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Abstraction and the Real Distinction Between Mind and Body
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
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Descartes contends that he, or his mind, is really distinct from his body. Many philosophers have little patience with this claim. What could be more obvious than that the mind depends on the body? But their impatience often dissolves when they recognize that Descartes only asserts a de re modal statement. To say that one thing is really distinct from another is to say that each can exist apart from the other (AT VII 162: CSM II 114). But should we grant Descartes this de re modal claim itself?
Descartes's argument for the real distinction is based on the assumption that clear and distinct conception provides a reliable guide to possibility.
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References
1 I use the translations of John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny throughout. The parenthetical references to Descartes's writings should be understood as follows:
AT CEuvres de Descartes, Volumes I through XII, Adams, Charles and Tannery, Paul eds., (Paris, France: Vrin 1964-1976).Google Scholar
CSM The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volumes I and II, Cottingham, John Stoothoff, Robert and Murdoch, Dugald trans., (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press 1985).Google Scholar
CSMK The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume III, The Correspondence, Cottingham, John Stoothoff, Robert Murdoch, Dugald and Kenny, Anthony trans., (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press 1991).Google Scholar
2 Descartes uses ‘knowledge’ and ‘conception’ interchangeably in the contexts that I will be concerned with. In the Fourth Set of Replies he speaks of rendering our knowledge (cognitionem) inadequate by abstraction (AT VII 221: CSM II 156). In the First Set of Replies he frames the issue in terms of conception (concipiatur) (AT VII 120: CSM II 85-6). Since one's knowledge of an object is mediated by one's conception of it (AT III 474: CSMK 201), one's knowledge of an object could be adequate only if one's conception of it was adequate as well.
3 In the Fourth Set of Replies Descartes concedes that a finite mind could know that it possesses adequate knowledge of an object's properties, but only if ‘God grants a special revelation of the fact’ (AT VII 220: CSM II 155).
4 I present textual evidence for ascribing an internalist epistemology to Descartes in two unpublished papers, ‘Cartesian Epistemics and Descartes’ Regulae’ and ‘Adequacy and Distinctness in Descartes.’ Plantinga, Alvin discusses Descartes's deontology in Warrant: Tile Current Debate (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press 1993), 11–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
5 Most of Descartes's commentators have neglected the role that abstraction plays in the argument for the real distinction. See the following discussions: Kenny, Anthony Descartes (New York: Random House 1968), 89–95Google Scholar; Wilson, Margaret Descartes (London, England: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1978), 188–200Google Scholar; Williams, Bernard Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin 1978), 115–29Google Scholar; Curley, Edwin Descartes Against the Skeptics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1978), 197–200Google Scholar; Cleve, James van ‘Conceivability and the Cartesian Argument for Dualism,’ Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64 (1983) 35–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Markie, Peter Descartes's Gambit (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1986), 240–69.Google Scholar Two exceptions are Weinberg, Julius R. ‘Descartes on the Distinction of Mind and Body,' in Ockham, Descartes, and Hume: Self-knowledge, Substance, and Causality (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press 1977), 71–82Google Scholar and Yablo, Stephen ‘The Real Distinction Between Mind and Body,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 16 (1990) 149–201, esp. 162-8.Google Scholar
6 Aristotle introduces the notion of abstraction at II, 2-4 in De Anima. Aquinas introduces it at Ia, 85, I in the Summa Theologica. For a brief account of the role that abstraction plays in Aquinas's philosophy of mind, see Norman Kretzmann's contribution to The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas. For a brief discussion of how Aquinas's use of abstraction differs from Aristotle's see Joseph Owen's contribution to the same volume. See Kretzmann, Norman and Stump, Eleonore eds., The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 1993), 140–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar and 49-51 respectively.
