On Descartes, Spinoza and Intuition

On Descartes, Spinoza and Intuition

by Richard Freeman-Toole

March 8, 1997

I write this paper in an attempt to assimilate some aspects of the philosophies of Descartes and Spinoza into a theory of intuitive thought, the formulation of which has preoccupied me for the last two years; this theory (in the context of a musical application) attempts to establish a relationship between the intuitive thought process and the so-called collective unconscious, or the collective mind. It was to strengthen my background for this research that I decided to take this class, and it was therefore with this work in mind that I came to the philosophers at hand.  I am aware that the the subject matter of this course historically precedes the formulation of anything like a modern conception of psychology , but in order to appreciate these philosophers it was necessary for me to translate into my own  language what was being said; the consequence of this has been that, while I reject much of the language of the texts under discussion, I have been able to relate the spirit of the text to my own special interest.  Only in this way has the writing had any personal significance for me, touched my life in any way.  Neither my theory, nor its full range of sympathetic resonance with intuitive thought processes discernible in Descartes and Spinoza will be given the space they deserve, but a general connection between my theory and their work will obtain.  Thus, this  paper must be seen as a minor commentary by a somewhat up-to-date view of psychology on thought processes which were responsible for the birth of modern philosophy

It is arguable that Descartes' most significant positive contribution to history was the example he set in breaking from the scholastic tradition with its emphasis on the handed down authority of the past. As the march of time time was leading Europe further and further away from a conception of the created world as a rigidly predetermined hierarchy of inflexible, inherited laws, toward a conception of man as a a free agent in a cosmology which allowed him the possibility of upward or downward mobility based on his individual efforts to achieve or fail, it was necessary for somebody  to come along and announce that we should start over again with a systematization of knowledge based on the new science; if in so doing we should stumble once again onto the old verities, so much the better. It was courageous of Descartes to insist that the contemporary authority of the personal, subjective experience was more powerful than the experiences of dead people expressed in musty monk-copied books. It was also prophetic of him in that the same kind of attempts to reconcile the claims of the opposing worlds of science and mysticism persist to this day; in fact, some might say that these reconciliatory attempts are approaching a particularly intense climax (not to say a resolution) in the current decade with the discoveries in quantum physics echoing and reinforcing many of the traditional propositions of parapsychology and the ancient religions.  

Aside from the elegance of his writing (not necessarily to say his logic) I found not much to commend his arguments; he seems to be a man spinning his wheels, looking for a definite answer to a definite question, in the definitely wrong place. Especially in his replies to criticism, he appears unable stand up to attack except by either stooping to  name-calling, referring to the precedent of traditional philosophical language, or invoking the natural light. However, it is the sincerity of his effort, the power of his conviction to express his vision, that most impressed me--with which I found myself resonating sympathetically. 

Descartes takes pains to clothe his concepts in the ill-fitting garb of rationalism, in an effort to align his thinking with the radically changing world view of the new science, a noble and inspired effort to be sure;  but it is nonetheless evident that the most primary tenets of his philosophy are founded on irrational  conclusions. Even motivated as he was to avoid the use of the antiquated, authoritarian language of the church, Descartes was unable to be unequivocally rational in expressing the reality of his own consciousness; aspects of my theory (outlined below) indicate that Descartes, in sorting out the paradoxical imbroglio of entangled considerations of objective rational thought and subjective religious experience, has relied heavily on intuitive  thought processes--processes which inevitably lead, via the collective mind (as we shall see),  to perceptions of a higher reality.  Descartes' efforts to justify his intuitive responses with rational arguments seem to us pretty silly, but the sensitive reader may readily go into "between-the-lines" mode to see how the collective mind is informing his subjective experience, if not his writing.

To summarize my theory concerning the collective mind : 

1. The intuitive response is a goal-oriented mental process motivated by a pre-conceived end condition. An event called re-centering  takes place during this goal-seeking process. Re-centering is a moment in time when the mind takes the components of an emotional set and radically restructures them in an effort to find the path of least resistance to the pre-conceived end condition. (Bastick)

2.  There are various states of mind that are associated with re-centering, which help initiate the process. One precondition for re-centering is redundancy; the use of familiar or repeated material (functional fixation) sets the stage for the next mental state which is psychological regression. Psychological regression is a kind of mental reversion to primitive mind states; during psychological regression there is a pronounced tendency for unconscious or so-called preconscious material to surface onto the stage of literal consciousness. Indeed, it is the manipulation of preconscious material that is the most obvious literal manifestation of the operation of intuitive forces on mental material. This preconscious material tends to express itself in forms which are universally shared archetypes; forms which are echoed and varied in the world's library of inherited artifacts, and which are universally (innately) understood without literal explanation.

