Descartes sent the text of the Meditations to two Dutch acquaintances, Bannius and Bloemart, and they submitted the text for comment to Johann de Kater—Caterus, to give the Latin form of his name—a Roman Catholic priest living in Alkmaar. His reply, the First Objections, is addressed to them rather than to Descartes. His comments bear chiefly on the proofs of the existence of God. Although Caterus refers to St Thomas Aquinas, and his reactions bear the marks of his scholastic training, Jean-Robert Armogathe suggests that his own point of view was neither thoroughly Thomist nor coherently independent.2 But his objections are shrewd, and required Descartes to clarify his notion of objective reality, his conception of God as cause of himself, and the nature of the distinction between mind and body. Both the first and the last points are represented in the extracts: to avoid repetition, the second is held over till the fuller discussion in the Fourth Objections and Replies, which relates back to the text of the First Objections.
The Second Objections and Replies were collected by Mersenne. But it has been argued by Daniel Garber3 that the mathematician and astrologer Jean-Baptiste Morin was among the contributors, and that Descartes’s reply was targeting a work of Morin’s, Quod Deus sit (That God Exists). The Objectors raise some significant points: they cannot see how Descartes has proved that thinking is not a bodily operation; they cast doubt on both the causal and ontological proofs of God; query whether Descartes’s argumentation is self-undermining, and whether all knowledge does depend on the knowledge of God. They ask Descartes for a presentation of his argument along geometrical lines: his reply contains some interesting discussion of method, and shows his sense of the limitations of a purely mathematical approach to knowledge.
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), author of the Third Objections (there are no separate replies: the text gives Descartes’s reply to each of Hobbes’s objections as it comes up), is undoubtedly the greatest thinker among the Objectors. He was living in Paris when the Meditations were published, since he feared being targeted by the parliamentary opponents of the king, and got to know Mersenne. His first major work, De cive, appeared in the year after the Meditations. His objections and Descartes’s replies hardly indicate a meeting of minds, but they are philosophically interesting for Hobbes’s attempt to substitute a materialist ontology and method for Descartes’s own approach.
Antoine Arnauld (1612–94), who submitted the Fourth Objections, was the most remarkable member of a remarkable family, which was closely linked to the convents of Port-Royal that were the centre of the movement in theology and spirituality known as Jansenism. His learning, acumen, logic, and sheer doggedness made him the foremost defender of the version of Augustine’s theology upheld by the ‘Jansenists’.4 But his interests were not confined to theology. He and Pierre Nicole drew up one of the classic textbooks of logic, La Logique ou I’art de penser (1662). Later he engaged in philosophical controversy with Malebranche, and in correspondence with Leibniz. When Louis XIV set about extirpating the Jansenist movement, Arnauld went into exile. The Objections show his critical engagement with Descartes, but he seems to have been satisfied with Descartes’s replies, though there was a further exchange of views in 1648. At any rate, he thereafter maintained Cartesian positions in philosophy, albeit in a critical and independent fashion.5 At the time of the Objections, however, he was very much an up-and-coming scholar, preparing for the doctorate in theology, and his sympathies, it has been argued, were with the theology of William of Ockham rather than that of St Thomas: which may have prepared him to accept certain Cartesian positions.6
The Fifth Objections come from Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), who was, like Descartes, an anti-Aristotelian: but his opposition took a very different form, which hardly predisposed him to espouse Descartes’s philosophy. His own philosophical interests were in scepticism and Epicureanism, and commentators have laboured to reconcile this with his status as an apparently conscientious Catholic priest.7 His objections are sometimes prolix, which is why they have been largely summarized rather than translated here, but contain some significant points: in particular, he can be said to anticipate Kant’s critique of the ontological argument. As with Hobbes, the interest is partly in the clash of opposing, and indeed irreconcilable, philosophical perspectives; and, as with Hobbes, the tone of Descartes’s replies is often far from amicable. Gassendi pursued the debate, and Descartes replied again (see above, p. xvii). In 1648 Descartes and Gassendi were publicly reconciled.8
The Sixth Objections were put forward by a group of philosophers, theologians, and geometers, and collected by Mersenne. Most of the points they raise had already been urged by others. The most significant relate to dualism: the real distinction between soul and body and the denial of souls to animals. Descartes’s replies are often of interest, especially the last section, where he describes his own intellectual evolution.
