Descartes on deception
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Present and explain Descartes’ response to Mersenne’s suggestion In the Second Objections to the Meditations that it would be compatible with God’s goodness that God deceive us. Along the way say something about how Descartes handles the issue of prophecies (prophet) that seem not to come true.
© 2007 by André Gombay
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deception and rights
chapter 5
We have yet to meet the proof that God is no deceiver – that he
has not so made us as to be always mistaken. Here it is:
It is impossible that God should ever deceive me; for in every fraud or
deceit some form of imperfection is to be found; and although the ability to
deceive may seem to be a mark of acumen or power, the will to deceive is
undoubted evidence of malice or weakness. So it has no place in God.
This is AT 7, 53; CSM 2, 37: the first page of Meditation Four.1
What to say of these thoughts? Let us grant the case about malice:
many lies indeed are self-serving or ill-intentioned – think of Iago; and
we cannot credit (biblical) God with one of them. Ditto for weakness, if
we mean by “weakness” the inability to achieve what we want by the
means that we most want. Yes, lies and ruses are often prompted by
impotence: would there have been a Trojan horse had the Achaeans been
able to win in honest battle? Again, and again for obvious reasons, that
brand of deceit cannot be attributed to God.
The problem with Descartes’ argument is the central disjunction. We
are told that “the will to deceive is undoubted evidence (proculdubio
testatur) of malice or weakness”: but is it beyond doubt that there are
only these two possibilities? Take the matter of weakness. As we have
seen,2 Plato already insisted that gods had no need to deceive, and is
quoted approvingly on that score by Descartes’ contemporary Grotius.
Yet it is difficult to escape the impression that this lineage of philosophic
insistence exists largely because there are such strong forces ranged on
the other side. Just think of how we speak. English (and not just English)
is replete with words that have come to signify dissimulation, having
begun life signifying power of some sort:3 “crafty,” “sly” (originally =
“able to strike”), “artful,” “cunning,” “impose,” “maneuver,” “machination,”
“manipulate,” “fabricate.” Did they just change skin? Nor is
it only words, but locutions also: “I’ve been had,” “je me suis fait posséder,”
“he put one over on me.” This vocabulary hardly suggests that
72 deception and rights
we view dissemblers as weaklings (at least when we set them against
their dupes). Nor is it just vocabulary, it is also our paragons – Ulysses for
example. In Plato’s dialogue Hippias Minor, Socrates asks Hippias who
is better (beltiôn): Achilles or Ulysses? and proceeds to convince his
incredulous respondent that it is Ulysses, because he at least knows the
truth that he chooses to conceal (371e). “Better”: is this mere Socratic
irony? Not only the philosopher speaks in that voice, so does the poet.
Homer, about Ulysses:
. . . the grey-eyed goddess
Athena smiled, and gave him a caress:
. . .
“Whoever gets around you must be sharp
and guileful as a snake; even a god
might bow to you in ways of dissimulation.
You! You chameleon! Bottomless bag of tricks!”
(Odyssey, book 13, 288–91)
Or closer to our time, and even closer to that of Descartes, we have
Don Juan:4 can anyone who has seen Molière’s play or heard Mozart’s
opera believe even for an instant that Molière or Mozart regarded Don
Juan as a puny figure, or punier for his deceits? “Quel homme!” exclaims
the servant Sganarelle – ambiguously of course, but – ambiguously. True
enough, Descartes will try to make room in his argument for the aura
surrounding these “Olympic” liars, by contrasting ability and will: Don
Juan may have been able to make 1,003 Spanish ladies believe that he
loved them, but he still is a weak man – for having wanted to do it! Well,
perhaps. Yet Descartes ought to be a little more loquacious in describing
that weakness, especially in view of the fact that he writes at the exact
time when in Europe the conceptual ties between power and untruth
are about to grow stronger. Why this is about to happen, we shall see
very soon; for the moment let us take a brief look at the other pole of
Descartes’ disjunction, malice.
Yes, there are Iagos. But are there not also Marlows – the stranger in
Heart of Darkness who tells Kurtz’s abandoned fiancée that the last
word Kurtz pronounced was her name? Surely, people often utter good
lies, i.e. lies that aim to improve the life of the person to whom they are
told. Imagine for example that the universe consists of colorless, odorless,
and soundless atoms; but God has so made us that we see sunsets,
smell roses, and hear trilling birds. Wouldn’t that be deception – for our
benefit? This is exactly the question that Mersenne asked in the Second
set of Objections:
Cannot God treat men as a doctor treats the sick, or a father his children?
