Thoughts on, among Other Things, Habit, Will, Potency and Transformation in Descartes

In order to provide a frame for the manner in which I would like to consider the themes of habit, inwardness, potential and transformation in Descartes, let me first present a metaphorical orientation. This will draw and elaborate upon an image that Descartes presents in the third part of the Discours de la methode, which moreover shares a certain resonance with the classical allegorical theme of a journey or pilgrimage through life, such as is found in the story of the ancient Tabula Cebetis, as well as in a piece, called The Labyrinth of the World, which was incidentally written during the 30 years war by the Czech philosopher and theologian Jan Amos Komensky and thus shares historical context and sentiment with Descartes’ reflections.

I find to be a very poignant image that of the traveler lost in the woods, who, having forfeited his sense of orientation, thinks it most prudent to to adopt a course of approximation in order to eventually reach the forest’s edge. We might consider that thinking finds itself in a similar predicament with regards to its beliefs, customs, prejudices, presuppositions, etc. Thought knows itself to exist, and moreover, knows that it is lost in the woods - surrounded on all sides by thick growth, the beyond of which remains ever shrouded. Nevertheless - and this is this is the aspect that points us in the direction of a transformative potential - thinking is also provided with an innate conception of what the nature of this ‘beyond’ must of necessity be. It has a concept of perfection upon which its imperfect striving must be founded, as well as a concept of omniscience, of a vast body of infinite knowledge the absolute possession of which by definition transcends its imperfect intellect and finite faculty of knowing. That is to say, by virtue of an innate disposition, thinking, or the lost traveller, has the certain conviction that there is civilization beyond these wild woods. It is as though the flashes of divine light that illuminate the space of thinking’s inwardness come simultaneously from within and from without. They are infrequent rays of light from amidst the opaque density of the trees that afford the opportunity for a recalibration of one’s course, and thereby, potentially, for great advances in the direction of an insistent inner-striving. We might otherwise characterize this striving as a desire for truth and completeness, for stability - a desire for concordance and for knowledge, peace, security, rational society, harmony, etc.

In the first part of the Passions de l’ame, Descartes explores the manner in which the striving of the soul manifests complex physiological and psychological dispositions, effecting a conjunction of mind and body in judgement and action. What is interesting about this conjunction is that it is not a synthesis of two distinct substances, as much as a synthesis of comportment, a certain systemization of complex networks of passivity in a relatively free and spontaneous activity. The soul does not so much unite with the body in the pineal gland at the center of the brain, as much as it manifests a kind of emanation of the body in passage. Thus, we cannot think of the soul as fragmented into quantity in extension, but must always think of it in terms of a unified disposition. In Descartes’ words:

“the soul is of such a nature that it has no relation to extension, or to the dimensions or other properties of the matter of which the body is composed: it is related solely to the whole assemblage of the body’s organ”. [Passions, §30]

Thus, the soul is related to, or rather, is the body insofar as the latter it is a synchronic assemblage, insofar as it is in movement, participating in the temporal dimension of existence.

This figure of wholeness and unity in movement, a figure of synthesis, furnishes Descartes with a justification for his musings regarding the pineal gland, which unites the various doubles and pairs that populate our physiological nature, as well as, interestingly enough - although I’m not sure that Descartes himself suggests this - the dualisms and dichotomies that populate our knowledge and represent the dominant trope of finite thought. Regardless of whatever discord and opposition may persist in our physical body - our imperfect body of knowledge - the soul always conducts itself with a unity of purpose that bespeaks the purity of the free will, although this is getting slightly ahead of ourselves.

What I wish to emphasize here is the power and potency of the soul over the habits of mind and body that is expressed in this unity of purpose and purity of will. Although we ought to be completely determined by the complex of nerve fibers tied up in sequences of cause and effect made concrete by history and the passage of time; there nevertheless appears to be an alternate aspect of this quasi-mechanical passage, which we suffer as a particular disposition of passions and bundle of associations. This is the flip-side of time, its futurity, so to speak, which issues forth as a constant renewal, as an active imbeddedness in the moment or instant of passage. Descartes tells us:

“It is useful to note that although the movements (both of the gland and of the spirits and the brain) which represent certain objects to the soul are naturally joined to the movements which produce certain passions in it, yet through habit the former can be separated from the latter and joined to others which are very different. Indeed this habit can be acquired by a single action and does not require long practice.” [Passions, §50]

Such is the power of each ‘single action’ that in the same movement in which it unifies the organic whole it concomitantly produces an alteration in and transformation of the whole’s complex of parts. I would suggest that in this movement we find an instance of the age-old dialectic between the metaphysical notions of being and becoming, between whole and part, and same and other, to name a few of the traditional pairs that aim at articulating the mysterious relation between transcendence and immanence.

