Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen: The Defense of Reason in Descartes's Meditations

Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen

Demons,

Dreamers,

and Madmen

The Defense of Reason

in Descartes’s Meditations

Harry G. Frankfurt

Foreword by Rebecca Goldstein

Princeton University Press

Princeton and Oxford

Copyright © 2008 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY

All Rights Reserved

Originally published: Indianapolis and New York:

Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1970

First Princeton Edition, 2008

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Frankfurt, Harry G., 1929– Demons, dreamers, and madmen : the defense of reason in Descartes’s Meditations / Harry G. Frankfurt ; foreword

by Rebecca Goldstein. — 1st Princeton ed.

p.cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN 978-1-40082-818-0

1. Descartes, Rene´, 1596–1650. Meditationes de prima

philosophia. 2. Reason. 3. First philosophy. I. Title.

B1854.F7 2008

194—dc222007012069

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Adobe Caslon Pro

Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

press.princeton.edu

Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Contents

Foreword by Rebecca Goldstein

Preface to the Princeton Edition

Preface

One THE FIRST MEDITATION

1 Introduction

2 The General Overthrow of Belief

3 The Criterion of Doubt

4 The Perception of the Physical World

5 The Strategy of the First Meditation

6 Simple and Universal Things

7 Mathematics in the First Meditation

8 Mathematics and the Omnipotent Deceiver

9 Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen

Two REASON AND ITS VALIDATION

10 Sum

11 Sum res cogitans

12 Clear and Distinct Perception

13 Objections to Descartes’s Rule of Evidence

14 Memory and Doubt

15 The Validation of Reason

16 Truth and Reality: The Galileo Controversy

Foreword

Rebecca Goldstein

Certain philosophers provoke a charitable genius in readers, who will labor hard to produce interpretations maximizing profundities and minimizing fallacies. Descartes is not one of these philosophers. There is something about him that invites familiarity, and we know what that breeds. Whereas the seeming paralogisms of a Nietzsche, a Heidegger, a Wittgenstein, or a Quine are not willingly accepted as such, at least not without some struggle, the conclusion that Descartes spoke nonsense often arrives with no signs of an inner tussle at all.

There are contemporary disciplines—cognitive science, for example, or neuroscience—in which Cartesianism and pineal gland (a metonym for Cartesian dualism) are snicker terms. There seems little doubt that Descartes’s proffered solution to the mind-body problem contributes to his diminishment, at least in certain circles. Cartesiandualism can feel like a reminder of some of the more embarrassing episodes from one’s childhood or adolescence. Perhaps this is no accident. The cognitive scientist Paul Bloom argues in Descartes’ Baby that innate structures in human cognition determine us to reason in two quite separate ways about animate and inanimate objects. Babies find it perfectly natural for a person to begin moving without having been contacted by a physical object, but they will evince surprise (expressed in longer stares) if a ball or a box just suddenly takes off as if of its own volition. A doubling of ontology— à la Descartes—can seem just a baby-step, so to speak, away.

If we grant such cognitive scientists as Paul Bloom an ontogenetic disposition toward ontological dualism, perhaps it’s not surprising that the Cartesian conclusion can seem a symptom of philosophical immaturity, one that our disabusing sciences patiently help us to outgrow. This can encourage a presumptive high-handedness toward the whole Cartesian enterprise, disposing us to dismiss it as akin to those childhood delusions centered on the family, through which we have all lived, and out of which we have, it is to be hoped, grown.

But there is much else in Descartes, in addition to his dualism, that induces a sense of our being almost too close and familiar with him to extend him the respectful attention required for inspired reading. This sense of approachability is underscored by the intimately confidential tone the author assumes in both the Discourse on Method and the Meditations on First Philosophy, speaking to us in the first person, letting us creep close enough up to him to eavesdrop on his (staged) thought processes, reenacted confusions and all. He dispenses with the distancing props of the professional thinker: the specialized vocabulary and stiltedsyntax, that trick of throwing the voice so that it seems to be channeling impersonal truth itself. In entering the Meditations, we find ourselves not in the hush of a cathedral- like lecture hall, much less standing sub specie aeterni-tatis, exposed to the icy blasts of faceless infinity. Rather we are chez Rene´, ensconced with a cozily clad philosopher before a fire whose warmth he will use in the Second Meditation to perform a homey experiment with a wad of wax.

So perhaps it is not surprising that we have come to feel so relaxed in the presence of Descartes that we abuse all the thoughtful preparations laid out for us by our gracious host, failing to see the ingeniousness and meticulousness of the arrangements, the care that went into making them appear so spontaneous.

