Experience in Descartes

ABSTRACT

I will focus on Anik Waldow’s reading of Descartes as contributing towards a specific form of human experience and the related capacity for self-determination. I discuss how this notion of experience relates to what is often taken to be the crux of Descartes’s Meditations. I conclude by noting that three elements are central to Waldow’s interpretation: Descartes’s intellectual metaphysical pursuit for epistemic certainty about essences of things, the specific kind of experience of our selves that arises out of the embodied state of the mind revealing ourselves as both active and passive, and a resulting new capacity for self-determination. The moral of Waldow’s reading is that we should not read the Meditations as an account of what the mind is but as an account of what the mind can do and how we can upraise ourselves not as metaphysicians but in our interactions with the world and others.

KEYWORDS:

• Descartes
• mind-body union
• meditation
• self-determination
• self-mastery

In her book Experience Embodied (Waldow 2020), Anik Waldow explains the relevant notion of experience as follows: ‘key to understanding experience as a phenomenon that requires a human body is the idea that thoughts and feelings are formed while we exist as embodied beings, move around, and interact with the world’ (Waldow 2020, 3). Waldow links this notion explicitly to Descartes in the introduction of the book through a reference to the correspondence between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and Descartes. In their exchange emerges a notion of experience at the center of which is its bifurcated nature: ‘it connects our being and acting in the world with the fact that we have sensations, thoughts, and feelings’ (Waldow 2020, 4). Waldow’s aim is to make us see that this form of experience is not only available to the Cartesian meditator but positively driving the methodic doubt which the meditator performs in order to sort out what belongs to the mind and what belongs to the body. This experience is subjective and mental and at the same time body-dependent and responsive to worldly events. In Waldow’s interpretation, it ultimately contributes to our capacity for just the correct type of self-determination suitable for a virtuous life.

In this comment on her Experience Embodied I will focus on her reading of Descartes as contributing towards the specific form of experience and the related capacity for self-determination. In particular, the aim is to understand how this notion of experience relates to what is often taken to be the crux of Descartes’s Meditations (AT VII; CSM II).¹ It is widely and I believe correctly accepted that Descartes’s aim in the Meditations is to conduct a rigorous metaphysical exercise and that one of the outcomes of the exercise is that we learn to refer things to their right places once we correctly conceive what depends on or derives from the body on the one hand, and the mind on the other. One consequence of this is that he seems to place experience firmly on the side of the mind and shut it out from the body. It does not mean that a strictly mental notion of experience is irreconcilable with the type of embodied experience Waldow is after, but it calls for some reflection to see how the in-itself-subjective experience refers the subject to their embodied existence and opens another perspective, one that provides us with a new capacity to self-determination.²

1. Two Key Capacities Gleaned from the Meditations

Here is a gloss on the Meditations that I believe is uncontroversial enough for the purpose of functioning as a helpful backdrop for Waldow’s interpretation. The outcome of the stringent meditative exercise teaches that claims for knowledge in metaphysics require clarity and distinctness. After having successfully concluded the meditation, I know what mind is and what body is. By knowing them, I know that they have essences that have nothing in common with one another. When this knowledge is coupled with knowledge about how modes depend on their substances, I am in a position to see that the modes of the two kinds of substances cannot have anything in common with one another, just like the essences of the substances cannot have anything in common with one another. Thoughts are nothing like modes of extension, and vice versa. This is metaphysical knowledge.

I have knowledge also about the union of mind and body. This knowledge however is not metaphysical knowledge of a thing’s essence. I know the union exists, but not what it is, because I have no clear and distinct conception of it. I know the union through experience, which Descartes sometimes calls a ‘teaching of nature’ in order to mark its difference from ‘natural light’ which belongs exclusively to the realm of intellectual cognition (AT VII:82; CSM II:57). One way to frame the distinction between the two ways of knowing is to contrast a capacity to conceive with a capacity to experience. Waldow is concerned with what falls within the capacity to experience. She does not herself delineate the specific realm of experience in Descartes quite in this way, but it is useful to note that it is a capacity that is related to, but also markedly distinct from, pure intellectual conception, the attaining of which has often been named the Cartesian aim with the Meditations.

It is also useful to see that she goes much further than just demarcating this realm of experience, as she claims that the epistemically driven investigation into metaphysics ‘unfolds against the background of broader practical-moral considerations that directly impact on how we live and experience ourselves in our interactions with the world and others’ (Waldow 2020, 43) and that the Meditations is designed to lead its readers to a point in which they can make proper use of their self-determining capacities. In other words, the notion of experience and its significance for our moral life is no spin-off but drives Descartes’s quest in the Meditations. It is ‘the most pressing task … to explain how humans can be more than causally driven complex machines’ with merely causally triggered mental states and hence lacking a capacity ‘to self-determine their thinking, feeling, and acting’ (Waldow 2020, 7). The capacities that enable us to surpass complex machines are grounded on our capacity to experience, as distinguished from our capacity to conceive. I take this to be the setting.

2. From the Capacity to Experience to Self-Determining Capacities

How does the capacity to experience affect us? According to Waldow, we learn about mastering the effects of our existence as embodied beings. Such a capacity is much called for because our interface with the world is predominantly of a receptive variety. For most of the time it is not me that is generating my thoughts. Waldow sees this as a challenge that Descartes is deeply concerned about. We must fight in order to determine anything, our selves included. In light of this challenge, one might now wonder whether experience so understood, including the hoped for self-determination, is just our everyday life? Is not this fight what we do anyway, regardless of any philosophical program, particularly as laborious as the meditative exercise Descartes is guiding us through in the Meditations?

