DESCARTES’ PRINCIPLES

FOOTNOTES
  1. A literal translation would be ‘Nothing has no characteristics or qualities.’ Descartes did indeed hold that there could be no such thing as a qualitiless substance (for example, a thinking substance which is not thinking); but it does not follow from this that qualities cannot exist without inhering in a substance. I have provided a charitable translation, which is reasonably close to his wording, while allowing the conclusion to follow.

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  2. The Latin is ambiguous here. Most translators read Descartes as saying that errors are not the sort of thing which require God’s co-operation. I think Cottingham is right to take him as stressing that errors are not things at all. This makes the passage exactly parallel to the argument in §23 that God is not the cause of sin, because sins are not things.

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  3. In the Latin, the distinction is between negatio and privatio, and the point is this: We can make true negative statements about God (e.g. that he is not a physical object). But this doesn’t mean that he lacks anything, since he is on a higher plane of existence than a mere physical object. So in the present case, the idea of his deliberately causing people to be deceived whenever they are deceived simply does not apply, since he is the source of all illumination. We, on the other hand, do lack something, namely the difference between our feeble understanding and God’s omniscience. So our errors are due to this privation or defect (or, more strictly, as Descartes hints above, to a defect in our will, since we obstinately refuse to believe only what God tells us through revelation and the light of nature).

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  4. It is important that Descartes makes such a sharp distinction between contemplating what is present to the mind (perception), and affirming (whether to oneself or to another) that it is true. The latter is a separate mental act; and since it is an act, it is performed by the will. It is in principle under our control whether we doubt, believe, or disbelieve the contents of our mind; and this is why it is a defect of our will if we believe things we should not believe, or fail to believe things we should believe.

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  5. The Latin is concilio, which has a number of meanings, including ‘bring together’, ‘unite’, ‘have sex with’, ‘win the favour of’, and ‘obtain’. I have no evidence of its meaning ‘reconcile’ or ‘harmonise’, which is how other translators render it here. In fact, Descartes’ message in this and the next paragraph is that freedom and preordination cannot be reconciled — at least not by our feeble understanding — and that we should not even attempt to reconcile them. He is telling us how to cope with their irreconcilability. As with the union of the soul and the body, it is something we mortals cannot begin to understand, and the best we can hope for is that the mystery will be revealed to us in the afterlife.

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  6. In the sense that we are not compelled to choose this rather than that. Obviously we might prefer one course of action to another, and one might be right and the other wrong. In a Christian context, it is likely that the action we prefer is the wrong one. But the preference comes from the body, and the will itself is absolutely free to choose good or evil.

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  7. As so often, Descartes’ metaphysical terminology is rather loose here. Strictly speaking, each substance has just one attribute, and everything else that can be said of it is a mode, or manner of being, of that attribute. But in the previous paragraph, he used the word ‘attribute’ as equivalent to the vaguer ‘property’ or ‘quality’. In this paragraph, the marginal summary (correctly) has ‘attribute’, whereas the main text has ‘property’, which is only half right. In scholastic philosophy, a ‘property’ is a characteristic which is exclusive to members of a species, but not part of its essence (the standard example was having a sense of humour in human beings). As for the word ‘distinctive’, the primary meaning of the Latin praecipuus is ‘belonging to one thing to the exclusion of all others,’ which is exactly what Descartes means. The standard translation of ‘principal’ wrongly suggests that a substance has more than one attribute, and fails to imply that no other substance can have it.

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  8. In fact, Descartes says ‘mode of extended thing.’ But this is not English, and it would be misleading to say ‘mode of an extended thing,’ since Descartes believed there was only one. The French translator had exactly the same problem, and I have adopted his cop-out: ce qui est estendu for res extensa.

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  9. The Latin variatio can mean either the difference between one thing and another, or change through time. Here Descartes clearly means it in the former sense: qualities are that in virtue of which we are able to distinguish different kinds of thing. When he later denies that there is any variatio in God, he is probably still making the strong claim that God’s attributes are absolutely universal and unvariegated.

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  10. Descartes uses the word modus. It is not always clear when he is using it in a technical sense, or more vaguely to mean ‘way’. Here I think the latter makes better sense, since he is denying that existence and duration have any modes.

