“A Necessary Preparative to the Study of Philosophy”: A Positive Appraisal of Descartes’ Universal Doubt

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Descartes
• first philosophy
• universal doubt
• Hume

In memory of the Chilean philosopher José Echeverría Yáñez (1913-1996)

1. Introduction

My main concern in this article is to provide an adequate explanation of why Hume was right in asserting that Descartes’ doubt in the Meditations, understood in a reasonable way, is “a necessary preparative to the study of philosophy.”¹ An answer to this question will be extracted from two “internal” sources, one textual and the other biographical. The first is an analysis of the Meditations that will also relate it to other works of Descartes that may shed light on this question. The second is the personal response—a mixture of spiritual upheaval and sudden insight—that the intimate search for truth that characterizes the Meditations has elicited from, and continues to provoke, in generations of students (probably even in Hume himself), who have gone “seriously and freely” to radically question things along with Descartes (HR I, 144; AT VII, 18 [Latin], IX, 13 [French trans.]). From these two standpoints combined, I want to show that the serious childlike character of Descartes’ universal doubt in the Meditations has given its readers a key impetus to begin seeing things afresh, from a critical, unprejudiced stance, and has thus provided an indispensable preparation for all those who have felt the vital urge to do serious work in philosophy as well.

2. Hume’s Critique and Rehabilitation of Descartes’ Universal Doubt

Hume does not wholly reject Descartes’ universal doubt, but mainly rejects the use Descartes makes of it as a means to establish his metaphysics as that which would provide certain knowledge of himself, of God, and of the world. In order to clarify this point, it may be useful to look at an extant document, a dialogue left unfinished by Descartes, The Search after Truth by the Light of Nature.² Since its date of composition is uncertain, it may be considered either as a rehearsal of the Meditations in a conversational mode, or, more probably, as a reworking of it, since it incorporates responses to a handful of the objections published along with the Meditations.

The main character in the dialogue is Polyander, a young, somewhat lazy, easygoing, and uncultured country gentilhomme. Perhaps Descartes gave him that name, which literally means ‘many men’ because the man he is at the beginning of the dialogue—a sort of untroubled bon-vivant dogmatist, who, through the exercise of his native rational capacity and the radical and universal questioning typical of the Meditations, is transformed—in the give and take of the conversation with Eudoxus and Epistemon—into another man: one for whom even if there remain many things that he is still ignorant of, those things that he does know, he clearly knows to be certainly true.

Hume’s objection to Descartes is, I think, similar to that which Polyander poses to Eudoxus, who pretends to do precisely what Hume thought not possible: “I do not see to what use this universal astonishment can serve, nor by what reason a doubt of this kind can be a principle which is able to carry us very far.” Eudoxus, who represents Descartes’ view—his name means ‘the one who expounds the good or true doctrine’—immediately replies: “I am going to conduct you further than you think. For it is really from this universal doubt which is like a fixed and unchangeable point, that I have resolved to derive the knowledge of God, of yourself, and of all that the world contains” (HR I, 316; AT X, 515).³

Hume’s critique extends to the presumed metaphysical and logical priority of the ego cogito, ego sum, the knowledge of which is provided by following the universal doubt, over all other axioms that are certainly true: “But neither is there any such original principle, which has a prerogative above others, that are self-evident and convincing: Or if there were, could we advance a step beyond it, but by the use of those very faculties, of which we are supposed to be already diffident” (EHU 12.1.3; SBN 150). Once again, this critique was anticipated by Descartes, who was intent on rebutting it. The clearest answer to this Humean objection is given by Eudoxus by way of emphasizing its greater heuristic fruitfulness when compared with other such principles. Therewith he replies to Epistemon, who has been given an ironical name, for ‘he who partakes of science’ is really an inveterate dogmatist, though a learned spokesperson for a scholasticism deeply influenced by Aristotle’s Metaphysics:

[H]e who knows how properly to avail himself of doubt can deduce from it absolutely certain knowledge, better, more certain, and more useful than that derived from this great principle which we usually establish as the basis or centre to which all other principles are referred and from which they start forth, viz. it is impossible that one and the same thing should both be and not be. (HR I, 322; AT X, 522)⁴

