Scribano, Emanuela, “Descartes and False Ideas.” Archives de philosophie 64, 2001. 259–78.
CAIRN.INFO, shs.cairn.info/revue-archives-de-philosophie-2001-2-page-259?lang=fr.
Descartes and False Ideas
“Descartes and False Ideas.” Archives de philosophie, 2001/2 Tome 64, 2001. p.259-278. CAIRN.INFO, shs.cairn.info/revue-archives-de-philosophie-2001-2-page-259?lang=fr.
- SCRIBANO, Emanuela,
- Descartes and False Ideas. Archives de philosophie, 2001/2 Tome 64, p.259-278. DOI: 10.3917/aphi.642.0259. URL: https://shs.cairn.info/revue-archives-de-philosophie-2001-2-page-259?lang=fr.
1 It is in the Third Meditation (TM) that Descartes introduces the notion of true ideas and false ideas. The latter category of ideas has attracted the attention of interpreters, especially due to the difficulty of identifying coherence between the theory of false ideas stated in the TM and that of the responses to the objections that Arnauld addressed to Descartes on this point. This will be the object of this discussion, which will therefore also bear on the doctrine of the “material falsity” of ideas.
2 The TM divides ideas into two categories: on the one hand, those that represent something, and to which the name idea properly applies; on the other hand, those that represent nothing and are merely modifications of thought, and to which, obviously, the name idea applies “improperly”:
3 Some of these (thoughts) are like images of things, to which alone the name idea properly applies: as when I think of a man, or a chimera, or the sky, or an angel, or God. Others, however, have certain other forms besides: as, when I will, when I fear, when I affirm, when I deny, I always apprehend some thing as the subject of my thought, but I also embrace something more than the likeness of that thing by thought; and from these, some are called volitions or emotions, others judgments. [1]
4 Descartes then asserts that ideas, considered independently of any judgment, cannot be false: “Now as to ideas, if they are considered alone, and I do not refer them to anything else, they cannot properly be false; for whether I imagine a goat or a chimera, it is no less true that I imagine one than the other…. Therefore, only judgments remain, in which I must take care not to be deceived.” [2]
5 The ideas properly so called constitute a premise of the first demonstration of God’s existence. These ideas have two sides: their “formal” reality, which makes them modifications of thought apt to represent something, and their realitas objectiva, namely what they in fact represent [3]. Descartes develops the proof of God’s existence through the search for a cause outside thought of the objective reality of ideas properly so called, and especially of the idea of God. It is within this proof that Descartes distinguishes ideas properly so called into two categories: true ideas and false ideas, depending on whether they represent beings that can exist or beings that cannot exist outside thought. False ideas constitute an exception to the initial declaration of the impossibility for an idea to be false:
6 Although I noted a little earlier that formal or proper falsity can be found only in judgments, there is nevertheless certainly a certain other material falsity in ideas, when they do not represent a thing as a thing: thus, for example, the ideas I have of heat and cold are so little clear and distinct that from them I cannot learn whether cold is merely a privation of heat, or heat a privation of cold, or whether both are real qualities, or neither. And since no ideas can be [ideas] except as things, if it is true that cold is nothing other than the privation of heat, the idea that represents it to me as a real and positive thing will deservedly be called false, and so on for the others. [4]
7 The falsity of ideas is called “material” insofar as it opposes properly or “formal” falsity, which is found only in judgment; material falsity thus indicates a falsity without judgment.
8 Arnauld interpreted this doctrine as if it referred to a case of false representation: what is nothing is represented as something. Material falsity should concern the representation of false objects, in the metaphysical sense of falsity, namely objects that cannot exist outside thought, and which are represented as if they were true objects, in the metaphysical sense of truth, namely as if they were objects that have a true nature and to which, consequently, possible existence befits. [5] However, in his objections, Arnauld radically rejected the notion of material falsity. No sense allows one to say of an idea that it is false, and false representation is always impossible: if the idea represents cold as it is, then it is the idea of cold, but if the idea represents cold as it is not, then it is not the idea of cold. In other words, if cold is something negative, the idea of cold must represent something negative; if it represents something positive, this idea is not the idea of cold, and if one judges that it represents cold, it is precisely an error of judgment, and not an error of the idea: “Finally, that idea of cold which you say is materially false, what does it present to your mind? Privation? Then it is true. A positive being? Then it is not the idea of cold.” [6]
9 In his response, Descartes excludes that the material falsity of an idea can have any relation to the metaphysical truth or falsity of the represented object. The “materiality” in question refers to the “material” side of the idea, namely to the capacity for representation that it possesses as a modification of thought, and not to the content of the idea, to what it represents, namely to its “formal” side. Descartes rebaptizes here what, in the TM, constituted the two sides of the idea: its “formal” side is named “material,” and the realitas objectiva becomes its “formal” side:
10
… since the ideas themselves are certain forms, and are not composed of any matter, whenever they are considered insofar as they represent something, they are taken not materially, but formally; but if they were regarded not as representing this or that, but only insofar as they are operations of the intellect, they could indeed be said to be taken materially, but then they would in no way regard the truth or falsity of the objects. [7]
11 Consequently, material falsity does not constitute a case of false representation, but a defect in the idea’s capacity for representation, a defect that occurs when the idea, being obscure and confused, does not allow one to discern whether the represented object is a (metaphysically) true object or a (metaphysically) false object, which makes it the occasion for a false judgment:
12 Nor does it therefore seem to me that they can be called materially false in any other sense than the one I have just explained: namely, whether cold is a positive thing or a privation, I therefore have no other idea of it, but the same one I have always had remains in me; and I say that it provides me with material for error, if it is true that cold is a privation and does not have as much reality as heat; because, considering both the idea of heat and of cold as I received them from the senses, I cannot notice that more reality is exhibited by one than by the other. [8]
13 In denouncing the equivocation into which Arnauld would have fallen, Descartes, as one sees, maintains that he has never spoken of false representation and that he has always used the notion of material falsity in the sense that the responses make more explicit: “Nor does it therefore seem to me that they can be called materially false in any other sense than the one I have just explained…”
