Monte Cook. Journal of the History of Philosophy. Volume 46, Issue 4, October 2008.
1
No one disputes that Robert Desgabets is a Cartesian of some sort and thus that his philosophy has non-empiricist elements. He explicitly describes himself as a follower of Descartes who corrects Descartes’s mistakes by using Descartes’s own principles, and many of his basic views are recognizably Cartesian. But a long tradition, from Cousin and Bouillier to Rodis-Lewis, Easton, and Lennon, regards him as a Cartesian empiricist. And indeed, on the face of it, the case for Desgabets’s empiricism is overwhelming. He says things that sound strikingly like Locke, and he argues against anti-empiricist reasoning in Descartes, Malebranche, and Arnauld, attacking in particular what Descartes and Malebranche have to say about pure intellection. Most importantly, throughout his writings he endorses the empiricist principle that nothing is in the intellect except what was previously in the senses. Defending this principle, Desgabets argues against Descartes’s attempt in the Meditations to divorce himself from the senses to arrive at pure intellections, and he argues against Malebranche’s and Arnauld’s examples of thoughts that are supposed to be completely independent of the senses.
Since Descartes and his followers are generally supposed to be prototypical nonempiricists, if Desgabets is a Cartesian empiricist, then he is a particularly interesting specimen. Indeed, Patricia Easton ends her Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Desgabets by stressing that “[h]is significance lies in his development and defense of a form of empiricism that, despite its anti-rationalist tendencies, has a clear basis in the work of Descartes himself and constitutes a respectable strain of Cartesianism.” In this paper, however, I challenge the case for taking Desgabets to be an empiricist. Specifically, I challenge the case for taking him to be a concept empiricist, someone who believes that all our ideas or concepts derive from experience. In the empiricist-sounding passages in his writings, Desgabets is not espousing concept empiricism; he is espousing a position on the union of the soul and the body. He wants to say, not that all our ideas derive from experience, but that all our ideas are united to motions of our bodies.
2
The strongest evidence for Desgabets’s empiricism is his frequent endorsement and defense of the principle Nihil est in intellectu quin prius fuerit in sensu (“nothing is in the intellect except what was previously in the senses”), a principle often referred to as the central doctrine of empiricism. But a close examination of Desgabets’s discussions of this principle (hereafter, the Nihil principle) reveals that Desgabets is not espousing empiricism. Rather, he is trying to show how preserving the distinctness of the soul from the body, and hence the immortality of the soul, does not require sacrificing the obvious truth that the soul and the body are very closely united.
To understand Desgabets’s position, it helps to look first at Arnauld’s attack on empiricism in the Port-Royal Logic and at Descartes’s attack on empiricism in Comments on a Certain Broadsheet. These attacks, on Gassendi and Regius respectively, condition much of Desgabets’s discussion of the Nihil principle. In a letter to Malebranche, Desgabets explicitly criticizes Arnauld’s attack on Gassendi, and he picks up his criticism again without explicitly mentioning Arnauld in his Supplement to the Philosophy of Descartes [Supplement] (OCM 18:88-89; RD 193). In the penultimate chapter of the Supplement, he explicitly criticizes Descartes’s attack on Regius (RD 268-69).
2.1
In Chapter I of the Port-Royal Logic, “Ideas according to their nature and origin,” Arnauld attacks the “common maxim” that nothing is in the intellect that was not previously in the senses, which he attributes to Gassendi and to “several Scholastic philosophers.” According to Arnauld, though Gassendi believes that all our ideas originate in the senses,
He admits, however, that not all our ideas exist in the mind exactly as they were in the senses, but he claims that at least they are formed from those which passed through the senses. This happens either by composition, as when we form a golden mountain from separate images of gold and a mountain; or by amplification and diminution, when we form a giant or a pygmy from the image of a person of ordinary height; or by accommodation and analogy, when we form the image of house we have not seen from the idea of one we have seen. Thus, he says, we conceive God, who cannot fall under the senses, under the image of a venerable old man.
