"In Idea, a thousand nameless Joys": Secondary Qualities in Arnauld, Locke, and Haywood's Lasselia

Abstract

Cartesian dualism is articulated as a particular kind of conundrum in Descartes' Sixth Meditation (1640), where he advances proof that have a Here, incompatibility of Descartes's and his body assumes its most impacted, most aggravated, and, paradoxically, its most resolvable and irresolvable form when Descartes narrates event of perception:Nature . . . teaches me . . . that I am not merely present in my body as a sailor is present in a ship, but that I am very closely joined and, as it were, intermingled with it, so that I and body form a unit. If this were not so, I, who am nothing but a thinking thing, would not feel pain when body was hurt, but would perceive damage purely by intellect, just as a sailor perceives by sight if anything in his ship is broken. Similarly, when body needed food or drink, I should have an explicit understanding of fact, instead of having sensations of hunger and thirst. For these sensations of hunger, thirst, pain and so on are nothing but modes of thinking which arise from union and, as it were, of mind with body.1In this passage, Descartes maintains his commitment to difference between extended (divisible, hence imperfect) body and unextended (indivisible, hence divinized) mind. But at same time, he concedes confused sensations, confused modes of thinking, union, and intermingling which transpire when, for example, he feels hunger. Rather than incarnating a mind-body split that would, so to speak, cut through Descartes himself, he is compelled by sensations like thirst, pain, or desire to reject hypostatized figure of rationality modeled by sailor in his ship. Yet as Sixth Meditation proceeds, Descartes revises his account of of mind and body which accompanies either sensations like hunger or perceptions about things located outside us. This is so not simply because a person mistakes things like real size of star that she perceives as the flame of a small light,2 but also because insight proven, for Descartes, by star-that its truth can be adjudicated only by intellect-applies equally to a person's perception of her own body. For Descartes, movement that stimulates body ultimately bears likeness3 to feelings which result inside brain, a discrepancy he vividly illustrates in Principles of Philosophy (1644): A sword strikes our body and cuts it; but pain is completely different from local motion of sword or body that is cut-as different as colour or sound or smell or taste.4 Even in this maximally entangled scene of intermingling, mind might indeed behave like a sailor in a ship when it judges truth of external objects; Descartes divorces ensuing ideas from sensory stimulation which cuts into of body itself.A close reader of Descartes, John Locke makes anti-Cartesian argument that ideas enter mind only through medium of body.5 (However immaterial it may be, Locke's mind harbors no innate ideas of divinity.) Yet Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) recurs to Cartesian example of sword when Locke likewise invokes swath of aesthetic sensations remote from particles of matter that move a person to perceive color or sound or smell or taste: It being no more impossible, to conceive, that God should annex such Ideas to such with which they have no similitude; then that he should annex Idea of Pain to motion of a of Steel dividing our Flesh, with which that Idea hath no resemblance.6 In following essay, I pursue relation between subject and object dramatized by Locke's borrowed piece of Steel-a subject whose internal idea fails to resemble an external object whose Motions, even in this graphically commingled case, produce that idea. But for Locke, as for his crucial predecessor Antoine Arnauld, difference between insensible corpuscular motion and such ideas as color or pain, far from isolating latter in Cartesian mind, drives them deeper and deeper into perceiving body. …