“Blind” and “Deaf” Thoughts in Leibniz and Cartesianism
By Gustavo Micheletti
Abstract
Leibniz used the expression "Cogitationes caecae" or "Cognitio caeca" in some of his Latin works to indicate a kind of thinking that, although it is efficient from the cognitive viewpoint, it does not allow a discerning vision of its meaning. Leibniz refers, then, to such expressions when, both in Nouveaux Essais and in Essais de Teodicée, he dwells on the limits of this kind of thinking under an ethic-physcological profile.
He writes that this French expression has the same meaning of the Latin expression "Cogitationes caecae", but he adds that "Pensées sourdes" are not able to touch the soul and modify our way of feeling and behaviour.
The expression "Pensées sourdes", already used in particular by F. Lamy, indicates, in the field of Cartesianism, a kind of "marginal" and "clandestine" thinking which develops collaterally towards the conscience at a preconscient or inconscient level.
The following essay wants to clarify the relationship between Leibniz’s two expressions according to the different meanings that the second one assumes, respectively, in Leibniz's works and within Cartesianism.
“Blind” and “Deaf” Thoughts in Leibniz and Cartesianism
In essays about transparency of thinking, about perceptions of which one is not conscious, about thoughts that guide us during life without realising and in general on relationships between conscious thinking and that which, for various reasons, cannot be considered such, a debate develops within Cartesianism which sees as its principle protagonists A. Arnauld, P. Nicole, and F. Lamy, but which involves, even if indirectly, other philosophers and theologians as well, among whom Malebranche, Poiret, La Forge and Regis.
The point of reference of such a debate consists of two distinct, but connected, definitions provided by Descartes. According to the first the ego is a “thinking thing”, or “a thing that doubts, that conceives, that asserts, that denies, that desires, that does not desire, that imagines too, and feels” (1): from this definition so one can deduce that however it is thinking in essence, the ego (or the mind) can never stop thinking because the essential peculiarities are never separate from their subject(2). The second definition, integrating the first, considers thinking to be always auto conscious, and attributes to the continual presence of the conscience the origin of transparency which distinguishes it (3). The reciprocal essentiality between thinking and conscience allows, thus, Descartes to deduce from the psychological certainty to think that ontological is a thing that thinks, a deduction that, if thought were not accompanied by the conscience would not be possible, because to think unwittingly does not lead to any certainty to think.
It is just for the basic function that the “Cogito” has in the area of Cartesianism, that the followers of Descartes consider the identification of thinking and conscience as a presupposed theory, which being questioned can radically distance itself from the perspective of that philosophy which feeds their speculation. Even those who do not completely agree such identification, certainly cannot do without thoroughly considering and suggesting with caution ones own reserve, because to the outcome of them are tied the solutions to controversial theological and moral matters. The same Descartes was repeatedly urged by the criticism of opponents or admirers to raise a doubt (or at least to limit) about the validity of these presuppositions (4) that, however, are questioned only when the philosophers above mentioned are in dispute about the unconscious spiritual phenomenon.
In such disputes, while Arnauld results as a punctual defender of the foundations of Cartesianism, Nicole and Lamy, who are more liberal in their precise reference to the philosophy of Descartes, contest the validity of the identification of thought and conscience, speaking clearly of “thinking about which one does not think” (5). They feed, then, such debates introducing notions like those of “unperceivable thinking”, “secondary thinking”, “marginal”, “clandestine” and “deaf”, notions that imply that all, even in different ways, have a relative absence of conscience.
The narrow relationship between these kinds of thinking and that what G. Rodis-Lewis calls “the problem of unconscious” (6) - a term which is not in any case to be intended in its contemporary acceptance, but broadly speaking and nearer to that which today we intend with the terms subconscious and preconscious - continues to exist in Leibniz, in whose works “the unperceivable inclinations”, or “small perceptions” have a first hand importance.
The destiny of the expression “deaf thoughts”, often used by F. Lamy, is different from that used by Leibniz with a new and original meaning, in which the relationship with “the unconscious”, a long way from being clear and taken for granted, instead result vague, and from the first view almost inexistent. While in fact for Nicole and Lamy the “deaf thoughts”, or “clandestine ones”, are like “annoying guests hidden in the depth of the soul”, from where, even if revealing now and again and working on our conscious determination from far away, “make our motives ably play on our behaviour (7), for Leibniz such thinking is apperceived and explicitly formed through characters or words.
