a20-30, p. 1623.
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bodies, while when length, breadth, and depth are taken away we see
nothing left except that which is bounded by these, whatever it be; so
that to those who consider the question thus matter alone must seem to
be substance. By matter I mean that which in itself is neither a particular
thing nor of a certain quality nor assigned to any other of the categories
by which being is determined. For there is something of which each of
these is predicated, so that its being is different from that of each of the
predicates; for the predicates other than substance are predicated of
substance, while substance is predicated of matter. Therefore the ultimate
substratum is of itself neither a particular thing nor of a particular quality
nor otherwise positively characterized; nor yet negatively, for negations
also will belong to it only by accident. For those who adopt this view,
then, it follows that matter is substance. But this is impossible; for both
separability and individuality are thought to belong chiefl y to substance,
rather than matter.11
But if form imparts a characteristic to substance, it cannot be what makes substance
a separate individual, because the form, being universal, would then be what is
common to several individuals. On the other hand matter cannot individuate because
it carries no characteristic by which to identify substance. The Form cannot resolve
this quandary because predication of a form of a substance entails identifi cation of the
substance being predicated, but this tactic is excluded by the premise that matter has
no defi nite characteristic prior to predication of its form. This presents the hypothesis
of a certain form that could not be predicated of substance, inasmuch as the predication
would imply a real distinction between the two, but rather that the substantial form be
11 Cf, Barnes, Jonathan, editor; The Complete Works of Aristotle, Princeton University Press,
1985; Metaphysics, Volume II, Book Z, 3, 1029a7-30, p. 1625.
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the substance, without possible distinction. This form, termed the essence, would then
be structured as the substantial subject:
⇒
The absurdity of the separation would appear also if one were to assign
a name to each of the essences; for there would be another essence
besides the original one, e.g. to the essence of horse there will be a
second essence. Yet why should not some things be their essences from
the start, since essence is substance? But not only are a thing and its
essence one, but the formula of them both is also the same.12
In effect, a double meaning of matter is introduced. A secondary sense of substrate
signifi es a substrate of which all attributes are predicated. Since a substrate with
no intrinsic character cannot exist, this second substrate signifi es a composite of
pure matter with the fi rst form. All accidental qualities are predicated of the second
substrate, while the second substrate is predicated of fi rst substrate.
⇒For there is something of which each of these is predicated, so that its being is
different from that of each of the predicates; for the predicates other than
substance are predicated of substance, while substance is predicated of
matter.13
The predication of Form of the fi rst substrate has no treatment in the logical context,
but in the physical context prima materia is indispensable. As prime matter, substrate is
12 Cf, Barnes, Jonathan, editor; The Complete Works of Aristotle, Princeton University Press,
1985; Metaphysics, Volume II, Book Z, 6, 1031b28-1032a1, p.1629.
13 Cf, Barnes, Jonathan, editor; The Complete Works of Aristotle, Princeton University Press,
1985; Metaphysics, Volume II, Book Z, 3, 1029 a22-24, p. 1625.
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matter without any determination whatever, whereas, in the logical treatment, substrate
is the composite form-matter. The composite is the substrate of accidents, able to
provide a this for predication, while the undetermined fi rst substrate fails in this, but
is entailed for the conceptual accountability of substantial change.
⇒
As the substrate and the essence and the compound of these are called
substance, so also is the universal. About two of these we have spoken;
about the essence and about the substrate, of which we have said that it
underlies in two senses, either being a “this” ? - which is the way in which
an animal underlies its attributes-, or as the matter underlies the complete
reality.14
Resulting senses of predication, accidental or essential, of primary matter or
substance, create the possibility of misappraising the attributes of the object. Moreover
the particularity of the substance is not a primitive given, but an as yet unexplained
result of the unifying property of the substantial form: attributes cannot exist except
as belonging to a substance. Consequently, ultimate simples are never given as such
in empirical intuition, but arise only in consequence of abstraction from the substance
to which they belong. Where Aristotle would puzzle over how a plurality of forms and
matter combine nevertheless to be one substance (not an aggregate), Descartes refl ects
through the same puzzlement as to how ideas are combined in the mind.
Veridical Illusion
The new attribution of misperception to epistemological factors was consequent
to the Cartesian formulation: what we see are mental images. Once a certain kind of
14 Cf, Barnes, Jonathan, editor; The Complete Works of Aristotle, Princeton University Press,
1985; Metaphysics, Volume II, Book Z, 13, 1038 b1-7, p. 1639.
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image is mentally formed with the additional illusion that it is primarily perceived as
outside, as the real object, in consequence of the mental handling of sense data, then
we do not see an image; rather, the image that we see is the real object. Given that
this veridical image is now perceived as being the real object, out there, it becomes
appropriate to understand veridical perception (or misperception) in terms of the mental
production of this veridical image rather than as a consequence of the ontological
structure of the real object.
Regarding the ontological structure of the object, perhaps the greatest illusion of
all is the exteriority of images. When we see objects, what we see is not images, but
objects; looking at a dog, I do not fi rst see an image, and then processing through a
refl ective act infer that it is a veridical perception of a dog outside my mind. It is the
reverse; I see a dog, and only by the most counterintuitive refl ection do I conclude
that the dog I see is in reality a mental image I formed and consequently modifi ed so
as to make it appear to be outside. While most of my images of things I do receive as
images, not as veridical perception, in neither case do I need an additional refl ection
to constitute it as one or the other. Yet, all of my veridical perceptions are images,
not objects themselves; a supposedly veridical perception is simply an image that
is so constituted that I cannot help but receive it not as an image, but as the original
in the external world. This formula is incomplete inasmuch as it should assert the
exact identity of the image with that of which it is the image; but given the Cartesian
premises, there are no truth conditions for being the same, until it can be devised
how a mental image represents. I fi rst become conscious of my images as real, external
objects, although upon refl ection, perhaps on the occasion of incoherence, I redact my
external, real object as at root merely my haywire mental image.
The Aristotelian sensible species, by the new Cartesian standard, is not something
that is patently present amongst my received sensory impressions; four legs, two ears,
a tail etc are among sensory data, but the recognition of such data and not others has no
sensory correlate. As idea, sensible species is the form disembodied, while in the object
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it is the same form, but embodied. This manner of thinking emphasizes the conformity
of thought to object: nihil in intellectu quod non in sensu fuerit. If all thought is an
isomorphic manufacture from sense data, no reference to a non-sensory source is
requisite to explain knowledge. If the hypothesis of sensible species is admitted, then
it suggests kindred scholastic properties such as fi nal cause, also without sensory
evidence. Under the Cartesian principle that anything we know must be mediated by
self-evident sensibilia, such Aristotelian terms associated with sensible species ought to
be evidenced in that of which we are plainly conscious.15 Assuming that knowledge
must build upon what is originally given, our representative ideas of things, rather
than of things themselves, are the only infallible basis of what knowledge, if any, is
possible. The ancient-scholastic conception that knowledge is an act of conformity of
the intellect to the thing then has no basis.
Teleological Explanation
Descartes shifted the idea of knowledge from the objects to the ideas we have of
objects. Given the Aristotelian conclusion that essences must inhere in particular
objects, essences were not predicated of particular objects; they were particular
objects; this tenet was necessary to avoid supposing that the essence, predicated of the
particular, meant that the particular was something separate from the essence, leading
to infi nite regress. Instead, the substratum was to be identifi ed by its essence, and
without that essence, substratum also did not exist.
To have knowledge of some object was to attain knowledge of its essence, which,
embodying the fi nal cause, explained the unique development of every individual.
15 Moyal makes a precipitate leap to suppose that objects must conform to the operations of
the intellect, but this might be true only if the statement were more refi ned than as it appears
in this context. cf. Georges J. D. Moyal, "Descartes Method: From things to Ideas", in Renée
Descartes: Critical Assessments, Vol. I, ed. Georges D. J. D. Moyal, Rutledge, 1991, p. 20.
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⇒
All the things mentioned plainly differ from things which are not constituted
by nature. For each of them has within itself a principle of motion and of
stationariness (in respect of place, or of growth and decrease, or by way of
alteration). On the other hand, a bed and a coat and anything else of that sort,
qua receiving these designations. i.e. in so far as they are products of art- have
no innate impulse to change. But in so far as they happen to be composed of
stone or of earth or of a mixture of the two, they do have such an impulse, and
just to that extent- which seems to indicate that nature is a principle or cause of
being moved and of being at rest in that to which it belongs primarily, in virtue
of itself and not accidentally.16
Natural objects are guided by an internal principle of growth, whereas artifacts have
no internal principle except for the matter from which they are composed. Aristotle
allowed for substances to undergo causal change by mutual infl uence, but in the
long term a substance’s development was governed by an internal principle, not
fundamentally by affection from other objects, and the substance would develop into
a defi nitive terminus, insofar as the substance was not violently deterred by external
causation.
