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Descartes on the Innateness of All Ideas CANADIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 355 Volume 32, Number 3, September 2002, pp. 355-388 Descartes on the Innateness of All Ideas GEOFFREY GORHAM Macalester College St. Paul, MN 55105-1899 USA I Introduction Though Descartes is traditionally associated with the moderately na­ tivist doctrine that our ideas of God, of eternal truths, and of true and immutable natures are innate, on two occasions he explicitly argued that all of our ideas, even sensory ideas, are innate in the mind (AT 8B 358, AT 3 418; CSM 1 304, CSMK 187).1 One reason it is surprising to find Descartes endorsing universal innateness is that such a view seems to leave no role for bodies in the production of our ideas of them. For how could bodies be the origin of our sensory ideas if, as Descartes says in a 1641 letter to Mersenne, these ideas 'must have been in us before' the stimulation of the sense organs (AT 3 418; CSMKI87)? This question has lately received considerable attention in the secondary literature, with the large majority of commentators arguing that, given a sufficiently nuanced account of what it means for sensory ideas to be innate, the universal innateness thesis does not preclude a significant causal role for 'AT' refers to Rene Descartes, Oeuvres de Descartes, 11 Volumes, Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, eds. (Paris: J. Vrin 1996); 'CSM' refers to Rene Descartes, The Philo­ sophical Writings of Descartes, 2 Volumes, John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1985); 'CSMK' refers to Rene Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes: The Correspondence, John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991). 356 Geoffrey Gorham bodies in sensation? The minority position, which is that in expounding the hyper-nativist doctrine Descartes intends to imply that bodies are not the efficient causes of our ideas, has had only a few proponents, most notably Janet Broughton.3 In this paper I aim to show that in spite of its 2 For instance, see Anthony Kenny, Descartes: A Study of His Philosophy (New York: Random House 1968), 104-5; Robert McRae, 'Innate Ideas,' in Cartesian Studies, R.J. Butler, ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1972), 50-3; Robert Adams, 'Where Do Our Ideas Come From - Descartes vs. Locke,' Illnate Ideas, Stephen P. Stich, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press 1975), 76-8; Desmond Clarke, Descartes' Philosophy of Science (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1982), 50-2; John Cottingham, Descartes (Oxford: Blackwell 1986), 147-8; Bernard Williams, Descartes: The Project of Pure Inquiry (London: Penguin 1987), 133-5; Nicholas Jolley, The Light of the Soul: Theories of Ideas in Leibniz, Malebranche, and Descartes (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1990),36-42; Margaret Wilson, 'Descartes on the Origin of Sensation,' Philo­ sophical Topics 19 (1991) 293-323, at 302-4; Daniel Garber, 'Descartes and Occasion­ alism,' in Causation in Early Modern Philosophy, Steven Nadler, ed. (University Park: Penn State University Press 1993),22-3 and Descartes' Metaphysical Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1992), 365-6, n. 57; Steven Nadler, 'Descartes and Occasional Causation,' British Journal for the History of Philosophy 2 (1994) 35-54, at 47-51 and 'The Occasionalism of Louis de la Forge,' in Causation in Early Modern Philosophy, Steven Nadler, ed. (University Park: Penn State University Press 1993), 66-8; Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ versity Press 1995),408-10; Tad Schmaltz, 'Descartes on Tnnate Tdeas, Sensation and Scholasticism: The Response to Regius,' in Oxford Studies in the History of Philosophy, Vol. II: Studies in Seventeenth-Century European Philosophy, M.A. Stewart, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1997),34-44 and 'Sensation, Occasionalism and Descartes' Causal Principles,' in Minds, Ideas and Objects: Essays on the Theory of Representation in Modern Philosophy, Philip Cummins and G. Zoeller, eds. (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview 1991), 42-9; Kenneth Clatterbaugh, The Causatioll Debate in Early Modern Philosophy: 1637-1739 (New York: Routledge 1999), 38; Marleen Rozemond, 'Des­ cartes on Mind-Body Interaction: What's the Problem?' Journal of the History of Philosophy 37 (1999) 435-67, at 449-62; David Scott, 'Occasionalism and Occasional Causation in Descartes's Philosophy,' Journal of the History of Philosophy 38 (2000) 503-28, at 516-20; Nancy Kendrick, 'Why Cartesian Ideas of Sense are Innate,' The Southern Journal of Philosophy 37 (2000) 413-28, at 414. 