CHAPTER 12
Catherine Wilson
I
Pr oo f
Soul, Body and World: Plato’s Timaeus and Descartes’ Meditations
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Christian Platonism has been aptly described by James Hankins as ‘one of those sunken Atlantises of the mind between the old world of traditional Christian society and the new world of the Enlightenment’,1 and historians are agreed that philosophical appeals to innate ideas and moral truths, and discussions of love and friendship in the seventeenth century owed much to the renewed interest in Plato that had begun in the Renaissance. Broader claims have been made as well for a positive influence of Platonism on the newly mathematised physical sciences, but these, by contrast, have proved difficult or impossible to substantiate.2 Platonic and NeoPlatonic concepts such as hierarchies of being, the world-soul, astral influences and the metaphysics of light, were antithetical to the new mechanical philosophy. Conversely, the Cambridge Platonists, who set themselves against Descartes and Hobbes, emphasised the impotence of matter,
1
James Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 1994), p. 362. Edward W. Strong’s well-regarded study. Procedures and Metaphysics: A Study in the Philosophy of Mathematical-Physical Science in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1936) but paid to claims for a role for Platonic metaphysics in Galileo’s physics earlier advanced by Alexander Koyré and Edwin A. Burtt. The frontispiece of the in Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers (ed.), Cambridge History of Seventeenth Century Philosophy 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) states of corpuscularianism that ‘This direct ancestor of presentday physics drew largely, for its philosophical credentials, either on Platonism or on the atomism of Epicurus.’ Yet the chapters of the history on the mathematicisation of physics by Michael Mahoney (see esp. I, 705) and on matter theory by Roger Ariew and Alan Gabbey (see esp. I, 426) appear explicitly to contradict the claim for a role for Platonism in the articulation of the mechanicalcorpsucularian philosophy of Descartes, Hobbes, Gassendi and Boyle. 2
177 S. Hutton and D. Hedley (eds.), Platonism at the Origins of Modernity: Studies on Platonism and Early Modern Philosophy, 177–191. © 2007 Springer.
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even guided by divinely ordained laws of motion, to produce all the phenomena of the world. Leibniz, who developed one of the most ingeniously wrought systems of philosophy of the early modern period in order to correct what he saw as the errors and deficiencies of the mechanical philosophy, repeatedly emphasised his allegiance to Plato.3 In addition to these well-established and largely discredited claims for the presence of Platonic doctrines and concepts in seventeenth-century philosophy, there remain a number of vexed and still largely open questions concerning the reception and reworking of Platonic epistemology and philosophy of mind. Almost a century ago, Wilhelm Wundt argued that Platonic idealism when attached to Democritean materialism, had a certain force against Aristotelian philosophies of nature,4 and a version of this thesis has been interestingly presented and defended by Stephen Menn. In Descartes and Augustine, Stephen Menn suggested that Plato’s Timaeus, known to seventeenth-century readers through the Renaissance editions and commentaries of Ficino and Jean de Serres, had a certain methodological importance for the seventeenth-century study of nature.5 Menn invites the reader to see the author of the Meditations as a practitioner of a method, a discipline that puts into practice the Timaeus’s main teaching that the first and most necessary step towards attaining wisdom consists in turning away from the sensible world.6 Where Plato directs the initiate to turn his attention from objects of sense that are multiple, perishable, elusive and comparatively unworthy, towards the regularities of the heavens and the creative intelligence that fashioned the world animal, Augustine, following Plotinus, substitutes the oneness of God as the proper object of consideration. Descartes, Menn suggests, continues this line of thought. The unusual juxtaposition of the Platonic discipline of aversion as method with the affirmation of theodicy as doctrine
3 See Leibniz’s Preface to the Nouveaux Essais, in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe. (Akademie der Wissenschaften: Darmstadt and Berlin, 1923–), VI, 6: 68 ff. 4 Wilhelm Wundt, Sinnliche und ueber sinnliche Welt (Leipzig: Koerner, 1914), p. 161. 5 Stephen Menn, Descartes and Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). The first complete Latin translation of the Timaeus, by Marsilio Ficino, was printed in his translation of the complete dialogues (Florence, 1484; reprinted in 1517). Ficino’s commentary on the Timaeus was printed in 1497. Another authoritative and widely used translation was that by Jean de Serres (Serranus) in collaboration with Henri Estienne (Henricus Stephanus) in 1578. The first edition of the original Greek text was printed by Aldus Manutius (Venice, 1513). For a full bibliography of Plato editions and translations, see Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance. For the reception of Renaissance Platonism see Brian Copenhaver’s Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Prior to the Renaissance, Timaeus was known only through Caldicius’s incomplete Latin translation. Approximately one-third of the work had appeared in Iamblichus, and Diogenes Laertius summarises some of 33–69. Plutarch referred to the work in his Iside et Osiride, and Tractatus de Animae Procreatione ex Timaeo. Plotinus, whose Enneads were translated by Ficino in 1492, discusses the Timaeus, but not systematically. [My thanks to the Editors for helpful assistance with these references—CW] 6 Descartes’ goals, Menn says, were ‘roughly, to construct a complete scientific system, including a mechanical physics and ending in the practical disciplines, on the basis of an Augustinian metaphysics’. Menn, Descartes and Augustine, p. 15.
