B. IDEAS AND THE IMAGINATIVE PATTERN
Around 1630 Descartes was approaching, but only approaching, the divide between imagination and intellect characteristic of the late philosophy. In the Regulae they still cooperate in near-perfect harmony. Le Monde, although restricting the scope of imagination, assures for it an infallibility when it is confined to evident properties of extension. In this sense, the eternal truths, which guarantee the applicability of pure mathesis to extension, provide the foundations of physics.
The continuing discussion of eternal truths in the 1630 correspondence with Mersenne induced Descartes to emphasize that infinity lies beyond
the ordinary conceptions of people, who prefer imagining to knowing. And in 1638, Descartes recurred to the intertwined problems of infinity, imagination, intellect, and eternal truths in answer to Mersenne's question about whether there would still be a real space if God had created nothing. At first we think the question is beyond our mind's power, but it exceeds only the power of imagination—just like those other existence questions about God and our souls. Intellect can know that there would be not only no space but also no eternal truths, for example that the whole is greater than its parts (AT II 138, 27 May 1638).
Descartes eventually separated the issue of our knowledge of number from that of extension. This is evidenced by the Meditations' claim that we can have a clear intellectual perception of triangles even without imagining one. What underlies the claim is a distinction that he drew in correspondence with Princess Elizabeth in 1643 and that is also present in the Principles. There are very few "primitive notions" that form originals
on the pattern of which we form all our other knowledge: and there are only a very few of these notions; since, after the most general, of being, of number, of duration, etc., which are appropriate to everything that we can conceive,[4] we have, for body in particular, only the notion of extension, from which follow those of figure and of movement; and for the soul by itself, we have only that of thought, in which are comprised the perceptions of understanding and the inclinations of will; finally, for soul and body together, we have only that of their union, on which depends that of the force that soul has to move the body, and the body to act on soul, in causing its sentiments and its passions. (AT III 665, 21 May 1643)
The basic conceptions of number and of eternal and mathematical truths are essentially grounded in the stock of notions that are most primitive of all, prior even to the distinction between body and soul or extension and thinking. This is what became of the Regulae's doctrine of natures common to both material and intellectual things. These natures, or notions, expressible in both reaims but not proper to either, are knowable only by intellect. Nevertheless, Descartes retained the idea that mathematics is greatly aided by imagination until the end of his life.[5]
Contrary to the Regulae, Descartes now assigns the principal cause of errors to our attempts to use imagination in order to conceive of soul, or soul moving body. This marks a revolution in the thought of one who
[4] In the Principles, pt. l, par. 48, Descartes attributes special status to the notions of substance, duration, order, and number, which apply equally to extension and thinking (AT Villa 22-23).
[5] For example, to Princess Elizabeth, 28 June 1643 (AT III 691-692) and in conversation with Franz Burman (April 1648; AT V 176-177). Descartes refers to the ingenium mathematieum and mathesis ingenium throughout this latter passage.
around 1620 had claimed that wind could signify spirit and light knowledge and who in the Regulae had attributed error to a badly composing intellect that did not resort to imagination and sense. If one is Cartesian, this revolution will appear as (finally) getting things right. Yet the revolution in an important sense does not change anything about Descartes's universe except perhaps to regroup the various powers of sense, imagination, and intellect differently, into different constellations: their relative positions remain, but the way in which we see them relating to one another changes.
No single set of concepts can rationalize every one of Descartes's adversions to imagination from, say, 1637 onward. Yet it is possible to schematize the later understanding under a small number of headings.
1. If the early theory of imagination stressed its activity, the later philosophy intensified a localization and restriction of the activity that had already begun in the Regulae. The distinction between common sense and imagination still present in Rule 12 was abandoned, the power of mind that was responsible for imagining was absolutely differentiated from the associated bodily functions, and its direct activity in the body was restricted to the pineal gland.