As Arnauld understands the view, every idea is either exactly in our minds as it was in our senses or formed from such ideas by one of various operations. It follows, he believes, that all our ideas must have sensible qualities; and he criticizes the view by presenting examples of ideas that do not have sensible qualities and are not generated by operations on what comes from the senses:
If it is undeniable, then, that we have in us the ideas of being and thought, I ask, by what senses did they enter? Are they luminous or colored for entering by sight? Low-pitched or high-pitched, for entering by hearing? Do they have a good or bad odor for entering by smell? A good or bad flavor for entering by taste? Are they cold or hot, hard or soft, for entering by touch? If someone says they are formed from other sensible images, let him tell us from which other sensible images the ideas of being and thought have been formed and how they could have been formed from them, whether by composition, amplification, diminution, or analogy.
In the end, Arnauld says,
it must be admitted that the ideas of being and thought in no way originate in the senses. Instead, the soul has the faculty to form them from itself, although often it is prompted to do so by something striking the senses, just as a painter can be brought to produce a canvas by the money promised him, without our thereby being able to say that the money was the origin of the painting.
And he sums up by saying,
It is thus false that all our ideas originate in the senses. on the contrary, one can say that no idea in the mind originates in the senses, although motions in the brain, which is all the senses can bring about, may provide the occasion for the soul to form various ideas that might not have been formed without this occasion.
Arnauld’s criticism here assumes that on the view in question, if our ideas come from the senses, then things must literally pass through the senses and become our ideas. He admits that the view allows some dissimilarity between our ideas and what passes through the senses: our ideas can be formed by “composition, amplification, diminution, or analogy.” nevertheless, what might be called the basic ideas-the ideas serving as the basis of these operations-“exist in the mind exactly as they were in the senses.” Initially, Arnauld does not deny that we have such basic ideas from the senses. Rather, he denies that all our ideas are either such basic ideas or can be formed from such basic ideas, and he concludes that the ideas of being and thought are formed from the soul itself on the “prompting” of something striking the senses. Immediately thereafter, however, Arnauld denies that even the supposed basic ideas can come from the senses, asserting that, at most, motions in the brain that result from the action of the senses can provide the soul occasion to form ideas. though he fails to clarify why the supposed basic ideas do not originate in the senses, he implies that it is because nothing like these ideas is in the senses and the brain. He seems to assume, like those he is criticizing, that if our ideas come from the senses then things must literally pass through the senses and become our ideas.
2.2
Arnauld’s attack on Gassendi picks up some themes in Descartes’s earlier attack on Regius. In Comments on a Certain Broadsheet, Descartes attacks Regius’s view that all our ideas come from the senses. though Descartes does not attribute to Regius the more sophisticated empiricism that distinguishes between basic ideas and ideas formed from them, Descartes’s attack on Regius is similar to Arnauld’s attack on Gassendi. Like Arnauld, Descartes singles out particular ideas that are supposed to tell against the maxim that all our ideas come from the senses. But more importantly, Descartes assumes, like Arnauld, that if our ideas come from the senses, then things must literally pass through the senses and become our ideas:
But this [that our ideas come from the senses] is so far from being true that, on the contrary, if we bear well in mind the scope of our senses and what it is exactly that reaches our faculty of thinking by way of them, we must admit that in no case are the ideas of things presented to us by the senses just as we form them in our thinking.
Elsewhere Descartes concentrates on a particular species of ideas that he thinks do not come from the senses, namely ideas of pure understanding. Here, however, like Arnauld, he concludes from the lack of similarity between our ideas and what the senses deliver us that none of our ideas come from the senses and that all that the senses can do is provide the mind occasions to form ideas:
We make such a judgment [that an idea that we have before our mind refers to a certain thing situated outside us] not because these things transmit the ideas to our mind through the sense organs, but because they transmit something which, at exactly that moment, gives the mind occasion to form these ideas by means of the faculty innate to it. nothing reaches our mind from external objects through the sense organs except certain corporeal motions … But neither the motions themselves nor the figures arising from them are conceived by us exactly as they occur in the sense organs … Hence it follows that the very ideas of the motions themselves and of the figures are innate in us. the ideas of pain, colours, sounds, and the like must be all the more innate if, on the occasion of certain corporeal motions, our mind is to be capable of representing them to itself, for there is no similarity between these ideas and the corporeal motions.
