Here we have his self definition.
I am my thought, I am a thinking thing.
I am a thinking thing. What does that mean?
It means I have all these different modes of thought,
including doubting being deceived… [pause] This is kind of existence Mariana has.
She is the one being deceived. What is her reality?
Well, we're not sure, we have to speculate about that, figure out
whether she's really in the hospital bed, whether she's really somebody who's just
going to the evaporate or die at the end of the story.
So, what happens now?
Because the difficulty here is that this is all well any good,
but what about my body? What about my need to eat?
What about these things that are part of my daily life,
that don't involve me just thinking?
He says at the bottom of 66: “I'm beginning to know a little better what
I am, but it still seems that I cannot resist believing
that corporeal things [pause] whose images are formed by which thought
which the senses themselves examine, are much more
distinctly known than this mysterious “I,” which does not fall within the imagination.
It would be strange indeed if these very things are considered to be doubtful, were more
distinctly known to me than what is true.
So the question is coming up here: What about bodies?
What about my body?
What about the things, things that I sense, things that any of you guys would point to
immediately if I asked ‘What's real?’
You’d say this is real.
[pause] Or this, this, this is a hand, and that’s real.
If your philosophy calls it into question there's something wrong with your philosophy,
not with my hand or my senses.
What about the plain evidence of my senses?
So he begins reasoning about wax, this wax experiment.
It's quite interesting, you can do this with chewing gum
or anything else that changes its qualities under a little bit of treatment.
His examination of the wax leads him to a particular conclusion.
This is my next bullet point, let me show this again.
[pause] His experiment with the wax and his conclusion
about how he perceives all bodies.
What about bodies? Well he does this wax experiment.
I have the wax here, it’s sealing wax, it’s hard, cold, has a certain smell, etc.
I bring it near the flame, it changes state.
It changes from hard to soft, it changes its smell, it changes its texture.
Every physical quality about it seems to change.
If we had time I’d pass out sticks of gum, and say List all the physical properties of
the gum before you chew it, chew it for a little while,
list all the physical properties. It looks like it’s changed.
So if the wax or the gum, if all of its physical properties
can change but it still remains the same wax, and undoubtedly it is the same wax before
and after I heat it, before and after it cools, it’s the exact
same wax, well, what *is* the wax then?
What is it?
It's not any one of the sensible qualities, it's not even all the sensible qualities together
that I'm experiencing, with the wax.
[pause] At the bottom of page 67: “Perhaps the wax
was what I now think it is: the wax itself was never really the sweetness of
the honey of the fragrance of flowers, nor the whiteness nor the shape nor the sound.”
[pause] But what was this thing, then, that I imagined?
It wasn't those qualities, the qualities were sort of extra, or changeable about it.
What's right down at the core of the wax?
What's the one thing that is always the same in the wax?
His answer is the wax is extension, or its ability to take up space.
The wax is a physical thing, it has a certain…
(We would use the standard category of matter, not a vocabulary term that Descartes has access to.)
It’s matter that takes on different qualities.
It's just an extended thing.
What is it to be extended?
Page 67 at the very bottom: “Is this thing’s extension also unknown?
For it becomes greater in the wax that is beginning to melt,
greater in boiling wax, greater still as the heat is increased.”
[pause] “It remains…” skipping a sentence.
“It remains for me to concede that I do not grasp what this wax is through the imagination.
I perceive it through the mind alone.”
How do I grasp the wax?
This extension of the wax…
We find the mind being more important than the senses again.
I grasp what the wax is intellectually, at the deepest level.
The sensory predicates that I attach to it, the sweetness, the smell, softness, color…
All of those things are subsequent, but my knowledge of the wax and what the wax is
is intellectual knowledge.
I sometimes call Descartes the modern Plato because here we see a similar intellectualism
to Plato’s. Plato says reality is the Form, not the physical thing.
Descartes’ not going that far, he’s not doing anything…
He’s not adopting the Platonic system, but he's saying in a similar way: it's not
those material properties that you know from your
senses that are the reality of the thing.
The ultimate reality of it is its extension, and all these things can be grasped ultimately
only by the mind.
What he says at the end of Meditation Two, which will lead us into Meditation Three,
at the end of class here, is that this is in fact the same thing
applying to every other material object that I know.
I know it with my mind, not with my senses.
The senses might give me some cues or some input,
but the ultimate grasp of what the thing is is a mental grasp.
He says in the middle of 69: “I note regarding the wax…
What I know regarding the wax applies to everything else that is external to me.”
Next paragraph: “Lo and behold, I have returned on my own to where I wanted to be,
since I now know that even bodies are not properly speaking perceived by the
senses or by the faculty of imagination,” that's visualizing using my senses, “but
by the intellect alone.
They are not perceived through their being touched or
seen, only through their being understood.”
Is he right about this?
Do we follow along with this argument, at least for the sake of argument?
Physical objects, things outside of my mind, maybe including my own body, are not…
they don't give me a sort of direct knowledge from the senses, I only know them through the mind.
We're in a sort of a weird place now, because we normally, we want to say [knock knock]
These are real, this is real.
Descartes says, “Is it?”
Or, what’s the foundation behind that, what's the philosophical story that you would
tell behind that…