British Journal for the History of Philosophy 13(1) 2005: 51 – 72
ARTICLE
‘DESCARTES’S ONE RULE OF LOGIC’: GASSENDI’S
CRITIQUE OF THE DOCTRINE OF CLEAR AND
DISTINCT PERCEPTION
Antonia LoLordo
We have arrived at an appropriate place for a few words about the Logic
which the illustrious Rene Descartes has recently put forth under the name of
Metaphysics or Meditations on Metaphysics. He imitates Bacon in that he
wishes – in order to provide foundations for another new philosophy – first of
all to put aside all preconceived opinions, and then, having immediately after
found some most solid Principles, to build up the whole structure again on
those foundations. However, the route is not the same as that which Bacon
uses; while Bacon sought in real things the means to perfect the thoughts of the
Intellect, Descartes, banishing all thought of things, believed that there were in
the Intellect enough resources so that the Intellect could achieve perfect
knowledge of all things – even the most abstruse, that is, not only bodies but
also God and souls – by its own power.1
Because he estimates that the way to have true and appropriate cognition of
things is not by exploring things through themselves and in themselves, but by
the Intellect alone and depending on thoughts alone, to that extent Descartes’s
procedure is certainly less appropriate than Bacon’s appeared to be. If there is
in the end anything that concerns Logic in all that which follows, it is above all
that Principle which the author poses as follows: Everything that I clearly and
distinctly perceive is true.
(I 90a)
Gassendi’s talk of ‘the Logic which . . . Descartes . . . has put forth under
the name of . . . Meditations on Metaphysics’ sounds rather odd to
contemporary readers. We tend not to think of Bacon and Descartes as
engaged in the same project. Nor do we share Gassendi’s understanding of
Descartes’s principle of clear and distinct perception as a principle of logic.
1
Pierre Gassendi, Opera Omnia I 65b; Georg Olms, 1964. All references to Gassendi’s works
are to volume, page, and column in his Opera Omnia. Volumes I and II are the Syntagma
Philosophicum and references to volume III are to the Disquisitio Metaphysica. Translations
are my own but I have benefited greatly from consulting the CSM translation of the
Objections.
British Journal for the History of Philosophy
ISSN 0960-8788 print/ISSN 1469-3526 online # 2005 BSHP
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/0960878042000317582
52 ANTONIA LOLORDO
However, Gassendi’s objections to Descartes’s main logical principle, the
clarity and distinctness rule, ultimately draw in most of the central themes of
the Meditations and of Gassendi’s own philosophical programme. For his
objections derive in large part from theories about the human cognitive
faculties and concomitant views on appropriate methodology which are
radically different from Descartes’s. Thus we can learn something about
Gassendi’s own views and the presuppositions of the Meditations through
Gassendi’s over-arching line of criticism directed against the doctrine that
all clear and distinct perceptions are true.
I begin (1) by considering the context of Gassendi’s reading of the
Meditations as a treatise in logic. Understanding the then-current
conception of logic will help us understand Gassendi’s insistence that the
procedure of the Meditations needs to be psychologically effective. In (2) I
consider Gassendi’s objections to clarity and distinctness and – in (3) – his
understanding of the method of doubt, which he thinks is intended to justify
the clarity and distinctness rule. In (4), I examine Gassendi’s argument that
the genuinely psychological doubt that Descartes requires is impossible for
us. I conclude in (5) with a consideration of Descartes’s rather polemical
response that accepting Gassendi’s objections would require disavowing
knowledge entirely. This is a line of response widely taken over by later
Cartesians against their objectors.
My presentation throughout tends to take the side of Gassendi over that
of Descartes. This is partly a matter of focus, since one goal of this paper is
to explicate the methodology underlying Gassendi’s objections. But it is also
intended to provide a new perspective on the Meditations by showing them
through the eyes of one of Descartes’s prominent contemporaries.
THE MEDITATIONS AS LOGIC
Gassendi describes the clarity and distinctness rule as a rule of logic both in
the Counter-Objections and in his history of logic, where Descartes occurs as
the last historical figure and the foil against which Gassendi puts forth his
own logic. Such histories of logic were quite a common feature of
contemporary texts.2 Gassendi’s list of figures to be discussed is rather
catholic: as well as Descartes, he includes Epicurus and planned to include
Hobbes.3 Why this is so is a matter for speculation. Perhaps the influence of
Epicurean canonics, or of his self-conscious advocacy of philosophical
reform, contributed to Gassendi’s construing logic more broadly than was
2
3
For example, Franco Burgersdijck, Robert Sanderson, and Zabarella append histories of
logic to their expositions. See also E. J. Ashworth (Language and Logic in the Post-Medieval
Period, D. Reidel, 1974) and Gabriel Nuchelmans (in the Cambridge History of SeventeenthCentury Philosophy, ed. Garber and Ayers, 1998).
After Gassendi’s death, Sorbiere (in a letter of 1656) asked Hobbes to write the ‘Hobbes’
Logic’ chapter that Gassendi had planned to write before he died. Hobbes declined.
GASSENDI ON DESCARTES’S ‘ONE RULE OF LOGIC’
53
typical. In any case, the early seventeenth-century construal of logic was
much broader than ours. Logic tended to include material we would call
epistemology, philosophy of science, or psychology.4 That is, it had both
descriptive aspects – corresponding to how we actually think – and
normative aspects – telling us how to think better.5 This was not thought to
imply the disunity of logic, as the normative and descriptive aspects seem to
have been thought of as inseparable.
Gassendi conceives of logic as an ars rather than a scientia, i.e. as a
practical, not theoretical, discipline. The ars conception was the dominant
conception.6 For Gassendi, logic is the ars bene cogitandi, the skill of using
our cognitive faculties most effectively in order to reach the truth:
because the mind can easily err in thinking . . . and because it recognises its
errors and wants to guard against making them . . . the mind provides for itself
this art [logic], by which it can direct its operations and by making them
immune from error attain truth itself, the mark it aims at.
(I 91a)
The mind is not, of course, a perfect instrument, but the study and
practice of logic can improve it. Thus Gassendi’s logic offers a great deal of
practical advice (as well as discussions of the figures of the syllogism). For
instance, he warns against allowing one’s ideas to be distorted by one’s state
of mind (as when those in love take their lovers’ warts for beauty-spots) or
by one’s temperament (as when an abstemious man conceives of wine as
unpleasant to taste) (I 96b ff).
Logic is thus supposed both to help us arrive at the truth (to the extent
that truth is accessible under the present circumstances and with our present
capacities) and to correspond to the way our cognitive faculties operate.