The expression “deaf thoughts” (pensées sourdes) appears for the first time in the writings of Leibniz in a letter to Princess Sophia in May 1697, in which he states that he doubts whether one can understand the thought without referring to its extension. “In fact I agree - he writes- that there is thinking to which neither the spirit, nor images, nor figures correspond and some of this thinking is distinct. But I do not agree with all the examples presented by the Cartesians because the figure of a thousand angles here designed is not extended more distinctly than some large numbers: it is a deaf thought, like in algebra, where one thinks in symbols in place of objects. So, often, to abbreviate, words are used thinking of them without analysing them, because that is not necessary in such circumstances”(8).
It would be enough now to compare this extract from Princess Sophia’s letter with other extracts from the writings of Leibniz in which he refers to the example of a polygon of a thousand sides, so as to understand that the French expression “pensées sourdes” is only the translation of the Latin expression “cogitationes caecae”, as Leibniz himself notes explicitly in the only passage of “Nouveaux Essais” in which he quotes the latter. It appears for the first time in “De arte combinatoria”, where indicates thinking that is not capable of understanding with a clear vision its own object (9).
Also in this text he uses the example, Cartesian, of the polygon of a thousand sides or kilyagon: in fact this figure, even if it is distinctly thinkable and definable, does not result as imaginable as much as analytical and clear; so that such a notion does not correspond in our minds with any image able to express a logical picture provided by its definition.
Other than those brief works in which Leibniz takes up the notion again of “blind thought”, to develop the mathematical-linguistic aspects (10), it reappears in the important essays about gnosiological argument “Meditationes de cognitione, veritate et ideis”, of 1684, where its meaning is described in a more articulate way and the kind of knowledge that distinguishes it is set out by Leibniz almost at the top of the graduation which he outlines from the variety of knowledge (11). From these texts “the blind or symbolic thought” results as definable as that which, progressing by signs or characters, avoids going back each time to the idea of things and that, if eventually we are able to construct a suitable “Universal Characteristic”, it would permit us to reason justly as well, transforming automatically in a mathematical error every paralogism of our arguments in natural language. On the other hand, if such thinking can make our reasoning more agile and sure, in any case it is not able, for mechanical and passive use of the signs it involves, to identify the contradictions that are concealed in certain concepts, like, for example, that of “faster motion” (12), or in certain series of thinking. Further, unless the language which is used does not determine its distinction and coherence, it is impossible from such thinking to cancel the confusions caused by the use of approximate meaning and ambiguous words.
Although being considered by Leibniz the type of more frequent thinking, because it characterizes every kind of calculation (algebra, geometry, or logic combined), as well as the reflections of mankind on different arguments when words are used without worrying to explain their sense, there is no mention in his writings to develop the ethic-psychological order of such a notion. These emerge only when the Latin adjective “caecus” will be substituted by “sourd” in the French works: that is, it seems, the only plausible explanation of the fact that the tightly correlation between the two expressions, “cogitationes caecae” and “pensées sourdes”, has not been noted and/or highlighted by scholars of Leibniz until a short while ago (13).
The problematic ethic-psychological in which the expression “pensées sourdes” is introduced in the “Nouveaux Essays” is centred around the relationships between intellect and will. In the XVII century such relationships had already found a syncretic formulation in the quote of a famous Ovidian verse: “Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor” (14), which, among others, Spinoza, too, used in his “Ethics” to introduce the study of relationships between reason and passion (15). Leibniz, as well, quotes in “Nouveaux Essais” this verse to summarise the difficulty that reason meets in stemming or modifying the passions, through Filalete, the Lockian character, who uses it to illustrate the typical situation of a man who, addicted to drink, even if distinctly understanding all the negative aspects of such a vice is not able to give it up.
The contradictory “impasse” that the Ovidian verse brings to light must not however constitute, according to Teofilo, the Leibnizian character in “Nouveaux Essais”, a moral alibi, making us believe that we have to abandon all those antique axioms for which “the will follows the major goodness or escapes the major evil felt”. The origin of the scarce solicitation towards the true goodness derives mostly from the fact that in objects or in circumstances in which the senses do not function, our thoughts are, just to say, deaf (in Latin I call them “cogitationes caecas ”) - Leibniz writes - without, that is, perception or sentiment, firm in the pure and simple employment of characters, like that which happens to those who, in algebraic calculation do not consider, now and again, the geometric figure that they represent, given that the word has the same effect on characters of arithmetic and algebra. Often one reasons almost without having the object in the spirit. Now, a knowledge as such is not efficient; to move it one needs something alive” (16).