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unites the two texts. For the Timaeus contains a strong affirmation of the view that harmonised well with Scriptural teaching: God, looking at the world He had just created, saw that it was good. Descartes, on Menn’s interpretation, employed Platonic aversion not to establish foundations for natural science, but rather foundations for practical philosophy, for making men better, individually and collectively, or physically and psychologically.7 He argues that the traditional view according to which, Descartes was aware of the popularity of Augustine in the Counter-Reformation, and therefore strategically adopted and adapted a few elements of Augustinian apparatus—chiefly the reference to a painful condition of doubt overcome by a correct apprehension of the divinity, and the cogito argument—is untenable. The adoption of Platonic concepts and attitudes by Descartes was genuinely doctrinal, Menn insists, not strategic, and it went well beyond the use of those figures. In favour of this hypothesis it might be observed that the Timaeus and the Meditations share a substantial amount of semantic space, especially where nouns are concerned: Animal Blood Body Brain Colours Death Demon Desire Disease Dream Flame Idea Mind Motion Space Star Sleep Sun Triangle Truth Wax
7 Menn sees the emergence of a skeptical crisis in the late sixteenth century to which Descartes is responding. This crisis, he maintains, did not stem from despair over the possibility of obtaining reliable knowledge of nature and the heavens from inconsistent testimony, or even confusion over the plethora of systems, as is sometimes suggested. It concerned rather the gap between the growth of knowledge in the physical sciences and the increase in practical wisdom. See Descartes and Augustine, p. 15.
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II
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Each work nevertheless arranges these concepts in a different intellectual pattern.8 How different they really are is the subject of this paper. While a reading of the Meditations against the background of the main themes of the Timaeus throws many Cartesian doctrines into sharp relief, Descartes is nevertheless best seen as a Democritean philosopher and as an exponent of what might be termed neo-Alexandrian experimental physiology.9 His sympathies did not attach to Platonic doctrine to the same extent as those of either Spinoza or Leibniz, both of whom appear to have given at least parts of the Timaeus a favourable reading. Descartes’ eye in the Meditations was always on its endpoint, his conclusion that human beings could have and ought to be permitted to have efficacious knowledge of corporeal nature.10 His conception of the relationship of physio logy to ethical theory was unplatonic in the extreme. Nevertheless, the view originally advanced by Wundt to the effect that Platonism softened the impact of the revival of atomism in the seventeenth century is sound and deserves further exploration along the lines indicated by Menn.
The Timaeus is a ‘cartographical’ work, for it maps the human body and the cosmos (as well as the lost continent of Atlantis), locating important features such as the heart, head, stomach, organs of generation, stars and planets, and explaining how their locations are related to their meanings. The world is ‘a visible living thing containing visible ones, perceptible god, image of the intelligible Living Thing, its grandness, goodness, beauty and perfection are unexcelled. Our one universe, indeed the only one of its kind, has come to be’ (Timaeus 92c).11 The world animal is composed of the four elements; but it has a ‘smooth round finish’, lacks limbs, senses and organs, and comprehends all shapes and living things (Timaeus 33). The human body has a head, made in imitation of the spherical universe, but with front and back, arms and legs, a face and sensory organs. Plato anatomises the skin, hair, blood, bones, sinews, brain and spinal marrow, as well as the stomach and the liver (Timaeus 71 b–c). There are said to be three souls.12
8 Compare the nouns of this guide to the life world with the significant nouns of modern treatises: Tiger, Water, Barn, Set, Number, Vat […]’. (Brain’ and ‘star’ persist, but ‘Blood’, ‘Wax’ and even ‘Dream’ have slipped out of the vocabulary of epistemology.) 9 On Alexandrian materialism, and especially the role accorded the nerves in animation, see Heinrich von Staden, ‘Hellenistic Theories of Body and Soul’, in John P. Wright and Paul Potter (eds), Psyche and Soma: Physicians and Metaphysicians on the Mind-Body problem from Antiquity to Enlightenment (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), pp. 79–116. 10 Henri Gouhier, La pensée réligieuse de Descartes, 2nd edn. (Paris: Vrin, 1972), p. 258. This view was endorsed by Etienne Gilson; see Menn, Descartes and Augustine, p. 298. 11 References in the text are to in John Cooper and D.S. Hutchinson (eds), Plato: Complete Works, trans. Donald J. Zeyl (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997). 12 See T.M. Robinson ‘The Defining Features of Mind-Body Dualism in the Writings of Plato’, in Wright and Potter (eds), Psyche and Soma, pp. 37–55.
