Gassendi on Human Knowledge of the Mind
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Gassendi on Human Knowledge of the Mind by Antonia LoLordo (Charlottesville)
Abstract: Gassendi holds both that we only have ideas of material things and that we know – by faith and, at least in later works, by reason as well – that the mind is immaterial. I examine the account of the mind provided in Gassendi’s Objections to the Meditations and show how Gassendi’s two theses can be rendered compatible. Indeed, the two theses, taken together, exemplify Gassendi’s account of the scope and limits of human understanding.
Gassendi and Descartes had reason to feel sympathetic toward one another when Gassendi first read the Meditations and composed his Objections.1 Both were friends and correspondents of Mersenne; both wanted to replace scholastic orthodoxy with a new system, albeit radically different new systems in the two cases; Gassendi admired Descartes’ mathematics while Descartes admired Gassendi’s astronomy. However, the tone of the Objections and Replies is rather less than friendly, on both sides. And in his Counter-Objections, Gassendi expresses his disappointment that a skilled mathematician like Descartes, someone of whom he had had such high expectations, paraded such spurious arguments as demonstrations (3.275b). One exemplary case of this is the 6th Meditation argument that mind and body are really distinct.2 Gassendi diagnoses the failure of the argument to lie chiefly, though not exclusively, in Descartes’ mistaken identification of the natures of mind and body as thought and extension.
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The 5th Objections and the Counter-Objections together constitute the Disquisitio Metaphysica. References to the 5th Objections are to the volume and page number in Descartes 1973–78 (AT = Adam and Tannery), as are references to Descartes’ Meditations and Replies. References to other of Gassendi’s works are either to the Disquisitio (volume 3 of Gassendi’s Opera Omnia) or the Syntagma (volumes 1 and 2), cited by volume, page and column number in the Opera. Gassendi tells us that he is disappointed that the promises made in the Preface are not fulfilled (3.275b). Now, the Preface and the title of the Meditations itself allege to demonstrate three things: God’s existence; the immortality of the soul; and the real distinction between mind and body. Gassendi takes all three arguments to fail but concentrates on the last, since the other two claims, he thinks, are true and wholly non-controversial.
Archiv f. Gesch. d. Philosophie 87. Bd., S. 1– 21 © Walter de Gruyter 2005 ISSN 0003-9101
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I begin with Gassendi’s objections to Descartes’ argument for the nature of body and then move on to worries about knowledge of the mind’s nature. With this in place, we will be in a position to examine Gassendi’s own account of our knowledge of the mind, an account which lies beneath the surface of the Objections and Counter-Objections and which is put forward in somewhat different form in his Syntagma Philosophicum, the roughly Epicurean replacement for the scholastic textbooks he found methodologically and ontologically unacceptable. For this account is best seen as emerging by contrast with the Cartesian account on one hand, and Gassendi’s own account of knowledge of body on the other. It seems, from a quick look at the Objections, that for Gassendi knowledge of the mind would simply be knowledge of body. For he makes quite clear there that we only have ideas of the material, so that whatever cognition of the mind is possible for us would seem to have to be knowledge of the mind as a material thing. But Gassendi is no materialist. He holds that we know by faith – and in later works by reason too – that the mind is immaterial. It is sometimes thought that there is an irreconcilable conflict between reason and faith within Gassendi’s thought, or that the nod to faith is less than sincere or consistent.3 However, this is not the case, as my examination of Gassendi’s focus on knowledge of the mind attempts to show. There is no inconsistency in holding both that the mind is immaterial and that we must cognize it as material for someone like Gassendi who holds that there are strict limits to human understanding.
The Meditations, Objections, Replies and Counter-Objections Let me begin with a brief overview of the debate over the mind and its relationship to body. Gassendi objects to a number of theses he finds in the 2nd Meditation, but three are particularly important for the current discussion. First, Gassendi objects that Descartes has not established that the mind is an immaterial thing rather than, say, a particularly subtle body, interspersed throughout the coarser matter of the human body (AT 7.260–261). In particular, Descartes has not proven that the power of thought cannot belong to any material body, although he appears to be relying on that assumption (AT 7.262). Second, Descartes has not established that the nature of 3
This is the position of Bloch 1970, who argues that Gassendi’s philosophy inevitably points in the direction of materialism and atheism, and that Gassendi himself manages to avoid acknowledging this tendency only by refusing to systematize his philosophy and make it consistent.
