Descartes: The Last Demonologist

On Descartes' Conception of Causality and his Comments on Ghosts. Chapter Excerpt.

Descartes’ major work, Meditations on First Philosophy, as well as his Discourse on Method, which functions essentially as a study for the first, are acts of radical skepticism. “Some years ago I was struck by the number of false things I had believed,” he says. Though he had been educated at “one of the most celebrated schools in Europe,” he writes, “as soon as I had completed this entire course of study… I found myself confounded by so many doubts and errors that it seemed to me that I had not gained any profit.” Descartes was disillusioned about the assumptions taken for granted by the authorities of the day. Among the reasons for his disillusionment was the work of Nicolaus Copernicus, the astronomer whose description of a heliocentric cosmos contradicted the beliefs held by the academic and political establishment. We know from his letters that Descartes also watched the indictment of Galileo Galilei closely and was acutely aware that, not only had the intellectual foundations of medieval philosophy lost credibility, but that academic and political authorities would defend those foundations whether they were valid or not. Indeed, Descartes hints that, not unlike demonology, his own rational idealism emerged in the wake of political chaos. He began his philosophical project, he tells us, while employed as a soldier in the Thirty Years War, a conflict often understood as a consequence of the Reformation, and he is explicit that his project of doubt arises in response to competing claims to authority—not just between Protestants and Catholics, but across the planet and through history. In an acknowledgement of a historical hermeneutics that prefigures Gadamer, Descartes comments in his Discourse: “On seeing many things that, although they seem to us very extravagant and ridiculous, do not cease to be commonly accepted and approved among other great peoples, I learned not to believe anything too firmly of which I had been persuaded only by example and custom.”

Attempting to free himself of confusion and think his way out of the collapse of authoritative knowledge, Descartes set about the “general demolition” of his opinions and beliefs, including all knowledge that was passed down by tradition (which is often wrong) and even all knowledge that came to him through his senses (which often deceive him). What he seeks is “clear and distinct” knowledge that cannot be doubted. Perhaps not surprisingly, the most radical formulation of this doubt involves the hypothesis of a “malicious, powerful, cunning demon.” Even mathematics and logic should be doubted, Descartes concludes, because it is conceivable that a powerful demon could implant these experiences and ideas in his mind, like “dreams the demon has contrived as traps.” The final implication of the demonic is that all the world is a dream, with no recourse to indubitable reality. In this sense, it is entirely plausible to understand Descartes’ demonstration of “clear and distinct” knowledge as an argument against the demonic.

René Descartes (unknown artist and date)

Descartes’ solution to this radical doubt is found in his famous formula: cogito ergo sum, or, “I think therefore I am.” Even if my every thought and sensation is a deception, I myself must still be something real in order to be deceived. The cogito is indubitable because even the act doubting my own existence reaffirms my existence as a “thinking thing.” This is an absolute truth: I exist. But this absolute and certain truth in turn takes Descartes to a truth beyond himself. The perfect, absolute truth of the cogito, he realizes, cannot come from himself, he who is so riddled with doubt and uncertainty, but can only come from a perfect being, given that, according to scholastic logic, nothing perfect can be produced by something imperfect. Therefore, a perfect being—namely, God—must exist. God grants certain truth, first glimpsed in self-certainty, and truth establishes reality. Through self-conscious reflection on my experience, I can develop more “clear and distinct” knowledge. Above all, I can come to clearly and distinctly understand the mathematical underpinnings of the physical world, which are, like the cogito, also absolute and perfectly understood in self-reflection. They have the same mark of perfection.