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The mortal, concupiscent soul was placed by the creators between the midriff and the navel. ‘Here they tied this part of the soul down like a beast, a wild one, but one they could not avoid sustaining along with the others if a mortal race were ever to be’ (Timaeus 70e). The mortal soul responsible for courage, passion, and anger was placed in the thorax, closer to the head, the better to be ruled by it, and the immortal soul ‘resides in the top part of our bodies. It raises us up away from the earth and toward what is akin to us in heaven […] For it is from heaven, the place from which our souls were originally born, that the divine part suspends our head, i.e., our root, and so keeps our whole body erect’ (Timaeus 90b). The places of the souls indicate their significance and worthiness. Why, one might wonder, was the corpuscularian theory to which Descartes subscribed deemed ‘mad’ by Christian writers when advanced by Epicurus and Lucretius, when the bird-men, sunken cites, human souls attached to stars and other memoranda of the Timaeus—not to mention its own triangle-atoms— did not impugn the sanity of its author? The difference in reception may be explained not only by developments internal to the history of science, but by the acceptability of the ethical doctrines of Plato versus those of Epicurus in the eyes of Christian commentators. The dialogue lays out the ethical imperatives corresponding to the placement of these features. And the clarity of the ethical doctrines of the Timaeus is remarkable. One injunction is this: The motions that have an affinity to the divine part within us are the thoughts and revolutions of the universe. These, surely, are the ones which each of us should follow. We should redirect the revolutions in our heads that were thrown off course at our birth, by coming to learn the harmonies and revolutions of the universe, and so bring into conformity with its objects our faculty of understanding, as it was in its original condition (Timaeus 90d).
The heavenly bodies imitate the ‘perfect and intelligible Living Thing’ (Timaeus 39e), and we are to imitate them. The wise man, as noted, achieves immortality by turning away from desire and ambition and ‘following and learning the harmonies and revolutions of the universe’. As Jowett summarises it: Man contemplating the heavens is to regulate his erring life according to them […]. He is to partake of the repose of nature and of the order of nature […]. The ethics of the Timaeus may be summed up in the single idea of ‘Law’.13
III
To decide in what respects Descartes can or cannot be considered a Platonist, it will be useful to look more closely at four Platonic topics in the Meditations: the confused nature of sensory experience; the value accorded to super-sensibles
13
Jowett, Dialogues, p. 702.
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and intellectual knowledge; the thesis of the beauty of the world and the theory of immortality. Sensory Experience One of the most memorable passages of the Timaeus reads as follows:
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We must agree that that which keeps its own form unchangingly, which has not been brought into being and is not destroyed, which neither receives into itself anything else from anywhere else, nor itself enters into anything else anywhere, is one thing. It is invisible —it cannot be perceived by the senses at all—and it is the role of the understanding to study it. The second thing is that which shares the other’s name and resembles it. This thing can be perceived by the senses, and it has been begotten. It is constantly borne along, now coming to be in a certain place, and then perishing out of it. It is apprehended by opinion, which involves sense perception. And the third type is space […]. We look at it as in a dream when we say that everything that exists must of necessity be somewhere, in some place and occupying some space, and that that which doesn’t exist somewhere, whether on earth or in heaven, doesn’t exist at all (Timaeus 52).
Three natures are distinguished in this passage: sensibles, intellectual things, and space. Note that Plato does not say that sensible objects are perceived dreamily. He does, however, say (in the older, slightly more perspicuous Jowett translation), ‘Of these and other things of the same kind, relating to the true and waking reality of nature, we have only this dreamlike sense, and we are unable to cast off sleep and determine the truth about them’. He says that sensible things are images, modeled after another reality, which exist ‘ever as the fleeting shadow of some other’ (ibid., 52c). There was perhaps a tendency amongst later readers to collapse the three categories into two and to stir together the Timaeus’s (and Republic’s) doctrines of original and copy, truth and delusion, with the theme of flux. The result is the conclusion that there is something ‘dreamlike’ or phantasmagorical about the experience of ordinary objects; matter ‘always makes opposites appear’. Visible things are said by Plotinus to be ‘unreal, having at no point any similarity with [their] source and cause’:14 Matter is […] veritable Not-Being, so that it is no more than the image and phantasm of Mass, a bare aspiration towards substantial existence […] invisible, eluding all our effort to observe it, present where no one can look, unseen for all our gazing, ceaselessly presenting contraries in the things based on it; it is large and small, more and less, deficient and excessive, a phantasm unabiding and yet unable to withdraw.15
14 Plotinus, Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna, 3rd edn., revised by B.S. Page (London: Faber and Faber, 1956), III, 6,7. 15 Ibid.