14 Recent interpretations of the Cartesian theory of the falsity of ideas are divided: some see an insurmountable incoherence between the version of material falsity in the TM and that in the responses to Arnauld’s objections [9], others, increasingly numerous, attempt to show the profound coherence of the two versions of this theory. [10]
15 Among the interpreters who take sides for Descartes’s coherence, Norman J. Wells has introduced a new perspective. Since I am convinced that Wells’s interpretation has brought very important elements for understanding Descartes’s doctrine, I want to discuss it here in its fundamental lines. Wells has tried to show that the Scholastic tradition, and notably the Suarezian one, of simplex apprehensio, allows one to defend, without recourse to the false representation rejected by Arnauld, the thesis of a falsity and truth of ideas independent of any judgment. It also allows one to defend the coherence between the TM and the responses to the objections. [11] The doctrine of simplex apprehensio provides as an analytic truth that every idea represents what it represents, and therefore that the falsity of a representation is a notion devoid of sense: “simplex apprehensio, seu cognitio non potest habere difformitatem cum rem, quae est obiectum eius, esto possit esse difformis aliis rebus: ergo non potest in illa esse falsitas.” [12] Descartes would have taken this doctrine literally in the theory of ideas in the TM: “quod ad ideas attinet, si solae in se spectentur, nec ad aliud quid illas referam, falsae proprie esse non possunt; nam sive capram, sive chimaeram imaginar, non minus verum est me unam imaginari quam alteram.” False representation is an analytically impossible case: either the idea represents a certain object, or it does not represent it, and consequently becomes the idea of another object: “… in simplici actu… simpliciter res aliqua repraesentatur: ergo vel repraesentatur sicut est, vel non est illa, quae repraesentatur, et consequenter repugnat, esse obiectum, et non repraesentari sicut est.” [13] Falsity is possible only in the judgment that posits a relation between the representation and an object external to thought, affirming or denying the conformity of the latter to the representation itself. A representation thus has, properly speaking, two objects: an internal object that simply constitutes the representation in itself, and another, external to thought, to which a judgment attaches the representation. The internal object of the representation may not correspond to the external object to which the representation relates, but, obviously, it is always conformable to itself. Due to the intentionality of the idea toward the external world, one says of the external object that it is the object of the idea. This expression is, however, equivocal and liable to false consequences. One might, for example, believe that an idea is false when the external object is represented in a way different from what it is. Whereas the idea is not, in this case, the idea of that object, but represents something else, and that something else, in fact, is its true object. Strictly speaking, one can say that an idea represents an external object only in the case where there is identity between representation and external object.
16 Descartes would always have spoken of the falsity of the idea with respect to this doctrine. The falsity of the idea does not consist in the fact that it falsely represents its object – which for Descartes, as for Suarez, is impossible –, but in the fact that it does not allow one to distinguish what it represents. In this case the idea fails in its nature, namely in its function of representation, which makes it materially false. Within the doctrine of simplex apprehensio, the only possible sense of the falsity of an idea is that of a defect in its function of representation, namely precisely the interpretation of falsity that Descartes makes explicit in his responses to Arnauld’s objections, by attaching falsity to the obscurity of the idea. An idea is called false when its obscurity does not allow one to understand whether the represented object is true or false, which can occasion a false judgment: “… propter hoc tantum illam materialiter falsam appello, quod, cum sit obscura et confusa, non possim dijudicare an mihi quid exhibeat quod extra sensum meum sit positivum, necne; ideoque occasionem habeo judicandi esse quid positivum, quamvis forte sit tantum privatio.” [14] Moreover, the occasion for error given by an idea constituted, for Suarez as well, the only case where an idea could be called (improperly) false: “… etiam Aristoteles… non intelligit, falsitatem proprie sumptam in ipsa simplici apprehension reperiri, sed esse in his apprehensionibus occasionem erroris et deceptionis, et inde falsas nominari.” [15]
17 However, Wells’s interpretation well accounts for the thesis of the TM, according to which ideas cannot be false, as well as for the interpretation of material falsity in the responses to Arnauld. It fails, however, in the face of the presentation of material falsity in the TM. This is evident from the very definition of idea from which material falsity is deduced: “nullae ideae nisi tanquam rerum esse possunt.” [16] The domain of res in Descartes does not include true objects and false objects. It includes only true objects, namely objects that can exist outside thought, and which, unlike false objects, are “something,” are precisely res. [17] One might say that res here should not be interpreted in the strict and technical sense of what can exist, but generically, as any content of a representation. On this point, however, the presentation of material falsity itself is decisive. In the TM, the materially false idea is the one that represents a non res as a res. The negative expression – non res – can only be understood if Descartes aims at an object that cannot exist outside thought, a false object, as Descartes immediately repeats: “… si quidem sint falsae, hoc est nulla res repraesentent.” [18] Arnauld had therefore well understood what material falsity in the TM was: a false representation, namely that of a false object, represented as if it were a true object; precisely the case that the doctrine of simplex apprehensio – a doctrine that Arnauld shares and that Descartes here consciously violates – considered analytically impossible.
18 Moreover, if the doctrine of material falsity had from the beginning been compatible with simplex apprehensio, why would Arnauld, who shares the same theory about ideas, refuse to accept Descartes’s doctrine as it had been presented in the TM? In fact, it is Arnauld’s position that reflects the doctrine of simplex apprehensio in its purity. It suffices to compare Arnauld’s words: “Denique, illa frigoris idea, quam dicis materialiter falsam esse, quid menti tuae exhibet? Privationem? Ergo vera est. Ens positivum? Ergo non est frigoris idea” with those of Suarez: “…vel (res) repraesentatur sicut est, vel non est illa, quae repraesentatur, et consequenter repugnat, esse obiectum, et non repraesentari sicut est.” [19]
19 Wells’s interpretation thus ends up placing the position of the Descartes of the responses and that of Arnauld on the same level. But since, according to Wells, Descartes never changed his mind, because the doctrine of material falsity in the TM was already framed within the theory of simplex apprehensio, it becomes difficult to understand Arnauld’s polemic, unless one admits that he fell into a misunderstanding about the Cartesian thesis. But the unequivocal sense of the elements on which Arnauld’s interpretation relies excludes this hypothesis: ideas always represent something, material falsity consists in the representation of a non res as if it were a res.