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the mind is thought, for reasons we will look at more fully later on. And third, Descartes has not shown that the nature of the mind is better known than the nature of body, even if we grant that the cogito establishes that the existence of the mind is better known than the existence of body (AT 7.275). For knowledge of the existence of something does not, on Gassendi’s view, imply knowledge of its essence. If we want to know the essence of the mind, we cannot simply think about our idea of the mind but should rather carry out something “like a chemical investigation of the mind” (AT 7.277). Descartes responds as follows. He denies that he has tried to prove, in the 2nd Meditation, that the mind is simply a thinking thing; rather, all he has argued is that he is, “insofar as [he] knows [himself …] nothing other than a thinking thing.” Similarly, he denies having tried to establish in the 2nd Meditation that the mind is distinct from body. The demonstration of this does not occur, he tells us, until the 6th Meditation (AT 7.354–355). However, he does at the same time allow that he knows his nature to be thought, as indeed the title of the 2nd Meditation suggests.4 Finally, Descartes replies to the worry about existence and essence that “one thing cannot be demonstrated without the other” (AT 7.359). Mocking the call for a chemical investigation of the mind, Descartes writes that he has never thought that anything more is required to reveal a substance than its various attributes; thus the more attributes of a given substance we know, the more perfectly we understand its nature (AT 7.360; cf. Principles 1.11 AT 8a.8). Hence we understand the mind’s nature better than the body’s nature because whenever we come to know an attribute of body, we thereby also – in addition to the knowledge derived from the cogito – know that the mind has the power to know that attribute of body. Margaret Wilson has famously suggested that Descartes is not really entitled to make this reply: knowing more attributes of particular extended bodies does not, for Descartes, automatically give us more knowledge of their nature. She suggests instead that a good Cartesian answer would involve developing the two themes of the transparency of mental processes and the distinction between human and animal or ‘mechanical’ thought processes – although there is in the end, she adds, a tension between these two themes given the assumption that “our explanations, and hence in an important sense our understanding, are limited to what can be explained on mechanical models”5. We shall see that this is a Gassendian assumption – one which, I have argued elsewhere, Descartes rejects. But Descartes’ rejection of this assumption, like Gassendi’s acceptance of it, is closely tied to his account of human cognition. The major theme of Descartes’ reply is that Gassendi has illegitimately taken him to task for not proving, in the 2nd Meditation, conclusions which he did not try to prove until the 6th Meditation. However, it is clear from Gassendi’s objections to the
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See Wilson 1978, 73f. on this point. Wilson 1978, 99.
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6th Meditation that this reply would not satisfy him. For instance, Gassendi objects that the 6th Meditation claim that the nature of the mind is thought has received no support beyond that given in the 2nd Meditation (AT 7.335). Similarly, he points out that Descartes has not added anything to rule out the mind’s being a particular sort of subtle body (AT 7.336–337). Thus he takes the real distinction argument to rely entirely on the claims about the natures of mind and body he sees as developed in the 2nd Meditation. Gassendi adds to his worries about our knowledge of those natures some difficulties he finds in the hypothesis that the mind is an immaterial substance interacting with the body, objections which concern the nature of body as well as the nature of mind. Thus before we can deal with the alleged unintelligibility of Descartes’ conception of the mind, we need to see what Gassendi thinks is wrong with the Cartesian accounts of the nature of body and mind, and what he would like to put in their place.
The Nature of Body Let us start with what Descartes’ and Gassendi’s accounts of the nature of body have in common. For, although Descartes and Gassendi have rather different conceptions of natures or essences, they still have enough in common to engage with each other. First, for both of them essences are only conceptually distinct from the substances whose essences they are, so that an essence individuates a substance. Second, for both of them modes or accidents of substances are understood as ways of being of those substances, in contrast with more traditional Aristotelian ways of understanding accidents which were sometimes thought to raise the specter of ‘real accidents’. From these two points follows a common way of understanding what is involved in giving an account of the essence of body: identifying that which is the same in all bodies such that they can have the modes or accidents they do in fact have. Now Gassendi argues that Descartes’ identification of the essence of body as extension fails to do this successfully. For although Descartes names a feature which all bodies have in common, this feature does not by itself show how it is possible for bodies to have the modes or accidents they have.6 The chief locus for this argument is the example of the 6
This may strike some contemporary readers as an odd objection. It is sometimes thought that the kind of explanations of particular bodily phenomena given in the later books of the Principles is somehow derived from the claim that the essence of body is extension (although it is disputed exactly how such a derivation could go, especially given the notorious role of extension in Descartes’ system). Gassendi does not seem to think of Descartes’ essence-claim as issuing in particular explanations for particular bodies. Although I think this is a plau-
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piece of wax from the 2nd Meditation. In response to this example and the intellectualist conclusions Descartes draws from it, Gassendi says that he agrees with the claim that we have intellectual perception of the substance of the wax – so long as that claim just amounts to “what everyone commonly asserts, viz. that the concept of the wax or its substance can be abstracted from the concept of its accidents”. However, he goes on to ask, does this really imply that the substance or nature of the wax is itself distinctly conceived? Besides the color, the shape, the fact that it can melt, etc., we conceive that there is something which is the subject of the accidents and changes we observe; but what this subject is, or what its nature is, we do not know. This always eludes us; and it is only a kind of conjecture that leads us to think that there must be something underneath the accidents. So I am amazed at how you can say that once the forms have been stripped off like clothes, you perceive more perfectly and evidently what the wax is. Admittedly, you perceive that the wax or its substance must be something over and above such forms; but what this something is you do not perceive (3.311a).
Rather than showing us what the substance of the wax is, Gassendi suggests, Descartes’ mentis inspectio shows instead merely that it is part of our concept of wax that it can melt, change colors in certain ways, and so on. Instead of showing how it is possible for the wax to have the power to undergo such changes – as natural philosophy should do – Descartes has merely told us that the wax has such powers. And this, Gassendi goes on, is something which we all already know: I took exception on the grounds that this inspection of the wax – more imperfect or more perfect, more confused or more distinct – pertained only to accidents and changes of accidents but did not apply to the substance itself. Thus from these inspections we can conceive of and explain what is understood by the name wax. However, we cannot conceive of and explain that nude substance, or rather, that substance which always remains hidden, with the result that we never know what the thing lying hidden under the accidents and subject to changes is (3.310a).
