![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
My main concern in this article is to arrive at a clear view of the nature, extent, and value of Descartes’ universal doubt, not to determine whether Hume’s critique of Cartesian doubt is compelling. It is rather to reflect on Descartes’ own assessment of the matter in order to explain why Hume was right in recommending Descartes’ doubt in the Meditations, when reasonably understood, as “a necessary preparative to the study of philosophy.” This task will be discharged, first, through an analysis of the Meditations and other works of Descartes connected with this topic; and second, by an exploration of the effect that the radical and extensive doubt undertaken by Descartes in the Meditations has elicited from generations of students, particularly from those inclined to philosophize, namely the sudden intellectual upheaval and awakening of their critical faculties. I argue that the universal, “hyperbolic” doubt is not artificial or rhetorical, or a mere heuristic construct to secure Descartes’ metaphysical principles. Instead, it is but a development and methodic refinement of a natural predisposition of the human mind that manifests itself early in the serious, encompassing doubts children entertain on certain occasions.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, 12.1.4. Hereafter references are to Beauchamp’s edition of An Enquiry, and are cited in the text as EHU followed by section and paragraph number; Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding, 150. Hereafter references to the Enquiries are to the Selby-Bigge edition, revised by Nidditch, and are cited in the text as SBN followed by page number.
I have previously dwelt on the complex and philosophically fruitful stance that Hume assumes with regard to Descartes’ project in the Meditations on First Philosophy to erect a complete system of the sciences upon absolutely certain foundations by means of a peculiar form of scepticism that is embodied in his method of universal doubt. My thoughts on the positive influence of Descartes on Hume’s philosophy, as well as the latter’s employment and critique of key Cartesian principles, has been brought together in Badía Cabrera, Enlightenment and Calvinism, 7–39. For Hume’s critique of Descartes’ version of the ontological argument, see Badía Cabrera, Hume’s Reflection on Religion, 190–211.
2. Descartes, Philosophical Works, edited by Haldane and Ross, I, 303–27; hereafter cited in the text as HR, followed by volume and page number; and Œuvres de Descartes, edited by Adam and Tannery, X, 489–532; hereafter cited in the text as AT, followed by volume and page number.
3. This simile is repeatedly used by Descartes, with the most well-known instance occurring in the Second Meditation where he compares the aim of his doubt to Archimedes’ fixed and immovable point (HR 149; AT VII, 14, IX, 19).
4. This reply by Eudoxus to the Peripatetic Epistemon is an ironic paraphrase of Aristotle’s Metaphysics (bk. IV, chap. 3, 1005b 11–12, 736), where he states that the principle of non-contradiction is “the most certain principle of all that regarding which it is impossible to be mistaken.”
5. Descartes, “You [Eudoxus] no sooner showed me the small amount of certainty which we have as to the existence of things which are only known to us by the evidence of the senses, than I commenced to doubt of them, and that sufficed me to make me know doubt and at the same time my certainty of it, in such a way that I can affirm that as soon as I commenced to doubt I commenced to know with certainty” (HR I, 325; AT X, 524–25).
6. All references are to Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by Norton and Norton, hereafter cited in the text as T, followed by book, part, section, and paragraph number; and to Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by Selby-Bigge, revised by Nidditch, hereafter cited in the text as SBN followed by page number.
7. Hume, “Whoever has taken the pains to refute the cavils of this total scepticism, has really disputed without an antagonist, and endeavoured by arguments to establish a faculty, which nature has antecedently implanted in the mind, and rendered unavoidable” (T 1.4.1.7; SBN 183).
8. Descartes, “And thus since often enough in the actions of life no delay is permissible, it is very certain that, when it is beyond our powers to discern the opinions which carry most truth, we should follow the most probable” (HR I, 96; AT VI, 25).
9. Not only in its subject matter but even in the manner of carrying it out, Hume’s “true metaphysics” approaches Descartes’ “first philosophy” because for him it is nothing but the determination “to enquire seriously into the nature of human understanding… its powers and capacity” (EHU 1.12; SBN 12; italics added).
10. Adrien Baillet translated extracts from the opuscules Descartes wrote in Latin from 1619 to 1621, which were transcribed in Œuvres de Descartes (AT X, 171–204): Opuscules de 1619–1621, Extraits de Baillet (Vie de Monsieur Des-Cartes). The first of these is Olympica.
11. Descartes: “X. Novembris 1619, cum plenus forem Enthousiasmo, & mirabilis scientiæ fundamenta reperirem &c” (Olympica, AT X, 179–88; originally in Baillet, La vie de Monsieur Des-Cartes, vol. 1, 50–51).