Teleology stressed that different methods of investigation were germane to different
types of object; one could not approach mathematics with the same methods as one
applied to biology or meteorology. This meant that causal interaction could be only a
quite limited explanatory principle; authentic explanation depended on grasping the
essence of each substance taken in isolation, and ultimately grasping the essence of the
object was equivalent to grasping its telos. Whatever we know about polar bears does
16 Cf. Barnes, Jonathan, editor; The Complete Works of Aristotle, Princeton University Press,
1985; Physics, Volume I, Book II, 1, 192b12-22, p. 329.
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not easily apply to the knowledge we might seek of tornadoes, because difference in
the manner of acquiring knowledge of different essences entails incommensurability
of knowledge obtained of one essence and that obtained of another. Commonality of
knowledge would be possible only if the principles of each object were not isolated
by virtue of different essences. Polar bears behave as they do because they are
governed by the fi nal cause of polar-bearness, whereas tornadoes are governed by
the fi nal cause of tornadoness; nothing from either will render light on the behavior
of the other. Inasmuch as common principles do not apply across essences, it would
be methodologically misfi red to attempt clarifi cation of unintelligible phenomena by
the discovery of interconnecting minute structures between different essences. The
explanatory gaps produced by teleological explanation gradually stocked the scholastic
cabinet with occult terms such as potentiality, act, disposition, essence, accident,
fi nal cause, prima material, etc., which gave accounts of those objectual phenomena
otherwise unexplained. What is meant by occult is that disposition, essence, act,
potential etc. were indispensable to fi ll gaps in our account of things on the basis of
scholastic substance philosophy, but were not intuitively evidenced in our sensory
observations of things; they were therefore posited, as if they were given outside of
sensory evidence, to maintain the coherence of Aristotelian substance theory.
Despite the groundlessness of the occult qualities of objects, the Aristotelian theory
presumes an immediate cognitive presence with the object in the place of the Cartesian
premise: we are merely acquainted with our received ideas of objects, never with
an immediate knowledge of objects unobscured by mediating ideas. The Cartesian
initiative is, therefore, a case of paradigm shift. One might persist in sustaining the
substance theory, but at the cost of introducing dubious postulates such as disposition,
fi nal cause etc. in order to sustain the coherence of the theory. The contemporary
astronomical postulation of epicycles needed to persist in describing planetary orbits
as perfect circles rather than as ellipses refl ects a cognate mentality. Or, one might
eliminate the occult qualities, insofar as sense experience does not support belief in
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their existence; this would destroy the substance theory for which they had become
indispensable supports. In their place one could then introduce Cartesian premises, but
since doing so introduces a new (insurmountable) problem, namely uncertainty over
whether we ever reliably experience the external world, one may reasonably wonder
whether supplanting the former substance theory is worth the price.
Homogeneity of Cognition
All of the substantive features of the object, insofar as intelligible in the scholastic
concept of substance, are unverifi able in the Cartesian context in which all knowledge
must be based upon our representative ideas of an object. The occult qualities of the
object were justifi ed preliminarily from the aporia that such qualities, and nothing
else, could account for certain features of empirical knowledge; though unaccountable
they were established by the fact that observed phenomena would have no account
if these principles were abolished. If on the other hand what is to our immediate
acquaintance not objects but exclusively our ideas of objects, then argument from
default fails. Substance, that in which occult qualities are supposed to inhere, is
suspended, and occult qualities cease to be pertinent when that which they presuppose
is in suspension. If the world is mediated solely through sensory ideas of things,
substance must be evidenced through sensibilia, which however do not evidence
substance.17 If, however, the notion of substance is insupportable, the notion that our
ideas represent things becomes perplexed (A: How do I know my idea represents the
world? B: There is no world. A: Yes, but how does my idea represent it?), even prior to
the question of the veracity of their representational function.
Different objects are not governed by internal rules (fi nal cause) different from
those of other substances, if different objects do not have different natures. The
17 cf. Georges J. D. Moyal, "Descartes Method: From Things to Ideas", in Renée Descartes:
Critical Assessments, Vol. I, ed. Georges D. J. D. Moyal, Rutledge, 1991, p. 19.
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MEDITATION ON THE FIRST MEDITATION
supposition of having a unique nature (essence) falls on the skeptical divide. Objects
are preliminarily uniform in nature insofar as Descartes supposes them all to be parts
of one uniform, homogenous space, subject entirely to uniform geometrical laws of
one space. If objects have natures, i.e. are unique substances with laws of movement
all of their own, this would need to be demonstrated a posteriori, i.e. after we construe
what objects are by a uniform geometry, solely from what we can construe from their
representative ideas.
Repudiating the Aristotelian division of essences, Descartes reduced the
knowledge of objects to a level at which all objects are the same, to their status as
conglomerations of sense data. Knowledge thus focused on ideas, i.e. to sensory
representations of objects. Prescinding from the Aristotelian intuition of essences as
the route to knowledge, our ideas, of whatever objects they may be, do not differ qua
representations; if a characteristic internal to our consciousness of an idea accounts
for how we make reference from it to polar bears and tornadoes, the characteristic of
reference should be the same in consciousness of all ideas. The Aristotelian teleology
(differences in the essences of objects entailed differences in knowledge acquisition for
objects of different sorts) would imply that knowledge of relations between different
essences is unobtainable, as the methods of their attainment are incommensurate. By
the supposition that objects are never directly known because of the physiological
mediacy of cognition, in the night all cows are black; since the natures of objects are
not directly accessible, the difference in nature between two essences is a matter of
indifference.18 Since both objects are accessible only through the representational ideas,
if at all, representation provides an undifferentiated methodology at the basis of
knowledge. The possibility that an epistemic quality discovered by refl ection on any
one representational idea might be true of all representations might then supply an
18 cf. Georges J. D. Moyal, "Descartes Method: From Things to Ideas", in Renee Descartes:
Critical Assessments, Vol. I, ed. Georges D. J. D. Moyal, Rutledge, 1991, p. 8.
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epistemic homogeneity to all episodes of knowledge of the external world. When all
empirical observation is resolved into ultimate simples, barring in principle reliance on
occult qualities, these homogenous sense data appear without structure; how are these
data to be construed as collections of objects?
Knowledge acquisition would fi nd its account in the rules by which we manipulate
sense data, namely intuition and deduction. If all knowledge ultimately depends on
intuition and deduction, analysis of these functions would pertain to all genera of
sensory knowledge. Scholastic supposition of ultimate properties such as potentiality,
disposition, fi nal cause, etc. preserved a realism, inasmuch as they kept intact faith in
the direct knowledge of the external object, locating all the problems of knowledge in
the object’s ontological structure. Reduction of knowledge to sensibilia, rather than to
Forms, eliminates the scholastic machinery, but shifts knowledge from objects to ideas
of objects.19
Essence and Existence
A common theme in Aristotle and Descartes had been
E
(a) = Fa. If a substance (a) is
defi ned by a formula F, then any instance of (a) will be an instance of F; we identify
E
(a)
by F, by which F is understood to formulate the essence of (a). But at this point Descartes
diverges from Aristotle and the scholastics. Aristotelianism supposes the priority of the
knowledge of the existence of a substance over the knowledge of its essence. The
question an est precedes the question quid est, in which quid signifi es the essence of
a substance. Descartes, to the contrary, posits that quid est , knowledge of the essence
of a substance, necessarily precedes knowledge of whether the substance exists.20
19 cf. Georges J. D. Moyal, "Descartes Method: From Things to Ideas", in Renee Descartes:
Critical Assessments, Vol. I, ed. Georges D. J. D. Moyal, Rutledge, 1991, p. 2.
20 Cf. Secada, Jorge; Cartesian Metaphysics The Scholastic Origins of Modern Philosophy,
Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 8.
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MEDITATION ON THE FIRST MEDITATION
According to Aristotle and his scholastic successors, one can know that (a) exists without
knowing that F is the essence of (a): {
E
(a) = Fa}. Recognition of (a)’s existence does
not depend on prior knowledge that F is (a)’s essence. In consequence it is impossible
to know that (a) is essentially F without a prior knowledge that (a) exists: existence
precedes essence. The thesis that one can know that (a) exists without knowing that (a)
is essentially F is however highly suspect, assuming that the form is the only method to
identify and refer to (a). It is important to notice that this position was taken posterior
to Aristotle’s distinction of essential and accidental attributes. Descartes to the
contrary proposes that it is impossible to know that (a) exists unless one knows that F
is the essence of (a); the essence, as the sole means to identify an (a), follows from the
original position taken by Socrates in the reminiscence argument: one cannot even
search for (a) unless one knows what (a) is, that one is searching for; possibly the
position is defective because it predates Aristotle’s distinction of attributes into
essential and accidental. The Aristotelian thesis partially explains why the scholastics
could assume the existentialist position, whereas we are left hanging as to why
Descartes took the essentialist position.
Causality
The radicalism in Descartes’ thought perhaps stems from his studies of optics.
Suppose that the object does not transmit its form (sensible species) to the retina;
suppose instead that sensory impressions are received by the retina, transferred through
a nervous system, and delivered to the brain, where a visual image is fi rst constituted,
and where, although the image is located in the brain, it is manufactured to appear to be
outside the brain, there from where the sensory data originated.