3.  It is my contention that the universal quality of, and the unlearned, shared agreement about, so much of this planet's archetypal symbology indicates that the intuitive response is keying in a higher state of mind, a super-personal state of mind. This mind state represents a tangible  access to a supernatural world, (maybe even a measurable access), which defines the subjective reality of the individual as a bubble in the consciousness of a cosmic mind which includes more and more such bubbles at ever high hierarchic levels. Hence, the intuitive response uses the subject's contact with the collective mind as a first step in the multi-stage progress toward the ultimate mind of God.

4.  The tip-off that an intuitive re-centering response has been initiated is a characteristic rhythmic acceleration of the sequential presentation of the conceptual material. If the flow of ideas speeds up such that their identities become blurred or integrated into a synthetic gestalt (kind of like escape velocity), it is a safe bet that the literal mind has made contact with the higher mind.

Thank you very much for listening, and what the hell does this have to do with Descartes ?  Well, I was particularly struck by two aspects of Descartes' proof of his own existence and of God's existence. First (actually second), the fact itself, that we can have a conception of God which is quantitatively different from our conception of anything else, proves the existence of God, and second (actually first), that my experience of myself as a thought makes me real. I find the relationship between these two ideas to be fascinating and revealing. There is an implication here that the only true  reality is the reality of mind--that God exists because I can conceive of Him, and that I exist for the same reason. Therefore it is possible to say that God and I are cut from the same cloth, since the ultimate test of our reality is whether we can be mentally conceived. If this is true, then Descartes is recapitulating an ancient Hindu concept of man as a little piece of God, a piece that is momentarily lost in the time distortion of the world of material illusion, but who is destined to rejoin the creative mind in eternal ecstacy after his worldly trials are ended. Furthermore, the Christian (and Jewish) idea of the Christ, as a focus of the Creator-mind in the flesh, the mysterious worldly manifestation of cosmic reality, sounds very similar to Descartes' dualistic, subjective self-conception as both a material machine and an infinite mind.

My point is that, although Descartes is attempting to dress up his ideas in fancy Cadillac terminology, his basic Chevy impulse to express his thoughts comes from an intuitive  experience of himself in relation to (or in) a higher mind state.  The fact is that "the natural light" does not tell us beans about anything, does not dignify anything, is not a resource for rational confirmation of anything; however, it does sensitize us to higher mental realities which are essentially irrational, or better, super-rational. [At this point let me comment on the expression psychological regression : at face value the term seems to point to a state of mind which is animalistic, or somehow subhuman; still, if we view the regression to preconscious states as a raising of consciousness to the level of super-personal collective consciousness, then we have no choice but to see the regression  as a progression.] Thus, Descartes' experience of himself as a thought of finite dimensions, allied to God as a thought of infinite dimensions, comes not from any objective,  rational operation, but merely from the quantum leap from the literal mind state to a supernormal mind state--an effect that is typical of intuitive re-centering .  

To arrive at the foregoing conclusion, one element is missing, namely, a description of how Descartes achieves, in his meditations, the mind state whereby he comes into contact with the collective mind. In a piece of music, the progression from redundancy to functional fixation to psychological regression to inspiration, as in, say, a jazz improvisation, or the development section of a symphony, is a pretty well-marked pathway, since musical cliches are fairly easy to identify, and the acceleration of the sequential presentation of these identities is easy to detect.  In philosophy the game is not so clear, since rhythm is not usually considered to be a significant parameter.  However, one need not look very far in the Meditations to find a number of personal asides like this one from the Third Meditation  :

The longer and more carefully I examine all these points, the more clearly and distinctly I recognize their truth. But what is my conclusion to be? If the objective reality of any of my ideas turns out to be so great that I am sure the same reality does not reside in me, either formally or eminently, and hence that I myself cannot be its cause, it will necessarily follow that I am not alone in the world, but that some other thing which is the cause of this idea also exists. (p. 43)

This paragraph is a polaroid postcard report of a person who has had an intuitive re-centering experience.  It begins with the suggestion of time spent in laborious pondering ("the longer and more carefully I examine all these points"), the end condition is called for ("But what is my conclusion to be?"), four concepts flash by in quick succession (1. "If the objective reality of any of my ideas turns out to be" 2. " so great that I am sure the same reality does not reside in me," 3. "either formally" 4. "or eminently,"), and finally a feeling of ego-death, of detachment from physical reality ("I myself cannot be its cause"), and a feeling of kinship with a collective mind ("I am not alone in the world").  The culmination of the paragraph ("some other thing which is the cause of this idea also exists") is the consequence of a radical recentering process that takes the subject from an egocentric consideration of literally-defined self to an experience of super-personal reality.