It is in contrast to this unmindful ingratitude that Harry Frankfurt’s Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen: The Defense of Reason in Descartes’s Meditations comes as a revelation. Under Frankfurt’s reading the philosopher whose familiarity breeds contempt becomes enchantingly unfamiliar; the philosopher who seems so accessible as to require no interpretation is revealed to be anything but; and, perhaps most startling of all, the philosopher who had seemed to be crushed by the vicious circularity of trying to vindicate reason through the use of reason is carefully extracted from beneath the wheel. That philosopher in dishabille has been far more cautious than we have incautiously concluded, not only constructing arguments of exquisite complexity while maintaining the charming air of a raconteur, but also calibrating his objectives so as to avoid the question-begging for which precocious undergraduates delight to despise him. Frankfurt shows us just how Descartes sets out to do it, and, after Frankfurt’s exposition, it is impossible ever to read Descartes the same way as before.

Descartes, in rejecting his philosophical antecedents, was free to create a new form of philosophical writing. Many of us, trained in one particular way of addressing philosophical questions, can forget that the style of philosophical discourse is no more a foregone conclusion than anything else in philosophy and can itself carry philosophical implications. In the Discourse on Method and the Meditations, Descartes devised an almost paradoxical genre, the impersonal autobiography. Descartes’s felicitous yet antinomian style corresponds to something peculiar about philosophy itself, the ways in which the personal and impersonal viewpoints must be held together in an impossible and yet necessary union (much like, on the Cartesian view, the union between mind and body). Once again, Frankfurt’s attention makes us see what is overlooked in our familiarity with Descartes, in this case his literary style, which Frankfurt makes strange for us, as well it ought to be. Frankfurt writes that the form of the Cartesian meditation addresses one of the touchiest problems of philosophical writing—to protect the vital individuality of philosophical inquiry without betraying the anonymity of reason. This is beautifully put and demonstrative of Frankfurt’s general approach, placing every aspect of Descartes that he touches within a context that enlarges and deepens philosophical understanding.

Frankfurt’s focus in Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen is on Descartes’s epistemology (and so that problematic dualism that I have brought up is not part of his subject). In particular, Frankfurt illuminates Descartes’s views on the faculty of pure reason: why he believes it is necessary for our knowledge of the world and why he believes it must be subjected to a particular doubt, which reason can remove. The ultimate end is to try to relieve Descartes of the ageold charge of circularity. In the process of doing so, Frankfurt profoundly excavates various arguments, including the First Meditation’s argument against empiricism and the Second Meditation’s version of the cogito.

What Frankfurt unpacks from the FirstMeditation alone is, in a word, astounding, an antiphonal chorus in which those eponymous demons, dreamers, and madmen chime in as objections to successive attempts that empiricism makes in its own defense. Frankfurt is so utterly convincing that once you see it, see the complexity contained in the seemingly simple conversational mode of the First Meditation, and see how what is done in the First Meditation will be echoed in the ultimate aim of the Meditations, the vindication of reason, you can only stare in amazed admiration at the elaborate care and subtlety of the Cartesian effort.

This is history of philosophy at its best, placing itself entirely at the service of elucidating the genius of another, doing full justice to what, exactly, the philosopher was up to and showing us how, precisely, he went about it.

When I first read Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen, decades ago, my admiration was such that I wanted to somehow make use of it in my own writing. At the least, I wanted to nab that superbly evocative title for use in a fictional work. It took me several years to come up with a plot to match that title. The short story I wrote, entitled Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen, opens with a young philosophy professor wandering the dark stacks of Columbia’s Butler Library in search of Frankfurt’s book, which she wants to put on reserve for her class, having, like me, a great enthusiasm for it. She switches on the light to find a strange young man standing there, holding the only copy of Frankfurt’s book, a man who will stalk her for several years. Is he demon, dreamer, or madman?

A few weeks after the story appeared, I received a letter with the return address of Harry Frankfurt, Dept. of Philosophy, Princeton University. Uh oh, I thought, fearing the worst, that the philosopher would take offense at my fictional violations. Quite the contrary, the letter was as gracious as any I’ve ever received.

So in addition to all the intellectual virtues of Harry Frankfurt that are so apparent from his work, I knew I could now add the moral virtue of professional generosity. But then I ought to have been able already to deduce this attribute about the author of Demons, Dreamers, and Mad-men: The Defense of Reason in Descartes’s Meditations. After all, it is a book that demonstrates that, in addition to the rigor and precision that are required for inspired philosophical work, generosity, too, has a vital role to play. Because of Frankfurt’s, we can appreciate Descartes’s genius all the better.

Preface to the Princeton Edition

Descartes was my first love in philosophy. Indeed, I have never been as devoted to studying the thought of any other philosopher as I was for some years devoted to studying the thought of Descartes. I was drawn to him at the start by his intriguing promise of ultimate and absolute certainty regarding the foundations of thought and regarding the totality of knowledge that he maintained could be built solidly upon them, by the precision and clarity of his writing, and by the fact that his books are short enough that a comprehensive mastery of his work did not seem entirely out of the question.

