An Outline of Descartes's 
Meditations on First Philosophy Therefore, our mind is much more clearly and distinctly known to us than our
Descartes's Arguments for Universal Doubt and the "Cogito" Argument
(An Outline of Meditations 1,2)
The argument for universal doubt:
A. The dream argument:
1. I often have perceptions very much like the ones I usually have in sensation
while I am dreaming.
2. There are no definite signs to distinguish dream experience from waking
experience.
therefore,
3. It is possible that I am dreaming right now and that all of my perceptions
are false
B. Objection to the dream argument:
1. It could be argued that the images we form in dreams can only be composed
of bits and pieces of real experience combined in novel ways.
therefore,
2. Although we have reason to doubt the surface perceptual qualities of our
perception, we have no reason to doubt the properties that we perceive the
basic components of our experience to have. (In particular, there is no reason
to doubt the mathematical properties that material bodies in general have.)
C. The deceiving God argument:
1. We believe that there is an all powerful God who has created us and who is
all powerful.
2. He has i in his power to make us be deceived even about matters of
mathematical knowledge which we seem to see clearly.
therefore,
3. It is possible that we are deceived even in our mathematical knowledge of
the basic structure of the world.
D. Objections to the deceiving God argument:
1. We think that God is perfectly good and would not deceive us.
2. Some think that there does not exist such a powerful God.
E. Replies:
1. If it were repugnant to God's nature to deceive us, he would not allow us to
be deceived at all.
2. If there is no God, we must assume the author of our being to be even less
perfect, so that we have even more reason to doubt all our beliefs.
F. The demon argument:
1. Instead of assuming that God is the source of our deceptions, we will
assume that there exists an evil demon, who is capable of deceiving us in the
same way we supposed God to be able
Therefore, I have reason to doubt the totality of what my senses tell me as
well as the mathematical knowledge that it seems I have.
The Argument for our Existence (the "Cogito"):
1. Even if we assume that there is a deceiver, from the very fact that I am
deceived it follows that I exist.
2. In general it will follow from any state of thinking (e.g., imagining, sensing,
feeling, reasoning) that I exist. While I can be deceived about the objective
content of any thought, I cannot be deceived about the fact that I exist and that
I seem to perceive objects with certain characteristics.
3. Since I only can be certain of the existence of myself insofar as I am
thinking, I have knowledge of my existence only as a thinking thing (res
cogitans).
The Argument that the Mind is More Certainly known than the Body:
1. It is possible that all knowledge of external objects, including my body,
could be false as the result of the actions of an evil demon. It is not, however,
possible that I could be deceived about my existence or my nature as a
thinking thing.
2. a. Even Corporeal objects, such as my body, are known much more
distinctly through the mind than through the body.
The wax argument for (2a):
i. All the properties of the piece of wax that we perceive with the senses
change as the wax melts.
ii. This is true as well of its primary properties, such as shape, extension, and
size.
iii. Yet the wax remains the same piece of wax as it melts.
therefore,
iv. Insofar as we know the wax, we know through our mind and faculty of
judgment, not through our senses or imagination
b. Therefore, every act of clear and distinct knowledge of corporeal matter
also provides even more certain evidence for the existence and nature of
ourselves as thinking things.
body.
General Outline of Meditations 3, 4, 5
I. Meditation Three: Descartes proves God's existence and that He is not a
deceiver, thereby allowing us to be sure that we are not deceived when we
perceive things clearly and distinctly.
A. Summary of things of which I am certain and those which I still must
doubt.
1. I am certain that I exist as a thinking thing.
2. I must still doubt both my senses and my intuitions concerning
mathematical knowledge since God may have constituted me so as to be
deceived even about those things I seem most certain.
Therefore, in order to become certain of anything else I must inquire into the
existence of God and see whether He can be regarded as a deceiver.
B. Preliminary Discussion of Ideas
1. I have ideas that are like images of things. The most common cause of error
is the judgment that these ideas are similar to things that exist outside of me.
2. There are three possible types of ideas: innate, those that originate in
myself, and those that originate from something outside of me. We shall be
most interested in the latter group.
3. Even though some ideas of apparent external objects come to me against
my will, I cannot regard them as corresponding to external things. This is
because:
a. I may have some faculty which produces these ideas.
b. Even if they come from outside me, I have no guarantee that they are
similar to their causes.
Therefore, the principle upon which I have judged my ideas to be similar to
external objects seems to be mistaken.
C. The argument for the existence of God from the fact that I have an idea of
Him.
1. Besides its formal reality, which accounts for its mere existence as an idea,
every idea also has objective reality according to the reality of the thing which
it represents, or its object.
2. There must be as much reality in the cause as there is in the effect. This
applies to objective reality as well as formal reality.
3. I need not assume a cause greater than myself for any of my ideas of
corporeal substance nor of other people or angels.
4. I have an idea of a perfect God, and this idea has more objective reality than
any idea of a finite substance.
5. The idea of God could not have originated in me, since I am a finite
substance.
Therefore, God must exist as the only possible cause of the objective reality
found in my idea of Him.
D. Objections to the argument and replies.
1. Perhaps our idea of God is gotten from a negation of our limited properties.
Reply - We must have an idea of perfection before we can have an idea of
limitation.
2. Perhaps the idea of God is materially false.
Reply - The idea of God is the most clear and distinct of our ideas.
3. Perhaps I am more perfect than I think and contain the perfections I
attribute to my idea of God potentially.
Reply - Potential reality is not enough to cause the objective reality of my
idea, and I will never have the actual perfection needed since I am a finite
being, always capable of improving
E. The argument from my existence: It can also be argued that a cause more
perfect than myself must be assumed to explain my coming into being and my
continued existence. This cause must be God.
F. Objections to the argument from my existence.
1. Why must this more perfect being who is the cause of my idea of God and
of my existence be taken to be God?
Reply - Any finite cause must itself be caused by something else and the
regress must end a some point with an infinite or perfect cause.
2. Why cannot there be several partial causes for my existence?
Reply - Unity is one of the main perfections in my idea of God; this must have
been caused by a unified being.
G. God cannot be seen as a deceiver, since He is perfect and deception
depends upon some defect.
II. Meditation Four: Descartes explains the possibility of error.
A. I know that God is not a deceiver and that God also created me along with
all my capacities. I also know that I am often in error. This error cannot be due
to the correct operation of any faculty which God has created in me, for this
would make God a deceiver. I must inquire, therefore, into how it is possible
that I can err even though I am the product of a benevolent God.
B. Error is due to the concurrent operation of the will and the intellect. No
error is found in the intellect. Error consists in the will, in its judgments, going
beyond what the intellect clearly and distinctly perceives to be the case.
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C. God cannot be blamed for giving us a free or unlimited will which it is
possible for us to abuse and thereby fall into error.
D. The way to avoid error is to refrain from judgment until our intellect sees
the truth clearly and distinctly.
III. Meditation Five: Descartes considers what properties we can know to
belong to the essence of material things and also considers another way of
proving God's existence by considering what properties we can know to
belong to God's essence.
A. When I examine those ideas of corporeal objects that are distinct and not
confused, I find that these are properties concerned with extension and
duration: length, breadth, depth, size, shape, position, and movement.
1. When I discover particular things about these properties, it seems as if I am
recalling something I already knew, something already within me.
2. Although they seem to be already in me, I am not the source of these ideas:
they have their own immutable natures which would be the same whether or
not I existed, or whether there exists any object that corresponds to these
ideas.
3. Neither do these ideas come to me through the senses: I can form an idea
that it is impossible to imagine or sense (such as the thousand sided figure
mentioned in Meditation Six) and demonstrate many necessary truths
concerning its nature.
B. The Ontological Argument for God's existence.
1. We have as a general principle that when I consider an idea, all that I
perceive clearly and distinctly as pertaining to that thing really does pertain to
it.
2. I understand clearly and distinctly that necessary existence belongs to the
essence of God.
3. Therefore, existence really does belong to the essence of God and, hence,
God exists.
C. Objections to the argument.
1. In all other cases we separate existence from essence.
Reply - It is impossible to conceive a perfect being as lacking a perfection,
existence.
2. Granted that we cannot think of God except as existing, still our thought
does not make him exist.
Reply - It is the necessity of God's existence that imposes the necessity on our
thought, not the other way around.
3. We need not assume that God has all perfections, including existence.
Reply - It is impossible in conceiving a supreme being to avoid attributing all
perfections to Him.
D. The role of God in making knowledge possible.
1. Even though we naturally take those things we perceive clearly and
distinctly to be true, if I were ignorant of God I could still find reason to doubt
these things once my attention was not fixed firmly on their demonstration.
2. In particular I might think that I was constituted so as to be deceived about
things that I believe I see quite evidently.
