(PDF) Descartes and the Buddha a rapprochement STRAWSON

(PDF) Descartes and the Buddha a rapprochement STRAWSON
Descartes and the Buddha a rapprochement STRAWSON
Descartes and the Buddha—a rapprochement? Galen Strawson

in Reasons and Empty Persons: Mind, Metaphysics, and Morality: Essays in
Honor of Mark Siderits, ed C. Coseru (Springer, 2023) pp. 63–86 (use for citation)

1 Introduction: Substance

Descartes’s conception of the mind is nothing like what most people suppose. I believe
it may have interesting affinities with certain Asian—even Buddhist!—conceptions of
the mind. I’m not qualified to comment on the Asian side, so I’m going to describe what
I take to be his position and invite others to judge.
Perhaps the only thing one can be sure of, when offering intertraditional comparisons
of this kind, is that both sides will feel affronted. So it goes. This piece will succeed in
its purpose if it reduces even by one the number of routine mistaken invocations of
Descartes.
I’ve published various versions of this view over the years, and draw on them here.1
As far as I know it has been met with perfect silence, and it is in the spirit of a Zen
exercise that I offer another variant. I conclude with a rebuttal of Lichtenberg’s famous
but feeble criticism of Descartes.
My central point can be made without paying much attention to what is known as
Descartes’s ‘substance dualism’—his official view that there are two fundamentally
different kinds of concrete being, mental and material.2 Two remarks, though, before I
put it aside. First, I say ‘his official view’ because there’s good reason to think that
Descartes knew that he couldn’t actually rule out a materialist monist view of the kind
he discussed with Regius.3 Second, the term ‘substance dualism’ is already highly
questionable insofar as it comes with a standard picture of Descartes as Mr. Substance.
This is hugely misleading: Descartes regularly stressed the point, usually attributed to
Hume (or at least Locke), that we have no positive conception of substance whatever.
When Mark Siderits writes, in his lovely book Buddhism as Philosophy, that for
Abidharma ‘the substances are useless cogs in the machine, they explain nothing’
(2007: 114), he could be glossing Descartes.
Desmond Clarke has an excellent discussion of this question in his book Descartes’s
Theory of Mind, which I am going to cite frequently. He shows that the notion of

See e.g. Strawson (1994: ch. 5, 2011: §§7.3–7.4; the previous versions are seriously defective because
they don’t take sufficient account of the role of the brain in Descartes’s theory). I’m afraid this one still
isn’t quite right. I’m going to try to fix it in a sixth and final attempt.
When I cite a work, I give the date of first publication or composition; the page or section reference is
to the edition listed in the bibliography. In the case of quotations from languages other than English I cite
a standard translation but don’t always give it. I use bold italics to mark an author’s emphasis and italics
to mark my own. References of the form ‘AT2.570’ are to the Adam and Tannery edition of Descartes (in
this case volume 2, page 570); references of the form ‘C3.137’ are to the Cottingham et al. translations of
Descartes (in this case volume 3, page 137).
Here ‘concrete’ simply contrasts with ‘abstract’: some people thing that numbers and concepts are
examples of abstract being.
See Regius (1647: 294–295). In his 1648 reply to Regius, Descartes reiterates his official—and
religiously orthodox—position. See Clarke (2003: ch. 9).

substance operates for Descartes as a kind of ‘dummy’ concept, invoked only insofar as
Descartes goes along with—without in any way clarifying—the philosophically
orthodox idea that all qualities must in order to exist somehow ‘be in’ (inesse)
something ‘as in a subject’.4
So much, very briefly, for Descartes’s ‘substance dualism’. Let me add a remark
about his religion. I’m with him when he says that ‘mingling religion with philosophy
… goes quite against the grain with me’ (AT2.570/C3.137). That said, I obviously
won’t bracket anything in his metaphysics that might be thought to flow from his
religious commitments, for example his unargued commitment to the existence of an
irreducible plurality of individual immaterial souls, which sits so strikingly alongside
his view that the material universe is in some fundamental sense a single thing.

2 Duration and God

Some brief notes, next, about duration, God, and the meaning of cogitatio. Descartes
holds that
a lifespan can be divided into innumerably many parts, each completely
independent of the others, so that it does not follow from the fact that I existed a
little while ago that I must exist now unless there is some cause that as it were
creates me all over again at this moment, i.e. which conserves me … the same
power and action are needed to conserve anything in existence at each individual
moment of its duration as would be required to create that thing de novo if it were
not yet in existence (AT7.49/C2.33, see also AT7.109/C2.78–9) …. Thus …
conservation and creation only differ relative to our way of thinking, and not at all
in reality (AT9.39)
This invites comparison with the Buddhist doctrine of momentariness, according to
which the existence of the universe consists of a series of distinct flashes of being:
as an entity vanishes, it gives rise to a new entity of almost the same nature which
originates immediately afterwards. Thus there is an uninterrupted flow of causally
connected momentary entities of the same kind, the so-called santāna … the world
… is at every moment distinct from the world in the previous or next moment, …
linked to the past and future by the law of causality.5

Plainly any such view raises a question about how the flash of being that constitutes the
existence of the universe at one moment accords as it does with its predecessor and
successor. Descartes has God to do the job, recreating the universe at every instant in a
way that seems to take the causality out of the entities themselves. That said, he also

See §6 below for examples of Descartes’s direct repudiation of the orthodox terminology. It’s important
to remember that he is anxious not to offend philosophical and religious orthodoxy, and to use standard
terminology as far as possible. For a discussion of the issue as it arises in Descartes’s intense exchange
with Hobbes, see Strawson (forthcoming).
Rospatt (1995: 1). According to one Buddhist estimate this happens 16,000,000 times a second. Some
physicists hold that time itself is quantal, and we may perhaps look in the region of the Planck time—
about 10−43 of a second—when looking for a measure.

writes that ‘I understand nature, generally considered, as nothing other than God
himself, or, if you will, the ordered system of created things set up by God’.6

I simply want to note this. When it comes to the question of duration, Descartes
doesn’t have some heavy and supposedly paradigmatically ‘Western’ conception of
what substance (or a substance) is that puts him at odd with more explicitly processual
views. My understanding is that Buddhist momentarists don’t hold that there are
literally innumerable moments—an idea which follows, for Descartes, from his
assumption of the literally infinite divisibility of temporal duration. Even so the
similarity in the matter of the flash theory of being is worth noting. It provides a useful
context for Russell’s arch and misguided ‘Humean’ complaint:
What [Descartes] was to himself is not best described as a single entity with
changing states. The single entity is quite otiose. The changing states suffice.
Descartes to himself should have appeared as a series of events, each of which
might be called a thought, provided that word is liberally interpreted. It was this
series of ‘thoughts’ which constituted Descartes’s ‘mind’.7

It’s also true that Descartes standardly talks as if minds are genuine continuants, things
which have, as persisting individuals, a moral destiny. This may be thought to be
warranted by the fact that there is on his view no real difference between conservation
and creation. For if conservation—persistence—in being is really (‘just’) continual
recreation, so too continual recreation is a species of genuine conservation in being—a
kind of genuine persistence. We needn’t make much of this, however, / when
speculating about Asian (in particular Buddhist) parallels in Descartes, because the idea
that entities like ourselves have some kind of persistence, quite irrespective of their
temporal flashiness, seems to be matched in Buddhist thought by the essentially
diachronic idea of karma.
From now on, I’ll use conventional language that suggests persistence—words like
‘stream’, ‘process’, ‘mind’—on the understanding that one can convert it into strict
Cartesio-Buddhist flash-theory terms as required. Whatever makes it the case that
individual entities like ourselves can be supposed to have a diachronic moral destiny
finds some echo in the fact that it is appropriate to talk of an individual karma trail
across time.