3
Desgabets’s defense of the Nihil principle is not what one would expect from an empiricist. He does not try to show that apparently problematic ideas like those of being and thought are basic ideas or can be formed from basic ideas; he does not even press a distinction between basic ideas that exist in the mind exactly as they were in the senses and ideas formed from these basic ideas. In fact, he actually accepts Arnauld’s and Descartes’s view that none of our ideas exist in the mind as they were in the senses. Yet, he still maintains that all our ideas come from the senses. As we shall see, Desgabets defends the Nihil principle not so much by answering objections to it as by clarifying it. And his clarifications move him away from an empiricist understanding of the principle.
3.1
To understand what is going on, one needs to appreciate that Desgabets’s discussion of the Nihil principle is part of a discussion of the relationship between the soul and the body. His main discussion of the Nihil principle is in Chapter 3 of Part one of the Supplement. Part one of the Supplement has the title “Concerning reflections on M. Descartes’s demonstration of the real distinction of the soul from the body and that the soul is known as clearly as the body” (RD 158), indicating that Desgabets’s overall concern is with the distinction between the soul and the body. In Chapter 2 of Part one of the Supplement, Desgabets declares that he will prove in what follows “that all our thoughts without exception depend on the body and there is not any that does not have its connection with a corporeal species,” and he complains that Descartes has not sufficiently considered how all our thoughts depend on movements of the body (RD 172). Consonant with this concern, Desgabets begins his Chapter 3 discussion of the Nihil principle by stressing the importance of properly understanding the distinction between the soul and the body and announcing his intention to explain how the union between the soul and the body is much closer than is ordinarily thought, an intention that he continues to pursue in the following Chapter 4, which has the title “that all our thoughts are tied with movements of our bodies” (RD 183). (Since Desgabets wants, in general, to stress that our thoughts depend upon our body, he is not particularly careful about what exactly our thoughts depend upon. Sometimes it is our senses, sometimes our brain, and sometimes just our body.)
Desgabets discusses the Nihil principle because he sees a misunderstanding of this principle as underlying a series of mistakes detrimental to our appreciating the real distinction between the soul and the body, and thus to our securing the great truth of the immortality of the soul. the libertines mistakenly deny that the soul is distinct from the body because they subscribe to this principle and conclude that, since what happens in our senses is physical, our thoughts must be physical as well. their ultimate mistake lies not in uniting the soul and the body too closely, but in identifying them (see RD 269). In reaction, Descartes and others who want to defend the immortality of the soul try to rescue the distinction between the soul and the body by rejecting the Nihil principle and saying either that none of our thoughts were formerly in the senses or that at least some of our thoughts-those of pure intellection-were not, and then using these sense-independent thoughts to argue for the distinction between the soul and the body. Falsely believing that taking the soul to be closely joined to the body obscures the distinction between the soul and the body, they go to the extreme of denying the obvious fact that our soul and body are very closely joined, and they end up making the soul more like an angel than a human soul. their ultimate mistake lies not in identifying the soul and the body, but in uniting them too loosely.
Desgabets believes that underlying this dispute is the mistaken assumption that, if our ideas come from the senses, then they must be similar to what happens in the senses. Believing that all our ideas come from the senses, which are material, the libertines make this assumption when they conclude that “our thoughts are in fact material and that they are only very subtle movements of parts of our brain” (RD 181; cf. CdC 115-16). Seeking to avoid the mistaken view that our thoughts are material, Descartes and most of those who write defending the immortality of the soul make this assumption when they reject the view that all our ideas come from the senses.