In exactly the same way, Gassendi will argue, the introspection of the thinking I will tell us only what is involved in the concept of the mind, without revealing anything about the underlying nature or substance of the mind. At this point, we must note a difference between the levels at which Gassendi’s and Descartes’ respective explanations of the nature of body sible reading, I shall not defend it here. For in any case, Descartes’ replies to Gassendi never suggest that particular explanations of bodily phenomena should follow from the claim that the essence of body is extension.
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primarily operate. For both men there is a legitimate question at the level of bodies in general – the question which Descartes answers with the claim that bodies are extended and Gassendi with the claim that they are structures of atoms in the void. However, for Gassendi, the general question is not the important one: what is more useful, he thinks, is to explain the nature of bodies of a specific type. Thus his physical explanations typically involve attempts to discern the particular corpuscular structure or contexture of a certain type of body – magnets, gold, wine – and to see how these structures explain the manifest features. Gassendi typically uses the terms ‘nature’ or ‘essence’ to refer to such structures, although he sometimes uses those terms to refer to the ideas produced in the mind instead.7 Unfortunately, Gassendi does not think we have as yet succeeded in giving explanations which reach all the way down to structures of atoms in the void: rather, as he tends to put it, the “secret or hidden essences” lying behind the appearances remain obscure to us (3.352b). However, we have met with some success in explaining manifest behavior in terms of the behavior of insensible parts, and an example of such success may be helpful: We used to marvel when people pointed out that a small piece of rotten cheese, strewn on a garment and brought near the skin, caused so much stinging to the senses. The Microscope has demonstrated the reason, namely, that all those grains [of cheese] are little animals who, among other things, push their little beaks into the skin and bore through and damage it, just as they might bore through and damage the surface of the earth, in order to seek their food (3.463a–b).
Here we have explained a manifest operation of a thing in terms of the behavior of its smaller parts, and this sort of explanation is the first step on the way to a complete natural-philosophical account. In order to complete the account, we should then go on to investigate the “little animals” themselves, and so on. Thus – to use another of Gassendi’s favorite examples – we would be giving a useful statement of an essence if we could say that a magnet is a structure of atoms arranged in ways x, y and z such that x, y and z together make possible the range of manifest properties and powers of the magnet. 7
See e.g. 2.463a for a clear case of the first usage. The second usage generally comes up when Gassendi is criticizing the views of those who, like Descartes and the Aristotelians, understand essences as real, immaterial, mind-independent things; it is in that context that Gassendi argues that such “essences” are simply ideas (if indeed they are anything at all). See 3.373aff.
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Now it is a little harder to give a programmatic explanation of what is going on for Descartes when we explain the possible range of modes or accidents of particular types of bodies. Descartes obviously does take bodies as falling into different types (rainbows, eyes, fetuses) which are explained in different ways – but the connection between this and the general claim that the essence of body is extension is not direct. This is very different from Gassendi’s case, where an account of the essences of particular types of bodies is simply a specification of the account of the essence of bodies in general. We are now in a position to see why Gassendi takes the claim that the essence of body is extension to be unhelpful. For it gives a general account of what bodies are without giving us any real help in figuring out what individuates particular bodies and makes it possible for them to have the modes or accidents they do. But Gassendi takes Descartes’ claim to have pernicious consequences as well, if taken seriously as a starting-point for natural philosophy. Gassendi argues elsewhere that the experienced fact of motion requires a void, so that Descartes’ essence-claim cannot be right. While he grants that our concept of body includes being extended, this does not on his view exhaust the nature of body even as we know it: an adequate concept of body must also include impenetrability or resistance (1.55a). As well as disagreeing with the Cartesian claim that the nature of body is extension, Gassendi has worries about the methodology by which it was arrived at. This worry begins with a point about knowledge of existence and knowledge of essence: the knowledge of the existence of a thing has no necessary connection with the knowledge of its essence or inner nature, for otherwise we would know the nature, essence and inner depths of anything that was obvious to the senses or whose existence we knew of in any way at all (3.290a–b).
Knowledge of existence is easy, on Gassendi’s view, since simply by perceiving a collection of accidents we naturally “conceive that there is something that is the subject of the accidents” and thus come to know that a certain thing exists, without acquiring a good idea of the thing itself, i.e. its substance or nature. Knowledge of substance or nature is rather more difficult to get and “requires a certain complete internal examination”: “essence does not become known except by bringing to light every inner depth” (3.311b–312a). Knowledge of existence does not amount to knowledge of essence, then, because essence is not perceived directly but rather is inferred from the perception of an existing thing.
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Descartes, of course, would not agree with the account of the acquisition of knowledge of essence which bases Gassendi’s distinction between knowledge of essence and knowledge of existence. Here Gassendi simply objects that if Descartes’ equation of knowledge of essence and knowledge of existence were sound, there would be no substantive natural-philosophical questions left for us to answer: If this method of philosophizing of yours were sound, what property and what nature in the world would then remain hidden? And if anyone struggled to explore and investigate the nature of the magnet, wouldn’t he be very silly since he should consider himself satisfied by this little formula of yours, that the entire nature of the magnet consists in the fact that it attracts iron and points toward the poles? (3.306a–b).
This quite clearly relies on the previous point, that for Gassendi interesting natural-philosophical questions are questions about the nature of particular types of bodies.8 Gassendi will go on to argue that the case of the mind parallels the magnet case closely. Gassendi’s objection is not merely skeptical. Rather, it derives from an alternative theory of cognition of essences – indeed, of imperceptible entities in general. Since it is this account which in the end leads Gassendi to the view that we only have an idea of the mind as a corporeal thing, let us now turn to that alternative theory. It begins with the recognition that what is evident to sense-perception is insufficient for constructing any natural philosophy which appeals to insensible entities like atoms or void. However, Gassendi holds that cognition of the insensible is parasitic on what is evident: it proceeds by analogy with the sensible, using signs – in particular, indicative signs.9 Thus the theory of signs is intended to explain the source and limits of knowledge of the insensible, as well as the proper criteria for judging cognition of the insensible.