In both these cases there is frequent deception though it is always
deception and rights 73
employed beneficially and with wisdom. For if God were to show us the
pure truth, what eye, what mental vision, could endure it? (AT 7, 126;
CSM 2, 90 – note the last sentence)
The same question, with the same paradigms of good lying, was raised
by Hobbes, the third Objector:
The standard view is that doctors are not at fault when they deceive their
patients for their health’s sake, and fathers are not at fault when they
deceive their children for their own good. . . . M. Descartes ought therefore
to consider whether the proposition “God can in no case deceive us” is
universally true. (AT 7, 195; CSM 2, 136)
Descartes’ answer is puzzling. He has no wish, he says (AT 7, 143; CSM
2, 102), to deny that God “may through the prophets engage in some
verbal lying, such as doctors engage in when they deceive the sick so as
to cure them”; however, in the Meditations he had in mind “not lying as
it is expressed in words, but the internal and formal malice inherent in
deception.” This seems to weave together two quite different distinctions,
that between verbal and non-verbal, and that between malevolent
and non-malevolent. True enough, God as imagined in Meditation One
would deceive not by lying but by rigging (as I have called it) – not by
whispering falsehoods into my ears, but by so creating me that I harbor
only false beliefs. It is hard to see, though, how that divide has any
relevance to the question that Mersenne and Hobbes asked: might not
fathers rig matters as well as tell lies – stage Santa Claus, for example?
If, on the other hand, Descartes is basically contrasting malevolence
with non-malevolence, and saying that in the Meditations he had only
malevolence in mind, because non-malevolent deceit isn’t really deceit:
if that is his stance, then he is surely conceding too much. Go back to
the sentence in Meditation One that started it all: “How do I know that
God has not so created me that I be always mistaken?” Does the reply to
Mersenne mean that Descartes worried only about being deceived by God,
since this would imply malice, and did not mind being so made by God
as to be forever mistaken – provided he were to benefit, as patients do from
the lies of their doctors? Are we to understand that he was prepared all
along to allow that possibility? This would make his doubt considerably
less searing – less “hyperbolic” – than we have been given to believe.
Let us assume, then, that Descartes does not mean seriously his
answer to Mersenne. Even so, it is significant that he should give it; for
it almost certainly reflects the fact that, as he writes, a change has
occurred in European thoughts about deception. The idea that benevolent
deceit is not really deceit is now more apt to elicit ready acceptance
– because it can now receive a ready justification. It is time that we
looked at the new landscape.
74 deception and rights
Shakespeare’s Iago tells his lies in order to have a rival officer dismissed,
perhaps even put to death; Molière’s Tartuffe tells his so as to rob a naive
benefactor of his estate: here, then, are two instances of lying, with two
different aims, each of them evil. Well, some moralists have held that
when we disapprove of lies and deceits, it can only be for the particular
harm that each of them brings about or aims to bring about – if indeed it
does. Here, for example, is Hobbes, in his Objection to Descartes (AT 7,
195; CSM 2, 136: this is the sentence I omitted when I quoted from this
source above): “the crime of deception resides not in the falsity of what
is said, but in the harm done by the deceiver” – where, by “harm,” he
manifestly means the harm specific to each occurrence of deceit. In my
examples, it is loss of life in one case and loss of property in the other.
Most moralists, however, have dissented from this Hobbesian, call it
“particularist,” outlook; and held that over and above the specific harms
that individual lies cause or aim to cause, there is a generic harm common
to all lying, to all deceit. The problem is to say exactly what it is.
As it happens, for centuries (millennia?) an answer has existed, according
to which lying is wrong – is a sin – in that it corrupts the soul of the
liar. Perhaps the philosopher who asserted this most forcefully was St
Augustine: here for example is a text (De mendacio, sect. 3, §10; p. 268)
where he discusses the well-known conundrum: what if telling the truth
should result in your own death?
Even as we seek to preserve our body, we must avoid corrupting our soul
through a lie. . . . Since no one doubts that the soul is superior to the body,
over and above the integrity of our body we must put the wholeness of our
soul – which can endure forever. But who would dare call whole the soul of
a liar?
People might of course disagree with Augustine’s rigoristic stance; but
the idiom, the language of “wholeness of the soul,” is what everyone in
Europe would have used until the late 1500s.5 Matters were about to
change, however, drastically.
Here is a text written not long before the Meditations:
Of lying, insofar as it is forbidden by its very nature . . . no other account
can be given than this: it is the violation of a standing right of the person to
whom discourse or signs are addressed. . . . The right in question is not
general or derived, but specific to this form of exchange and born with it.