Assume that pain causally originates from an affection of my big toe. I do not
transparently perceive the causal interaction; I do not perceive the existence of the
material basis of the pain (combustion of the carbon-bearing elements of big toe
cells), the material basis of corporeal pain. Most importantly, I do not perceive a pain
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originating in my big toe, or feel the pain as it travels up my nerve cells into a pain
in the nerve ganglia of my lower back, traveling further as a felt pain up my spine
and fi nally feeling a big toe pain in a specifi c location of my brain. Whatever the big-
toe pain is, it apparently travels in code until it is transformed in my brain into a
manifest pain in my big toe. This would on the contrary fi t with the notion of sensible
species, which would not code in the transmission process and decode in the brain.
Since even feeling the pain does not convey a knowledge of the essence of pain, it is
obscure how I can know that (whether) the event in my big toe in any way resembles
the manufacture in the brain of sensed pain, which is moreover manipulated by the
brain in which the signal is transformed into phenomenal pain, to be felt not as if the
pain were in the brain, but as if it were in the big toe.21
Perhaps one might say that we are not conscious of objects when we are conscious
of our ideas of them inasmuch as we do not know how the original material is altered
in the neurological production of their mental images (pain, incidentally, is an image
(i.e. representative) just as a sound or sight of a dog). Consequently study must focus
on mental images, because it is ultimately only that of which we are immediately
conscious.
Knowledge of the external world, being empirical, seems to depend on causality:
certainty of the existence of external objects is not evident directly from our ideas of
them, as that would not account for reference; rather, reference from images to specifi c
objects depends on the premise that the idea of the object correlates to the specifi c
time that the idea appears, and to adventitiousness: the idea presents itself in a way that
is not dictated by our will. The two conditions combine to create the impression that
ideas are caused by something other than ourselves.22 This sensation that we are forced
to be conscious of something we do not will to be conscious of is the basis of belief
21 cf. James M. Humber, "Recognizing Clear and Distinct Impressions, in Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research, Vol. 41, no. 4, 1981, pp. 487-507.
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MEDITATION ON THE FIRST MEDITATION
that there is an outer world.
But this means that if causality is imperfectly conceived, the reality of the external
world is impugned. The classical conception of causality had been of mutual affection
between substances. One might suppose that a tree causes me to see a tree in the same
sense as rain causes fl owers to grow, just as, for instance, Aristotle had supposed that
sight was caused by hylomorphic affection of the retina.
However, no one prior to Descartes had conceived consciousness to be a substance;
it is therefore questionable whether all of the results from the theory of causality,
conceived as affection of physical substances, can be unproblematically assumed
to explain affection of a non-physical substance by a physical substance. Thought
concerning substantial causality had never comprised the categorically different notion
of causal transaction between the physical and the conscious. As Aristotle established
that all accidental change is restricted to contraries, and that the new quality had to
be present in the subject in potency, it is cumbersome to suppose that one substance
(physical) should be able to bring about change in a completely incommensurate
substance (consciousness).
It is mysterious that a piece of wood corrupts when affected by fi re; nothing visible
elucidates why wood should react in this way. Mystery ceases when we penetrate
to a microscopic level, where the agent and the patient seem to be homogeneous;
the alteration consists in some electrons being pushed out of orbit by the presence
of others. This is more intelligible than macroscopic observation of the same thing,
because at the microscopic level the agent and patient are subsumable under the same
set of laws. Reduction of fi re and wood to the level at which they are homogeneous
produces the condition under which the microscopic can account for macroscopic
22 cf. Frederick P. Van De Pitte, Mathematics and the Doctrine of Eternal Truths in the
Development of Descartes’ Epistemology, in René Descartes: Critical Assessments, vol. I, ed.
Georges J. D. Moyal, Rutledge, 1991, p. 407.
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D. Morgan Pierce
change. But this paradigm does not work for the equally mysterious episode, in
which a physical agent affects a mental patient. There is no microscopic reduction
at which physical and mental appear to be homogeneous. A wave length of so many
angstroms causes a perception of red. This is a reduction to the microscopic substrate,
just as in the case of wood and fi re, but in this case the reduction does not arrive to a
homogeneity between agent and patient: the two sides of the divide are describable
only by distinctly different sets of laws. This incommensurability is the quintessence of
Descartes’ ontology. Without the intractability of mental and physical explanation, the
Cartesian theory of innate ideas would collapse.
If the stimulus requires so much intermediate processing before being a visual (or
other) image, how can one suppose that the image as experienced should be identical
with its cause? Aristotle had postulated that (1) a cause resembles its effect, e.g. a hot
thing causes the effect of feeling hot, and (2) that the cause must contain at least as
much reality as its effect. This presupposes formal identity of cause and effect. An
effect can never have a greater magnitude of the given quality than is contained in its
cause. (3) Causality supposes consistency, i.e. that C1 (taken by itself) is invariably
the cause of E1, never of E2. Such a dogma of causality would be necessary to support
realism.
Number (2) has a venerable history. Early in Greek thought a principle of physical
continuity preshaped the concept of causality, to wit: whenever there is change, there
must be something that underlies the change, and remains itself unchanged throughout
the process of change. (a) was non-F and comes to be F; thus at one time non-F,
at another time F, is predicated of (a). Thus (a) persists through the change; the (a)
undergoing change is some sense must remain unchanged in order for change to take
place. If there were no underlying substratum that did not change, there would be no
same thing before and after the change, and hence no change either.
When (a) changes from non-F to F, the substance undergoes an accidental change
such that the unchanging substratum is the composite of form plus substance.
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MEDITATION ON THE FIRST MEDITATION
⇒
Things are said to come to be in different ways. In some cases we do not
use the expression “come to be”, but “come to be so-and-so”. Only
substances are said to come to be without qualifi cation. Now in all cases
other than substance it is plain that there must be something underlying,
namely, that which becomes. For when a thing comes to be of such a
quality or quantity or in such a relation, time, or place, a subject is always
presupposed, since substance alone is not predicated of another subject,
but everything else of substance.23
Given the premise that nothing can emerge from nothing, however, it appears
impossible that something should become, for instance, red, because the red,
appearing from what was not red before, would then emerge out of nothing.
The aporia was overcome by the thesis that change takes place only in pairs of
contraries. For instance, red cannot change into cold, because cold is not a contrary of
red. Red can change into blue, because, as members of the same species (color), they
are contraries. Thus something that is red can be indifferently hot or cold at the same
time it is red, but something red cannot be blue at the same time it is red. Furthermore,
the red thing can become blue, but the red of the thing never becomes blue; accidental
change is an exchange of contrary qualities which in themselves do not change.
Change takes place when the blue, which already exists in the thing qua potency,
becomes actual, while the actual red recedes into potency. This should account for why
accidental changes are not instances of emergence from pure nothingness; any quality
that appears had already existed in the bearer, but potentially. In the case of accidental
change the essence persists as the unchanging element of the change, while some
23 Cf. Barnes, Jonathan, editor; The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume I, Princeton
University Press, 1985; Physics, Book I, 190a32-37, p. 325.
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D. Morgan Pierce
accidental form is replaced entirely by its contrary form:
⇒
Thus, from what has been said, whatever comes to be is always complex.
There is, on the one hand, something which comes to be, and again
something which becomes that- the latter in two senses, either the subject
or the opposite. By the opposite I mean the unmusical, by the subject,
man; similarly I call the absence of shape or form or order the opposite,
and the bronze or stone or gold the subject;24
The underlying schema for the pairing of qualities into contraries is that (1) the same
effect E1 cannot be caused by opposite causes and (2) the same cause cannot produce
opposite effects, either E1 or E2.25 It follows that if A-ness is the authentic cause of F,
anything other than A, i.e. non-A, cannot be the cause of F. Furthermore, if something (a)
causes F, (a) cannot be non-F. If (a) causes F, merely because of being (a), then
inasmuch as (a) per se always causes F, (a) itself must be F. If on the contrary (a) is fi re
that cools, for instance, although it otherwise heats, then it is after all not (a), but
something in (a) that is always the cause of F, and is in itself the highest instance of F.
There can be only one cause for an effect E1; if there is change in an object, it must be
affected by an opposite cause such that the cause P of (o)’s being non-F must
surrender to the cause Q of (o)’s becoming F.
The postulate of the alternation of contraries however fails to sequester substantial
change from the simple exchange of one thing for another, i.e. the utter annihilation
of one substance into nothingness, replaced by creation out of complete nothingness
24 Cf. Barnes, Jonathan, editor; The Complete Works of Aristotle, Princeton University Press,
1985; Physics, Volume I, Book I, 7; 190b12-14, p. 325.
25 Cf. Hankinson, R. J,; Cause and Explanation in Ancient Greek Thought, Oxford University
Press, 2001, p. 89, passim.