3 Cogitatio = Consciousness

It’s well known that Descartes standardly uses the word ‘thought’ or ‘thinking’
(cogitatio, pensée) in an extremely broad way to cover all conscious occurrences
whatever, including all sensing or feeling, willing, and imagining:
Thinking. I use this term to include everything that exists within us in such a way
that we are immediately conscious (conscius) of it. Thus all the operations of the
will, the intellect, the imagination, and the sense are thoughts (AT7.160/C2.113)
….

CSM2.56, AT7.80 (per naturam enim, generaliter spectatam, nihil nunc aliud quam vel Deum, ipsum,
vel rerum creatarum coordinationem a Deo institutam intelligo).
1950: 148. See also the discussion of Lichtenberg in §12 below.

Understanding, willing, imagining, having sensory perceptions … all fall under the
common concept of thinking or perception or consciousness (AT7.176/C2.124)
For this reason, I’ll regularly use ‘consciousness’ and ‘experience’ interchangeably,
instead of ‘thought’ or ‘thinking’, in presenting Descartes’s views. Since ‘con-
sciousness’ and ‘experience’ are themselves philosophically vexed terms, let me say
that I’ll use them only in their very broadest sense to mean actual, live, occurrent
conscious experience of any sort whatever; actual occurrent experiential ‘what-it-is-
likeness’, ‘phenomenology’, feeling, sentience, qualial consciousness of any sort,
however primitive, however sophisticated (this seems to be what most analytic phi-
losophers mean by ‘consciousness’ today). On the Buddhist side I’ll take it that
‘consciousness’ and ‘experience’ cover all (occurrent) elements or dharmas that are
instances of the four ‘mental’ or nāma skandhas.
The best translation of ‘cogito ergo sum’, given this use, is ‘I’m conscious therefore I
exist’, or ‘I’m experiencing therefore I exist’. It’s certainly not ‘I think therefore I exist’
or ‘I’m thinking therefore I exist’—not if ‘think’ is understood to have any sort of
distinctively cognitive implication.8

4 C is a Consciousness-Process

So far, perhaps, so good. Now for the central question. What is a Cartesian mind—call
it C? C, I propose, is quite unlike a Cartesian mind as usually imagined—call it C*. C*
is some sort of unit of immaterial stuff that

[i] is a vehicle or bearer of states of consciousness

[ii] has (therefore) some nature or mode of being other than consciousness

[iii] can continue to exist even when there is no consciousness.

C, by contrast, is just a stream of consciousness, a consciousness-process. It is not [i] a
vehicle or bearer of states of consciousness, it does not [ii] have any nature or mode of
being other than consciousness and it cannot [iii] continue to exist even when there is no
consciousness, i.e. in a state of unconsciousness:
[1] C = thinking = consciousness, consciousness-process.
That’s all there is to C, ontologically speaking. The stream of consciousness doesn’t
happen or ‘live’ in something else.9
Descartes holds the same view as the fifth-century thinker Mamertus. Hobbes saw
this quite clearly (see Strawson forthcoming), and Priestley took it for granted when,
discussing Mamertus, he found

Descartes’s broad use of ‘thought’ and ‘thinking’ to mean any kind of conscious experience survives in
Western philosophy well into the twentieth century. It’s only relatively recently (perhaps in the last sixty
years) that this use has been misunderstood to mean something essentially intellectual or cognitive. (Note,
though, that Descartes does on occasion use ‘think’ in a more narrowly cognitive sense closer to our
present-day use. See Rozemond (1998); Strawson (forthcoming).)
Who came up with C*? I’m not sure. I think that Spinoza, Leibniz, Berkeley and Hume all reject it.
Among the leading Western early modern philosophers only Locke appears to make use of it (and his
own deep inclinations are—I suspect—materialist).

in some of his expressions the peculiar opinions of Descartes. For, he says, the soul
is not different from the thoughts, that the soul is never without thought, because it
is all thought [i.e. conscious process] (Priestley 1782: 250)
Many have wondered why Descartes held that the mind is always conscious—that it
can’t possibly exist (in dreamless sleep, for example) in a state of unconsciousness.
Here is the explanation! The mind can’t possibly exist in a state of unconsciousness
because it’s wholly constituted of consciousness. If consciousness stopped it would
cease to exist.
There are no doubt difficulties in this view. That doesn’t change the fact that it is
Descartes’s view. At one point in the Principles he treats the terms ‘mind/soul’ and
‘thinking’ as strictly interchangeable, writing of ‘what we call our soul or our thinking’
(AT9B.10/C1.184, ‘ce que nous appellons notre âme ou notre pensée’). Later in the
Principles he writes, unequivocally, that
consciousness … must be considered as nothing else than conscious substance
itself …, that is, as mind (AT8.30–1/CSM1.215).10
It may seem surprising that this fact about Descartes is not more generally known. In
one way it is surprising, in another way not. In its more popular versions, the small area
of the history of philosophy that I know something about contains some astonishing—
and seemingly ineradicable—misconceptions (Locke on personal identity, Hume on
causation, Hume on personal identity). Kant says that
many historians of philosophy, with all their intended praise, … attribute mere
nonsense … to past philosophers. They are incapable of recognizing, beyond what
the philosophers actually said, what they really meant to say. (1790: 160)
He underestimates how often historians don’t even take in what past philosophers
actually say.

