Descartes’ Sixth Meditation: Mind-Body Distinction
Sixth Meditation
1. Are there material things? Is there an extra-mental reality?
2. The ability to imagine in me seems proven because there is nothing but the power of knowing bodies. Imagination allows me a clear mental representation or image of what we conceive. I can conceive of a chiliagon or myriagon or make a confused mental representation or image of them, but not truly imagine them.
3. The ability to imagine does not belong to the essence of my mind, so it must depend on something close and attached to my spirit that I may consider whenever I want. When the spirit conceives, it does not merely consider innate ideas; when it imagines, it considers adventitious or fictitious ideas.
4. Therefore, it is likely the body.
5. Although the idea of the body is other than myself, I cannot deny its existence or properties because I have often imagined – albeit with less distinction – colors, sounds, tastes, pleasures, and pains through sense perception and memory. (It has been understood that these are not extra-mental existences.)
6. Therefore, we need to examine the reasons for confidence I had at first in the information supplied by the senses and the reason I later questioned it.
7. I felt I had a head, hands, feet, and other members that make up my body. I regarded the body as part of myself or even the whole. I felt other bodies and the pleasure or pain they caused. I felt hunger, thirst, and other appetites and passions such as joy, sadness, and anger. I felt the length, shape, and movements of bodies, their hardness, heat, and other qualities captured by touch, light, colors, smells, tastes, and sounds. I thought these qualities belonged to some bodies. I thought these bodies and their qualities were due to ideas present in my mind because their ideas were presented without the consent or even against the will of the cogito. And, as these ideas were more vivid and distinct, in their way, than those of meditation or memory, I thought they were true copies of the realities they represent. Also, I thought there was no idea in my mind that had not come through the senses. I remembered having used the senses before reason because the ideas I formed for myself were not as explicit as those of the senses and because those were made many times by them. I also thought the body belonged to me because I could never part with it, and in and through it, I felt my appetites, affections, and feelings like pleasure and pain.
8. But there was no reason to explain the relationship between body and soul. Pleasure generates joy in the soul, pain generates sadness, hunger, or thirst provokes in me the desire to eat or drink. I considered that it should be so and that nature had taught me because my judgments about it formed in me without any time to think.
9. Various experiments disproved the credit to the senses. The information provided by external or internal senses could be false: the phenomenon of perspective, feeling pain in amputated limbs, the impossibility of knowing whether I was dreaming, or the evil genius hypothesis. My confidence weakened as nature led me to learn that many things I believed were wrong. The realization that it is not necessary to conclude that sensible ideas come from something other than myself but do not rely on my will.
10. Now I know better and know God, I must not rashly accept as true all that the senses teach, but not consider it false.
11. Now I know that everything I clearly and distinctly conceive can be produced by God as we conceive. Just clearly and distinctly conceive one without the other to know they are different. Critical to the existence and nature of God. Criticism of vicious circle. Logical criticism of the ontological argument.
12. I know that I exist and I am something that thinks and is not extended. I have a distinct idea of the body as an extended thing that does not think, so my soul is distinct from my body and can exist without it.
13. I can exist without the power to imagine and feel, but they cannot exist without me. These powers must belong to a corporeal substance because there is in me a passive faculty of feeling to receive and recognize the ideas of sensible things, which would be useless if there was not in me or anything else an active faculty of forming and producing those ideas. That power cannot be in my thoughts because it is part of their essence, as it presents ideas without the help of my thoughts or even against their will. That power must belong to a substance that contains essentially all the formal and objective reality of the ideas that occur: a formal body actually containing content representing this idea, God, or a creature more noble than the body that has essentially represented by idea.
14. Not being a deceiver, God does not send me these ideas, nor can He allow a being that possesses only eminently the representative content of these ideas to send them. God has given me a strong inclination to believe that ideas are based on the tangible, so we can conclude that they exist. Critical to the existence and nature of God. Criticism of vicious circle. Logical criticism of the ontological argument.
15. Everything we perceive clearly and distinctly in bodies – the truths of geometry – belongs to them. But everything else is dark and confusing, though God has empowered me to shed light on this.
15.1. Nature has taught me – God or the order and arrangement of things created by Him – that I have a body that feels pain if unwilling or hunger or thirst if needing to eat or drink.
15.2. I am not stuck in my body like a pilot in his ship but so closely associated and confused and mixed with it to form a single whole with my body. If I did not know what happens to the body, why would I feel pain, hunger, or thirst?
15.3. There are other bodies from which I can receive comfort or discomfort. Critical to the existence and essence of God. Criticism of vicious circle. Logical criticism of the ontological argument.
16. Nature has given me the rational truths that I know by natural light without the help of the body, as it is done. Others pertain only to the body, like the quality of being heavy. And that has given me as composed of spirit and body to avoid pain and seek pleasure.
17. Other things – that nature seems to have taught me but have entered my mind by judging hastily – lead me to error: the existence of empty space, that heat, color, taste, and other things I perceive are qualities that belong to the bodies, that the size I always perceive is the actual size of bodies. Nature is not responsible for the mistakes I make when I feel inclined to that which hurts me – wanting to eat or drink when we would do wrong, but the limitation of my understanding. (More power to deceive us, it occasionally failing to get hungry or thirsty to remind us of our need for food or drink.)
18. Therefore, the way they teach me is more often true than false on what should be the body. I must therefore make use of several of them to discuss one thing, memory, and understanding to avoid errors in what the senses show me.
19. I can also decline the inability to distinguish between waking and sleep because our memory fails to bind and assemble a dream with others and the lifetime as a board of what happened while awake. Critical to the existence and nature of God. Criticism of vicious circle. Logical criticism of the ontological argument.