If we focus on the so-called corporeal sensible qualities, Desgabets believes, we can see that it is a mistake to assume that if our ideas come from the senses they must be similar to what happens in the senses. In Critique de la Critique de la Recherche de la vérité, he relates the libertines’ understanding of the Nihil principle on which our ideas resemble what happens in our sense organs to Foucher’s “odious” mistake of assuming that ideas must resemble their objects (CdC 115-22). According to Desgabets, Foucher fails to appreciate the lesson Descartes has taught us about the nature of sensible qualities. People used to believe that the sensation of heat gave us knowledge of a quality in the fire that was entirely similar to what we felt when we approached the fire. they took our senses to convey to our soul what was in the fire. As a result, it is not surprising that they should have assumed that our ideas resembled their objects. But we now know from Descartes that there are no “corporeal sensible qualities.” Sensible qualities like heat are in us, and there is nothing like them in either the fire or our senses. knowing this, we should no longer assume that if our ideas come from the senses, then they must be similar to what happens in the senses.
Like the libertines, then, Desgabets believes that our ideas come from the senses; but like Descartes, he denies any similarity between our ideas and what happens in the senses. He thinks that once we reject the assumption that if our ideas come from the senses they must be similar to what happens in the senses, we can acknowledge both that the soul is closely united to and depends upon the body for all its operations and that it is distinct from the body. this, Desgabets says, is the middle position between the other two in that “it accords with the first [that of the libertines] in recognizing that in all thought without exception there is something going on in the body [il y a quelque chose de la part du corps], and it accords with the second [that of Descartes and other defenders of the immortality of the soul] in that it holds that the soul, which thinks dependently on the body, is not at all the body but that it is simply united to it” (RD 181-82; cf. RD 269-70).
3.2
Locke asks how the mind comes to be furnished with the materials of thought and answers that it is from experience, from either external sense or internal sense. Desgabets defends the view that all our ideas come from the senses, distinguishing between external sense and internal sense. these views seem very similar, but if we reflect on Desgabets’ clarification of the Nihil principle we see that they differ significantly.
Locke emphasizes the relation between our ideas and experience. We cannot have an idea of red, for example, unless we have had an experience of red. our experiences, or at least some of them, result from actions on our sense organs, but Locke emphasizes the experiences, not the sense organs. Desgabets, in contrast, emphasizes the relation between our ideas and our brain and our sense organs. We cannot have an idea of red unless something has gone on in our body. As tad M. Schmaltz says, “Desgabets’ main thesis is not that all our thoughts are sensory in nature, but rather that they ‘are allied with motions of our bodies.'” When Desgabets says that all our ideas come from the external or internal senses, he means something physical by “the senses.” the external senses are the sense organs, and the internal senses are species traced in the brain.
Accordingly, when Desgabets criticizes Descartes’s position on the Nihil principle, he is not criticizing an anti-empiricist view about the relation between our ideas and experience; he is criticizing a view about the relation between our ideas and states of the body. He describes Descartes as holding (though not consistently- see RD 269) that the soul’s thoughts, especially in pure intellection and thoughts of universal or spiritual things, do not depend “either on internal or external senses.” When he rejects Descartes’s position and says that the soul “always has commerce with the senses, at least with the internal senses” (RD 181), he is not saying that our ideas depend upon experience, but that they depend upon the body. He is attacking not Descartes’s attempt to divorce the soul from sensory experience, but his attempt to divorce it from the body. to reject the Nihil principle and divorce the soul from the body, Desgabets thinks, is to fail to understand the true nature of the union of the soul and the body, which “consists only in the reciprocal commerce of thoughts and movements that the soul and the body give to one another” (RD 183). Failing to understand the true nature of the union of the soul and the body, Descartes fails to understand what makes us human beings and distinguishes us from angels (RD 187).