Polyander’s reply to Hume’s objection is somewhat different. He insists that reason cannot be deceived in this instance. Since by following our own “natural light,” and in no way relying on any external authority (such as what we have been taught by our parents, nurses, preceptors, or even by the testimony of our own senses), we most clearly understand what doubting, thinking, and existence mean, then nothing could be more indubitably certain than I who doubts, or thinks, exists.⁵ In short, he appears to uphold “the prerogative” of the principle “I am, I exist” (Ego sum, ego existo), emphasizing, like Descartes at the beginning of Meditation 2, that the necessary truth of no other principle can be established merely by the act of putting it in doubt: “this proposition I am, I exist, is necessarily true each time that I pronounce it, or that I mentally conceive it” (HR I, 150; AT VII, 25, IX, 19).

It is also apparent from the quoted passage in An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding that Hume implies that one can obtain knowledge out of the universal doubt that allows us to become aware of the certain existence of the self that doubts, only at the cost of falling into a vicious circle. Like Hume, Epistemon seems to suggest that once we begin to proceed in accordance with Descartes’ doubt, the trustworthiness in the cognitive power of reason will be put into question, and we will inevitably plunge into a Pyrrhonian scepticism that will leave us with no certainty whatsoever. As Epistemon says:

I think it very dangerous to proceed too far in this mode of reasoning. General doubts of this kind lead us straight to the ignorance of Socrates, or the uncertainty of the Pyrrhonists, which resembles water so deep that one cannot find any footing in it. (HR I, 314; AT X, 512)

Yet even more clearly than in the Enquiry, in A Treatise of Human Nature Hume seems to have given his approval to Epistemon’s Pyrrhonian conclusion.⁶ In Section 1, Part 4, “Of Scepticism with regard to reason,” he produces an argument possibly of Cartesian inspiration in order to prove that, since it is a fact that we do commit mistakes in reasoning about matters of mathematics, which are the most simple and clear, it would not be possible to validate our confidence in the reliability of reason by repeatedly double-checking our calculations or retracing the steps in an argument because we would have no option but to employ that faculty which is liable to err in each reassessment. Such a revisionary procedure would only gradually decrease our confidence in reason, producing in the end an absolute and permanent suspension of judgment—“a total extinction of belief and evidence” (T 1.4.1.6; SBN 183). Hence, as Hume remarks in the Enquiry, “CARTESIAN doubt, therefore, were it ever possible to be attained by any human creature (as it plainly is not) would be entirely incurable; and no reasoning could ever bring us to a state of assurance and conviction upon any subject” (EHU 12.1.3; SBN 150). Pyrrhonian scepticism cannot be defeated by Descartes’ universal doubt, but only by nature (T 1.4.1.7; SBN 183).⁷

I think Descartes would have agreed with Hume that no reasoning can ever defeat “nature”—“a certain spontaneous inclination which impels me to believe” (HR I, 160; AT VII, 38, IX, 30) that, for instance, some of my sensible ideas are caused by “things that existed outside of, and different from me” (HR I, 161; AT VII, 40, IX, 31). But, according to Descartes, the operation of such “a blind [and rash] impulse” (aveugle et temeraire impulsion), gives us no certainty about the existence of external things, whereas Hume employs a very similar phrase—“this blind and powerful instinct of nature”—(EHU 12.1.8; SBN 151)—to describe the same predisposition, and also to suggest that, in spite of its almost invincible force, for all we know, in this case too this “instinct of our nature … like other instincts, may be fallacious and deceitful” (EHU 12.2.22; SBN 159).

What I do find odd in that passage in the Enquiry is Hume’s assertion about the impossibility of attaining Cartesian doubt. After all, he himself suggested that Pyrrhonian doubt is not only victorious over Cartesian doubt but even indistinguishable from it, at least when we pay exclusive attention to its consequences. Still, a sceptic may be right in pointing out the doubtfulness of a doctrine or belief even if she or he might be forced to act as if it were true. Thus, instead of being impossible to attain, Hume should have said that it is not possible to maintain Cartesian doubt in practice, which is what he makes clear in Section 12 of the Enquiry.