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Plotinus cites for lack of understanding, ‘those who […] on the evidence of thrust and resistance, identify body with real being and find assurance of truth in the phantasms that reach us through the senses, those in a word who, like dreamers, take for actualities the figments of their sleeping vision’.16 (Plotinus’ language is echoed by Leibniz: ‘Bodies in themselves are not self-states, but shadows which flow away. Corporeal things are but shadows which flow away, glimpses, shapes, truly dreams […] But inexperienced men take the spiritual for a dream and what is tangible for the truth’.)17 Descartes’ reflections on the ‘piece of wax’ in Meditation II seem initially to hearken back to the distinction between the elusive things that flow past the senses and the robust things that it is the aim of the understanding to grasp. The wax of experience is phantasmagorical; it can change its scent, shape, texture, colour, and sound; it is ‘a body which presented itself to me in these various forms a little while ago, but which now exhibits different ones’ (CSMK, II, 20, AT; VII, 30).18 An aversion to the phantasmagorical material world is suggested by the Meditator’s announcement ‘I will now shut my eyes, stop my ears, and withdraw all my senses’ (CSMK, II, 22; AT, VII: 34). By the end of Meditation VI, the Meditator has determined that sensory experience is inherently ‘confused’. Sensory experience implies the cooperation of soul and body in a manner we cannot really understand (CSMK, II, 56; AT, VII, 81). Further, it implies a mistaken attribution of qualities of colour, taste, scent, etc. that cannot inhere in corporeal things to them (CSMK, II, 56 ff.; AT, VII: 82 f.). Finally, at various places in the Meditations, passive sensory experience is implicitly contrasted with active and focused mental exercises of a mathematical or para-mathematical nature, such as demonstrating and inferring from definitions. Descartes was concerned in the Meditations to refute the Epicurean claim that we are animated by material soul-atoms and accordingly doomed to permanent extinction of our personalities, memories, and experiences after death, as well as the Aristotelian suggestion that the soul is an inseparable ‘form’ of the living body. The first two Meditations are reminiscent of Augustine’s attack on the Epicureans in the City of God. They are the ‘philosophers who, with minds enslaved to the body, have formed the opinion that corporeal things are the first principles of nature’.19 Nevertheless, Descartes did allow corporeal things to be the first principles of nature. A piece of wax can be understood by ‘purely mental scrutiny’. By reflecting on what the wax can and cannot be, ‘clear and distinct knowledge’ of this stuff can be obtained. Descartes did not try to make 16
Ibid., III, 6,6. ‘On the True Theologia Mystica’, in L.E. Loemker (ed.), Leibniz: Philosophical Papers and Letters, 2nd. edn. (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1969), p. 368, orig. in G.E. Guhrauer, (ed.), Deutsche Schriften, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1838–1840), I, 410. 18 English translation of Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 3 vols, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch and Anthony Kenny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–1991 (cited as CSMK) vol. II, with page and volume number to Descartes, in Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (eds), Oeuvres, 11 vols (Paris: Vrin, 1964–1974) (cited as AT). 19 Augustine, in R.W. Dyson (ed. and trans.), The City of God Against the Pagans (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998), Bk. VIII, Ch. 5, p. 319. 17
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a Platonic cut between material things-known-by-the-senses and immaterialthings-known-by-the-intellect, the latter having ontological priority and the study of them greater worth. Rather, he insisted that material things were ‘better known’ by the intellect than by the senses. Although he maintained that intellectual things, beginning with one’s own soul, were better known than corporeal things (CSMK, II, 20; AT, VII, 30 ff.), he did not draw the inference that it is better to know the better known things, or that knowledge of the worse known things had only a relative or propædeutic value. Descartes posited ‘extended substance’ under the flux of sensory qualities. This enabled him to defend mechanism, while escaping the objection that had been posed to the ancient atomists with monotonous regularity, namely, that no one had ever seen such hard, indivisible little bodies as they claimed to exist. The fact that no one had ever seen the corpuscles composing ‘extended substance’ was not an argument against the corpuscular theory of matter, in Descartes’ view, for his theory of perception entailed that individual corpuscles could not be seen. For physical reasons, the eye and brain could not form an image of such minute entities. Descartes can be compared in this respect with his more Platonic successor and critic who did assign immaterial things known by the intellect (‘monads’) ontological priority. Leibniz concluded that the infra-sensible world could not, after all, be a material world, and he accused Descartes of having cut his reasonings short in inferring that infra-sensible reality was material.20
INTELLECTUAL KNOWLEDGE
Is the material world really worth knowing, for Descartes, even if it is knowable? This might seem doubtful. Knowledge of God is said by Descartes in Meditation III, in a manner reminiscent of Augustine, to bring to us ‘the highest joy of which we are capable’. However, Descartes was clear that the discipline through which he was putting his readers was not meant to indicate to them a way of life based chiefly on meditation and so on aversion from experience. This is the substance of the Letter to Elizabeth of 28 June 1643: I believe that it is very necessary to have properly understood, once in a lifetime, the principles of metaphysics, since they are what give us the knowledge of God and of our soul. But I also think that it would be very harmful to occupy one’s intellect frequently in meditating upon them, since this would impede it from devoting itself to the functions of the imagination and the senses. I think the best thing is to content oneself with keeping ion one’s memory and one’s belief the conclusions which one has once drawn from then, and then employ the rest of one’s study time to thoughts in which the intellect co-operates with the imagination and the senses (CSMK, III, 228; AT, III, 695).