But while mathematical and logical truth can be regarded as absolutely real, physical experience and knowledge gleaned through the senses can never attain to such perfection. It is in this move that Descartes becomes the founder of rationalism, the Gadamerian figure of scientific, organizational prejudice: What is clearly understood through reason takes precedence over what is experienced. In Descartes, God himself becomes identical to nature, and nature becomes identical to its mathematical description. “I ought to regard the existence of God as being at least as certain as I have taken the truths of mathematics to be,” he writes. Through this identification of God with mathematics, nature is reduced to that which follows necessary laws, and what appears can only be real if it can be clearly and distinctly understood. For most of the Meditations, Descartes is ambivalent even about whether external bodies exist. When he finally affirms that they do, he writes that “They may not all correspond exactly with my sensory intake of them, for much of what comes in through the senses is obscure and confused, but at least bodies have all the properties that I vividly and clearly understand, that is, all those that fall within the province of pure mathematics.” Thus is born the modern concept of reality: If it cannot be described mathematically, it cannot count as true knowledge of the real.

However, in Descartes’ description of mathematical nature, the door is not entirely closed on the supernatural. Just as his Meditations begins with a malicious demon, the final paragraph returns to the possibility of a supernatural encounter. Descartes’ demonstration that the sensory world is not the product of a demonic intelligence hinges on a clear and distinct understanding of causality. Particularly, on a causal series of events. For Descartes, I can be sure that I am not deceived by a demon, which is to say, I can be sure that I am not dreaming, only because I am able to rationally reconstruct the set of causes and effects that have produced the current moment. “If I have a firm grasp of when, where and whence something comes to me, and if I can connect my perception of it with the whole of the rest of my life without a break, then I am sure that in encountering it I am not asleep but awake. And I ought not to have any doubt of its reality in that it is unanimously confirmed by all my sense as well as my memory and intellect.” This certainty involves more than just an understanding of the series of events that led to the present one, but an understanding of the network of causes and effects that all together mutually reinforce the same understanding. We might say that my certainty about the reality of my experience depends on my understanding of a causal fabric that binds this moment to all the others I have experienced, that unites all my sensory data and all the moments of my life.

“The Haunted Mere” (Alfred James Munnings, 1896)

And yet, Descartes allows the speculation that something might exist otherwise, outside of or as interruptive force within this causal fabric. In the final lines of the Meditations, he writes: “If, while I am awake, a man were suddenly to appear to me and then disappear immediately, as happens in sleep, so that I couldn’t see where he had come from or where he had gone to, I could reasonably judge that he was a ghost or an hallucination rather than a real man.” A ghost or a hallucination—an undecidability we are now familiar with. What is astonishing about this conclusion—and is almost entirely absent from modern academic debate around Descartes—is that, having tied God and nature to mathematics, and reality to that about which we can have certain knowledge, he concedes the possibility that something real, a real phantom, might be experienceable but not comprehensible through an understanding of the causal fabric. I.e. that a noncausal phenomenon might indeed appear. Let’s hypothesize—as Descartes has already done in his malicious demon—that such an experience is something more than hallucination or fantasy. This does not contradict Descartes’ description of reality, but only entertains the possibility that real things might exceed our best understandings of causality and potentially exceed the capacity of human intellect. (Descartes never denies we have only limited intellectual capabilities.) Demonologically, then, we might say that, for Descartes, so long as I follow only what I understand clearly and distinctly, a demon cannot deceive me about what is real—because what I understand clearly and distinctly is guaranteed by the natural light that flows from God’s perfect truth. But, at the same time, the mathematical character of nature does not in itself exclude the possibility that something apparently supernatural might appear. In this, Descartes could be said to push beyond Aristotelian ambivalence, too. He implies that such a phenomenon can be accounted for as a noncausal being through an understanding of the causal fabric, even if we fail to grasp the appearance clearly and distinctly. In this Cartesian ambivalence, if such experiences exist, they are not categorically out of bounds for philosophy but might, at least theoretically, be approached rationally. It is from a perspective of Cartesian ambivalence that we can say these reported apparitions, or out-of-the-blue hallucinations, whatever they are, should be countenanced in hope of forming an idea about them, and that our inability to cognize them is not evidence of their nonexistence.