This correspondence relies on an assumption that our faculties must tell us
the truth (again, to the extent that truth is accessible) if used carefully and
with constraint. Thus we learn how to gain knowledge by learning how to
use our faculties properly. For, Gassendi thinks, we cannot doubt the truth-
4
5
6
For instance, Aquinas and his followers organized logic according to the three mental
operations: simple apprehension (forming terms); composition and division (forming
propositions); and reasoning (forming arguments). Some writers thus organized logic books
in three parts, terms, propositions, and reasoning (as well, perhaps, as method as the fourth
part). Others, like Gassendi, chose the names of the mental operations. See Ashworth (op.
cit.), who denies that this method of organization makes logic psychologistic in the strong
sense of implying that the study of logic simply is the study of the mental operations.
See Stephen Gaukroger (Cartesian Logic: An Essay on Descartes’s Conception of Inference,
Clarendon Press, 1989) and Gary Hatfield (‘The Workings of the Intellect: Mind and
Psychology’, in Easton (ed.), Logic and the Workings of the Mind: The Logic of Ideas and
Faculty Psychology in Early Modern Philosophy. North American Kant Society Studies in
Philosophy, 1997) as well as Nuchelmans.
The view that logic is an art was the standard humanist view, and was also held by diverse
writers like Burgersdijck and Zabarella. Cf. Nuchelmans.
54 ANTONIA LOLORDO
conduciveness of properly used faculties without doubting the goodness of
God’s creation (III 363a–365b).
Descartes famously agrees that it is inconsistent with God’s nature that
properly used cognitive faculties could be deceptive (AT IXb). This claim
(with a caveat about proper use) was very widely accepted. Gassendi agreed
with the consensus position. For a consequence of the human faculties being
created by God is that they must be adequate for their purpose, i.e. capable
of grasping the relevant, knowable truths. Any dispute is thus over what the
proper use of the cognitive faculties involves, rather than whether proper use
is compatible with radical deception.
Note that God’s goodness is not – for Descartes and especially for
Gassendi – supposed to imply human access to all truths. God need not
have given us a great faculty of cognition, but he would not have given us
one subject to error when used appropriately and within its proper sphere.
Thus a preliminary requirement for doing science or philosophy is to
determine what the proper sphere of human cognition is. Gassendi argues
that Descartes’s procedure of ‘using thoughts alone’ – his commitment to
clear and distinct perceptions arrived at after a certain process of meditation
– is inappropriate for seeking scientific or metaphysical knowledge because it
involves improper use of the cognitive faculties. Such investigations should
proceed instead by exploring things ‘in themselves and through themselves’.
In this context, it is relevant that Gassendi thinks of the Meditations (like the
Discourse on the method of rightly conducting reason and seeking truth in the
sciences) as a treatise on method. Consider how Gassendi introduces
Descartes’s project, in the continuation of the above quote:
he wishes – in order to provide foundations for another new philosophy – to
. . . build up the whole mass again . . . [Descartes] believed that there were in the
Intellect enough resources that the Intellect could achieve perfect knowledge of
all things – even the most abstruse, that is, not only bodies but also God and
souls – by its own power. Hence he gave this preface: Some years ago I was
struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my
childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had
subsequently based on them. I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of
my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the
foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable
and likely to last.
(I 65a, paraphrasing AT VII 17)
Gassendi then reads the remainder of the Meditations as providing the
method whereby we gain access to these new foundations and then acquire a
new picture of the world. On this view, the Meditations is not an exercise of
the method but the provision of an amended and extended version of the
method itself.
What matters here is that method, like logic in general, fuses
psychological and epistemological components. Thus, Gassendi assumes,
GASSENDI ON DESCARTES’S ‘ONE RULE OF LOGIC’
55
for the project of the Meditations to succeed, the method has to be useful; it
has to be something that would give us the truth (or as close as can
reasonably be expected) if used properly, and something that we can actually
carry out. Gassendi, as we shall see, denies that we can carry out the method
of the Meditations. In fact, he denies that Descartes’s procedure fulfils either
criterion. We cannot actually carry out the method, since we cannot doubt
all sensory beliefs and thereby end up with a clear and distinct perception of
purely intellectual ideas. Nor can we learn the truths of nature by focusing
on Descartes’s allegedly clear and distinct ideas.7
Gassendi speaks of Descartes as both wanting to establish a ‘new
philosophy’ and to establish something stable ‘in the sciences’ (and, most
commonly, as simply trying to discover ‘the truth’). It is not entirely clear what
Gassendi takes the method of the Meditations to be a method for doing –
whether, that is, he takes it to be a method for achieving genuine scientific
knowledge to replace the false, scholastic, hylomorphic explanations or a
method for arriving at new metaphysical conclusions. The passage just quoted
and the comparison with Bacon tend to suggest the former, as does his
characterization of the Meditations as an attempt ‘to extend the boundary of
the sciences’ (III 273a). But the lack of discussion of purely scientific issues in
the Disquisitio – with the rather high-level exception of worries about the
vacuum – suggests the latter.8 Fortunately, little hangs on this for present
purposes. Gassendi thinks the method of the Meditations is supposed to lead
to conclusions about the relation between mind and body, the different
faculties of the mind, and the nature of bodies – that is, it is a method of
discovery and not a method of justification.9 And the Meditations do argue for
7
In these passages Gassendi reads Descartes as thinking that the acquisition of knowledge
requires only the intellect, thus discounting the role of sense-based knowledge in Descartes’s
programme. Whether this is a product of genuine misunderstanding or is an exaggeration
done for rhetorical purposes is difficult to tell. Gassendi certainly knew of and respected
Descartes’s empirical scientific work, having read the Discourse, Optics, Geometry, and
Meteorology, although I know of no evidence suggesting he took it as particularly closely
related to the project of the Meditations.
8
we suffer so much loss of hope with you, so great a man, with so much expected from . . . can it
happen, that this man, brought up in the study of Mathematics and so well knowing what things
are demonstrations, considers and publishes these arguments as demonstrations, which
nevertheless cannot elicit assent from us who direct our attention toward them and are welldisposed? Or that he – puffed up with pride from having thought of and discovered some new
things in Geometry – considers it possible that he will be equally fortunate in other related
matters and especially Metaphysics?
(Cf. III 275b)
9
Gassendi is certainly right in that the Meditations present clear and distinct perception as a
method of discovery rather than a way of legitimizing claims arrived at on some other basis. It
is rather less clear that Descartes himself used clear and distinct perception as a method of
discovery. The presentation of it in the Meditations is misleading, as scholarly work on
Descartes’s observational work has shown.
56 ANTONIA LOLORDO
such conclusions. Thus it is not terribly important for our purposes whether
these conclusions are classified as metaphysical or natural philosophical.
CLARITY AND DISTINCTNESS
Gassendi denies that Descartes’s meditative method is practicable because
he denies that we can isolate a stable, consistent, and commonly held set of
clear and distinct perceptions. He begins by noting that clear and distinct
perception is supposed to be both introspectible and objectively justificatory:
1.
