Mind–Body Causation, Mind–Body Union and the ‘Special Mode of Thinking’ in Descartes

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Notes

¹All realities (in the objective reality of ideas) are properties we perceive but not all properties we perceive are realities, in this sense, for Descartes. In particular, qualitative properties presented to the mind in sensations do not seem to count as realities. This complication is introduced by Descartes's doctrine of the material falsity of ideas of the senses. Interpreting this doctrine is a tricky business that I cannot go into here: I have done so elsewhere. See Thomas Vinci, Cartesian Truth (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) 180–87; 195–207 (Hereafter, ‘‘CT'').

²For the primary qualities of the object the mode of containment would have to be eminent, for the secondary qualities it could be formal. See CT, Chapter 2, esp. 61–81.

³I make these assertions somewhat dogmatically here in order to proceed with the argument without too many lengthy digressions. However, I have defended these assertions in some detail elsewhere. See CT, Chapters 2, 3.

⁴This brings to light an important point about the nature of eminently contained realities, apparent in the definitions that Descartes gives in the Second Replies:

Whatever exists in the objects of our ideas in a way which exactly corresponds to our perception of it is said to exist formally in those objects. Something is said to exist eminently in an object when, although it does not exactly correspond to our perception of it, its greatness is such that it can fill the role of that which does so correspond.

(AT VII, 161; CSM II, 114)

The point is that there is an epistemic dimension to the distinction between things formally and things eminently contained in a cause: both are perceived but formally contained things are perceived as they are, eminently contained things are not perceived as they are. A full account of this difference is beyond the scope of the present paper but I give it elsewhere. See CT, 69–73; 110–11.

⁵See Meditation III: AT VII, 45; CSM II, 31.

⁶Not all commentators agree. See below, Section 4, for a reference to some commentators taking this position.

⁷See the discussion of Gorham below.

⁸This is true of the official list: ‘pain, pleasure, thirst, hunger, colours, sound, taste, smell, heat, cold and the like … ’ Hatfield and Epstein note that there is a passage later in the Reply where Descartes seems to include the ‘extension of the colour’ in the second grade, thus opening the door to locate primary quality appearances in the second grade. Wherever we locate it, Epstein and Hatfield are right to have seen that there is in Descartes's theory of perception a ‘sensory core’ in principle available to consciousness that is in itself neither rational calculation nor judgement. William Epstein and Gary Hatfield, ‘The Sensory Core and the Medieval Foundations of Early Modern Perceptual Theory’, Isis 70 (1979) 363–84. See 376–7.

⁹I have defended it elsewhere. See CT, 116–21.

¹⁰Perhaps the most obvious meaning of the analogy is that ideas, like images, represent things other than themselves. (See Rafaella De Rosa, Descartes and the Puzzle of Sensory Misrepresentation (Manuscript), Chapter 2). For example, a picture of a tree stands for a tree but is not itself a tree, thus stands for something distinct from itself. However, this is too restrictive an interpretation of the analogy. Consider the case of sensations. Sensations are ideas and thus are like images of things in the doctrine of Meditation III but Descartes expressly denies that they stand for something outside of themselves (Principles I, 71: AT VIIIA, 35; CSM I, 219.) Yet, sensations can be the subject of judgement, including erroneous judgement (in this capacity they are ‘materially false’ ideas) and so are available to cognitive action no less than the object of any other kind of idea. Although, again, I cannot go into much detail on the doctrine of material falsity in general here, I think that the only way to reconcile these two requirements is to allow that ideas of sense present themselves to cognitive action. Because of the self-presenting nature of such ideas, it seems inappropriate to me say that they represent themselves, although I would not object if readers found such a locution salutary.

¹¹I have argued elsewhere that for Descartes the perceptual system also makes use of consciously available appearances in generating judgements about the objective spatial properties of objects in our physical environment., See CT, 116–21.

¹²Thanks to Darren Abramson for this way of putting the point.

¹³See Rule 3 (CSM I, 13–15).