Waldow’s answer must be ‘no.’ She is not however fully explicit about the difference between our ordinary ways of learning to navigate in the world and the one exposed in the Meditations. The position that emerges from Waldow’s discussion of Descartes is that ordinary life is confused: it can allow us to know that we can act and be acted on, but it does not go far with helping us to understand what makes acting and being acted on possible (Waldow 2020, 40). Unlike the struggle of the everyday life anybody oblivious of the lessons of the Meditations lives through, the experience at stake for Descartes is a specific type of experience that enables us to self-determine our thinking and acting, which is something exercising the meditation can engender. We see something critical about what might be called the mind-infusedness of the body and body-infusedness of the mind that we would miss along the ordinary course of life. By meditating, we can remove the confusion. What does it involve?

Waldow points out that after having performed the cogito we experientially realize that practicing reflection (i.e. attending and focusing on our thoughts), we learn that the self is a source of thoughts and volitionally directs its thinking. She continues with an interesting claim, namely that ‘our ordinary, everyday experience of acting and being acted on lacks this particular kind of focus and experiential awareness of what is self-determining and what is not’ (Waldow 2020, 41). It is interesting since arguably people have a sense of activity and self-determination regardless of the meditative exercise, but according to Waldow, the cogito experience is required for discovering what it means to be truly active (Waldow 2020, 40). Taking body and mind as a single thing is a manifestation of the lack in conceptual clarity and precision everyday experience suffers from. Here it seems that, according to Waldow, the purely intellectual knowledge of what is the true nature of thought enters this new experience which is practical in nature as it is an experience of the activity of (true) self-determination. The contrast between these two kinds of knowledge is the contrast between knowing what and knowing how. Knowing what the mind is feeds into the capacity to ‘distinguish the responsive and passive nature of being acted on from the active nature of willfully directed thought’ (Waldow 2020, 42).

Waldow is not quite as clear as the reader would wish about of what her distinction between an experience of self-determination and a capacity for self-determination consists. The unenlightened presumably do experience themselves as self-determining agents, but that is not the correct type of experience as it is uninformed by the metaphysical knowledge acquired by the (successful) meditator. On top of the meditator developing a new metaphysically informed experience of herself, is an altogether new capacity for self-determination developed as well? As Waldow explains in the last section of the chapter, Descartes surely has a view about our moral status as beings capable of virtuous life, in which capacity for self-determination plays a key role. But is this capacity crucially different in those who have successfully meditated as contrasted to those who act based on everyday experience? The reader is left wondering just how the everyday experience fails in what the meditation-derived capacity provides us with.

Waldow argues that it is a misplaced question to ask whether the senses are trustworthy or have a due role and place in the overall scheme of things. Since the senses are a natural part of the totality of things in the universe, one might maintain, as has been done in the scholarship (e.g. Simmons 2017), that our pre-meditation prejudices have ‘a rightful place within the whole of the created universe’ (Waldow 2020, 44). Senses misrepresent the world with respect to our purposes of doing metaphysics, which requires clear and distinct ideas of things, because they are body-dependent perceptions. They are nonetheless ‘true’ in the sense of truth that there obtains an isomorphism between sensory ideas and the world which is manifested in their aptitude to make us navigate successfully within the world. Waldow’s claim is that although we may accept this, the interesting question is how the senses function in relation to the functioning of the intellect – how to judge well about the deliverances of the senses. This is a good point. We may however still ask whether an answer to this question presupposes the specific kind of experience Waldow has argued for and whether it is also needed to engender a capacity (which judging well about sensory content surely is). Waldow points out that ‘to acquire this competence, it might indeed be useful to know what kind of task each one of our faculties is supposed to perform’ (2020, 47). I take this to refer to the non-practical intellectual knowledge, which is at best a step towards what is ultimately crucial in Waldow’s reading – namely, to acquire a practice of using our capacities well. This practice, she points out, is what the Meditations is designed to teach us. Now, a little confusingly to me, Waldow says towards the very end of the chapter, in section 1.3, that by meditating (i.e. participating in the meditator’s reflections), we acquire a ‘certain kind of experiential knowledge’ (Waldow 2020, 47; my emphasis) rather than acquire a new competence of judging well for the purposes of virtuous life that is based on this specific kind of experiential knowledge gleaned from the Meditations. It is worth noting that Waldow’s interpretation of the correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia is that Descartes is making a point to Elisabeth about a newly acquired capacity for self-determination, which Waldow takes to indicate that Descartes’s aim with the Meditations has been all along to teach us self-mastery to conduct a virtuous life. It remains unclear to me how the following three elements are interrelated in Waldow’s interpretation, namely the intellectual metaphysical pursuit for epistemic certainty about essences of things, the specific kind of experience of our selves that arises out of the embodied state of the mind revealing ourselves as both active and passive, and a resulting new capacity for self-determination.

Waldow concludes the chapter by rightly pointing out that her reading does not overemphasize Descartes’s metaphysical dualism (which I take to be read as a remark about the bulk of scholarship on the Meditations). The moral of Waldow’s reading is that the Meditations is not just about what the mind is but importantly what the mind does. There is no doubt that it should be taken seriously. How radical and new as an interpretation of Descartes this is depends largely on how exactly the three elements depend and build on one another.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Academy of Finland [308147].

Notes

1. References are to Descartes (1964–76), Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, 12 vols., cited as ‘AT’ followed by volume and page number, and to Descartes (1984–91), The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, ed. and tr. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch (and Anthony Kenny, vol. 3), cited as ‘CSM’ for vols. 1 and 2, followed by volume and page number.

2. For an interesting comparison of the role of body in the experience we have of ourselves, see Chamberlain (2020).