It is none other than the freedom of judgement that human beings are
understood by a kind of tacit agreement to owe one another in their verbal
intercourse.
This is Grotius’ De jure belli ac pacis (3.1.11), published in 1625.6 Three
things jump out, even in the first sentence. First, the announcement that
deception and rights 75
we are to be offered an anti-Hobbesian, “essentialist,” account: we are to
be told why lying is forbidden “by its very nature.” Equally striking are
the words that come next: “it seems that no other account can be given
than this.” No other account: really? As we have seen, a canon about the
wrongness of lies has been in place for centuries, St Augustine’s, quite
different from the story that we are about to hear. So the lead-up in that
first sentence can only be seen as a manifesto: old, outworn, ideas are
being cast out. And finally comes what we are being led up to – the
proclamation of what makes lying “by its very nature” impermissible.
Liars, we are told, violate a standing right of those to whom they speak,
the right to freedom of judgment.
The thought just voiced may look commonplace to us now, but at the
turn of the 1600s it was not. For the vision of human beings as bearers of
rights or entitlements against fellow-humans or against authority was
born in Europe around that time; or born at any rate then, the idiom that
expresses this vision – an idiom that we still use. Grotius’ De jure belli
ac pacis is probably the first document where it flourishes: one might
almost view that thick tome as a long catalogue of the jura, or “rights,”
that individuals possess in war or in peace. For example, if you are my
neighbor and have already lit a fire, I have the jus to take a burning twig
from your fire in order to light my own (2.2.11); or draw water to drink
from the brook that runs through your land, if no brook runs through
mine (2.2.12); or the right to have my slaves and mules returned to me
after the war, if they had been taken away during it (3.9.3). Some jura are
of course more abstract, as for instance the one we are considering right
now in connection with Descartes’ deceiving God – the right to freedom
of judgment.
We shall need to ask what this freedom of judgment is, a freedom that
is injured when a person is told a lie or is deceived in some other manner:
I leave discussion of this topic till the final chapter. For the moment, let
us take notice of a more general matter. Look back to the Augustinian
explanation of the wrongness of lying, and compare it to the one offered
in our Grotean paragraph. There is almost an ocean between the two.
The older view located the wrong of lying in something that befell the
liar – his heart was being destroyed, his soul was being corrupted: call
this an internalist view. By contrast, the new account locates that wrong
in what happens to the intended dupe – his or her freedom of judgment is
being violated: call this, by contrast, an externalist explanation. It is as
though the harm inherent to lies and deceit had emigrated from the
deceiver to the dupe.
Of course, it isn’t just in thoughts about deceit that this emigration
will have occurred. Odds are that it took place on a wider front – and
Descartes can hardly have remained immune; and so let us look at how
thoughts of rights come into the Meditations, starting with the topic
76 deception and rights
that has preoccupied us of late: deceit, and more particularly God’s
deceit.
Though they are nowhere mentioned, rights are almost certainly the
pedestal of Descartes’ answer to Mersenne – the pedestal of the view that
benevolent deceit isn’t really deceit. How so?
Let us think of rights in general. As we know, they have their vicissitudes:
a right presumed to exist may in fact not exist; or it “may have
existed but be now obsolete, thanks to the rise of another, supervening,
right” (De jure, also 3.1.11); or it may have been forfeited; or it may have
been renounced, explicitly or tacitly. Here is what Grotius says about
benevolent lying (3.1.14):
[W]henever it is clear that a recipient of discourse will not resent the injury
to his freedom of judgement, but will in fact welcome it because of some
good it brings him, then you have not committed a lie in the strict sense
(i.e. an injurious lie); just as you would not commit a theft if, presuming
the owner’s consent, you were to use a small possession of his to secure
him a great benefit. For where there is clear certainty, a presumption is
taken for express consent; and no one is injured who consents.
When a doctor tells an untruth to her patient for the sake of his health,
she is telling him no lie in the strict sense of the word – for she can
assume that he has on this occasion tacitly renounced his right to freedom
of judgment. Truth, therefore, is not owed to him; no right of his is
violated; no lie has been spoken. This may look like a simplistic and
grossly permissive view, in that it absolves the doctor of all misgivings;
yet it remained the common currency on the subject in Europe for
almost two centuries.7 Jean-Jacques Rousseau put it like this in his
fourth Promenade: “If you give counterfeit money to someone to whom
you owe nothing, you may be fooling that person, but you are not
robbing him.”8 Rewording Descartes’ reply to Mersenne in terms of
Rousseau’s quip, we might say that if God makes us believe there are
roses and sunsets and singing birds when there are only atoms, he might
be giving us counterfeit money; but he is not robbing us, he is not deceiving
us in any way.