3. Once we are aware of God's existence and that he cannot have made us so
as to be deceived about what we see clearly and distinctly, we cannot be
deceived as long as we assent only to what we see clearly and distinctly. It
does not matter if we are in fact dreaming; what our intellect tells us is wholly
true.
4. Therefore, the truth and certainty of every science depends upon the
knowledge of God.
Synoptic Outline of Meditation Six
On the Distinction of Mind and Body and the Existence of Material Objects
I. Introduction to the problem of the existence of material things.
A. I know that material objects exist insofar as they are objects of pure
mathematics, since I clearly and distinctly perceive the mathematical primary
properties of corporeal objects.
B. It also seems that my imagination gives me evidence of the existence of
external objects. Therefore, we must investigate this faculty.
II. The distinction between Imagination and Intellect.
A. When I imagine something, I intuit that thing as present to my mind.
B. Imagination is thus distinct from thought since I can think of things without
intuiting them as present. An example is a thousand sided figure, the chiligon.
I can think of this even though I cannot form an image of it.
C. Effort is required for imagination, while it does not seem to be for Thought.
D. The faculty of Imagination is not essential to me. I can exist without this
faculty.
E. In thought the mind turns on its own ideas. In imagination the mind turns
toward the body.
Therefore,
F. The imagination seems to require the existence of the body, but this is only
a probability. We cannot yet say certainly that a body exists.
III. The evidence for the existence of corporeal things from the senses.
A. Summary of old beliefs that I got from the senses: all of my impressions of
the secondary properties of objects.
B. Reasons for thinking that these showed the existence of objects.
1. These ideas appeared against my will.
2. They are more vivid than those ideas I imagine.
3. All of the ideas that I form through imagination are composed out of
components that come from the senses. Nothing is in the imagination that was
not first in the senses.
4. I sense pain and pleasure in my body, but not in objects external to me.
C. Reasons for doubting that these things show that material objects exist.
1. The senses often show things to me about objects hat I know cannot be true.
For example, a tower in the distance seems round when in fact it is square.
2. People sometimes fell pain in limbs that have been amputated, so the
feeling of pain in our body gives no evidence for its existence.
3. It may be possible that I am dreaming.
4. I may be constituted by nature so as to be deceived about things I think I
see clearly.
5. There may be some unknown faculty in me that produces these ideas in me
even against my will.
IV. The argument for the distinction of mind and body and the existence of
material objects.
A. The distinction of mind and body.
1. The argument from knowledge.
a. If I clearly and distinctly understand one thing as distinct from another it is
so.
b. I am certain that I exist as a thinking thing, while I am not certain of the
existence of my body.
Therefore,
c. I am a thinking thing and nothing else. My mind is distinct from my body.
2. The argument from extension.
a. I am a thing that thinks and not an extended thing.
b. I have a distinct idea of body as an extended thing.
Therefore,
c. My mind is distinct from my body.
B. The argument that material objects exist.
1. I can understand myself without imagination and sense, but I cannot
understand imagination and sense without attributing them to a thing that
thinks.
2. Movement is a power of mine, but movement is a power only of extended
things
Therefore,
3. It seems that although I am essentially a thinking thing, I am not only a
thinking thing. It at least seems to me that I also have an extended body, but
we must now see how we can be certain of this.
4. I not only have the power of passive sense, of examining the contents of my
mind, but I also have active sense, the power of originating ideas within my
mind. This faculty of active sense cannot be within me for two reasons:
a. No intellection is required for this active sensing.
b. These ideas come to me by active sense against my will.
Therefore,
5. This faculty is in a substance other than myself.
6. This substance much have as much reality as the objective reality of the
ideas it produces.
Therefore,
7. This substance must be either God or an external extended body.
8. God is no deceiver.
9. He created me and gave me a great inclination to believe that these ideas
come from corporeal things.
10. If they do not come from external objects, then God must be a deceiver.
But this is an absurdity.
Therefore,
11. Material objects exist.
C. These objects, however, may not be as they seem to us through the senses.
Having established the existence of external objects, Descartes goes on to
consider whether our senses tell us the truth about them.
V. The relation of Mind and Body.
A. I am intimately joined with my body. Feelings of pain and pleasure are
confused modes of perception arising out of my union with the body.
B. We have many ideas from sense, but our nature does not teach us to
conclude anything from these unless there is an inquiry by the intellect. Mind,
not the composite of mind and body is capable of knowing truth.
Therefore,
C. The senses tell us only what is necessary for the welfare of the composite
of mind and body.
D. With respect to the essences of things the senses are confused.
E. The poison objection: It would seem that it some cases our senses do not
tell us what is best for the welfare of our body. For example, many poisons
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seem attractive to the senses, or an ill person may desire something injurious
to her.
VI. Is God, therefore, to blame for giving us sensory faculties that sometimes
lead us into harm?
A. The body is like a machine.
B. Mind and Body are distinct. This can be seen by noting that mind is
indivisible, while body is divisible.
C. Mind is affected only by the brain, so all signals from the body must travel
up into the brain.
D. Signals travel to the brain from the periphery of our body by means of
animal spirits, so the system is like a cord running to the brain which can be
pulled at any point along its length. Thus we can get signals in the brain that
do not originate in our senses, but which we perceive as doing so.
Therefore,
E. Even though this is the best possible arrangement to protect our body, it is
possible to be deceived by a cause of a disturbance in our animal spirits within
our body rather than outside it. Thus God cannot be blamed for this
arrangement.
VII. Being aware of this arrangement, I can use memory and intellect to avoid
error by restricting my judgment to those things I perceive clearly and
distinctly. We can return all those beliefs which we formerly took as doubtful,
while disposing of those which led us astray.
4. The Mind
a. Cogito, ergo sum
In the Second Meditation, Descartes tries to establish absolute certainty in his
famous reasoning: Cogito, ergo sum or “I think, therefore I am.”
These Meditations are conducted from the first person perspective, from
Descartes.’ However, he expects his reader to meditate along with him to see
how his conclusions were reached. This is especially important in the Second
Meditation where the intuitively grasped truth of “I exist” occurs. So the
discussion here of this truth will take place from the first person or “I”
perspective. All sensory beliefs had been found doubtful in the previous
meditation, and therefore all such beliefs are now considered false. This
includes the belief that I have a body endowed with sense organs. But does the
supposed falsehood of this belief mean that I do not exist? No, for if I
convinced myself that my beliefs are false, then surely there must be an “I”
that was convinced. Moreover, even if I am being deceived by an evil demon,
I must exist in order to be deceived at all. So “I must finally conclude that the
proposition, ‘I am,’ ‘I exist,’ is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by
me or conceived in my mind” (AT VII 25: CSM II 16-17). This just means
that the mere fact that I am thinking, regardless of whether or not what I am
thinking is true or false, implies that there must be something engaged in that
activity, namely an “I.” Hence, “I exist” is an indubitable and, therefore,
absolutely certain belief that serves as an axiom from which other, absolutely
certain truths can be deduced.
b. The Nature of the Mind and its Ideas
The Second Meditation continues with Descartes asking, “What am I?” After
discarding the traditional Scholastic-Aristotelian concept of a human being as
a rational animal due to the inherent difficulties of defining “rational” and
“animal,” he finally concludes that he is a thinking thing, a mind: “A thing
that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, is willing, is unwilling, and also
imagines and has sense perceptions” (AT VII 28: CSM II 19). In
the Principles, part I, sections 32 and 48, Descartes distinguishes intellectual
perception and volition as what properly belongs to the nature of the mind
alone while imagination and sensation are, in some sense, faculties of the
mind insofar as it is united with a body. So imagination and sensation are
faculties of the mind in a weaker sense than intellect and will, since they
require a body in order to perform their functions. Finally, in the Sixth
Meditation, Descartes claims that the mind or “I” is a non-extended thing.
Now, since extension is the nature of body, is a necessary feature of body, it
follows that the mind is by its nature not a body but an immaterial thing.
Therefore, what I am is an immaterial thinking thing with the faculties of
intellect and will.
It is also important to notice that the mind is a substance and the modes of a
thinking substance are its ideas. For Descartes a substance is a thing requiring
nothing else in order to exist. Strictly speaking, this applies only to God
whose existence is his essence, but the term “substance” can be applied to
creatures in a qualified sense. Minds are substances in that they require
nothing except God’s concurrence, in order to exist. But ideas are “modes” or
“ways” of thinking, and, therefore, modes are not substances, since they must
be the ideas of some mind or other. So, ideas require, in addition to God’s
concurrence, some created thinking substance in order to exist (see Principles
of Philosophy, part I, sections 51 & 52). Hence the mind is an immaterial
thinking substance, while its ideas are its modes or ways of thinking.
Descartes continues on to distinguish three kinds of ideas at the beginning of
the Third Meditation, namely those that are fabricated, adventitious, or innate.