The Seventh Objections, by the Jesuit Pierre Bourdin, are the longest set of all. They are difficult, and would be unrewarding, to summarize in great detail. This is principally because Bourdin misunderstands Descartes more seriously than any of the other objectors, to the point where the latter accuses him of dishonesty. Moreover, the intercutting of Bourdin’s dissertation and Descartes’s comments makes for difficult reading. (The structure is not identical to that of the Third Objections and Replies: Hobbes is working his way through Descartes’s actual text, and raising difficulties as they come up, whereas Bourdin offers a dissertation, based on his own arrangement of Descartes’s material.) But the difficulty also derives from Bourdin’s style, which is elaborately metaphorical and dialogical. His attempts at humour are painfully laboured, and his tone is often irritatingly smug and snide, with its affectation of submission and respect giving way to schoolmasterly diatribes addressed as if to a cocky pupil who needs taking down a peg or two: Descartes understandably objects to it (AT 7. 526). In other ways Bourdin’s style is rhetorically interesting, especially in the sections of dialogue, rapid-fire exchanges of succinct utterances, systematically sustaining a set of core metaphors: a far cry from the complex syntax and technical vocabulary of most contemporary scholastic philosophy. Provoked by Bourdin’s needling, and despising his philosophical critique, Descartes responds in a far more rhetorical vein than is usual in his writings, playing with metaphors to ridicule his opponent. Seizing on the military imagery used by Bourdin, Descartes depicts him as a sort of rhetorical Don Quixote, battling with enemies spawned by his own imagination.
The Objections cover only the first two Meditations, though, to be fair, Bourdin clearly believes that his critique of Descartes’s fundamental positions is so destructive that there is no point in discussing the subsequent arguments based on them. But the institutional context may be relevant here. Descartes was planning, as he explains to Dinet, head of the French branch, or ‘province’, of the Society of Jesus, a presentation of his philosophy suitable for use in educational establishments (this was eventually published as the Principles of Philosophy, AT 7. 577–8). Had the Jesuits themselves adopted it as a textbook, the success of his philosophy would have been assured. If Bourdin was, as has been suggested, expressing the view of the Society of Jesus, it is natural that he should concentrate on the supposed flaws of the Method, in order to show its unsuitability as a basis for teaching.9
Although on the whole less philosophically significant than any of the earlier sets, the Seventh Objections are of great interest from the point of view of intellectual and cultural history. Generally, the other Objectors at least make an effort to engage with Descartes’s arguments, even when their own approach, as with Hobbes and Gassendi, is quite antithetical to his. But the Seventh Objections show why an intelligent reader, not hidebound by traditional views, could either find his effort to understand completely fruitless or perhaps simply fail to see why the effort was worth making. Precisely because they do not closely engage with the particular arguments, they throw light on what Bourdin sees as baffling in Descartes’s general approach. Essentially, Bourdin cannot see that Descartes is constructing and regulating a philosophical experience in the course of which truth is discovered, in which propositions that may initially have appeared false or doubtful emerge as true, and some we initially took as true are revealed as needing to be rejected or corrected. As Descartes points out, Bourdin treats ‘true’, ‘false’, ‘doubtful’ as if they were inherent properties of propositions, irrespective of the thinker’s relationship to them as it develops over time. (This is not an individual quirk, but reflects a general scholastic habit of thought, whereby to become learned in a discipline involves assimilating the general consensus of scholars as to what propositions are true, false, or doubtful.) He tries to put Descartes’s arguments into a traditional logical framework, e.g. as follows:
I am either a mind or a body.