As it happens, some objectors to Descartes were to push this line even
further:
[M]ay not God delude us continually by sending semblances or ideas into
our souls? . . . God might do this without injury or injustice, and we would
have no cause to complain of him, since he is the supreme Lord of all
things and may dispose absolutely of his possessions.
deception and rights 77
These are the Sixth Objectors (AT 7, 415; CSM 2, 280). The tell-tale
words are absque injuria & iniquitate, “without injury or injustice”: we
are hearing the voice of the rights-theorist, a voice that rings even clearer
in the French translation (AT 9a, 220). For there, after the mention of
what God could do without injury or injustice, Clerselier (the translator)
inserts the clause I have italicized, “nous n’aurions aucun sujet de nous
plaindre de lui”; and for good measure a few lines later, after the reference
to God’s absolute dominion, he adds the canonical word itself, “il
semble avoir le droit de le faire”: “he has, it seems, the right to do it.”
God has the right, of course – because against him, we have none.
We have just encountered a tricky question, one with which the
seventeenth century will cope diversely. Go back to the De jure. In its
opening pages, after having remarked that people use the word “jus” to
mean all sorts of things, Grotius announces that he will employ it “in a
strict and proper sense” – to denote a “creditum, cui ex adverso responded
debitum”: a “credit, to which a debt corresponds on the opposite side”
(1.1.5). Defined in this way, rights are basically adversarial powers; they
are held against someone. My right to a burning twig, for example, is
against my neighbor; he, in this situation, has a debt toward me: he owes
me a twig. Well, suppose that you view rights in this Grotean manner, as
indeed we still do (at least some of them – we call them “claim-rights”);
the question will arise, have we any rights against . . . God?
Some seventeenth-century philosophers do not see this as a problem.
Leibniz, for example, will write in the Monadology (article 51) that “a
monad demands with good reason [demande avec raison] that God in
setting up all the other monads from the beginning of things should take
it into consideration” – “demande” is standard rights-lingo. And three
articles later: “each possible [world] has the right to claim existence [a le
droit de prétendre à l’existence] according to the perfection that it
involves.” So, pre-established harmony and the best possible world are
rights of the monads against God – Leibniz does not even bother to offer
a justification, he just declares.
Many seventeenth-century thinkers, however, stand on the opposite
shore – as do, for instance, the Objectors whom I quoted a page ago. God
cannot be supposed to have obligations toward human beings. So if God
were to “send continual semblances to our souls,” even non-benevolent
ones; if for instance he were to make us perceive just atoms where there
were in fact sunsets, flowers and birds; even if he were to do that, he
would be doing it “without injury or injustice.” Why? Because there are
no rights for him to injure; and consequently, no deceit on his part.
The Sixth Objectors were not alone in holding this view. It had
already been voiced by Grotius in the De jure (3.1.15): “God has a
supreme right over human beings” – supreme-jus on one side of course
means zero-jus on the other. And it will be voiced even more vividly a
78 deception and rights
few decades later, in 1696, in a well-known compendium of contemporary
discussions: Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique. Bayle
is writing about skepticism:
[T]he more you raise the rights of God to the privilege of acting contrary to
our ideas, the more you destroy the only means left to you to prove that
there are bodies – namely that God does not deceive us and that he would
be doing so if the corporeal world did not exist: to present to people [as real]
something that does not exist outside their own minds would be deceitful.
For [the skeptic] will answer, distinguo – “I distinguish”: if a prince did
so, concedo – “I grant it”; if God did so, nego – “I deny it”: for the rights of
God are quite different from the rights of kings.9
The skeptic’s thrust is plain enough: unlike kings, God has no obligation
toward his subjects; ergo, they have no rights against him; ergo, if he
makes them believe massive untruths, even non-benevolent, he will not
be violating any right of theirs; he will not be deceiving them. Absolute
power is in no way wedded to truth.