Fabricated ideas are mere inventions of the mind. Accordingly, the mind can
control them so that they can be examined and set aside at will and their
internal content can be changed. Adventitious ideas are sensations produced
by some material thing existing externally to the mind. But, unlike
fabrications, adventitious ideas cannot be examined and set aside at will nor
can their internal content be manipulated by the mind. For example, no matter
how hard one tries, if someone is standing next to a fire, she cannot help but
feel the heat as heat. She cannot set aside the sensory idea of heat by merely
willing it as we can do with our idea of Santa Claus, for example. She also
cannot change its internal content so as to feel something other than heat–say,
cold. Finally, innate ideas are placed in the mind by God at creation. These
ideas can be examined and set aside at will but their internal content cannot be
manipulated. Geometrical ideas are paradigm examples of innate ideas. For
example, the idea of a triangle can be examined and set aside at will, but its
internal content cannot be manipulated so as to cease being the idea of a three-
sided figure. Other examples of innate ideas would be metaphysical principles
3

like “what is done cannot be undone,” the idea of the mind, and the idea of
God.
Descartes’ idea of God will be discussed momentarily, but let’s consider his
claim that the mind is better known than the body. This is the main point of
the wax example found in the Second Meditation. Here, Descartes pauses
from his methodological doubt to examine a particular piece of wax fresh
from the honeycomb:
It has not yet quite lost the taste of the honey; it retains some of the scent of
flowers from which it was gathered; its color shape and size are plain to see; it
is hard, cold and can be handled without difficulty; if you rap it with your
knuckle it makes a sound. (AT VII 30: CSM II 20)
The point is that the senses perceive certain qualities of the wax like its
hardness, smell, and so forth. But, as it is moved closer to the fire, all of these
sensible qualities change. “Look: the residual taste is eliminated, the smell
goes away, the color changes, the shape is lost, the size increases, it becomes
liquid and hot” (AT VII 30: CSM II 20). However, despite these changes in
what the senses perceive of the wax, it is still judged to be the same wax now
as before. To warrant this judgment, something that does not change must
have been perceived in the wax.
This reasoning establishes at least three important points. First, all sensation
involves some sort of judgment, which is a mental mode. Accordingly, every
sensation is, in some sense, a mental mode, and “the more attributes [that is,
modes] we discover in the same thing or substance, the clearer is our
knowledge of that substance” (AT VIIIA 8: CSM I 196). Based on this
principle, the mind is better known than the body, because it has ideas about
both extended and mental things and not just of extended things, and so it has
discovered more modes in itself than in bodily substances. Second, this is also
supposed to show that what is unchangeable in the wax is its extension in
length, breadth and depth, which is not perceivable by the senses but by the
mind alone. The shape and size of the wax are modes of this extension and
can, therefore, change. But the extension constituting this wax remains the
same and permits the judgment that the body with the modes existing in it
after being moved by the fire is the same body as before even though all of its
sensible qualities have changed. One final lesson is that Descartes is
attempting to wean his reader from reliance on sense images as a source for,
or an aid to, knowledge. Instead, people should become accustomed to
thinking without images in order to clearly understand things not readily or
accurately represented by them, for example, God and the mind. So, according
to Descartes, immaterial, mental things are better known and, therefore, are
better sources of knowledge than extended things.
5. Blondel’s Metaphysical Trilogy
In his later years, Blondel returned to the themes of L’action (1893), this time
as a moment in a much more explicitly worked out metaphysical trilogy, La
Pensée (2 vol.) in 1934 and 1935, L’être et les êtres in 1935., and a new
version of L’action (2 vol) in 1936 and 1937. The later works reflect not only
a deepened philosophical conception of the problems Blondel grapples with,
nor simply a greater contact with and comparison to the thoughts of other
philosophers, but also a more systematic structure of the problems. By treating
the categories of thought and being rigorously in two separate, but related,
works, he evades some of the difficulties that arise by placing action as the
primary category. The various studies, however, form a cohesive whole,
which is, in the end, rounded out by his more properly theological works,
L’esprit chrétien and Les exigences philosophiques de chrétienité, and All of
them culminate, like the first L’action, in considerations of the “option” and in
the relationship to God. Only a greatly adumbrated account can be given here
of these five volumes of work, but perhaps the key points can be made
evident. In terms of this article, this requires a presentation that departs from
Blondel’s explicit structuring of the works and instead places the key points in
relation to each other synthetically.
In La Pensée, Blondel outlines a doctrine of “unthought thought”, or “cosmic”
thought, thought that has not been thought by any human thinker, but
nonetheless admits partially of being brought to intelligibility in a mediated
fashion by human thinkers. This intelligible structure of phenomena does not
remain, however, for the observer, merely immanent structures of phenomena,
a dialectic of nature to be discovered and participated within. Nor does the
thinking subject alone supply the determination to the reason and order it finds
in the cosmos it explores, as in a dialectic of spirit. The thinking and acting
human subject represents, not the ground of being and thought, nor simply a
function or product of being or previous human thought, but rather an
insufficient acting and thinking being whose action has its intelligibility and
whose thought has its power of action only partly on its own basis. In effect,
Blondel elaborates a dialectic of the supernatural that does not, as those of
German Idealism do, reduce the spiritual to the human, a dialectic between
nature, spirit, and God, which is a dialectic unfinished but not undetermined
from the perspective of the human agent. In La Pensée, this takes place in
terms of intelligibility , and in terms of the relationship of the subject to two
constituitive types of thought.
In L’être et les êtres, the same problematic is approached in ontological terms,
ultimately through the notion of created being. Blondel denounces various
forms of what he calls “ontologisme”, ontologies that falsely hypostatize or
reify some aspect of being as the ground or essence of all other beings and of
Being itself. As he noted in La Pensée and comes to note in both L’action
(1893) and the later L’action. There are striking similarities, given this
formulation, between Heidegger’s insistences throughout his works that the
question of Being has been reduced in each historical epoch to questions about
beings; however, Blondel’s analyses both radically depart from Heidegger’s
claim that all valuation is simply illegitimate projection onto Being on the part
of the subject, and that the Christian God, as concept in a philosophical-
theological system (for instance that of Thomas) does not address Being, but
only a being to which all other beings are placed into relation.
In order to preserve and do justice to both the mysteriousness of Being, and
the constant determination of beings, these cannot be strictly separated from
each other by a concept of “ontological difference” as Heidegger claims.
Rather than Being having to be unfigurable, it must be figured, there is an
exigency within our very relation to Being that requires us to give it, and to
discover within it, determination and solidarity not only between beings and
other beings, the immanent order, but also between beings and Being, the
order of transcendence. At the same time, from the human side, the thought of
this, the being that supports this, and the action that produces this is always
insufficient, meaning not that it necessarily fails, but that it requires the
succor, teleological draw, and assistance of a greater Being, the “uniquely
necessary”. Blondel argues that this is the Christian God.
It is for these reasons that the concept of created being is taken by Blondel to
be the only truly coherent and consistent one. Any other ontology, in
particular those of various forms of idealism, is more than simply a theory
about the structure of and essence of beings; it is also an act of the willing
subject, an act that covertly places the willing subject and its experiences as
the center and ground of all other than itself, a form of self-idolatry. The
central problem with such a position is not, however, simply that it is
idolatrous, but that it betrays itself and its self-imposed philosophical task;
such a position inevitably requires dismissing or reducing to another domain
central phenomena of human historical existence. It is only through a study of
being that acknowledges the insufficiency but also the capacity of the creature
to know creation and the Creator that the being of the human person can be
properly grasped. This has, as a consequence, the effect of arguing against the
4
privileging of epistemology over a metaphysics of the knowing and acting
subject, a common occurrence in Modernity.
Materiality is the first level of being that Blondel turns his critical attention to,
primarily because materialisms of various sorts, as well as idealism as
reactions against the stultifying effects of materialism, is a very common
prejudice of Modernity. Blondel reiterates his argument made earlier in the
article “L’illusion idéaliste” that any form of materialism that takes matter as
something absolutely self-sufficient, as the ground of which all determinate
things are made is actually a covert form of idealism, since it hypostatizes a
concept, namely that of matter, and simply assumes the reducibility of all
phenomena to arrangements of matter, actually to idealized structures. At the
same time, Blondel does not aim to simply replace the concept of matter with
that of thought and generate a new idealist system. Rather, his concern is to
take account of the role of matter. Here, his account bears similarities to both
the Thomistico-Aristotelean and the Marxist accounts of matter. For Thomas,
prime matter is a mere conceptual necessity, a being of reason, but at the same
time, our spiritual nature cannot be extricated absolutely from our matter,
which provides the possibility not only for passion and duration, but also for
action, sensation and intellection itself. Marx makes a distinction between
vulgar materialism, which views matter and spirit as completely separate, and
dialectical materialism, which views matter as already inhabited by spirit.