But if this is the case, then Hume’s view of Cartesian doubt appears to be not much different from Descartes’, who repeatedly emphasized that his doubt was theoretical, not practical. At the end of Meditation 1, he unequivocally stresses: “For I am assured that there can be neither peril nor error in this course, and that I cannot at present yield too much to distrust, since I am not considering the question of action, but only of knowledge” (HR I, 148; AT VII, 22, IX, 17). The same point had been distinctly remarked in Part 3 of the Discourse on the Method (HR I, 95–100; AT VI, 22–31) where Descartes introduces his provisional morality (une morale par provision), namely the maxims that will guide his conduct in life while reflecting on the first metaphysical principles.⁸ And finally, the exclusively theoretical character of this doubt is delineated at the very beginning of Part 1 of the Principles of Philosophy as well, a later work in which Descartes presents the “principles of human knowledge” in a systematic fashion. In the first three of these principles, he addresses this matter: (1) “That in order to examine into the truth, it is necessary once in one’s life to doubt of all things, so far as this is possible”; (2) “That we ought to consider as false all these things of which we may doubt”; and (3) “That we ought not to make use of this doubt for the conduct of our life meantime” (HR I, 219–20; AT VIII, 5 [Latin], IX, 25–26 [French trans.]; italics added).

However, immediately after criticizing Cartesian doubt at the beginning of section 12 of the Enquiry, Hume proceeds to rehabilitate it in the next paragraph. And he does so by paraphrasing the rules of Descartes’ Discourse on the Method (HR I, 92; AT VI, 18–19), making it clear that it is not only possible but crucial to begin any philosophical research with an open, unprejudiced mind and self-evident principles, and, more importantly in the present context, that for anyone intent on doing philosophy, like his own “true metaphysics” (EHU 1.12; SBN 12),⁹ a reasonable Cartesian doubt is an indispensable groundwork:

It must, however, be confessed, that this species of scepticism, when more moderate, may be understood in a very reasonable sense, and is a necessary preparative to the study of philosophy, by preserving a proper impartiality in our judgments, and weaning our mind from all those prejudices, which we may have imbibed from education or rash opinion. To begin with clear and self-evident principles, to advance by timorous and sure steps, to review frequently our conclusions, and examine accurately all their consequences; though by these means we shall make both a slow and a short progress in our systems; are the only methods, by which we can ever hope to reach truth, and attain a proper stability and certainty in our determinations. (EHU 12.1.4; SBN 150)

Perhaps Hume’s endorsement of Cartesian doubt by making a sharp sideways reference to this key section in the Discourse is his way of saying that if its scope is mitigated, it may reasonably be retained as a valuable instrument in our search for truth. For in contradistinction to the first two Meditations, Descartes’ curt description of methodic doubt in the Discourse could lead many keen and philosophically sophisticated readers to suppose that there is no inkling that such doubt could encompass reason itself. In other words, that it may be possible for us to envisage that we could err even with respect to those things that appear to our reason most evidently true. That particular dictum by Descartes in the Discourse leaves the issue ambiguous: “The first of these [precepts of his method] was to accept nothing as true which I did not clearly recognize to be so: that is to say, carefully to avoid precipitation and prejudice (Prevention) in judgments, and to accept in them nothing more than what was presented to my mind so clearly and distinctly that I could have no occasion to doubt it” (HR I, 92; AT VI, 18). Yet the following declaration on Cartesian doubt in the Synopsis of the Meditations approximates the moderate scepticism that Hume adopts: “But although the utility of a Doubt which is so general does not at first appear, it is at the same time very great, inasmuch as it delivers us from every kind of prejudice” (HR I, 140; AT VII, 12, IX, 9).

All in all, it is an open question whether Hume’s “reasonable” reconstruction of Descartes’ doubt is actually a form of restoration. I wish merely to suggest that one may plausibly argue that the “mitigated,” “more moderate,” or “reasonable” version of Descartes’ “antecedent scepticism” that Hume recommends as a “necessary preparative to the study of philosophy” is not really a correction of Descartes’ universal doubt, but rather his original doctrine when one considers not only how he explains its use, extent, and limits in the unfinished dialogue in The Search after Truth, in Part 3 of the Discourse on the Method, and Part 1 of the Principles of Philosophy, but also the manner in which Descartes employs it particularly in Meditations 1 and 2.