Let me return to Descartes: he would know well enough what his
objectors have in mind when they insist that God could make us continually
take semblances for truths – “without injury or injustice.” Yet
once again his reply is evasive. Instead of confronting the charge, he
resorts to what looks like a totally new line of defense: “[I]t is contradictory
that human beings should be deceived by God: this follows clearly
from the fact that the form of deceit is non-being, toward which the
supreme being cannot tend” (AT 7, 428; CSM 2, 289). And he goes on at
once to discuss other matters, scriptural – how to construe sayings of
Saint Paul and King Solomon that the objectors had adduced in support
of their challenge. Nor do I know of any passage where Descartes
explains the thought voiced so pithily here. “Tend toward nothing” does
recur as a tag on deceivers in 1648, in the Conversation with Burman
(AT 5, 147; CSMK, 334); and again a year later (April 23, 1649) in a letter
to Clerselier (AT 5, 357; CSMK, 378), but again unglossed both times,
and bare – except for the comment to Burman that this is a “metaphysical
consideration, perfectly clear to all those who give their mind to it.”
So what are we to say, in the end, about Descartes’ proof that God does
not deceive?
First we ought to remember that the proof is not a minor hurdle in
Descartes’ path; he needs to clear it so as to dispose of the doubt. Also,
the proof turns on questions that are of perennial interest and that
intrigued the seventeenth century – exactly what is deceit? When do we
commit it? Why do we disapprove of deceivers? Why do we deride
gullible dupes? Why do we dislike compulsive tellers of truth? etc., etc.
Given the richness of the subject, one can only regret that Descartes
deception and rights 79
should have treated it as airily and evasively as he does. As we saw, in
the Meditation he rests his case on a blunt disjunction: deceivers are
either malicious or weak, and God of course is neither. When challenged
about the first disjunct (by Mersenne and Hobbes), he equivocates; and
when challenged about the second (by the Sixth Objectors), he simply
ignores the question and turns to a new argument, again presented ultrabriskly:
deceivers tend toward non-being, which it is impossible that
God should do.
So let me end with two conjectures. Even though he will offer once
again after the Meditations, and just as airily, the malice-or-weakness
argument – in Principles, Part 1, art. 29 – odds are that, if challenged
again, Descartes would fall back onto the “metaphysical” line, the one
about deceivers “carrying themselves” (feri) or “tending” (tendere)
toward non-being. After all, that is his final word, if we look at the entire
corpus; and beyond its intuitive appeal, it has the merit of resting on
notions that are sufficiently abstract and internalist-looking to discourage
a challenge based on rights. Why should Descartes want to thwart
such a challenge? Why is he evasive when confronted? The reason (and
here is my second guess) is that on the matter of rights in general – and
even more, of rights against God – Descartes has a Janus-like posture:
officially an adherent of Grotean orthodoxy, he nonetheless feels strong
attraction toward Leibniz-type egalitarianism. We shall see these contrary
forces at work clearly enough as we turn to the main topic of
Meditation Four – human error.
The topic arises quite naturally. Descartes has just found that he need
not worry about being always mistaken; but he still has to live with the
disagreeable fact that he is so frequently mistaken. “I am prone to countless
errors” (AT 7, 54; CSM 2, 38). How is that so? And why is that so?
It is useful to separate these two questions – an example might help. I
have just brought my bicycle home from its spring tune-up, and notice
that the front wheel does not revolve quite as it should: at one point in
each rotation, the rim rubs, however slightly, against the brake-pad. The
wheel is probably a little bent: not all its circumference is on a plane perpendicular
to the axle. So now I have an explanation of how it is that the
rotation isn’t quite right – a diagnosis, we might say, of what is amiss.
Yet that is not the end of my questions. I might also ask myself, perhaps
with a sense of surprise or even irritation, why is that defect there, why
did the mechanic not correct it? did he perhaps even create it through
repairing other fixtures – perhaps he tightened the brakes too close, for
the sake of safety? This is a different order of questioning: it has to do
with the history of how the diagnosed defect came about, or was allowed
to remain. So we should distinguish between what one might call plain
diagnosis – understanding where the trouble is – and, on the other hand,
80 deception and rights
case-history – being able to tell how the trouble has arisen or has not
been corrected. Of course there isn’t always a clear dividing line between
the two domains: history and diagnosis interact. But in a rough way at
least, the distinction can be made; and it will be helpful to keep it in
mind as we study the account of human error that Descartes offers in
Meditation Four. In fact, I shall if anything exaggerate it – looking at
what I call “case-history” in the next few pages, and leaving the matter
of diagnosis until the chapter that comes after.
There is of course one clear difference between Descartes’ predicament
and the problem with my bicycle: the contrivance whose malfunction
he is trying to explain is himself. So this will be, on his part, an exercise
in self-examination. But there are also similarities, including one that I
have not labored so far, and which yet deserves to be stressed.
One striking fact about Meditation Four – concealed somewhat in its
translations – is how often words occur in it that have to do with debt.