When Descartes divorces the soul from the body, Desgabets thinks, he goes against plain experience, which tells us that the soul is intimately united to the body. We all know, for example, how in sleep the soul is at the mercy of the body, which gives the soul all sorts of bizarre thoughts. And we know how the body’s lacking a (physical) sense can affect the soul, as can the body’s being old or young or its being healthy or sick (RD 184-85).
More generally, Desgabets argues that the dependence of our thoughts on memory shows that they “are allied with motions in our bodies.” Rejecting any kind of memory apart from the brain, he says that throughout our life our thoughts depend on memory and thus on the internal sense that is located in the brain:
[T]he soul insofar as it is distinguished from the body has not in itself any faculty to retain its thoughts. Everything flees and escapes it; it continually disappears from itself without its being able to preserve the least subject on which it can meditate or reason or even formulate a judgment on. It is therefore uniquely the internal sense that keeps its treasure in the reservoir of memory from which it draws when it wishes … But as the use of memory and the recall of its thoughts is continual during life, it is impossible not to see that we have no thought except as depends on the body. I propose this truth without allowing any exception to it, insofar as memory equally conserves the species that recall gross, subtle, abstract, natural, and supernatural thoughts, whether they have as an object the body, angels, or God.
When Desgabets says that in all its thoughts the soul “has commerce with the senses, at least the internal senses,” then, one thing he means is that they depend on memory stored in the brain.
As mentioned earlier, since Desgabets generally wants to stress that our thoughts depend upon our body, he is not particularly careful about what exactly our thoughts depend upon. He usually either just says that they depend upon our body, or says that they depend upon our internal or external senses. And sometimes, when he wants to say that the body is involved even when the sense organs are not, he stresses the dependence of our thoughts on our internal senses (as in the passage just cited). But it must be admitted that in Critique de la Critique Desgabets speaks in a way that gives precedence to our external senses, i.e., to our sense organs, in that he speaks of the internal senses as being parasitic on the external senses. thus he speaks of the internal senses as “like seconds” of the external senses that “maintain and renew” the action of the external senses (CdC 94; cf. CdC 111-12, 129). In these contexts, when Desgabets says that all our ideas come from the senses he gives a picture on which they all come from the external senses (see CdC 127-28). Most of the time, however, Desgabets does not give this sort of precedence to the external senses.
Desgabets does not alter the import of the Nihil principle just when he makes it a principle about the relation between ideas and the body. He also alters it when he denies any similarity between what happens in the senses and our ideas. the supposed similarity between what happens in our senses and our ideas underwrites an empiricist view on which the senses furnish the materials of thought. on this view, our senses provide the content of our thoughts in that our ideas either are, or are copies of, what was in our senses. But if there is no similarity between what happens in our senses and our ideas, then our ideas can neither be, nor be copies of, what was in our senses. our senses cannot in this way furnish the materials of our thought.
Since he denies any similarity between what happens in our senses and our ideas, Desgabets prefers to state the Nihil principle not as that there is nothing in the intellect that has not formerly been in the senses (in sensu)—which, again, suggests that something is both in the intellect and in the senses—but as that there is nothing in the intellect that has not formerly been from the senses (a sensu):
This last phrase, which notably changes the maxim, serves to make it understood altogether how much the body is necessary to the soul to make it have its thoughts and nevertheless that it by no means follows from this dependence that our thoughts are similar to what happens in our senses … (RD 183; cf. RD 308)
Desgabets is correct that he has notably changed the maxim: it is much less empiricist. now rather than saying that the body and the senses provide the material for our thoughts, it says that they cause our thoughts. A non-empiricist can surely say that the body and the senses cause our thoughts.
4
Desgabets does not try to explain how apparently problematic ideas like those of being and thought are formed out of basic ideas from the senses. He does, however, argue against the existence of mental processes that are completely independent of the senses. In particular, as one might expect from an empiricist, he rejects Descartes’s (and Malebranche’s) notion of a pure intellection that is completely independent of the senses. Against Descartes, he says that “even in the most abstract speculations” the soul “always has commerce with the senses, at least with the internal senses” (RD 181). Desgabets’s rejection of Descartes’s pure intellection, however, is not quite what it seems.
