01 March 2008

On wax

“So what was it in the wax that I understood with such distinctness? Evidently none of the features which I arrived at by means of the senses; for whatever came under taste, smell, sight, touch or hearing has now altered—yet the wax remains.”

The wax is a body that ‘presented itself’ to Descartes ‘in these various forms’ earlier, and is now ‘exhibiting’ other forms. The central problem of Cartesian metaphysics has got to be this: what sort of body could there be that has no sensible properties necessarily/essentially? Aren’t bodies just those things that are extended? How can an extended thing not have any sensible properties, and yet have causal powers to ‘make’ itself present this way or that?

And if the intellect is able to grasp this true ‘formal object’ (my label, for now), aren’t we simply talking about some kind of a mental substance—perhaps a non-thinking thing that is thought, a thinked thing (sorry)?

(It’s remarkable that two centuries of metaphysics are traceable to these few paragraphs that every undergraduate has read. Make that four centuries, depending on your view of Kripke and (David) Lewis.)

What impresses Descartes as most mysterious about the wax, it seems, is that it is capable of an infinite number of different extended states:

“I would not be making a correct judgement about the nature of wax unless I believed it capable of being extended in many more different ways than I will ever encompass in my imagination. I must therefore admit that the nature of this piece of wax is in no way revealed by my imagination, but is perceived by the mind alone.”

Oddly, though his point goes to mental architecture, it has the metaphysical implication that bodies are extended in an infinite number of ways, outrunning our sensory apparatus and imagination, and are only catchable by our intellect. The oddness is that, by making the intellect a transcendental requirement for any sensory experience that may contribute to knowledge, Descartes seems to be making bodies essentially un-extended, or perhaps pre-extended, and throwing into doubt the ability for bodies to play any causal role in nature.

I’m anticipating another look at this in meditation 5.

Res cogitans

Descartes famously doubts those attributes of his soul that are body-dependent (nutrition, movement, and sense-perception). But notice the different kinds of dependence: Nutrition and movement are mere ‘fabrications’ if body does not exist, whereas sense-perception does not occur without a body, and so (presumably), though it need not include body within what it perceives, it must be illusory if the bodily state it would occur in does not in fact obtain.

If that is so, it does not really matter what the object of sense-perception is to the Cartesian skeptic. All that is required to support his (negative) worry is that the bodily state required for the sensory state fail to be realized.

If that is so, then doesn’t the dream argument become superfluous? Descartes even suggests as much, mentioning it as an aside:

“Sense-perception? This surely does not occur without a body, and besides, when asleep I have appeared to perceive through the senses many things which I afterwards realized I did not perceive through the senses at all.”

But more importantly, I think, it makes the argument much more transcendental than I realized. I always think of the Cartesian skeptic as preoccupied with the objects of thought—I think I see a tomato, but that’s not really a tomato, because this sensory information has a faulty object. But Descartes seems to be arguing about the conditions for the possibility of a sensory experience (surprising since Kant usually gets the credit for that), and—very surprising—the conditions for that possibility seem to be this or that bodily state.

That carries through to the res cogitans notion: “I am, I exist—that is certain. But for how long? For as long as I am thinking.” Whereas the cogito itself is an objective account (it answers the question, what is the object of thought, and what makes it true) the res cogitans argument is a transcendental account (it answers the question, what are the conditions for the possibility of a thinking experience).