2.
the clarity and distinctness of a perception is something to which the
perceiver has immediate, incorrigible introspective access;
all clear and distinct perceptions are true – in central cases, true in virtue
of exhibiting to the perceiver the essences of things.10
Then Gassendi argues that (a) and (b) do not have the necessary connection
Descartes requires, in other words, that the link between the experiential
property and the truth-linked property cannot be established.
In fact, Gassendi argues, (a) and (b) are incompatible as general rules. For
one thing, experience seems to tell us that they are inconsistent, for we
recognize that there have been cases when we thought we perceived
something clearly and distinctly and later perceived something else
incompatible clearly and distinctly. Gassendi uses asymptotes as an
example:
At one time . . . I could have sworn that it is impossible that two lines,
continually approaching each other more closely, should not eventually meet if
they are produced to infinity. I thought I perceived [this] so clearly and
distinctly that I counted [it] as among the truest and most indubitable axioms.
Nevertheless, afterwards I came across arguments which convinced me that
10
This requires qualification. Gassendi talks as if clear and distinct perceptions are supposed to
be true in virtue of exhibiting essences of existing things. On Descartes’s view, however, some
clear and distinct perceptions (e.g. perception of the thinking I or the common notion
whatever thinks exists) have objects which are not essences; others (e.g. perception of
mathematical entities) have as their objects essences which need not be instantiated. The first
sort becomes important only in disputes about the cogito. I shall bracket out the second sort
as much as possible, to keep the focus on clear and distinct perception. Readers interested in
an approach from the direction of essences should consult Olivier Bloch (La Philosophie de
Gassendi: Nominalisme, máterialisme, et me´taphysique, Nijhoff, 1970), Thomas Lennon
(‘Pandora, Or, Essence and Reference: Gassendi’s Nominalist Objection and Descartes’s
Realist Reply,’ in Roger Ariew and Marjorie Grene (eds), Descartes and his Contemporaries,
University of Chicago Press, 1995) or Margaret Osler (Divine Will and the Mechanical
Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World,
Cambridge, 1995).
GASSENDI ON DESCARTES’S ‘ONE RULE OF LOGIC’
57
the opposite was the case and that I perceived it even more clearly and
distinctly. Yet now, when I consider the nature of mathematical propositions,
I am in doubt again.
(III 314b)
Moreover, different people have inconsistent, allegedly clear and distinct
perceptions:
everyone thinks they clearly and distinctly perceive that which they defend. And
– lest you say that most either waver in or feign their beliefs – there are those
people who even face death for their opinions although they see others so
suffering for opposite opinions. You cannot really think that they are not sincere.
(III 315a)
This is supposed to show that anyone who holds that all clear and distinct
perceptions are true must also hold that there can be mistakes about
whether a perception is clear and distinct.11 But if this is so – if clarity and
distinctness are not a matter of incorrigible, first-person access – then we
need a mark for telling which of our persuasive perceptions are actually
clear and distinct:
What you should be working on is not so much confirming this rule which
makes it so easy for us to take the false for the true, but instead proposing a
method to guide us and teach us when we are mistaken and when not, in the
cases where we think we clearly and distinctly perceive something.
(III 315a)
Since Descartes has not provided any such mark, Gassendi argues, his
vaunted method is all but useless.
Note here that Gassendi has not simply brought up the notorious
problem of the criterion against Descartes. Rather, he has provided an
argument for there being particular need for a criterion in this case, by
pointing out that we have all experienced cases where our seemingly clear
and distinct perceptions are incompatible with each other or with those of
other people.12
11
Descartes denies this by claiming that ‘it can never be proved that [such people] clearly and
distinctly perceive what they so stubbornly affirm’ (AT VII 361). Gassendi does not take this
denial seriously:
For us, who are men [as opposed to disembodied minds] and who, as is suitable for men, reason
from things done [ex effectis], the fact that these men go to meet death for the sake of some
opinion appears to be a perspicuous argument that they perceive it clearly and distinctly as the
best and the one which should be followed.
(III 317a)
12
It is important that Gassendi thinks the same could not be said for what is clearly and
distinctly sensed, as he holds that the appearances themselves cannot be false, only
judgements made on the basis of the appearances. Nor can appearances conflict with each
other, as the information they convey is always relative to the context of perception. This is
supposed to provide a basis for a genuine, sensory truth-criterion.
58 ANTONIA LOLORDO
In response, Descartes points out that clarity and distinctness are features
only of the perceptions of people who have freed their minds from the senses, i.e.
who have properly followed the method of meditating.13 Such people will not
be mistaken about what is clearly and distinctly perceived. But since Gassendi
has failed to meditate in this way, inconsistencies among his apparently clear
and distinct perceptions are irrelevant to Descartes’s project. Gassendi fails to
grasp the efficacy of the method because he is still ‘mired in the senses’:
As for the method enabling us to distinguish between the things that we really
perceive clearly and those that we merely think we perceive clearly, I believe, as I
have already said, that I have been reasonably careful to supply such a method,
but I have little confidence that those who spend so little effort on getting rid of
their preconceived opinions that they complain that I have not dealt with them in
a ‘simple and brief’ statement will arrive at a clear perception of it.
(AT VII 379)
Those who have not abandoned preconceived opinions and freed
themselves from the senses cannot perceive clearly and distinctly; but those
who have freed their intellects will never disagree about what is clearly and
distinctly perceived. Hence clarity and distinctness need no mark beyond the
associated compulsion to believe. So, Descartes replies, the method for
determining which perceptions are genuinely clear and distinct has already
been given:
You say at the end of this section that what we should be working on is not so
much a rule to establish the truth as a method for determining whether or not
we are deceived when we think we perceive something clearly. This I do not
dispute; but I maintain that I carefully provided such a method in the
appropriate place, where I first eliminated all preconceived opinions and
afterwards listed all my principal ideas, distinguishing those which were clear
from those which were obscure or confused.
(AT VII 361–2; cf. AT VII 477 & IXb 22–3)
This response initially seems unhelpful. Gassendi asked for a method for
distinguishing genuinely clear and distinct perceptions from belief-compelling, but not clear and distinct, acts of the mind. Descartes responds that a
method has been given, as follows: eliminate all preconceived opinions, list
the principal ideas, and distinguish the clear principal ideas from the obscure
or confused principal ideas. One might now ask how the last step is to be
carried out – isn’t distinguishing clear principal ideas from obscure ones just
a special case of distinguishing the genuinely clear and distinct?
Descartes’s answer, I take it, is yes – but it is a case where error is
impossible. For error in seeing what’s perceived clearly and distinctly results
13
For the possibility of those who have not meditated mistaking something else for clarity and
distinctness, see e.g. AT VII 35: ‘. . . there was something else which I used to assert, and
which through habitual belief I thought I perceived clearly, although I did not in fact do so’.