2. In the later philosophy, especially in discussions postdating the Meditations, it is not the knowing force or intellect that acts on imagination but rather the will. In the later philosophy, will comes to be understood as the primordial activity of soul, whereas intellect is a passivity. Therefore one has to distinguish the receptive aspect of imagination, in which the mind attends to the impression, trace, or enforced movement of the pineal gland, from the productive formation of images by willing. In turn, one must distinguish between the contemplation of those images that are formed in the pineal gland because of the actions of the sense organs, nerves, animal spirits, or other parts of the mechanical system of the body from images that are produced by an autonomous act of will.
3. Furthermore, a sharper distinction was drawn between the figure in the organ and the idea perceived in consciousness than was the case even as late as L'Homme. What is impressed in phantasia or the pineal gland is not what one directly experiences in thinking. Rather, the trace in the gland somehow gives rise to an idea in consciousness. There may be some resemblance between the two, but there need not be.
These tendencies and distinctions require one to conceive imagination along the following lines: The organ of imagination takes on figures chiefly in two ways, through sensation and through the act of imagining. The receptive part of mind (intellect) can be turned by the will toward the
pineal gland; when the figures or traces there come from the sense organs the result is sensation, whereas imagining proper occurs when the will makes a new impression in the brain with the "windows [of the senses] closed" (AT V 162), an impression of which the intellect takes note. In consciousness one does not in any case simply register the presence of the figure or trace in the imagination organ; the idea is not the organ trace. Moreover, besides the sense-directed and will-governed traces in the organ there can also be an undirected and ungoverned production of images that result from stirrings in the nerve and animal spirit system, one result of which is dreams.
Although Descartes had used the term 'idea' in his early philosophy, it initially and typically meant the image or look of a corporeal thing. Even in the Discourse on the Method 'idea' is often used in this sense, although it also takes on the newer meaning.[6] With the Meditations, Descartes introduces the new sense with programmatic intent. It is in effect a generalization of the corporeal sense: 'idea' refers to the look of things in consciousness, to the forms of thoughts. In the "Second Replies," in complying with the request for a more geometric or synthetic presentation of the content of the Meditations, he explicidy defines the term. After specifying that 'cogitatio' is anything in us in a way that we are immediately conscious of it,[7] 'idea' is defined as
that form of any cogitation whatever, through the immediate perception of which I am conscious of this very same cogitation. . . . And thus I call 'ideas' not only images depicted in phantasia; now here I in no way call these ideas, insofar as they are in the corporeal phantasia, that is, depicted in a certain part of the brain, but only insofar as they inform the mind itself turned toward that part of the brain. (AT VII 160-161)
Earlier in the "Second Replies" he distinguishes the nature of the idea from that of "images of material things depicted in phantasia"; the idea proper is "only that which we perceive by intellect either in apprehending, or in judging, or in discursive reasoning" (AT VII 139).
One of the most revealing characterizations of the idea is in the "Third Replies," to Thomas Hobbes. Contrary to Hobbes, who resolutely interprets ideas as corporeal or even as names, Descartes attempts to show that there exist genuinely noncorporeal ideas. He uses the term 'idea'
[6] For instance, contrast the strictly corporeal use of AT VI 55-56 to the ideas of God and soul of 34-35.
[7] He continues: "Thus all operations of will, intellect, imagination, and senses are cogitations. But I have added 'immediately,' to exclude things that follow from these, as voluntary motion indeed has cogitation for its principle, but nevertheless it is not cogitation" (AT VII 160).
for everything that is immediately perceived by the mind, to such an extent that, when I want and I fear, because I simultaneously perceive that I want and I fear, this same volition and fear are numbered by me among ideas. And I have used this word because it was already commonplace among Philosophers for signifying the forms of perceptions of the divine mind, although we recognize no phantasia in God; and I had none apter. (AT VII 181)
What is surprising is that this suggests that ideas in the noncorporeal sense are conceived by an analogy to the divine mind, but the divine mind taken contrafactually as though it possessed the apparatus of the internal senses that would allow it to perceive.
