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Descartes: Truth and Self-deception

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2015

Shai Frogel
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Abstract

The paper examines the role of self-deception in Descartes' Meditations. It claims that although Descartes sees self-deception as the origin of our false judgments, he consciously uses it for his searching for truth. He finds that self-deception is a very productive tool in our searching for truth, since it expands our ability to free ourselves from our old certainties; logical thinking enables us to doubt our certainties but only self-deception enables us to really suspend them.

Descartes, then, proposes a logical-psychological method in first person for philosophical investigation, in which self-deception plays a crucial role. The Cogito should be understood accordingly as a first psychological truth rather than a first philosophical truth. Nevertheless, it is a crucial step in Descartes' philosophical investigation and exposes the relations between the logical aspect and the psychological aspect of philosophical thinking.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 91 , Issue 1 , January 2016 , pp. 93 - 108
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Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2015 

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References

1 René Descartes, The Meditations Concerning First Philosophy in Philosophical Essays. Translated by Laurence J. Lafleur (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), 59–143, 80.

2 Ibid., 75.

3 Ibid., 77.

4 Frankfurt rightly argues that Descartes' doubt of mathematical judgment is general and not specific to these kinds of judgments:

His aim is not to call attention to any logical gap in the relation between mathematical judgments and the grounds on which they are affirmed. He is simply calling attention to the well-known propensity of men to settle upon judgments that do not reflect a proper grasp of the material with which they are dealing, but reflect only their own vagaries and misconceptions.

Harry G. Frankfurt, Demons, Dreamers and Madmen (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1970), 78.

It is, however, important to note that although Descartes points out a psychological bias, he turns it into philosophical doubt by a logical move: from the recognition of actual misjudgment to the possibility of permanent misjudgment.

5 Op. cit. note 1, 79.

6 Ibid., 79–80.

7 Bair argues that Descartes failed to control his own self-deception, and wrongly considered his feigned denials to be genuine in order to conclude that he can be a thinking being without a body. She goes on to claim that his objectors, Mersenne, Arnould and Gassendi, pointed out his mistake

Annette C. Bair, ‘The vital but dangerous art of ignoring: selective attention and self-deception’, in Self and Deception, edited by Roger T. Ames and Wimal Dissanayake (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), 53–72.

This would be true if Descartes' argument were empirical rather than logical. From a logical point of view, ‘feigned’ denial is as good as ‘sincere’ denial, since the sphere of the possible, not the actual, matters in logic. Hence, if Descartes can prove his existence as a thinking being even under an entirely speculative assumption that he has no body, then he has logically proved that the body is not necessary for his existence as a thinking being. In making this remark, I don't reject the possibility that Descartes may have lost control over his self-deception, but I'm emphasizing my claim that one should carefully distinguish between the psychological aspect and the logical aspect of Descartes' investigation.

8 Frankfurt expresses it very well: ‘The demon hypothesis does not simply refresh his awareness that he may be deceived in all the judgments at issue; it entails that he is deceived in all of them.’ (Op. cit. note 4, 86) Yet Frankfurt interprets this in Descartes' terms of an external deceiver (‘he is deceived’) and not as a process of self-deception.

9 Op. cit. note 1, 79–80.

10 Ibid., 80.

11 Descartes, René, The Principles of Philosophy, translated by John Veitch (Whitefish: Kessinger Publishing, 2010 [1644]), 17.

I quote from this translation, since it is a more successful reflection of the original Latin text (emphasis mine, S.F):

[…] non autem ideὸ nos, qui talia cogitamus, nihil esse: repugnat enim, ut putemus id quod cogitat, eo ipso tempore quo cogitat, non existere. Ac proinde haec cognitio, ego cogito, ergo sum, est omnium | prima & certissima, quae cuilibet ordine philosophanti occurrat.

René Descartes, Oeuvres de Descartes, Vol. VIII-1. Translated by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1964a), 7.

The Cambridge translation, for example, is problematic at this point:

But we cannot for all that suppose that we, who are having such thoughts, are nothing. For it is a contradiction to suppose that what thinks does not, at the very time when it is thinking, exist. Accordingly, this piece of knowledge – I am thinking, therefore I exist – is the first and most certain of all to occur to anyone who philosophizes in an orderly way.

René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol 1, translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff & Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 194–195.

Descartes, it should be clear, speaks about a psychological experience rather than a logical recognition.

12 Op. cit. note 1, 102.

13 Spinoza, as a Cartesian discipline, starts his Ethics with the idea of God and does not repeat Descartes' ‘mistake’.

See: Benedict Spinoza, Ethics, translated by W. H. White (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 2001 [1677]).

14 Op. cit. note 1, 81.

15 Ibid., 85.

16 Bernard Williams notes that the Latin verb cogitare and the French verb penser have a wider meaning than the English verb to think. Bernard Williams, Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (London: Routledge, 2005), 62.

17 Op. cit. note 1, 91.

18 Later in the investigation, he will distinguish between willing and thinking.

19 Ibid., 92.

20 Ibid.

Descartes was attacked in relation to this psychological principle of truth. This is probably the reason why in Principle 45 of his later book, Principles of Philosophy, under the title ‘What Constitutes Clear and Distinct Perception’, he writes in an ironic yet apologetic manner that ‘there are indeed a great many persons who, throughout their whole lifetime, never perceive anything in a way necessary for judging it properly’.

Op. cit. note 11, Descartes 2010, 23.

21 Tlumak argues that the acknowledgment of God is the first metaphysical truth and the turning point of the Meditation, since God, as Eternal Being, is the only being that the certainty concerning its existence at any moment could be considered an irreversible truth. This is the reason why Descartes, after demonstrating God's existence, can rule out preposterous possibilities which enable metaphysical doubts. See: Jeffery Tlumak, ‘Certainty and Cartesian method’, In Descartes: Critical and Interpretive Essays, edited by Michael Hooker (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 40–73.

22 This is the rationalist idea of freedom upheld since Plato: real freedom means the freedom to act according to reason. Kant is, perhaps, the last great thinker who continues this line of thinking when he claims that the moral law expresses our freedom to obey our reason:

[T]his self-legislation of the pure, and therefore practical, reason is freedom in the positive sense. Thus the moral law expresses nothing else than the autonomy of pure practical reason.

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, translated by Thomas Kingsmill, Abbott (Mineola: Dover Publishing. 2004 [1788]), 34.

23 It is interesting to note that this is the first time in his epistemological investigation that Descartes mentions ethical terms such as good and bad or sin. This strengthens the interpretation that he considers his epistemological investigation to be an existential task.

24 Op. cit. note 1, 115.

25 This calls to mind Freud's definition of illusion: ‘Thus we call a belief an illusion, when a wish-fulfillment is a prominent factor in its motivation […]’

Sigmund Freud, ‘The future of illusion [1927]’, In The complete psychological works, Vol. XXI. Translated by James Strachey (London: The Hograth Press, 1961), 5–56, 31.

26 Op. cit. note 1, 117.

27 Ibid., 118.

28 Ibid., 143.

29 Ibid., 142.