GASSENDI ON DESCARTES’S ‘ONE RULE OF LOGIC’
59
from the contagious effect of obscure and confused concepts acquired before
the age of reason:
those who do not abandon their preconceived opinions will find it hard to
acquire a clear and distinct concept of anything; for it is obvious that the
concepts which we had in our childhood were not clear and distinct, and
hence, if not set aside, they will affect any other concepts which we acquire
later and make them obscure and confused.
(AT VII 518)
Once methodological doubt removes such distortion, there is no
principled difficulty identifying clear and distinct perceptions.14 There is
then no need for any further criterion of clarity and distinctness; it can be
defined simply by pointing at examples we have experienced.15 Recall what
Descartes says about clear and distinct perception in the Geometrical
Appendix to the Second Replies:
I ask my readers to ponder on all the examples that I went through in my
Meditations, both of clear and distinct perception, and of obscure and
confused perception, and thereby accustom themselves to distinguishing what
is clearly known from what is obscure. This is something that it is easier to
learn by examples than by rules, and I think that in the Meditations I
explained, or at least touched on, all the relevant examples.
(AT VII 164)
The examples given in the Meditations are examples that must be
experienced by the reader in order to be compelling.16 Descartes asks the
reader to follow him in getting herself in a position to, for example, perceive
the thinking I clearly and distinctly; we are supposed then to be certain of
the existence of that I. Then he points out that the feature of the experience
which made the reader certain is what he means by clarity and distinctness
(cf. AT VII 162–3).
14
15
16
All four causes of error listed at Principles I 71–4 pertain either to reversion to preconceived
opinions or to paying attention to words rather than things – that is, with lapses in attention
or failure to clear the mind of preconceived opinions. So Descartes allows occasional sources
of error aside from preconceived opinions of the senses, but, I take it, the contrast between
distortions like fatigue and distortions like reliance on the senses is intuitively clear.
This may seem in tension with the Principles’ definitions of clarity and distinctness: clear
perceptions are ‘present and accessible to the attentive mind’; distinct perceptions are clear
and also ‘so sharply separated from all other perceptions’ that they contain within themselves
only what is clear. But note that the explanation of being ‘present and accessible to the
attentive mind’ – i.e. that presentness operates as it does in the case of vision, where we see
something clearly ‘when it is present to the eye’s gaze and stimulates it with a sufficient degree
of strength and accessibility’ – would not help anyone understand clarity and distinctness
from the outside. Here, again, Descartes points to an example of clear and distinct
perception and intends the reader, who has similar God-given faculties, to generalise.
See Hatfield, ‘The Senses and the Fleshless Eye: The Meditations as Cognitive Exercises’ (in
Stephen Voss (ed.) Essays on the Philosophy and Science of Rene Descartes, Oxford, 1993).
60 ANTONIA LOLORDO
This experiential focus is also evident in the 3rd Meditation move from the
clear and distinct perception of the thinking I to the ‘general rule’ of clarity
and distinctness, a move which is to be defended by dismissing worries
about a deceiving God:
I am certain that I am a thinking thing. Do I not therefore also know what is
required for my being certain about anything? In this first item of knowledge
there is simply a clear and distinct perception of what I am asserting; this
would not be enough to make me certain of the truth of the matter if it could
ever turn out that something which I perceived with such clarity and
distinctness was false. So I now seem to be able to lay it down as a general rule
that whatever I perceive very clearly and distinctly is true.
(AT VII 35)
Gassendi says, in objection to this, that Descartes seems
in reverse order and contrary to the laws of Induction, to infer a universal
proposition from the sole observation of a singular proposition, when, from
the mere fact that you have observed that the certainty of this proposition I
think springs from clear and distinct perception, you infer this conclusion,
therefore everything which I perceive clearly and distinctly is true.
(III 316a)
Descartes’s response is helpful. He is not, he tells us, inferring a universal
proposition from one observed instance. Rather, experiencing that instance
makes him notice a general rule already implicitly and inevitably ascribed to,
one whose truth-conduciveness he will examine in the worry about the
deceiving God.17 The general rule is supposed to gain its initial plausibility
not from induction but because of our felt compulsion to follow it.
Descartes has thus in effect argued that the clarity and distinctness of a
perception are obvious and unmistakable to someone who has meditated
properly. Thus Gassendi has failed to establish that there is any problem
about clear and distinct perception besides the general sceptical problem I
discuss in section V.18 This response, of course, relies on Descartes having
provided reason to believe that after we have followed the method of
meditating and have thereby abandoned all preconceived opinions, there
17
18
For it is left open at this point that the clarity and distinctness rule, though compelling, may
be false because his nature might be such that he is systematically deceived. This worry bears
on the metaphysical question, however, and not the methodological question: it is no longer
concerned with picking out a stable, consistent, and commonly-shared set of clear and
distinct perceptions but rather with determining that the set provides the basis for knowledge
of the world.
Note that this does not fully explain why someone should not worry that his own clear and
distinct perceptions, although consistent as a set, are inconsistent with those of other people.
However, both Descartes and Gassendi seem happy to assume that the basic cognitive
faculties operate in the same way for all people, so that if what’s clearly and distinctly
perceived is a product of the basic operations of the intellect alone, clear and distinct
perception should be the same for all people.
GASSENDI ON DESCARTES’S ‘ONE RULE OF LOGIC’
61
can be no inconsistency in what we perceive clearly and distinctly. Hence the
terrain of the critique now shifts to the possibility of doubt itself.
THE METHOD OF DOUBT
Gassendi reads the 1st Meditation’s doubts as a tool intended to allow us to
isolate the clear and distinct perceptions of the intellect, and hence reads
doubt as centrally important: ‘this Meditation about the avoidance of
preconceived opinions is the fortress of your arguments, and it is like a
Trojan Horse: when [your arguments] come forth out of it, they overcome
any defences, however greatly guarded . . .’ (III 279b).
For he takes this doubt to be an experiment intended to convince the
meditator of the distinction between intellectual or innate ideas, and sensory
cognitions.19 (There is a certain slippage in the debate here between ideas
and judgements, since Descartes and Gassendi draw the distinction
differently: but it is not, I think, crucial to understanding what is going
on.20) Gassendi summarizes – or, perhaps better, parodies – Descartes’s
argument for innate ideas of the intellect as follows:
He who, having previously known things, considers himself in a state of
ignorance as a result of his pursuit of the divestment of ideas, readily
recognizes innate ideas, i.e. those which we would have in a state of ignorance
as a result of pure denial.
Now I, having previously known things, consider myself in a state of ignorance
as a result of my pursuit of the divestment of ideas.
Therefore I readily recognize innate ideas, i.e. those which I would have in a
state of ignorance as a result of pure denial.
(III 320a)
19
20
Gassendi tends to equate innate ideas with purely intellectual ideas. However, innateness
does not do any work of its own in Gassendi’s argument; it just functions as a corollary of
the existence of peculiarly intellectual ideas (and the consequent postulation of the intellect
as a distinct faculty not dependent for its operation on sense or imagination). The reader may
substitute ‘intellectual’ for ‘innate’ in reading Gassendi’s texts if she wishes.