7 Locke, John An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, edited with an Introduction by Nidditch, Peter H. (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1975), 173.Google Scholar Michael Ayers emphasizes that Locke's account of abstraction resembles Arnauld's and that Arnauld's account is based on Descartes's. He notes that ‘according to the [Port-Royal] Logic, “abstraction” is not the distinction of parts which can actually stand alone, but the distinction of inseparable aspects.’ See Ayers, Michael Locke, Volume I: Epistemology (London and New York: Routledge 1991), 242.Google Scholar
8 Arnauld emphasizes this point both in the Fourth Set of Objections (AT VII 203: CSM II 143) and in the Port-Royal Logic: ‘geometers do not suppose that there are lines without width or surfaces without depth; geometers suppose only that we can consider length without paying attention to breadth.’ See Arnauld, Antoine and Nicole, Pierre The Art of Thinking, or Port-Royal Logic, Dickoff, James and James, Patricia trans. (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill 1964), 49.Google Scholar
9 Thomas M. Lennon recommends that we turn to the Port-Royal Logic to supplement our understanding of Descartes's account of abstraction. See Lennon, Thomas M. The Battle of the Gods and Giants: The Legacies of Descartes and Gassendi, 1655-1715 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1993), 346–7.Google Scholar
10 Stephen Yablo agrees that to render a conception inadequate by abstraction is to render it unintelligible. He writes that ‘one avoids problematic abstraction by thinking of x in terms of properties such that the supposition of its existing with them alone is not repugnant to reason.’ See Yablo, Stephen ‘The Real Distinction Between Mind and Body,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 16 (1990) 167–8.Google Scholar
11 Daniel Garber notes that ‘When we examine our concepts, we note that some of them are incomplete, and require certain connections to others for full comprehensibility' — the concept of shape, for example, cannot be fully comprehended apart from that of extension. See Garber, Daniel ‘Descartes’ Physics,’ in Cottingham, John ed., The Cambridge Companion to Descartes (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 1992), 297.Google Scholar
12 Contrast Tyler Burge's claim that Descartes would not credit a subject with a thought unless she ‘completely’ understands its content. See Burge, Tyler ‘Individualism and the Mental,’ Midwest Studies in Philosophy 4 (1979) 73–121, esp. 102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Heil, John appears to endorse Burge's claim in The Nature of True Minds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992), 152.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
13 This statement will be qualified in the following section. Transcendental properties, such as duration and number, apply to all classes of things (AT VIIIA 22-23: CSM I 208) and (AT X 419: CSM I 45).
14 See Berkeley, The Principles of Human Knowledge,§§ 12 and 157.Google Scholar
15 John Carriero argues that we cannot appreciate the unity of the Second Meditation unless we recognize that Descartes repudiates the Aristotelian notion of abstraction. See Carriero, John ‘The Second Meditation and the Essence of the Mind,’ in Rorty, Amelie Oksenberg ed., Essays on Descartes’ Meditations (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press 1986), 199–221Google Scholar. The notion of abstraction that I locate in the Second Meditation is distinct from the Aristotelian notion.
16 Hoffman suggests that Descartes introduces straddling modes to avoid positing 'migrating’ modes, modes which pass from one substance to another. See Hoffman, Paul ‘Cartesian Passions and Cartesian Dualism,’ Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 71 (1990) 310–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
17 More specifically, Garber claims that Descartes distinguishes the notion of individuality from the notion of the substantiality of finite bits of material substance. See Garber, Daniel Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1992), 175.Google Scholar
18 Descartes individuates physical bodies on the basis of how they move relative to other bodies within their environment. A body is a collection of parts that moves together (AT VIIIA 53-54: CSM I 233). A body will survive a change among its parts just in case it retains the mereological integrity in virtue of which it can continue to move as a unified whole. So a body will survive rarefaction and condensation (AT VIIIA 43: CSM I 225), but it won't survive being burned to ashes (AT XI 7: CSM I 83).
19 Descartes emphasizes that biological organisms are continually undergoing change (AT XI 247: CSM I 319). But organisms lose their identities (or die [AT VII 153: CSM II 109]) if their parts change in certain ways (AT VII 14: CSM II 10). An organism will not survive a change among its parts if those changes disrupt the internal organization in virtue of which vital fluids circulate through it.
20 I think that this account of individual things is compatible with Descartes's mechanism. Many of Descartes's physiological explanations are framed in terms of the causal and functional relations that obtain among the parts of organisms. I am not ascribing to Descartes the Leibnizian view that individual things are distinguished by an internal principle of unity.
21 Thanks to Louis Loeb, Steve Yablo, and an anonymous referee for a helpful set of comments on an earlier draft of this paper.