The verb itself, “debere,” appears nine times; the noun or adjective designating
my condition when I am not given what is owed to me, “privatio”
or “privatus,” eight times. Other members of the family are there
too, not very distant cousins – we have met them recently, and will meet
them again. For the moment, though, let me confine my attention to the
two that I have just mentioned.
How does the idiom of debere come into the meditation? Descartes, as
we saw, notes that he is prone to countless mistakes, and his first reaction
is to ascribe the proneness simply to his limited faculties: the power
that God has given him to discern true from false “is not infinite” (AT 7,
54; CSM 2, 38). God has not given him the power to discern red from
infrared, either (my example). Yet almost at once, Descartes repudiates
this first reaction – “this is not entirely satisfactory”; and he repudiates
it by appealing to the notion of what is owed to him. When he errs, he is
victim of a privatio, he “lacks some knowledge that somehow ought to
[deberet] be in [him]” (AT 7, 55; CSM 2, 38). And he continues: “[W]hen I
consider the nature of God, it does not seem possible that he should have
put into me a faculty that is not perfect of its kind, i.e. is deprived
[privata] of some perfection that is owed [debita] to it.”
“Privata–debita”: it is within the framework of this coupling – and
of the question it enables to ask: “How can I be deprived of what I am
owed?” – that Meditation Four will unfold.
You might wonder what entitles Descartes to suppose that when he
makes a mistake, he has been deprived – a debt toward him has remained
unpaid? There is no privation, for example, in my not distinguishing
red from infrared. On the other hand there would be, if I were unable to
distinguish red from green; and even more – this is the standard example
from the Schools – if I were blind. Why so? Because sight, and the ability
deception and rights 81
to distinguish the main hues of the spectrum, are the normal faculties of
members of my species. Well, suppose that, in my head, I multiply 13 by
17 and come out with the wrong result: why should this be equated with
my being unable to tell red from green, rather than equated with my
being unable to tell red from infrared? Why is it not a mere limitation,
but something worse – a privation? Was infallibility owed to me?
Yes, Descartes will reply; and the reason has to do with who my maker
is. Look back to the passage I quoted two paragraphs ago: “when I consider
the nature of God, it does not seem possible . . .” Why does it not
seem possible that I should have a defective faculty of multiplying?
Answer: because my maker is God, a supremely skilled craftsman; and
The more skilled the craftsman, the more perfect the works that come
from him. (AT 7, 55; CSM 2, 38)
We are meeting again an axiom of fabrication – in fact the converse of
the one that Descartes appealed to in Meditation One. There, you may
remember, he used the dictum
the less skilled the craftsman, the less perfect the works that come from
him
to argue that the atheist had even more reason to doubt his faculties,
more reason to suppose he might be mistaken even where he was most
certain – he was, after all, the product of random causes. Now, after
Meditation Three, Descartes’ condition is of course reverse to that of the
atheist: he knows that he is an opus crafted by that incomparable craftsman,
God. So now the reverse axiom applies: why does he, Descartes,
make any mistake at all? Nor, if you reflect, is the axiom very far
removed from my bicycle story: I brought the mount to a professional
caretaker, so why does a wheel rub against the frame? Here again is a
privatio.
So much for privatum–debitum. Unsurprisingly, the seventeenth
century will add a further word to that coupling: to be deprived of one’s
due will now be seen as being deprived of something to which one has a
right – this is our Grotean equation. Also: if one is so deprived, one has a
right to complain. Well, again unsurprisingly, this forensic vocabulary is
ultra-present in Meditation Four. Descartes will consider at length (AT
7, 60–1; CSM 2, 42–3) whether he “should complain” (debere queri),
whether he has “cause to complain” (causam conquerendi); and will
eventually conclude that no, he has “no right to complain” (nullum jus
conquerendi). Why he has not, we shall see shortly; what matters for the
moment is that we take good notice of the courtroom tonality of all
these concerns – all the more because it creates a quandary for Descartes’
readers.
82 deception and rights
Ask yourself, who would have been defendant in the suit had Descartes
decided that, yes, he had a right to complain? It would of course have
been the craftsman who had assembled him in the first place, namely
God; which brings us once again to the vexed question: do human beings
have any rights against their maker?