20 Leibniz, ‘Critical Thoughts on the General Part of the Principles of Descartes’, in Loemker (ed.), Philosophical Papers, p. 409.
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Such cooperation between intellect, imagination and sense was not envisioned by Plato; at least, it did not constitute the best sort of life in his view. While the Symposium allowed ‘the sciences’ or ‘learning in general’ a rank above the knowledge of human laws and institutions, the best knowledge restricted the focus to ‘one single form of knowledge, i.e. of beauty’. According to the Republic, ‘sight tries’, after men emerge from the cave, ‘at last to look at the animals themselves, the stars themselves, and, in the end, the sun itself’, but it succeeds only in looking at ‘divine images in water and shadows of things’. The crafts, however (presumably the arithmetic and calculation, geometry, astronomy, harmonics and dialectic mentioned earlier at Republic 525–529), ‘awaken the best part of the soul and lead it upward to the study of the best among the things that are, just as, before, the clearest thing in the body was led to the brightest thing in the bodily and visible realm’ (Republic 530–532). According to Descartes, one cannot enter into the sciences as a pure empiricist, for such a person has no basis for trusting his epistemological faculties and no idea of the criterion of truth (CSMK, I, 182–3; AT, IX.2, 8–9). Yet, for Descartes, there is little to learn about God or the soul—undoubtedly the best things that are—as supersensible objects. God is infinitely powerful and good; the human mind has an array of capabilities when linked to a body, and it can (whether or not it ever does) exist separately from the body. This seems to be all one can really know about God and the soul. The best form of knowledge for Descartes appears to be messy and physiological, not pure and supersensible. The terminus of the Meditations, expounded at length in Meditation VI, recapitulating Parts IV and V of the Discourse, is the Meditator’s discovery that the body is causally connected with the physical world through its reticulation of sensory and motor nerves, and that animation, motion and feeling depend on these nerves. Our ability to represent even mathematical objects depends on our possession of a brain communicating with the mind. While Descartes seemed to reserve some forms of knowledge for a disembodied mind, the Meditations as a whole seem intended to reintroduce into natural philosophy an essentially Galenic, physiological conception of what it is to be an animated thing.
THE GOOD WORLD
The goodness and beauty of the world are strongly asserted in the Timaeus: Now why did he who framed this whole universe of becoming frame it? Let us state the reason why: He was good, and one who is good can never become jealous of anything. And so, being free of jealousy, he wanted everything to become as much like himself as was possible. […] The god wanted everything to be good and nothing to be bad so far as that was possible, and so he took over al that was visible — not at rest but in discordant and disorderly motion — and brought it from a state of disorder to one of order, because he believed that order was in every way better than disorder. […] He wanted to produce a piece of work that would be as excellent and supreme as its nature would allow (Timaeus 29e–30c).