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The criticism of Descartes thus seems unfair: Descartes does not hold that full understanding of the magnet is reached through its concept, but rather through postulating a certain inner structure. Descartes would not, that is, say that we have explained the modes of the magnet by saying that its nature is extension. Gassendi generally tends to over-emphasize both the aprioricity of Descartes’ programme and the extent to which the Meditations is supposed to issue in substantive conclusions about bodies. Neither of these tendencies, however, are particularly worrying for the topic at hand, since Cartesian investigation of the mind – unlike the magnet – is a priori and is supposed to issue in substantive conclusions about particular minds. Gassendi distinguishes indicative from admonitory signs, where admonitory signs signify things “hidden by circumstance” such as smoke signifying fire, lactation pregnancy, and so on (1.79b).
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Indicative signs signify things “hidden by nature”, i.e. never perceptible, such as God, the void, atoms, or unmodified substances. An indicative sign signifies its object “because it is the sort of thing which, if the object did not exist, could not itself exist, and therefore when it exists, the object also exists necessarily” (1.81b). Thus, sweat is – or at least was, before the invention of the microscope – an indicative sign of pores in the skin, and the ‘wholly admirable works of nature’ indicate God’s existence. And since that which is signified explains or makes intelligible the existence of the thing construed as a sign, the range of manifest qualities and operations of a thing together indicate its substance or nature. When we think of the underlying substance or nature of things whose manifest properties we perceive, we form a notion of something which underlies the manifest properties (i.e. something which fills a certain specified role) and then imagine it by analogy with sensible things. Thus our cognition of objects cognized through signs must in principle be like cognition of sensible objects. When we form an idea of something by the use of signs, we must, on Gassendi’s account, do so by analogy with things we already have ideas of, namely, things evident to sense. Thus all our ideas must in the end represent things as material. Even though we know that God is immaterial, for instance, we do not have an idea which represents him as immaterial but merely an idea formed by analogy with powerful men we have encountered in the past.
The Nature of the Mind Let us again start with what Gassendi and Descartes agree about. First, they agree that we have knowledge of the modes or accidents of the mind; this is given to us in experience. Second, they agree that these modes or accidents should not be explained by recourse to scholastic faculties or souls any more than the modes or accidents of bodies should be explained by recourse to forms and qualities. And third, they agree that some explanation of the possibility of the modes or accidents of the mind is required. It would be insufficient for the natural philosopher to simply say that fire exists and can burn things, without giving an explanation for how there can be something with those powers. In the same way, it would be insufficient for the natural philosopher to say simply that the mind exists and can take on a variety of modes or accidents and perform a variety of operations, without explaining what kind of thing the mind is such that it can have such modes or accidents.
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Now Gassendi reads the Meditations expecting Descartes to show us what kind of thing the mind is such that it can have the various thoughts, sensations and operations we experience. Gassendi’s disappointment stems here, just as it did in the case of body, from his judgment that Descartes has not given any such explanation but merely told us that there is some thing called the mind underlying that collection of modes and accidents: when you say that you are simply a thing that thinks you mention an operation which everyone was already aware of – but you say nothing about the substance carrying out this operation: what sort of substance it is, what it consists in, how it organizes itself in order to carry out its various different functions in different ways, and other issues of this sort, which we have not known about up till now (3.300b).
Gassendi thus takes Descartes’ claim that the mind is a thinking thing to simply pick out a certain entity – the unitary subject of the various cognitive powers – without telling us what the underlying substance or essence of that entity is, let alone demonstrating that it is distinct from any body. For, he argues, if Descartes had really uncovered the nature of the mind then a number of questions that are currently unanswered would have clear answers, questions such as the following: What sort of thing [the underlying principium of thought] is, how it exists, how it holds together, how it acts, whether it has certain faculties and functions, whether or not it has parts, and if it has any, what kind they are: if it does not have any and is indivisible, how it arranges itself in so many different forms; how it performs so many functions; by what means it deals with the body; by what means it goes beyond it; how it lives without it; how it is affected by it (3.306b).
Since Descartes has failed to answer these questions, Gassendi takes it that the claim that the mind is a thinking thing is merely a nominal or, perhaps, accidental definition – one which describes the operation or quality proprietary to the mind without making clear the essence or substance from which that operation flows. And again, Gassendi diagnoses the underlying problem with Descartes’ account as methodological: given that you are looking for knowledge of yourself which is superior to common knowledge […] it is certainly not enough for you to announce that you are a thing that thinks and doubts and understands, etc. You should carefully scrutinize yourself and conduct something like a chemical investigation of yourself, if you are to succeed in uncovering and explaining to us your internal substance (3.311a).