For Blondel, matter likewise does not simply provide the possibility of
individuation and differentiation, but also of the solidarity of phenomena,
even those of different orders, not least because being material also means at
the same time insufficiency and determination.
Just as matter serves to separate them [beings] from Being in-itself , it also
permits a participation without possible confusion with it. (EE.78)
Our material nature and the material nature of other beings we are in relation
reflects our nature as thinking beings, a nature which, however, is not
determined by an univocal or single grounding kind of thought.
If we have to speak according to sensible appearances and according to the
common imagination, it is thought that seems to be contained in organized
matter. Quite to the contrary, it is matter that is comprised between two very
real faces of imperfect thought, of a thought that, irreducible to diaphanous
unity, senses itself everywhere, in its effort to know (connaître), to will, to act,
and to perfect itself, faced with an obstacle, a wall, an opacity, not, certainly,
absolutely inscrutable, but which never allows itself to be entirely suppressed,
to be entirely traversed. . . . So, matter is less a thing (chose) than the common
condition of the resistances that all things (choses) oppose to us, and that we
ourselves oppose to ourselves. (EE 80)
This thought finds itself split.
Our thought assumes two forms, neither self-sufficient in isolation nor directly
connected, which we cannot therefore define either in their separate being or
in their conjunction, and which operate, like all the generations of nature, in
darkness and a kind of unconsciousness (Vol. 2. 41)
Blondel calls one of these forms noétique, the type of thought that unifies, that
grasps universally and abstractly. The other form is the pneumatique, thought
that grasps the particular, that penetrates to singularity. Both of these require
the mediation of the other, and the task of the management of these introduces
new possibilities of error, or rather of making the grounds of certain errors
clear, errors which correctly recognize part of the being that they
misunderstand. On the one hand, one can attempt to grasp all beings, thought
and action primarily through the medium of abstraction, imposing strictures
thereby upon what can be considered to be real, and thereby taken into
consideration. On the other hand, one can go to the other extreme and
privilege something particular or singular as the sole reality, around which all
else is organized.
The exigencies that these two forms of thought necessary for human being and
action impose are irreconcilable in any absolute sense for a human being. This
introduces two other exigencies, one of the human relation to self, the other of
the human relation to God. First, the insufficiency of human thought requires
that all thought must be placed in relation to, but not reduced to practical
comportment. Moral action and speculative knowledge thereby both depend
on the use to which the willing subject puts the two types of thought, not
allowing itself to be dominated by either type while it relies upon them for
determination of the relationships to self, world, and ultimately to God.
Second, the recognition of such insufficiency also requires, given the fact that
human action and thought does in fact possess a limited sufficiency, a
recognition of what allows that to take place, namely the supernatural order,
and ultimately the creative and loving action of God.
Thought, being and action are not three separate categories that could be
schematically or deductively arranged apart from one another. To begin with,
both thought and action are modes of being; neither one of them could be
completely separated from a general study of being, but, on the other hand,
neither one of them is simply reducible to a type of being, so that, having
determined general characteristics of being, one would have at the same time
defined and determined all characteristics of thought and action. All thought is
a kind of action as well, without, again, thought being reducible to action;
being requires for its part activity as well as duration and determination, and
to be already implies, not just for the human, but at all levels of being, action.
Thought provides coherent and reflective intelligibility to both being and
action, a capacity for self-determination, limited by its insufficiencies to fully
determine being or action, but also acting as a guiding function of both.
The metaphysical trilogy is rounded out by the partially unfinished theological
work, L’esprit chrétien (completed by the two studies, Le sens chrétien and
De l’assimilation, brought together in the work, Exigences philosophiques du
christianisme), towards which all the texts of the trilogy lead. The analyses of
the previous works lead to the point where the insufficiency of solely human
thought, being, and action was successively demonstrated. At the same time,
this insufficiency was always in relation to the Absolute, not an absolute
insufficiency; human being, thought, and action possess determinacy, and a
limited substantiality and consistency. Philosophy, carried out rigorously and
in as much self-honesty as possible, ends up revealing its own limitations, the
areas where it no longer possess a full competence. It retains, however, a role
in relation to the Absolute, to the relationship to the Absolute that is religion,
and, for Blondel, in particular Catholicism. Jean Lacroix provides an excellent
summation of this:
On the one hand, rational thought has revealed exigences and aspirations to
which a revelation must answer. . . . On the other hand, if it is truly an answer,
this revelation in turn must nourish reason itself, must magnify it in some way
and enable it to develop in a way that it could not have done on its own.
(Maurice Blondel: An Introduction to the Man and his Philosophy, p. 65)
6. Blondel’s Methodology
Blondel, because of the systematicity of his work, has been called the “French
Hegel” and the “Catholic Hegel”. In his main works, Blondel develops
dialectical treatments of a set of levels of the phenomena under investigation,
beginning from the requirements imposed by the subject matter itself. He
treats the level of the acting subject early on in each of his works, first
demonstrating that the subject cannot be reduced to any type or order of
objectivity, whether it be of . The similarities to the Hegelian use of the
dialectic lie in Blondel’s attention to structures of mediation and the role of
determinate negation. Indicating the determination of the immanent by the
transcendent does not mean referring the order of immanence simply to an
order of transcendence or to a single transcendent moment, but rather means
uncovering structures of mediation, by which the order of immanence is
mediated by the entire structure of the transcendent, including by other levels
relatively transcendent to the level treated as transcendent in relation to the
immanent order, the order of phenomena being investigated. For instance, the
social order is transcendent to the order of individual subjects, and mediates
them in relation to each other and in the relation of the subject to itself, but the
social order is itself mediated by larger social structures of shared history, and
by the order of religion in relation ultimately to the Christian God.
This requires that the point of view, of analysis and description, be shifted
from the immanent order to the transcendent, guided by the structure of
mediation. This means that the immanent order, as in Hegelian Aufhebung, is
not reduced to or nullified by the transcendent now under investigation, but is
rather conserved and affirmed as an integral part of the larger structure and
order, simply recognized as insufficient to itself and as mediated by the
transcendent order. This recognition, from within the process of investigation
of the immanent order, of the need for transcendence in order for the
immanent phenomena to possess their meaning and being, is analogous to
Hegel’s determinate negation, in which the negation of the thesis, the
5
antithesis, emerges from the historical working-out of the truth and meaning
of the thesis. It is through a full investigation of the immanent order, treating
it provisionally as if it were fully self-sufficient and adequate to itself, that the
order indicates its own negativity, its requirement for transcendence.
Blondel’s attention to the structures of the individual subject in the beginnings
of his works does not at all therefore reflect a commitment to an ontology
which would take those individuals as primary, and ontologically prior to the
other levels of structure, in particular the social and the religious, which he
later turns to. In fact, as pointed out earlier, his use of the method of
immanence has as its purpose and aim to indicate the interpentration of those
higher-level structures transcendent to the individual in the very structures by
which the individual, the acting subject, exists. This involves Blondel in a sort
of return to a realism about universals and about social structures, a realism,
however, whose objects remain constrained by the same unfinished .
Ontologically, one can put this in the following way. Individuals and
individual things do not have full being, but the structures in which they take
place do not have full being either. In terms of subject and object, one can say
that both subject and object have an ontological insufficiency, which does not
the same time, negate their reality or their existence.
Whereas, for Hegel, the System found its unity in the subject of Absolute
Knowing, later treated as the philosophical subject or as Absolute Spirit, for
Blondel, the ultimate unity comes in the Christian God as creator, who
remains outside of the order of description of the relations and structures of
the phenomena. Blondel, therefore, rejects Hegel’s insistence that the relation
to the Absolute must, in the end, get beyond representation (Vorstellung) and
assume the condition of Absolute Spirit conscious of itself in relation to its
Other. Blondel also rejects Hegel’s doctrine that at the end of the process of
development, all difference is no longer difference of form but only of
content. For the acting human subject, who acts, thinks, and is, in relation to
the Absolute, History has not come to an end, and humanity is still involved in
processes that also involve development and difference in form as well as
content, meaning that no speculative or theoretical body of doctrine can
legitimately claim full adequacy, while, at the same time, the process of
development remains one inhabited by and guided by a rationality which
humanity and the acting subject can participate within fully.