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‘Of all things that have come to be, our universe is the most beautiful’ (Timaeus 29a). The Timaeus takes the human body and its sensory equipment to have been constructed for a noble purpose. Vision enables us to see the sun, stars, and heavens. The heavenly bodies in turn have given us the concepts of time and number, ‘and from this source we have derived philosophy than which no greater good ever was or will be given by the gods to mortal men. God gave us sight that to the end that we might behold the courses of intelligence in the heaven and apply them to the courses of own intelligence which are akin to them’ (Timaeus 47b). Disease, death, inflammation, corruption, evil, madness and ignorance are nevertheless to be reckoned with (Timaeus 82–89). Without ascribing evil propensities to matter, or suggesting that defect and error have a purpose, Plato hints that the recalcitrance of matter to the imposition of form limits goodness, and that the fastening of a body to the immortal soul is the source of human ills (Timaeus 43a). But he does not try explicitly to reconcile the doctrine of the good world with observation. The notion that things are as good as they can be, ‘boundedly perfect’ under constraints, is a familiar theme of early modern philosophy.21 Modern philosophers by and large reject the notion that matter prevents things in general from being as good as they could be, even while retaining something of his ethical principle that material preoccupations prevent men from being as good as they could be. Thus Leibniz: Nor is it necessary to seek the origin of evil in matter. Those who believed that there was a chaos before God laid his hand upon it sought therein the source of disorder. It was an opinion which Plato introduced into his Timaeus. Aristotle found fault with him for that […] because according to this doctrine, disorder would be original and natural, and order would have been introduced against nature. […] Plato recognized in matter a certain maleficent soul or force, rebellious against God; it was an actual blemish, an obstacle to God’s plans […] But matter is itself of God’s creation; it only furnishes a comparison and an example, and cannot be the very source of evil and of imperfection.22
21 Leibniz compares Shaftesbury’s Characteristics to his own Theodicy, giving a Platonic gloss to both: ‘The universe all of one piece, its beauty, its universal harmony, the disappearance of real evil, especially in relation to the whole, the unity of true substances, and the unity of the supreme substance of which all other things are merely emanations and imitations are here put in the most beautiful daylight’. ‘Remarks on the Three Volumes Entitled Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times’, 1711–12, in C.I. Gerhardt (ed.), Die Philosophische Schriften von Leibniz, 7 vols (Hildesheim: Olms, 1965), III, 423–431; Loemker, Philosophical Papers, p. 633. 22 Leibniz, in trans. E.M. Huggard, Austin Farrer (ed.), Theodicy (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1985), §379. ‘The source of evil’, according to Leibniz, ‘lies in the possible forms anterior to the acts of God’s will’ since ‘the possibility of things or forms’ is ‘that which alone God did not make, since he is not the author of his own understanding. Theodicy, §380–1.
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But was Descartes really convinced of the goodness of the world, and, if so, in what sense? His theodicial views concern the goodness of his mind for thinking and the goodness of his body for surviving, not the excellence of non-human nature. Leibniz noted perceptively that the salient feature of Cartesianism was its ethical neutrality, and he habitually contrasted Platonism with Cartesianism.23 God, to be sure, ‘lays his hand’ upon the initial chaos of the creation in Descartes’ system. The ‘chance’ of the atomists is insufficient, in his view, to bring stable structures and animal forms into existence. The laws of motion, however, are sufficient, and the system of the world consistently defended by Descartes from Le Monde to the Principles derives from Lucretius. Though we know that the world was created from the start ‘with all the perfections it now has’, Descartes ventures in the Principles, with the sun, moon, stars, and plants and with Adam and Eve ‘created as fully grown people’, If we want to understand the nature of plants or of men, it is much better to consider how they can gradually grow from seeds than to consider how they were created by God at the beginning of the world (CSMK, I, 256; AT, IX.2, 99).
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To the dismay of Gassendi, Descartes waved away all questions of divine purpose and intention in his Replies to the Objections posed to his Meditations: ‘I consider the customary search for final causes to be totally useless in physics; there is considerable rashness in thinking myself capable of investigating the impenetrable purposes of God’ (AT, 39 VII: 55). Not only is aversion in the Meditations a temporary experimental procedure, not a constant lifelong struggle, but the presentation of the good world is undermined by the aesthetic and moral neutrality of Cartesian created nature. The references to beauty, order and perfection typical of Platonic–Plotinian and even Augustinian discourse are almost entirely absent from Descartes’ essays and treatises. Although Descartes firmly insisted that he had no reason to reproach God for his own or the world’s apparent imperfections and deficiencies, he did not, unlike some of his contemporaries, claim constantly to discover fresh beauties in the Creator’s handiwork. References to order, beauty and perfection typical of Platonic–Plotinian and even Augustinian discourse are almost entirely absent from Descartes’ essays and treatises; again the contrast with Leibniz is telling. Another feature of the Platonic handprint, the ambivalence about beauty that is necessary for the method of aversion to have a point, is lacking in Descartes. Ambivalence is more properly ascribed to Malebranche, in whom the fascination with form, colour, and vitality war with an Augustinian austerity. As a moral philosopher, Descartes is not at all ambivalent about pleasure: it is good. According to Plato, the midriff-soul is moved by ‘pleasure, the greatest incitement to evil’, while pain deters us from the good (Timaeus 69c). Though
23 Leibniz, Letter to Molanus on God and the Soul (1679) in R. Ariew and D. Garber (eds. and trans.), Leibniz: Basic Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), p. 242.