In the Discours, we find Descartes tarrying with this implosive/explosive dynamic on two fronts, forming a pair that is inextricably both epistemological and ethical. These threads are combined in a notion of “Method as habitus” that leads from the individual’s inward experience of knowledge to the projection of this knowledge as a ‘world’ onto a social plane, whereupon such knowledge must become objective, and wherein the world that it imagines must become a shared world. As Timothy Reiss suggests, in his Mirages of the Selfe, “good sense was to Method as human history to methodical civil society. Descartes hoped that such an equation would enable an agent subject to be re-articulated on a civil-community of traditional values.” [Mirages, 496] In this equation we find another instance where Descartes attempts to mediate a dichotomy or tension, in this case, between the individual and collective. In a sense, as has often been noted in our seminars, this is a problem of Descartes’ own making. His emphasis on the clarity and certainty of self-conscious inwardness provisionally isolates a subject agent - the ego cogito - and thereby presents the problem of how a plurality of such isolated entities might compose a community en concorde.

Considering the character of the Cartesian cogito’s self-certainty in inwardness, I agree that it is highly productive to adopt the figure of the poêle, that stove-heated room where thinking finds itself alone and free for meditation upon its essence, which happens in seamless conjunction with the contemplation of the idea of God. A very similar figure is to be found in Komensky’s tale of the pilgrim who, much like in Descartes’ personal ‘fable of the mind’, becomes disillusioned with the scholastic world of discourse, with the vanities of worldly occupations and worldly notions, finding that his revulsion leads him consistently back to himself. He thus internalizes the same maxim that Descartes proposes in the moral par provision of the Discours: “to always try to master myself rather than fortune, and change my desires rather than the order of the world” [Discours, F25/E123] In James Dodd’s recounting of Komensky’s tale, after having heard the call to ‘return!’ and discovering that his guides, Searchall Everywhere and Delusion, have abandoned him, “the pilgrim finds himself standing in what is described as a small, empty, neglected, overlooked, little room of the self, where he lingers”. [Dodd, ‘The Philosophical Significance of Hope’, 137] This description of a, if you will, ‘poêle of inwardness’ serves a very special function in Dodd’s treatment of the philosophical significance of hope, as well as, I would argue, in an understanding of the potency of the cogito. For Dodd, following Heidegger,

“when, in [the phenomenon of] mood, we say that Dasein is brought back to itself, it is in part brought back to a resource of the moment to resist the dominance of the future with respect to its sense of being. This means that it is not completely ‘lit’ by the openness of possibility; the moment is a more complex space, with dark corners and shadows which are places of solace and reflection. This does not mean that the moment exempts itself from the unity of temporal ecstasis; as passage, it is ultimately nothing, even precisely ‘at the moment’ of its emergence”. [Dodd, 143]

I find Dodd’s use of the motifs of light and dark, of the ‘lit’ nature of open possibility and the dark corners and shadows of reflection, to be quite illuminating. In an important sense, that which is possible, that to which thinking opens itself, it but the continuation of that which is actual. Moreover, actuality would seem to bear a direct correspondence to the habitual ways in which thinking has grown accustomed to encountering and being-in its world. Yet we cannot discount the dark. As Heidegger cryptically suggests in his early lectures on Aristotle,

“there are visible things that are visible only in the dark... darkness is something that, in a quite specific way, lets things be seen... we must draw upon a completely fundamental distinction in Aristotelian philosophy: the difference between energeia [actual being] and dynamei on [potential being]... darkness is dynamei on, something utterly positive”. [Heidegger, Intro to Phenomenological Research, 7]