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MEDITATION ON THE FIRST MEDITATION
of a new substance in its place. Qualities, such as red and blue, hot and cold, form
natural pairs of contraries, but, unlike a quality, substances have no opposites; a cat
is not the contrary or opposite of a dog, or a hippopotamus. Since substances do not
constitute contraries, a different substance cannot be conceived to be already existent
in the matter of another substance, though in potency. The corruption of one substance
and generation of another cannot be explained as the play of potency and actuality.
Without such an explanation, substantial change is indistinguishable from an absence
of change, in which one thing simply stands in the place of another. Since in substantial
change no essential property survives, no determination remains to identify something
as being the same thing as what had been prior to substantial corruption. The presumed
same thing (a) cannot refer to any form, for no form persists; (a) can refer only to
the underlying prima materia (prima materia, incidentally, is a medieval coinage; the
term was not used by Aristotle). The hypothesis of an underlying substrate that stays
the same throughout change is necessary to distinguish change from non-change, the
simple exchange of two different things. This account of substantial change is however
highly tenuous, because it involves depending on prima materia to account for identity
through change, but Aristotle has strongly argued that an entity that has absolutely no
determination cannot be said to exist.
Since Aristotle denies the possibility of creation ex nihilo, the idea of unchanging
substratum must somehow apply to the cases of substantial generation and destruction.
That is, when a substance passes out of or into existence, and all substantial forms are
lost, this must also be somehow understood as a transformation of matter that remains
the same throughout change:
⇒
But that substances too, and anything that can be said to be without
qualifi cation, come to be from some underlying thing, will appear on
examination. For we fi nd in every case something that underlies from
which proceeds that which comes to be; for instance, animals and plants
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D. Morgan Pierce
from seed.26
By this hypothesis, instead of change there would be corruption into absolute
nothingness and spontaneous generation of something new out of absolutely nothing.
Given this dilemma, Aristotle adopted the tenet that nothing comes out of nothing, or
conversely, that there must be as much in the cause of something as in the effect.
⇒
Now we do not know a thing without its cause; and a thing has a quality in a
higher degree than other things if in virtue of it the similar quality belongs
to the other things (e.g. fi re is the hottest of things, for it is the cause of
heat of all other things); so that that which causes other derivative truths to
be true is most true.27
To surpass this incoherence Plato had attributed non-being to being in the sense that
what we mean by non-being is difference in being: Socrates is not, insofar as he is not
large. Aristotle accepts this interpretation of change:
⇒
Clearly then also to come to be so-and-so from what is not means “qua what is
not”. 28
The problem was the Parmenidean problem of how being can emerge from non-being.
26 Cf. Barnes, Jonathan, editor; The Complete Works of Aristotle, Princeton University Press,
1985; Physics, Volume I, Book Physics, Book I, 7 190b1-5, 325.
27 Cf. Barnes, Jonathan, editor; The Complete Works of Aristotle, Princeton University Press,
1985; Volume II, Metaphysics, Book II(a), 2, 1 993b24-26, p. 1570.
28 Cf, Barnes, Jonathan, editor; The Complete Works of Aristotle, Princeton University Press,
1985; Physics, Volume I, Book I, 191b9-10, p. 327.
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MEDITATION ON THE FIRST MEDITATION
If Socrates is non-musical, he cannot become musical because in that case musical
would come from nothing, i.e. something would materialize from nothing. Aristotle
paraphrased Plato’s solution:
⇒
But obviously it is not true that if Being means one thing, and nothing can at
the same time both be and not be, there will be nothing which is not; for
even if what is not cannot be without qualifi cation, there is no reason why
it should not be something or other.29
If something comes to be it does not come out of what is perfectly nonexistent, but out
of what is not such-and-such.
⇒
We ourselves are in agreement with them in holding that nothing can be said
without qualifi cation to come from what is not. But nevertheless we
maintain that a thing may come to be from what is not in a qualifi ed sense,
i.e. accidentally. For a thing comes to be from the privation, which in its
own nature is something which is not- this not surviving as a constituent of
the result.30
The nonexistent here is in reference to a lack in something which is. Something
comes into existence from something else which is, but which caries the negativity of
the nonexistent in terms of the lack of some attribute. The Aristotelian solution for the
29 Cf, Barnes, Jonathan, editor; The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume I, Princeton
University Press, 1985; Physics, Book I, 187a3-5, p. 319.
30 Cf, Barnes, Jonathan, editor; The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume I, Princeton
University Press, 1985; Physics, Book 1, 191b13-16, p. 327.
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D. Morgan Pierce
capacity of change rests in matter; nonsensory substances, which Aristotle allows, are
eternal and immutable, whereas sensible substances, i.e. those composed of matter, are
mutable per accidens only because of matter:
⇒
Therefore, since not all things are or come to be of necessity and always, but
the majority of things are for the most part, the accidental must exist; for
instance a white man is not always or for the most part musical, but since
this sometimes happens, it must be accidental. If not, everything will be of
necessity. The matter, therefore, which is capable of being otherwise than
as it for the most part is, is the cause of the accidental. And we must take
as our starting point the question whether everything is either always or for
the most part. Surely this is impossible. There is, then, besides these
something which is fortuitous and accidental.31
It has previously been established that accidents do not play a role in scientifi c
knowledge, because there is no bilateral implication between essence and accident.
Knowledge must be of what is universal; red cannot be located in the essence, so as to
be a universal, because that would entail that all apples are red. Although the being of
this red entails the existence of this apple, the existence of this apple does not entail
red. This apple may be this apple whether it is red or green. But if the apple does not
entail its being red, it follows that the accident does not exist as a further determination
of the form, apple. If red does not belong to the form, how is it possible, in any sense at
all, to belong to the substance, this apple? The substantial form can be, in actuality,
only in compound with the matter which it determines. Apparently, since red is not a
determination of the form apple, it must be a determination of matter that is identifi ed
31 Cf, Barnes, Jonathan, editor; The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume II, Princeton
University Press, 1985; Metaphysics, Book E, 2, 1027a7-17, p.1621.
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MEDITATION ON THE FIRST MEDITATION
through the form, apple. But matter is per se indeterminate, so it is through the
contingency of matter that the substance is capable of having either red or not red,
indifferently, without alteration to the identity of substance. This is called per accidens
predication: it is analogous to a rose patch, in which the soil is necessitated for the
rose bush, but amongst which there is space for weeds to grow, which however do not
affect the identity of the rose bush. Barring substantial change, the changes effected by
causal interaction are of the accidental, not the essential, qualities. Although change is
from non-being to being, the conclusion that something emerges from nothing is not
entailed, but rather an emergence from another something that may be characterized as
nothing in the sense of a lack.32
In our context it is problematic that this account was concerned with causality
between physical substances, but was never considered in the case of the proposed
causal relation between physical reality and consciousness. If we cannot be directly
conscious of the object as we are of its idea produced in us (i.e. what we experience as
the object directly is in reality a mental image of it), our knowledge of the world is still
saved if the fi rst two rules of causal inference are valid. The distinction of the object
itself and the image of it was necessitated in the fi rst place because e.g. my perception
of a bridge, if it were the thing itself, would entail either the real presence in my mind
of something several hundred meters long, or the elimination of a mind in which
the perception was to reside. But suppose that rule (1) does not obtain, but rule (3)
does: e.g. the hot cause does not produce a hot effect (my brain does not feel hot at the
sight of a fi re), but what it causes is non-random. Thus, although what I experience as
heat does not resemble the property in the hot thing, the same property in the hot thing
consistently causes the feeling I call heat; the systematicity of knowledge would be
preserved without the identity of object and idea. Aristotle had perhaps presumed the
32 Cf. Scaltsas, Theodore; Substances and Universals in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Cornell
University Press, Ithaca, 1994, p. 9
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D. Morgan Pierce
identity of cause and effect because it would conveniently enable one to sort out what
is cause and what is effect; a hot thing, for instance, causes heat in the patient, but the
patient cannot grow hotter than the agent. But what supports this assumption? The hot
thing might for instance transfer the hotness to another thing, in such a way that the
property would be the same; but the transfer of the property, not to another material
substance, but to consciousness, is perhaps an equivocation of causality such that the
effect, consciousness of hot, is radically different from the transmission of a material
cause to a material effect.
The inquiry then turns to whether something internal to the consciousness of an
object marks out that the object is just like it is in its experience or, failing that, whether
some feature recognizable within the experience would at least signify that the same
experience E1 would reliably materialize when the same causal condition C1 obtains.
Perhaps this suffi ces to account for Cartesian skepticism of the external world. Insofar
as our consciousness of X were radically different from its external causes, the world of
which we are conscious could look the same regardless of whether or not the external
world existed. Only if (1) the idea were identical with the cause of the idea (sensible
species), and (2) no other causal event could produce the idea, could our consciousness
of the world guarantee the existence of an external world. If there is no identity
between cause and its effect, then our idea of the world could be instigated from causes
other than the presumed external objects. The dichotomy of object and idea of object
entails that nothing in immanent experience certifi es that objects are as they seem;
reception of our ideas qua objects of those ideas entails incorrigibly false knowledge of
the world. Thus Descartes stipulates that we must confi ne ourselves to study of ideas as
ideas, suspending their reference to the external objects they supposedly represent.33
How does a portrait of Descartes, though a perfect rendition in all detail, successfully
33 cf. Georges J. D. Moyal, "Descartes Method: From things to Ideas", in Renee Descartes:
Critical Assessments, Vol. I, ed. Georges D. J. D. Moyal, Rutledge, 1991, p. 7.