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To this, Descartes responds that he does not see “what more [Gassendi] expect[s] here, unless it is to be told what color or smell or taste the human mind has, or the proportions of salt, sulphur and mercury from which it is compounded” (AT 7.360–361). I shall return to this response in a moment, but first let us see the particular explanatory problems Gassendi sees for the conception of the mind as a thinking substance. As a preliminary, Gassendi argues simply that Descartes has shed no light on the traditional problems of explaining what sort of substance can be capable of having sensations, performing abstract thought, and the like. Whereas scholastic explanations failed because the forms and faculties they appealed to were unacceptable, Descartes simply gives no explanation apart from the bare claim that it is in the nature of the mind to do these things. More importantly, however, Gassendi argues that Descartes’ account has raised new explanatory problems, ones which previous accounts of the mind did not need to deal with – namely, the problem of body-mind causation and the problem of representation. The problem of body-mind interaction is a familiar one. Descartes sometimes explains interaction by positing the pineal gland as its locus, but this, Gassendi says, is unsatisfactory. There is no place – whether a part of extension or a mere point – at which material and immaterial substances could be joined with the desired result (3.405a). As a result of this, Gassendi says, we cannot make sense of the possibility of bodies affecting an immaterial mind, for bodies act by contact and contact with the immaterial is impossible. The mechanist powers of body cannot explain bodies having actions which do not occur in any place; indeed, mechanism, in either its Cartesian or Gassendian form, seems to rule out this possibility.10 The problem of representation is less familiar and may strike the reader as less worrying. It hinges on the claim that the immaterial mind is simple and indivisible, that is, lacks parts. Gassendi asks:
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Body-mind interaction is often described as a two-way problem. However, Gassendi only seems worried about bodily causes having mental effects and not vice versa. For Gassendi does not claim to grasp what a Cartesian mind would be like well enough to say that such a mind could not have bodily effects; he can make only the weaker objection that Descartes does not make clear how an immaterial mind affects the body. Since Gassendi takes himself to lack any clear idea of an immaterial mind, he cannot insist that its causal mechanisms preclude action in the material world; and since he holds that God is immaterial and acts in the material world, he would not want to suggest that our inability to understand how the immaterial can affect the material is grounds for thinking that the immaterial cannot affect the material.
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Antonia LoLordo how […] do you think that […] an unextended thing could receive the semblance or idea of a body that is extended? […] if it lacks parts, how will it manage to represent parts? If it lacks extension, how will it represent an extended thing? […] If it lacks all variation, how will it represent various colors and so on? (3.400b)
It is tempting to read this as a commitment to a naïve picture theory of representation.11 But this is not Gassendi’s settled view: his account of vision, for instance, holds that while the image imprinted on the retina resembles the apparent object, the impression formed in the brain as a result of the reception of the retinal image does not. Instead, I think, Gassendi has in mind the deeper point that in order to represent structure and variation, the representing mind must itself possess structure and variation. Indeed, this is part of a larger problem about how any sort of explanation can be given of the workings of a simple thing like a Cartesian mind. The explanations we are familiar with – explaining pictorial representation in terms of isomorphism; explaining the properties of the wine in terms of its composition; etc – explain the operations or properties of a whole in terms of the interaction of smaller parts arranged in some sort of structure. Descartes’ account of the mind precludes any such explanation because he holds that the mind has no parts, physical or otherwise, a claim which Gassendi seems to take as amounting to the claim that Cartesian minds have no internal structure at all.12 Let me now return to Descartes’ reply to Gassendi’s call for “something like a chemical investigation of the mind”. Descartes responds that he does not see “what more [Gassendi] expect[s] here, unless it is to be told what color or smell or taste the human mind has” (AT 7.359). To say this is in effect to claim that one should not expect an expla11
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For instance, Arnauld 1990, 61, quotes from this or a very similar passage in an attempt to show how “damnable” are the conclusions one is led to if one models cognition on physical vision. It is not entirely clear to me whether Descartes would grant that the simplicity of the mind precludes its having structure. Although Descartes does not talk about mental structure, it seems, as Wilson points out, that the doctrine of innate ideas requires some underlying structure in the mind. Nor am I sure whether we ought in general grant that a simple immaterial thing lacks structure: perhaps simplicity could be preserved so long as the structure is not divisible into parts. But Gassendi himself must think of the lack of structure of the immaterial mind as following from Descartes’ claim that it is simple, for – given his claim that we have no real idea of an immaterial mind – he has no independent grounds for insisting that the mind’s immateriality precludes its having structure. He could only make the weaker claim that we cannot conceive of the immaterial mind as having structure.
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nation of the mind parallel with physical explanations in terms of structure. The Gassendist response is simply to point out that Descartes does not offer us any other sort of explanation, so that the Cartesian theory of the mind not only fails to provide us with a science of the mind but also seems to preclude the possibility of our developing one. We have now seen why Gassendi rejects both the claim that the essence of body is extension and the claim that the essence of mind is thought. Because of this, together with the new explanatory problems raised by the hypothesis of an immaterial thinking substance, Gassendi dismisses Descartes’ claim that mind and body are two distinct substances. It is now time to turn to the account of the mind Gassendi can suggest in its place.13
Human Knowledge of the Mind On Gassendi’s account, it will turn out, our knowledge of the mind is quite strictly limited. We know various modes or accidents of the mind by reflective experience, but the mind itself – the inner substance or nature which grounds and makes possible these modes or accidents – is hidden from sensation and reflection. Thus acquiring an idea of the substance of the mind can only be done through signs, by means of the following process. First, I perceive my various thoughts and feelings by reflection, and then construe those thoughts as signs of a hidden something which must exist in order for the existence of the thoughts to be possible. I thereby form a notion of a role: being that whose existence makes thoughts possible. Finally, I form an idea of the thing which fills that role, by analogy with something I already know. But since everything I know I originally knew through the senses, the basis of my analogy will always be a sensible, corporeal thing, so that my idea of the mind will always be the idea of a thing analogous to some corporeal thing. Here Gassendi favors the use of a ‘subtle body’ like wind or ether as the basis of analogy:
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Until this point, Gassendi’s objections to the Cartesian account of knowledge of the mind or its nature may strike the reader as very similar to those later made by Malebranche (save for Gassendi’s allowing that we could have a clear idea of a thing without thereby knowing its nature). The chief difference, that for Gassendi our idea of the mind must be the idea of a material thing even though we know through other means that the mind is immaterial, will become clear in the next section.