These passages show that even if the idea is meant to be distinguished, as residing in the mind, from the corporeal form or shape in objects or in the phantasia/pineal gland, the very concept is designed in analogy to and according to the logic of the corporeal idea and the system of sensing and imagining. So the workings of pure intellect are understood as analogical to those of imagination, although those workings in the most proper sense exclude the imagination. This logic of analogy-with-exclusion is exhibited in an exchange with Pierre Gassendi (in the "Fifth Objections and Replies"), who argued that the mind's supposedly clear understanding of a chiliagon was merely verbal and so just as "confused" as that of the image and that it involved at least an indistinct picture of a figure with many angles (AT VII 330-331). Descartes responded that since we can know many things most clearly and distinctly about it, it cannot be perceived either confusedly or merely in name. We have an understanding of the whole figure even if we do not imagine the whole. These phenomena of awareness show that understanding and imagination differ not just in degree in a single mental power but as two completely different modes of operation. "For which reason in intellection mind uses itself alone, but in imagination contemplates corporeal form. And although Geometric figures be entirely corporeal, nevertheless, with respect to them these ideas through which they are understood, when they [= the ideas] do not fall under imagination, are not to be considered corporeal" (AT VII 384-385; note the biplanarity of idea and figure). Thus one has a criterion of the difference: intellection is easier than imagination and is recognized in its uniqueness by a process and by results that are different from those of the corporeally dependent imagination.
Descartes therefore seems ready to argue that we know not just number apart from imagination but also geometry. Gassendi was right to detect ambiguity here, for what can it possibly mean to understand a chiliagon in complete and utter abstraction from imagination, not merely without a distinctly conceived thousand-sided figure in phantasia but without any
figure or even any sense of spatiality at all? In the period of the Regulae, Descartes might himself have considered this to be a monstrosity of badly applied intellect, the situation par excellence wherein by not imagining things concretely the intellect affirms absurdities.
Can the mind have a concept of extension without any form of imagination whatsoever? In answering we need to be careful not to take Descartes's self-understanding in a more extreme sense than he intended. Earlier in the "Fifth Replies," Descartes insists that
I also often distinctly showed that mind can operate independently of the brain; for naturally no use of the brain can be for understanding purely, but only for imagining or sensing. And although when imagination or sense is strongly accessed (as happens when the brain is disturbed) the mind is not free for easily understanding other things, we nevertheless experience that when imagination is less strong we often understand something quite different from it: as when in the midst of sleeping we notice we axe dreaming, there is a certain need of the imagination so that we be dreaming, but that we notice we axe dreaming requires only intellect. (AT VII 358-359)
In the Aristotelian-Scholastic theory of knowing by abstraction from phantasms there was virtual unanimity that knowing proper (i.e., the activities of intellect and discursive reason) was not the operation of any organ, but that was not to say that in human beings one could know without the assistance of the organs that produced the phantasm. Descartes is not arguing differently in this passage. Clearly he does not mean that we can notice and understand that we are dreaming in the complete absence of dreaming—quite the contrary—but that there is nothing at all in the activity of the brain, or of imagination as the having of traces in phantasia, that is itself a form of knowing or the proper instrument or organ of knowing. Knowing belongs to intellect alone.[8] This is also one of the lessons of the piece of wax example, at the end of the Second Meditation: we have become accustomed since childhood to think that we see things like the piece of wax with our senses, but nothing in the senses knows or perceives the wax as wax. The imagination, although it can conceive different appearances that the wax might assume, cannot embrace the indefinite, seemingly infinite variety that is possible. Only the intellect is powerful enough to conceive the unity of substance through all the appearances and
[8] of course, Descartes went much farther toward the location of intellect in an organ than would have been acceptable to most Aristotelians by claiming that the soul was particularly situated in the pineal gland. One should notice that the distinction between the uses of intellect and imagination that Descartes makes in the passage is similar to the acts of intellect "on its own" in the Regulae, when intellect is used to set up a problem in initial terms and to conceive negations. See chap. 5, Sec. G, above.
possibilities, and it is intellect itself that perceives the existence of more possibilities than I have ever sensed or imagined.