As straight words go, Descartes’ answer is quite categorical. In the
midst of discussing his privations, he at one point (AT 7, 60; CSM 2, 42)
interjects that God “has never owed me anything” – mihi nunquam
quicquam debuit. The message is plain: no debt on one side, no right on
the other. Descartes has no rights against God. Yet it is hard to resist the
impression that somehow Descartes’ attitude is more complicated; that
he is not really such a strict adherent of Grotean orthodoxy; that he is
perhaps even confused about the matter. After all, if he held without
further ado that God owed him nothing, would he not dismiss the very
idea of complaining about the make-up that God has given him, as
downright absurd? Yet nowhere in Meditation Four does this happen.
Descartes will spend page after page showing that, although his mistakes
are innumerable, he has no cause to complain about his maker.
Mistakes are erroneous judgments; and judgments (so he tells us – I shall
discuss the doctrine in the next chapter) involve the intercourse of two
faculties, intellect and will. Well, might one of these be defective? No,
each of them is “perfect of its kind” (in suo genere perfecta) (AT 7, 58;
CSM 2, 40). However, one “extends further” than the other (again, to be
explained in the next chapter); and mistakes arise from that disparity.
Well, couldn’t God have put into Descartes some mechanism to counter
the imbalance – for example have “impressed on [his] memory that [he]
should never make a judgement when [he] does not grasp clearly and distinctly”
(AT 7, 61; CSM 2, 42)? Yes, he could have. And so we reach the
final verdict: if God had made him that way, Descartes would be a more
perfect creature – considered as a separate unit. But the world as a whole
would be less perfect. For there is more perfection where creatures are
not all exactly alike, even if this means that some are not immune to
error (AT 7, 61; CSM 2, 43).
Whatever we think of the merits of this argument, much more noteworthy
is the fact that it should be offered at all; it tells something about
Descartes. Surely if he believed wholeheartedly that God “owed him
nothing,” the very thought of an apologia for God would be out of place.
So why does he offer one? This is only one more instance of a deeper
ambivalence in Descartes – one that we already ran into when we considered
what he says of his idea of God. On the one hand, he often
emphasizes the supremely exalted, or infinite, nature of the Divinity,
insisting that it is beyond his grasp or comprehension. And if you reflect,
that is the side in evidence in the espousal of the Grotean dictum, that
God has “a supreme right” over human beings – the emphasis is on the
deception and rights 83
enormous distance between God and us. We shall meet it again later,
present again at an important moment, how to explain human freedom:
once more Descartes will appeal to God’s immensity, and to human
inability to fully comprehend it.
But there is also the other side, the one that I earlier termed “prosaic”
– I might well have called it “workmanlike” (see chapter 4). It surfaces
often at no great distance from the idiom of immensity. God, insofar as
Descartes has a clear idea and talks about him confidently, is really a
master craftsman. In that capacity, we can rate the quality of his work
– be satisfied, or inclined to complain. In that capacity too, axioms of
fabrication apply to his products, not just the two that I have mentioned
so far, but also this one:
No matter how skilled the craftsman, he does not have to put into each of
his works all the perfections that he can put into some.
This, too, is in Meditation Four (AT 7, 56; CSM 2, 39) – only a few lines
after the remark that “God’s nature is immense, incomprehensible and
infinite”! It is in the spirit of this third axiom that Descartes, after having
described at length the features (or “perfections”) that God could
have put into him to counterbalance the gap between the two faculties
involved in the passing of judgments, will appeal to considerations of
cosmic richness and diversity to explain why God deliberately omitted
to put those features into him, and so made it possible that he, Descartes,
not always judge rightly but lapse into mistakes.
Something else goes with the vocabulary of craftsmanship, with the
idiom of putting or not putting, of inserting or not inserting, of stamping
or not stamping – remember, those words are the backbone of the argument
about what God could have done. The words suggest an image.
They encourage us to see ourselves as contraptions into which their
maker has installed, or not installed, certain fixtures. This is not far distant
from how I think about my bicycle – even though Descartes is only
speaking about mental capacities. Much of Meditation Four is in tune
with a vision of human beings as complicated mechanisms – bodiless of
course, so far as Descartes can tell at this point. Call this a mechanist
view of the mind.
But once again, this is only one face. There is the other, almost adjacent
in the text. Descartes, and it is important to insist on this, never
renounces the view that mistakes are privations: “in their formal
definition, falsity and fault just consist in privation” (AT 7, 60–1; CSM 2,
42). So when I wrongly multiply 13 by 17 (my example) I am indeed
deprived of what is owed to me – even though the privation “in no way
requires the concurrence of God.” Well, if God is uninvolved, who is it
84 deception and rights
then that deprives me? Again Descartes is ultra-laconic, in fact confining
himself to one remark a few lines before those that I have just
quoted: “[T]he privation that constitutes the essence of error lies [inest]
in the incorrect use of free will. It lies in the act itself, insofar as it proceeds
from me [in ipsa operatione, quatenus a me procedit]” (AT 7, 60;
CSM 2, 41). So: when I miscount 17 times 13, I do not just exhibit a limitation;
I am deprived of what is owed to me. But who is the depriver? It
isn’t my prime maker, since the privation does not arise from my native
constitution but “lies in the act itself insofar as it proceeds from me.”