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MEDITATION ON THE FIRST MEDITATION
function as a picture of Descartes? How does a photograph of a dog, Fido, represent
Fido? Normally we suppose that an image represents by virtue of its similarity,
although representation without similarity is also possible; how indeed does perfect
similarity enable representation? If similarity is entailed, how do we know when
representation and represented are similar?
A suitable approach is terrifi cally perplexed. The primary relation of a mental act
causally effected by an external object is obscure because minute transference structure
between external object and mental act is invisible; how could this connection possibly
be visible, under the premise that the mental act is the fi rst condition preceding any
consciousness at all? Inasmuch as the actual causal event is not conscious, but has to
be inferred, a person can relate a mental image to an object (o) under two conditions. (1)
He must posit the actual existence of (o). (2) He must judge the similarity of (o) to the
image it has presumably occasioned in his mind.
Nevertheless, the above has to be completely wrong. Since (o) is given to
consciousness only by representation through its idea (i), never without mediation, (3)
there is no test of the similarity of (o) and (i). (4) The object (o) having fallen out of
use in a method of verifi cation, one must wonder at the justifi cation for hypothesizing
the existence of (o) in the fi rst place. Presumably we are certain that (o) exists because
it is the necessary condition for the causal relation between (i) and (o). Given the
uncontested presumption of the existence of the external world in the ancient scholastic
tradition, inference to the causal relation is unproblematic, but as soon as the Cartesian
dichotomy removes the certainty of the fi rst premise, the argument is obviously
circular.
Innate Ideas
Assuming sensibilia are not organized through Aristotelian forms, fi rst, it is obscure
how the image is organized into resemblance, sensibilia not being given as such
prior to intellection, and second, presuming that the image is assembled into perfect
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D. Morgan Pierce
resemblance, how does this resemblance isolate and refer to its intended object of
representation? Inchoate sensibilia are not given in a way that supports representation;
if sensibilia must be assembled, the assembly gets no help from the source of these
data. Instead, the sensibilia, are organized into physical objects solely by innate ideas,
and innate ideas derive from the mind alone, without original correlates in the source
of sense data.34
Though serving roughly the same role as Platonic Forms, Cartesian innate ideas
are neither transcendent (Plato), nor are they immanent like the substantial forms of
Aristotle. They are similar to the transcendence of Aristotelian forms in that they are
immutable; deriving from the mind but not from sense, they do not belong to the mind
from which they originate; that is, like adventitious idea, innate ideas are compulsory.
The mind does not create these forms arbitrarily, as if choosing to paint either a portrait
or a landscape. Although their source is the mind, their structure is pregiven; since they
do not derive from sensibilia, they are immutable, as sensory experience is the only
source of mutability. Because these forms are not transcendent, traditional objections
against Platonic/Aristotelian forms do not apply. As the mind itself generates the form,
there is no basis for requiring a standard in terms of which the mind commensurates
the form and the actual entity (the innate idea is what fi rst creates the “actual entity”.
The forms are not transcendent because there is no need to discover a resemblance
between the form and the object: hence the Third Man Argument cannot get started.
Partially this is true because Descartes does not embrace the traditional subject object
dichotomy, according to which the object is delivered to us ready-made. The Cartesian
forms operate to create the object in the workings of mental reception; in this regard
there is no need to validate application of the form to its object because the object
would not exist but for the instrumentality of the form. Instead of the recognition of
34cf. Frederick P. Van De Pitte, "Descartes Innate Ideas, in Kant-Studien, Band 76, no. 4,
1985, pp.363-384.
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MEDITATION ON THE FIRST MEDITATION
conformity between form and object in Platonic epistemology, recognition consists in a
mere appreciation of a necessity inherent across the simple features of the concept.35
Nevertheless the proposal of innate ideas doesn’t function at this point to
explain the organization of sensibilia into physical objects any better than Socratic
reminiscence, the Delphic oracle, or the rabbit in the hat; the establishment of innate
ideas is based on nothing more than the default argument that, since innate ideas have
no derivation from sensory input, they must be supplied by the mind. What can be
meant by the operation of an innate idea? Does this mean that innate ideas fi rst construe
sense data, for instance, as a dog, from a blur of sense data, or is this to mean that the
predication dog occurs simultaneously as the perceptual image of dog is organized
from the given sense data? Is predication somehow entailed in the mere capacity of
assembling sense data as objects? This would imply that perceptual substances are not
formed except as predication is made of them.
Raw sense data are already a mental state; once modifi ed by a mental operation
into an intelligible object, the fi nal product owes virtually nothing to the source of the
sense data. Differing with the Aristotelian notion of sensible species, external objects
are not thought to communicate an image of themselves to consciousness. Rather, they
stimulate an occasion upon which the innate ideas fabricate an image. The notion of
occasional causation conveys that the apparent cause of perception is not an instance
of authentic causality.
Under Cartesian premises even ideas of colors and sounds are innate, because the
physical movements involved in sensation cannot be cognitive:
⇒
The sense organs bring us nothing which is such as the idea which is
awakened in us on the occasion of them, and thus the idea must have
35 cf. Frederick P. Van De Pitte, "Descartes Innate Ideas, in Kant-Studien, Band 76, no. 4,
1985, pp.363-384.
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D. Morgan Pierce
been in us previously.36
The mind does not perceive ideas, in the sense of receiving them, because no physical
event, not even in the nervous system, has the least element of consciousness or
sensation. Rather, the mind creates ideas wholly from innate ideas always potentially
present in the mind, when it is stimulated by physical, non-mental events in the
perceptual apparatus.37
The Cartesian theory of causation posits that the cause must contain more of the
same quality which it transfers to its effect; by characterizing perception as occasional
causality, it follows that the effect (perceptual image) does not bear any common
quality supposedly imparted by the cause. The sense data, as occasional cause, are
requisite merely as the occasion on which the innate ideas are stimulated to form the
image.38
As sense data are not the authentic cause of perception, nothing compels an
assumption of resemblance between ideas and the source of the correlative sense data.
All knowledge is ultimately an explicit recognition of innate ideas; this is similar to the
Aristotelian tenet that knowledge is only of universals. Existence is therefore entirely
outside the scope of scientifi c knowledge. All necessary relations are entirely captured
in the essences of things; what is lost by abstracting from existence is any consideration
of accidental attributes, which cannot be inferred by the essence of the substance, and
are perceptible only on the level of sensation. What is excluded from this authentic
36 cf. Adam, Charles and Tannery, Paul, eds.: Oevres de Descartes, J. Vrin, Paris, 1996,
Volume III, Letter to Mersenne, 22nd July 1641, p. 41837 cf. Alan Gewirth, Experience and the Non-Mathematical in the Cartesian Method, in the
Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 2, 1941, pp. 183-210.
38 cf. Frederick P. Van De Pitte, "Descartes Innate Ideas, in Kant-Studien, Band 76, no. 4,
1985, pp.363-384.
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MEDITATION ON THE FIRST MEDITATION
knowledge is the sensory stimulation by virtue of which the innate ideas were induced
to formulate an experience.
⇒
Namely, that we know just that these or those ideas which we now have
present to our thought, refer to certain things situated outside us...because
these things have sent to our mind something which has given it the
occasion, through its innate faculty, of forming the ideas at this time rather
than at another.39
The act by which the mind projects the image into the external world is the only act
for which experience is responsible. Innate ideas, which had been undifferentiated and
without reference, are differentiated by reference to external objects on the occasion of
sensation.40
Sensory stimulation occasions ideas but does not cause them. Fine; they are
created by an innate faculty, perhaps similarly as sleep is caused by the presence of
vis dormativa. If not, what substantive meaning can be harbored in asserting that the
innate ideas are within the mind? Innate ideas connote knowledge that is not reducible
to the results of sensory consciousness.41 Incorrigibility of the innate ideas is to be
explained by the impossibility of tracing the content of innate ideas to sense data; thus
innate ideas cannot have derivation from empirical experience. But elimination of
sensory output does not establish mental derivation in any sense more illuminating than
39 cf. Adam, Charles and Tannery, Paul, eds.: Oevres de Descartes, J. Vrin, Paris, 1996,
Volume III, Notae in Progressu; VIII (2), p. 358.
40 cf. Alan Gewirth, Experience and the Non-Mathematical in the Cartesian Method, in the
Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 2, 1941, pp. 183-210.
41 cf. Frederick P. Van De Pitte, "Descartes Innate Ideas, in Kant-Studien, Band 76, no. 4,
1985, pp.363-384.