The intellect transcends the limitations of sense and imagination, and the ability of the mind to imagine beyond the already or previously given depends on this transcending power. The proper objects of intellect are the things that it can perceive even in sensibles and imaginables that do not belong per se to those sensibles and imaginables: the ideas of the essences of things (like the waxness of the wax) and the eternal truths. So, for example, when we see that one piece of wax is larger than another, and a third is larger than the first, we are "seeing" these things by virtue of intellect, not of sense or imagination, and seeing that the third is larger than the first as a consequence of the first two perceptions is a judgment of will based on a clear seeing by intellect. We of course can also note, in turn, the principle of transitivity (If C is greater than B and B is greater than A, then C is greater than A ), which is properly speaking even farther removed from the particular sensations and imaginations, although the principle can be expressed through things in imagination and in the external world. These truths are graspings by the will-oriented intellect, graspings that are intrinsically shapings or informings of the mind, that is, thought-graspings. Another, more intellectualistic rather than voluntaris-tic way of putting this is that the appearances of things are illuminated by the light of reason that God has made part of our fundamental nature and that is the essence of us insofar as we are perceiving beings.
Thus it becomes evident why Descartes insisted that the eternal truths exist in the mind alone. This does not mean that the external world is in no way touched by the eternal truths (as though physical objects do not obey the principle of transitivity with respect to large and small) but that to find the principle one must look to the mind. There is no principle-thing "out there." The exhibition of the principle can take place through things that are "out there," but the only place that exhibition (or appearance) genuinely occurs is in mind.
The positions of the Regulae and the Sixth Meditation on intellect and imagination are not so far apart, then. The Sixth Meditation does not intend to investigate imagination for its own sake but tries to determine whether imagination as a faculty of mind is sufficient to establish the existence of something corporeal. The first task is to assure that it is distinct from intellection: that is what the chiliagon example accomplishes. The second is to use this difference to establish that something different in nature from intellect actually exists. Imagination unaided by sense makes this no more than probable. "Although I investigate everything accurately, nevertheless I do not yet see that any argument can be drawn from the distinct idea of corporeal nature that I discover [or invent] in my imagination
that necessarily concludes that body exists" (AT VII 73).[9] While noting that I can imagine things that are perceived even better by sense, like color, sound, odor, and pain—whereupon the meditation proceeds to investigate sense—Descartes remarks that these things go beyond the imagery of "that corporeal nature that is the object of pure Mathesis" (AT VII 74). This repeats the formula 'pure mathesis' that occurred shortly before, at the end of the Fifth Meditation: "Now indeed innumerable [things], some about God himself and other intellectual things, some also about all that corporeal nature that is the object of pure Mathesis, can be plainly known and certain for me" (AT VII 7l).
The Fifth Meditation, which is rifled "Of the essence of material things; and again of God, that he exists," takes as an example of the ideas of things other than God and myself ("insofar as they are in my cogitation" and in order "to see which of them are distinct, which confused") the imagination of quantity. "Namely, I distinctly imagine quantity, which philosophers commonly call continuous, or the extension in length, breadth, and depth of this quantity or, better, quantified thing; I number in it various parts; I assign any magnitudes, figures, positions, and local motions to these parts, and any durations to these motions" (AT VII 63). It is in imagination, then, that we have a distinct notion of that nature that is the essence of mathematics and physics, extension. Once I imagine quantity—which, if we draw in advance on the explicitation of the actions of will in the post- Meditations period (see Secs. D and E, below; this explicitarion is in conformity with the dynamic mathematical imagination of Le Monde ), is an action of the will in phantasia perceived according to the idea of extension—I can make further active graspings of it, articulating extended quantity in ways that appear under the idea-forms of number, magnitude, figure, position, motion, duration.
But again the question intrudes: How, then, can Descartes assert that he has a clear and distinct understanding of a figure like the chiliagon without an image? Although it is possible that here lies an ultimate unintelligibility, there is a more charitable interpretation. Descartes grants in the Sixth Meditation that, "on account of the usage of always imagining something whenever I cogitate about a corporeal thing, I perhaps represent to myself some figure confusedly" (AT VII 72); thus in thinking a chiliagon I might represent to myself an image that is no more appropriate to a chiliagon than to a myriagon. The passage does not necessarily imply
[9] This reasoning suggests that necessity in mathematics does not ordinarily require argument but can get by with the clear seeing of intuitus. The kind of necessity required for the certain existence of bodies must come from arguments, not just the intuitus-seeing of corporeal images. For passages relevant to this distinction, see the preface to the French edition of the Principles (AT IXA 2) and the conversations with Burman (AT V 176-177).