For Descartes, an idea can be either term-like or propositional in form, and a judgement is
the giving or denying of assent to something presented in idea. For Gassendi, ideas must
always be terms, and judgments are the joining of two ideas by is or is not. (This leaves him
with a problem in distinguishing between believing a proposition and entertaining it.) On his
theory of ideas, judgements are wholly determined by the ideas possessed, so that
withholding or granting assent to a propositional complex is never an act of will but is fully
determined by the intellect. Hence, for Gassendi, the contents of judgement are determined
by the contents of ideas, so that he is unwilling to allow Descartes that judgements can be
doubted while ideas remain unchanged.
62 ANTONIA LOLORDO
He interprets Descartes as claiming that the fact that a certain class of
ideas – the ideas of body, extension, shape, quantity, etc (AT VII 20 & 27–38)
– remains after all the ideas acquired through the senses have been thrown
off, shows that those ideas are innate and pertain to an independent faculty of
the intellect. If this is right, then Descartes’s argument for purely intellectual
ideas relies quite clearly on our actually having carried out the divestment of
all sensory ideas. If we do not divest our minds of sensory ideas then we have
not carried out the experiment; we have merely feigned doing so.
Gassendi proceeds to argue that the divestment of sensory ideas is
impossible. In fact, he argues, we cannot even divest ourselves of the beliefs
of the senses. Thus the method of doubt establishes nothing: ‘. . . from what
you imagine in this divestment [of pre-existing cognition], you cannot draw
a conclusion concerning those things which you would have done in that
pure denial of all pre-existing cognition’ (III 320a).
Grant that if we were to abandon all the ideas acquired through the senses
and found ourselves left with certain purely intellectual ideas, we would
have some reason to take them as constituting a special class for the
purposes of scientific or metaphysical cognition. That is, grant that if the
experiment were carried out with the result Descartes describes, it would
show what he wants it to. Gassendi denies that the experiment has actually
been carried out. The method of doubt does not enable us to doubt all
preconceived opinions – as I shall argue, on Gassendi’s view nothing could
do that. Rather, it is ‘merely verbal’, and merely verbal doubt is unhelpful:
If [you hold preconceived opinions to be false] in name and as a jest, then this
does not make you advance at all toward the correct perception of things. For
whether you do this or not, the mind is not affected at all, and it is not helped
either to perceive or to perceive more clearly.
(III 280b)
For merely verbal doubt does not change the way the mind perceives; in
particular, it cannot make the mind capable of clear and distinct perception,
for it cannot erase the sensory beliefs which Descartes thinks distort
judgement. Without genuinely doubting the beliefs of the senses, we cannot
tell whether certain intellectual beliefs rely on them without our knowing it.
Gassendi quotes Descartes saying that ‘no sane man seriously doubts’
beliefs like the Sun is round, I am a man, from two straight lines are formed
two right angles or two angles equal to two right angles, and then asks, ‘if it is
only in words that you can doubt these things and similar preconceived
opinions, then do you still suppose that you are able to destroy all
preconceived opinions?’ (III 280a, paraphrasing AT VII 351). Thus
Gassendi argues that the meditator has only pretended to carry out the
experiment. And this thought experiment cannot establish the conclusions
which Descartes wants it to. Rather than establishing that there is a
privileged class of non-sensory ideas, Descartes merely establishes that he
thinks there is such a class.
GASSENDI ON DESCARTES’S ‘ONE RULE OF LOGIC’
63
Compare the methodology of this thought experiment to two cases
which Gassendi thinks could help determine whether there are ideas innate
to the intellect: the cognitive state of those with sensory deficits, and the
results of brain damage. Gassendi argues that the case of the man blind
from birth gives us good reason to doubt that there are innate ideas. For a
man born blind has no idea of colour, and a man born deaf no idea of
sound, and this is presumably because ‘external objects have not been able
to transmit any images of themselves to the minds of such unfortunates’
(III 320b). Descartes replies, first, that Gassendi does not know that the
blind man has no idea of colour; and second, that even if Gassendi is
right, one could ‘just as well attribute the absence of ideas of colour in the
man born blind to the fact that his mind lacks the faculty for forming
them’. For this last hypothesis ‘is just as reasonable as [Gassendi’s] claim
that he does not have the ideas because he is deprived of sight’ (AT VII
363). To this, Gassendi replies that – while he cannot demonstrate that the
blind man has no idea of colour – nevertheless Descartes’s claim is not as
reasonable as his own. It is more probable that the blind man has no idea
of colour, and that this is because he has never seen coloured objects. And
this observation, although it only gives us probable reason to deny innate
ideas, is still more legitimate than Descartes’s thought-experiment, which
lends no probability at all.
The case of brain damage works more or less the same way. Gassendi
argues that Descartes fails to establish the distinction between imagination
and intellect either by means of the 1st Meditation doubt, or by means of
examples of ideas allegedly knowable only by the intellect, such as the ideas
of the chiliagon and the substance of the wax. For an alternate explanation
of the genesis of those ideas is available to us, namely, the operations of
abstraction and composition over materials derived from the senses.21 Thus
we need not posit two genuinely distinct faculties of mind. Gassendi asks,
my good Mind, can you establish that there are several internal faculties and
not one simple and universal one which enables us to know whatever we
know? . . . If, after brain damage or some injury to the imaginative faculty, the
intellect remained as before, performing its proper functions all unimpaired,
then we could say that the intellect is as distinct from the imagination as the
imagination is distinct from the external senses. But since things do not happen
in this way, there is surely no ready way of establishing the distinction.
(III 300b)
21
We abstract the idea of substance, such as the substance of the wax, from the idea of body
(etc.) which is in turn arrived at by abstraction from the idea of rocks, trees, dogs, etc. These
last ideas are arrived at by grouping together particular sense perceptions on the basis of
similarity. The chiliagon case is more complicated, and for Gassendi mathematical ideas are
a special case since – unlike the ideas of other ‘theoretical entities’ – they do not carry
existence claims with them.
64 ANTONIA LOLORDO
These two cases are Gassendi’s suggestions as to what might actually
establish the distinction between the intellect and its objects, a distinction
which, he thinks, Descartes wants the method of doubt to establish. Unlike
the method of doubt – which is ineffectual because it cannot actually be
carried out – the cases of brain damage and of sensory deficits could,
Gassendi thinks, give us compelling (although not wholly certain) reason to
believe. In fact, these suggestions fit into a larger pattern of what Gassendi
takes to be proper scientific method, one which gives recommendations for
achieving scientific knowledge which are incompatible with Descartes’s
recommendations. Gassendi does not object to the Cartesian method
because he denies the possibility of knowledge, but because he thinks the
Cartesian method validates precisely those ideas which are arrived at
through dubious, potentially misleading psychological processes, rather
than ideas such as sensory ideas, which at least in paradigm cases are fully
evident.
