C. MEMORY, THINKING WITH DESCARTES

One psychological power that the early imaginative approach to knowing was supposed to eliminate made an enigmatic return in the late philosophy. That power is memory. The Regulae had tried to overcome it by the instantaneous grasp of intuitus and the progressive reduction of deductio to an intuituslike status. All knowledge was therefore on essentially the same basis, and anything truly known was known as well as anything else that was known. In the later philosophy Descartes introduced a hierarchy of certainties. God, whom we do not comprehend, is nevertheless more certain than our selves. What is perceived by the senses is least certain of all, especially since sense was instituted for preservation of the mind-body union rather than for truth.

There is something paradoxical about the Meditations' reevocation of memory, the specific location of which is the Fifth Meditation. It provides us, after the fact of experiencing fundamental truths, with the warrant of that experience. By recalling, for example, that we have clearly and distinctly conceived God (and therefore his existence and his goodness), we can be sure that other things we have clearly and distinctly known have been truly known and can in their turn be recalled and used in confidence. We do not have to recall the proof of the Pythagorean theorem to use it, only that we have proved it previously. This power of memory yields the equivalent of a (modern) proposition with a propositional attitude attached. But the substrate of this intellectual memory is that we know that we have actively thought the truth of the proposition in its texture and contexture: thus we remember not just the fact of truth, we remember that we have experienced it as true against a background that permitted it to emerge. Presumably this means that having an approximate idea of God roughly based on a rather vague memory that we once proved his infinity, existence, and goodness would not be enough. The idea would need to be focused, and we would need some memory of the background of active thought that evidenced God as God and not just as a word or conceptual

possibility. By contrast, the Regulae would have us as much as possible rehearse once again the full experience of truth in all its evidence, without recourse to memory. All that memory would do for the life of the mind is provide it with the stock of all the natures that ingenium has experienced; combined with the habit of thinking those natures according to order and proportion, it would provide to active, imaginative mind everything relevant to perfect knowledge.

The late philosophy, following the traces of imagination, returned to memory. Descartes did not think through the questions of memory—if he did, the evidence is not preserved for us—and therefore he cannot be a guide here in as positive a way as in the case of imagination. He distinguishes intellectual from corporeal memory and also aligns intellectual memory with ideas in their potentiality. In the Regulae, imagination is meant to overcome memory; in the Meditations, imagination and thought are supported by remembering the knowledge we have had. At the level of the body, the physiological traces of memory in the brain are produced by the actual experiences we have had, and they largely govern our particular associations of images, so that the memory of corporeal images is a key to the reliable functioning of the unified mind and body.

But the fact is that Descartes wrote very little about memory, and that little is more enigmatic than clarifying. Descartes thus leaves us in more than one sense on the threshold of memory. That threshold is the place where we are most fallible and most human, where we can least think of ourselves as autonomous, self-perceiving, serf-certifying beings because we are bound by a past history. From the little we have seen, however, it seems likely that he thought imagination away from memory, until, as he worked out the consequences of transcending the limits of imagination, he was compelled to readmit the fact of remembering, at least in the form of a memory of intellectual events. Memory is important because it weaves the fabric of our everyday, contingent lives, but also because it reinforces our experience and understanding of essential truths. One might then expect further thought and investigation to reveal some parallels between the status of imagination and the status of memory in Descartes. If we are attentive, we might find traces of memory all along the path of imagination, throughout Descartes’ psychological philosophy.

Modernity as a concept is predicated on a contrast with the old, in particular on comparing the present with what is past. In the early modern age the standard for comparison was the ancient Greeks and Romans (and those reputed wise from every remote time and place, whether they were named Moses or Hermes Trismegistus), who inspired admiration but also ambition. The young Descartes thought that the ancients (most of all the ancient mathematicians) surpassed the moderns in knowing because they possessed the secret of how to acquire knowledge, a secret they had

concealed. It was being rediscovered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however; and all that it required was attention to the possibilities inborn in each human being, possibilities that if developed would yield wisdom. He believed that imagination was the key to acquiring this wisdom, in both theory and practice. The later philosophy did not reject the goal, it only modified the conception of how to get there.

If in the course of the seventeenth century, if in the writings of Descartes himself, imagination underwent an eclipse, this does not mean that it became irrelevant or that the project Descartes had initially envisioned lapsed. The impulse of that project carried over through the later writings and ultimately passed, in unanalyzed form, to the Cartesians and post-Cartesians. The scientific and truth-discovering powers of imagination that Descartes had conceived did not vanish; they were simply reassigned in the psychophysiology and the thinking activity of human beings. We cannot say that this reassignment occurred in a perspicuous way, however, and not even that it was done for good reasons. The past three hundred years have given us many theories of imagination but no consensus, nor have they given us much agreement about what the basic facts of imagination are. We have difficulty articulating a coherent understanding of imagination yet make frequent appeals to it. Is this a sign that we are so deeply entwined in it that we can experience it no more clearly than we do our ears or eyes?

Descartes recommenced thought about the relevance of imagination, recommenced it after the long continuation of Aristotle had blossomed in Avicenna, was raised to a higher pitch in the Renaissance, and ultimately succumbed to erosion by formulaic repetition. Both this ancient tradition and Descartes’ thought of imagination have been for the most part hidden from us. For centuries neither has been a part of our experience; much less have they been the object of thought. The task of reacquiring the experience and thinking it through stands before us. If this task is carried out genuinely in thought, it will be not simply a surrender to the past but a reevocation of a heritage.

Whether we are moderns or postmoderns, it is unlikely that we can get a proper estimation of imagination and its value without Descartes. Perhaps we have no choice but to think with Descartes, and to imagine with him, until we reach the point of thinking and imagining for ourselves. The paradox is that most people learn how to really think from the example of others, but it is only when we have begun thinking ourselves that we can truly think with another. Perhaps the same is true of imagining, especially if it is thoughtful and not just willful. If that is so, and if following in Descartes’ traces helps us to act accordingly, then there is truly some hope that this work will have served a larger purpose than merely imagining Descartes.