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Descartes’ revolution in “first philosophy”
The full title of Descartes famous 1641 work is Meditations on First Philosophy. With this title, he’s
explicitly saying that in this work he’s not just, and not primarily, doing theory of knowledge, or
“epistemology” (which is how he is commonly interpreted). That is, he’s not merely attempting to show
what we can and cannot know with certainty, including that his “method of clear and distinct
perception” achieves his goal of guaranteeing that, if we follow it, we’ll forever avoid errors and can
achieve certain knowledge about things for which this is possible. Instead, Descartes is employing his
theory of knowledge in order to do first philosophy. As we’ve seen, “first philosophy” is Aristotle’s term
for the most general kind of philosophy: metaphysics, or ontology: the study of what it is for anything to
be as such. Ultimately, as we’ll see in this handout, Descartes comes to the following, radically new
conclusion:
Something is if and only if it’s an object that can correspond to a true act of judgment, i.e., if and only if
it can become an object of a true act of representation, or consciousness, by a thinking subject, or mind.
Here we see the “payoff” for our excursion into Aristotle at the beginning of the course. The essence of
so-called “Enlightenment” philosophy, from Descartes around the mid-1630’s through Immanuel Kant
through around 1800, can be understood by way of how it contrasts with Aristotle’s view of what it is to
be. That is, the revolution in philosophy beginning with Descartes can be seen to stand out very clearly
by comparing it to Aristotle’s view of being. This can be understood by looking at how Descartes’ pen
radically transforms the meanings of some very basic words in our language. And with this radical
transformation of language goes a radical transformation of how we understand what it is for something
to be. Seeing this will require ‘unpacking’ the various terms used in Descartes’ definition of being as
such: “representation”, “consciousness”, “judgment”, “object”, “subject”. These constellation of terms
revolves around Descartes’ radically new definition of “substance”, i.e., “actual entity”: something that
is.
I. “Judgment”: a belief or statement of the form “S is P”:
BD. For Aristotle, a judgment, or belief (pistis) always occurs on the basis of our sense-perception of a
perceived body. And such sense-perceptions bring our souls in immediate contact with the form of the
perceived bodies. This is why Aristotle claims that sight, for example, can’t be wrong about colors and
shapes. For Aristotle, judgments aren’t acts of will; the only kinds of willing that Aristotle recognizes are
our attempts to exert efficient (or moving) causality on tools and materials in order to bring about the
realization of some telos (as when we attempt to make a pot, fix a car, write a paper, build a bookcase,
etc.).
AD. There are two very significant ways in which Descartes’ view of judgment differs from Aristotle’s.
First, Descartes insists that all of our perceptions of ‘external’ physical objects occur in judgments, as
described in (I AD). Since all that we perceive directly are ideas, we have no direct perception of such
physical objects. Second, Descartes also follows the late medieval Christian philosophical tradition in
regarding all of our judgments as acts of will. In keeping with this philosophical tradition, Descartes
regards acts of will as exertions of efficient causality on something to produce some effect. In particular,
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when we judge that something is or is not the case, our wills exert efficient causality on our perceived
ideas, where the resulting judgment is the efficient-causal effect of such acts of will.
II. “Presence” and “re-presentation”:
BD. For Aristotle, anything can potentially be present to our souls. That is, our souls have the potential
of becoming aware of anything, in particular, any particular thing, which Aristotle calls an ousia. Natural
things become present to us through our sense-perception. Perception occurs as the forms of these
natural things literally impress themselves on our sense-organs and the sensitive aspect of our souls. Of
course, the highest ousia – the one that is to the maximum possible extent - doesn’t have a body, and
thus can’t be perceived by the senses; nevertheless, God can become present to us as we actually
become (numerically identical to) God, by doing exactly what God does: engaging in pure thinking,
thinking about itself. Aristotle does have a concept of “re-presentation”, but this is entirely dependent
on our perceptions. When we remember some natural thing that we’ve perceived before, we “represent” it, by letting its form, now stored in our souls, become present to us again, without having to
use our sense-organs to receive it.
AD. For Descartes, only ideas can be immediately present to our minds, and all ideas are “contained”
within our minds. That is, the only things that can become present to us – that we can become aware of
– are ideas. Our minds can think about things outside our minds only by way of making a judgment
about these immediately-perceived ideas. Each of our judgments is an act of our wills. Judgment
proceeds in two stages. First, an idea (or several ideas, such as the many different sensations that are
taken together when we look at a piece of melting wax) becomes present to our minds by our perceiving
it. Then, secondly, we use our will to take a stand on this idea (or ideas), either by affirming this idea
(i.e., willing that the idea corresponds to something that it resembles), denying this idea (i.e., willing that
there isn’t anything that the idea corresponds to), or withholding judgment (i.e., neither affirming nor
denying that the idea corresponds to anything). Crucially, an idea is a numerically distinct thing from
the object that it corresponds to. Because judgment is based on the perception of ideas, whenever we
perform a judgment, we literally re-present these ideas to ourselves; we re-present an idea when we’re
not just aware of it, but when we willingly take a stand about whether the idea corresponds to
something. Thus all of our thought about things outside our minds is a re-presenting: first a presenting
to ourselves of ideas, and second a re-presenting to ourselves of our judgment about these ideas. This is
why virtually all philosophers of mind nowadays speak, without thinking about it, of ‘mental acts’, or
‘intentional states’, as “representations”.