20 On the other hand, there is no doubt that Descartes, with his theory of ideas that cannot be false, aligns himself with the doctrine of simplex apprehensio, or, more exactly, with the doctrine of Aristotelian origin, which is the source of simplex apprehensio, according to which falsity can only be found in the composition of simples and never in the simples themselves; [20] and it is certain also that the interpretation of material falsity in the responses to Arnauld fits within this doctrine. In short, Wells demonstrates very well that Descartes reasons within the framework of the doctrine of simplex apprehensio, but he fails to demonstrate the coherence of the theory of material falsity, because only the version of material falsity present in the responses to Arnauld proves compatible with this doctrine.
21 In fact, the version of material falsity in the TM is irreducible to that in the responses to Arnauld on several points:
- In the TM the falsity of the idea consisted in the false representation of a false object (“… est tamen profecto quaedam alia falsitas materialis in ideis, cum non rem tanquam rem repraesentant”), [21] whereas in the responses it consists in a defect in the capacity for representation of an idea, which remains the same whether its object is a true object or a false object (“… sive frigus sit res positiva, sive privatio, non aliam idcirco de ipso habeo ideam, sed manet in me eadem illa quam semper habui…”). [22]
- Consequently, material falsity which, in the TM, consisted in a deformation of the objective reality of the idea (… non rem tanquam rem repraesentant…) shifts, in the responses to Arnauld, to the capacity for representation of the idea, namely to what, in the TM, was the “formal” side of the idea and which Descartes here names its “material” side (“… si vero (ideae) spectarentur, non prout hoc vel illud repraesentant, sed tantummodo prout sunt operationes intellectus, dici quidem posset materialiter illas sumi, sed tunc nullo modo veritatem vel falsitatem objectorum respicerent.”) [23]
- In the TM, obscurity prevented establishing whether an idea was true or false (“… nonnisi valde confuse et obscure a me cogitantur, adeo ut etiam ignorem an sint verae, vel falsae, hoc est, an ideae, quas de illis abeo, sint rerum quarundam ideae, an non rerum”), [24] whereas in the responses obscurity coincides with the falsity of the idea (“… propter hoc tantum illam materialiter falsam appello, quod, cum sit obscura et confusa, non possim dijudicare an mihi quid exhibeat quod extra sensum meum sit positivum, necne…”). [25]
- In the TM material falsity concerned only sensible qualities which, like privations, are an absolute nothing (“… ab iis (ideis) discere non possim, an frigus sit tantum privatio caloris, vel calor privatio frigoris, vel utrumque sit realis qualitas, vel neutrum.”), [26] whereas, in the responses, falsity concerns, in general, all ideas that can be the occasion for a false judgment, including fictitious ideas and desires. Consequently, in the responses, falsity has gradations, depending on whether the idea gives rise to a greater or lesser occasion for error (“… illae (ideae) quae vel nullam vel perexiguam judicio dant occasionem erroris, non tam merito materialiter falsae dici videntur, quam quae magnam: unas autem majorem quam alteras erroris occasionem praebere, facile est exemplis declarare. Neque enim tanta est in confusis ideis ad arbitrium mentis effictis (quales sunt ideae falsorum Deorum), quanta est in iis quae a sensibus confuse adveniunt… Omnium autem maxima est in ideis quae ab appetitu sensitivo oriuntur: ut idea sitis in hydropico…”). [27]
- In the TM material falsity is truly inherent in the idea (“Quamvis enim falsitatem proprie dictam, sive formalem, nonnisi in judiciis reperiri paulo ante notaverim, est tamen profecto quaedam alia falsitas materialis in ideis…”), [28] whereas in the responses the idea is called materially false only because it is the occasion for a false judgment (“… dico mihi praebere materiam erroris”) [29]
22 Now, all these changes respond to a precise logic: they result from the elimination of false representation, in which material falsity in the TM consisted. In the responses, false representation has become impossible for Descartes as for Arnauld. Consequently the material falsity of the responses has nothing to do with the material falsity of the TM.
23 The keywords “material” and “confused” from the TM, skillfully taken up in the responses, allow Descartes to maintain that he has not changed his mind. But it is an attempt that is not difficult to unmask. When it came to false representation, falsity was in the objective reality of the idea. Now, having left the possibility of false representation, but wanting to keep the notion of material falsity, Descartes has at his disposal only the other side of the idea, namely the idea insofar as a modality of thought, which Descartes, for the first time, names the “material” side of the idea, thus building an opposition as new as it is shrewd between the “formal” side of the idea (what the idea represents) and its “material” side (the modality of thought). The words themselves now suggest the place where material falsity must be located: “… cum ipsae ideae sint formae quaedam, nec ex materia ulla componantur, quoties considerantur quatenus aliquid repraesentant, non materialiter, sed formaliter sumuntur; si vero spectarentur, non prout hoc vel illud repraesentant, sed tantummodo prout sunt operationes intellectus, dici quidem posset materialiter illas sumi, sed tunc nullo modo veritatem vel falsitatem objectorum respicerent.” [30] Note the shift in Descartes with respect to what is taken “materially”: the formal/material couple previously referred only to truth and falsity. Falsity formally speaking, that of judgment, was opposed to falsity materially speaking, that of ideas, namely to a falsity without judgment: Quamvis enim falsitatem proprie dictam, sive formalem, nonnisi in judiciis posset reperiri … est tamen profecto quaedam alia falsitas materialis in ideis … Now, on the contrary, the falsity of an idea resides in its material side, hence its name material falsity. The question has shifted, it is no longer simply: is there material falsity of ideas, but rather: can ideas taken materially be (materially) false? Masked by the homonymy of “material,” a decisive shift has doubled the opposition between falsity without judgment (material) and falsity in judgment (formal) with an opposition between the material side of the idea (which can be the occasion for an error), and the formal side of the idea (which now, and against the TM, can never be false). Having been attached to the side named “material” of the idea, material falsity cannot, by definition, refer to the falsity of the represented object, but only to the representation function of the idea. The preface to the Meditations will record the semantic change that occurred in the responses to Arnauld, calling precisely “material” the side of the idea that previously was called “formal.” [31]
24 As for the obscurity of the idea, the shift found in the responses to Arnauld is even more evident. In the TM, the confusion of the idea did not allow one to distinguish whether it was a true idea or a false idea; in the responses to Arnauld, falsity consists in its obscurity, which makes it impossible to decipher whether what is represented is a true object or a false object.