4.1
To understand Desgabets’s attack on Descartes’s notion of pure intellection, we need to distinguish different strands in Descartes’s discussions of pure intellection. In the Meditations, Descartes doubts the senses to help his readers divorce themselves from sensory experience and thereby arrive at the clear and distinct deliverances of pure intellection. He believes that without the distorting influence of sensory experience we can know by pure intellection such metaphysical truths as that there is a God and that the nature of body is extension. When he comes to characterize pure intellection, he contrasts it with imagination. though we can grasp some things both by imagination and pure intellection, many things-God, infinity, mind, a chiliagon-we can grasp only by pure intellection. Imagination differs experientially from pure intellection: it involves seeing things “as if they were present before me” and it requires “a peculiar effort of the mind which is not required for understanding.” Descartes explains this experiential difference by appealing to the special role that the body (presumably the brain) plays in imagination: in imagination the mind “turns towards the body and looks at something in the body which conforms to an idea understood by the mind or perceived by the senses.” Descartes’s talk of “something in the body which conforms to an idea understood by the mind or perceived by the senses” and his statement that “imagining is simply contemplating the shape or image of a corporeal thing” give a picture in which imagination involves contemplating an image in the brain. And Descartes tells us that the brain is not employed in this way in pure intellection: “I also distinctly showed on many occasions that the mind can operate independently of the brain; for the brain cannot in any way be employed in pure understanding [nam sane nullus cerebri usus esse potest ad pure intelligendum], but only in imagining or perceiving by the senses.”
It is unclear how we should understand Descartes’s assertion that in pure understanding the mind operates independently of the brain. Margaret Wilson takes Descartes to be denying that acts of pure understanding have any corresponding or correlated physical occurrences. As Wilson says, “pure understanding is carried on independently of all physical processes; any physiological study will necessarily be irrelevant to it.” Marleen Rozemond, in contrast, stresses the distinction between the mind’s operating independently of the brain in pure understanding and there being no physical events that parallel acts of pure understanding. Strictly speaking, she says, Descartes is not saying that there are no physical events that parallel acts of pure understanding, but only that in pure understanding the mind operates independently of the brain: “one could hold that intellectual acts are in and of themselves independent of body even though they are paralleled by states of body.” Still another way of understanding Descartes’s assertion that in pure understanding the mind operates independently of the brain is to stress his talk about the brain’s not being employed (usus) in pure intellection. This expression suggests that even though there could in pure understanding be a brain state paralleling and even causing the act of understanding, the mind does not employ such a brain state in the way in which it employs a brain state in imagination. One version of such a view would be that although there could in pure understanding be a causally relevant brain state, it is not an image that “conforms to an idea understood by the mind or perceived by the senses,” and thus is not a brain state that could be employed by imagination.
4.2
Though Desgabets attacks Descartes’s (and Malebranche’s) notion of pure intellection, he agrees with much of what Descartes says about pure intellection. He does think there is such a thing as pure intellection. (In fact, he thinks that there are only two ways of knowing [manières de connaÎtre]—imagination and pure intellection—and that sense perception is sometimes imagination and sometimes pure intellection [CdC 91-104].) Like Descartes, Desgabets says that imagination differs experientially from pure intellection. In imagination, the soul does something more: it exerts itself to form an image, which requires a special effort on its part (RD 298; cf. CdC 93-94). He even agrees with Descartes in explaining the experiential difference by appeal to the special role that the brain plays in imagination. In imagination, but not in pure intellection, the soul turns towards “a corporeal species … traced in the brain [that] has a true resemblance with the object” (CdC 122; cf. CdC 94). Moreover, Desgabets explicitly indicates that he is agreeing with
Descartes: in contrast with pure intellection, “imagination turns directly towards some image traced in the brain that has some true resemblance with the object, as M. Descartes and several others explain” (RD 185-86; cf. RD 215, 298). Despite this agreement with Descartes, Desgabets vigorously objects to two strands in Descartes’s discussions of pure intellection: Descartes’s use of the method of doubt to arrive at pure intellections and his understanding of how in pure intellection the mind operates independently of the brain. Desgabets thinks that if we attend to the nature of thought we will see the error in both of these. In neither case is Desgabets’s objection that of an empiricist.