3. The Serious Nature and Epistemic Role of the Universal Doubt in Meditations 1 and 2

In his Letter to the Translator of the French version of The Principles of Philosophy (HR I, 203–15; AT IX, 1–20), Descartes describes knowledge as a tree, asserting that the roots of all rational knowledge are metaphysics, or first philosophy [the critical examination of the principles of all sciences]; the trunk is physics [the mathematical science of nature], and its branches, the special sciences, among which the most important are mechanics, medicine, and morals (HR I, 211; AT IX, 14). I claim that the seeds of the “roots” out of which the “tree of science” grows, namely first philosophy, are encapsulated in the universally evolving doubts that incipiently arise in childhood; for at that time the mind is awakening to the consciousness of itself and of the manifoldness and strangeness of the world that appears to the senses. The use of this metaphor of the seeds to point to the rational capacities immanent in all humans that sprout from the contemplation of themselves and of the world around them inciting them to doubt, to question, and to investigate by themselves—is not a fortuitous attribution of my own invention. On the contrary, it captures an early and key idea that Descartes expressed when he was twenty-three years old in the opuscule Olympica.¹⁰ In it he relates the sudden inspiration he had on the night of the 10th of November 1619, in which after three consecutive dreams, “full of enthusiasm” he “discovered the foundations of an admirable science.”¹¹ There Descartes asserts the superiority of poetry, which puts its trust in inner illumination, over Scholastic philosophy, which rests on external authority:

[H]e did not believe that one should be much surprised to see that Poets, even those that are simple, are full with sayings more serious, more sensible, and better expressed that those that are found in the writings of Philosophers. He attributed this marvel to the godliness of enthusiasm & the force of imagination, which make the seeds of wisdom (which are found within the mind of all men like the sparks of fire inside the stones) to come out, with much more ease and much more brilliance, as not even reason itself can do it in the Philosophers. (AT X, 184; italics added)¹²

That is why I believe that the interpretation of Descartes’ peculiar doubt in the Meditations as simply artificial or contrived is wrong. In contradistinction to thorough and respected commentators, it appears to me that such a deep doubting is rather a philosophical development of a natural predisposition of the human mind, which is a correlative of, and corrective to, the inclination to believe too much, and which manifests itself, generally speaking, even at its earliest stage, in infancy.

The allegedly feigned nature of such doubt is commonly deduced from the genuine and self-confessed epistemic function it performs for Descartes’ project of building the complete system of the sciences upon rational and absolutely certain foundations. And it is these foundations that universal doubt must provide. Why? If the principles that constitute the basis of the truth of all the sciences the human mind is capable of attaining are doubtful, or possibly false, then everything that rests upon such grounds would also become doubtful; and so, we would have reached at most only probable opinion, or δόξα (doxa), instead of true science, or επιστημη (episteme). Such presumed artificiality is also made plausible by the way Descartes answers a few of the objections that accompany the body of the Meditations. Sometimes he says that he is really not putting anything in doubt, or that he is only imagining, or feigning, or simulating a state of mind that he or any other person has never really had, or that it cannot be sustained in practice. One of many such instances is his pointed remark in the Synopsis of the Meditations “that there is in truth a world, that men possess bodies, and other of such things … never have been [seriously (seriò)] doubted by anyone of sense” (HR I, 142–43; AT VII, 15–16, IX, 12).

Another of these baffling passages is found in the Third Meditation:

Let who will deceive me, He can never cause me to be nothing while I think that I am, or some day cause it to be true to say that I have never been, it being true now to say that I am, or that two and three make more or less than five, or things similar to these, which I clearly see that cannot be in any other manner but as I conceive them. And, certainly, since I have no reason to believe that there is a God who is a deceiver, and I have not yet satisfied myself that there is a God at all, the reason for doubt which depends on this opinion alone is very slight, and so to speak metaphysical. (HR I, 158–59; AT VII, 36, IX, 28; italics added)¹³

Martial Gueroult, an outstanding and revered interpreter of Descartes’ thought, has pointed to that striking passage in order to reduce the “hyperbolic” doubt to essentially a mere rhetorical fiction or intellectual construct.¹⁴ This kind of doubt would exclusively fulfill an epistemological function and would not have been provoked by any actual uncertainty on the part of Descartes about matters such as the truths we think we can obtain through mathematics and the existence of an all-perfect Being or God. According to Gueroult, in contrast to the “natural” doubt as to whether our senses always deceive us so that our life may be just a dream, this is an artificial kind of doubt: “the hypothesis of a deceiving God is not founded upon ‘the mystery of our origin,’ but on a false idea of our own making about our Author (auteur) and his omnipotence.”¹⁵ I will not attempt here to refute this notable and influential reading by Gueroult, but will only state two misgivings that make me uncomfortable with it—one religious and the other philosophical.