We can only conclude that the depriver is – myself. Which brings us to
two important points.
First, this announcement is a major corrective to the view suggested
by the “putting into” – language of Meditation Four, the view that I am a
sophisticated sort of machine. Look back to our last quote – to error
residing in the act “insofar as it proceeds from me.” When does an act
proceed from me? Answer: when it was up to me whether to engage in it
or not. It is a persistent view of Descartes’ that there is error in the strict
sense only where there is an “incorrect use of free will” – see again our
quote above. This is what happens when I mis-multiply 13 by 17; but
doesn’t happen in other cases that Descartes keeps bringing to our attention,
so as to contrast them with the standard kind. In the Principles,
Part 4, article 196 (AT 8a, 320; CSM 1, 283),10 he tells the story of a young
woman who, unknown to herself, had had her arm amputated at the
elbow and kept complaining of pain in her fingers, when in fact these no
longer existed – I gather this is now called “phantom-limb experience.”
In Meditation Six (AT 7, 84; CSM 2, 58) the example is dropsy, a sickness
where the patient craves drink even though drinking is bad for him. The
young woman, the dropsical man, are not simply mistaken, Descartes
will insist; they are being deceived. Deceived by whom, exactly? Not by
God of course, since God is no deceiver; but by “a positive impulse
derived from the nature that God has given [them] so as to preserve
[their] body.”11 Let us not ask how the impulse preserves; nor even how
God, in this situation, escapes the charge of deception. What matters is
the insistence that these are not cases of plain error, not cases where the
deluded have deprived themselves of the truth: someone or something
has deprived them – “nature.” They are victims, not agents. By contrast,
when I miscount 17 times 13, I am an agent; the wrong answer is one
that I have opted for; and opting isn’t anything that a machine can do.
A second thought lurks in the talk of self-deprivation, also important.
As we saw, when I deprive myself I fail to provide for myself what is my
due, or what I owe to myself. Now “privation,” “owing,” “debt,” “due”
– these are all words well present in Meditation Four. By contrast, “debt
to myself” is a phrase that Descartes’ reader has to make up from that
laconic proviso about privation inhering in the act “insofar as it proceeds
deception and rights 85
from me.” If we reflect, it is no surprise at all that the phrase should be
absent: a century such as Descartes’, where talk of rights rules the roost,
will pay attention to what others owe to me, and to what I owe to others
– and not to what I owe to myself. The mere fact that Descartes should
voice the thought of self-debt, even if only indirectly, suggests that he
does not fully share the prevalent Grotean vision, and does not primarily
regard himself as a bearer of rights – one might even view him as an
ancestor of Kant, and of the doctrine that humans beings have duties not
just to others, but also to themselves.12 When we come to his moral theory,
we shall find more to support this conjecture; for the moment, let us
simply retain the thought that for Descartes, there is an inherent wrong
in every mistake we make – namely, we owed it to ourselves not to make
it: a striking thought, surely. What is more, that fact, too, distances us
from machines: perhaps (perhaps?) it is owed to my bicycle that its
wheels not rub against the frame, but it is not something that the bicycle
owes to itself. The debt is mine, or the mechanic’s; bicycles don’t owe
themselves anything.
So, to look back, what has our Meditation detailed so far about error?
Well, I now know that God has not so rigged me as to be like a clock
that always tells the wrong time: my faculties “tend toward the truth.”
Still, has he not so created me that I often make mistakes – I may believe
that the earth is flat, or that 464,731 is a prime number, or like Snow
White, that this apple is good to eat?13 The answer is: yes and no. Yes, he
could have so made me that I had none of these beliefs – in that sense,
God may be said to “have a share” (concurrere) in my errors (AT 7, 60;
CSM 2, 41). But in a deeper sense, God is not responsible – most of the
errors I make are really mine: I misuse the faculties that God has given
me, and the misuse originates in me alone.
Still, to understand this assignment of responsibilities we need to see
how beliefs arise in the first place, and how they go astray. This is what
Descartes discusses in the central pages of Meditation Four; I now turn
to them.