5 Substance and Attribute

Objection. ‘Surely there is, on the one ontological hand, the substance, the Cartesian
mind or soul, C, and on the other or at least further ontological hand, its attributes, and
in particular what Descartes calls its ‘principal’ attribute, i.e. consciousness? Surely the
substance is not literally identical with the attribute(s)?’
Like it or not, this is Descartes’s view. The substance, for him as for Spinoza, is
literally identical with its attribute(s).11 Descartes is one of a considerable number
(including Kant, Nietzsche, and Schlick, in addition to Spinoza, in the Western tra-
ditions, and no doubt many in the Eastern traditions) who grasp the deep and difficult
metaphysical truth (such I believe it to be) that an object (anything that we pick out as
an object) is not something that is in any manner ontologically over and above its total
intrinsic qualitiedness.12

10
non aliter … cogitatio concipi debet, quam ipsa substantia cogitans …, hoc est, quam mens (I’ve edited
out the strictly parallel claim about extension, and so changed the plural verb ‘debent’ to the singular
‘debet’).
11
Spinoza speaks of “substances or, what is the same, their attributes, and their affections” (1677: IP4d).
12
It’s important not to call this view ‘the bundle theory of objects’, because the name brings with it the
framework that the view repudiates, and this makes it seem problematic in a way that it isn’t. Briefly: the

The quotations in the last section are unequivocal, although Descartes (anxious not to
cause undue upset in a time when unorthodoxy could lead to death) continues for the
most part to use the language of substance and attribute in the received manner. When
Frans Burman in his famous conversation with Descartes explicitly asks him to confirm
his apparent view that there is indeed no ‘real distinction’, no ontological distinction,
between a substance and its attributes, Descartes does so:
the attributes [of a substance], when considered collectively, are indeed identical
with the substance. (AT5.155/1648: 15)
He speaks here of attributes in the plural simply because anything that exists concretely
has, in his scheme of things, in addition to its ‘principal’ attribute (either consciousness
or extension), the attributes of existence, duration, and number. But the only specific-
character-constituting attribute of mind—the principal attribute—is: consciousness
(thinking). Conscious process is in other words the whole stuff—the whole concrete
being—of the mind. Existence, duration, and number are not themselves concrete,
stuffy.
When reading Descartes, then, one mustn’t fall back into thinking of conscious
experience as somehow just a property of a something else that is ontologically distinct
from it. This falling back is almost irresistible for us, but Descartes specifically rules it
out—even while he continues for the most part to talk in the accepted way in order to
not to get into too much trouble.
A principal attribute—a concrete instantiation of a principal attribute13—is itself a
res, a thing, according to Descartes. Certainly we naturally speak of the principal
attribute of a thing, as if the attribute were in some way distinct from the thing. There is
nevertheless a fundamental sense in which we speak imprecisely—albeit in a manner
that our natural ways of thinking and talking force on us. For, again, the attributes of a
thing (principal or characteristic attribute + attributes of existence, duration, number)
are that thing, are identical with that thing. To that extent the phrase ‘attribute of a
thing’, though natural and useful in conveying ideas to others, is misleading; although it
still serves to distinguish the characteristic nature of the particular thing from its (mere)
concrete existence.14

6 Substance and Attribute 2

Contrary quotations can be found. Shortly after confirming to Burman that the attributes
of a substance are identical with the substance, Descartes speaks conventionally of the
substance ‘underlying’ the attribute (AT5.156/1648: 17). His basic commitment is
nevertheless clear. The distinction between the notion of an attribute like
thinking/experiencing or extension ‘and the notion of substance itself is, he says, a
merely conceptual distinction’ (AT8A.31/C1.215), like the distinction between
triangularity and trilaterality. It is in other words a distinction that can be made in

bundle is taken to be a bundle of qualities, and the notion of a quality that is deployed is understood as
standing in essential—constitutive—contrast to a notion of an object that, given the contrast, can’t be just
its qualitiedness. See e.g. Strawson (2021).
13
Adding the attributes of existence, duration (existence in time), and number to the attribute
consciousness gives it concrete existence.
14
One might say that the work done by ‘res’ in the phrases ‘res cogitans’ and ‘res extensa’ is simply the
assertion of real (concrete) existence, while the work done by ‘cogitans’ or ‘extensa’ is identification of
the type of existent.

thought, a ‘distinction of reason’, not a ‘real’ distinction; where to say that there’s a real
distinction between two things is simply to say that each can (or does) exist in reality
without the other existing. Clarke is unequivocal: there is for Descartes
no real distinction … between a thing and its properties … in the case of material
things … it would certainly be a mistake to think of their substance as some kind
of reality that is independent of their properties’. (2003: 215, 217)
Nadler is no less clear: Descartes’s ‘considered position…is that while there is a
conceptual distinction between substance and attribute … there is not a real distinction
between them. Substance and attribute are in reality one and the same’ (2006: 57).
Rozemond agrees:
much of what [Descartes] says suggests that the principal attribute constitutes the
entire substance and that there is no bare subject of inherence at all … the
substance just consists in a principal attribute. I think that this is indeed
[Descartes’s] view. But his commitment to this view is not entirely without
problems.15

Certainly, one can never when reading Descartes infer commitment to traditional
views from use of traditional terminology:

I pay no attention to the way in which certain words have been used in recent times
in the schools … All I do is to notice what particular words mean in Latin, so that,
when I lack appropriate words, I shall transfer to my own meaning whatever words
seem most suitable. (AT10.369/C.1.14)
His philosophy is in part a covert operation: ‘I hope that readers’, lulled by the use of
traditional terminology, ‘will gradually get used to my principles, and recognize their
truth, before they notice that they destroy the principles of Aristotle’ (AT3.298/C3.173).
Shortly after his assertion of substance–attribute identity in response to Burman’s
unavoidably direct question (AT5.155), Descartes talks again in conventional fashion of
a substance underlying (substerno) its attribute (AT5.156). Cottingham (1976: 77–9)
has a good discussion of this, but I don’t think he’s right to suggest that we should give
priority to Descartes’s use of a word that accords with the conventional position over
his earlier unequivocal (and ‘Aristotle-destroying’) assertion of the radical substance–
attribute identity position.
So Descartes entirely rejects C*, the Lockean picture of the immaterial mind or self
that is usually assumed to be his view. For according to this picture, as already
remarked,

(a) there is some sort of immaterial mind-substance or mind-stuff X

(b) X is the ‘ground’ or ‘bearer’ of conscious mental goings-on

(c) X can continue to exist in the absence of any conscious mental goings-on

from which it follows that

15
1998: 11. See also Principles 1644: 1.62. I discuss some further objections in Strawson forthcoming.

(d) X has some nature other than conscious mental process.

We can represent the difference between C and C* in a diagram and at the same time
introduce C+, a third possible picture of an immaterial mind (Fig. 1).

Everyone agrees that Descartes rejects (c), in holding that a mind or subject must
always be thinking (= conscious), but his claim in the Principles that ‘each substance
has one principal property which constitutes its nature or essence … and thinking (=
consciousness) constitutes the nature of thinking (= conscious)substance’
(AT8A.25/C1.210) is often read as if it allowed, as in C+, (d) that the mind has some
other necessary manner of being that is not occurrent thinking = conscious experience.16
It can also, of course, seem extremely problematic to reject (d). This is because we
think of a mind as something that essentially has powers, powers that must (we may

16
It’s arguable that Berkeley endorses C+.This reading is, however, extremely problematic; for to claim
that something Y constitutes the nature of something X is to claim that nothing else does.

suppose) be in some way ontologically over and above the being of the conscious
stream. At the very least, it seems that the stream must be somehow thicker than the
stream of conscious contents one is experiencing at any given time.
This is something we must address. For the moment, though, it seems clear that
Descartes rejects all of (b)–(d), and allows (a) only in taking it (as remarked) that there
is no real distinction between ‘the thing … we call …a “substance”’17 and its attributes.
His picture is C. The non-material mind or self or soul or subject is: a consciousness-
process. Descartes is thought of as clunky Mr Substance, as already remarked, but for
him mental substance is just consciousness–process (and the process is flashy).
So when Descartes famously states that the mind or soul can’t exist in the absence of
consciousness—when he holds that consciousness is an essential property of mind in
this sense, a property it can never lack—this isn’t any sort of extra stipulation on his
part, a special and seemingly rather odd18 condition added to an already existing
conception of the mind. The reason why a mind in which no thinking is going on is as
impossible as a physical object without extension is simply, and again, that mind is
consciousness; it’s wholly and literally constituted of occurrent conscious process. This
immediately explains why Descartes holds that it can’t possibly exist without being
conscious.