So I read with great intensity what Descartes had written, and I studied the leading commentators—Gue´roult, Gouhier, Alquié, Beyssade, Curley, as well as numerous others who have contributed to the scholarly literature—with eager interest and expectation. I believe that I learned more about philosophy by doing this than I have learned in any other way. And I came to admire Descartes, particularly for what struck me as his profundity, as well as for the manifest lucidity and rigor of his analyses and arguments. It seemed to me that his reasoning was a lovelier and more compelling paradigm of philosophical thinking than any I had ever encountered.

For that reason, I was especially distressed by the persistent charges that his reasoning was—in perhaps its deepest and most important region—disastrously flawed by a notoriously elementary fallacy. Everyone appeared to agree that the central argument in Descartes’s defense of reason was altogether vitiated by a palpable mistake—by an error no more subtle or complex than patent circularity in his reasoning. I simply could not accept that so acute and self-critical a thinker had committed such an egregious blunder.

I knew, of course, that even the greatest philosophers do make quite obvious mistakes. Often, their mistakes are so conspicuous that they can be spotted even by beginners. However, I was stubbornly unwilling to concede that Descartes—my paragon of clear and robust thinking—could have fallen into so easily recognizable an error at the very fulcrum, at the veritable heart, of his philosophical enterprise. So I determined to show that he had not really done so—that the common charge against him of circular reasoning, however plausible and apparently easy to sustain it may be, is wrong.

This book is devoted mainly to presenting my defense of Descartes’s defense of reason. It proceeds from a close reading of his First Meditation, from which I develop a dialectical account of how Descartes thought to invalidatethe authority of sensory data; and I argue that this account provides a warrant for reading his subsequent attempt to validate reason in a way that avoids the question-begging circularity with which it has generally been charged.

Though I did not try to argue the point there, nor indeed elsewhere, I believe that the strategy designed by Descartes for demonstrating that reason can successfully be shown to validate itself has more than an exclusively historical interest. Its general logical pertinence and philosophical value are, in my opinion, worth a conscientious and appreciative elucidation. I hope that other scholars will be encouraged, by what I have written, to pursue this matter.

In the final chapter of my book, I presented a speculation concerning how Descartes’s epistemological explorations were a response to the most profound and potentially most fruitful intellectual crisis of his time. This was a crisis, generated by Galileo’s confrontation with then-current Roman Catholic orthodoxy, that threatened the otherwise undeniable authority of the empirical sciences. My hypothesis was that the Cartesian epistemology was designed to resolve the Galileo-Church controversy in a manner that would equally protect both the claims of the Church and the claims of science.

When I wrote the book I had no direct evidence, either in Descartes’s writings or in the writings of others, for this hypothesis. I still have no such evidence. However, I continue to believe that the hypothesis is a reasonable one, both from a historical and from a philosophical point of view, and that in fact it is indirectly confirmed by a correct (that is, by my own) interpretation of Descartes’s thought.

Needless to say, it is very gratifying to me that the Princeton University Press has seen fit to reissue my book. In this connection, I want to thank Robert Tempio, my editor at the Princeton University Press, who managed the whole thing; and also Janet Broughton, who one evening at dinner came up with the rather unexpected idea that it would be a thing worth doing.

Preface

The scope of this book is very limited. It deals only with the Meditations and only with those parts of the Meditations that I believe are indispensable to understanding Descartes’s attempt to provide a justification of reason. Part One is devoted almost entirely to an exploration of the First Meditation. Part Two deals with those aspects of later Meditations that bear on the interpretation of the epistemological doctrine with which I am primarily concerned. The last chapter of the book offers an hypothesis concerning the relation between the theory of knowledge inherent in the Meditations and the controversy over the significance of scientific truth that developed in the seventeenth century between Galileo and the Catholic Church.

I have not attempted to present a comprehensive and balanced account of everything Descartes says about all the topics I discuss. In dealing with certain problems, for example the validation of reason, I have tried only to identify and develop one important and interesting tendency of his thought. I do not wish to be understood as denying that impressive support can be found for interpretations other than my own, which focus on other tendencies.

I am deeply grateful to my friend Norman Kretzmann for his invaluable assistance and for his encouragement. He translated all the quoted passages that were originally written in Latin (the translations from the French are my own). He also read the book in manuscript and made a large number of important suggestions for improving it. He invariably responded to my requests for help without hesitation or reserve. In this matter, as in others, I relied heavily on his friendship and he never failed me.

