Rene Descartes Meditation 6 ｜ What Nature Teaches Us ｜ Philosophy Core Concepts

Hi, this is Dr. Gregory Sadler. I'm a professor of philosophy and the president and founder of an educational consulting company called Reason.io, where we put philosophy into practice. I've studied and taught philosophy for over 20 years, and I find that many people run into difficulties reading classic philosophical texts. Sometimes it's the way things are said or how the text is structured, but the concepts themselves are not always that complicated, and that's where I come in. To help students and lifelong learners, I've been producing longer lecture videos and posting them to YouTube. Many viewers say they find them useful. What you're currently watching is part of a new series of shorter videos, each of them focused on one core concept from an important philosophical text. I hope you find it useful as well. In the sixth meditation, after he has concluded that there is an external world and that I do have a body based on considering the nature of two of our faculties, that of imagination, an active faculty, and sensibility, a more passive faculty, both of which only really make sense if we do, in fact, possess a body and engagement with an external reality, something outside of our minds, something that is, as he says, extended and corporeal. Descartes is going to say something quite interesting and important. He says, there is no doubt that everything nature teaches me contains some truth. This is not to say that everything is exactly the way that what we're going to call nature in just a moment portrays it to us. As a matter of fact, we have to be a little bit careful sometimes not to mix things up, but there's some truth in it. There's something that we can rely upon. If you think about the Cartesian project in general, not only do we want to have the fact that, yes, I have a body, and there is an external world of other bodies that I'm engaged with in some way. We want to know more about what we can call the details, the nitty-gritty, whether things are as I perceive them to be or imagine them to be. First, we have to think about what he means by nature. What is it to be taught by nature? He talks about nature in two different ways here. He says, by nature considered in general, I don't understand anything other than God itself or himself. Do you mem? We can think about the marks that God has placed within the mind, he says, as a workman does to his product. You know, the very idea of God as a perfect being or other things that God would have taught us in that way, perhaps by supplying the storehouse of consciousness, which we'll get to in just a moment. Or he says the order and disposition that God has established within created things. So if we think about the universe as a totality, insofar as it is a created universe, we can know things about it and we can know about the arrangement, the connections between things. So this opens up the door for doing what Descartes is really interested in, which is science, natural science. Descartes was very interested in mathematics and geometry, but he was very interested as well in what we would nowadays call physics and biology. So this opens up the possibility that nature teaches us all sorts of things by way of showing us things about the order and disposition of created things. He also talks about my nature in particular. And he says, what that is, is the complexion or the assemblage of all the things that God has given me. And complexion, don't think about, you know, the way things look on your face or anything like that. It's really just a French translation of complexio in the Latin. And this comes from the word for, you know, come is together and then plectere is folding. So the way things are enfolded together, the way things are connected together, think of cause and effect and other connections, resemblance, all those sorts of things. And the assemblage, the ways in which things have been, you know, heaped up. You might say what's in there, what's not. What has God given us? God has given us our various faculties, intellection or understanding, volition, imagination, memory, sensation, the capacity to feel emotions. All of these things, which are types of thought, are things that God has given us. The entire storehouse of innate ideas that Descartes says we can grasp the true and immutable natures of in Meditation 5 would also be things that consist in my nature in particular, things that God gave me. How does this help us when it comes to the external world? Well, this is where nature teaches us all sorts of things. I should point out as well that Descartes has a little bit of a digression a little bit later, where he talks about things that we know without the intermediary of the body, things that we know just from the mind itself and its workings. He calls these truths that are known by the illumination of the natural light, looking at them. These are things that we provided. We're using our intellects properly and not substituting imagination for it. We should be able to do so. He says one example of this is that what was done at one point in time cannot no longer not have been done. So logical truths, we could say. But if we get away from those and we talk about, well, what else does nature teach us? What else does my nature in particular or the nature of the universe in general teach us as human beings? One of