Note how radically different Descartes’ view is from Aristotle’s view; for Aristotle, anything – including,
of course, anything outside our souls – can become present to our souls, and re-presentation occurs
only when we remember something that was already present to our souls. For Descartes, any
awareness of something outside our minds is a re-presentation. We are epistemically separated by an
unbridgeable gap, or gulf, from any object outside our minds. On this side of the gap lies what our
minds can immediately perceive: our ideas and the judgments that we make about them. On the other
side of the gap lie things external to our minds. For this reason, our minds are separated from physical
things by the “veil of ideas” within our minds. (As it turns out, Descartes argues [in Meditation III] that
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there is just one thing external to our minds that we can know with certainty exists: God; we cannot,
however, be absolutely certain even of the existence of physical things that seem to be the efficient
causes of our sensations.)
III. From moral “con-science” to thinking “con-sciousness”:
BD. “Con-science” is a medieval Christian term.1 The “con” in “con-science” means the same as the
“con” in such expressions as “con-spiracy” (literally: “breathing together”), or the “co” in “co-pilot”, “coproducer”, “co-author”, etc. That is, con-science involves two things. In particular, someone’s conscience (where the Latin “scientia” means not “science” as we think of it now, but direct awareness, i.e.,
certain knowledge) is their co-knowledge of two kinds of things. Instead, “con-science” is a basic
concept in medieval Christian view of human nature. Whenever we act, we employ our negatively free
will. And such acts of will are always accompanied by awareness of two things. First, we’re aware of the
content of our will, i.e., what is the goal, or ob-ject, of our will: what it is that we intend to do. Second,
we’re aware of God’s moral law: what God wants us to do in creating us. Naturally, when we’re coaware of these two things, we’re also aware of whether what we’re willfully intending to do corresponds
to God’s moral law. If our wills correspond to the moral law, we have a clear, or good, conscience; if our
wills fail to correspond to the moral law, we have a bad conscience, and feel a sense of guilt.
AD. Descartes applies the medieval Christian concept of moral conscience is applied exclusively to our
beliefs, or judgments. (What allows Descartes to do this is the medieval Christian view that our
awareness of things is an intention, i.e., an act of will whose goal is to correspond to the object of the
intention; see [III D] below.) This leads to an entirely new view of con-scientia inaugurated by Descartes.
Instead of con-scientia being our co-knowledge of the content of our will and God’s moral law, for
Descartes con-scientia is our twofold immediate awareness: first, of perceived ideas in our mind;
second, of the judgment that we make about these ideas. Since for Descartes (as we’ve seen in [II AD]
above) our sense-perception of objects external to our minds always takes the form of a judgment
about our ideas, all of our awareness of such objects involves this twofold awareness. And this twofold
awareness is what philosophers after Descartes call “con-sciousness”. What’s designated by the term
“con-sciousness” is the very same mental act that philosophers after Descartes call “re-presentation”.
Really, “con-sciousness” and “re-presentation” are two names for the same thing: first, our scientia, i.e.,
presentation, of our ideas; and, second, our con-scientia, i.e., re-presentation, of our judgment about
these ideas. Just like the term “representation”, philosophers of mind now commonly use the word
“consciousness”, or “act of consciousness”, to refer to any of our beliefs.
IV. “Ob-ject”:
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Now unlike medieval Christian philosophers, Aristotle doesn’t have a concept of conscience in a moral sense
Although Aristotle doesn’t have the concept of a moral con-science, he does have the concept of prudence, or
“practical wisdom” phronesis, which is the kind of reasoning that we use when we are deciding which of our
desires, if pursued, will lead to our leading a happy life; and which of our desires, if pursued, will lead to an
unhappy, “shameful” life. The result of engaging in prudential reasoning is a desire to increase our desire for a
telos that will make us happy in pursuing it, and to decrease our desire for a telos that will make us unhappy in the
long run.