7 The Powers of the Mind

There still seems to be a serious difficulty in this position—the difficulty, already noted,
of finding a ground or ‘place of residence’, a manner of real existence, for mental
faculties or capacities or powers like will and understanding, for innate ideas, and for
what Descartes calls ‘intellectual memory’. Where can they possibly be lodged, given
the rejection of (d)—given the idea that C, the thinking subject is, metaphysically,
nothing other than conscious process? It’s true that Descartes doesn’t really believe in
faculties as entities, holding that ‘the term “faculty” denotes nothing but a potency’
(AT8B.361/C1.305), but potencies or powers also seem to need a place of residence (a
manner of real existence) of a sort that seems hard—impossible—to supply if all one
has to hand at any particular time—say t—is an individual human being’s current
conscious process with the particular extremely limited (conscious) content that it has at
t. The difficulty might be diminished if Descartes’s use of ‘thinking’ could be supposed
to extend to non-conscious occurrent contentful mental goings-on. Then we might
suppose C to be a great, deep, thick ongoing process—a great sinewy stream of non-
conscious mental content as well as conscious content—that could in some manner
carry all C’s capacities. But it seems that we can’t do this: according to Descartes all
thinking is conscious, consciousness. And even if we could, it would remain obscure
how the categorical being of a rich process of non-conscious occurrent mental goings-
on could serve as the place of residence of C’s capacities.
It may be that a similar problem arises about the being of the mental skandhas (see
e.g. Siderits 2007: §3.2), given that the current set, which we may suppose to be heavily

17
AT7.222/C2.156; my emphasis.
18
For this opinion, see Locke (1689–1700: 2.1.10). Locke failed to grasp Descartes’s conception of the
soul.condition added to an already existing conception of the mind. The reason why a mind in which no
thinking is going on is as impossible as a physical object without extension is simply, and again, that
mind is consciousness; it’s wholly and literally constituted of occurrent conscious process. This
immediately explains why Descartes holds that it can’t possibly exist without being conscious.

preoccupied with a cow, cause others which cause others (etc.) which … later include
an understanding-French-involving skandha. For it seems that the understanding-
French-involving skandha must somehow inherit everything that underlies its
possibility of being what it is from its causal predecessors.
Can we mitigate the difficulty? The first thing to do, perhaps, is to try to forestall a
possible misunderstanding of my use of the term ‘conscious process’ or ‘consciousness-
process’. Whatever consciousness-process C is, it’s not a mere streaming of passive
content. It is rather something that must be conceived as inherently live, dynamic,
active, powerful. Now anything that concretely exists at all, and that therefore has
categorical (actual, existing) properties, ipso facto has powers.19 So to say that the
existence of conscious process involves the existence of powers is not to say anything in
any way peculiar. We can (and must) think of consciousness-process C as having
powers, like any concretely existing thing whatever; and plainly the powers of a thing,
considered specifically as such, need not be obviously manifest at all times in what one
might call the overt being of the thing (the ‘overt being’ of C at any given time is C’s
having the total conscious experience it has at that time, the conscious experience that
constitutes its existence).
There is, then, a completely harmless—unavoidable—sense in which the process of
thinking is not fully manifest to itself (unless—I suppose—one is God). Descartes
makes the point explicitly when replying to Arnauld: ‘although we are always actually
aware of the acts or operations of our minds’, he says, ‘we are not always aware of the
mind’s faculties or powers, except potentially’.20
But there still appears to be an enormous difficulty: how can any human con-
sciousness–process, of the sort with which we are all familiar, possibly carry or harbour
all the powers—or, more neutrally, properties—we associate with an individual human
mind like C—will, understanding, memory, linguistic ability, possession of concepts,
innate or not?21How can the categorical being of C—which is, again, simply
consciousness-process, consciousness-process which appears at any particular time t to
have only some very particular and extremely limited content—possibly wholly
constitute what one might call the power being of C at t? Right now I’m absorbed by a
white cow in a field, swishing its Sideritsian tail, and my knowledge of French and
algebra isn’t manifest in this experience. Somehow Descartes has to find room for a
mind or self or subject with sufficient ‘ontic depth’—sufficient capacitational depth,
adequate ‘storage’. And this last requirement may seem to sink his position—unless
perhaps Leibniz can help, by modifying it in some way.
It may perhaps be said that the problem disappears given a flash theory of being, but
even on the terms of a flash theory of being we will need successive flashes that have
capacity-carrying content or ‘depth’ over and above the evident conscious content
experienced by the human individual in the present moment, if there is to be any real
plausibility in the idea that each flash gives rise causally to the next. For although I am

19
This is my view. It is very widely held, but the idea of perfectly ‘inert’ material substance was also
widely embraced in the seventeenth century.
20
AT7.246–7/C2.172. Descartes continues: ‘by this [i.e. the word ‘potentially’] I mean that when we
concentrate on employing one of our faculties, then immediately, if the faculty in question resides in our
mind, we become actually aware of it’ (AT7.246–7/C2.172).
21
It’s precisely this problem that leads Hume to give up his official empiricist account of the nature of
mind—‘all my hopes vanish’—in the Appendix to his Treatise (1739–1740: Appendix §20).
10

currently delighted by a cow, I may in the succeeding flashes hear and understand
something in French and reply appropriately in that language.
Sautrāntika Abidharma, facing very much the same problem, posits capacity-carrying
mental dharmas called ‘seeds’ to do the required work (see e.g. Siderits 2007: §§6.3–
6.5). The same problem presumably motivates the various accounts of ‘storehouse
consciousness’ (Sanskrit ālaya vijñāna) and ‘minimal sentience’ (bhavaṅga citta),
although they may vary on the question of whether or not there is really some sort of
consciousness at all times (as a strong parallel to Descartes would require). There are
clear connections even though the Cartesian position accepts the notion of a persisting
mind while the various Buddhist positions reject it. At the very least they face a similar
difficulty.
What is to be done? The fact that all concrete entities necessarily have powers allows
us to put aside the objection that the whole being of the consciousness-process that is C
at t must be fully manifest in consciousness at t—manifest in the ordinary everyday
consciousness of the subject of experience that we take to be identical with C. When it
comes to finite minds like ours, the power being of something needn’t be—can’t be—
fully manifest in the way it currently appears to us in our conscious experience. This is
so even when the something is ourselves, and even when it is wholly constituted of
consciousness.
Descartes explicitly says of immaterial minds that ‘I understand them as powers or
forces of some kind’ (AT5.270/C3.361), and we can register this by adding an explicit
reference to power into the existing equation [1] (C = thinking = consciousness), and
give it a new number to mark the addition:
[2] C = consciousness = thinking/power of thinking.
[2] is perhaps not easy to understand. The being of the power of the consciousness-
process at any given time has to be nothing over and above the being of the actuality of
the consciousness-process at that time, and the consciousness actuality may still seem
too thin, at any given time, to be (or ‘ground’) the power. But it is, I submit, Descartes’s
view, so that any difficulty in it is his difficulty. It’s also wholly in accord with a radical
processual view of concrete reality that is I believe correct independently of Descartes.22