Blondel’s use of the “method of immanence” (a term taken originally from
Eduoard Le Roi’s works) bears a strong resemblance to methods used by other
philosophical movements of the time. In that Blondel explicitly rejects
anything like the Husserlian epoche, because it makes an unwarranted
assumption of the possibility of suspension of claims to existence as well as a
disengagement from practical and moral comportment, which in tunr does not
allow the meanign of moral and practical phenomena to be grasped, Blondel’s
way of getting at the phenomena bears a closer relationship to the
phenomenologies of Max Scheler and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
From the moment when I pose the theoretical problem of action and when I
claim to discover the scientific solution, I no longer admit, at least
provisionally and to that different point of view, the value of any practical
solution. The usual words of good and evil, of duty, of culpability, that I
employed are, from that moment on, denuded of meaning, until, of there is a
place, I could restitute to them their fullness. (L’action. p.xix)
Scheler develops a hierarchy of values, which is not simply a hierarchy of
meanings relative to each other, but also an order of constitution, ultimately
guided by the value of the Holy that at the same time recognizes the relative
sufficiency and absolute insufficiency of the other orders (utility, pleasure,
life, and culture), and the constant interpenetration of these other orders by the
transcendent as Holy. Merleau-Ponty places a constant emphasis upon the
dialectic of the present and the absent, or the virtual, mediated by structures of
affectivity and the human body, which is it the same time, in so far as it is a
human body, socialized and oriented towards transcendence. On the other
hand, Blondel’s insistence upon engaging with the phenomenon as the
condition for knowledge of it does bear much in common with what
Phenomenology, at its best, purports to require, getting “back to the things
themselves”
Blondel’s readings of other philosophical figures also bears a striking
resemblance to the type of reading carried out under the rubric of
Deconstruction. There are some major differences, however, both in the aim
and the method of the reading. Blondel’s style of reading is to read a text
through fully, eschewing polemics and taking of reified positions until the
doctrines advanced in a text have been adequately understood. Then he
proceeds to develop these doctrines or theses to their fullest extent, acting as if
they were true in order too see what sort of consequences they would have for
the thinking and acting subject. The aim is to assess the adequacy of the
doctrines as the representation of a philosophical position, and this consists in
two parts. First, there is the question of the adequacy of the representation.
Second there is the question of the adequacy of the developed philosophical
position itself. The goal of such a reading is to allow a doctrine or
philosophical position to provide evidence of its own inadequacy on its own
grounds, by indicating to us the extent to which it is true and able to provide
an account of itself immanently, and by thereby indicating to us the extent to
which it is only relatively true and insufficient, without thereby being simply
false.
In his focus upon and demonstration of the inadequacy of the various
philosophical positions and theses Blondel considers in his works, the
mediations of human action that remains irreducible to unreflective practice,
and the necessary requirement of a transcendence which the philosophical
positions and doctrines attempt to efface, disparage, or force into
forgetfulness, Blondel can also be brought into a continuity with certain
Western Marxist figures, perhaps most closely with Theodore Adorno.
Although Blondel does not use the term until his later works, he is intent upon
critiquing reified consciousness and ideology.
Philosophical Context ( LOCKE)
The Essay Concerning Human Understanding is the only work on
epistemology and metaphysics in a lifetime collection dominated by religious
and political writings. There is no indication that Locke showed any interest in
epistemology prior to 1671, electing instead to focus his energies on questions
of politics, religion, and science. In a famous paragraph in the Essay's,
"Epistle to the Reader," Locke explains what drew him suddenly to the study
of human understanding: while discussing an unrelated subject with friends
(he does not mention what this subject was), he came to the conclusion that no
significant headway could be made in any field until there was an
understanding of understanding itself, in particular of its capacities and limits.
Therefore, he set out to determine what we could and could not hope to
understand by analyzing the human mind and the nature of knowledge. The
Essay can be read as an attempt to ground all of Locke's further inquiries into
politics, religion, economics, education and the like, by drawing the
boundaries that demarcate where a search for answers should begin and end.
The philosophy Locke presents in his Essay is best understood as a direct
response to the two schools of philosophical thought dominating the
intellectual scene of the late 17th century: the Aristotelian-influenced
Scholasticism, which had ruled the Universities since the Middle Ages, and
the Cartesian rationalism, which was challenging Scholastic authority with a
radical new picture of how the mind comes to know. Locke wanted to chart a
middle course between these two views, one that retained the positive features
of each. The Scholastic picture of how the mind works can be summed up the
phrase "nothing in the intellect, not first in the senses." Scholastic
philosophers, following Aristotle, believed that all of our knowledge comes
through our sense organs. They were empiricists, like Locke. However, their
empiricism was of a very naïve form; they believed that our senses are
incapable of systematically deceiving us about the kinds of things that are in
the world. If the senses tell us that there are colors, then there are colors. If the
senses tell us that there are enduring objects, such as tables and chairs, then
there are enduring objects. The trustworthiness of the senses was built into the
theory of how perception operated: on this view, the perceiver took on the
form of the thing perceived and became, in a very obscure sense, like the
object of perception.
Rene Descartes, in his Meditations of First Philosophy, attempted to
revolutionize epistemology. If the Aristotelian view can be summarized as
"nothing in the intellect, not first in the senses," Descartes' position can be
summed up as "no trusting the senses until they have been verified by the
intellect." Descartes believed that the senses systematically deceive us, and
that it is only by properly utilizing our faculty of reason that we can come to
know the world. Like the other rationalists who came after him, such as
Baruch Spinoza and G. W. Leibniz, Descartes believed that the entire natural
world is explicable in terms of a chain of logical connections, and that all we
need do is use our reason to trace these connections to know everything there
is to know.
6
Descartes' primary reason for asserting that the senses systematically deceive
was his commitment to the new mechanistic science, which conflicted with
the Scholastic conception of the natural world. On the Scholastic view, the
most basic units of existence were substances, and these came in an
innumerable variety, each with their own distinct essence, the thing that made
them what they were. All substances were composed of some mixture of the
four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. To explain why anything happened in
the natural world, the Scholastic would appeal to these four elements and the
four primary qualities by which they were characterized - hot, cold, wet, dry.
Descartes simplified this picture considerably. He too called the basic units of
existence substances, but for him substances came in only three types, rather
than in an innumerable variety. There was God, there were minds, and there
were bodies. The essence of mind was thought, while the essence of body--of
matter, of the natural world, of all we see around us--was extension. By
making extension the essence of body, Descartes was able to simplify the
study of the natural world: it no longer involved the complex and obscure
charting of primary qualities flowing in and out of elements. Instead, the study
of the natural world was simply the study of geometry.
This was where Descartes' new epistemology came in. The natural world that
he posited--one that was explicable exclusively in terms of the size, shape, and
motion of matter--sounded nothing like the world our senses represent to us.
We perceive a world filled with things like color, odor, and sound and see
nothing to indicate that the essence of body is extension. Descartes' solution to
this apparent problem was to give more power to the intellect and less to the
senses. On his view, we come to understand the world not by observing it, but
by reasoning about it, starting from ideas innate to the human mind. It is by
reasoning with these innate ideas, he claimed, that he arrived at the discovery
that the essence of body is extension, and it is by reasoning that we can come
to know everything else about the way the world really is.
Like Descartes, Locke, was a proponent of the new science. He too believed
that the natural world was explicable exclusively in terms of shape, size, and
motion of matter, though the particulars of the view he ascribed to were
somewhat different from the Cartesian picture. (Whereas Descartes believed
that all matter was continuous, Locke ascribed to Boyle's Corpuscular
Hypothesis, according to which the natural world is composed of indivisible
bits of matter called corpuscles.) He had to admit, therefore, that Descartes
was right about that the senses do systematically deceive us.
Locke, however, resisted accepting Descartes' epistemology because he held,
like the Scholastics, that nothing came into the mind except via the senses.
The Essay, therefore, is an attempt to reconcile his empiricism with his
commitment to the new science. His aim was to defend an empiricist model of
the mind, while clearing the way for new ideas about the nature of reality.
The attempt had never been made before, but once Locke began the search for
a plausible empiricism, one consistent with science, has never really ended.
George Berkeley and David Hume made the first significant endeavors after
Locke, building on the foundation that their predecessor had so meticulously
laid. In the 20th century the Logical Positivists gave it a worthy shot as well,
as did their nemesis W.V. Quine. Empiricism has, to a certain extent, fallen
out of fashion as of late, but epistemology is still largely guided by the
questions originally posed by Locke and his empiricist followers.
The Essay Concerning Human Understanding is sectioned into four books.
Taken together, they comprise an extremely long and detailed theory of
knowledge starting from the very basics and building up. Book I, "Of Innate
Ideas," is an attack on the Cartesian view of knowledge, which holds that
human beings are born with certain ideas already in their mind. "Of Innate
Ideas" begins with an argument against the possibility of innate propositional
knowledge (that is, innate knowledge of fact, such as the fact that whatever is,
is), and then moves on to an argument against the possibility of innate ideas
(such as the idea of God).
