The Moral Formation of Descartes’ Meditations

ABSTRACT

Although Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy seems to be an especially theoretical work, this essay argues that reading the Meditations as a work of pure theory conceals an important dimension of Descartes’s philosophical project. I begin by examining the distinctive genre of the Meditations and by distinguishing Descartes, the author of this work, from the meditator who narrates it. I then highlight that the meditator describes his pursuit of scientific knowledge in moral terms and argue that the meditator’s search for truth is a self-conscious attempt at moral self-transformation. After tracing out the development of the meditator’s moral self-transformation, I conclude that the Meditations is a work of moral philosophy—not because it seeks to articulate ethical principles that are normative for particular choices or actions, but because Descartes composes the Meditations in such a way that the very act of reading it imparts a moral education to its readers.

KEYWORDS:

• Descartes
• Meditations on First Philosophy
• meditation as genre
• meditator
• self-transformation
• moral education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Descartes, Meditations, VII, 17. Hereafter all references in the text are to the Oeuvres de Descartes, edited by Adam and Tannery, cited as AT, followed by volume and page number. All quotations of the Meditations are from the translation by Roger Ariew and Donald Cress.

2. As its title indicates, the idea that the Meditations is a project of “pure enquiry” is a central thesis of Williams’s Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry.

3. For a helpful overview of the history of the meditational genre, see Martz, The Poetry of Meditation. For other treatments of Descartes that explore the significance of his decision to write meditations, see Cunning, Argument and Persuasion in Descartes’ Meditations; Hatfield, “The Senses and the Fleshless Eye”; Hettche, “Descartes and the Augustinian Tradition of Devotional Meditation”; Kosman, “The Naïve Narrator”; Mercer, “Descartes’ Debt to Teresa of Ávila,” and “The Methodology of the Meditations”; Rorty, “The Structure of Descartes’ Meditations”; Rubidge, “Descartes’s Meditations and Devotional Meditations”; Secada, “God and Meditation in Descartes’ Meditations”; Sepper, “The Texture of Thought”; Stohrer, “Descartes and Ignatius Loyola”; and Vendler, “Descartes’ Exercises.”

4. See Stohrer, “Descartes and Ignatius Loyola,” 14.

5. For helpful discussions of the authors and traditions that may have shaped Descartes’ thinking, see Hettche, “Descartes and the Augustinian Tradition of Devotional Meditation”; Mercer, “Descartes’ Debt to Teresa of Ávila”; Rubidge, “Descartes’ Meditations and Devotional Meditations”; and Stohrer, “Descartes and Ignatius Loyola.” Recent book-length treatments of Descartes’ response to the traditions of medieval thought that he inherited include Ariew, Descartes and the Last Scholastics and Carriero, Between Two Worlds.

6. I offer a more detailed discussion of the four points laid out in this paragraph in Stoner, “Who is Descartes’s Evil Genius?” 10–14.

7. For an alternative perspective that raises doubts about the philosophical significance of Descartes’s decision to write meditations, see Rubidge, “Descartes’ Meditations and Devotional Meditations.” For compelling responses to Rubidge’s skepticism about Descartes’s interest in the meditational genre, see Sepper, “The Texture of Thought,” and Hettche, “Descartes and the Augustinian Tradition of Devotional Meditation.”

8. In Meditation Two, the meditator discovers not only that it is impossible to doubt his own existence, but also that he can know that he exists with absolute certainty. This discovery enables the meditator to see that radical doubt is an effective path to genuine knowledge. But, prior to this discovery, the meditator cannot know that his attempt to discover certain knowledge by doubting all dubitable opinion will be successful. Thus, at the conclusion of Meditation One and the beginning of Meditation Two, the question of whether doubt will lead to knowledge or undermine the possibility of knowledge is still open. The meditator offers a vivid description of his uncertainty about the results of his doubt at the beginning of Meditation Two: “Yesterday’s meditation has thrown me into such doubts that I can no longer ignore them, yet I fail to see how they are to be resolved. It is as if I had suddenly fallen into a deep whirlpool; I am so tossed about that I can neither touch bottom with my foot, nor swim up to the top” (AT VII, 23–24).

9. The meditator seems to acknowledge this possibility when he claims that the return of his longstanding opinions is “almost” against his will (AT VII, 22), the implication being that the meditator’s habitual affirmation of longstanding opinions is not simply beyond his control and that he is aware of his ability to resist it.

10. I offer a more detailed argument for this claim in Stoner, “Who is Descartes’ Evil Genius?” 19–21. In that essay, however, I mistakenly claimed that the meditator introduces the evil genius as a representation of his habituated intellect, rather than correctly identifying the evil genius as a representation of the meditator’s habituated will. I had not yet seen how crucial the psychology presented in Meditation Four is for explaining the meditator’s predicament in Meditation One.

11. For a detailed treatment of Descartes’ analysis of the teaching of nature, see Kennington, On Modern Origins, 161–86.

12. This similarity between nature’s teaching and the evil genius’s deceptions leads Richard Kennington to claim that the evil genius is a representation of the teaching of nature (Kennington, On Modern Origins, 145–52). For a critique of Kennington’s account of the evil genius, see Stoner, “Who is Descartes Evil Genius?” 17–18.

13. Though the meditator’s analysis of the teaching of nature ultimately reveals that the good for the human being is a life that combines a minimum of pain and a maximum of pleasure with a minimum of disease and a maximum of health, it is not immediately obvious that this account of the telos of human life coheres with Descartes’ mechanistic account of nature. On this front, see Kennington’s account of the “Cartesian ‘antinomy’ of mechanism and teleology” as the “basic Cartesian dualism” and “the typically modern paradox” (Kennington, On Modern Origins, 183–86). In this context, it is worth wondering whether the moral education Descartes provides in the Meditations is conducive to the good life for human beings. Unfortunately, the question of whether the life of the expert devoted to scientific research is the most pleasant, healthy, and virtuous life is beyond the scope of this essay.

14. All quotations from the Discourse are from Richard Kennington’s translation.

15. This account of the Discourse is indebted to Kennington’s remarkable series of essays on Descartes in On Modern Origins.

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Notes on contributors

Samuel A. Stoner

Samuel A. Stoner is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Assumption University in Worcester, MA, USA. He has a broad interest in the history of the Western intellectual tradition, and his research focuses on early modern philosophy and German Idealism, with a special emphasis on the question of the origins, nature, and fate of modernity and the thought of Immanuel Kant.