8 The Cartesian Brain

We can solve almost all of the storage problem straight away. It’s enough to note the
central place of the body, and above all the brain, in Descartes’s overall account of our
mental lives.23
Objection. ‘The brain is fundamental in Descartes’s theory, but it can’t do all the
work of storage. He’s committed to the existence of innate ideas, which must be located
in C, along with what he calls “intellectual memory”, i.e. wholly non-corporeal
memory, “memory that depends only on the soul” (AT3.48/C3.146).’

22
It’s worth comparing the case of matter, or rather physical stuff in general. There is I believe no
difficulty in saying that the being of the power of physical stuff is nothing over and above the being of the
actuality of physical stuff. I take it that this is in fact correct.
23
‘Above all the brain’: Descartes holds that ‘a lute player, for instance, has a part of his memory in his
hands’ (AT3.48/C3.146).All our ideas, memories, knowledge are stored there, not in C. The human
imagination is in Descartes’s view a wholly neural phenomenon.
11

Reply. Innate ideas don’t constitute a separate problem, for they are in Descartes’s
view nothing over and above powers. ‘When we say that some idea is innate in us, we
do not think that it is always present to us; in that sense no idea would be innate. We
mean only that we have within us a power to produce the idea in question’
(AT7.189/C2.132; see Clarke 2003: 162). Descartes explicitly rejects any conception of
innate ideas as intrinsically contentful items ‘always actually depicted in some part of
our mind, in the way in which many verses are contained in a book of Virgil’
(AT11.655). So the supposed problem posed by innate ideas reduces to the problem of
how C can be intrinsically powerful.
Descartes’s occasional references to ‘intellectual’ or purely soul-based memory can’t
be accommodated in this way, but they have a strangely glancing character in his
writings, like his reference to ‘internal emotions which are produced in the soul only by
the soul itself’ (AT11-1.440/C1.381). They don’t sit well with his overall theory, or his
clearly stated view that ‘purely spiritual beings have no genuine recollection at all’.24
For present purposes, though, we may accept that Descartes commits himself to the
existence of purely C-based memory, and that the storage problem remains even when
we have built powerfulness into C, as in [2] C = consciousness = thinking/power of
thinking.
I think we find further striking—overwhelming, if indirect—support for the attri-
bution of [2] to Descartes when we compare his conception of mind with his conception
of matter. I’ll come to this in §10.

9 ‘Thin’ Subjects

I want first to consider another reason to attribute the Mamertian view of the mind (i.e.
[1]/[2]) to Descartes. I think it constitutes further powerful support for the attribution,
although it’s not clear that more support is needed, given the textual evidence set out in
§§4–6. But before that I need to step back a little.
Consider René, a human being, a subject of consciousness or experience (I’ll use
‘experience’ instead of ‘consciousness’ because of the naturalness of the phrase ‘subject
of experience’). What is a subject of experience? There are several views. There is, first,
the thick conception of the subject, according to which the subject is the whole
organism, e.g. (to take our own case) the whole human being. There is, equally, the
traditional inner conception of the subject, according to which the subject is a persisting
entity which isn’t the same thing as the whole human being, but is instead a particular
persisting complex brain-system, say, or alternatively, perhaps, a Lockean, C*-type
immaterial soul (such an immaterial soul may not be thought of as literally inner, but the
idea is clear). In both the thick and the traditional inner case it’s standardly supposed
that a subject of experience can continue to exist when there is no experience that it is
the subject of. Both these conceptions of the subject allow for the possibility that René
can continue to exist as subject of experience during dreamless sleep of the kind we
believe human beings regularly experience (or rather do not experience).
According to the thin inner conception of the subject of experience, by contrast, a
subject of experience is something that exists only if experience exists that it is the

24
AT3.425; Clarke (2003: 99–105) has a very good discussion of this point.
12

subject of. I believe this to be the most important philosophical conception of the
subject, and it is in any case the one that will concern me here.
A thin subject, then, is something that is essentially experientially ‘live’. If there’s no
experience/experiencing, there’s no subject of experience:
[3] [subject of experience → experience]
and since it’s a necessary truth that an experience entails an experiencer
[4] [experience → subject of experience]
we can express the thin conception of the subject of experience as a biconditional:
[5] [experience ↔ subject of experience]:
a subject of experience exists if and only if experience exists—experience that it is the
subject of.
It’s important to be clear that [4] says nothing about the ontological category of the
subject. In particular, it carries no suggestion that the existence of the subject of
experience is in any way ontologically over and above the existence of the experience,
the experiencing. All it does is point out is the fundamental (trivially true) sense in
which experience is necessarily experience-for—experience-for-someone-or-something.
Experience necessarily has this structure even if that all that exist are experience
flashes. Pain is essentially pain-for, it’s essentially felt, hence, necessarily, felt by
someone-or-something.
[4], then, is compatible with any view that admits the existence of pain (and
accordingly values compassion), and therefore, I take it, with the vast majority of
Buddhist views. Whatever the no-self doctrine denies, it doesn’t deny this. Some may
like to say that there is subjectivity but no subject, but there’s no issue here, for my use
of the term ‘subject’ adds nothing whatever to what they allow.25
We may call the subject as represented by the thin conception of the subject the ‘thin
subject’. We may then express the present point by saying that this is Descartes’s
conception of the subject:
[6] C is a thin subject.
This is not news, in the context of this paper, because it follows immediately from
[1] C is wholly constituted of (conscious) mental goings-on.
If [6] is also, as I believe, the most natural Buddhist conception of the subject of
experience—remember that the existence of subjects of experience, however
momentary, must be allowed as soon as the existence of experience, e.g. pain, is
allowed—then we have a further point of connection. It may be said that Cartesian
subjects are sempiternal, whereas Buddhist subjects come in flashes. But we have
already seen that Cartesian subjects also come in flashes.
Objection. ‘This can’t be said to be a Buddhist view. Certainly there is experience;
but no experiencer. “The Buddhist does not countenance … an experiencer” (Siderits
2007: 128).
Reply. Here Siderits is using ‘experiencer’ in the standard way that builds in
commitment to [i] some sort of substance–property distinction and [ii] some idea of the

25
I discuss this in a number of places. See e.g. Strawson (2010/2017: 167–8).
13

experiencer as something persisting. Both of these commitments are explicitly cancelled
by the thin conception of the subject. This leaves us free to assert [4] as an absolute
metaphysical truth, as we must—while remaining wholly friendly to Buddhist views.26