I wish to acknowledge my good fortune in having been the beneficiary of the remarkable competence and the cheerful concern of Miss Frances Fine, who prepared the typescript of this book. I also wish to thank the editors of the Philosophical Review and of the American Philosophical Quarterly for permitting me to include in this book material already published in their journals.

I dedicate this book to my wife, Marilyn, and to my daughter, Katherine Alexandra.

H.G.F.

One

The First Meditation

1

Introduction

In the Theaetetus, Plato describes thinking as a conversation conducted by the soul with itself.¹ This has sometimes been taken as a reason for admiring his use of the dialogue form.Koyre´ goes so far, in fact, as to maintain that "the dialogue is the form par excellence for philosophic investigation, because thought itself, at least for Plato, is a ‘dialogue the soul holds with itself.’"² But a dialogue is not a conversation with oneself. It is a conversation with other people. If thinking is indeed internal discourse, then dialogue can hardly be the ideally appropriate literary form in which to convey it. A much more appropriate vehicle is the meditation, in which an author represents the autonomous give and take of his own systematic reflections.

Moral and religious meditations were published before the seventeenth century, but Descartes was the first to use the form in an exclusively metaphysical work.³ During his lifetime he published three major philosophical books. One of these, Principles of Philosophy, was meant as a text for use in the schools, and its form was dictated by this intention. But in the Discourse on Method and in the Meditations, Descartes was free to write philosophy as he liked. Both books are autobiographical. Like Plato’s dialogues, they do not emasculate the philosophical enterprise by severing its connection with the lives of men. Descartes differs from Plato, however, in the way he solves one of the touchiest problems of philosophical writing—to protect the vital individuality of philosophical inquiry without betraying the anonymity of reason.

Plato never enters the dramatic scenes he creates. He may intend to signify by this self-effacement his refusal to use the stage of inquiry for personal display.⁴ There is a certain tension, however, between his conception of inquiry and the literary genre he chose. Plato insists that philosophy and rhetoric are antithetical, but his dialogues would have been lifeless if he had rigorously excluded rhetoric from them. If the characters in a dialogue are to appear as persons, and not merely as devices for punctuating the text, rhetorical elements must naturally intrude into their discourse just as they do into the conversations of real people.

Descartes avoids this difficulty by declining to place his inquiry within a social context. He does his thinking in private, and no one appears in his Meditations but himself. To be sure, his style is personal and sometimes even intimate. But while he writes autobiography, the story he tells is of his efforts to escape the limits of the merely personal and to find his generic identity as a rational creature.Whatever actually may have been his motives in publishing the Discourse anonymously, philosophically it was appropriate for him to do so. His attitude toward philosophy is nicely implicit in the paradox of an anonymous autobiography,which serves to reveal a man but which treats the man’s identity as irrelevant.

Religious meditations are characteristically accounts of a person seeking salvation, who begins in the darkness of sin and who is led through a conversion to spiritual illumination. While the purpose of such writing is to instruct and initiate others, the method is not essentially didactic. The author strives to teach more by example than by precept. In a broad way the Meditations is a work of this sort: Descartes’s aim is to guide the reader to intellectual salvation by recounting his own discovery of reason and his escape thereby from the benighted reliance on his senses, which had formerly entrapped him in uncertainty and error.

In reading the First Meditation it is essential to understand that while Descartes speaks in the first person, the identity he adopts as he addresses the reader is not quite his own. Students of Descartes often fail to take into account the somewhat fictitious point of view from which he approaches his subject, and this frequently leads to serious misunderstanding. As he begins the Meditations, Descartes’s stance is not that of an accomplished scholar who has already developed the subtle and profound philosophical position set forth in that work. Instead, he affects a point of view he has long since outgrown—that of someone who is philosophically unsophisticated and who has always been guided more or less unreflectively in his opinions by common sense.

This is not very surprising, of course, in view of the autobiographical nature of his book. Descartes’s meditations occurred years before he wrote the Meditations, and the First Meditation represents an early stage of his own philosophical thinking. He makes this quite explicit in the Conversation with Burman, where he explains that in the First Meditation he is attempting to represent a man who is first beginning to philosophize, and where he discusses some of the limitations by which the perspective and understanding of such a person are bound.⁵ The lack of sophistication that Descartes affects consists essentially in a failure to appreciate the radical distinction between the senses and reason. Thus it concerns doctrine, not talent, and it is by no means inconsistent with the resourcefulness and ingenuity that Descartes displays in the First Meditation. The talent available to him as he starts his inquiry is his own. It is only the assumptions that govern his initial steps that are naïve and philosophically crude.

This point is also implicit in the method Descartes employs to present his ideas in the Meditations. He describes this method in a well-known passage near the end of his Reply to the Second Objections. There he distinguishes between what he calls the analytic and the synthetic methods of proof, and he observes that "in my Meditations I have followed