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Radical Critique, Scepticism and Commonsense
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
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Suppose that someone writes an argument on a blackboard which leads to the conclusion that he may, at that time, be dreaming. He goes over it, considers its validity, the truth of its premises, its assumptions and so on, and then to his dismay, he judges that he is compelled to conclude that he may be dreaming. He goes over the argument repeatedly and carefully, but finds the conclusion ‘inescapable’. If reviewing the argument on the blackboard may be taken as an analogue of reviewing thoughts before one's mind, then his condition seems like the condition which Descartes describes at the beginning of the Second Meditation: ‘The meditation of yesterday filled my mind with so many doubts that it is no longer in my power to forget them. And yet I do not see in what manner I can resolve them; and just as if I had all of a sudden fallen into very deep water, I am so disconcerted that I can neither make certain of setting my feet on the bottom, nor can I swim and support myself on the surface.’
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References
1 Descartes, Réné, Meditations on First Philosophy in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Haldane, Elizabeth S. and Ross, G. R. T., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), Vol. 1, 149.Google Scholar
2 Ibid. 143.
3 Ibid. 148.
4 Ibid. 148.
5 Ibid. 149.
6 Ibid. 149.
7 Descartes, Réné, Reply to Objections V, in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Haldane, Elizabeth S. and Ross, G. R. T., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), Vol. 2, 207.Google Scholar
8 A fundamental difficulty with this idea is that it is not clear who is applying the method. Is it Descartes or the persona of the Meditations? Descartes would abandon the method as unfruitful if he found no solution to the sceptical quandry represented at the end of the First Meditation. The same cannot be said for the persona of the Meditations. It is internal to the persona of the Meditations that he would be stuck with his doubts if he found no argument to overcome them. Therefore, in whatever sense doubt is a method for the persona, it is not of a kind which would enable him to distance himself from it if it proved fatal. Nor can we insofar as we respond to the invitation to adopt that persona ourselves. That is one of the consequences of the essentially first personal form of the Meditations, which is in that respect, quite unlike the Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting Reason.
9 Although, clearly, Descartes did not think so.
10 For the application of this to moral philosophy, see Gaita, Raimond, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception (London: Macmillan, 1990), Chapters 15 and 16.Google Scholar
11 In the Sixth Meditation Descartes tries to give an account of the relation between the res cogitans which he believes himself essentially to be, and his body. The account would have to make perspicuous that he was ‘very closely united to [his] body and, so to speak, intermingled with it that [he] seems to compose with it one whole’. The problem as he sees it is how an immaterial substance can be so ‘closely united’ to a material substance so as to seem ‘to compose with it one whole’, and philosophers have followed him in thinking that this is the primary sense in which the Meditations raise a problem concerning the relation between ‘mind’ and ‘body’.
The account I have given of the res cogitans does not depend upon it being an immaterial substance, but it reveals I think, the futility of Descartes' hope as he expresses it in the Sixth Meditation. The res cogitans as a presupposition of the intelligibility of his hyperbolical doubt, is as serious an obstacle to an adequate account of the relation between mind and body, as is the res cogitans conceived of as an immaterial substance.
12 Williams, Bernard, ‘Descartes' Use of Skepticism’, in Burnyeat, Myles (ed.), The Skeptical Tradition (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: The University of California Press, 1983).Google Scholar
13 Williams, Bernard, Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978).Google Scholar
14 Ibid. 64.
15 Nagel, Thomas, ‘Subject and Object’, in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 206.Google Scholar
16 The point is made especially powerfully by Wittgenstein when he combines it with his radical insight that the reason we cannot doubt such things as we are invited to doubt by traditional sceptics, is not because we are so epistemically secure in this region. We do not believe or know that there is an external world, that there are other minds, that we are now awake: a fortiori, these are not beliefs of commonsense. I know I am awake; I know that there are other minds: these are pseudo epistemological claims. See Wittgenstein, Ludwig, On Certainty, trans. Paul, Denis and Anscombe, G. E. M. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969).Google Scholar
17 I am very grateful to David Cockburn for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.