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  11. He writes numerus, or ‘number’, which would make no sense in English. But the word is picked up as ‘number’ in the next paragraph.

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  12. The Latin motus means either ‘motion’, or ‘change’ more generally. As a definition of time, I think it would read better as meaning ‘change’ rather than ‘motion’ — but Descartes is clearly thinking of motion in the rest of the paragraph. It is a feature of the early modern mechanical world view that ultimately all change can be reduced to motion. However, the picture is confused by the fact that Descartes believed in a law of the conservation of motion, which he failed to distinguish from momentum. So when he says that the total quantity of motion in the universe remains constant, there is a serious confusion with his definition of time as the ‘measure of motion.’ Indeed, the whole paragraph is seriously muddled. However, the main message is that time is only in the mind, whereas duration is an attribute of things (and presumably of the mind as well). When we measure the duration of things in time, we add the concept of time to duration, by reference to the heavenly bodies. But he does not make it clear whether he is saying that the quantity of motion of a thing is in the thing itself, or in the mind (or both).

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  13. In Adam & Tannery, the French version has ‘doubt’. According to a footnote, ‘The translation does not take account of the list of errata in the Latin edition, where dubitatio is corrected to duratio.’ Oddly, Cottingham reads it as ‘doubt’, and says in a footnote: ‘In place of dubitatione (‘doubt’) AT read duratione (‘duration’); the former reading is undoubtedly correct, and is followed in the French version.’ Presumably Cottingham prefers ‘doubt’ on the grounds that motion is a mode of body, whereas doubt is a mode of mind; and the context demands that they be modes of different substances. But Descartes has recently been discussing the distinction between motion and duration (in §57), and there he seemed to be saying that motion (like time) is a mode of mind, as contrasted with duration, which is a mode of bodily substance.

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  14. Non vacaret — which can mean lack of room, lack of time, or both. I think the spatial metaphor is better in this context.

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  15. Other translations imply that the body was deliberately pursuing the beneficial and avoiding the harmful. But, quite apart from the question of whether the body can have deliberate intentions, Descartes has just said that its motions are random. There is nothing in the Latin which requires to be translated in terms of goal-directed behaviour.

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  16. In fact, Descartes says ‘main specific differences’ (praecipuae differentiae). I say ‘species’ because the term is more familiar; but it comes to the same thing, since a main specific difference is a characteristic which is significant enough to demarcate one species from another. Cottingham takes Descartes as talking of types of nerves. This is possible grammatically, but it doesn’t make much sense, since we have no means of distinguishing types of nerves except by the sensations they produce.

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  17. The Stoic sage was the perfectly wise person, who had achieved the Stoic goal of freedom from passion. Descartes is saying that purely intellectual joy was admissible, since it didn’t involve any ‘passion’ in the sense of the soul being passive with respect to the body, or acted upon by it.

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  18. The Latin word is animalis, which is the adjective from anima, meaning ‘soul’. Although Descartes sometimes uses the word anima instead of the usual animus or mens (‘mind’, as contrasted with body), he normally uses the adjective only in the phrase ‘animal spirits’. Here ‘animal’ refers to the soul which was believed to be common to all sentient and mobile beings — hence ‘animals’. But for Descartes, the animal spirits which filled the bodies of all such beings, and were responsible for all sensation, action, and emotion, were nothing other than a sort of gas consisting of highly rarefied material particles. ‘Physical’ might almost be the best translation, even though it could hardly be less literal.

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  19. In other words, our emotions are sometimes initiated by an intellectual awareness of the situation, sometimes by the imagination, and sometimes by purely physical factors, as in this example.

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  20. Descartes doesn’t really explain why he suddenly uses the word appetitio instead of the more usual appetitus here. There is no obvious distinction in classical Latin, and I don’t know of any precedents in pre-Cartesian philosophy. There may be some; and the issue is quite significant, because appetitio became one of the key concepts in Leibniz’s philosophy. Anyway, Descartes’ point is clearly that any word deriving from the Latin petere (to seek) implies goal-directedness. But only human minds are goal-directed. Bodies, whether human, animal, or inanimate, are at best mechanical robots, and it is a category mistake to describe them in goal-directed terms. Strictly speaking, only human volitions are appetitions or appetites. However, he allows bodily appetites to be described as such because (in the case of human beings) they are invariably accompanied by volitions. The confused ‘affection’ of the soul mediates between the soul’s clear and distinct perception of what it wants, and the blind forces operating in the body.