10 Mind and Matter

Many will agree that §§4–6 already provide a sufficient defence of [1], and therefore
[6], but there’s a further consideration which is I think of great importance. I have in
mind the deep—all-the-way-down—resemblance between Descartes’s conception of the
nature of mind and his conception of the nature of matter. Descartes holds that matter is
quite literally nothing other than extension. This being so, it seems hardly surprising
that he holds that mind is quite literally nothing other than thinking (i.e. experiencing,
consciousness).
Descartes’s view about matter is often derided. One common objection is that there
can be no difference, for him, between a cubic metre of deep space and a cubic metre of
lead or cheese. What such objections show, however, is that Descartes (obviously!)
doesn’t conceive of space or extension in anything remotely like the way we do in
everyday thought. It’s arguable that he conceives of it more in the way Steven Weinberg
does when he proposes that all physical objects of the sort we take ourselves to have to
do with are made of ‘rips in spacetime’, spacetime being itself a physical object, an
essentially substantial something that is itself, in some immovable sense, the only thing
there is.27
One might add that in conceiving of space—extension—as substantial, Descartes is
also in effect conceiving of it as something inherently powerful, in spite of his official
conception of matter as passive. This, again, is in accord with orthodoxy in current
physics, according to which there is simply no such thing as empty space(time), but
rather the ‘quantum vacuum’, a substantial physical thing.
On this view, there is strictly speaking only one material thing or substance, the
spatially extended universe, one big extended thing ‘with different nubbly gradients of
texture’28 at different places that amount to trees, people, railway lines, and so on—an
idea which, once again, seems profoundly in accord with the spirit of much present-day
physics—relativistic quantum field theory—and cosmology. It also appears to accord
with some version of the doctrine known as Indra’s Net. Consider any proper part of the
material universe that we are naturally inclined to pick out as a truly independent single
thing or substance. There are no such truly or radically independent things in
Descartes’s metaphysics—no plurality of irreducibly independent material substances.
Whether or not one accepts this thing-monist idea,29 the material universe is in
Descartes’s view a ‘plenum’, that is, it contains no literal vacuum (the definitional
opposite of plenum), no place that isn’t occupied by matter. How could there be such a
place, given that extension is matter—that extension is itself something concrete,
substantial? So too, it contains nothing that isn’t interdependent with everything else.

26
I once wrote a paper called ‘What is the relation between an experience, the subject of the experience,
and the content of the experience?’ Strawson (2003/2008) The answer to the title question, I propose, is
‘Identity’; strict metaphysical identity.
27
Weinberg (1997: 20).
28
Catherine Wilson, in correspondence.
29
A thing monist (e.g. Spinoza) holds that there is only one thing. A stuff monist (e.g. Hobbes) holds that
there is only one kind of stuff, although there may be many distinct things.
14

Descartes takes this thing-monist view of matter to be compatible with ordinary
conventional talk of multiple distinct material objects, and he never explicitly suggests
that there is in the same way really only one mind—one res cogitans. He takes it, as
remarked, that there are many irreducibly numerically distinct individual minds, fully in
line with conventional Christian eschatology. He claims—but without ever offering any
account of their identity and individuation conditions—that ‘each of us understands
himself to be a thinking being and is capable in thought of excluding from himself every
other substance’ (8A.29). It’s worth noting, though, that this form of words doesn’t
unequivocally exclude the view that we are all ultimately one thinking substance. In
their absorbing book The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self Ray Martin and John Barresi
observe that ‘although officially Descartes subscribed to a doctrine of personal
immortality, how personal it was is open to question’ (2006: 136). Some have suggested
that when Spinoza went on to explicitly endorse the idea that our minds are ultimately
aspects (or modes) of one single universal mind, he was simply rendering Descartes’s
philosophy fully consistent.30
I’m going to leave this line of thought hanging. Even if one doubts that there is
anything resembling the ātman-brahman view in Descartes (he would certainly have
known of Averroës’ cognate view), an absolutely fundamental similarity between his
view of mind and his view of matter remains: just as he holds that spatial extension is
literally all there is to the latter, he holds that thinking (consciousness, experiential
process) is literally all there is to the former.
Plainly we need to make a truly radical adjustment to our conception of extension if
we want to acquire any remotely realistic sense of what Descartes thinks matter is when
he equates matter and extension. We need to adjust it to the point where it allows us to
accommodate the fact that Descartes is as realist about ordinary massy physical objects
as we are, while at the same time holding that the existence of matter is simply the
existence of extension. We shouldn’t therefore be in the least surprised, but should
rather expect, that we will need to adjust our conception of mind no less radically if we
want to acquire any remotely decent sense of what Descartes thinks mind is—and of
what he thinks an individual mind is. We will need to adjust it to the point where it can
accommodate the fact that Descartes is as realist as we are about the capacities of minds
—minds coupled to bodies and in particular brains which solve almost all if not all their
‘storage’ problems—even though he holds that there is nothing more to their existence
than conscious process. His conception of the nature of experiential process must be at
least as rich—at least as power-full—as his conception of the nature of concretely
existing extension needs to be if it is to accommodate all the seeming massy phenomena
of the non-mental physical world in the way he thinks it does. One hasn’t begun to
understand Descartes’s conception of mind until one sees that it invites exactly the same
kind of initial puzzlement as his conception of body. (‘Body can’t be just extension!’
‘Mind can’t be just a stream of conscious goings-on!’)
Does this help with the problem of ‘ontic depth’ mentioned above? It may still be
hard to see how. For whatever the nature of this depth, these riches, the whole
categorical being of mind or self or subject is still held to consist of nothing other than
mental process—conscious mental process (= [1]). And when we ask what this
conscious mental process is supposed to consist in, we may still be inclined to think that

30
Spinoza offered a systematization of Descartes’s philosophy in his Principles of Cartesian Philosophy
(1663).
15

it must (by definition) be something whose whole categorical being at a given time t is
phenomenologically manifest in consciousness at t—something, in fact, whose whole
categorical being just is what is phenomenologically manifest in consciousness at t. And
when we then turn to consider C at t, and consider what is phenomenologically manifest
to C, who is perhaps absorbed in watching a cow, it seems painfully obvious that there
just isn’t enough room, in the total (categorical) being of C’s conscious mental process,
for all the powers we want to lodge in C at t—even though the body and brain can
wholly solve the problem of content storage (one’s knowledge of French, Arabic, chess,
and so on).
It’s true that that which constitutes C’s fully explicit occurrent content-process at t is
necessarily the ground of certain powers, powers that are not themselves consciously
displayed at t, simply because (in any sound metaphysics) all categorical being is also
and necessarily and at the same time power being. But if—since—it can’t be the ground
of all the powers and capacities we want to attribute to C, there must be more conscious
content occurring somewhere in C, as part of C; because, again, all we have, when it
comes to furnishing categorical grounds for powers and capacities, is occurrent
conscious content.
It seems, then, that we have to reject the thesis that the whole being of C’s mental
process at t is fully manifest (self-manifest) to C in consciousness at t, and allow that
the conscious process that constitutes C at t can after all include something of which C
is not conscious or only dimly conscious. One question is whether some variant of the
notions of ālaya-vijñāna (‘storehouse consciousness’) or bhavaṅga citta (‘minimal
sentience’) or indeed citta-santāna (‘mind-stream’) can provide the necessary
accommodation. I would be extremely interested to hear of any possible parallels. The
move may seem to be immediately ruled out given Descartes’s view of the self-
transparency of mind. But the thesis of the self-transparency of mind is not something
additional to the thesis that the categorical being of the mind consists wholly of
conscious process, it’s part of it; and I think we may now do five helpful things:

(i) recall the passage where Descartes says he conceives of minds ‘as powers or
forces of some kind’

(ii) note again the respect in which powers qua dispositional neither are nor can be
manifest in the essentially occurrent (i.e. non-dispositional) content of the process of
consciousness, but may nonetheless reside in the process of consciousness

(iii) note again the primordial parallel between Descartes’s conception of matter as
extension—something that seems initially far too thin—and his conception of mind
as conscious process—something that again seems initially far too thin

(iv) signal the important qualification in his statement of the self-transparency thesis
in the First Replies, which allows for different—and perhaps very faint—degrees of
awareness: ‘there can be nothing in me of which I am in no way [nullo modo] aware’
(AT7.107/C2.77)

and finally

16

(v) note a passage in which Descartes seems to state explicitly that the thinking—the
conscious process—may at a given time be the place of residence of mental powers
that are not grounded merely in the existence of the particular and limited conscious
content of the thinking at that time: just as ‘the memory of material things depends
on traces [vestiges] that reside in the brain’, he says, so too ‘the memory of
intellectual things depends on … traces that reside in thinking [la pensée] itself’
(AT4.114).

11 A Leibnizian Solution?

Objection. ‘This can’t work. A genuine acknowledgement of what one might call the
‘power being’ of C amounts—in spite of (i)–(v)—to giving up [1]. It amounts to giving
up the view that C is wholly constituted of actual conscious process. It is irredeemably
illegitimate to expand [1] into [2] in the way you have done.’
Reply. This may be a problem in Descartes’s position rather in this account of his
position. But I don’t think it’s insuperable. It may be—for one thing—that a broadly
speaking Leibnizian solution is available. A full exposition of this idea would require
another paper, but I’ll conclude with a sketch of how it might go.
We need to be careful when we talk of powers, but it’s perfectly acceptable to say
that all powers require categorical grounds (it’s just that one shouldn’t in saying this
wrongly think that their being—that in which their existence consists—is distinct from
or over and above the being of their categorical grounds). By hypothesis, the only
categorical grounds available in the case of C are actual conscious goings-on. We must
therefore suppose that conscious goings-on ground (constitute) all C’s powers. If we do
this, it seems that we can hold on to [1]—the existence of C is wholly a matter of the
existence of conscious mental goings-on—even as we think of C as intrinsically
mentally powerful. What we can no longer hold on to, it seems, is the thesis of the full
self-transparency of mind. We can continue to hold that all mental process is necessarily
conscious, live, and it seems that we must do so if we are to present a position that can
hope to be genuinely Cartesian. But we must then allow that there is conscious mental
process that is part of what constitutes one’s mind at a given time t, and constitutes in
particular its needed ontic (capacitational) depth at t, although—how to put it?—the
conscious subject that one experiences oneself to be at t, and experiences as having the
experiences one has at t, isn’t conscious of it, or (rather) is conscious of it only in a very
dim way.
Does this make sense? We already have Descartes’s crucial qualification of the self-
transparency thesis: ‘there can be nothing in me of which I am in no way [nullo modo]
aware’ (AT7.107/C2.77). That may already be enough (compare the fact that ālaya-
vijñāna or storehouse consciousness is sometimes said to be not unconscious but
‘subliminal’). Another way to try to make sense of it, I think, is to suppose that one’s
mind (or any unenlightened mind), a stream of consciousness, consists of more than one
‘locus’ of awareness (not ultimately, perhaps, but for all practical experiential
purposes). Let ‘top subject’ name the putative entity picked out at the end of the last
paragraph: the conscious-subject-that-one-normally-experiences- oneself-to-be-and-to-
be-having-the-experiences-one-experiences-oneself-as-having. One can then express the
present proposal by saying that there may be more to the full metaphysical reality of the
subject of experience that one is—that one is correctly said to be—than the ‘top subject’
17

as just defined. One can allow that experience occurs, experience that is correctly said
to be constitutive of the being of the subject of experience that one is considered as a
whole, in loci of awareness (within the overall subject of experience that one is) that are
other than the top-subject locus of awareness. The phenomenological content of this
experience must be fully consciously manifest somewhere, because its being fully
consciously manifest is an essential feature of what its existence consists in, and since it
can’t be fully manifest in the experience of the top subject, it must be fully manifest in
other loci of awareness— although one can again allow, in line with the nullo modo
qualification, that the top subject always has some sort of dim awareness of it.
This may seem to sit ill with Descartes’s doctrine of the indivisibility of mind, but I
think that it may be part of what Leibniz has in mind when he postulates tiny
experiences or conscious mental goings-on (petites perceptions) that are genuinely
partly constitutive of one’s mind, although one, i.e. the ‘top’ subject, is not conscious,
or is only very dimly conscious, of their content (see e.g. Leibniz c. 1704: 54). Jointly
they constitute a mental entity that has (coupled as it is to body and brain) the necessary
‘thickness’ to be the place of residence of all one’s mental powers. And this may be so
whether they’re perceptions of which we are in some sense aware although they’re
individually too small for us to notice (the distant roaring of the sea is the sum of the
separately indiscernible sounds of many individual waves), or whether there is really no
sense in which we (the top subjects) can be said to be aware of them.31
If this picture makes sense, as I think it does, then it provides a means of greatly
expanding the categorical being, and hence (equivalently) the power being, of C. I
think, in fact, and contrary to Descartes, that we are in fact wholly material beings, but I
also think it extremely likely (empirically very plausible) that there are loci of
consciousness in us, so considered, of which we as ‘top’ subjects are unaware (or only
very dimly aware) even when we judge ourselves to be fully awake and conscious. Does
this idea oblige me—or Descartes—to say that an individual’s existence as a subject of
experience is partly constituted by or at least dependent on many subjects in an
ontologically substantial way that is fatal to Descartes’s thesis of the indivisibility of the
mind? I think not. Not even the most passionate proponent of the indivisibility and
‘substantial simplicity’ of the mind can deny that the mind is highly complex.
Many may still doubt that the picture offers a sufficient response to the question how
anything that consists of nothing but conscious mental process can have the whole
mental power being of subjects of experience like ourselves.32 Certainly more needs to
be said. I feel no difficulty with the idea, although I’m a ‘stuff monist’ and an all-out
materialist, because it seems to me that the least implausible view of the intrinsic nature
of the physical stuff which constitutes concrete reality is that it is—or at least essentially