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BD. Literally, the word “ob-ject” (ob-jectum in Latin) meant the goal of one’s intentional act of will: what
we want to cause to exist through our activity.2 This is in keeping with the literal meaning of “objectum” (where “ob-” means “against” and “ject” means “throw”, or “project”). Thus an ob-ject is the
goal that we willfully project ourselves toward in trying to bring that goal about. This original meaning
of “ob-ject” is the one we’re using when we speak of “the object of the game,” or the “objective” of
someone’s course of action. Of course, Aristotle didn’t use the Latin term “ob-jectum”. Rather, he uses
the Greek term “hou heneka”: the telos for the sake of which we’re acting: the limiting possibility that
we’re attempting to bring about. Thus just as Aristotle (see [III BD] above) thinks of acts of will as simply
our attempts to bring about some practical (or “technical”) telos, he also thinks of ob-jects as those
limiting possibilities that our acts of will are trying to achieve. What’s important for our purposes here is
that Aristotle doesn’t think of the physical bodies that we perceive as ob-jects, precisely because they’re
not the goal of our practical, or technical, activities. Crucially, then, it’s simply not the case for Aristotle
that everything is an object (as is built into our current language, which takes over Descartes’
interpretation of what it is for something to be as such).
AD. As we saw in (III AD) above, for Descartes our beliefs are acts of will, or intentions. Now each act of
will (i.e., the exertion of efficient causality to produce an effect) has a goal, or object. And because
Accordingly, an ob-ject is anything that can correspond to a true judgment. And .
V. “Sub-ject”:
BD. For Aristotle, “subject” (Latin: subjectum; Greek: hypokeimenon) literally means what is “thrown
under” something else (“sub-” as in “submarine”, and “-ject” as in “projectile”). What a sub-ject
underlies is its properties, just as the grammatical subject of a sentence is what the sentence is about.
Thus the subject of my belief that the cat is on the mat is the cat, just as the subject of the proposition
“the cat is on the mat” is the grammatical subject of this sentence, “the cat”. As we saw in (I BD) above,
anything can be present to our souls. Thus anything can be a subject (of a belief or a proposition).
AD. As we saw in (I D) above,
VI. “Substance”:
OK: Descartes does admittedly use “subject” and “substance” to refer not just to minds, but to extended
things as well. But there’s a clear hierarchy here. This is because the mind is definitional in the being of
everything, including extended things. An extended thing, if there are any, is what corresponds to our
subjective idea of extended thing.
BD. One way of understanding what Aristotle meant by “substance” (ousia) is as follows: an ousia – i.e.,
a particular thing – is anything that can only be a subject, and not a predicate, of a belief or proposition.
If you think about it for a while, you’ll see that this is why only particular things are substances. A
category (such as place, time, action, quality, quantity, etc.) other than substance – what Aristotle calls
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More originally, an “ob-ject” is something that stands in the way of our achieving this goal, as when we speak of
an “objection” to someone’s claim.
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categories said of a substance – can be employed as the subject of such sentences as “Athens is a
place”, “399 BCE is a time”, “teaching is an action”, “paleness is a quality”, “two(ness) is a quantity”.
And the same goes with the secondary substances (genus and species) that are ‘present in’ primary
substances; for example, we can say “human beings are mammals”, “mammals are animals, “animals
are living”, “living things are physical”, etc. But only primary substances – particular things – can appear
only as subjects of sentences, e.g., “Socrates was in Athens”, “Socrates died in 399 BCE”, “Socrates
taught Plato”, “Socrates was pale,” “Socrates and Plato are two human beings”; and also “Socrates was
a human being [a mammal, an animal, living, etc.]”. Because only particular things can appear only in
the subject of a proposition, only a particular entity counts as a primary substance (ousia). Clearly, every
ousia counts as a ‘substance’ in this sense. The Latin “substantia” is a translation of Aristotle’s ousia,
since an ousia is something fixed that “stands underneath” an entity’s changing ‘properties’ and
‘accidents’.
AD. For Descartes, there is only one thing that fits the medieval Christian definition of “substance”. This
is the human judging mind. Thus the only actual substance is a judging mind.
What’s so radical about Descartes’ view is his treating thinking minds as the only substances. The being
of anything else is defined in terms of the mind: everything at all is a possible ob-ject for our con-scious
re-presentations.
It’s important to note that these changes in the meanings of words is not merely a “semantic” change.
The reason for this is that these words are absolutely basic in our vocabulary: they are the very words
we use when we say pretty much anything. For this reason,
This new metaphysics (being = possible ob-ject of our con-scious re-representation)
Thus Descartes’ ontology can be properly called “subjectivist”. This is not the same as a kind of
‘subjectivism’ that amounts to epistemic relativism: the view that something actually exists if and only if
we believe that it exists. After all, Descartes insists that something is if and only if it is the object of a
true act of judgment (i.e., of representation, or consciousness). And a judgment is true only if the ideas
that form the basis of the judgment actually do correspond to some object (at least this is the case for
affirmative judgments; negative judgments are true if and only if there is no object that correspond to
the ideas employed in the judgment).
Instead, Descartes’ ontology is ‘subjectivist’ in a deeper, metaphysical sense. This is because anything
by definition makes reference to the subjective mind.
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