Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

194 RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM
employ concepts presupposes from the outset the existence of that extra-mental
world which he is supposed to be doubting. From a modern perspective, in short,
the very idea of the primacy of the subjective dissolves away, and yields to the
primacy of the social.
The second problematic feature about the primacy of the cogito arises even
within the seventeenth-century context. Descartes’s concession that the cogito is
not entirely self-standing, but presupposes the meditator’s grasp of the concepts
involved, allows the following question to be raised. The extreme doubts of the
First Meditation left open the possibility that the meditator might go astray
‘every time he adds two and three or counts the sides of a square, or in some
even simpler matter, if that is imaginable’. 44 But if a deceiving God could
pervert my intuitions regarding the simplest concepts of mathematics, why could
he not also pervert my grasp of the fundamental concepts I need in order to reach
the cogito? How, in short, can I trust my basic intuitions of the ‘intellectual
simple natures’ like the concepts of thought and of doubt, not to mention the
‘common simple natures’, which include the concept of existence and also the
fundamental rules of logic which seem necessary for any thought process at all to
get off the ground?
The correct answer to this conundrum, at least as far as Descartes’s own
strategy is concerned, seems to be that the doubts of the First Meditation are not
intended to be as radical as is often supposed. Doubts about our grasp of
mathematics are raised by the deceiving God argument, but a careful reading of
the First Meditation confirms that doubts about our intuitions of the intellectual
simple natures are never entertained. Despite his talk of ‘demolishing
everything’, Descartes is chiefly concerned, as he says in the Synopsis, 45 to
challenge our preconceived opinions concerning the nature and existence of the
material world around us. He wants to direct the mind away from physical things,
so that it can turn in upon itself and let the ‘natural light’ within each of us reveal
the truths that cannot be doubted. The Cartesian project is not to ‘validate
reason’, 46 for such a project would be doomed to incoherence by the very
attempt to undertake it by using the tools of reason. Descartes cannot, and does
not propose to, generate a system of knowledge ex nihilo. What he does propose
to do is to demolish commonly accepted foundations for knowledge, based
largely on sensory experience and preconceived opinion, and utilize instead more
stable foundations derived from the inner resources which have been implanted
in each soul. The project is aptly summarized in Descartes’s dramatic dialogue,
the Search for Truth, which was perhaps composed around the same time as the
Meditations:
I shall bring to light the true riches of our souls, opening up to each of us
the means whereby we can find within ourselves, without any help from
anyone else, all the knowledge we may need…in order to acquire the most
abstruse items of knowledge that human reason is capable of possessing. 47