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IMMORTALITY
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both philosophers perceive an analogy between physical and moral disease-states, Descartes treats the analogy less paradoxically. Pleasure, for Descartes, signals what is good for us and pain what is damaging (Meditation, VI, VII: 81). Pain cannot deter us from the good because it is good to be out of pain. Moral error appears to be an accidental by product of our spontaneous attraction to the good, just as epistemological error is a by-product of our spontaneous attraction to the true (Meditation, IV, VII: 57–58). It is true that pleasure can deceive us as to the good, but this is not because pleasure and the good are fundamentally opposed, but because the good attracts us through pleasure.
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Cosmological maps locate the region in which the human soul resides after death and its putative experiences there, and Plato gave considerable thought to its fate in the Phaedo (Phaedo 81ff.) and the Republic, as well as in the Timaeus. Donkeys, bees, ants and ghosts figured in his thinking. Light-minded persons, he decided, are reborn as birds; dull ones as quadrupeds and depraved ones as women (Timaeus 90e). According to Wolfson, Plato’s reincarnation talk must have been mere clothing, for ‘when Plato wanted to give to his purely philosophic notion of the indestructibility of the soul a religious tinge, he had to borrow from popular religion the theories of reward and punishment and the transmigration of souls, though these were hardly warranted by his own philosophy’.24 This opinion is controversial. However, as Wolfson points out, theories of immortality face the following dilemma. If they treat immortality as a reward for good conduct, they tend to become fabular and often foolishly so; for the form of life that succeeds the life that was previously led must reflect some features of it. If by contrast they treat immortality an intrinsic property of the human soul and posit a future state based on its more ineffable properties, they may enjoy greater rigor but miss a pedagogic opportunity. Plato tries elsewhere in the Timaeus to escape the dilemma by proposing an intrinsic connection between living the right kind of life and achieving immortality. If a man has been absorbed in his appetites or his ambitions and takes great pains to further them, all his thoughts are bound to become merely mortal. And so far as it is at all possible for a man to become thoroughly mortal, he cannot help but fully succeed in this, seeing that he has cultivated his mortality all along. On the other hand, if a man has seriously devoted himself to the love of learning and to true wisdom, if he has exercised these aspects of himself above all, then there is absolutely no way that his thoughts can fail to be immortal and divine […] And to the extent that human nature can partake of immortality, he can in no way fail to achieve this (Timaeus 90bc).
24
Harry Austryn Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza (Cleveland: Meridian, 1958), p. 350.
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Spinoza appears to have glossed this thought, though whether its source is Plato or a Platonist is unknown, as follows:
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The essence of the mind consists in knowledge. Therefore the greater the number of things the mind knows by the second and third kinds of knowledge, the greater is the part of it that survives […] he whose body is capable of the greatest amount of activity is least assailed by emotions that are evil […] Thus he has the capacity to arrange and order the affections of the body according to the intellectual order and consequently to bring it about that all the affections of the body are related to God […] [T]herefore he has a mind whose greatest part is eternal. 25
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Though Spinoza’s ‘third kind of knowledge’, and the manner in which it confers whatever sort of immortality is possible in Spinoza’s universe, is not well understood, the notion that immortality is earned and assured by intellectual enlightenment, to which it has an intrinsic and not merely accidental connection is surely Platonic. Descartes advances no such thesis. He chooses the second option: immortality is logically inevitable in human beings and does not need to be earned, though he is unable to say very much about the experiences to be had in that bodiless condition. His Meditations reveal to him nothing regarding earned or deserved immortality. He provides no corporeal images of immortality, and furnishes no special incentives for good conduct. Considering that one of his declared aims in the Preface to the Meditations was to show that the immortality of the soul could be defended on rational grounds, this omission is remarkable. Descartes did not even manage to convince his critics that he had shown that immortality was an essential attribute of a thinking thing, though he claimed to have done something worthwhile in showing that it is not an impossible attribute of a thinking thing. Menn points out that Descartes’ insistence on the incorporeal nature of the soul is at odds with the prevailing hylomorphic interpretation of soul-body relations. The consequences of his rejection of hylomorphism are severe, but they do not bring him any closer to the Platonic tradition. For a disembodied soul, there cannot even be an experiential world, if one supposes that Meditation VI subverts the initial hypothesis that a malevolent demon could make me experience a world even if I did not have a body. For a Cartesian, living things cannot exist in intelligible worlds, while, for Plato, these worlds are their destiny. Plotinus echoes Plato in insisting that: Our task, then, is to work for our liberation from this sphere, severing ourselves from all that has gathered around us; the total man is to be something better than a body ensouled — the bodily element dominant with a trace of Soul running through it and a resultant life course mainly of the body — for
25 Spinoza, Ethics, Part V, Props. 38–39, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1982). Spinoza implies that conduct and intellectual attainments are the conditions of immortality, though it is hard to see where this fits in his metaphysics; see Wolfson, Philosophy of Spinoza, p. 350.