25 One must perhaps take Descartes seriously, when he says, in the responses to Arnauld, that he leafed through the Scholastics to verify whether he had erred on the notion of material falsity. [32] It was not simply a matter of verifying the Scholastic sense of material falsity, but rather and above all of identifying in the Scholastics a notion of falsity of the idea compatible with the doctrine of simplex apprehensio. In fact, if Suarez had used a notion of falsity of the idea within simplex apprehensio, Descartes could have taken it up as a legitimate interpretation of his own material falsity, thus demonstrating the coherence of his material falsity of the idea with simplex apprehensio.
26 Now, Descartes could well find in Suarez the notion of material falsity understood as Descartes had interpreted it, namely as a falsity independent of judgment. But Suarez did not relate this falsity to the idea. On the contrary, Suarez admitted only one eventuality in which one could speak, albeit improperly, of falsity with respect to the idea, namely when an idea is an occasion for error. [33] Sometimes ideas partially represent what is their object outside thought. They do not thereby become properly false, as simplex apprehensio teaches, because the true object of the idea is the object actually represented; and yet, since knowledge aims at the object outside thought, one can say that the lack of correspondence between the represented object and the external object is the occasion for the false judgment that attributes to the external object the characteristics represented in the idea: “…quando (imaginatio) apprehendit rem, quae re vera non est, vel non eo modo quo est, falli dicitur, quia discrepat ab illa re, quam pro obiecto habere videtur, quamvis re vera ad illam, vel ad talem modum eius non terminetur eius apprehensio: et ideo non sit in eo propria falsitas, sed imperfectio quaedam, quae est occasio falsitatis.” [34]
27 Faced with Suarez’s text, Descartes’s operation is double. On the one hand, in the responses to Arnauld, Descartes reproduces the Suarezian relation between idea and false judgment as the only correct interpretation of the falsity of the idea in the TM: falsity remains properly in the judgment, but the obscure and confused idea is the occasion for false judgment. On the other hand, he relies on Suarez’s authority to name “material falsity” the occasion for error that the idea can offer to the judgment, given that such an occasion is necessarily antecedent to the judgment.
28 And since the defect that leads to error is in the side named material of the idea, the false judgment that follows it testifies all the more to a material falsity of the idea itself. In the responses to Arnauld, and with Suarez’s help, material falsity has become compatible with simplex apprehensio. [35]
29 What then should one think of the TM? Can one think that Descartes presented two incompatible doctrines there – simplex apprehensio, when he declared that ideas cannot be false, and false representation where material falsity of ideas resides –, and that Arnauld’s objections forced him to coherence? Before accepting this hypothesis, one must verify the level of incompatibility between the version of material falsity in the TM and the doctrine of simplex apprehensio.
30 Now, Francisco Suarez also supports the doctrine that Descartes will present under the name of “material falsity of the idea,” with respect to the formation of entia rationis. According to this thesis, which Suarez expounds in a text very distant from the one that contains the theory of simplex apprehensio, [36] what is pure nothing, like negations and privations, cannot be represented as it is, namely as nothing. Since the object of the intellect is ens, what is nothing is necessarily represented as if it were something:
31 The first (occasion for feigning … entia rationis) is the knowledge by which our intellect tries to attain even negations and privations, which are nothing. For since the adequate object of the intellect is being, it can conceive nothing except in the manner of being, and therefore while it tries to conceive privations or negations, it conceives them in the manner of beings, and thus forms entia rationis. [37]
32 Taking into account the doctrine of the formation of beings of reason, one must formulate Suarez’s doctrine of simplex apprehensio with at least one exception. The case of a deformation in the perception of the represented object is analytically impossible, except in the case of ideas of what is nothing. In this case, what, outside thought, is nothing, is always represented as if it were something, but the idea does not thereby become the idea of something else; it remains the idea of that nothing, because what is nothing cannot be represented otherwise. In the case of the representation of nothing, one of the possibilities that representation has before it – to represent the object as it is or to represent something else – is suppressed: it is not possible to represent the object as it is; therefore the representation of something else is the only possible representation of that object. It is therefore not true that the idea can never falsely represent its object, without becoming the idea of something else, as the doctrine of simplex apprehensio seemed to claim. [38]
33 The Suarezian doctrine of the formation of entia rationis is a radical exception with respect to the doctrine of simplex apprehensio. And yet, it very well explains the thesis of a falsity of ideas, insofar as relative to the falsity of their objects. Descartes’s false ideas, like the ideas of entia rationis, represent an object that is nothing (a non res) as if it were something, and yet they do not become ideas of other things, because what is nothing cannot be represented otherwise. This is why these ideas are false – namely, they falsely represent their object – independently of any judgment. Descartes, moreover, deduces material falsity from the fact that the natural object of the idea is always a res, a something, exactly as Suarez had deduced the formation of entia rationis from the fact that the natural object of the intellect is always ens: … nullae ideae nisi tanquam rerum esse possunt… ; Cum enim obiectum adaequatum intellectus sit ens…
34 Now, the doctrine of the formation of entia rationis does not call into question simplex apprehensio in Suarez, as the doctrine of material falsity does not force Descartes to renounce the thesis according to which falsity resides in judgment and not in the idea, because of their extremely limited domain. In fact, the case of entia rationis as the case of the falsity of the idea concerns only what is absolutely nothing, like negations and privations, and not metaphysically false objects in general, like imaginary beings. This point deserves to be clarified. To repel Arnauld’s interpretation of material falsity, Wells drew attention to the fact that, when Descartes, in the TM, speaks of ideas that cannot be false, and of ideas “images of things,” he cites the case of the representation of a chimera, therefore of a metaphysically false object: “… sive capram, sive chimaeram imaginar, non minus verum est me unam imaginari quam alteram.” [39] Consequently, Descartes could not have assumed a doctrine according to which it would be impossible to give a veridical representation of what is not a true object. But one could address the same objection to Suarez, who speaks of a true representation of false objects like imaginary entities, but admits false representation in the case of negations and privations: “Imo nullum potest esse obiectum ita fictum, et impossibile, quin conceptus illius, ut sic verus sit, ut conceptus chymerae, vel hippocentauri, etiamsi dici possit falsus conceptus veri, aut possibilis animalis, tamen respectu chymerae, aut hippocentauri est verus conceptus eius.” [40] The representation of imaginary beings, which are nevertheless metaphysically false objects, does not lead to false representation, which nevertheless occurs in the case of negations and privations.