First of all, with regard to the much-contested issue of Descartes’ religious beliefs, I think that he was in his own way a sincere Christian, even in claiming that his philosophy could offer a secure grounding for key tenets of that faith.¹⁶ Descartes’ deep-seated conviction, repeatedly expressed in the Meditations, about the finiteness and fallibility of human understanding prevented him from going all the way to establishing a purely rational religion,¹⁷ and also from abandoning the Thomist doctrine he learned at the Jesuit College of La Flèche that truths of faith are above, but do not contradict, truths of reason.¹⁸ From a religious standpoint, the hypothesis of a deceiving God (Dieu trompeur) could be considered as “a false idea of our own making” by people of faith only if, or after they have come to terms with, the multiple and inevitable circumstances in the life of individuals and communities in which both believers and unbelievers endure much undeserved pain, huge misfortunes, and terrible sufferings after the loss of those they love.¹⁹ An instance of the latter evil is the unspeakable sorrow Descartes lived through before the death of his daughter Francine when she was merely five-years old: “He grieved for her with a tenderness that made him realize that true philosophy does not in any way smother what is natural.”²⁰ On the whole, for a philosophically minded believer, which is a reasonably well-established characterization of Descartes’ frame of mind, to rationally confront the problem of evil, be it natural, moral, or intellectual, is a serious matter indeed.²¹

Secondly, when viewed from a philosophical stance, the fact that Descartes used the term metaphysical to characterize the hyperbolic doubt does not necessarily demean its seriousness or reality. In the Western tradition, metaphysics (for Aristotle as well as for Descartes) has been conceived as the science of first principles and causes of all things. In that sense it is the culmination of our insatiable curiosity in face of the mystery of everything around us and within us. Since philosophy naturally arises out of the innate desire to know that defines us as human beings, I find no compelling reason not to say that the hyperbolic doubt, which is clearly an instrument Descartes employs to establish the first principles of his metaphysics, is at the same time a natural and serious enterprise which might not have arisen if he, too, had not begun to wonder about “the mystery of our origin.”

It is true that we know little about the childhood of René Descartes before he entered the Jesuit College of La Flèche around 1606, except perhaps that early on he seems to have developed a relentless and ardent desire to know. This we gather from the work of Adrien Baillet, Descartes’ first biographer, who remarks that René’s father, Joachim Descartes, was accustomed to calling him “his philosopher due to the insatiable curiosity with which this child asked him about the causes and effects of everything that passed through his senses.”²² Hence, it appears that at least the primary and general philosophical urge to know all things emerged in Descartes at a very tender age.

4. The Cathartic Effect of Cartesian Doubt on Students

After many years of discussing Descartes’ Meditations with my students in introductory courses on philosophy, I can attest to the following: It is the profoundly personal involvement with which the successively more radical and extensive acts of doubting are undertaken by Descartes in the first two Meditations that immediately allure the attentive and unbiased student to accompany him in this systematic self-destruction of our most basic certainties and beliefs. I could easily gather from their animated reactions—at first incredulous protestations, and at times surprisingly sharp questionings and droll observations about the philosopher’s theses—that it was as if my students were in the classroom re-enacting with Descartes a state of mind with which they had had some acquaintance long beforehand, but had forgotten or simply kept at a safe distance so as to go on thinking and acting in the world of their everyday life—just as Descartes did until leaving La Flèche—routinely following the maxims and advice of their teachers, authority figures, and providers of information within the social world to which they belonged. For most students, then, the instant and disturbing effect of Descartes’ Meditations was the awakening of their intellectual, critical faculties.²³