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D. Morgan Pierce
Socratic reminiscence. Whether or not the notion of innate ideas is an instance of deus
ex machina depends on whether any gain in explanatory power arises from insistence
that knowledge depends on an element of experience underived from sense data. By
virtue of occasional causation sensory experience stimulates apprehension of innate
ideas; refl exive awareness of the innate idea is occasioned inasmuch as there would
never be apperception of the innate idea if there were never occasion for its use. It is
this apperception of the necessary structures of perception and thought that constitutes
knowledge, for the innate idea satisfi es the knowledge-criterion of universality. Sensory
experience is no part of knowledge at all, excepting its indispensability for putting
innate ideas in operation; knowledge consists solely in the articulation of innate ideas.
The construed perceptual object is then entirely mental, different from the
preperceptual givenness of the sense data. The thesis of mental construction from
nothing supports Cartesian rationalism; if the innate ideas are given from the mind,
they are immune to skeptical aversion from the external world. If innate ideas were
Platonic Forms, such that they were independent, then, being transcendent like the
empirical world, they would be subject to the same doubt, whether in their reception
they are the same as their originals, etc. But if sense data and the ideas operating
upon them are entirely mental, images are apodictic in a way they could not be if our
ideas were in any way received. Thus Descartes’ happy inference that I can be in
doubt about whether the object I see is green, while at the same instance it is certain
and beyond doubt that I seem to see a green thing. But by the same token, the theory
incapacitates any account of how such mental images successfully refer to the external
objects of which they are presumably ideas.
Reference
The notion of the innate idea has profound consequences. In both the Platonic and
Aristotelian approaches the universal is not only in the mind, but in the object; they
account for reference through the supposition that marks in the idea are isomorphically
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MEDITATION ON THE FIRST MEDITATION
present in the object; they support the correspondence theory of truth. But the theory of
innate ideas prescinds from this tenet. Scholasticism established, in consonance with
Aristotle, that although essence is the object of scientifi c knowledge, in the order of
knowing, we know the object’s existence before we know its essence. What is per se
most intelligible comes comes to be known last, whereas what is least knowable comes
fi rst in the order of knowing for us. Following two premises from Aquinas, if one is to
know the essence of something, one must fi rst know that it exists:42
⇒
Since there is no essence or quiddity of a non-being, no one can know the
nature of what does not exist; but one may know the meaning of a name,
or know an account composed from several names: thus one can know
what is the meaning of the name ‘goat-stag’, but it is impossible to know
the essence of a goat-stag, for there is nothing of such kind in reality.43
A partial articulation of Aquinas’ empiricist position (knowledge of existence
precedes knowledge of essence) is that knowledge of whether an essence is possible
only by actual encounter; only an actual essence proves that the essence is possible.
Aquinas supposes that two processes are ingredient in the formation of an empirical
concept. (1) The object must be received by the senses. (2) A faculty, the light of the
agent intellect then organizes that perceptual material into a concept. These being the
two comprehensive conditions in the formation of a concept, there is nothing in the
intellect (i.e. in concepts) that was not previously present in perception: nihil in
intellectu quod non prius in sensu fuerit.44 In this regard physical sensation is the sole
source of empirical knowledge.
42 Cf, Barnes, Jonathan, editor; The Complete Works of Aristotle, Princeton University Press,
1985; Metaphysics, Volume II, Book Cf. Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, Book II, 7, 92b4-8.
43 Cf, Aquinas, Commentary on the Posterior Analytics, Book II, 6,2
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D. Morgan Pierce
There is no a priori method to demonstrate that a non-existent essence could possibly
exist. Our knowledge of possible essences is limited to our knowledge of actual
essences. On the opposite camp stood the Platonic thesis that one must know what
X is before one could possibly know whether an X exists; for Plato this condition of
identifi cation signifi ed that one must already know the essence of X before one could
discover the existence of an X. Descartes resumed the Platonic thesis: knowledge of a
thing’s essence precedes knowledge of its existence:
⇒
According to the rules of true logic we must never ask whether something
exists [an est] unless we already know what it is [quid est].45
As he asserted in reply to Caterus in the fi rst series of replies to criticism of the
Meditations, similarly in a letter to Mersenne in the same year Descartes castigates
theologians who, following ordinary logic, ask whether God exists before asking what
His nature is’.46 The Platonic notion of the preexistence of essences accounted for the
non-absurdity of knowing the essences of which one has never encountered substantial
instances, or of knowing the essences of non-existent things. The empiricism of
Aquinas (priority of existence over essence) was tenable only because his substantial
theory of objects posits that essences actually exist in the object, before the mind
conceives the essence by which to identify the object. Aquinas supposed that one could
identify and speak of objects by secondary descriptions prior to knowing their essences.
44 cf. John Morris, Descartes’ Natural Light, in the Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol.
XI, 1973, pp. 169-187.
45 cf. Adam, Charles and Tannery, Paul, eds.: Oevres de Descartes, J. Vrin, Paris, 1996,
Volume VII, pp, 107-108.
46 cf. Adam, Charles and Tannery, Paul, eds.: Oevres de Descartes, J. Vrin, Paris, 1996,
Volume III, pp, 273.
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Descartes did not want to claim merely that to know that something exists one must
have some answer, however elliptical, to the question: what is it that exists? Aquinas
grants that at least some description is needed to isolate an object of predication:
⇒
It is impossible for us to know that a thing exists except through some account
of that thing. 47
Aquinas admits that some background understanding is required to recognize the
existence of a substance, but denies that essential defi nition is necessary for reference:
⇒
Regarding a thing of which we have no account, we cannot know if it exists or
not. But there is some other account of a thing apart from the defi nition:
this is either an account which explains the meaning of a name, or an
account for the very thing named which, however, is distinct from the
defi nition because it does not express the nature as does a defi nition, but
perhaps some accident.48
Since the conception of the object for Descartes is solely constituted by innate ideas,
existing only in the mind, the supposition of the priority of existence would be
incoherent.
Abstraction
Descartes accordingly cannot regard abstraction as the source of concept formation.
Aristotelian abstraction involves a plurality and a variety of the same kind of object,
47 Cf, Barnes, Jonathan, editor; The Complete Works of Aristotle, Princeton University Press,
1985; Metaphysics, Volume II, Book Cf. Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, Book II, 8,6.
48 Cf, Aquinas, Commentary on the Posterior Analytics, Book II, 6,2.
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D. Morgan Pierce
from which determination is made of what universals commonly apply. Substantial
form is a universal that is abstracted from substances of the same kind; as it is not itself
a concrete particular, but a universal that designates the substance most specifi cally,
it is called second substance; it is then the universal denoting the concrete particular,
the fi rst substance. The form abstracted is not, however, a distinct entity within the
substance; it is separable by abstraction, but not separable in reality.
The notion of abstraction, i.e. the mental separability that has no correlate in reality
(divisibility) is implicated in Aristotelian ontology. In the Platonic scheme a particular
shared (methexis) in a form, making it what it was; but this formulation meant
that, insofar as the form was predicated, or shared in (the distinction had not yet been
discovered) the individual, the individual was something separate from the form
predicated of it, but had no attribute prior to the predication that would identify it as a
something . To overcome this incoherence Aristotle postulated that the substance
and the substantial form were identical.
Let us take up one of Aristotle’s examples: a severed fi nger is not a fi nger, except
paronymously. A fi nger attached to a body is radically different from the severed
fi nger because of its functions for the whole body; as it loses the several functions
and its relations with the other parts of the body, it remains a fi nger by appearance
only; its nature is determined by the other parts of the body of which it is a part. All
non-essential features change in their nature when the they are conceived as parts of
a substance. The only feature of the substance which is not altered in the least from
composition into a unifi ed substance is the essence, i.e. that feature which is termed to
be identical with substance. Whereas the actualization of a fi nger results in its being
Socrates’ fi nger, the actualization of the substantial form human being results in a
human being.
One could discern the substantial form and its substrate by abstraction, albeit that
these were inseparable in reality. The substrate and the form could be abstractly
considered, but neither form nor substrate could exist in separation. Thus, abstraction
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MEDITATION ON THE FIRST MEDITATION
enabled Aristotle to repudiate the independent existence of Platonic Forms. Although
human being may be thought separately from Socrates, in reality the two are
inseparable, and there is no need to postulate a separate Form (i.e. Platonic Form) to
account for the relation between the two: there is no relation, because the two are in
reality one. The empiricist element of Aristotle’s essentialism is due to the condition
that relations between universals derive from relations of the real substances from
which universals are abstracted. For Plato the interrelations of Forms are known
independently of empirical instances, because Forms are the authentic substances; for
Aristotle the truth conditions of universals derive from the substances of which they
are abstractions. Since the separation of forms by abstraction does not refl ect actual
divisions on the ontological level, validation of universal forms derives from primary
substances.49
Similarity consists in the capability of separating, by abstraction, not division, of
the same entity from two substances. The similarity on which abstraction is based
depends on the same entity that is not separable, but abstractable from, the different
substances.50 Concept formation is then taken to result from a plurality of particular
judgments. Abstraction, possible only because the concept is constructed by a series of
particular judgments, and can therefore undergo analysis in reverse order.
