More on elements

“For even when painters try to create sirens and satyrs with the most extraordinary bodies, they cannot give them natures which are new in all respects; they simply jumble up the limbs of different animals. Or if perhaps they manage to think up something so new that nothing remotely similar has ever been seen before—something which is therefore completely fictitious and unreal—at least the colours used in the composition must be real. By similar reasoning, although these general kinds of things—eyes, head, hands and so on—could be imaginary, it must at least be admitted that certain other even simpler and more universal things are real. These are as it were the real colours from which we form all the images of things, whether true or false, that occur in our thought.”

This includes, says Descartes, extension, shape, quantity, place, time of duration. Is this a first stab at primary qualities?

Does Descartes mean that one begins, even in imagination, with these elements that are the same throughout the natural world? Is it a prior constraint on our thought about the natural world? Or does he mean that nature itself has these constraints, that objects already have built into them these qualities? The first gloss is the Kantian, of course, the second, Lockean.

Or does such a distinction not make sense to ask of Descartes?

The puzzle gets trickier when, in the second meditation, Descartes supposes that, among other things, “[b]ody, shape, extension, movement and place are chimeras.” Why don’t those ‘chimeras’ resist doubt in the thought experiment, if they are universal, simple, and thus real?

I never realized this before: if Descartes maintains a distinction between primary and secondary qualities, or elements and arrangements of elements, does that undermine his solipsism? Wouldn’t the existence of primary qualities be assured, even if the secondaries were doubtful?

Maybe this is how Locke and Kant read him. I never thought about it in these terms before.