¹⁴Flage and Bonnen seem not to have noticed this. See Daniel E. Flage and Clarence A. Bonnen, Descartes and Method (London and New York: Routledge, 1999) 27, n18.

¹⁵Objections from both of these texts are pressed by Rozemond in Marleen Rozemond, ‘Descartes on Mind–body Interaction: What's the Problem?’ Journal of the History of Philosophy 37 (July 1999) No. 3: 435–67 (hereafter cited as Rozemond, ‘What's the Problem?’).

¹⁶This terminology originates with Wilson (Margaret Wilson, ‘Descartes on the Origin of Sensation’, Philosophical Topics, 19 (Spring 1991) No. 1: 293–323.

¹⁷See Thomas Vinci, ‘Reason, Imagination, and Mechanism in Descartes's Theory of Perception' in Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy, Vol. II, edited by D. Garber and S. Nadler (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

¹⁸This conclusion may seem to provide trouble for my contention that only the special cognition underwrites genuine body-to-mind causation. If the occasioning of an idea by brain events is truly causal, and the mechanism of occasioning need not involve the special cognition, then the special cognition is not the only mechanism underwriting true body-to-mind causation. My reply to this is that when Descartes uses the language of ‘occasioning’ or ‘natural institution’ he means to be designating a relation that is not truly causal. (Here I am in agreement with Gorham. See Geoff Gorham, ‘Descartes on the Innateness of All Ideas’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 32 (2002) 355–88. However, Gorham takes this to show that there are no true causal relations between body and mind, a conclusion that I of course reject. Gorham goes wrong, I believe, in not recognizing the existence of the special cognition in Descartes's writings and the role it plays in underwriting true body-to-mind causation.) By ‘not truly causal’, I mean not causal in a sense governed by Descartes's causal principles: Axiom IV and Axiom V in the Second Replies. We can see this most clearly in the case of sensations: sensations cannot be caused by brain events in accord with either of these Axioms. The argument for this depends on the assumption that sensations are not understood as representing states external to the mind. Take as our example, sensations of colour:

In this case, (1) the idea of color is a colored sensation and the reality of this idea is color as we experience it. (2) The cause of the colored sensation contains color-as-we-experience-it either formally or eminently. (Axiom IV.) (3) Set the possibility of eminent containment aside for now. So (4) the cause contains color-as-we-experience-it formally. But (5) color-as-we-experience-it does not exist as a property of any material substance so (6) the formal cause cannot be in the material world. There is the possibility that (7) the cause is eminently contained in something, but for reasons of general metaphysical doctrine, (8) the thing in question must be a mind, so (9) there are no physical events causing the occurrence or the reality of sensations of color.

What this argument shows is that in its usual application a natural institution cannot be a true causal relation. It is, rather, a stable and abiding correlation. I believe that the language of natural institution and occasioning keeps this connotation even when extended to the case of ideas of primary qualities. Unfortunately, considerations of space prevent me from going into more detail here.

¹⁹For mention of some scholars holding this view, see Section 4.

²⁰For evidence that Descartes sees the corporeal imagination as the locus for unifying diverse sensory inputs, see The Passions of the Soul I, art. 32: AT XI, 352–3; CSM I, 340.

²¹This view has also, of course, been defended by scholars. For example, R. C. Richardson, ‘The ‘Scandal’ of Cartesian Interactionism’, Mind 91 (1982) 20–37; and Louis E. Loeb, From Descartes to Hume (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981).

²²Daniel Garber, ‘Descartes and Occasionalism’ in Causation in Early Modern Philosophy, edited by Steven Nadler (University Park: Penn. State University Press, 1993) 9–29 (hereafter cited as Garber, ‘Occasionalism’); and Rozemond, ‘What's the Problem?’

²³The illustration is originally due to Garber, ‘Occasionalism’. See p. 23.

²⁴E.g. Comments Against a Certain Broadsheet, AT VIIIB, 358–9; CSM I, 304.

²⁵E.g. Optics VI, AT VI, 130–8; CSM I, 167–70.

²⁶See AT XI, 3–5; CSM I, 81.

