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Descartes Reinvented
In this study, Tom Sorell seeks to rehabilitate views that are often
instantly dismissed in analytic philosophy. His book serves as a reinterpretation of Cartesianism and responds directly to the dislike of
Descartes in contemporary philosophy. To identify what is defensible in Cartesianism, Sorell starts with a picture of unreconstructed
Cartesianism, which is characterized as realistic, antisceptical but respectful of scepticism, rationalist, centered on the rst person, dualist, and dubious of the comprehensiveness of natural science and its
supposed independence of metaphysics. Bridging the gap between
history of philosophy and analytic philosophy, Sorell also shows for
the rst time how some contemporary analytic philosophy is deeply
Cartesian, despite its outward hostility to Cartesianism.
Tom Sorell is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Essex. He is
the author of six books, including Descartes (1987), Scientism (1991),
and Moral Theory and Anomaly (2000).
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Descartes Reinvented
TOM SORELL
University of Essex
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Contents
Introduction
Unreconstructed Cartesianism Versus Innocent Cartesianism
Innocent Cartesianism and Pre-Philosophical Ways of Thinking
Between History of Philosophy and Analytic Philosophy
Acknowledgements
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Contents
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126
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Cartesian Misogyny?
Cartesian Speciesism
Lesser Parts of Worthwhile Wholes and Rationalist Intervention
Rationalism Again
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Conclusion
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Index
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Introduction
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Introduction
into minds and bodies. They dislike the Cartesian favouritism of mind
over body, the Cartesian favouritism of intellectual capacities over sensitive and emotional ones, and, as they think, the implied favouritism
of male over female. In the same way, they dislike the favouritism of
rational human beings over animals and the rest of nature. And they
dislike the divorce of human nature from the political. These dislikes
are not always well founded when inspired by Descartess own writings, and they do not always hang together. For example, a theory
that emphasises the possibilities of rational self-control in human beings, as Descartess own theory does, is not anti-ecological and is not
necessarily unsympathetic to animals. On the contrary, the possibilities of human self-control may be the only hope for environmentalists
or protectors of animal welfare. Again, although we do not get from
Descartes a picture of the contribution of politics to human improvement, such a picture is not ruled out, and the outlines of a Cartesian
politics are neither impossible to indicate nor unattractive when they
are spelled out. As for the relation between intellectual and sensitive
or emotional capacities, the critics probably exaggerate the tensions
between them. A Cartesian approach is rationalistic, but it does not
imply that we do or should live by reason alone. On the other hand,
it insists that where reason is applicable, it can come to conclusions,
both practical and theoretical, that are objectively correct.
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appearance, and we should not be lulled into belief by conventional wisdom or habit either. Rationalism along these lines
can be associated with foundationalism, the idea that there are
a small number of self-evident truths in the light of which all
or most other truths are evident, or from which other truths
can be derived by self-evident reasoning. Cartesian rationalism extends to ethics and the conduct of life, where it asserts
that detachment from the appetites is sometimes necessary for
distinguishing genuine from merely apparent goods, and for
identifying an order of priority among the genuine goods.
(iv) Unreconstructed Cartesianism puts many of the fundamental
questions of philosophy in the rst person. What can I be certain of ? Am I alone? What capacities really belong to me?
The answers to some of these questions are sometimes essentially rst-personal as well. For example, in Descartess own
Cartesianism the answer to What can I be certain of? consists
initially of two principles. The rst of these I am thinking;
therefore I exist does not remain certain if Rene Descartes
is thinking is put in place of I am thinking, for the existence
of the man Descartes and his thinking is dubitable under the
sceptical hypotheses of the Meditations, while I exist is not. Not
only are some metaphysical and epistemological questions and
answers essentially rst-personal for Descartes; the nature of
the mind in unreconstructed Cartesianism is connected with
the accessibility to the rst person of most or all of the minds
thoughts.
(v) It is from the perspective of the I that Descartes decides provisionally that he is complete as an intellect and a will minus the
capacities of imagination and sensation, and complete minus
a body. The emphasis on the rst-person perspective, then,
facilitates Descartess argument for substantial dualism for
his belief in the conceptual distinctness of the mental and the
physical and in the reality of entirely distinct satisers of those
concepts. It also aggravates the problems of being clear about
the way interaction between mind and body works.
(vi) Finally, unreconstructed Cartesianism insists on the need for a
metaphysics distinct from and more fundamental than natural
science, a metaphysics with its own subject matter of immaterial
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Introduction
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innocent Cartesianism, it is no accident that at any rate natural science is successful, and the explanation of the success consists partly
in the t between theoretical concepts and an independent world,
partly in the existence of concepts playing a role similar to that which
Descartes assigned to the mechanical simples in physical explanation. The belief in the possibility of t between fundamental concepts
and an independent world is foundational in innocent Cartesianism,
but a metaphysical proof that ideas of the simple material natures
are sufcient for a complete and successful science is done away with.
Instead of a proof that natural science can be successful, innocent
Cartesianism indicates an explanation of why natural science is successful. This explanation is partly to do with the human ability to
get beyond a sense-based understanding of phenomena and to arrive
specically at mathematical concepts that the behaviour of physical
objects ts. A related ability to get beyond an appetite-based understanding of what is valuable and harmful explains our ability to perfect
ourselves using practical reason. This is the ability that is central to an
unreconstructed Cartesian ethics, and it is here that unreconstructed
Cartesianism contributes directly to innocent Cartesianism.