This arrangement in a new moral environment as regards that which is collected in the notion of “blind thought”, like an explanatory knot, reveals, so, a new limit of general definable thinking as a symbol as well, that which is not able, “touching the soul”, to provoke choices and behaviour ethically rational. To such inability the “Essays de Teodicée” also make a reference in the only passage in which Leibniz uses the expression “pensées sourdes” to give an explanation of the resistance of the soul to truth which it knows and denounces, resistance which is more just when “the intellect proceeds most of the time with deaf thoughts”: (17) these, in fact are “little able to touch” (18) and demonstrate the precariousness of the ties between judgement of reason and will (19). When men think of God, of Virtue and Happiness, often “they speak and reason without explicit ideas: these are in their spirit, but they do not bother to deepen the analysis. Sometimes they have the idea of an absent goodness or evil, but very weak (….) so, if we prefer the worse things it is because we feel the goodness and not the evil that they contain, while we do not feel the goodness which is an opposite side. We suppose or believe, or rather simply repeat having faith in others and relying on the memory of past reflections, which the best parts are on the better side and the worst parts on the opposite side. But when we do not overlook them - continues Leibniz - the thoughts and reasoning are a type of “psittacism” that do not offer anything new to the spirit and if we do not take measures to avoid this the wind will carry them away”(20).
Repeating our reasoning lazily and mechanically, “uti psiptacus” (21), the soul is in fact not affected and the will not shaken, “so there is no need to wonder if in the fight between the flesh and the spirit, the spirit so often gives up”(22); “this fight is no other than the opposition of the different tendencies that make themselves felt often so clearly, while the distinct thoughts are ordinary clear only in power: they could be if they wanted to make the effort to penetrate the sense of the words and characters, but by not doing it, either for negligence or for not enough time, we debate empty words and weak images to lively sentiments” (23).
The analysis of the meaning of words, making us know that what is implied, seems on the contrary to be able, according to Leibniz, to make us see what are the consequences of our choices as well, consenting us to perceive good or bad that can follow and implicitly pushing us to choose the best solutions. Instead, when the words are used in a repetitive way or in a “blind” one, and we cannot see all that their meaning implies, they continue to prevail in us those inclinations and sensations which, even if perceived only in confusion, shock us in a more vivid way. So, the thought that, from the point of view of a theory of knowledge, is blind, for its inability to identify the contradictions that are hidden in certain concepts or to consider clearly the implications of their meaning inside a complex reasoning (24), is, in a moral perspective, deaf, in subjective and objective sense of “surdus” in Latin, or deaf as it is not able either to make itself feel or listen.
In fact, it is possible to distinguish two different orders of causes of deafness of our thoughts. The first one can be considered objective, as it is dependent by arbitrariness of signs we use in respect to their meanings and for the fact that while we think, to proceed in our reasoning, we are obliged to omit analysis. The second one we can consider subjective, because we are responsible ourselves for it, who, even when we could and should deepen the analysis of the meaning of symbols, we limit ourselves to lazily repeating the succession, giving up considering “the ideas”, “the perceptions” and “the sentiments” that such symbols are able to evoke. If from one side, in fact, the relationship between the relative conventionality of signs and the symbolism of thought determines the possible passive and repetitive use of the words, that does not impede the formulation of correct reasoning, neither to be aware of their correctness, given that we can always remember to have controlled them in other circumstances and given that their sense can seem pre-semantically evident to us.
But when the finality of our reflections is not only cognitive and one wishes on the contrary to motivate or modify moral choices, then the negligence in paying attention to the sense of words that make up our thoughts constitutes the authentic and eliminable reason of their persuasive inefficiency.
So, if in a certain sense the thoughts themselves do not allow the soul to listen for arbitrariness of the signs in which they are composed in respect to the perceptions or sentiments that they can evoke, in an opposite sense it is the reason itself to conceal behind its own deafness and psychagogic inefficiency when, even being taken up with the most secret passions or desires, continues trusting in the auto-combinatorial capacity of symbols, almost as if committed to a mathematical or algebraic calculation.
We have seen how, according to Leibniz, in this last case such a blind manner to advance reveals itself to be as correct as necessary, “because the reasoning can be in some way automated and reduced to the simple manipulation of signs” (25), and because the evocation of ideas corresponding does not result essential for the thought when it is considered as a calculation.
Nevertheless, it is just this reduction of thinking to calculation that can render opaque the sense of our words and empty of perceptions and sentiments our thoughts. If then with the notion of “blind thought” Leibniz wants to bring to the light the positive aspects of a reduction of thought to “calculating thought” (rechnendes Denken), this does not imply, as sustains Martin Heidegger (26), that Leibniz considered such a dimension of thought bereft of gaps, so as to be considered the first promoter aware of such a reduction. On the contrary, with the notion of “deaf thought” - a notion that in respect of the first is synonymic and at the same time speculating – Leibniz distinctly shows the limits of that reduction which, again according to Heidegger, constitutes one of the metaphysical nucleus of modern thinking.