35 In the TM, Descartes repeats exactly the Suarezian doctrine of simplex apprehensio with its narrowly limited exception: one can have a true representation of anything, except negations and privations, namely what is absolutely nothing. In fact, Descartes does not limit himself to classifying sensations, which in no possible sense represent something that can exist outside thought, among false objects. He grants them a specific place among privations: “Et quia nullae ideae nisi tanquam rerum esse possunt, siquidem verum sit frigus nihil aliud esse quam privationem caloris, idea quae mihi illud tanquam reale quid et positivum repraesentat, non immerito falsa dicetur…”; “…an frigus sit tantum privatio caloris, vel calor privatio frigoris, vel utrumque sit realis qualitas, vel neutrum.” [41] Descartes well distinguishes the case of imaginary entities from the case of pure nothing. Fictitious entities, in fact, can have properties of which one has a distinct idea, and to which, consequently, a true nature belongs. It follows that one cannot say of fictitious entities that they are simply, and without reservation, a nothing like privations and sensations. [42] Consequently, fictitious entities do not require being denatured to be represented. On the contrary, false representation is the only possibility one has to represent what is an absolute nothing. By the narrowness of its domain, the false representation of nothing does not disrupt the theory of simplex apprehensio in Descartes as in Suarez, but only constitutes an exception to it, and is presented as such by Descartes: “Quamvis enim falsitatem proprie dictam, sive formalem; nonnisi in judiciis posset reperiri paulo ante notaverim, est tamen profecto quaedam alia falsitas materialis in ideis …” [43]
36 One must therefore correct Wells’s thesis, according to which it would not be possible to uphold both the theory of simplex apprehensio and the theory of material falsity that Arnauld believes he reads in the TM. On the contrary, Arnauld – and Wells – are wrong to believe that simplex apprehensio admits no exception. When simplex apprehensio conflicts with another doctrine concerning the limits of representation, and which excludes the possibility of representing nothing as such, one is obliged to limit its scope. One therefore has no difficulty attributing to the Descartes of the TM both simplex apprehensio and false representation.
37 But Wells’s correction also involves difficulties. In fact, if Wells had trouble explaining Arnauld’s critiques, it has now become difficult to explain Descartes’s change. Descartes could well have defended the false representation of nothing within the conceptual framework of simplex apprehensio from which Arnauld posed his objections. Why then modify the doctrine of material falsity and abandon the false representation of nothing?
38 My hypothesis is that the theory of material falsity represents a provisional stage in the path toward the prohibition of inferring from ideas of sensible qualities their possible existence outside thought. Or better, that the theory of material falsity constitutes a justification of this impossibility, which is still constructed with Scholastic and “pre-Cartesian” materials, in accordance with the logic of meditation, which provides that the starting conceptual material be still largely drawn from the reader’s prejudices. [44] But the doctrine of material falsity, in the terms in which it is expressed in the TM, proves to carry consequences too dangerous for the Cartesian system to be able to accept it even provisionally. The modifications that this doctrine undergoes in the responses to Arnauld would then testify to a will to eliminate the undesired consequences; on the other hand, the fact that this doctrine has no place in the ensemble of Descartes’s work would testify to its value as a tool, destined only for the path of meditation.
39 By means of the theory of material falsity, Descartes intends precisely to avoid the danger of passing from the idea of sensible qualities to their existence and resemblance outside thought, as an allusion to what one might infer from possession of the idea of cold and heat reveals: “discere non possim, an frigus sit tantum privatio caloris, vel calor privatio frigoris, vel utrumque sit realis qualitas, vel neutrum.” [45] It is not because I have the idea of cold and heat that I can legitimately infer the reality of cold and heat. To justify the prohibition of passing from the fact of having an idea to the reality of the quality it represents, Descartes decides, in the TM, to use a traditional, Scholastic instrument, familiar to the one who meditates and who has not yet arrived at Cartesian truth, namely the doctrine of beings of reason from Suarez. The idea that represents cold in my mind as ‘a thing’ does not allow one to exclude that cold is a privation and that, therefore, it cannot exist outside the mind. Indeed, in the case of ideas of sensible qualities as in that of entia rationis, the tendency to give them reality is inscribed in the nature of thought, but this tendency does not testify in favor of their effective reality; indeed, it would operate also in the case where sensible qualities were non-things.