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  21. Literally ‘by them whole’ (ab illis integris). I agree with Miller that this must mean ‘in all their qualities’, which are specified in the rest of the sentence (though strictly they are ‘qualities’ rather than Miller’s ‘properties’, as is confirmed by the next sentence). Cottingham’s ‘though remaining intact’ is theoretically possible, but doesn’t really make sense in the context — unless perhaps Descartes is taken as denying that objects lose some of their substance in the form of a scholastic species when sensed (i.e. the content of the sensation is not derived directly from the object itself).

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  22. Literally, ‘from their ordinary motion.’ I think Descartes’ point is that ordinarily we are receiving sensations from our skin all the time, but they are modified when we come into contact with an external object. At any rate, this makes more sense than Cottingham’s ‘or have their normal motion checked.’

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  23. For example, there is only a small difference of degree between a fire or curry which warms pleasurably, and one which hurts unpleasantly. Which way it goes in any particular instance will depend on the strength of the body concerned.

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  24. Descartes says that the particles are ‘separated from each other.’ Clearly this is shorthand for their being separated from the bodies and then scattered. When we have food in the mouth, the saliva dissolves off some of the particles, and carries them to the nerves. It is odd to say, as Cottingham does, that the bodies are ‘split up into particles’, since most of the splitting up takes place in the stomach.

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  25. It was a long-established belief that the most rarefied and smallest particles are the most powerful. If you take a dense sludge of grape juice, skins, and stalks, it won’t do much for you. If you leave it for a while, and then extract the nimbler fluid, it will have an effect if you drink enough of it. But if you put it in a still, and collect the most rarefied vapours in a bottle, the product will have a much more dramatic effect, and it really hits your nose if you sniff it. Of course, we are now talking spirits, and for Descartes, spirits, in this purely material sense, are what animate human and animal bodies. An interesting twist on ‘I drink, therefore I am.’ More generally, the ‘essence’ of a substance is what gives it its special powers and virtues. The alchemical idea was that the essence resides in the most refined and volatile parts, which can be extracted by distillation. It is no accident that the French for petrol is essence, since it consists in the active component of crude oil, as extracted by distillation.

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  26. Descartes believed there were three types of material particle: large ones of various shapes and sizes which constituted physical objects; much smaller, spherical ones (these ‘globules of the second element’) which constituted light; and even smaller ones which completely filled the spaces between all other particles, which were required for there not to be a vacuum.

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  27. The Latin of this summary (and of the first sentence) is ambiguous. It could be read as ‘That mind is of such a nature that its various sensations can be stimulated only by motion in the body.’ While it would be fair enough to say that a sensation is not a sensation unless it is stimulated by a bodily event, this is not the point which Descartes makes in the accompanying paragraph, where he refers to any thought whatever. He is making the double point that (a) despite the traditional view that the mind is essentially active, it is capable of being acted upon directly by the body; and (b) there is no resemblance between the affections of the mind, and the bodily motions which cause them.

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  28. The Latin is sensus, sive sensationes. For once I side with Veitch in translating this simply as ‘sensations’. My reasoning is that the classical Latin sensus meant both ‘sense’ and ‘sensation’. There was a medieval Latin word sensatio which meant only ‘sensation’, but Descartes generally avoided it because he wanted to write in pure, classical Latin. Then the Latin sive means ‘or’ in the sense of ‘or in other words’. So by saying ‘sense or sensation,’ Descartes is saying that he means ‘sense’ in the sense of the modern word ‘sensation’. The French translation likewise has the single word sentimens. Other English translations seem unanimous that the translation should be either ‘feelings or sensations,’ or ‘sensations or feelings,’ presumably picking up on the fact that both sensory images and emotions are included later in the paragraph. But if he had intended them as distinct concepts, he would have used vel or aut instead of sive. Descartes is clearly using both sensus and sensatio to mean any affection of the mind arising from the body.

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  29. There was a long established tradition that the spoken word (particularly when uttered by an expert rhetorician) had a more powerful effect on the imagination than the written word. Indeed, there is still a serious question over the relative merits of oral and written communication (e.g. lectures versus written handouts).