Descartes repudiates this account of concept formation, but he is in a weaker
position here. If I should judge that a certain quality is essential, because I cannot
conceive of the object without that quality, the inconceivability may be consequent to my
having included the quality when I fi rst naively learned the concept. The impossibility
of a dog having horns may be a psychological result of habituation. I may be unable
49 Cf. Scaltsas, Theodore; Substances and Universals in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Cornell
University Press, Ithaca, 1994, p. 5.
50 Cf. Scaltsas, Theodore; Substances and Universals in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Cornell
University Press, Ithaca, 1994, p. 5
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D. Morgan Pierce
to distinguish a contingent, psychological incapacity from a logical incapacity, by
which an essential quality is such due to metaphysical necessity. Whereas attention
to whether an attribute is essential may consist in what relation the quality stands to
a context of other attributes, the devil is in the detail; what is it in relation to other
attributes that designates its compossibility or incompossibility?
Certain ideas e.g. God and the self are such that even after reduction to ultimate
simples there is still no sensory correlate. Mathematical objects do have sensory
correlates, but we can conceive mathematical objects never encountered in empirical
experience, and discover recondite truths about such objects that will be true in
examples of the object not as yet encountered. This supports Cartesian essentialism,
and leads to inquiry whether the properties of God, the self, but also of ravens and
writing desks might also be discovered by analysis of logical relations binding their
constitutive properties, without recourse to observation of an instance of the concept.
As with mathematical objects, a necessity that binds components such as color, fi gure,
extension, etc. might reveal the properties of empirical objects prior to experience. Any
logical connection between properties of an object, bound in necessity by virtue of
logical connection, should on this hypothesis be knowable a priori because its necessity
cannot be given from without; any necessity in the collection of conceptual marks
inherent in the parts of a concept is a mental ingredient.
The components of an Aristotelian substance do not stand in relations, as perhaps
sodium and chlorine; it is emphasized that they are amalgamated. In the Cartesian
project on the other hand necessity is somehow derived by refl ection on how sense data
are organized; innate ideas are supposed to account for why sense data appear in the
confi gurations they have; the sensory properties, though taken in themselves purely
contingent, by being organized in an object mutually limit each other so that each has
its logical location by virtue of the limitations posed by the other attributes.51 If the
attributes constituting a particular are interrelated in a context because they mutually
limit each other, what is it about the innate ideas that institutes this mutual limitation?
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MEDITATION ON THE FIRST MEDITATION
A thing’s being blue is compatible with being large or cold, but is incompatible with
the thing’s being red: why? How can blue preclude the thing’s being red; how can
we affi rm that there can or cannot be black swans? Or is the postulation of innate ideas
to answer this sort of objection circular? Supposing the linearity and infi nite divisibility
of time, the argument is to the effect that the organization of sensibilia in their context
is due entirely to mental operations, under the premise that sensibilia are at fi rst utterly
dissociated because they come to the mind one-at-a-time in discrete moments of time,
Indian-fi le through a pinhole, thus obliterating any hypothetical preperceptual
organization on the basis of which the mind might otherwise be supposed to synthesize
them. Given this repudiation of substantial unity on the Aristotelian model, one cannot
stand fi rm on the inherence of accidents and essences in substance; if there is a fi rm
concomitance of two attributes in a substance, there must be some logical trait to
account for their fi rm connection, vaguely on the analogy of chemical elements.
It is noticeable that the Cartesian cogito takes over the role attributed to the Species
Form. Plato and Aristotle had proposed that objects were composed of various qualities
because of the unifying feature of the Form predicated of the object, but not because
the Form is predicated. Following Aristotle and scholasticism the form actually exists
in the object prior to predication of the form of the object. Under Cartesian premises
things must be grasped as a unity because the ego is unitary; the object is synthesized
and structured as it is in order to sustain the unity of the ego. Because the Form of
the object is generated by the mind, the problem of how an immaterial aspect of the
object (its substantial form) is taken through the various senses and reconstituted by
the common sense, dissolves; there is no longer a need to demonstrate that the form
in the object and the form in the mind are the same. Eschewing this correspondence
Descartes can nevertheless assert that the form in the cognition is the identical form as
51cf. Frederick P. Van De Pitte, "Descartes Innate Ideas, in Kant-Studien, Band 76, no. 4,
1985, pp. 363-384.
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D. Morgan Pierce
that in the external object.52 This hypothesis rests on two factors. Necessity
characterizes the internal relations of the conceptual components, but this necessity is
not a causal image of the object, but a refl ection of how the attributes mutually limit
each other as a condition of unity in the object. But this still seems to be a version of
deus ex machina; in regard to the unity of the ego, exactly how this combination of
attributes is necessary; given the sparsity of Descartes’ mention of mutual limitation,
one must wonder whether this approach is not too reliant on Kant. The second factor
is the necessary fi xation of the concept in a wider context of other concepts. Insofar
as the mind has no way to reject this necessity, it has no alternative but to accept the
perception obtained through it as veridical.
The Cartesian thesis is built upon the premise that necessity cannot be derived from
sensibilia: but why not? Why can we not determine that swans are necessarily white,
by an element within the substance swan? Why should it be impossible to discern
necessity in an empirical state of affairs whose necessity inheres in the object? There
is a merely epistemic ground for the thesis that all necessity is contributed by the
subject. If we pronounce that all swans are white, without merely intending a merely
verbal stipulation, then we might try to prove it by inspecting every swan. But the
aspiring universal statement would remain open ended either because we did not
fi nd every swan, or because a black swan might appear in the future; this is logically
possible because at the ouset we denied that all swans are white is a defi nitional
stipulation. An authentic universal proposition should preclude the liability of a future
disconfi rmation. The necessity of a universal statement must never depend on empirical
data, which might vary; therefore, if there is necessity, it must come from the mind.
This demonstration does not exclude the possibility that necessity derives from the
object, but merely that, if there were such a transcendent necessity, it could never be
52 cf. Frederick P. Van De Pitte, "Descartes Innate Ideas, in Kant-Studien, Band 76, no. 4,
1985, pp. 363-384.
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MEDITATION ON THE FIRST MEDITATION
recognized as such.
That I have never come across a dog with horns suffi ces for the existentialists,
Aristotle and Aquinas, to deny that we can know whether there is such an essence prior
to experience, for in their systems the only essences we can know to be possible are those
essences which are actual. In some cases we might know an unencountered essence
to be impossible, but we cannot conclude that a seemingly possible essence is indeed
possible, until its actual occurrence.
Notably in this context, Descartes’ affi rmation of the vis absoluta [contrast: vis
ordinata] of God conveys that not even the scholastic tenets on possible essences
are acceptable, because if He wished, God could make the logical and mathematical
axioms false. Absolute and eternal truths are necessarily true for me, and even for God
within the parameter of vis ordinata, the limits that God posits for his own power.
However, unless God had been able to entertain alternatives, God could not have
freely created the world, for in that case each feature of the world would have ensued
from necessity. God’s freedom therefore entails God’s power to imagine things the
imagination of which are impossible for a human. Despite a human’s inability to
conceive a necessary truth as anything but true, God in his vis absoluta could think and
create truths that are for humans contradictory. In consequence a proposition which for
me is absolutely false may nevertheless be true. It is easy to see how the notion of
perfect certainty does not guarantee truth for Descartes; the law of non-contradiction is
the basis of the inconceivability of any alternative, but on Descartes’ notion of God’s
omnipotence, he could have made contradictory propositions true if He had so willed.
Assume that all the logical axioms are inalterably true in the universe in which I exist,
but are not true in a possible universe; in that case I cannot evaluate the validity of
logical axioms from a viewpoint external to my universe. Such is Descartes’
voluntarism. For me, a proposition is necessarily true if its denial is inconceivable, but
for God it is necessarily true only in the sense that He decided it would always be true.
Concepts are contradictory only for a creature like me and only because God has made
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D. Morgan Pierce
me so that I must apprehend them as such. Necessity is one thing for me and quite
another for God. The necessity I register is not the necessity that characterizes the
eternal verities; it is at best a distorted view of a connection which must remain
incomprehensible.53
Aquinas and scholasticism admit that the mind can conceive entities that do not and
have never existed, that nonexistent entities can be imagined. Such as can be imagined
is however made up exhaustively from material that has originally been given in
sensation. Nevertheless, the mind is incapable of determining what it has imagined
could possibly exist, short of encountering its actual existence. One might know
an essence in the absence of existence, but one cannot know whether this contrived
essence could be the essence of a possible substance. In this context the essence does
not amount to whether it can be linguistically formulated, a matter of stipulation of how
to call something by a name. The notion of essence entailed conditions of necessity and
possibility for a substance possessing that essence.54 Scholasticism rules out a
capability of knowing whether such an imagined essence is a possible essence.
But if, following Descartes, we can know whether a nonexistent essence is possible,
there has to be a logical device to distinguish psychological from metaphysical
necessity. Descartes argues that there is an indubitable distinction between logical and
conditioned intuition:
⇒
When I say that it seems that it is taught to me by nature, I understand by the
word "nature" only a certain inclination which leads me to believe a thing,
and not a natural light which makes me know that it is true. But these two
53 cf. Leonard G. Miller, "Descartes, Mathematics and God, in Philosophical Review, Vol.