40 But the doctrine of material falsity of ideas, if it allows in a first time to defend against the spontaneous tendency to give reality to sensible qualities, carries, in turn, two undesirable consequences: the first, noted by Arnauld, of casting suspicion on true ideas, and notably on the idea of God, which could be false. But this eventuality does not concern Descartes, who has already forestalled this objection in the TM, thanks to the clarity of the idea of God: sensible ideas are so obscure that they do not allow one to understand whether they are true or false, whereas the idea of God is so clear and distinct that one cannot doubt that it is true. [46] The second consequence, much more formidable, leads to placing error inside thought, in the very nature of ideas, which is entirely contrary to the Cartesian program of freeing nature, of divine origin, from any inclination to evil and error, to found science on God’s veracity. This consequence is never clearly expressed, but indices allow one to guess its presence.
41 According to the doctrine of material falsity of ideas, one cannot eliminate the appearance of reality in the representation of nothing; it is judgment that must contrast this natural appearance and become an antidote to the traps of the nature of ideas. On the contrary, according to the Fourth Meditation, where Descartes had developed his theory of the origin of error, the good use of reason should consist in limiting the freedom of judgment, the true source of error, to recover the irresistible coaction to assent given by nature, certain mark of truth. Only a small number of cases, studied in the Sixth Meditation, inverts the relation between the freedom of judgment, possible origin of error, and the necessity of nature, source of truth: these are the errors in the practical teachings of nature, whose exemplary case is that of the thirst of the dropsical, in which nature itself gives a deceptive message, by pushing to desire what is harmful to health. In these cases, the correction of error is entrusted to judgments and experience, against deceptive nature. [47]
42 Now, materially false ideas risk enormously enlarging the domain of natural falsity. In fact, the resemblances between the material falsity of ideas in the TM and the thirst of the dropsical are evident: in both cases it is not judgment that deceives, but nature (of the idea or the desire) that is deceptive, and judgment must contrast natural deception. But, in the Sixth Meditation, the deception of nature was limited to practical errors; moreover, Descartes had emphasized the extreme rarity of these cases, and, thanks to a few physiological remarks on the human body’s machine, had justified them by the impossibility, for God, of preventing these regrettable eventualities. On the contrary, in the case of material falsity of ideas, the tendency to speculative error would be in the nature of thought itself, and it would concern the entire domain of knowledge of the nature of bodies, namely science proper. The price to pay to counter, even initially and even provisionally, the tendency to give reality to sensible qualities, is very high.
43 The confirmation that in the material falsity of the idea the question of the error of nature stirs, with its dangerous consequences for divine veracity and the foundation of science, hides in the responses to Arnauld themselves. Descartes, defending a legitimate sense of the falsity of the idea, identifies the gravest case of falsity in the thirst of the dropsical, namely in one of the rare cases that, in the Sixth Meditation, had been judged as true errors of nature: “Omnium autem maxima [occasio erroris] est in ideis quae ab appetitu sensitivo oriuntur: ut idea sitis in hydropico, nunquid revera ipsi materiam praebet erroris, cum dat occasionem judicandi potum sibi esse profuturum, qui tamen sit nociturus?” [48] What interests us more here is the rapprochement between the material falsity of ideas and the case of the dropsical, which testifies to their theoretical proximity. But since, in this passage, falsity shifts from the idea to judgment, the thirst of the dropsical also benefits from this shift, and is presented as one of the cases, albeit the gravest, in which a perception favors the error of judgment.
44 But when one can avoid mentioning the falsity of ideas, as in the case of the second objections, the thirst of the dropsical remains the only case of falsity, but true falsity of nature. And Descartes does not hesitate to warn against the temptations to extend beyond these cases the attacks on divine veracity brought by the falsity of nature:
45
… and even… from natural instinct itself, which is given to us by God, we sometimes see that we are really deceived, as when the dropsical thirsts; for then he is positively impelled to drink by nature… ; but by what reason this does not conflict with God’s goodness or veracity, I explained in the sixth Meditation. But in those things which thus cannot be explained… I plainly affirm that we cannot be deceived. For since God is the supreme being, He cannot but also be the supreme good and true, and therefore it is repugnant that anything from Him should positively tend toward the false. [49]
46 Descartes must have seized the occasion of Arnauld’s objections to abandon a path that, even provisional, risked being too costly for the foundation of physics, insofar as it dangerously enlarged the casuistry of ‘errors of nature.’ [50] Indeed, after the responses to Arnauld, the notion of material falsity will disappear entirely from Descartes’s work, and a fortiori from the explanation of the spontaneous tendency to confer reality on sensible qualities.
47 Relative to the disappearance of the notion of material falsity, the responses to Arnauld represent an intermediate state, dominated as they are by the concern not to contradict the text of the TM, and therefore to keep a legitimate sense, but less dangerous, to the ‘falsity of the idea.’ Sensible ideas are obscure and confused, independently of any judgment, but they do not falsely represent their object; it is their obscurity that can induce error, an error that remains in judgment. To strengthen this reading, as we have seen, Descartes subsequently intervenes by rebaptizing as ‘material’ what in the TM was the ‘formal’ side of the idea. But when the concern for coherence with the text of the TM has entirely disappeared, ideas as such will no longer share responsibility for error at any level. This is what happens in paragraph 71 of the first part of the Principia, devoted to the origin of the false belief about the nature of bodies.
48 Before asking whether things exist outside thought, the child made a distinction between sensations to which no possible existence in the world corresponds, and the mathematical properties of objects, which he judged could exist outside thought. When one judges things only by what the ideas truly represent, the ideas never lead to error. The doctrine of simplex apprehensio knows here no exception, and materially false ideas have disappeared:
49
… in the first age, our mind was so closely bound to the body that it had no thoughts other than those alone, by which it sensed what affected the body: it had not yet referred them to anything placed outside itself, but only when something harmful to the body occurred, it sensed pain; when something advantageous, it sensed pleasure; and when the body was affected without much advantage or harm, according to the diversity of the parts in which and the modes by which it was affected, it had certain diverse sensations, namely those we call the senses of tastes, smells, sounds, heat, cold, light, colors, and the like, which represent nothing placed outside thought. At the same time it also perceived magnitudes, figures, motions, and such things; which were presented to it not as sensations, but as things, or modes of things, existing outside thought, or at least capable of existing, even if it did not yet notice this difference between them.
