Descartes and the Doubting Mind by James Hill;

Author:James Hill;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2011-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

3. The Self Perceived by Pure Intellect

The result of the method of subtraction is that the narrator undergoes a change in how he conceives of himself. No longer does he use the corporeal imagery of sense and imagination. Previously, in line with the empiricist principle, he had tried to understand himself by calling up an image:

as to the nature of this soul, either I did not think about this or else I imagined it to be something tenuous, like a wind or fire or ether, which permeated my more solid parts.14

The picture of the soul presented here is almost certainly an allusion to the traditional Epicurean view of the mind as a kind of highly rarefied matter.15 But what is most important for us is the manner in which the meditator describes his attempt to conceive his soul: indicating his empiricist leanings, he says ‘I imagined it.’ The imagination here does not mean fantasy, as we have already seen, so much as the faculty of forming corporeal imagery: he has been trying to picture himself. In the context of hyperbolic scepticism the resulting materialist conception of the self is shown to be hopelessly inadequate. All images of corporeal things may, after all, be the impositions of an evil demon, designed to ‘ensnare our judgement’:

‘I will use my imagination to get to know more distinctly what I am’ would seem to be as silly as saying ‘I am now awake, and see some truth; but since my vision is not yet clear enough, I will deliberately fall asleep so that my dreams may provide a truer and clearer representation.’16

Instead of the imagination, and corporeal images, he uses another faculty, which is still a form of ‘perception’. This perception, it is assumed, cannot be wrong:

I thus realize that none of the things that the imagination enables me to grasp is at all relevant to this knowledge of myself which I possess, and that the mind must therefore be most carefully diverted [diligentissime esse avocandum] from such things if it is to perceive its own nature as distinctly as possible [ut suam ipsa naturam quam distinctissime percipiat].17

What kind of perception is now being thought of? The answer can only be that this most distinct perception (distinctissime percipiat) is one of the pure intellect, the faculty that operates independently of corporeal images.18 The meditator does not say this outright because pure intellect is a category that is still strange to him – one which he, with his empiricist background, has not yet consciously reflected upon and identified. But Descartes is showing us the process by which the significance of pure intellect dawns on the meditator, and how the mind turns inwards to know itself.

The use of the pure intellect in self-knowledge means two things. It means the process of coming to know the self can act as a demonstration that we do indeed have a faculty of pure intellection, and therefore not all that is intelligible is also imaginable. The empiricist assumption, which we

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