THE POSSIBILITY OF DOUBT
Gassendi construes Descartes as attempting, in the 1st Meditation, to draw
a sharp distinction between sensory (or imaginative) cognition and
intellectual cognition. He supposes this distinction to be drawn through
the method of doubt, which strips the mind of sensory beliefs leaving behind
only intellectual cognition of innate ideas. The cogency of Gassendi’s
objection thus relies on the 1st Meditation being intended to bring about
believable psychological doubt, rather than merely providing epistemic
considerations against everyday beliefs. For it is in no way plausible that
purely epistemological doubt would alter the structure of the mind in the
appropriate way.
That Cartesian doubt is intended to be psychologically efficacious, to
actually change the contents of the doubting mind, is relatively clear. For
one, consider Descartes’s customary notes that radical doubt is very difficult
and requires ‘months, or at least weeks’, which would not make sense except
on a psychological reading (AT VII 94; cf. AT VII 17 & Principles I.1); for
another, consider the way the method of doubt is introduced in the Search
for Truth (AT X 508–9). Of course, not all belief is supposed to be destroyed
– only the sensory beliefs. Thus not all the 1st Meditation doubts need be
believable. We need not genuinely cease to have beliefs like 2 + 3 = 5 or
whatever thinks exists: and this is fortunate, since only a ‘slight and
metaphysical’ doubt of such self-evident beliefs is possible (AT VII 146–7).
When I talk about Cartesian doubt from now on, I have in mind only the
sort of doubt applicable to propositions such as I am seated in front of a fire
and not the sort applicable to 2 + 3 = 5.
Now, Gassendi argues that the hypotheses of the 1st Meditation are
insufficient to bring about believable doubt about all the beliefs acquired
GASSENDI ON DESCARTES’S ‘ONE RULE OF LOGIC’
65
through the senses. For, he argues, such doubt is impossible given the way
the human cognitive faculties work. The method of doubt assumes ‘that it is
possible for a mind to be freed from all preconceived opinions; but that seems
to be an impossible occurrence’ (III 279a). A fortiori, considering the
deceptiveness of the senses, the possibility of dreaming and the evil demon
cannot be sufficient to empty the mind:
in order to call everything into doubt you pretend that you are asleep and
consider that everything which occurs is an illusion. But can you thereby
compel yourself to believe that you are not awake, and to consider as false and
uncertain whatever is going on around you? Whatever you say, no one will
believe that you have really convinced yourself that not one thing you formerly
knew is true, or that your senses, or God, or an evil demon, have managed to
deceive you all the time.
(AT VII 258)
Gassendi has three reasons for thinking that genuinely psychological
doubt is impossible. His first reason is experiential: despite a great deal of
effort, he himself has not succeeded in freeing his mind from preconceived
opinions by meditating along with Descartes. The method, Gassendi says,
did not help him any.
Second, Gassendi argues, the way memory operates makes abandoning
all beliefs impossible. Even if we want and have reason to abandon the
beliefs of the senses entirely, the influence of old beliefs remains in the
memory:
since the memory is like a storehouse of judgements that we have previously
made and deposited in its keeping, we cannot cut it off at will . . . judgements
already made persist so strongly by habit, and imprints similar to those of a
signet are so fixed, that it is not in our power to avoid them or erase them at
will.
(III 279a)
Here, Descartes might agree that in some sense we still ‘retain the same
notions in memory’ (AT IXA 204) when we withhold assent. But because,
on Descartes’s view, the intellect has some capacity to judge which is
independent of the traces held in the corporeal memory, the existence of
certain material traces does not prevent us from withholding assent to
certain judgements voluntarily, but only makes it somewhat more difficult
for us to do so. And the difficulty of carrying out the method of doubt is
something which Descartes has already very clearly noted.
Third, there are some types of belief which we cannot help assenting to:
there are some preconceived opinions that can be changed and there are
likewise some that cannot . . . since every judgement refers to some object as it
appears to the mind, it results that if the object always appears the same way –
as the Sun always appears round and shining, or as the meeting of two straight
66 ANTONIA LOLORDO
lines always appears to form two right angles or two angles equal to two right
angles – then we always make the same judgement . . . [these] judgements
cannot be changed (because what appears in the object is not changed), and
therefore . . . the mind cannot escape them.
(III 279b)
Gassendi thinks this accords with introspection. But the argument also
relies on substantive theses about cognition. On Gassendi’s theory of the
mind, our ideas determine our beliefs so that, if the appearance of something
is always the same, we cannot help always having the same belief. For
instance, so long as the ideas of the Sun and of light are fixed – so long as the
sun always appears the same in the relevant respects – we cannot avoiding
believing that the Sun is light:
consider, for as long as you wish, the Sun and Light separately; and similarly
two straight lines crossing each other and two right angles or two angles
equalling two right angles. When it behoves you to connect the terms or
attributes of the subject again you will not apply any connection other than
that same word ‘is’. You will not say, the Sun is not light, or that two straight
lines intersecting is not [a thing] creating two angles which are either right or
equal to two right angles.
(III 279b)
For judgement is simply a matter of comparing ideas, and the agreement
of the ideas of the sun and lightness is unmistakable. Since there are many
objects of which we have entirely constant ideas, not all judgements can be
changed.22
It makes no difference here that Cartesian doubt is intended to operate
merely temporarily, within the limits of the pursuit of truth. On Gassendi’s
theory of judgement, we cannot doubt everything even temporarily and for
a restricted purpose
you suppose that it is possible to hold [every preconceived opinions] false
during some period of time; but either you suppose them to be held false
seriously and in fact, or in name and as if in jest. If seriously and in fact, then it
is as impossible to hold them false for an hour as for a year or a century. If in
name and as a jest, then this does not make you advance at all toward the right
perception of things.
(III 280b)
22
When things do not always appear the same – when we have several different ideas of, i.e.
caused by, the same thing – the judgements can be changed. Consider the idea of the size of
the sun: through sight, we obtain an idea of the sun as something very small; but the idea of
the sun modified by the mind on the basis of the empirical observations that distant objects
appear smaller than they are and that the sun is distant, is an idea of something much larger.
In learning astronomy, our idea of the size of the sun changes; the ideas which determine
judgement are not exclusively basic sensory ideas. See III 321a ff.
GASSENDI ON DESCARTES’S ‘ONE RULE OF LOGIC’
67
For restricting doubt to a limited sphere does not affect the basic
mechanisms of the mind which, on Gassendi’s account of human cognition,
render radical doubt psychologically impossible. We need not enter into the
details of the account of judgement presupposed here. All we need to see is
that Gassendi’s criticism relies both on his experienced inability to doubt
and, more importantly, on a worked-out theory of cognition.
Descartes has two possible lines of response, neither of which can resolve
the situation satisfactorily. He might respond that he himself has cast off the
preconceived opinions of youth entirely, so the project is obviously possible.