Once he feels secure that he has sufficiently argued the Cartesian position,
Locke begins to construct his own theory of the origins of knowledge. The
short answer is: from experience. The long answer is Book II. Book II lays out
Locke's theory of ideas. He argues that everything in our mind is an idea, and
that all ideas take one of two routes to arrive in our mind: either they come in
through the senses, or else they come in through the mind's reflection on its
own operation. He also classifies our ideas into two basic types, simple and
complex (with simple ideas being the building blocks of complex ideas), and
then further classifies these basic types into more specific subcategories. The
vast majority of this book is spent analyzing the specific subcategories of our
ideas.
Though Book II is primarily an attempt to account for the origin of all our
ideas, it also includes two other very important discussions, only tangentially
related to the subject of the origin of ideas. Chapter VIII contains Locke's
argument for a distinction between primary and secondary qualities. He
attempts to show that there are two very different sorts of relations that can
hold between the qualities of the outside world and our ideas about those
qualities. The relation between primary qualities (e.g. size and shape) and our
ideas of them is one of resemblance; what we sense is roughly what is out
there. In contrast, the relation between secondary qualities (e.g. color and
odor) and our ideas of them is one of mismatch; there is nothing out in the
world that resembles our sensations. In chapter XXIII, Locke tries to give an
account of substance that allows most of our intuitions without conceding
anything objectionable.
Analysis
Because the argument for the claim that there is no universal consent for any
theoretical principles is long and arduous and also extremely important
historically, it demands some detailed analysis. The best way to understand
the argument is by breaking it up into dialogue form, giving both the nativist
and Locke chances to speak in turn. The dialogue opens with the nativist's
statement of his position in unqualified form: There are certain principles that
are universally agreed upon and the only way to explain this is to suppose that
these principles are innate. Locke's primary reply is that there are no such
principles. Even the principles whatever is is and nothing can be and not be at
the same time are not agreed upon by idiots. The nativist then refines his
position: Our knowledge of these principles does not start out as explicit and
conscious knowledge, rather we have tacit knowledge of the principles in
question, and it takes some work to make this tacit knowledge explicit.
Locke's response is to call this position incoherent. It is impossible for
something to be in the mind without our being aware of it; to be in the mind,
to be mental, is to be conscious. This claim is often referred to as Locke's
thesis of the "Transparency of the Mental." It is by no means an
incontrovertible claim. There is, first of all, the problem of memory; we are
not conscious of memories but they are in the mind. There is also the issue of
non-conscious principles, propositions, or bits of knowledge. Even when I am
not thinking that two plus two equals four, I am tempted to say that I still
know it. (In reply to these objections Locke would most likely argue that in
order to get into the mind we had at one time to be conscious of these
memories and truths.) It is because of cases like these that many philosophers
have been tempted to say that knowledge is dispositional; we know something
if and only if we know what to do with it once it comes into awareness.
This is exactly the point that the nativist next makes. It is not really that we
have tacit knowledge, he says, but that we have an innate capacity or
disposition, an inborn ability to entertain certain ideas and arrive at certain
principles. Locke dismisses this position, claiming that the doctrine is empty
because it ends up saying that everything we know is innate (since we
obviously have the capacity to know everything we come to know). He also
points out that it does not really qualify as a theory of innate principles, since
it admits that experience is required to trigger any and all knowledge.
It is not at all clear that Locke's response here is adequate to disprove the
nativist position. At the very least, there is a nativist position very close to the
one stated here that escapes Locke's criticism. This is the position held by the
philosophers G.W. Leibniz and Immanuel Kant. According to Leibniz, we
have a disposition toward knowing certain things and we can find the basis for
this knowledge in ourselves through introspection. He appeals to the
distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification in
order to make this claim. While experience may be required to discover truths,
it cannot be the basis for our knowing them. We could never arrive at claims
about all objects through experience since we never experience anything but a
very limited number of objects. This justification must somehow be supplied
by the mind, and Leibniz claims that the justification is supplied through
innate dispositions toward knowledge. Kant's notion of the categories of
thought plays a similar role; the categories act as innate molds into which we
form our experience in order to arrive at knowledge.
7
Neither Kant's nor Leibniz's formulation of the nativist position is empty in
the way that Locke claims. In addition, both can be seen as real nativist
claims, contrary to what Locke argues. Though experience is necessary to
trigger knowledge on these models of the mind, experience is not sufficient
for knowledge. Innate categories of thought, in the form of certain innate
principles, are needed if human beings are to arrive at any knowledge through
experience.
Locke's nativist, however, is unaware that he has not yet lost this particular
argument. Rather than pointing out that Locke misunderstood his claim
(which, of course, would be impossible, since the nativist is simply Locke
playing devil's advocate with himself) the nativist tries once again to
reformulate his position. Locke and the nativist continue to wrangle for a few
more pages before Locke considers the battle won. Given his crucial mistake
in characterizing the nativist claim regarding dispositions, however, he is not
really justified in believing that he defeated the nativist. Whether or not he
might have been able to think up an objection to the position as formulated by
Leibniz and Kant, he failed to do so in the Essay, and so as an argument
against innate knowledge, Book I fails.
In Book III, "Of Words," Locke turns from philosophy of mind to philosophy
of language. Ideas, however, are still an important part of the picture.
According to the theory of meaning that Locke presents, words do not refer to
things in the external world but to the ideas in our heads. Locke, relying
heavily on his theory of ideas, attempts to give an account of how we form
general terms from a world of particular objects, which leads him into a
lengthy discussion of the ontology of types (that is, the question of whether
there are any natural kinds out in the world or whether all classifications are
purely conventional).
Book IV, "Of Knowledge and Opinion," finally gives us the long awaited
theory of knowledge. Locke begins with a strict definition of knowledge, one
which renders most sciences (all but mathematics and morality) ineligible.
Knowledge, according to Locke, is the perception of strong internal relations
that hold among the ideas themselves, without any reference to the external
world. He lists four sorts of relations between ideas that would count as
knowledge (identity/diversity, relation, coexistence, actual existence), and
then distinguishes between three grades of knowledge (intuition as the
highest, demonstration as a middling level, and sensitive knowledge as a sort
of pseudo- knowledge). The remainder of the book is spent discussing opinion
or belief, which is the best we can hope for from nearly all our intellectual
endeavors.
Locke is very careful to refrain from speaking as if opinion is "mere opinion;"
he is not a skeptic and does not believe that science is futile. On the contrary,
he is very eager to claim in the last chapters of theEssay, that we should be
satisfied with this level of certitude and that we should continue collecting
scientific data with gusto. Gaining a better and better opinion of the world is a
worthy goal, and one that he shares. He does ask, however, that we be aware
that as good as our opinions become, they are never going to reach the level of
knowledge.
Important Terms
Abstract general idea  -  A abstract general ideas are the pieces of our mental
geography that correspond to our general terms, such as "man" and "cat", as
opposed to "Socrates" and "Garfield". Our general terms refer to these abstract
general ideas rather than to anything in the world. According to Locke, we
form abstract general ideas by attending to the similarities between particular
ideas and abstracting these out (e.g. the similarities between Felix and
Garfield yield our idea of cat). Locke identifies abstract general ideas with
what the *Scholastics* and *Cartesians* would call *essence*.
Argument from Parsimony  -  In an argument from parsimony, the
conclusion rests on the suppressed premise that it is best to posit as few
existents in the world as possible. Rather than prove conclusively that
something does not exist, an argument from parsimony just shows that any
puzzle that might be solved by positing the existence of the thing in question
can also be solved (better) without positing the thing's existence. There is no
need, therefore, to posit the thing's existence, and so, by the suppressed
premise, we should not. Locke's argument against the existence of secondary
qualities in the world is an argument of this form.
Cartesians  -  Followers of Rene Descartes. See also *rationalists*.
Corpuscular Hypothesis  -  The Corpuscular Hypothesis was a particular
formulation of the *new mechanistic science* of the 17th century,
propounded by Locke's mentor Robert Boyle. According to this theory, matter
is composed entirely of tiny, invisible, indivisible bits, called corpuscles. All
events and states in the natural world can be explained with reference to the
size, shape, and motion of these corpuscles. Locke believed strongly in this
view of reality, and it had a powerful influence on the ideas he expounds in
his Essay.
Demonstration  -  Demonstration is the middle grade of knowledge according
to Locke, not as good as *Intuition* but still a legitimate form of knowledge.
Demonstration is knowledge that proceeds by reasoning out a proof. Each step
of the proof in demonstration must be an intuition, so demonstrative
knowledge depends upon intuitive knowledge.
Empiricism  -  "Empiricism" is a collective name given to a variety of
philosophical doctrines concerned with human knowledge. Empiricists
generally believe that knowledge comes exclusively through experience and
that human beings are born completely without knowledge. In addition to
John Locke, some famous empiricists have been George Berkeley, Thomas
Reid, David Hume, Rudolph Carnap, G.E. Moore, and W.V. Quine.