these, he says, says that there is nothing that this nature teaches more expressively or more sensibly than the fact that I have a body, j'ai un corps, right? Which is badly disposed when I feel pain, which has a need to eat or to drink, when I have the feelings of hunger or thirst. And he says, I can't doubt that there is some truth in this. It might not be that hunger is exactly what I'm picturing itself, what I'm picturing it to be to me. We have all these nice metaphorical terms for hunger. I'm feeling hunger pangs. My stomach is upset. I have this gnawing inside of me, right? It's like a wolf is tearing at me from the inside. Okay, all those are essentially images that we use to convey something. They're not actually what we're feeling. But there is some truth there. There is something going on. This is a total digression. We now know that there are some things that are analogs to brain cells within the gut. And so perhaps if Descartes were around today and finding that out, he might be inclined to say, well, perhaps there's some mind-body connection going on in terms of the alimentary canal as well. Going on with this, he says, As nature also teaches me by these very sentiments of pain, hunger, and thirst, that I'm not only lodged in my body like a pilot in a ship, but beyond that, I am conjoined with it very closely. Très étroitement in French. And so mixed up with it. That I compose a single whole with it. I'm not just a mind and a body. One over here, one over here. There's no over here, by the way, for minds. They're non-corporeal, non-spatial. But I'm not just a mind and a body. I am the unity. I am the whole that is that mind and body together. So he says, if this wasn't the case, when my body was wounded, I would not feel for that pain. And I do, in fact, perceive this pain with my sensation. If it weren't the case, I would only see the wound with my understanding. Sort of like a pilot observes what's going on with their ship. Instead, I feel it through this body. So he goes on and he says that when my body has need to drink or eat, I know this simply by itself without having to be warned by these confused sentiments. And he says, in effect, all these feelings of thirst and hunger and pain are nothing other than certain confused manners of thinking, which arise out of and depend on the union, and as it were, the mixture of the mind with the body. So nature teaches us that we actually do have bodies, that we are, in a certain respect, our bodies by being connected with them so closely. It also teaches us that other bodies exist. And he says that nature teaches us that there are other bodies around that of my own, among which I should pursue some of them and flee others. I also sense different sorts of colors, odors, flavors, sounds, heat, hardness, etc. And all of the things of those sorts. From this, I can conclude that there are in these bodies, from which proceed these different perceptions of the sense, something in there, he says, some qualities, something in there, some difference, from which these arise and to which they respond, even though they might not be exactly the same thing as exists in my mind. He does caution us, however. There are some things that nature appears to be teaching us, but isn't actually teaching us. Instead, we're the ones who are making the contribution by, as he says, our habits of inconsiderate judgments, right? He says, a certain custom that I have of inconsiderably, that is, you know, not paying close enough attention, judging things. And he says, so it can easily happen that they contain some falsity. So, what's an example of this? One of the interesting ones that Descartes was connected with was this controversy about, can there be a vacuum in nature? Descartes thought there couldn't. There was always going to be some sort of particle. This depends on his physics, which you can look at the principles of philosophy to understand. But he says, you know, we look at things and, you know, we think, well, there could be a vacuum there, but really there couldn't if we think about it carefully. More interesting and more importantly, I would say, is this realization that he has that, he says, in a body which is warm, we think that there's something similar to the idea of heat, which is in me, strictly speaking in my mind, right? That in a body that's black or white, there is the same whiteness or blackness that I sense, or in a body that is bitter or sweet, there's the same taste or the same flavor, and so on with other things. He talks about the stars as well, you know, which are very far away from us. We know this through the intellect. You know, we think that they're like little candle flames, and that's not really the case. Nature isn't teaching us those things. We are making a contribution to what nature is providing us and drawing the wrong conclusions, and we could apply the same sort of, you know, you could call it a thesis or ethics of the use of the mind that Descartes spelled out in meditation four to avoid falling into those sorts of errors, and Descartes thinks that, in fact, we should do that. But we can say that even if, you know, blackness or whiteness are not actually in those things, there's something in them that is giving us that sensation, which then our mind translates as those colors. Likewise, tastes and smells and things like that. So we actually learn quite a bit from what Descartes calls nature.