Here both parties’ positions derive solely from introspective experience.
There is no good way, at this point in the argument, to adjudicate between a
Descartes who claims to be able to doubt all the judgements of sense, and a
Gassendi who says that he cannot do so – unless, of course, we simply want
to go by our own introspective experience.
Descartes could also respond, on the basis of his theory of the cognitive
faculties, that judgement is a matter of the will, and hence is voluntary:23 ‘. . .
we nonetheless experience within us the kind of freedom which enables us
always to refrain from believing things which are not completely certain and
thoroughly examined’ (AT VIIIA 6).
If, on the one hand, the appeal here is simply to the experience of such
freedom – as in the examples of the sun’s brightness and the intersection of
two straight lines – then, as we have seen, Gassendi simply denies that we
have such freedom in the case of all preconceived opinions. Appeals to
particular introspective experiences are no more conclusive here than was
the general appeal to introspection. If Descartes claims, on the basis of
introspection, to be able to genuinely doubt the sun’s brightness and
Gassendi denies on the basis of introspection that he can do so, there seems
to be no principled way to adjudicate the dispute. The reader must simply
experience, or fail to experience, believable doubt as a result of
concentration and meditation on what is said in the 1st Meditation.
If, on the other hand, the appeal is to a theory of cognition, then – if
Gassendi’s interpretation is more-or-less right, as I have argued – then it
cannot legitimately be made in this context. On Gassendi’s reading of the
method of doubt, the method of doubt is supposed, in large part, to provide
the argument for a particular theory of the faculties. (If this is not the case, it
is difficult to see where in the Meditations Descartes does provide such an
argument.24) Thus theses about the structure of the cognitive faculties cannot
23
24
This is over-simplified. All judgement falls under the scope of the will and hence is voluntary
in one sense. However, clear and distinct perception is irresistible – ‘Admittedly my nature is
such that so long as I perceive something very clearly and distinctly, I cannot but believe it to
be true’ (AT VII 69) – and hence involuntary in another sense. This complication can be
ignored since the ‘preconceived opinions’ which the method of doubt applies to are not
perceived clearly and distinctly.
The argument about the intellectual and imaginative conceptions of the chiliagon is the most
obvious other possibility: but this is given too late in the dialectic to help.
68 ANTONIA LOLORDO
be brought in to defend the method of doubt if the project is to be compelling
to anyone outside the fold. If the Meditations argues for a controversial
theory of the faculties on the basis of clear and distinct perception, then the
notion of clarity and distinctness cannot be defended on the basis of that
theory without begging the question. Thus, although comparisons between
the theories of the cognitive faculties relied on by Descartes and Gassendi in
this dispute are both interesting and independently important, the dispute
cannot in any way be resolved by invoking or denying a certain set of
intellectualist principles. We have reached what is at best a stand-off.
DESCARTES’S RESPONSE
Perhaps the reader is wondering why God in his role as guarantor of the
truth of clear and distinct perception has not entered into the argument.
Cannot Descartes argue for the truth of clear and distinct perception on
the grounds that God is not a deceiver; argue for the primacy of purely
intellectual ideas on the basis of his clear and distinct perception of them;
and then infer from this to a conception of the intellect as capable of
operating in isolation from sensory and imaginative cognition? Then
everything would be fine, except for the annoyance of the Cartesian Circle
– the problem of how to achieve knowledge of the God who is not a
deceiver without appeal to clear and distinct perception. And this, the
reader might say, can hardly be taken seriously in this context. After all, I
began my argument by saying that both Descartes and Gassendi accept
that there is a non-deceptive God who guarantees that properly used
cognitive faculties are truth-conducive (to the extent that truth is accessible
to us).
In other words, one might object that the shared assumption that
properly-used cognitive faculties are truth-conducive rules out the possibility of objecting to the doctrine of clarity and distinctness right away,
without need for any investigation of its cognitive basis. Indeed, Descartes
himself makes this suggestion at times. Consider the letter to Gibieuf of 19
January 1642, discussing the real distinction argument:
You will say perhaps that the difficulty remains [after granting that the idea of
the mind is of a substance], because although I conceive the soul and body as
two substances which I can conceive separately and even deny each of each
other, I am still not certain that they are such as I conceive them to be. Here we
have to recall the rule already stated, that we cannot have any knowledge of
things except by the ideas we conceive of them . . . In the same way we can say
that the existence of atoms, or parts of matter which have extension and yet
are indivisible, involves a contradiction . . . I do not on that account deny that
there can be in the soul or the body many properties of which I have no ideas; I
deny only that there are any which are inconsistent with the ideas of them that
GASSENDI ON DESCARTES’S ‘ONE RULE OF LOGIC’
69
I do have, including the idea that I have of their distinctness; else God would
be a deceiver and we would have no rule to make us certain of the truth.
(AT III 477)
A similar point is made, this time explicitly against the Gassendists, in the
‘Letter to Clerselier’. Responding to the objection that mathematical
extension subsists only in the mind, and thus that a physics based on
mathematical extension must be imaginary and fictitious rather than real,
Descartes says scornfully:
All the things that we can understand and conceive are, on this account, only
imaginings and fictions of our minds which cannot have any subsistence. And
it follows from this that nothing that we can in any sense understand, conceive
or imagine should be accepted as true; in other words we must entirely close
the door to reason and content ourselves with being monkeys or parrots rather
than men, if we are to deserve a place among these great minds. For if the
things we can conceive must be regarded as false merely because we can
conceive them, all that is left is for us to be obliged to accept as true only things
which we do not conceive.
(AT IXB 212)
This passage, like most of the 5th Replies, is rather on the rude side (even
for Descartes). One might wonder why. I suspect that this is because we
have reached a point at which Descartes cannot answer Gassendi’s objection
in a way likely to be acceptable to someone not already within the fold (nor
vice versa).
Gassendi’s objection to the clarity and distinctness doctrine derives from
a theory of cognition on which to say that mathematical extension is
merely an abstraction of the mind does not – as Descartes tries to suggest
– imply that ‘all the things that we can understand and conceive are . . .
only imaginings and fictions of our minds’. That conclusion follows only
for someone who, like Descartes, thinks there is no better choice of ideas
on which to base scientific knowledge than such ‘purely intellectual’ ideas
as the idea of extension. And, as Gassendi argues, this principle cannot be
made compelling without already assuming that the clear and distinct
perceptions resulting from divorcing the mind from the senses and
focussing solely on the idea of the pure intellect, are our pre-eminent
source of knowledge.
The objection is, in effect, that Descartes is simply assuming that the idea
of mathematical extension is one of the best cases, so that if it does not
represent truly then nothing does. But Gassendi argues precisely that
Descartes has failed to establish that his clear and distinct ideas are the best
case. Hence Gassendi sees no reason to give up his own view, that the ideas
derived directly from sense are the best case: and hence he can deny the
truth-conduciveness of Descartes’s clear and distinct perceptions without
raising any general sceptical worries. The issue is not whether God’s
70 ANTONIA LOLORDO
goodness implies the veracity of properly used cognitive faculties, but what
counts as proper use.