Epistemology  -  The branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge, belief,
and thought. Epistemological questions include: What is knowledge? How do
we form beliefs based on evidence? Can we know anything?
Essence  -  An important concept in *Scholastic* philosophy, an essence was
supposed to be the quality that made something the type of thing that it was.
The essence of man, for example, was believed to be rational thought because
it is rational thought that distinguishes man from all other beings. The essence
of a knife would be the ability to cut. Descartes tried to demonstrate that there
are only two essences in the world--thought, the essence of mind, and
extension, the essence of body. Locke attempted to demolish the concept of an
essence as anything objectively existing out in the world. Instead, he claimed
that it was only human thought that imposed categories on the world, and thus
that it was human thought that makes things the types of things that they are.
See also *real essence* and *nominal essence*.
Innate ideas  -  Innate ideas are ideas that are present in the mind at birth.
Plato and Rene Descartes are most famous for holding a theory of innate
ideas. Locke's first book of the Essay is an attack on the doctrine of innate
ideas.
Intuition  -  Intuition is the highest grade of knowledge according to Locke.
In intuition, the mind perceives the connections between ideas as soon as the
ideas are understood. Examples of intuitive knowledge would be the
knowledge that I exist and the knowledge that A=A. Intuitive knowledge is
much the same thing as what later philosophers would call analytic truths.
Metaphysics  -  The branch of philosophy concerned with asking what there
is in the world. Questions about *substance* are metaphysical questions, as
are questions about God.
Mode  -  According to Descartes, a mode was a way of being a certain
substance (e.g. square or red). Locke expands considerably upon this
definition. For Locke, a mode is something that depends on substances for its
existence, something that cannot exist independently. Properties such as
square and red are modes for Locke, but so are numbers, and more abstract
concepts such as "gratitude", "beauty", and "hour".
New Mechanistic Science  -  Gaining immense popularity in the 17th
century, this movement sought to replace the messy and complicated
*Scholastic* model of the world with a simpler picture. According to the
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mechanistic view, all explanation can be given in terms of the principles of
matter and motion. Within the mechanistic camp, there were a wide variety of
competing theories regarding what those principles should be.
Nominal Essence  -  Another name for an *abstract general idea*. A nominal
essence is the set of qualities that men have decided to use in order to pick out
a particular type. The nominal essence for gold, for instance, might include
qualities like yellow, shiny, or malleable. Nominal essences can be relative. A
chemist's nominal essence for gold, for instance, might include its atomic
number while a layperson's might will not. As a consequence, a piece of metal
might count as gold for one person and not for another. See also *real
essence*.
Ontology  -  The branch of philosophy concerned with questions of existence.
Ontology is a subcategory of *metaphysics*.
Opinion  -  According to Locke, most of the facts of science and everyday life
are correctly classified under this heading. Opinion differs from knowledge in
that it is only probabilistic and not certain.
Primary qualities  -  Qualities such as size, shape, and motion. According to
Locke these qualities really exist in the external world in a way that roughly
corresponds to how we perceive them. See also *Secondary Qualities*.
Rationalism (Rationalists)  -  "Rationalism" is a collective name given to
several philosophical systems marked by similar strains. Rationalists tend to
believe that reason is extremely powerful, and that by using it we can come to
know almost everything that there is to know. The most famous Rationalists
are Rene Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and G. W. Leibniz.
Real Essence  -  According to Locke the real essence of an object is the
object's microstructure of corpuscles, which gives rise to the observable
properties. Although these microstructures do exist out in the world, real
essences do not generate natural kinds the way the *Scholastics* and
Descartes thought that essences did. This distinction arises because Locke
held that the determination of what part of the microstructure is included in a
thing's real essence is based wholly on the man- made *nominal essence*.
Scholasticism  -  The dominant school of thought in Western Europe from the
Middle Ages through the Age of Enlightenment. Scholastics strictly followed
the doctrines of Aristotle.
Secondary Qualities  -  Secondary Qualities include qualities of color, odor,
smell, and taste. According to Locke, there is nothing in the world that
corresponds to our ideas of these qualities. What we see as "red", for instance,
is really just a colorless arrangement of corpuscles, which, by their particular
size, shape, and motion, have the power to produce in us the sensation of
redness.
Sensitive knowledge  -  The lowest grade of knowledge according to Locke,
it does not even count as a wholly legitimate form, but is more akin to pseudo-
knowledge. Sensitive knowledge is our knowledge that there is an external
world corresponding roughly to our perception of it.
Substance  -  According to the *Scholastics* a substance was the most basic
unit of existence. Descartes agreed, but he reduced the types of substances in
the world from an innumerable mass to only three - God, mind, and Body.
Locke grapples with the notion of substance in Book II of the Essay, where he
mocks both the Scholastic and Cartesian views, but fails to come to any strong
conclusions of his own.
Substratum  -  In attempting to come up with a theory of *substance*, Locke
reluctantly adopts the notion of a substratum as an unknowable, imperceptible,
indescribable basis to which all the qualities of a substance belong. The
substratum is what those qualities are "of".
Transparency of the Mental  -  "Transparency of the Mental" is a phrase
used to describe Locke's assertion, espoused in Books I and II of the Essay,
that nothing can be in the mind without our being aware of it. The assertion is
based on Locke's identification of thought with consciousness.
Veil of Perception  -  "Veil of Perception" is a phrase used to refer to the
notion that our perception of the world is indirect, filtered through the medium
of our ideas. Locke's doctrine of ideas suggests that he subscribes to the veil
of perception, though commentators have argued against this reading.
SECTION XII: on the Academic or Sceptical Philosophy
116-23. There are not to be found more philosophical reasonings on any
subject than those refuting the Atheists by proving the existence of a Deity.
And yet most religious philosophers believe that no one can be so blind as to
be an atheist. At least the knights of old who sought to remove dragons had no
doubt in their existence.
The Sceptic is another enemy of religion who provokes the indignation of all
divines. However, a total sceptic is not to be found because everyone has
opinions and principles by which he thinks and lives.
What is a sceptic? There are several species --
Universal doubt : (that of Descartes and others) of all former opinions,
principles and faculties. But such doubt is plainly impossible and incurable.
Reasoning can never lead any conviction. However, a more moderate form of
this species of scepticism is necessary for the study of philosophy by bringing
impartiality to our judgement and by removing prejudice. We must begin with
clear and self-evident principles, advance carefully, review regularly, and
examine consequences accurately. This is the only method for reaching truth.
Consequential doubt : to find through science and enquiry the fallaciousness
of the mind and the senses questioning even the maxims of common life. Of
course our sense organs can be fallacious by providing the crooked
appearance of an oar in water, the misleading perceptions of a view from a
distance, and the double image of a pressed eye. Obviously the sense alone
cannot be depended upon and our senses require reason as a corrective. The
image made by the senses is not the external object and can merely represent
it. As we move from a table it gets smaller, but this is from our perspective;
the table itself is unaffected. This is a dictate of reason: our images are copies
of an independently existing object that does not change with the perceptions
of it.
But how can it be proved that perceptions of the mind are caused by external
objects and not by the mind itself as in a dream or in madness. Here
experience is silent, for the mind only receives perceptions and cannot gain
experience of their connection with objects.
To take recourse to a Supreme Being is to make our senses infallible, for such
a Being would not deceive. Further, to call into question an external world in
this way would reject the possibility of proving the existence of such a Being.
Qualities such as hard, soft, hot, cold, black, and white are acknowledged as
secondary qualities existing not in an object but in the mind. But this must
also follow with the supposed primary qualities of extension and solidity.
Extension is acquired from the senses of sight and feeling. If all qualities
perceived by the senses are in the mind, then extension is to be found there. It
must be concluded that the ideas of these primary qualities are attained by
abstraction, but this is an unintelligible, absurd opinion. Try to conceive of an
abstract triangle that is neither Isosceles nor Scalene and of no particular size
or shape, and you find that it cannot be done. Remove from matter its primary
and secondary qualities and you annihilate it. Even all sceptics would have to
agree.
Part II
124. Sceptics attempt to destroy reason by argument. But even scepticism
must be driven to the use of reason. Thus sceptics themselves must become
sceptical of their scepticism.
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Sceptical objections to moral evidence or to reasonings concerning matters of
fact are derived from the natural weakness of human understanding, including
the existence of conflicting opinions and our own changing judgements over
the years. But because we cannot avoid making and reacting to decisions
reached moment by moment, later experience and argument is irrelevant and
not a reason for total scepticism. Our actions subvert extreme scepticism. As
soon as sceptical philosophers leave the shade of their cloisters and enter the
world of real objects and sentiments, their principles vanish like smoke.
