Philosophy Rene Descartes Philosophy of The Mind Essay

Topic

Background Context for Your Essay

The title of the second of Descartes’ six Meditations on First Philosophy is “The Nature of the Human Mind, And How It is Better Known than the Body” (pp. 312-317). In the first half of this Mediation, Descartes aims to show that even though he can doubt the existence of the entire physical, “corporeal” world that includes his own body, he cannot doubt his own existence as a “thinking thing” or mind. (Note: The word ‘corporeal’ comes from the Latin word ‘corpus,’ which means ‘body’ and is translated as such throughout the text. It is important to remember that a corpus/body is anything that takes up space, anything that we might more usually nowadays call a ‘physical object.’ A human body is just one special kind of body: among all the physical objects in the world it is the one that is truly mine; it is my body.) Descartes says he knows that he exists as a being that affirms some beliefs, doubts others and has sensory experiences (even if these sensory experiences turn out to be nothing but a dream). And he knows all this “even if I am asleep all the time, and even if he who created me is doing all he can to deceive me” (p. 314). Descartes concludes this discussion at the top of p. 315 in our textbook.

Immediately following his conclusion, in the first full paragraph on p. 315, Descartes raises a worry about the account he has just offered:

“But it still appears—and I cannot stop thinking this—that the corporeal things of which images are formed in my thought, and which the senses investigate, are known with much more distinctness than this puzzling ‘I’ which cannot be pictured in this image.”

In other words, despite his best efforts to train himself by means of his meditations to reject all beliefs that are merely opinion or merely habitual and to accept only what he cannot possibly doubt, he still cannot help himself from returning to his old, careless habits of thought. It is difficult for him to focus attention on the intellectualtruths about his own existence as a mind when his sensory experiences of the physical, “corporeal” world feel so immediate such that he can’t help believing what his experiences tell him about the world. Descartes finds himself tempted by the the following thoughts: True, my reasoning by which I concluded that I know myself as a thinking thing is convincing. But since my mind—this ‘I’ whose existence I cannot doubt—lacks any shape or location, I cannot picture it in my mind. For this reason, the ‘I’ seems “puzzling.” By contrast, what could be more obvious than that I am surrounded by various “bodies” (physical objects) that I can see, touch, smell, and so forth? Don’t I know these bodies better than this “I” that I can’t even imagine?

The remainder of the Second Meditation (pp. 315-317) aims to respond to this challenge and show, as the title has it, that the mind is “better known than the body.” This is the portion of the text that you will discuss in your essay. Central to this portion of text is Descartes’s use of the example of his perception of a piece of wax. (Note: the word ‘perception’ in English is most often used as a synonym for ‘sense perception.’ But Descartes is using the Latin word ‘perceptio,’ which also means ‘thought’ or ‘knowledge.’) Descartes allows his readers to suppose that our careless and merely habitual opinion is correct and that I do perceive bodies around me such as a piece of wax. Rather than disputing that point, Descartes aims to show that any knowledge I might have of a piece of wax (or any other physical object) presupposes knowledge of myself. Moreover, knowledge of the piece of way presupposes not just that I exist, but that I exist as a thinking thing or mind and not, for example, as a thing that can merely sense or imagine (i.e. picture things). In this way, Descartes thinks he has shown that the mind is “better known” than any body (any physical object) and thus better known than even my own body.

Your Essay

Your task in this essay is to reconstruct and briefly evaluate Descartes’s argument for this conclusion. In your essay you will:

1. Summarize what Descartes intends the example of the piece of wax to establish. Hint: I discussed this in the background given above in terms of the title of the Second Meditation.
2. Reconstruct, in your own words, Descartes’s argument for the conclusion that he perceives a piece of wax “by the mind alone” (p. 316). Make sure you discuss (a) Descartes’s reasons for saying that the wax is not what our senses tell us and (b) Descartes’s reasons for saying that the wax is not what I can picture in my imagination.
3. State clearly what Descartes means by concluding that he perceives the wax “by the mind alone.” Hint #1: he doesn’t mean that we can be aware of the presence of the wax without the need of any of our five senses (that would be silly). Hint #2: consider Descartes’ analogy with his perception of men walking outside his window and, more specifically, his claim that, strictly speaking, he does not see the men but rather judges that there are men there.
4. Answer the question: how does the analysis of the perception of a piece of wax serve to establish the the mind is “better known” than the body?
5. Explain how this conclusion is meant to challenge what “people commonly think” (p. 315) about what kind of things we know best.
6. Conclude by briefly evaluating Descartes’s use of the wax example to establish that he knows the mind better than the body.