The organising thesis of innocent Cartesianism is that natural science, while capable of objective truth within its domain, is not a theory
of everything. There are more forms of systematic and objectively correct self-understanding and reasoning than are provided by natural
science. Brain science does not tell us everything about the mind;
Darwinism does not tell us everything about the place of human beings in nature and what motivates them. There are further authoritative forms of understanding, including those belonging to ethics,
philosophy, and mathematics. The point of insisting on the autonomy
of these forms of understanding is not to meet the supposed need for
an Archimedean point from which science can be shown to be a viable
enterprise, as in unreconstructed Cartesianism. It is rather to insist
on the intelligibility and value of questions and answers to problems
about knowledge, mind, and what human beings ought to do that cannot be pressed into a scientic mould except by force. Nevertheless, to
say that natural science is not a theory of everything is not to say that
natural science tells us nothing, still less that its pretensions to truth
and objectivity are empty or that they mask a brute power-hunger. In
the face of claims like those, innocent Cartesianism takes the side
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Introduction
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Introduction
Now my claim about these precepts is not just that they are Cartesian but also that they are, or have a lot in common with, things we nd
truistic. By we I mean not only philosophers, but educated people in
the West at the beginning of the twenty-rst century. Formulations not
very different from the ones I have just given would look like commonplaces in the wider intellectual world. Thus, it seems truistic to say that
we ought to think for ourselves; that we shouldnt believe everything
is as it appears; that we shouldnt accept assertions uncritically; that
we shouldnt act in the ways we do just because it is the fashion or just
because we are required to do so by those in authority. In order to be
commonplaces these have to be recognised as commonplaces without
much argument or stage setting. I take it they are recognisable as commonplaces. How Cartesian any nonphilosopher is being in accepting
them, especially when they are stripped of any pointed references to
consciousness, is another question and, I concede, a tricky one. For
present purposes, however, I hope it will be enough to indicate why
Descartess application of the precepts goes with, rather than against,
an early-twenty-rst-century grain.
Descartes applies the precepts to arguments from authority that
is, arguments for the truth of propositions based on the identity and
celebrity of the people propounding the propositions. The rst precept of Descartess so-called logic implies that propositions are not to
be accepted as true on the basis of authority; and there is a related
message in Descartess refusal to count as philosophy or science mere
knowledge of what a gure from the philosophical past has said, without being able oneself to say why it is true. The rejection of intellectual
deference is second nature even to those who repudiate Descartess
inuence; so, too, I think is the aspiration to ground claims on evidence for their truth.
I do not deny that many claims which are not commonplaces are
to be found in Descartess writings. I do not deny that one of the
favoured instances of thinking for oneself in Descartes is conducting
oneself through the metaphysical meditations, and that this seems to
many to be involved with solipsism, which is not a widespread intellectual tendency. To concede these things is not, however, to imperil the
claim that in matters of intellectual autonomy there is much common
ground between Descartes and ourselves, the intellectual culture beyond philosophy included. Someone who encounters the instruction
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Discuss critically on an examination paper may nd it hard to comply, but that is not because the instruction belongs to an alien way
of life. Those who are criticised for unthinkingly regurgitating their
teachers views, or their parents views, or the views of their social class
may not in fact be regurgitating those views, or may not be doing so
unthinkingly; but the point of criticising those who are doing so is
surely not obscure. The widespread acceptance of the prohibition on
plagiarism ts in here. So does the tendency to praise what is thought
to be original or new. All of these tendencies are as fundamental to
the Cartesian outlook as claims concerning the methodology of belief,
doubt, consciousness, and God.
It may look less easy to nd common ground with Cartesian rationalism in relation to action than in relation to belief. For Cartesian
rationalism seems to require agents to be highly reective rather than
spontaneous, and when Descartes asks for actions to be backed by
reasons, he often means reasons as opposed to passions or emotions
or sensations. Because it is plausible to say that many actions can
be worse for being consciously thought out, and because Descartes
sometimes urged the suppression of emotions even in cases where to
feel the emotions would attest to ones humanity or loyalty or something else with undoubted value, one can dissent perfectly reasonably
from Descartess requirements for agents. That does not mean, however, that no common ground exists between Cartesian rationalism
and a modern sensibility about action. When Descartes urges the suppression of emotional behaviour, he does so partly because he connects the emotional with compulsive behaviour (see Chapter 5) and
partly because he thinks that emotions can represent as good things
that harm, or at any rate dont improve, the mind and the body. We
can share Descartess dislike of compulsive behaviour without supposing that all passionate behaviour is compulsive. What is more, we
can agree that bodily and mental health are important goods, that
emotions can sometimes point us away from these goods, and that
when they do, the emotions may need to be overridden. We can
also agree with the deeply Cartesian thoughts that detaching ourselves from the emotions for the purpose of controlling them is possible and sometimes useful, and that health is a matter of pursuing
both goods of mind and goods of body, sometimes by strategies of
self-control.
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acknowledgements
I started thinking about the themes of this book in 1993, and then
unexpectedly got involved in other projects. I went back to work on
Cartesianism in 1998. Since then I have had some opportunities to
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Introduction
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Descartes Reinvented
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