Representation, Self-Representation, and the Passions in Descartes

THAT DESCARTES WAS INTERESTED from the very start his philosophic career in developing a method for problem-solving that could be applied generally to the solution unknowns is well known. Also well known is the further development the method by the introduction the technique hyperbolic doubt in his mature, metaphysical works, especially in the Meditations. Perhaps less widely appreciated is the important role that accounts systems signs played in the development his early accounts a method; it is crucial to the method that the elements problems be identified and signified by simple and convenient signs that can then be arranged to display the relations among the known elements and the unknown solution. Commentators such as Michel Foucault(1) have brought this interest in signification to our attention and shown the widespread importance such projects in the seventeenth century. Few, however, have examined the relation between the early projects signification and the later, metaphysical works. I suggest that one way to understand Descartes' metaphysical turn in his mature work is as attempt to ground the accounts he has offered signification in something further: representation, particularly mental representation. From the start, Descartes explains signification by reference to mental representation: a word, figure, or symbol signifies its objects by prompting the mind to think those objects. Although Descartes offers detailed and comprehensive accounts in works such as the Rules for the Direction the Mind what constitutes effective and convenient systems signification by way the relations between signifying element, system, and the objects signified thereby, the mental operations that allow signification to operate, especially that the intuition simple natures, is never fully explained. It remains to the mature phase Descartes' career to crack open the basic operations our thought by developing the full-fledged doctrine ideas--a doctrine that makes explicit how object is represented to a subject.(2) Looking at the doctrine ideas developed in such works as the Meditations allows us to develop a model representation, that is, what is involved when Descartes says that idea represents such-and-such object. What I suggest is that a is a structural whole embracing several, interrelated component parts. The component parts include what I call the subject-position, that is, a relation to the first-person subject for whom the representation is a representation. This subject-position is directed at object, what is represented in the representation (the representatum), through a representation, which vehicle stands in a particular (and variable) relation to the represented object. This vehicle, I should emphasize, does not as such constitute some tertium quid intervening between the subject-position and what the idea is of; what idea is of is its object, which is directly represented therein. Indeed, in many cases the vehicle is not metaphysically distinct from the object. If, for instance, the object is a substance, it may be represented through some its modes, which constitute the vehicle. To be sure, we may also talk representing a chunk extension through its color or a mode extension through a line segment, in which cases the relation representation is--or should be--considered conventional. More generally, the vehicle is formed by the interaction subject and object. The object can be modified by the vehicle, in the sense that what the object is represented as is a matter the vehicle through which the object is represented. Although I will not argue the matter further here, I do think there is a great deal textual evidence for this model--particularly in Descartes' crucial notion an idea taken objectively as well as his use per, ut, and in the case materially false ideas, tanquam clauses that modify the represented object as or through something or other. …