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in such a combination all is, in fact bodily. There is another life, emancipated, whose quality is progression towards the higher realm, towards the good and divine, towards that Principle which no one possesses except by deliberate usage but so may appropriate, becoming, each personally, the higher, the beautiful, the Godlike, […rather than] fate-bound, no longer profiting, merely, by the significance of the sidereal system but becoming as it were a part sunken in it and dragged along with the whole thus adopted. 26
V
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The aspiration towards a higher realm appears to be missing in Descartes. Descartes finds that the total man is nothing more than ‘the bodily element dominant with a trace of Soul’. This ‘trace’ is reserved for occasional volitions, ‘non-corporeal memory’, and thought without images. The total man is not dragged by the stars or fate, for Cartesian physics and metaphysics leave the concept of fate uninterpreted, and the stars in his system are mechanically incapable of any dragging action.
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Taking into account Descartes’ devotion to experimental philosophy, his belief that matter can be understood intellectually and has no evil properties, his sense that metaphysics is an exercise to be completed and then ignored, his antiprovidentialism, and his lack of interest in post-mortem retribution for our sins, it seems difficult to fault the older commentators who insisted that the soul of Descartes is not Platonic. The appeal to Augustine appears, as Gouhier said, incidental: It matters little that the cogito is found in one and in the other; it matters little that the two apologetics have recourse to the same procedures; it matters little that the two dialectics work themselves out beyond the bounds of the sensible world. Should their proceedings be rigorously parallel, should their expressions be identical, above all this there is a soul which these resemblances do not touch, and it is to this soul that a study like ours should lead.27
Menn’s study nevertheless reinforces the point emphasised by Wundt. An admixture of Platonism adorned the mechanical philosophy with moral-theological features that helped to redeem it from its association with atheism and that enabled to compete in the within the universities with scholastic-Aristotelian natural philosophy.28 Descartes’ borrowings from the Platonic tradition, which 26
Plotinus, Enneads II, 3,9. Henri Gouhier, Pensée réligieuse, p. 258. 28 Simon Patrick, the student of John Smith and Ralph Cudworth, urged students of divinity to abandon the lost cause of Aristotelianism and return to their ‘old loving Nurse the Platonick philosophy’, promising that ‘the Mechanics also will be faithful to her’. Quoted by R.H. Syfret, ‘Some Early Reactions to the Royal Society’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 7 (1950), 207–263, pp. 230–231. 27
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included his respect for divine goodness, his appeals to innate ideas, his dismay over the ‘confusion’ of sensory experience, and his conception of immortality as involving a release from the body, compensated for the apparently bleakness of the corpuscularian doctrine at the center of his philosophy. To a great extent—as Menn’s study confirms—Descartes’ appropriations owed more to the Plotinian tradition than to Plato himself, whose doctrines seemed strange and harsh to many of his readers. Even Leibniz was perturbed.
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Plato believed that souls had been in a happier state and many of the ancients […] believed that for their sins they were confined in bodies as in a prison. They rendered thus a reason for our ills, and asserted their prejudice against human life; for there is no such thing as a beautiful prison. But […] I make bold to say [quite apart from the faith in compensation in other lives] that taking all in all human life is in general tolerable.29
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Where the Timaeus projects antecedently established values seemingly discovered by philosophical contemplation of the cosmos, the author of the Meditations and the Principles of Philosophy finds no ethical messages in its survey of the heavens and the human body. The extraction of ethical content is possible only in a mythic system, for the values extracted are simply recouped from preexisting emotions and aspirations. If Descartes hoped to extract wisdom from natural philosophy, the method of aversion, by contrast with experimental philosophy, was not well suited to that aim. Insofar as science is not a projection of aspirations and fears, it is not a source of wisdom. To the extent that it appears a source of wisdom, it must incorporate a considerable dose of myth. The presentation of the human circulatory system in the Discourse and the human nervous system in the Meditations might remind us of the cartography and hypercartography of the Timaeus, but they do not lead to similar insights. The Meditations might even be said to be an inverted image of the Timaeus. The hero of the Meditations finds himself back home in a flesh and blood body he has learned to admire and respect after a brief imaginary flight into a fantastic delusion of incorporeality, while the hero of the Timaeus escapes to his special personal star, having shed his material carapace after a trying sojourn on earth. Yet both works present paradoxes. The paradox of the Timaeus is that the beautiful and good world turns out to be a sign pointing unambiguously to another world, by the standards of which the first world turns out to be neither beautiful nor good. The paradox of the Meditations is that a mind is shown to have issued from a good God who made it extremely reliable, which mind then proceeds to discover that this God has no interest in human affairs.
29
Leibniz, Theodicy, § 260.
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