31
Some think that Leibniz’s notion of petites perceptions or unconscious perceptions extends to cover
goings-on that are completely unconscious in a modern sense of ‘unconscious’ according to which they
have no phenomenological content at all. I believe that this is wildly anachronistic, and that it is for
Leibniz definitionally true that anything that is called a ‘perception’ or a ‘representation’ or a ‘thought’
has phenomenological content. A perception fails to be ‘conscious’ (if it does) simply in not being a
distinct—or distinguishable—object of explicit awareness in a creature’s everyday experience.
32
But perhaps this is to take the claim that our mental being is ‘everything that exists within us in such a
way that we are immediately aware of it’ (AT7.160/C2.113) too narrowly. Why not understand this
immediate awareness (and self-transparency of mind) to extend beyond the contents of present occurrent
conscious experience to cover all those dispositional contents (beliefs and other mental states) of which
we may be said to be immediately aware inasmuch as they are immediately available to us? (Thanks to
Stephen Gaukroger and James Hill for prompting this thought. What they have in mind seems to be what
Descartes calls ‘potential’ awareness in the quotation on p. 10.)
18

involves—conscious experience. I think, in other words that panpsychism in some form
is the least implausible position to hold about the nature of concrete physical reality in
the present state of our knowledge. And here my use of the word ‘physical’ is, as
always, the same as Russell’s:
the word ‘physical’, in all preliminary discussions, is to be understood as meaning
‘what is dealt with by physics’. Physics, it is plain, tells us something about some
of the constituents of the actual world; what these constituents are may be
doubtful, but it is they that are to be called physical, whatever their nature may
prove to be. (1914: 150)
Let me finish with a remark about Lichtenberg—and ‘pure consciousness experience’

12 Lichtenberg

Lichtenberg objected that Descartes didn’t have the right to assert cogito, i.e. ‘I am
having conscious experience’, only ‘There is conscious experience’, or ‘It’s conscious-
experiencing’—as in ‘It’s raining’ (1765–99: 190, §18). His objection has been
endlessly repeated and praised, but I don’t think it’s valid. Descartes uses ‘I’ simply
because our thought about ourselves naturally and inevitably occurs for us in terms of
‘I’. He uses ‘I’ successfully as a referential term to refer to something that certainly
exists (see §8 above), as he carries through his thought-experiment of doubting
everything he can, without claiming to know the metaphysical nature of the something.
He states explicitly that he doesn’t know its metaphysical nature:

What else am I? I will use my imagination. I am not that structure of limbs which is
called a human body. I am not even some thin vapour which permeates the limbs—a
wind, fire, air, breath, or whatever I depict in my imagination; for these are things
which I have supposed to be nothing. Let this supposition stand; for all that I am still
something. And yet may it not perhaps be the case that these very things which I am
supposing to be nothing, because they are unknown to me, are in reality identical
with the ‘I’ of which I am aware? I do not know, and for the moment I shall not argue
the point, since I can make judgements only about things which are known to me. I
know that I exist; the question is, what is this ‘I’ that I know? (1641: 18)

He doesn’t know. He might for all he knows be something that’s more like a process or
a property than a self-subsistent substance as ordinarily conceived. He might be just a
‘thin vapour’ permeating the body, i.e. a wholly physical phenomenon, nothing like a
‘Cartesian subject’ as ordinarily and mistakenly conceived of (a Lockean C*—see p.
000). The word ‘I’ carries no such implication. The force of cogito in Descartes’s use is
in fact precisely ‘There is conscious experience going on’, ‘There is conscious process’.
It is precisely what Lichtenberg criticizes it for not being.
Later, in the Sixth Meditation, Descartes argues that he is indeed a substantial
something. But this claim, once again, is not the claim that he is a C*. It’s the claim that
he is C, something wholly constituted of consciousness—something whose existence
Lichtenberg also and equally admits. Once again: Descartes doesn’t hold that there is
some substance distinct from his conscious experience that is doing the experiencing—
some substance distinct from his stream of consciousness that is the independently

19

substantial locus of the stream of consciousness. He only holds, with Lichtenberg, that
there is conscious process. This processual phenomenon is the ‘substance’ in question,
and it is the thing referred to by ‘I’ when one uses ‘I’ to refer only to one’s mental
being. The use of ‘I’ is unexceptionable.
There remains the thought that this consciousness process is an individual
consciousness-process, one among others. But, first, it is not clear that Lichtenberg
rejects this claim when he says that Descartes was only entitled to assert ‘there is
thinking (i.e. conscious experience) going on’ (Lichtenberg was not then concerned
with scepticism about other minds). Secondly, and as already remarked, it’s not clear
that Descartes holds that an individual human mind is an irreducibly separate entity—
even though he is concerned not to tread on orthodox toes. Material objects as ordinarily
and conventionally understood are not irreducibly separate substances, on Descartes’s
view, but are, rather, and ultimately, parts of one single thing—Extension. It’s arguable
that the deep trend of Descartes’s thought is, as Spinoza saw, towards the parallel but at
that time dangerously unorthodox view about minds: all minds are ultimately parts of
one thing—Mind.
Objection. ‘All this time you’ve been forgetting Descartes’s claim that “even if all the
accidents of the mind change, so that it has different objects of the understanding and
different desires and sensations, it does not on that account become a different mind”
(AT7.14/CSM2.10). This sufficiently shows that C can’t be simply and wholly
constituted of its contents. It must have some principle of identity—and therefore some
kind of being—that is independent of, over and above, all its particular contents.’
Reply. Not so. One can supply a principle of diachronic (flash-being-diachronic)
identity for a mind without supposing that it has any kind of being over and above its
particular contents. Causal linkage is enough—this episode or flash giving rise to this
next one. This mind is this particular stream (flash-stream)—that’s it. Here again there
seems to be a connection with certain Eastern conceptions of the mind.
Objection. ‘Any such appeal to causal linkage amounts in effect to supposing that
there is more to C than all the particular conscious contents.’
Reply. Conscious contents are inherently powerful, like all concrete things, and there
seems to be no good reason to allow this objection. And here there is perhaps another
resource: a conception of conscious process (well developed in Eastern philosophy) that
allows that it can exist and be genuine conscious process while being ‘pure’ in some
sense, i.e. without having any particular experiential contents of the sorts with which we
are familiar. On this view, a cross section of C at any given time in the waking day will
indeed reveal nothing but consciousness, conscious process, ‘thinking’, but while some
of it will be ‘coloured’ (contentful in the everyday ways with which we are familiar),
some of it will be pure; and a great repository of capacities. If Descartes has something
like this in mind, he can allow for the cessation of all ordinary content in C (e.g. in
dreamless sleep) while still holding that the mind is always conscious—as it must be
since (once again) it is wholly constituted of consciousness. A cross section of C in
dreamless sleep will reveal consciousness-process, thinking, but no particular everyday
contents.33

33
My thanks to Christian Coseru for some most helpful advice.
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