66, 1957, pp. 451-465.
54Cf. Secada, Jorge; Cartesian Metaphysics The Scholastic Origins of Modern Philosophy,
Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 11.
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MEDITATION ON THE FIRST MEDITATION
things differ greatly between themselves; for I would not be able to cast
doubt upon anything that the natural light makes me see to be true, as it
has just made me see that, from the fact that I doubted, I was able to
conclude that I was. And I do not have in me any other faculty, or power,
for distinguishing the true from the false, which could teach me that what
the light shows me to be true is not true, and which I could trust more than
it.55
He argues that no faculty exceeds my Reason to determine truth or falsity, it would
be irrational to defer the verdict of Reason. Aquinas assigns to the natural light the
function of giving to man the "fi rst principles" upon which his reasoning is based:
⇒
The light of the agent intellect gives man immediate actual knowledge of
the fi rst principles which we know by nature, and in virtue of this actual
knowing he is led to actual knowledge of conclusions previously known by
him only potentially.56
The knowledge of Aquinas’ fi rst principles is infallible, and they are to be
distinguished from scientia, the result of investigation. Aquinas means by natural light
what we would probably call intuition: a power knowing the axioms of knowledge. He
distinguishes natural light from Reason, the power of ratiocinating deductive proofs.57
55 cf. John Morris, Descartes’ Natural Light, in the Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol.
XI, 1973, pp. 169-187.
56 Cf. Aquinas, Commentary on De Anima, translators Foster, Kenelen and Humphries,
Silvester, Yale University Press, 1965; section 372, pp. 244-245.
57 cf. John Morris, Descartes’ Natural Light, in the Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol.
XI, 1973, pp. 169-187.
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D. Morgan Pierce
Descartes uses the same term natural light to convey infallibility, but meaning the
simple apprehension of the mind’s own contents. Such knowledge cannot be mistaken
with respect to their "proper" objects: when I am seeing green, I may be mistaken in
supposing that the given object is actually green, but I cannot be mistaken in thinking
that my sensuous experience is that of greenness. Whenever I form a given concept
(e.g. man) I may be mistaken in supposing that there are any actual men corresponding
to my concept, but I cannot be mistaken in judging that my concept, considered in and
of itself, is so-and-so. In considering its own contents, the intellect cannot be mistaken;
there is simply no room for deception to occur.58 Error is possible from mistaking my
apprehended mental contents as if they were an external object; this is especially
devious because nonveridical sensory perception is given as if it were veridical.
The fact that I think a dog to have four legs, essentially, but a dog with horns to
be impossible, signifi es that, be it psychological or metaphysical, I already take my
incapacity to be metaphysical, in that I can fi nd no way to second-guess myself, but
that further inability does not guarantee that my incapacity to condone possible dogs
with horns is not, nevertheless, merely psychological.
Normally one legitimates the conception that dogs have four legs by the fact that
one’s perception of dogs with four legs is universal. The position that concept
formation is posterior to abstraction of course coheres with the thesis that we cannot
know that a substance is possible until we know that it is actual. However, in denying
that abstraction is the method of concept formation, there is no basis for appeal to
ordinary observation; if the concept of dog is an innate idea (albeit occasioned by
sensory experience), then experience is not a basis to assert that four leggedness is
essential to a dog, i.e. all dogs have four legs. A further inconsistency crops up; the
notion that abstraction is the basis of concept formation appears to confl ict with the
58cf. John Morris, Descartes’ Natural Light, in the Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol.
XI, 1973, pp. 169-187.
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MEDITATION ON THE FIRST MEDITATION
falsity of: all swans are white. If empirical enumeration cannot support a universal
necessary judgment, it should be impossible to formulate essences from empirical
abstraction. In the Cartesian approach the imagination is integral to concept formation
(i.e. mentally varying sensory data, arms, legs, horns, to determine whether one would
still call the result a dog), but the intellect is somehow supposed to judge what qualities
from this imaginary variation turn out to be essential for the referent of the concept one
formulates. Deployment of imaginary variation demotes real sensory perception nearly
to insignifi cance in the process of concept formation. Accordingly concept formation
is not a process of abstraction because it is ultimately the act of judgment, aided by
imagination, which determines conceptual marks.59 Despite the empirical source in
science, Descartes excludes experience in the process of discovering essences;
empirical experience, understood as correlations of essences and accidents, still
contains much that is composite, and therefore liable to confusion. Descartes supplants
scholastic discourse of essences and accidents with ultimate simples, which are built up
into composites by minute steps of clear and distinct perception. The reduction of
experience into ultimate simples, which are not given in experience, is supposed to
prevent the possibility of error by subjecting each step in cognition to clear and distinct
perception. The premise is that ultimate simples, unlike empirical intuitions, cannot be
mistaken for anything else because there is no complexity to confuse.
I do not see how this can support the denial of abstraction in concept formation; if
one decides by imaginative variation that one conceptual mark rather than another is
essential for predication of a concept, it nevertheless remains possible that verdict over
the essentiality of an attribute is due to psychological, not metaphysical necessity. The
criterion of clear and distinct is question-begging unless it is refi ned. Anyone who
asserts a proposition ipso facto believes that his belief is clear and distinct; if he did not,
59 cf. Frederick P. Van De Pitte, "Descartes’ Innate Ideas, in Kant-Studien, Band 76, no. 4,
1985, pp.363-384.
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D. Morgan Pierce
it would be false to assert that he believes it. Clear and distinct serve as criteria for
truth only if these criteria can distinguish between intuitions, all of which the subject
has already credited with being clear and distinct. Accordingly intuitions should have
logical marks that distinguish authentically clear and distinct intuitions, and which are
entirely immune to psychological factors.60 A logical mark is one that is compelling
for everyone, whereas psychological necessity, which may in the end be indiscernible
for the subject entertaining the belief, does not guarantee truth because what goes into
the psychological core of one individual may differ greatly from that of another.
All philosophers agreed that knowledge could be of universals alone; the thematic
problem had been to establish universals upon a basis of particular and contingent
sense data. Plato supplied transcendent forms and participation to account for the
caesura between particular and universal; Aristotle attempted the same account of
knowledge by locating universals in immanent forms.61 That is, it is due to a certain
kind of universal resident in the substance, and identical therewith, that there can be
knowledge: the only direct object of knowledge is the universal, but the universal is
identical with individual substance.
⇒
If there is nothing apart from individuals, there will be no object of thought, but all
things will be objects of sense, and there will be no knowledge of anything,
unless we say that sensation is knowledge. Further, nothing will be eternal
or unmovable; for all perceptible things perish and are in movement.62
60 cf. Alan Gewirth, "Clearness and Distinctness in Descartes, in Philosophy , Vol. 18,
1943, pp. 17-36.
61 cf. Frederick P. Van De Pitte, "Descartes’ Innate Ideas, in Kant-Studien, Band 76, no. 4,
1985, pp.363-384.
62 Cf, Barnes, Jonathan, editor; The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume II,Princeton
University Press, 1985; Metaphysics, Book B, 4, 999b1-4, p.1578.
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MEDITATION ON THE FIRST MEDITATION
The reason offered by Aristotle for the needed something over and above the
particulars, if there is to be knowledge, is that:
⇒
For all things that we know, we know insofar as they have some unity and
identity, and in so far as some attribute belongs to them universally.63
In Plato’s terms the one over the many is what accounts for predication, and hence
of knowledge; the principle of our recognition of objects is the identifi cation of an
object in terms of what it has in common with other objects.
⇒
And how will it be possible to know, if there is not to be something common to
a whole set of individuals? 64
Both Aristotelian-scholastics and Descartes diverted the object of knowledge from the
particular and contingent. Descartes, supposing the nugatory knowledge value of the
particular-contingent, undertakes to derive knowledge from innate ideas. One might
have the impression that Descartes fi rst impugned empirical knowledge in pursuit of a
higher objective but that, upon his proof of the existence of God, redeemed empirical
knowledge in the Sixth Meditation. This is not quite cogent; empirical knowledge is
left unredeemed, and Descartes never purposed to give it an infallible foundation. His
redemptive argument in a nutshell had been: (1) God exists. (2) A perfect being, such
as God is by defi nition, could not be perfectly good and also deceive. (3) Therefore I
can rely on God’s benevolence to trust that the external world is exactly as He makes
63 Cf, Barnes, Jonathan, editor; The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume II, Princeton
University Press, 1985; Metaphysics, Book B,4, 999a28-29, p. 1578.
64 Cf, Barnes, Jonathan, editor; The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume II, Princeton
University Press, 1985; Metaphysics, Book B,4, 999b26-27, p. 1579.
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D. Morgan Pierce
it appear to me. It is conspicuous that in this redemption of knowledge of the external
world he never attempts to undo his skeptical argument in its own terms.
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