12. Descartes, “[I]l ne croioit pas qu’on dût s’étonner si fort de voir que les Poëtes, même ceux qui ne sont que niaiser, fussent pleins de sentences plus graves, plus sensées, & mieux exprimées que celles qui se trouvent dans les écrits des Philosophes. Il attribuoit cette merveille à la divinité de l’Enthousiasme, & à la force de l’imagination, qui fait sortir les semences de la sagesse (qui se trouvent dans l’esprit de tous les hommes, comme les étincelles de feu dans les cailloux) avec beaucoup plus de facilité & beaucoup plus de brillant même, que ne peut faire la Raison dans les Philosophes” (Olympica, AT X, 184). The translation of these two sentences from the Olympica extract as well as of all the following non-English language texts that are quoted below, is mine, unless otherwise noted.
13. The italicized clause “or things similar to these, which I clearly see that cannot be in any other manner but as I conceive them” is translated in the Haldane-Ross edition as “or any such thing in which I see a manifest contradiction.” Such rendering does not follow the Latin text of the Meditations, “vel similia, in quibus scilicet repugnantiam agnosco manifestam,” which may be roughly translated as: “or similar things, which are manifestly opposed to what I clearly know.” It contradicts the French translation as well, which is the one I have followed: “ou choses semblables, que ie voy clairement ne pouuoir estre d’autre faiçon que ie les conçoy.”
14. Gueroult, Descartes selon l’ordre des raisons, vol. 1, 45, note 35.
15. “L’hypothèse du Dieu trompeur ne se fonde pas sur “le mystère de notre origine,” mais sur une fausse idée que nous nous faisons de notre auteur et de sa toute-puissance” (Gueroult, Descartes selon l’ordre des raisons, vol. 1, 44).
16. Descartes, “Letter to the Most Wise and Illustrious the Dean and Doctors of the Sacred Faculty of Theology in Paris” (HR I, 134; AT VII, 2–3, IX, 5). See also Badía Cabrera, Enlightenment and Calvinism, 33–35.
17. See Badía Cabrera, Hume’s Reflection on Religion, 35–36.
18. See Aquinas, The Summa Contra Gentiles, bk. 1, chaps. 7–8, 14–17.
19. In Passions of the Soul, Part Third, Article CLXXXIV, Descartes defines pity as “a species of sadness, mingled with love or good-will towards those whom we see suffering some evil of which we consider them undeserving” (HR I, 415; AT XI, 469).
20. “Ill la pleura avec une tendresse qui lui fit éprouver que la vraie philosophie n’étouffe point le naturel,” in Baillet, Vie de Monsieur Descartes [abridged 1692 edition], 163.
21. In his youth, Descartes’ Catholic faith was robust. He even made a pilgrimage to the sanctuary of the Virgin of Loreto in Italy in order to fulfill a promise he had made on the morning of November 11, 1619, when “he sought to interest the Saint Virgin in an affair that he judged as the most important of his life,” that is, “the search after truth” (Baillet, Vie de Monsieur Descartes, 38–39).
22. Baillet, Vie de Monsieur Descartes, 6–7: “Le soins de cette nouvelle famille ne firent point diversion à ceux que Joachim Descartes devait à son fils du Perron [the surname given to René Descartes at his baptism], qu’il avait coutume d’appeler son philosophe, à cause de la curiosité insatiable avec laquelle cet infant lui demandait les causes et les effets de tout ce que lui passait par les sens.”
23. This cathartic aspect of the Meditations, considered as a prominent feature in the stylistic structure of the text and not so much as the intended aim of the methodic doubt, has been remarked by Gaukroger in Descartes, An Intellectual Biography, 336: “The Meditationes read like an account of a spiritual journey in which the truth is only to be discovered by a purging, followed by a kind of rebirth.”
24. Echeverría’s mature reflections on the methodology for teaching philosophy are gathered together in Aprendiendo a filosofar preguntando.
25. Echeverría was the author of a critical edition of De l’apperception immédiate, an important philosophical work of Maine de Biran.
26. See “José [Rafael] Echeverría [Yáñez],” in Diccionario de filosofía, ed. Ferrater Mora, vol. 2, 884–85.
27. Baillet, Vie de Monsieur Descartes, 9.
28. Jiménez, “El viaje definitivo”: “Y yo me iré. Y se quedarán los pájaros cantando y se quedará mi huerto con su verde árbol, y con su pozo blanco” (Poemas agrestes).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Miguel A. Badía Cabrera
Miguel A. Badía Cabrera is professor (now retired) at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Puerto Rico. His main areas of interest are the philosophy of religion and early modern philosophy, in particular Hume’s philosophy of religion and the Scottish Enlightenment. In various articles and books, he has reflected on the complex and consequential relationship of Hume’s philosophy with the thought of Descartes.