Dogmatic Descartes

Pierre Daniel Huet, seventeenth-century bishop of Soissons, was one of the most respected scholars of his time. A historian of religion and apologist, he was also one of the first critics of Descartes.

As Thomas Lennon described it in The Plain Truth, one of Huet’s central criticism was that Descartes was more dogmatist than doubter: “despite Descartes’s initial display of doubt, he emerged as a dogmatist, and that Descartes’s dogmatism was of a very dangerous sort. For ‘although [Descartes] teaches that philosophy, which is a product of the human mind, should submit to faith, which comes fr om God, he in fact adjusted the faith to the principles of his philosophy.’”

Taking the argument that leads to the cogito as an inferential one (that is: whatever thinks must exist; I think; therefore, I am), Huet also argues that Descartes’s doubt didn’t go nearly far enough, for “Descartes’s inference goes through only on the basis of the rules of logic, which, like all else according to Descartes’s methodological resolution, ought to have been doubted.” (Whether this is the most defensible reading of Descartes is questionable, and Lennon explores other options, including the revisionary Cartesianism of Malebranche.)

Huet’s “skepticism” uncovered other internal contradictions in Descartes’s argument. One issue is the passage of time: “Descartes cannot say that he exists on the basis that he is thinking, because the thinking on the basis of which he says that he exists occurs as a separate thought at a time previous to the time of the existence he now claims. The only argument he can mount, therefore, is that since he now thinks he will exist, or since he was thinking, he now exists. But Descartes’s own premise that whatever thinks exists so long as it thinks precisely indicates to Huet the invalidity of these arguments, for nothing follows in these cases from what is true at one moment to what is true at the next.”

Lennon summarizes, “The cogito can only be an inference, according to Huet, but to avoid the unhappy consequences thereof, both D escartes and his followers tr y to hide, claiming that ‘when someone thinks, he is, during the time that he thinks, conscious of his thought, and knows and perceives his thought; so that when he thinks that it is day, he not only thinks that is day, but also knows that very thought. Thus, the knowledge [notitia] of his thought is the same as the thought itself.’ This conclusion Huet takes to be a reductio of the Cartesian response; the thought of day and the day itself are obviously different.”

A convinced Christian, Huet believed that Descartes went wrong in his pursuit of a certainty that human beings are not permitted to have. Huet’s is an early example of the “postmodern” critique of Descartes.