3 See Janet Broughton, 'Adequate Causes and Natural Change in Descartes' Philoso­ phy,' in Human Nature and Natural Knowledge, Alan Donagan, Anthony Petrovich, and Michael Wedin, eds. (Dordrecht: D. Reidel 1986), 116-19. Kenneth Winkler is another author who seems inclined to the non-causal interpretation, though his position is more guarded than Broughton. Winkler writes that Descartes 'is uneasy about the further claim that they [bodies] playa causal role, not because he wants to deny it, but because he is not prepared to specify the sense in which it is true' ('Grades of Cartesian Innateness,' British Journal for the History of Philosophy 1 [1993] 23-44, at 32). John Yolton, in Perceptual Acquaintance from Descartes to Reid (Minnea­ polis: University of Minnesota Press 1984),30 and Perception and Reality: A History from Descartes to Kant (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1996), 193-209; and Daise Radner, 'Is There a Problem of Cartesian Interaction?' Journal of the History of Descartes on the Irznatmess of All Ideas 357 recent unpopularity, and notwithstanding its revisionist implications for our understanding of Cartesian mind-body interaction, the non-causal interpretation remains the more plausible. To this end, I will first argue that the most detailed causal readings are inadequate in a variety of ways. Next, I will provide an updated defense of the non-causal ap­ proach, improving on earlier versions and answering recent objections. We will see that the issue turns as much on Descartes's notion of causation as on his notion of innateness. Finally, I will address a funda­ mental difficulty with my interpretation. Critics of the non-causal read­ ing have argued that if bodies are not the causes of our sensory ideas then our knowledge of the external world is completely undermined. Against this objection, I attempt to show that Descartes himself came to recognize that his proof of the existence of the external world does not require the assumption that our sensory ideas come from bodies, and that we can be confident that our sensory ideas present us with reliable information about a world of material things even if the source of those ideas is the mind itself. II Causal Interpretations of the Universal Innateness Thesis Descartes's most detailed defense of the universal innateness thesis is given in the 1648 Comments on a Certain Broadsheet, his point-by-point response to a list of criticisms published the previous year by his erst­ while disciple, Regius. One of the assertions in Regius's pamphlet is that since all of the common notions, along with the idea of God, 'have their origin in the observation of things or in verbal instruction' it follows that the mind has no need for any innate ideas (AT 88 345; CSM 1 295). Descartes was familiar with this sort of empiricist objection to innatism since he had faced versions of it in both Hobbes's and Gassendi's published objections to the Meditations. J Considering this familiarity, his reply to Regius in the Comments is surprisingly strong. In order to answer Regius, it would have been sufficient simply to enlist familiar arguments leading to a modest brand of innatism about the idea of God and certain Philosophy 23 (1985) 227-31 also argue, though on the basis of very different considerations from one another, that Descartes cannot regard bodies as simply the efficient causes of ideas. But neither of them addresses in any detail the question of universal innateness. See also S.V. Keeling, Descartes, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press 1968), ch. 6. 4 Hobbes: AT 7186-8; CSM 2130-32; Gassendi: AT 7279-88; CSM 2 195-201 358 Geoffrl?!! Gorham common notions, as he had done in his responses to Hobbes and Gas­ sendi.5 Instead, Descartes offers a general argument for the innateness of all ideas: 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 them presented to us by the senses just as we form them in our thinking. So much so that there is nothing in our ideas which is not innate to the mind or the faculty of thinking, with the sale exception of those circumstances which relate to experi­ ence such as the fact that we judge that this or that idea which we have immediately before our mind refers to a certain thing situated outside us. We make such a judgment not because these things transmit ideas to our minds 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, as our author himself admits in article nineteen, in accordance with my own principles. But neither the motions themselves nor the figures arising from them are conceived by us exactly as they occur in the sense organs, as I have explained at length in my Optics. Hence it follows that the very ideas of the motions themselves and of the figures are innate (innatas) in us. The ideas of pain, colors, 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 (similitudil1cm) between these ideas and the corporeal motions.
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