²⁷Principles I, 53 (VIIIA, 25; CSM I, 210–11).

²⁸See the Geometrical Exposition in the Second Replies, Axioms IV and V (AT VII, 165; CSM II, 116–17).

²⁹Radner seems to fall into this category, although she also discusses Descartes's causal principles. Daisie Radner, ‘Is There a Problem of Cartesian Interaction?’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 23 (1985) 35–49.

³⁰For example, Rozemond, ‘What's the Problem?’, Steven Nadler, ‘Descartes and Occasional Causation’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 2 (1994) 35–54 (hereafter cited as Nadler, ‘Occasional Causation’); and John Yolton, Perceptual Acquaintance From Descartes to Reid (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) Chapter I. Yolton denies that body-to-mind occasioning is causal in any sense but does not rest his case on (4), so I include him here. Similarly, Garber, ‘Occasionalism’. Rozemond and Nadler deny that mind–body occasioning is causal in the strongest sense, but allow that weaker forms of causality genuinely are allowed by Descartes. Gueroult (M. Gueroult, Descartes's Philosophy Interpreted According to the Order of Reasons, Vol. II, translated by Roger Ariew (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985)) endorses a position that has strong affinities with constellation (b) of this theses, but also with (a).

³¹For example, Janet Broughton, ‘Adequate Causes and Natural Change in Descartes's Philosophy’ in Human Nature and Natural Knowledge, edited by A. Donagan, A. Petrovich, and M. Wedin (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1986). Also see Geoffrey Gorham, ‘Descartes on the Innateness of All Ideas’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 32 (2002) 355–88, hereafter cited as Gorham, ‘Innateness’. For a critique of Broughton, see Tad Schmaltz, ‘Sensations, Occasionalism and Descartes's Causal Principles’ in Minds, Ideas and Objects: Essays in the Theory of Representation in Modern Philosophy, edited by P. Cummins and G. Zoeller (Atascadero, CA.: Ridgeview, 1993) 37–55. For a view that generally discounts the relevance of Descartes's causal principles for his claims about interaction, see Eileen O'Neill, ‘Mind–body Interaction and Metaphysical Consistency: A Defence of Descartes’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 25 (1987) 227–45. For a view that disparages the coherence and importance of Descartes's causal principles and his theoretical treatment of causation as a whole, see Jonathan Bennett, Learning from Six Philosophers: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Berkeley, Locke, Hume, Vols I and II. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), Vol. I, Ch. 5.

³²Rozemond, ‘What's the Problem?’

³³Gorham, ‘Innateness’.

³⁴For a version of this view see J. Broughton and R. Mattern, ‘Reinterpreting Descartes on the Union of Mind and Body’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 16 (1978), 23–32. For another version of this view, see Tad Schmaltz, ‘Descartes and Malbranche on Mind and Mind–body Union’, The Philosophical Review, 101 (April 1992) No. 2: 281–325. For a contrary view, see Marleen Rozemond, Descartes's Dualism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), Chapter 5.

³⁵One of the texts crucial to the new-substance reading is a letter to Regius of January 1642, CSM III, 209; AT III, 508; but even in that letter Descartes makes it clear that the relational notion of mind–body union (a ‘substantial union’ as he calls it there) is logically prior to the substantival notion of a human being.

³⁶See Med VI, CSM II, 54; AT VII, 78.

³⁷Rozemond seems to agree on the meaning of union – that it requires ideas that entail the existence of physical objects (see Rozemond, Descartes's Dualism, Chapter 6) – but sees sensations standing alone as the cognitions fulfilling this requirement. As I have argued just above, I do not see how sensations standing alone can fit the bill, especially with an account of the weak causal relation between sensations and their external world correlates of the sort she favours.

³⁸I note for interest that this account of mind–body union is the one favoured by Spinoza. (Ethics, Bk II, Prop 21.)

³⁹Perhaps this is why sensations do such a bad job of presenting the nature of material substances. See Principles II, 3 (AT VIIIA, 41–2; CSM I, 224).