This brings to mind a question that occupied me on the subway ride home last Tuesday evening. That is, does it make any sense at all to conceive of something like an omniscient self-consciousness? This would presumably be the state of God’s self-consciousness; however, it seems to me that self-consciousness and inwardness immediately imply a limitation and provide the framework for the realization that one’s being is in fact finite and imperfect. This would seem to raise the question: does the concept of knowledge make sense outside of finitude? As we know, the foremost criteria for knowledge in Descartes is that of certitude, which Heidegger characterizes as follows: “what matters for knowing is for it to be executed in such a way that the knowing and the known in this being-known are known”. [Heidegger, 92] To judge something known and to possess true knowledge is to ascribe certainty to something that has always already been apprehended by thought. The ascription of belief in certainty implies that what one takes to be true could very well have been false, which I take to mean that one has already come to terms with his or her limitation. This is really more of an aside; but what prompted me to meander briefly down this path is the thought that if one must already have come to grips with finitude in order to experience the divine light of certainty in truth, then we must agree with Aristotle, Heidegger, and Dodd that darkness represents a requisite condition of possibility for the experience of light. Hence the importance of the woods, of the poêle of inwardness in which we repose, fermenting our ever-present potential for certainty.

That said, we do not remain in this poêle, but rather find ourselves possessed of the insatiable desire to go out into the world and to commune with others on the plane of objectivity, to the extent to which this remains or becomes more or less possible.

“When I turn my mind’s eye upon myself, I understand that I am a thing which is incomplete and dependent on another and which aspires without limit to ever greater and better things; but I also understand at the same time that he on whom I depend has within him all those greater things, not just indefinitely and potentially but actually and infinitely...”. [Discours, 51/35]

Here, Descartes makes clear that the thought of incompletion and finitude immediately (“at the same time”) entails its obverse, that of the whole and the infinite. How are we to understand this double movement, this limited, inward glance of reflection into the dark regions of the mind that concurrently illuminates the limitless, perfect whole? Is it possible that, in reflection, the part and the whole, the finite and infinite, achieve parity? As we know, Descartes resolves this seeming tension by appeal to the nature of our free will, thus establishing a ground on which thinking, always incomplete and often in error, partakes of the genuine power of being.

“It is only the will, or freedom of choice, which I experience within me to be so great that the idea of any greater faculty is beyond my grasp; so much so that it is above all in virtue of the will that I understand myself to bear in some way the image and likeness of God. For although God’s will is incomparably greater than mine... it does not seem any greater than mine when considered as will in the essential and strict sense”. [Meditations, L57,E40]

As Descartes tells us in the Discours - interestingly enough, in the context of the first maxim of the moral par provision - “believing something and knowing that one believes it are different acts of thinking, and the one often occurs without the other” [Discours, 23/122] (hence, our tendency to lapse into error). What I take to be the import of this assertion is that one cannot authentically reflect upon the ground of his knowledge of any particular thing without in the same passage illuminating the potential for a choice, which derives directly from the realization that he is, for the most part, enshrouded in the dark. And yet, from amidst this darkness, there is light; and thus our faculty for ascribing belief and initiating action possesses both a guide and an interpreter, which are one and the same thinking process of methodical doubt. The process of doubt, which, as Tim has noted, sustains the Meditations, augments our openness to the possibilities of the world with our ability “to affirm or deny, to pursue or avoid”.

In closing, the aspect of Descartes’ discussion that I find perhaps most interesting is that the faculty in which our power and potency is commensurate with God’s is precisely the one regarding which we don’t have a choice. As Sartre famously declared, “we are condemned to be free”, to choose a particular course of action, to accept certain beliefs, be they certain or not. That said, our freedom does not necessitate that we always exercise our faculty of judgement in the clear and distinct light of certainty - hence our faculty’s relative imperfection. Our being is of such a nature that, to quote Heidegger, our “being is a question for itself”; however, this does not mean that we always pose this question or meditate upon the ground of our experience of being. Meanwhile, following the path of least resistance, misconceptions and false beliefs trail behind us sedimenting in the habits and general reactivity of our physiological body. In this respect, we are not strictly speaking negative beings, but rather beings who inhabit a position of passage between being and non-being, in the gray medium of becoming. Fortunately for us, this mode of existence as habitus acts as a nexus in which our imperfection and our perfectibility collide, endowing us with the ability to actively acquire passions, to reconfigure our reactivity, to take on new forms and to be renewed. It is this power of transformation that I take, with Descartes, to be “man’s greatest and most important perfection”. For,

“admittedly, I am aware of a certain weakness in me, in that I am unable to keep my attention fixed on one and the same item of knowledge at all times; but by attentive and repeated meditation I am nevertheless able to make myself remember it as often as the need arises, and thus get into the habit of avoiding error.” [Meditations, 62, 43]