Descartes's Early Doctrine of Clear and Distinct Ideas

Abstract

Philosophers since Arnauld have often found the doctrine of clear and distinct ideas, as it figures in works such as the Meditations, distinctly odd and implausible. My aim in this paper is to show that the original version of the doctrine, which Descartes held up to 1628, is very different from the doctrine that is defended in Meditations. I shall argue that the earlier doctrine is both more plausible and more restricted than the later metaphysical doctrine. It is not a doctrine that derives from considerations about our cognitive relation to the external world but one that is concerned rather with the evidential quality of images, not one which concerns itself so much with absolute certainty as with conviction, and the mental images it works with are not the highly abstract ideas of the later writings but vivid pictorial representations. Nevertheless, it is this earlier doctrine that develops into the later doctrine of clear and distinct ideas, and I believe that a number of the severe problems that the later doctrine was subject to derive from the anomalous nature of its origins. I shall not concern myself with the development and transformation of the doctrine after the abandonment of the Regulae in 1628. A study of the early version indicates, however, that the later one is a doomed attempt to convert a good but limited rhetorical-psychological criterion of what constitutes compelling evidence into a criterion which purports to guarantee our cognitive grasp against hyperbolic doubt. Moreover, the pictorial nature of the images to which the early doctrine is directed militates against the view, encouraged by Descartes himself and still widely accepted by commentators, that the doctrine of clear and distinct ideas derives from reflection upon mathematics. In fact, as I shall show, in so far as the early doctrine has a specific bearing upon mathematics, it is actually in conflict with it. But even if the two were in agreement, the source of the doctrine certainly does not lie in mathematics. The source, as I shall show, is ultimately rhetorical-psychological. The Regulae ad directionem ingenii, which were not published until after Descartes's death, were once generally thought to have been composed in 1628. There have, however, always been those who have believed