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Antonia LoLordo As for the ideas of allegedly immaterial things, such as those of God and an angel and the human soul or mind, it is clear that even the ideas we have of these things are corporeal or quasi-corporeal, since (as previously mentioned) the ideas are derived from the human form and from other things which are very rarefied and simple and very hard to perceive with the senses, such as air or ether (3.386a).
Now, it is notable that Gassendi does not claim that the idea of the mind as some sort of subtle body is a terribly good idea. In fact, Gassendi’s account makes it clear that the human idea of the mind is quite a bad one. For one important criterion for ideas acquired through the use of signs is this: they are good ideas to the extent that what the idea represents really would make possible the manifest properties and operations of the thing in question. That is, ideas acquired on the basis of signs are good ideas only if they have some significant explanatory power, since they are acquired by a sort of inference to the best explanation – in fact, the only explanation – to begin with. Now, Gassendi does not claim that his idea of the mind as a sort of subtle body actually does any significant work in explaining the manifest properties and operations of the mind. In fact, as we have seen from the argument against Descartes, Gassendi thinks that we have no understanding of how these properties and operations are possible. Here, then, is the situation. Gassendi claims that we have some idea of the mind, in that we can talk about it and we know some of its possible accidents and operations, but denies that our idea of the mind is sufficiently good to count as revealing to us the inner substance or nature of the mind. At the same time, Gassendi is quite harsh in criticizing Descartes for claiming to know the nature of the mind when all he really has is the vague and entirely non-explanatory conception of it as some unknown thing that is not material. One might wonder at this point if Gassendi’s criticism is fair: isn’t he in more or less the same position as Descartes here? I answer that he is not, for two reasons. First, Gassendi would say that at least his account of the mind makes the idea of the mind an idea we can have. We have no problem conceiving of a sort of subtle body interspersed throughout the coarser matter of the brain but, Gassendi argues, Descartes’ “immaterial substance” is something we can conceive of only to the extent of saying that it is like a material substance, only not material. Gassendi has told us what the mind is, albeit not in any detail; Descartes has only told us what the mind is not. And telling us that the mind is not material gives us no help in conceiving of what an immaterial thing could be like (3.402b). Second, Gassendi himself never claims to know or have an idea of the nature of the mind. To say that the
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mind is some sort of subtle body is no more to claim to know the nature of the mind than to say that a magnet is composed of atoms arranged in the void in some way is to claim to know the nature of the magnet. Descartes requires an idea of the mind which is good enough to reveal the mind’s nature, for the real distinction argument to work: we need to know the nature of the mind in order to be certain that what underlies the range of modes or accidents we know from reflection is not a species of body. This sets the bar for the idea of the mind pretty high – it has to be such as to exhibit the nature of the mind to us, at least clearly enough to distinguish it from body. But Gassendi does not attempt to derive any dramatic ontological conclusions from his description of the mind, and hence his idea need not fulfill any such stringent criteria. Indeed, as we are about to see, Gassendi argues that no ontological conclusions at all should be inferred from the idea of the mind. Faith and the Human Soul The reader might wonder, at this point, how a mid-seventeenth-century priest could have believed, let alone stated for publication, that we must conceive of the mind as material. Isn’t this, one might ask, dangerously close to a commitment to materialism? Isn’t Gassendi in danger of violating the requirements set out in the condemnation of Pomponazzi, for instance? However, Gassendi takes pains to point out that his claim that we conceive of the mind as material is a claim about human cognition rather than an ontological claim. In matters of ontology, Gassendi makes clear, he follows the dictates of faith: I hold by Faith that the Mind is incorporeal. I hold that this issue appears too obscure by the natural light for me to claim to know the nature of the Mind […] it is not apparent how, while the Mind dwells in the body, it can represent or understand any substance except under some corporeal species [and thus it is not apparent] under what species the Mind might represent itself other than as some subtle body (3.369a).