The problem this admission presents is greater than Descartes acknowledges, though. If such phenomena do appear, they introduce into reality an element that cannot be understood through the causal fabric, given that these phenomena appear to be uncaused. If, unlike Aristotle, we admit these phenomena into the natural order, resisting the expediency of consigning them to a supernatural or eternal realm, we admit not that there is some higher order of being to which the human intellect cannot attain, but that within the order proper to human understanding there are real forces that do not submit to empirical causal analysis and cannot be grasped through classical mathematical operations. It implies that we have immediate access to a reality beyond the world determined by the empirical causal fabric. Descartes is typically interpreted as saying that such knowledge is the only inherently valuable knowledge, because it provides the only access we have to reality. But if there is an additional aspect of reality we immediately encounter and cognize, however inadequately, the importance of clear and distinct empirical causal knowledge is relativized. It poses a question about the value of knowledge based solely on the empirical causal fabric. And it should at least shake our certainty that the knowledge we have clearly and distinctly is indeed knowledge of reality.

We might think of reality as an extremely large paint-by-numbers tableau, for which we only possess a few of the required colors. We fill in the picture clearly and distinctly, using the colors we possess to fill in the blank numbered spaces according to the coloring instructions. We can be certain we have painted what we have painted correctly, even if much of the picture remains blank. Our resulting painting will be understandable to an extent, and will hang together in itself with some interpretation, but we certainly can’t say we have painted the painting. A cryptomorphic experience is like the flash of a new color: we have no familiarity with it or how to use it and can’t begin to understand where it might fit in the painting, but it indicates that there is more to the picture, and that the understanding of the painting we’ve gleaned through clear and distinct knowledge might still be, as it were, complete bullshit. The story we tell about the picture we are a part of makes sense, but nevertheless might be inaccurate. If the other colors were supplied, we might realize that the part of the picture we described logically was only a small, essentially insignificant part of bigger picture. We might be entirely wrong about what we thought we were looking at, even if we were right about what we saw.

Title page of Isaac Newton’s works on Prophecy

It is worth mentioning that this subtle Cartesian ambivalence was also the position of no less a scientist than Isaac Newton. Newton’s 1687 Principia Mathematica, which described the universal mathematical character of motion, did more to establish nature as a set of mathematically determined material laws than any other work. But Newton was also convinced that mathematics did not exhaust nature. For Newton, not only could God still exist in a scientific world, but could also intervene in natural laws. Mostly in private treatises and correspondences, Newton wrote extensively on Christian theology, prophesy, and miracles. In 1733, for instance, he wrote Observations Upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John, which sought to clarify the relation between these dueling biblical visions of the end times. In a fragment from an unfinished treatise on The Book Revelation, he makes his position explicit, going so far as to suggest the miraculous is not non-cognizable but instead non-mathematical. It is, he writes, “contrary to God’s purposes that the truth of his religion should be as obvious and perspicuous to all men as a mathematical demonstration.” In a letter written to the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz by one of Newton’s closest confidants and students, Samuel Clarke, the point is made even more explicit:

With Aristotle’s laws of motion overthrown… [t]he hand of God, which had once kept the heavenly bodies in their orbits, had been replaced by universal gravitation. Miracles had no place in a system whose workings were automatic and unvarying. Governed by precise mathematical and mechanical laws, Newton’s universe seemed capable of running itself. [But] that things could not be at first produced by Mechanism, is expressly allowed: And, when this is once granted…why should it be thought that God is under any Obligation or Confinement either in Nature or Wisdom, never to bring about any thing in the Universe but what is possible for a corporeal Machine to accomplish by mere mechanic Laws[?].

Despite Newton’s personal belief in prophesy and Descartes’ subtle ambivalence on the subject of inexplicable phenomena, the totalizing picture of nature that emerged through Cartesian metaphysics and Newtonian physics, which described nature and experience if not exhaustively then at least universally, made it easy to dismiss the possibility that anything in existence could diverge from these universalities or exist apart from the established rational order. The rejection of this belief was made all the easier because it was identified with the corrupted authority of the Catholic church.