If we attend to the nature of thought, Desgabets believes, we will see the flaw in using the method of doubt to arrive at pure intellections. He says that Descartes’s “first fault” is “doubting the reality of the things of which we think and speak.” this is a mistake because it is the nature of thought to have an existent object: “the thing of which one thinks is real in itself outside of thought” (RD 171). Desgabets spends considerable time clarifying and defending the striking and seemingly obviously false view that we cannot think of what does not exist. For our purposes, the important point is that he is not concentrating on something special about sense perception-his assertion is about thought in general. According to Desgabets, Descartes is mistaken in believing that we can rationally doubt whether there is a physical world, because the mere ability to think of the physical world is proof of its existence.
If we attend to the nature of human thought in particular, Desgabets believes, we will see the flaw in Descartes’s understanding of how in pure intellection the mind operates independently of the brain. I mentioned that there is some obscurity about how we should understand Descartes’s assertion that in pure understanding the mind operates independently of the brain. Desgabets clearly interprets Descartes and Malebranche as holding that acts of pure intellection are independent of the brain in that there are no brain traces corresponding to them (see CdC 92). Desgabets’s own view, in contrast, is that acts of pure intellection are not independent of the brain in this sense. Rather, they are independent in that, while in pure intellection corporeal species traced in the brain cause our thoughts, these species are not images and do not resemble the objects of thought. Hence these species are not employed in the way that brain images are employed in imagination. (See CdC 92-97, 122; RD 215, 298.)
Attending to the nature of human thought, Desgabets believes, we can see that acts of pure intellection must have corresponding physical occurrences. He says that Descartes’s “second fault” is rejecting all commerce with the senses, which Desgabets understands as Descartes’s attempting to reduce himself to the state of a pure mind and to compose his Meditations using only thoughts that are absolutely independent of the body (RD 174-75). this is a mistake because it is the nature of human thought to have duration. Since Desgabets believes that duration and time are defined in terms of motion, he believes that human thoughts must be connected to something that has motion (see RD 70-72). He concludes that “all [our] thoughts, without exception, depend on the body and that there are not any that does not have its connection [liaison] with a corporeal species” (RD 172). Again we need not go into the details of his reasoning.44 For our purposes, the important point is that, when Desgabets objects to Descartes’s conception of pure intellection, he is neither objecting to an anti-empiricist aspect of this conception nor raising empiricist objections to it. Accordingly, when he does single out our ideas of universals, of God, and of angels, ideas that might seem problematic for an empiricist, he does so not to explain how they depend upon experience but to explain how they depend upon the brain (see RD 191; cf. RD 294).
5
I conclude that it is seriously misleading to regard Desgabets as a Cartesian empiricist. Admittedly, he endorses the motto, Nihil est in intellectu quin prius fuerit in sensu, and, as one might expect from an empiricist, he criticizes Descartes’s notion of pure intellection. But in neither case is he advancing an empiricist doctrine. When he says that everything in the intellect comes from the senses, he is claiming not that the materials of our thought (our ideas) come from sense experience, but that our thoughts or ideas are caused by states of our body. And when he criticizes Descartes’s notion of pure intellection, he is criticizing not the rationalist distinction between intellect and imagination, a distinction he endorses, but Descartes’s claim that in pure intellection the mind operates in complete independence of the brain. In both cases his overarching concern is not to argue for a brand of empiricism but to explain how one can preserve the immortality of the soul without denying that the soul and body are very closely joined.