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  30. We would not normally describe a mental image stimulated by reading a text as a ‘sensation’. This is a remarkable example of the way Descartes conflates sensory images and thoughts.

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  31. The point of the objection is that the mind is traditionally active. Intellection is a mental activity, whereby the mind apprehends concepts or truths without any sensory imagery. The suggestion is that the mind first has an abstract thought, and then actively conjures up a sensory image corresponding to it. Descartes doesn’t actually defend his thesis that a text can stimulate mental imagery directly, without our first understanding it intellectually. Instead he goes back to the example of a sword causing pain, where the thought (the pain) is unlike its cause, and is stimulated without our intellectually understanding what is happening.

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  32. I think the reference to ‘forms’ is merely a concession to scholastic terminology. For Descartes, the sensible quality of heat, in so far as it is in the object, is nothing other than the rapid motion of particles. This is why it is relevant that it is often observed to be caused by motion (e.g. lighting a fire by rubbing two sticks together), and to be the cause of motion (e.g. sparks flying up from a bonfire).

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  33. Descartes uses the rare word indigitare, which means to invoke a deity using a verbal formula. I assume that he is using the word metaphorically, to imply that we superstitiously treat these qualities as if they were real beings with real powers existing in external objects. Later, Malebranche explicitly made the point that to treat external objects as having real causal powers is to revere them as minor deities. There is no evidence in the text that Descartes went this far, so I have compromised by translating it as ‘superstitiously reify’ (i.e. to treat something as a thing in its own right, rather than as an abstraction, or a quality of something else). Descartes certainly regarded the belief in substantial forms as superstitious. To translate indigitare merely as ‘call’, as other translators do (including the original French translator), completely misses the point.

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  34. This is complete rhetoric. Descartes knew that his philosophy was radically innovative, and the intention was that his Principles should replace Aristotle as the basic university text. On the other hand, Descartes was himself influenced by the Renaissance idea that all truths were known to the ancients, even if some of them were handed down only by word of mouth; some were written down with deliberate obscurity; and some had been lost altogether. He himself tried to father his analytic geometry onto the ancient Greek mathematician, Pappas.

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  35. Certus can mean ‘specific’ or ‘known with certainty.’ The former makes better sense here, since (for Descartes) empirical observations supply only specific instances of general laws, and they are not known with certainty.

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  36. Grammatically, ‘this’ should refer to whatever was asserted in the previous sentence. But the last sentence was a rhetorical question rather than an assertion, and it is far from obvious how things like the breaking up of bodies into particles could be detected by hearing. I suspect that the ‘this’ refers to extension, of which size, shape, and motion are modes. Descartes is then making the interesting point that our perception of spatial characteristics is objective because it is common to all senses. Characteristics unique to one sense are merely subjective.

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  37. Literally, ‘what happens in the body;’ but from the context, Descartes is clearly not thinking about events, but about characteristics. The Latin for ‘to happen’ is accidere, and the scholastic term accident is derived from it. I think that here he is merely avoiding the scholastic term (even though it existed with the same sense in classical Latin).

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  38. The French translation explains this by giving as examples ‘prime matter’, ‘substantial forms’, and other unintelligible qualities. But again, Descartes is being somewhat disingenuous, since the scholastics attributed these to macroscopic objects rather than to minute particles.

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  39. In the case of artefacts, Descartes uses the Latin word instrumentum, and in the case of natural bodies, the Greek word organum. Although the most interesting natural bodies are living organisms, I don’t think Descartes intended any difference in meaning between these two terms, and ‘mechanism’ is conveniently neutral.

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  40. For Descartes, mechanics is a branch of mathematics, and of a high level of generality. Physics is more specific, since it is limited to the interactions of such bodies as actually exist in the created world. For example, mechanics can predict the behaviour of a particle of a size and shape quite unlike anything to be found in nature.

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  41. In other words, it is so improbable that there should be two different codes which give two different meanings to one and the same set of characters (especially if the letter is a long one, as added in the French translation), that it is morally certain that a code which gives a meaningful result is the correct one. But while this is true of simple codes, a sufficiently complex code can give any meaning whatever to a text of the same length. This fact was known in antiquity, and some commentators believed that God used a single sacred text to communicate a wide range of different messages to human beings. It is surprising that Descartes seems to have ignored this here.

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