Descartes: A Biography

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Metaphysics in a Hornet’s Nest (–) 

are meant to coach the reader into reflecting on his or her own thinking,

and to guide the reader into that kind of reflection. Descartes outlined the

method involved, in reply to a correspondent’s query about the metaphys-

ical overtures of theDiscourse: ‘Thus I would have you spend enough time

onthis meditation to acquire by degrees a very clear and, I would say, an

intuitive notion of intellectual nature in general. This is the idea which, if

considered without limitations, represents God, and if limited, is the idea

of an angel or a human soul’ (i.).

The simplicity of this strategy was obscured by the language of innate

ideas, when Descartes claimed that the idea of God is innate in human

minds. He was forced to clarify this by saying that he did not hold that

infants are born thinking about God, but that they are born with an innate

capacity to generate an idea of God by reflecting on their own intellectual

activities.According to the argument developed in theMeditations,we

acquire some idea of what thought is by reflecting on our own thinking.

Since this is an intellectual activity, we thereby form an admittedly indirect

and somewhat impoverished concept of what is meant by a ‘thinking thing’

(because the activity of thinking cannot exist without belonging to some

subject or other).

All this effort is required simply to acquire an idea of a thinking subject.

This cannot be done by listening to a lecture, by looking at a painting or

representation of a thinker, or by reading a book. It can be done only by

reflecting on the activity of thinking that we take for granted when we

normally focus our thoughts on external things. Cartesian meditations

are therefore intended to guide untrained metaphysicians to ‘look’ in the

appropriate place for the fundamental idea on which the whole enterprise

depends, or to put them in an appropriate frame of mind to notice what is

already going on inside themselves. If the method works, the result is an

inner experience rather than a concept, to which Descartes attaches the

name ‘idea of thinking’, because the idea is not distinct from the activity

itself of thinking.

Descartes seems to take more seriously than usual the fact that sceptical

arguments could be launched against metaphysical thinking of this kind.

None of his readers – or, at least, none who also read French – could have

failed to notice the similarities between his argument against universal

doubt and that of Jean Silhon. The more familiar version of that argument

occurs in theDiscourse.‘When I noticed that this truth, “I think, therefore

I am”, was so firm and certain that all the most extravagant assumptions of