A number of conclusions are to be drawn from the claim that we know by faith that the mind is material, even though the mind must represent itself by means of a corporeal image and thus must represent itself as corporeal. The first such conclusion is that our idea of the mind is deeply misleading. But this seems to raise a problem of its own, in the guise of a possible conflict between the deliverances of faith and reason. Fortunately, however, Gassendi has the resources to avoid any such conflict – resources which we have already seen. First, on Gassendi’s
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view, the idea of the mind as a corporeal entity is not a very good idea even by its own light. And second, we can see, again from the theory of signs, that we would think of the mind as material regardless of whether or not it actually is material. For the explanation of why we must conceive of the mind as material makes no reference whatsoever to the actual nature of the mind but only to the nature of things evident to us through sense. Thus reason itself makes us aware that our idea of the mind as corporeal is unreliable. But in what position are we left when we conclude that reason’s dictates about the mind are systematically unreliable? Does this, for instance, leave us with complete skepticism about the mind, or is there still a reason to continue natural philosophical investigations of the mental? Gassendi can, I suggest, maintain the latter option. For he holds that empirical investigations like his investigations of the formation of ideas in the brain as a result of the physiological processes of vision give some further understanding of the mind. They do not penetrate into the nature or substance of the mind (any more than microscopic investigation of the cheese revealed its atomic structure), but they do bring about some increase in understanding. That the nature or substance of the mind is in principle concealed from reason need not make us despair of getting further knowledge of the processes underlying its manifest characteristics. Indeed, Gassendi suggests, it is difficult if not impossible for us to attain knowledge of the inner substance or nature of anything known by observation. Given this, we need to recognize that the difficulty of knowing natures or underlying substances provides insufficient reason for skeptical despair. Granting that inner substances or natures are hidden, we can still have full knowledge of the manifest characteristics of things – and it is knowledge of those manifest characteristics that is truly necessary for us. Making use of a distinction between essence and appearance – a distinction that he tends to equate with the distinction between hidden substance and manifest properties – Gassendi tells us the following: since the attribute or property is one thing and the substance or nature of which it is [an attribute] or from which it emanates is another, so to know the attribute or property or collection of properties is not thereby to know the substance or nature itself. What we can know is this or that property of this substance or nature when it lies open for the purpose of observation and is perspicuous by experience, and we do not thereby penetrate into the inner substance or nature – just as when looking at bubbling spring water, we know that this water comes from this source, but do not thereby strike the edge of our gaze on the interior
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and establish the subterranean source. So, it seems, the good, all-powerful God established when he founded nature and left it to our use. For whatever is necessary for us to know about every thing, he made open for us by granting things properties through which we might come to know them and by granting us various senses through which we might apprehend them and an interior faculty through which we might make judgments about them. But he willed that the internal nature and, as it were, source be hidden, since knowledge of it is not necessary for us (3.312b).14
Since God has allowed us to know what we need to know, by creating things with manifest characteristics that correspond to our ability to acquire sensory information and the power to reason about those manifest characteristics, it would be unreasonable of us to complain that our cognitive faculties were not terribly well fitted for the knowledge of the hidden, underlying substance of things. It is unfortunate here that Gassendi does not tell us what it is that our knowledge of the appearances is necessary for, as Locke does in similar passages: but I take it that what Gassendi has in mind here is simply the successful continuation of everyday life. The passage just quoted is importantly ambiguous: Gassendi may mean that it is in keeping with how God arranged things that we do not now know the nature of things, or that it is in keeping with how God arranged things that we cannot in principle know the nature of things. It is clear in the case of the mind that Gassendi thinks inner substance is in principle ungraspable – but the mind is, as we have seen, a rather special case. Considering the corporeal example Gassendi gives us – “when looking at bubbling spring water, we know that this water comes from this source, but do not thereby strike the edge of our gaze on the interior” – may help us to figure out whether substance is unknowable in principle or just unknown. I read Gassendi as saying here that when we look at the spring water rising from the ground we take it as a sign of a hidden spring. We do not know exactly what the hidden spring is like: in particular, we have no direct idea of it. Rather, when we think of 14
Compare the following passage, made in the context of a suggestion that just as the microscope has allowed us to explain some phenomena in terms of smaller internal parts, we might be able to explain all the manifest properties of things if we could see the smallest parts of things (that is, the atoms), a possibility whose non-actuality Gassendi bemoans: “since we are destitute of vision of this sort (that is, microscopic vision), and since there is no great hope of ever obtaining such a splendid microscope […] should we, I ask, be content with those things for the purpose of whose knowledge – as [that knowledge] alone is necessary for us – our author has instructed us?” (2.463b).
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the hidden spring we imagine something by analogy with springs we have seen. Now, such an analogical idea can never be as certain or as informative as a similar idea acquired through sense, on Gassendi’s view: what is known by the use of indicative signs does not transcend probability, whereas our knowledge of the manifest is, in the best cases, entirely certain. I take this to imply two things about knowledge of hidden, corporeal substances, on Gassendi’s view. In practice, we do not know any of them as completely as we could. And even in principle, we cannot have knowledge of them which is as evident and certain as our knowledge of what is directly sensed. For the only way we could have such knowledge is if, per impossibile, we could literally perceive the inner substance itself. One might wonder whether Gassendi thinks we will ever get even this less certain kind of knowledge concerning the hidden substances of corporeal things. I cannot claim with any confidence to know what Gassendi really thinks here; he certainly does not commit himself one way or another. Perhaps he does not want to venture a guess about whether we will ever get far enough with the programme of corpuscularian natural philosophy to get down to the level of the atoms or not. Such a refusal to speculate would be entirely in keeping with his philosophical temperament. I have argued that Gassendi’s conceptual materialism about the mind co-exists peacefully with his claim that we know, at least by faith, that the mind is immaterial. Given the limitations his theory of the cognitive faculties places on itself, we have no reason to see any principled tension between the two claims, and hence no reason to think that his submission to the dictates of faith is in any way philosophically problematic. Thus the reading I have offered opposes that of Olivier Bloch, who takes the case of the nature of the mind as one of the strongest examples for his overarching thesis that Gassendi fails to systematize and make fully coherent his philosophy in order to avoid confronting the tension between orthodox religion and the materialist philosophy he was in the process of developing. Bloch grants that Gassendi may well have been personally sincere, but holds that his philosophy has a strongly materialist orientation15, an orientation that does not become fully explicit because of the tension which would be created if it did. Now Bloch’s reading relies on his understanding of such episodes as the objections to Descartes as themselves requiring materialism. He does
15
Bloch 1970, 156f.