that this use or custom is inessential to thinking about corporeal things, nor that extension is hereby confusedly imagined; in fact, it would appear instead that extension is imagined as such in this custom of cogitation, only it is not carefully articulated by the mind's distinct attention to its parts. Moreover, this absent articulation into figural parts, which to be present requires that the acies mentis, the sharp edge of the mind, be applied so that the sides, the angles, and the area are grasped simultaneously (all which would demand a great effort of the soul in the activity of imagining), is not necessary for understanding the pentagon or the chiliagon in distinction from other figures. Even in the Regulae the thought that a chiliagon is not a myriagon would be accomplished by intellect, not imagination. The intellect is in principle capable of making such articulations and such distinctions of number—or, to emphasize the activity, of articulating and numbering —but this capacity far outstrips the ability of a human being to actually, completely, and distinctly carry out the articulation in a present image. To produce a clearly and distinctly perceivable geometrical image, the imagination must constitute a real figure that embodies in concrete form an implication and intrication of natures, both simple and complex. The human ingenium is often not up to the task. Neither is the intellect, but its task is the different one of grasping limited aspects that need virtual rather than concrete realization.[10]
These possibilities of applying the sharp edge of the mind—even the possibility of distinctly conceiving spatiality or extension in pure form, as was done at the beginning of the sixth part of Le Monde —amount to no less than ideas in their innateness. When Descartes pointed out to Hobbes that calling an idea innate did not mean that it was always showing itself to us, "but only that we have in ourselves the faculty of eliciting it" (AT VII 189), he was pointing to, without naming, this will-based power of drawing the forms of cogitation out of ourselves and applying and distinguishing them appropriately. All ideas as perceived are given their fundamental form by God's institution of our nature; those that we control—as opposed, for example, to the sensations of the external world that we do not control, although even they appear in accordance with the institution of our nature—we can summon forth at will (although how the willing is perceived is again a matter of the institution of our essence as thinking things and our nature as human beings).[11] In this sense, we "have" the idea of extension in the purely spiritual power of the will to elicit it, even when there is nothing that we are actively imagining, and all the articulations of
[10] it would doubtless be fruitful to consider this distinction of Descartes in light of the Scholastic distinction between first and second intentions.
[11] See Sec. C, below, on the distinction between our essence as thinking things and our nature as human beings.
which that willing is capable can, in some way, be perceived by the mind even in the absence of an image.
The Fifth Meditation implicitly explains this, since, as an investigation of that corporeal nature that is the essence of pure mathesis and of matter, it is working in what Descartes understands as the distinct realm of imagination. The meditation discovers in extension not merely that things
thus viewed in general are to me plainly known and transparently seen, but beyond this also by attending I perceive innumerable particulars about figures, about number, about motion, and similar things, the truth of which is so open and in agreement with my nature, that provided that I first uncover these things, I seem not so much to learn something new as to be reminded of things that I already knew before, or to turn for the first time to these things that were long in me, although I had not before turned the gaze of the mind to these. (AT VII 63-64)
That is, extension is so constituted (by God) that having the general idea of it (in imagination), or further articulating it in accordance with "true and immutable natures," as the next paragraph calls them, is implicit and in perfect agreement with my nature. These natures or essences are ways in which I take hold of or conceive extension because my nature was created by God precisely as it is—in accordance with the eternal truths, as Descartes reminded Mersenne in 1638.
Once we understand these natures or essences and how they implicitly contain what we do not immediately perceive, we can argue by analogy that just as a triangle has certain properties and not others, even when we are not attending to them, so does God have the property of existence; the truth of existence is involved in the very idea of God, just as the truth of the relations demonstrated by a geometrical theorem is involved in the very idea of a geometrical object. These involvements are imposed by the essences, not by an arbitrary act of mind.