Spinoza's contribution to all this is a commentary on the relationship of finite things to eternal things which supports the idea of a collective mind. In Prop. XVI of the Ethics ,  he says,

 ". . . from the given definition of anything a number of properties necessarily following from it (that is to say following from the essence of the thing itself) are inferred by the intellect, and just in proportion as the definition of the thing expresses a greater reality, will more properties be inferred. But the divine nature possesses absolutely infinite attributes . . each one of which expresses infinite essence in its own kind (in suo genere), and therefore,  from the necessity of the divine nature, infinite things which in infinite ways (that is to say, all things which can be conceived by the intellect) must necessarily follow. ( p. 309)

It will be apparent from this quote that Spinoza, with Descartes, sees mind as the ultimate reality. It will also be noted that Spinoza is in agreement with an idea that I suggested earlier, i.e. that the infinite is subject to subdivision; indeed, the subdivision of infinite essence into consciously accessible components seems to be that primary activity of intellect, bearing in mind that each definition arrived at consciously is a mere reduction of the essence into incomplete parts of the whole, a whole which becomes more and more vast as the intellect climbs back up the hierarchic beanstalk toward God. The stages in the intuitive mental process outlined above, from literal goal-oriented consciousness, to psychological regression, to the collective mind state and higher, consists of the same kind of breakdown in psychological material that Spinoza hints at here. 

Since Spinoza's idea of intuitive knowledge is that of knowledge which is initiated by rational processes, gives knowledge of ideational particulars which correspond to all the particles of nature, but which nevertheless sees nature as timeless substance, manifesting the mind of God, it will be evident that the type of progression of mind states I have previously suggested is consistent with Spinoza's assessment of things. In fact, the quoted paragraph indicates that Spinoza's conceptual picture of mind is of a very fluid two-way street running back and forth between higher and lower;  the essences  of things  are perceivable as subdivisions of the mind of God, and our internal perceptions of these things  as subdivisions of those essences. 

In particular, it is necessary to emphasize the idea that "as the definition of the thing expresses a greater reality, [so] will more properties be inferred"; this idea corresponds to my idea that the joining of the literal mind with the collective mind makes available to the subject the vast astral library of the inherited archetypal forms of Man, enabling Man to communicate with himself in an universally understood symbolic language, and to approach higher states of God-consciousness. Surely the expression of a particular idea of a particular subject will tend to be more unique than a collective generalization, but the collective generalization is actually more complex than a personal statement because the averaging process of archetypal formalization involves synthesizing the essence of many  subjective particularizations into a single composite form--thus the one includes the many, as each tiny voice in the whole cosmic chorus sings out its individual part as the whole is articulated through  the many.  

In summary,  although as a work of logic the Meditations  of Descartes fail at least as much as they succeed, as the efforts of a man seeking to articulate the truth  there is more to commend them than petty quibbling has the power to vitiate. Spinoza, not as dedicated to rational expression (we say jargon  nowadays) as Descartes, does not seem so ridiculous as a logician; Spinoza makes himself ridiculous (to the cynical modern eye) in a different way--by using metaphysical language which sounds like so much gobbledy-gook to the rationalist, who would always prefer to assign a precise value to an essence and then divide by the current rate of inflation.  From my point of view, I appreciate the heartfelt sincerity of this work, and relate to it, as I do to most things, as music; i.e. as the subtle interplay of abstractions which refer only incidentally to the material world, but which always point with prophetic finger to higher worlds.  If my work with intuition has helped create a flimsy bridge between psyche and anima it is of no ultimate consequence, mere wordplay.  But without this wordplay what would our minds do while our hearts seek out the face of God?

Urbana

March 8, 1997

Bibliography

Descartes , Selected Philosophical Writings , Cotingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, trans. , Cambridge University Press, 1988

From Descartes to Kant , ed. T.V. Smith and Marjorie Grene, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1940, Ethics,  Part I  

Intuition  by Tony Bastick, 1982, John Wiley and Sons, New York

(Supplemental Bibliography)

Bastick, Tony

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Brun, Herbert

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Godwin, Joscelyn

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Keil-Feld

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Kosslyn, Stephen Michael

1980 Image and Mind . Boston : Harvard University Press

Kosslyn, Stephen Michael

1948 Ghosts in the Mind's Machine  . New York : W.W. Norton

Maraire, Abraham Dumisani

1971 "Introduction," Mbira Music of Rhodesia [Notes with the Recording, Mbira Music of Rhodesia, UWP 1001] Seattle : University of  Washington Press

Merriam, Alan P.

1964 The Anthropology of Music  . Evanston : Northwestern University Press

Miller, Leon K.

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Pressing, Jeff

1988 "Improvisation : Methods and Models," in  John A. Sloboda, ed. Generative Processes in Music (Oxford : Oxford University Press), 

pp. 130-177.

Treitler, Leo

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1967 The Chinese Theory of Art . New York : G.P. Putnam's Sons

                                                        Freeman-Toole