Indeed, this natural effect of the Meditations was also part of my own personal experience as a student. I had the good fortune of having the Chilean philosopher José Echeverría Yáñez (1913–1996) as my teacher in my first philosophy course.²⁴ Echeverría Yáñez not only possessed a profound knowledge of French philosophy, particularly of Descartes and of Maine de Biran,²⁵ but was also recognized as one of the most distinguished Spanish-speaking philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century.²⁶ It was by studying and discussing the Meditations in his classroom that his students began to discover the paradoxes and enigmas of self-consciousness, the perhaps unsolvable problem of intersubjectivity as well as many other philosophical puzzles. Step by step he led us by the hand of Descartes to become conscious of the precariousness of the “truths” of common sense and the great difficulties in rationally justifying them. These are both our more universal and strong convictions and those that appear to us as the most obvious amidst all the beliefs that populate our minds, especially those about our own being as living, sentient, and intelligent corporeal organisms in the natural, social, and historical world that we take for granted that we inhabit. This is the external universe we have access to through ordinary sense perception, and which we believe exists when we perceive it and when we do not, and that would continue to exist even if we and no other sentient being were present to perceive it. Since Descartes held not only poets in high esteem, but “loved verses” (aimait les vers) and “also had a talent for poetry” (avait même du talent pour la poésie) when he was young,²⁷ he might have appreciated how the Nobel laureate Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881–1958), piercingly expresses this basic conviction in the first verses of his unforgettable poem “The Definitive Journey”: “and I will go away. And the birds will stay singing, and my orchard will stay with its green tree and white well.”²⁸

In the class taught by José Echeverría I also came to learn that I had lived a fragment of my early childhood immersed, without knowing it, in an attitude of Cartesian doubt. In other words, for a brief time I had been instinctively philosophizing, assuming a contemplative tenor that was not really silly or absurd, even if it was contrary to the “sensible” attitude of the adults around me whom I loved and trusted entirely. For although I did not dare to communicate to them my incipiently encompassing and apparently foolish doubts, it was no less true that I found it too difficult to understand some of the stories my father told me, at least until the day in which a friend from my elementary school died and I caught a glimpse of her absent being in the distraught look of her mother. One of those stories was about Jesús Pastor, a brother of my father, a pilot that had disappeared and was most probably killed on a mission over the Coral Sea, between New Guinea and Australia, during World War II, less than a year before I was born. Full of perplexity, after hearing such a tale, I said to myself something like this: “How come that there have been things and people before I came into existence, since I have been constantly here, since I have existed always?”

In sum, the study of Descartes’ Meditations in class, by occasioning the sudden recollection of these sort of intimate epiphanies, catapulted some of the students who decided to make philosophy an inseparable part of their life, in some sense to retake those unavowed questionings that originate in early childhood, such as the hyperbolic doubts of an inchoate transcendental I—that is, of an infant subjectivity that animated by a vocation of eternity and still feeling that it enjoys being omnipresent and perennial, cannot think of any moment in which it has not been.

5. Closing Observations

All in all, the serious childlike character of Descartes’ universal doubt is a prominent feature of its enduring, widespread appeal even to casual readers of the Meditations. But more importantly, the Cartesian ethos has given its readers in the past and will continue to give its future readers an outstanding model of rational, clear, autonomous, and self-critical thinking the value and usefulness of which is fit for all seasons, and particularly for an era such as ours that is full of countless sources of “fake” facts. And finally, for those who heed the call to study philosophy, to be undertaken as Descartes encouraged in the Meditations, “seriously and freely,” his universal, methodic doubt continues to be, as Hume rightly said, “a necessary preparative.”

It is fitting to conclude with another noteworthy statement by Hume that has perplexed scholars for quite a while and led to diverse interpretations: “philosophical decisions are nothing but the reflections of common life, methodized and corrected” (EHU 12.3.25; SBN 162). I have attempted to show why it is at least plausible, on the one hand, that those reflections arise early in common life out of the serious, encompassing doubts that are not uncommon for children to entertain; and on the other, to show that Hume’s statement is particularly true with regard to Descartes’ universal doubt in the Meditations, which is, I think, an impressive methodical refinement of those serious proto-philosophical doubts that occur in infancy.

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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.

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, 1005^b 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).