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not seem really to consider the possibility that these claims should be read as claims about our knowledge of the mind rather than about the mind itself. And, so far as I can see, if he did not read the Disquisitio in the way he does, he would not see any such tension between faith and philosophy in Gassendi’s work. I have argued that a more nuanced reading of the Disquisitio and Gassendi’s account of knowledge of the mind shows that he is not committed by what he says there to ontological materialism: quite the contrary. Hence I take myself to have dissolved the chief motivating factor for Bloch’s diagnosis.16 And since there are strong, although not indefeasible, reasons to avoid ascribing relatively blatant inconsistency to historical figures, I take that showing that there is a coherent alternative to Bloch’s interpretation by itself gives good reason to accept that alternative.
Gassendi’s Later View Gassendi’s later work contains what at first looks like a dramatic change of opinion for him: a set of arguments alleged to show that the mind is immaterial.17 He provides three examples of operations performed by the mind which in principle could not be performed by a material thing. First, the mind or intellect can understand itself and its functions, while no material thing can act on itself directly.18 Second, the mind can apprehend certain notions lacking imagistic content (such as the notion of an immaterial substance, formed by way of negation) (2.440b). Third, the intellect can have some grasp of universals although genuine universals cannot be apprehended by sense or derived from sensory apprehension (2.441b). These are traditional arguments, and it is interesting to note that Gassendi often ran them in reverse in his earlier work, arguing, for instance, that we cannot entertain genuine universals because we lack the immaterial intellect needed to do so. What matters for present purposes, however, is what these arguments for the immateriality of the mind imply. They are supposed to be probable arguments, based on reason, to the effect that the human soul cannot be corporeal. Thus they are not intended to show, as Descartes’ argument is intended to show, that the human soul is a substance individuated by something we grasp which rules out corporeality. Gassendi neither says anything that seems intended to establish that the incorporeal
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More recent English secondary literature has not tended to endorse Bloch’s reading: see Michael and Michael 1988, Osler 1994 and Sarasohn 1996. For a full account of this, see Michael and Michael 1988, 483f. 2.441a. It is odd that Gassendi here runs together the mind’s capacity to reflect on itself directly – which Gassendi explicitly denies in the Disquisitio – and its capacity to notice its functions – which Gassendi allows in the Disquisitio but does not seem to think requires incorporeality.
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mind is a substance,19 nor anything suggesting that we have some positive grasp on the nature of the incorporeal mind. Although the claim that the intellect can reflect on itself directly seems as if it should imply that we can form a positive conception of our own minds, Gassendi does not offer any description of such a conception, but rather holds that our idea of the mind is formed by negation. Our idea of the incorporeal mind is the idea representing some thing, different in kind from the corporeal things we experience because incorporeal, which can perform these three operations. This idea is barely, if at all, more informative than the earlier idea of the mind as a corporeal subtle body. Certainly it gives us no more resources for further investigation of the mind. Indeed, it is remarkable that when Gassendi makes this shift to the claim that we know by reason that the mind is immaterial, nothing else in his account of the mind changes. The claim that the mind is incorporeal neither rules out the physiology of impression-formation in the brain nor provides us with any new explanation of the states and operations of the mind. Gassendi’s switch in views brings together the ontologies suggested by faith and natural philosophy without making any impact on natural-philosophical accounts of the mind. We should have expected this. Recall Gassendi’s objection to Descartes that postulating a simple, indivisible, immaterial mind rules out any explanatory resources. Now, while Gassendi does not explicitly assert that the incorporeal mind is simple and indivisible, he does not think that our idea of it depicts it as having any parts or structure, and hence it is no more useful for explanatory purposes than an idea representing a simple, indivisible, incorporeal thing. Thus on Gassendi’s view, whether or not we have an idea of reason of the mind which is in keeping with the dictate of faith that the mind is immaterial, the immaterial mind whose existence we accept has nothing to do with the natural philosophy of the mind. I take this to be a straightforward expression of Gassendi’s commitment to discovering the limits as well as the extent of human knowledge.20
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It seems most natural to think that Gassendi’s incorporeal mind is a thing, but he does not really tell us so. For all he says, the incorporeal mind might as well be a form. Although he argues elsewhere that explanation in terms of forms is vacuous and unhelpful, this does not rule out the possibility of saying that there is a form in a case where he has already said that full explanation cannot be given. Indeed, he does not rule out the Lockean view that the mind may be an immaterial power, although there is no evidence that he thinks this and, indeed, does not much trade in the language of powers. Part of the research for and writing of this paper was supported by a fellowship from the Huntington Library. I would like to thank the Huntington for its generous support. I would also like to thank two anonymous referees for this journal for helpful comments on a previous version of this paper.
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Arnauld, A. 1990. On True and False Ideas. Transl. Stephen Gaukroger. Manchester. Bloch, O. 1970. La Philosophie de Gassendi. The Hague. Descartes, R. 1973–1978. Œuvres de Descartes. Ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery. Paris. Gassendi, P. 1658. Opera Omnia in sex tomos divisa. Lyon (reprint: Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 1964). Michael, E. and Michael, F. 1988. “Gassendi on Sensation and Reflection: A NonCartesian Dualism”. History of European Ideas 9.5: 483–495. Osler, M. 1994. Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy. Cambridge. Sarasohn, L. 1996. Gassendi’s Ethics. Ithaca, NY. Wilson, M. 1978. Descartes. Boston.
