incorrect, in that he declares Descartes’thought as contemporaneous with
and not causal to perspectivalism. In contrast, Martin Jay’s phrase
“Cartesian perspectivalism,”which effectively sums up a modern confla-
tion of perspectivalism with the self-sufficiency of reason attributed to
Descartes, ignores the deeply religious context in which Descartes devel-
oped his thought and, like ibn al-Haytham, contemplated the relationship
between scientific method and faith in an absolute God.
Descartes even casts the continuity of the self as an illusion, constructed
through memory, as no instant can have any duration. For him, this proves
God as necessary to hold the moments together, providing the illusion of
duration and causality that the senses fool us into understanding as
inevitable. Taking up an occasionalist position, Descartes attributes free
will not to the individual, but to God:“Since the whole time of life can be
divided into innumerable parts, each single one of which depends in no
way on the remaining, from the fact that I was shortly before, it does not
follow that I must be now, unless some cause as it were creates me anew at
this moment, that is conserves me.”^53 The independent self is an illusion,
perennially reconstituted by God, so free that he might even malevolently
disturb this order at will. Far from asserting free will, Descartes argues that
he must“always conquer myself rather than fortune, and change my
desires rather than the order of the world.”^54 His notion of vision as
internal reverberates with that of ibn Arabi, who defined visual perception
as“a meaning that God creates in the eye according to what the viewer
wants to see from visible things.”^55 Adopting the (baffling) current equa-
tion of Cartesianism with empiricism, Akkach describes ibn Arabi’s
thought by saying,“This non-Cartesian view shows how the soul was
seen to be capable of effectively shaping external reality according to his
inner desires.”^56 Surprisingly, far from oppositional, both emerge from
parallel philosophical roots as developed through intertwined (trans-)
religious mystical interpretation.
Basic issues that Descartes raises–skepticism resolved through self-
awareness, the infinity of the divine, imagistic memory, and the know-
ability of God through the action of memory–lay in theological premises
essential to Christian Platonism and strengthened through scholastic
engagement with Islamic and Jewish philosophy.^57 Like Descartes, the
fifteenth-century cleric Nicholas of Cusa located God in the mind.^58 He
writes:
(^53) Schmaltz, 2008 : 72. (^54) Descartes, 1912 : 21. (^55) Akkach,2005b: 119.
(^56) Akkach,2005b: 119. (^57) Schmaltz, 2008. (^58) Harries, 1973 : 30.
Perspectives on Perspective 323