Descartes seems unwilling to argue against this sort of objection, and thus
responds by repeating that the objector asks for the impossible: asks that we
think without using ideas. That is, he responds as if the only possible
objection to his position were to deny the possibility of knowledge and the
deliverances of our God-given faculties. Compare the following passage,
again dealing with the real distinction:
had I not been looking for greater than ordinary certainty, I should have been
content to have shown in the Second Meditation that the mind can be
understood as a subsisting thing despite the fact that nothing belonging to the
body is attributed to it . . . I should have added nothing more in order to
demonstrate that there is a real distinction between the mind and the body,
since we commonly judge that the order in which things are mutually related in
our perception of them corresponds to the order in which they are related in
actual reality. But one of the exaggerated doubts which I put forward in the
First Meditation went so far as to make it impossible for me to be certain of
this very point (namely whether things do in reality correspond to our
perception of them), so long as I was supposing myself to be ignorant of the
author of my being.
(AT VII 226)
The presupposition of this argument is that, if we cannot move from clear
and distinct perceptions to things, then we would be able to know nothing.
Later Cartesians made much mileage out of the argument that to deny
their doctrine of clear and distinct perception is to render knowledge
impossible.25 The Port-Royal Logic gives a version of this argument:
This principle [that whatever is clearly and distinctly perceived is true] cannot
be contested without destroying everything evident in human knowledge and
establishing a ridiculous Pyrrhonism. We can judge things only by our ideas of
them, since we have no other means of conceiving them except as they are in
the mind, and since they exist there only by means of their ideas. Now suppose
the judgements we form in considering these ideas did not concern things
themselves, but only our thoughts. In other words, suppose that from the fact
that I see clearly that having three angles equal to two right angles is implied in
the idea of a triangle, I did not have the right to conclude that every triangle
really has three angles equal to two right angles, but only that I think this is the
case. It is obvious that we would know nothing about things, but only about
our thoughts. Consequently, we could know nothing about things except what
we were convinced we knew most certainly, but we would know only that we
25
I have in mind here primarily epistemologically-minded figures like Arnauld and
Malebranche. Those more oriented towards natural philosophy, such as Regius, tended to
be interested in a method of discovery and rejected clear and distinct perception as
inappropriate for that purpose.
GASSENDI ON DESCARTES’S ‘ONE RULE OF LOGIC’
71
thought them to be a certain way, which would obviously destroy all the
sciences.26
This response runs together two different claims: a general, anti-skeptical
thesis and, less explicitly, an echo of Descartes’s claim about which sorts of
ideas are ‘clear and distinct’ and thereby license inference to the nature of
things. However, so doing makes the response less than satisfying, since the
point of Gassendi’s empiricist objection is precisely that the Cartesian
account of which ideas license inferring to the nature of things can be
challenged without falling into skepticism. Gassendi’s objection is not
simply that the gap between ideas and their objects, once opened, cannot be
closed. This is trivial once we grant, as both parties do, that ideas are in
some sense the materials for thought. And it is not a problem given, as both
parties agree, that there are ways of improving our view of the objects of our
ideas. Rather, the issue is which ideas we should take to be the truthconducive ones. This is why Gassendi keeps coming back to the alleged
inconsistency of what is apparently perceived clearly and distinctly:
do not say that your Ideas represent things, not just as they are in Idea or in
the intellect, but rather as they are in themselves and beyond the intellect. For
indeed this is what is in question; and since everyone can say the same thing,
you see what discrepancy must be admitted to follow if there is a discrepancy
of ideas. You may say that this is limited to things known clearly and
distinctly. But the question is, what sort of thing this clear and distinct
knowledge is, in which there can be no falsity at all.
(III 382a)
Gassendi, of course, has his own answer to propose about what sort of
thing can have no falsity at all. It lies in the combination of his version of the
Epicurean doctrine that what appears to sense is always true, together with
an account of how ideas are acquired from the impressions which the
appearances leave in our brains. On this alternate proposal, what method
recommends is to begin with the ideas of individual, particular things. For
on Gassendi’s account all abstract ideas are fictitious, so that Descartes’s
‘clear and distinct perception’ of his essence is no more a guide to what that
essence really is than more obviously constructed ideas:
I add that when someone has in the intellect the Idea of a golden mountain
they understand clearly and distinctly that consisting of gold truly pertains to
the golden mountain and its immutable nature, essence or form and it cannot
be less true and immutable than that a golden mountain consists of gold, that a
rational animal is provided with reason. Thus can one move gradually from
the nature which is represented in Idea and within the intellect to the nature
26
Arnauld and Nicole, Logic or the Art of Thinking, pp. 247–8 (trans. by Jill Buroker,
Cambridge, 1996). See Lennon (Ibid) for a different but (I think) compatible way of relating
this passage to the Gassendi-Descartes debate.
72 ANTONIA LOLORDO
which is in the thing itself and outside the intellect? Truly only this can be said:
What we clearly and distinctly conceive to truly pertain to a golden mountain
and its immutable nature, in so far as it is in Idea, we can with truth affirm of
the golden mountain to the extent that it is in Idea. And do not say that there
is a difference between the golden mountain and the rational animal. For
indeed, there is a certain difference, when you go from the ideal state to the real
state, or the prison of intellect into the theatre of nature: you can see a rational
animal here and there, but a golden mountain nowhere. But as long as you
remain in the ideal state, there is no difference of ideas; and you do not have a
Criterion by means of which you can judge if a certain idea conforms to a
thing existing outside the intellect or not; and you must wait until a Criterion is
given in experience in the real state.
(III 382a)
This constitutes a denial that Descartes’s proposed internal criteria for the
quality of ideas work, together with a claim that there are usable criteria
given in experience. The claim that usable criteria are given in experience
relies on basic features of Gassendi’s theory of cognition that cannot be
addressed here, but the point is clear. Descartes’s response that clear and
distinct perception cannot be doubted without leading to skepticism is
plausible only if one already accepts the theory of the cognitive faculties
argued for in the Meditations. And, since Gassendi takes it that the
argument for that theory fails – because it requires trusting the validity of
clear and distinct perception to begin with – he has no reason to take
Descartes’s anti-skeptical reply seriously. That God’s goodness is incompatible with the possibility that properly used cognitive faculties are deceptive,
is no help in resolving the stand-off that emerges at this point in the debate
between Descartes and Gassendi.27
University of Virginia
27
I would like to thank Martha Bolton, Raffaella De Rosa, Peter Klein, Paul Lodge and Jorge
Secada for helpful comments on previous versions of this paper. Some research was
generously supported by a joint fellowship from Caltech and the Huntington Library.