Where they had grounds for their scepticism is that all reasoning concerning
cause and effect concludes that two objects can be experienced as conjoined
together but not connected. For we cannot conclude that what has been
conjoined together in the past will be in the future, and that this conjoining is
actually a connection. Repetitions in relationships in the past guarantee
nothing for the future. This seems to destroy conviction but does not remove
the need for action.
The main objection to excessive scepticism is this: nothing durable and good
can ever result from it. If we ask the Sceptic, "What are you talking about,
what is your intention?" -- he is silent. A Copernician and a Ptolemaic have
different systems of astronomy, but they are at one in seeking conviction. A
Stoic and Epicurean have principles which effect behaviour. But a Pyrrhonian,
an extreme sceptic, expects no influence on the mind. Indeed, he must
acknowledge, though is unlikely to admit it, that if his principles were
universally accepted, all activity would cease and the world would perish. The
argument against the Pyrrhonian principle of total scepticism is that one must
act and reason and believe if one is to live.
Part III
130. But Pyrrhonism, or excessive scepticism, if corrected by common sense
and reflection, can help yield a durable and useful scepticism. Mankind is
often too dogmatic and unwilling to consider more than one side of an issue.
All need to become aware of weaknesses in human understanding and be
more modest and less prejudicial against those who differ. A small tincture of
Pyrrhonism might help the intellectually arrogant to understand that any
advantage -- if any -- they may have over their fellows is little when
contrasted with the confusion inherent in human nature. A degree of doubt
must accompany every decision.
Pyrrhonian doubt should also warn mankind to limit enquiries to within the
narrow capacity of human understanding. Imagination and speculation can run
out of control, influencing incorrect judgements by not keeping enquiry to
common life and within the confines of experience. Speculation is not the task
of the philosopher and belongs, in any case, to the embellishments of poets,
priests and politicians. The situation of nature before the origin of the world
and beyond to eternity is outwith the remit of the philosopher.
What is within the circle of appropriate investigation for philosophical
enquiry? Demonstration by the abstract sciences should be limited to quantity
and number. Reasoning beyond this boundary is sophistry. All other enquiries
regard matters of fact and existence and are incapable of demonstration. It is
just as conceivable that something does not exist as that it does. Both ideas are
clear and distinct. Existence of any object can only be proven by arguments,
founded on experience, from its cause to its effect. Arguments based upon à
priori reasoning could conclude that anything could be able to produce
anything else. We could reason that a falling pebble could extinguish the sun
or that a person's wish could control the planets. Experience alone teaches the
relationship of cause and effect. And this also applies to moral reasoning
which concerns most of human knowledge and is the source of all human
action and behaviour.
The sciences concerned with causes and effects of general facts include
politics, natural philosophy, physics and chemistry.
Theology has a foundation in reason only as far as it is supported by
experience. Its best foundation is faith and divine revelation.
Morality is not something to be understood but to be evaluated by taste and
sentiment. Beauty is a feeling more than a perception. And if we reason
concerning morality to set a standard, we must evaluate the general taste of
mankind or seek another fact as the object of our reasoning and enquiry.
If we hold a book -- whether of divinity or metaphysics or whatever -- we
should ask:
Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number?
No.
Does it contain any reasoning based on experience concerning matter of
fact and existence?
No.
Then commit it to the flames for it can contain nothing but sophistry and
illusion.
This argument comes from Dr. Berkeley and most of the writings of that
ingenious author form the best lessons of scepticism to be found anywhere.
Yet he professes in a title page (and truthfully) to have written against the
atheists and free-thinkers. All his arguments are sceptical in that they admit of
no answer and produce no conviction.
This paradox and contradiction can only be avoided if there are no abstract or
general ideas but only particular ones attached to a general term. Thus the
term "Horse" brings to mind a creature of a particular shape, size and colour,
and variances can be easily recalled afterwards; but we reason as if they, too,
were present in our mind. The same is true with the term "Number" or the idea
of quantity. Think of one number at a time, and you will conclude that
"Number" cannot be infinitely divisible.
MENO
Overall Analysis and Themes
If Plato's dialogues in general are notable for their depth within a relatively
straightforward framework, the Meno is particularly so. At first glance, the
dialogue seems to proceed quite clearly (albeit with a few somewhat involuted
sections, such as the geometrical quiz given to Meno's slave). It also seems to
settle or establish very little--in the end, no definitive answer is given to the
text's central question of what virtue is.
This simplicity and inconclusiveness, however, hide an extremely ambitious
set of goals. The first such project we encounter concerns the nature of a
definition, a concept quite new in Socrates' time and largely at odds with the
received wisdom of ordinary Greek citizens. That the nature of virtue could
even be a question is remarkable to Meno (and presumably to Plato's early
readers)--indeed, he opens the dialogue not by asking what virtue is, but rather
if and how virtue can be taught.
Thus, much of the initial dialogue is devoted to the idea that virtue must be
rigorously defined before we can deal with subsequent questions about it. This
point is at the heart of the Socratic elenchus, which seeks to clear the ground
of received, unconsidered knowledge in favor of the pursuit of truth. Meno
confidently offers a number of definitions of virtue, but each of them merely
cobbles together various aspects of Greek cultural custom. Socrates then
dissects these to show that they do not meet the requirements of a definition.
Thus, on the pretense of determining what virtue is, Socrates actually pursues
the prior project of showing what fundamental virtue is not. What is really
accomplished in the Meno is not a theory about virtue but rather a theory
about what is necessary to frame a good theory about virtue.
The first such necessity is attention to what is truly universal about "virtue."
Meno's most common error involves naming various examples of virtue
instead of naming what is common to all the examples. A closely related
necessity for a definition is that it cannot use the term to be defined within the
definition itself. Socrates makes this point in the context of Meno's idea that
virtue is the ability to acquire beautiful things. Socrates makes Meno admit
that such acquisition is virtuous only if it is just. But if justice is a virtue, it
cannot be used in the definition of virtue (i.e., Meno has basically defined
virtue as the acquisition of beautiful things in the context of a type of virtue).
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This is truly an awesome project--Socrates (and Plato after him) is trying to
convince a world that has always been confident in its knowledge that it in
fact knows nothing about the things of which it is most certain. What is even
more striking is that he is trying to convince the world not only that it does not
know, but also that it does not even know how to know. Socrates makes no
claim to know the real answer to the question of virtue, but he does claim to
know the basic form that such an answer would take.

Nonetheless, this radical destabilization of everybody's most heartfelt

knowledge about goodness is a painful and disorienting process for Socrates'
interlocutors, who are repeatedly flabbergasted by what they now seem not to
know. This uncertainty comes to a head in the paradox about seeking what
one does not know, which Meno brings up after one of Socrates' unforgiving
deconstructions. How are we to look for virtue without first knowing what it
looks like?

This question inspires Socrates to introduce an early version of his idea of

anamnesis--the idea that learning truth is really a matter of the soul
recollecting what it has learned before its current human birth. This idea has
always been a major focal point for readers of Plato, partly because it seems to
be a radical departure from Socrates' constant claims that he knows he knows
nothing. The theory of anamnesis seems to be a glaringly positive piece of
theory amongst a heap of negatives and deconstructions.

In the end, Socrates has in fact made a few substantive points about virtue
besides the point that to learn it (if it were knowledge) would actually be to
recall it. The most important such point is that the good or virtuous depends
on wisdom: "All that the soul undertakes and endures, if directed by wisdom,
ends in happiness." This will be a recurring theme in the rest of Plato's work--
true virtue is not a matter of custom, but rather of knowledge.

In the Meno, however, this is not stated clearly. There is a lingering conflict
between the conclusion that virtue is, "as a whole or in part," a kind of
wisdom and the conclusion that no one can teach it (so that it cannot be
knowledge). The Meno leaves us hanging between defining virtue as straight
knowledge or as a kind of mysterious wisdom revealed to us by the gods
"without understanding." It is seen as likely that most virtuous men are so by
holding "right opinions" rather than true knowledge. Right opinions lead us to
the same ends as knowledge, but do not stay with us because they are not "tied
down" by an account of why they are right. Thus, we can only depend on
semi-divine inspiration to keep us focused on right opinions rather than wrong
ones.

This dilemma brings us back to Socrates' (and Plato's) original purpose--the

mode of dialogic analysis Socrates pursues with Meno is meant first of all to
show up wrong opinions. Secondly, it is meant to clear the ground for an
inversion of the whole sequence of right opinion and truth. If the requirements
for a definition of virtue can be filled, we would no longer need to test out
opinions blindly (as is done throughout the Meno). Rather, we would have an
account of virtue first--an idea of virtue that is "tied down"--and could
determine the details from there. The Meno only pursues the first part of this
project, but it lays a great deal of groundwork for the second.

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