In the Fifth Meditation, Descartes responds to an issue that had been raised by Rule 12: whether things as grasped by the mind are like real things, and whether error is a matter of the mind's miscomposing elements (the natures of the Regulae ) that are true in themselves. As thinker I cannot guarantee the truth of what my mind puts together, but the constancy of the implications of truths in something elementally given to me by nature, even when I do not attend to those implications, assures me that some combinations of natures are simply given as such. The Regulae had not reached the level of thought at which this could be settled. It had only analyzed as natures the ways of grasping things and postulated that complex natures were in some way composites of simple natures; some complex natures might be necessary, others contingent, some might come about through impulse, others through conjecture, yet others through deduction
(AT X 421-424). The basis for these distinctions was not made thematic, however. The Regulae in its method had even allowed wide latitude to the cognitive use of fictions for imagining artificial dimensions along which things could be grasped in the process of problem solving. Natures in the Meditations, however, are no longer aspects or axes along which things can be compared, evaluated, and arrayed, but natures in the sense that Rule 5 had dismissed: natures as the essences of existing things.
The later philosophy can nevertheless be viewed as retaining a crucial element of the Regulae's conception of natures as aspects. Aspects are used in order to isolate essences, which, to be precise, are (except in the case of God) potentially existing essences.[12] The Meditations in particular shows how one can distinguish the corporeal aspect from the noncorporeal aspect precisely by attending to the inability of the corporeal aspect to encompass or even to exhibit the aspect 'thought'. This can be recognized only through the direct experience of actual thought (in meditation), preeminently in the act of doubting the existence of everything, even of the doubt itself. The potentially existing essences must be enacted in cogitation, and in cogitation the mind is capable of comparing and distinguishing what is similar and what is different, though without the strict determination of proportion that had been the goal of the Regulae. The enactment of the cogito, for example, is viewed under the three aspects of ego, thought, and being, which are nevertheless inextricably united in the experience of the actuality. Exploring this actuality opens up a more distinct notion of the thinking aspect as it is wholly contained in the act of the thinker (distinct first of all from body, but secondarily distinguished into the different kinds or aspects of thinking), and the exploration of this actual thinking and its thoughts opens up the new dimension of its inability to account for its own existence (under the aspect of cause). The causal aspect then opens up the route to the experience of the necessity of the unlimited perfection of God as the only support for the actual thing I have experienced myself to be in the course of meditation.[13]
Thus the kind of aspectual analysis of things introduced in the Regulae produces a way of arriving at an experience of the synthesis of the aspects in realities (not in fictions made up by cogitation), and these syntheses (the thinking ego, for example) lead in turn to new aspects that point to the ultimate synthesis of all, God. "For certainly I understand in many ways that that [idea of God] is not something fictitious depending on my
[12] Compare what the Principles has to say about attributes in pt. l, pars. 51-58, AT VIIIA 24-27.
[13] In the intellect's discovery that it is finite, and through this the recognition of posifive infinity, there is an analogy to the power of the intellect in the Regulae : it is the only faculty capable of recognizing the positive truth expressed in negation.
cogitation, but the image of a true and immutable nature" (AT VII 68). That Descartes called this idea an image is not surprising in view of what he told Hobbes, that 'idea' indicates the forms of the nonexistent divine faculty of phantasia. More significant, it means this: that the idea is like an image, an informing of a perceptive power, that reliably refers to and derives from a synthesis that is naturally instituted, that is, a true and immutable nature. The idea is to the nature as the image is to the corporeal reality. Both ideas and images are fundamental looks or aspects of things that bear the likenesses of their originals. That these aspects themselves are susceptible of a consistent and reliable unpacking of involvements and implications (ideas opened up by their aspects), their complexity of truth, is the surest mark of their bearing resemblance to the corresponding realities. For the mature Descartes, thought is articulated by ideas just as imagination is articulated by figuration, and all thought, having an idea and an object to which that idea refers (by virtue of its objective reality the idea points both to its existence as an essence and to possible and real individual instantiations), is intrinsically biplanar—this in a sense even more fundamental than in the Regulae, which was satisfied with a more speculative, that is to say, hypothetical, biplanarity.