50 In the first days of life, what cannot exist outside thought – what is in itself nothing – is represented as it is, as a mere mental state, a sensation, whereas only the true natures of things appear endowed with possible existence. Ultimately the tendency to error no longer nests inside the idea, and therefore in nature – nature does not deceive –, but only in judgment, in the “interpretive context” of the idea. [51] The tendency to attribute independent reality of thought to all ideas, including those of sensations, arises subsequently, as a consequence of the practical use of the senses:
51
And then, when the body’s mechanism, which is thus fabricated by nature so that it can be moved in various ways by its own power, twisting itself here and there rashly, by chance achieved something advantageous or fled something harmful, the mind adhering to it began to notice that what it thus achieved or fled was outside itself; nor did it attribute to it only magnitudes, figures, motions, and such things, which it perceived as things or modes of things, but also tastes, smells, and the rest, whose sense in itself it noticed was produced by it. [52]
52 Error is always and only in the false judgments that accompany the ideas and never in the idea. In fact, the passage from an obscure and confused idea to a clear and distinct idea consists, according to the teaching of the Principia, but also of the examples of the Meditations, in the separation of judgment from perception, to recover simplex apprehensio which can never be false, at least at the speculative level. [53] Judgment must not combat the deceptions of nature, and therefore of God, but only against other judgments, free, and therefore human.
53 The “Cartesian” explanation of error now provides a doctrine of simplex apprehensio without exceptions, as Arnauld wanted: it suffices to return to the original perception of sensible qualities, that of early childhood, where the judgments induced by practical necessities have not yet become ingrained, to exclude the reality of sensible qualities, without invoking a fallacious tendency to their ontologization inherent in thought. Thus, if false representation has disappeared, it is not for the epistemological reasons recalled by Arnauld, but for theological reasons. With false representation, in fact, disappears the shadow it cast on divine veracity.
Publisher’s Keywords: Descartes, Falsity, Ideas
Date of online publication: 01/06/2008
Notes
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sc*******@***si.it - [1]
AT VII, p. 37,3-12. References to Descartes’s text are taken from the ADAM-TANNERY edition, Œuvres de Descartes (new presentation by P. Costabel and B. Rochot, Paris, Vrin, 1964-74), abbreviated as AT, following the volume, page, and lines. - [2]
AT VII, p. 37,13-22. - [3]
AT VII, p. 40-41. - [4]
AT VII, p. 43,26-44,8. - [5]
The metaphysical sense of truth is used by Descartes in the Fifth Meditation. Cf. AT VII, p. 65,4-5: “… for it is evident that everything that is true is something…” - [6]
AT VII, p. 207,17-19. - [7]
AT VII, p. 232,12-19. - [8]
AT VII, p. 232,19-33,2. - [9]
A. KENNY, Descartes: A Study of His Philosophy, New York, Random House, 1968, p. 117-25; M. WILSON, Descartes, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978, p. 102-119; J. Cottingham (ed.), Descartes’ Conversation with Burman, Oxford, Oxford U.P., 1976, p. 67 sq. M. Wilson returned to her positions in “Descartes on the Representationality of Sensation,” in J.A. Cover and M. Kulstad (eds.), Central Themes in Early Modern Philosophy, Indianapolis, Hackett Publ. Co., 1990, p. 1-22. On the obscurity of the doctrine of material falsity, cf. J.-M. BEYSSADE, “Descartes on Material Falsity,” in P.D. Cummins and G. Zoeller (eds.), Minds, Ideas, and Objects, Atascadero, CA, Ridgeview Publishing Co., 1992. - [10]
N. J. WELLS, Material Falsity in Descartes, Arnauld, and Suarez, in “Journal of the History of Philosophy” XC (1984), p. 25-50; L. ALANEN, “Une certaine fausseté matérielle: Descartes et Arnauld sur l’origine de l’erreur dans la perception sensorielle,” in J.-M. Beyssade and J.-L. Marion (eds.), Descartes: Objecter et Répondre, Paris, PUF, 1994, p. 205-230; M. BEYSSADE, Sur la fausseté matérielle, ibid., p. 231-246; R.W. FIELD, Descartes on the Material Falsity of Ideas, “The Philosophical Review,” 102 (1993), p. 308-333, and now also P. HOFFMAN, Descartes on Misrepresentation, “Journal of the History of Philosophy,” XXXIV (1996), p. 357-381, and further N.J. WELLS, Descartes and Suarez on Secondary Qualities: A Tale of Two Readings, “The Review of Metaphysics” 51 (1998), p. 565-604. - [11]
N. J. WELLS, Material Falsity, op. cit. - [12]
F. SUAREZ, Disputationes metaphysicae, Disp. IX, I, XIV. - [13]
Ibid., IX, I, XV. - [14]
AT VII, p. 234,13-18. - [15]
F. SUAREZ, Disputationes metaphysicae, Disp. IX, I, XVI. - [16]
AT VII, p. 44,4. - [17]
Cf. AT VII, p. 64,6-9-65,3-4: “… I find within myself countless ideas of certain things, which, even if they perhaps exist nowhere outside me, nevertheless cannot be said to be nothing… they are something, not mere nothing…” - [18]
Precisely R.W. FIELD, op. cit., p. 316, highlights this point as irreconcilable with Wells’s thesis. - [19]
F. SUAREZ, Disputationes metaphysicae, Disp. IX, I, XV. - [20]
Cf. ARISTOTLE, De anima, III.6, 430a 10-430a 29. This thesis is taken up, with an explicit reference to Aristotle, by Saint Thomas, De veritate, 14,1. Moreover, Suarez himself presents it as a communis sententia. Cf. Disp. met., Disp. VIII, III, I: “It seems to be the common opinion that the truth of knowledge, properly and strictly speaking, exists only in the composition and division of the intellect, and not in its simple acts.” - [21]
AT VII, p. 43,28-30. - [22]
AT VII, p. 232,21-23. - [23]