But I am not a body.
… I am a mind;
and then points out that they do not work. But this way of putting the argument is foreign to Descartes, whose concern is with the discovery of knowledge in experience.10 Moreover, Bourdin fails to distinguish between beliefs Descartes once held, and those he currently upholds. He thus supposes that the former beliefs about soul and body recalled by Descartes in the Second Meditations are being reasserted as his current position, when of course they are being drastically corrected. The following summary does not contain all the many instances where Descartes objects to Bourdin’s misunderstandings or misrepresentations of his views, or where he imputes unworthy motives to his critic.
In one area, though, Bourdin’s criticism is distinctive, and sharper than Descartes acknowledges. Scholars have sometimes noted that Descartes’s sceptical critique really bears on the unreliability of sense-perception: clear and distinct intellectual perception is left out of account.11 Bourdin urges that Descartes’s doubt ought logically to extend further: that the dream-hypothesis destabilizes not only sense-perceptions but supposedly clear and distinct perceptions of intellectual truths.
Bourdin’s dissertation consists essentially of two Questions (a scholastic way of organizing the material), each of which is subdivided into a number of sections, in which Descartes’s positions are expounded and criticized. (He represents the Questions as being put to him by Descartes, who objects to this version of the relationship between them.) Each Question is followed by an Answer, in which Bourdin delivers his overall judgement on the issue.12 The core of Bourdin’s dissertation (his Question 2) consists of a series of attempts to get inside Descartes’s method (he takes up the image of thinking as a journey found in the Discourse on Method, and sustains the metaphor throughout this section). He represents himself as a nervous fellow-traveller seeking guidance from the philosopher, and reconstructs the dialogue between them, in a set of rapid-fire exchanges. But every time they attempt to get moving they are confronted by a new impassable obstacle, some previously unsuspected crying defect in the method. Finally, the would-be traveller gives up, and conducts, as he puts it, an orderly retreat. That is, he sets out what he takes to be Descartes’s key argument in syllogistic form, in such a way as to expose its invalidity. The Answer to Question 2 contains a twelve-part condemnation of Descartes’s method.
Descartes’s comments are slotted in between the sections of Bourdin’s text (a detailed account is given below). His comments on the Answer to Question 2 involves a sustained development of the building metaphor which he also used in the Discourse and which Bourdin occasionally invokes here. Descartes compares himself to an architect, methodically clearing and excavating the ground before laying the foundations for a temple. He is persecuted by a common mason (Bourdin), who ignorantly criticizes the architect’s whole procedure in public. The metaphor is historically interesting in that it draws on a very general reconfiguration of productive practices in the early modern period, the emergence of a distinction between ‘arts’, with an intellectual and conceptual content that renders them more socially prestigious, and ‘crafts’, inferior because (supposedly) reliant on mere manual knowhow. Bourdin’s criticisms are restated by Descartes in keeping with this allegory, so as to exhibit their irrelevance.
The summary given is selective, not exhaustive. Bourdin addresses Descartes in the second person: Descartes’s comments usually refer to Bourdin in the third, and I follow this pattern here. Descartes’s replies are sometimes addressed to points explicitly made by Bourdin, sometimes to implications (perhaps unsuspected) or flaws in the Jesuit’s text. In the latter case, I have not troubled to summarize the original statement of Bourdin’s to which Descartes takes exception or on which he comments. Bourdin’s text was printed with marginal letters indicating the points to which Descartes replies. To find Descartes’s reply to a particular point, the reader looks for the corresponding letter in his section of the text. I shall include these letters here, where possible and helpful.
In what follows, the Objections are printed in italic, Descartes’s Replies in roman type. My summaries and comments are given in smaller type. As before, numbers in the margin or in square brackets refer to page numbers in AT.