AT VII, p. 232,15-19. - [24]
AT VII, p. 43,23-26. - [25]
AT VII, p. 234,13-17. - [26]
AT VII, p. 44,1-3. - [27]
AT VII, p. 233,22-234,7. - [28]
AT VII, p. 43,26-29. - [29]
AT VII, p. 232,23-24. - [30]
AT VII, p. 232,12-19. - [31]
AT VII, p. 8,20-23: “(idea) can be taken either materially, as an operation of the intellect…, or objectively, as the thing represented by that operation…” - [32]
“I would fear, however, lest perhaps, since I never spent much time reading the books of the philosophers, I have not sufficiently followed their manner of speaking, when I said that ideas which provide material for error are materially false, unless I found the term materially used in the same sense in the first author that has come to hand: namely, in Fr. Suarez, Metaphysicae disput., 9, section 2, number 4.” AT VII, p. 235, 6-14. - [33]
In Disputatio IX, Suarez speaks of a falsity independent of judgment, that which can be found in de dicto statements and not de re, for example when the expression ‘God is not’ is neither spoken nor even thought, but written somewhere. But the opposition, in Suarez, lies between the statement, which still involves a composition of concepts, and the judgment, while Descartes opposes the idea, which is simple, and the judgment on a statement. Descartes is therefore right when he refers to Suarez for material falsity, understood as falsity without judgment, but it is Descartes who applies it to the idea. Cf. Disputationes metaphysicae, Disp. IX, II, IV. - [34]
Ibid., Disp. IX, I, XVI. - [35]
Descartes therefore assumed, in the responses to Arnauld, the notion of falsity (improperly so called) of the idea, which Suarez had formulated within the doctrine of simplex apprehensio. Now, since the Suarezian doctrine of simplex apprehensio is also found in Arnauld, who makes it the starting point of his critiques of Descartes, it is easy to understand why he declared himself satisfied with Descartes’s explanations. Cf. Mersenne to Voetius, Dec. 13, 1642, AT III, p. 603. - [36]
This concerns Disputatio LIV. - [37]
Disputatio LIV, I, VIII. - [38]
Wells also, perhaps aware of the insufficiency of the theory of simplex apprehensio to explain the expressions with which Descartes, in the TM, expounded the doctrine of material falsity, recalled, in passing, the Suarezian interpretation of entia rationis, as a possible source of the Cartesian thesis of the material falsity of ideas (Material falsity, op. cit., p. 40-41). But the reference to the thesis of the knowledge of entia rationis, on Wells’s part, is at least surprising, because it attributes the origin of beings of reason precisely to the natural attitude by which one represents as true beings those that cannot exist outside thought, that is, exactly the doctrine which, according to Wells, should not be present in the Cartesian theory of material falsity, and which, on the contrary, would have been falsely attributed to Descartes by Arnauld and by contemporary critics. - [39]
AT VII, p. 37,15-17. - [40]
F. SUAREZ, Disputationes metaphysicae, Disp. VIII, s. III, III. Italics mine. - [41]
AT VII, p. 44,4-8; p. 44,1-3. Italics mine. - [42]
Cf. L’Entretien avec Burman, ed. J.-M. Beyssade, Paris, PUF 1981, p. 73: “Whatever can be conceived distinctly and clearly in a chimera, that is a true being, nor is it fictitious…”; Primae responsiones, AT VII, 118,2-8: “… if I consider a triangle inscribed in a square, … as I examine only those things that arise from the conjunction of both, its nature will be no less true and immutable than that of the square or triangle alone…”; ibid., AT VII, 119,6-11: “… if we carefully examine whether existence befits a supremely powerful being, and what kind, we can clearly and distinctly perceive that at least possible existence befits it, just as it does all other things whose distinct idea is in us, even those that are composed by the intellect’s fiction.” - [43]
AT VII, p. 43,26-29. Italics mine. The problem of the representation of what is nothing will return in Spinoza, who, in the spirit of the TM, will refuse to consider representations of beings of reason as ideas. Cf. Cogitata Metaphysica, I, in B. SPINOZA, Opera hrs C. Gebhardt, Heidelberg 1925, I, p. 234. - [44]
For an example of a reading of the Meditations that takes into account the modification of notions as the process of meditation unfolds, I permit myself to refer to my essay L’inganno divino nelle «Meditazioni» di Descartes, “Rivista di filosofia” XC (1999), p. 219-251. - [45]
AT VII, p. 44,1-3. - [46]
AT VII, p. 46,5-11. - [47]
AT VII, p. 89,11-17: “… since I know that all the senses, regarding those things that pertain to the body’s advantage, indicate the true much more frequently than the false, and that I can always use several of them to examine the same thing, and moreover memory, which connects present with past, and intellect, which has now discerned all causes of error…” - [48]
AT VII, p. 234,5-9. - [49]
AT VII, p. 143,18-144,6. Italics mine. - [50]
To explain to Burman the passage from the TM according to which ideas considered as such “scarcely… provide any material for error,” Descartes will choose the version of material falsity given to Arnauld, in which falsity remains in the judgment, even if the object of the judgment can be the idea considered independently of its relation to external objects: “… as if I consider the idea of color etc. and say that it is a thing…”, L’entretien avec Burman, p. 37-39. - [51]
Following the felicitous expression of A. Gewirth, Clearness and Distinctness in Descartes, “Philosophy,” XVIII (1943), p. 17-36. - [52]
Cf. Principia philosophiae, I, § 45 and 46.
Cite this article
- Scribano, E.
(2001). Descartes and False Ideas. Archives de philosophie, Tome 64(2), 259-278. https://doi.org/10.3917/aphi.642.0259.
- Scribano, Emanuela.