A.

• The standard view of the Cartesian mind (C) is ‘a gross caricature’.

• We can obviously call C ‘immaterial’, as long as we take care not to hear that word in
the way some philosophers do—i.e. as having some kind of positive descriptive meaning.

• Being spatially extended is for Descartes the same thing as being material. Hence, C is
unextended.

• C is i) immaterial, ii) unextended, iii) a fully self-conscious subject of experience and iv) it
consists of mental goings-on.

• C is nothing like C*, where C* is a locus or substantial ground of mental goings-on—a unit
of immaterial stuff—that doesn’t wholly consist of mental goings-on: C is nothing like C*.

• C can’t exist in the absence of mental goings-on. C is a stream of consciousness, a stream

of thought or thinking, in Descartes’s standard wide use of these terms.

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• A difficulty: how can a subject of experience be wholly constituted of mental goings-on,

instead of being, precisely, an experiencer of mental goings-on that cannot, as such, be
wholly constituted of them? (Cf. also Mamertus, Kant, Hume and James).

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• mental goings-on: occurrent mental entities as opposed to so-called dispositional mental

entities; all mental goings-on are conscious for Descartes

• conscious: phenomenologically contentful, i.e. possessed of some experiential qualitative

character, however primitive; some experiential ‘what-it’s-likeness’

• All possible kinds of phenomenological content are just particular modes or modifications
of the fundamental ‘attribute’ of consciousness (i.e. Cartesian ‘thought’), just as
sphericality and cylindricality are particular modes or modifications of the fundamental
attribute of extension

• principal attribute of x: the fundamental attribute of x in virtue of which it is an instance of

the fundamental kind of which it is an instance the characteristic attribute of that thing

• Thinking G: In equating ‘consciousness’ with Descartes’s ‘thinking’ I’m connecting it with

his principal broad use. ‘Consciousness’, then, denotes the whole concrete occurrent
phenomenon of ‘thinking’, phenomenological content and all; just as ‘thinking’ does in
Descartes’s broad use.
• Thinking I: Descartes also sometimes uses ‘thinking’ in a more restricted way that excludes
sensation and imagination, to mean intellectual activity more narrowly understood. In effect
thinking I is restricted to logic, mathematics, and a priori reasoning

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 • Some philosophers doubt or deny the existence of cognitive experience, cognitive
phenomenology, even while they fully admit the existence of sensory experience, sense-
feeling phenomenology.

• But for Descartes, all thinking I is thinking G: actual, occurrent, essentially

phenomenologically contentful, conscious goings-on.

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• C = consciousness—whether we hold that C is to be identified with all the thinking G in the

stream that we take to be the C stream, or only with all the thinking G in that stream that is
thinking I.

• The standard object–property distinction can be profoundly misleading if imported

uncritically into fundamental metaphysics and taken to mark a fundamental ontological—
categorial distinction (as opposed to a practically indispensable conceptual distinction, given
the fundamental discursive subject-predicate structure of our thought), a distinction that
‘carves nature at the joints’

• Sein ist Sosein: There is no residue (of ‘substance’) when concretely existing quality
(qualitiedness) is fully accounted for.

• A principal attribute—a concrete instantiation of a principal attribute—is in Descartes’s

terms itself a res, a thing. For the attributes of a thing (its principal or characteristic attribute
+ the attributes of existence, duration, number) are that thing, are identical with that thing.

• The distinction between the notion of an attribute like thinking/experiencing or extension

and the notion of substance itself is a merely conceptual distinction, like the distinction
between triangularity and trilaterality. It’s a distinction that can be made in thought, a
‘distinction of reason’, not a ‘real’ distinction, where to say that there’s a real distinction
between two things is simply to say that each can (or does) exist in reality without the other
existing.

• It’s quite clear that Descartes rejects C*, the Lockean picture of the
immaterial mind or self that is usually assumed to be his view, and according to which:
(i) there is some sort of immaterial mind-substance or mind-stuff X
(ii) X is the ‘ground’ or ‘bearer’ of conscious mental goings-on
(iii) X can continue to exist in the absence of any conscious mental goings-on
from which it follows that
(iv) X has some fundamental nature other than conscious mental process.

• It seems clear enough that Descartes rejects all of (ii)–(iv). What’s more, he accepts (i) only
inasmuch as he takes it (as already remarked) that there is no real distinction between ‘the
thing ... we call ...a “substance”’ (AT7.222/C2.156; my emphasis) and its attributes.

• Objection: Replying to Arnauld Descartes agrees that episodes of thinking like

“understanding, willing, doubting etc. are ... attributes which must exist in something if
they are to exist; and we call the thing in which they exist a ‘substance’”. Replying to
Hobbes, he notes that “a thought cannot exist without a thinking thing”, and that if
confusion has arisen in the interpretation of his position, it’s because “‘thought’ is
sometimes taken to refer to the act, sometimes to the faculty of thought, and sometimes to
the thing which possesses the faculty”.
 • Answer: As already remarked, Descartes makes a point of continuing to use accepted
terminology even though it plays no active role in his position, both for protreptic reasons
and for reasons of personal caution. Substance just a ‘dummy’ word, a peace-keeping
word. It remains the case that ‘the attributes [of a substance], when considered collectively,
are ... identical with the substance’ (AT5.155)

• Descartes doesn’t actually think that the notion of substance has any meaning or intelligible
reference or explanatory force whatever, in so far as a substance is supposed to be
something that is in any way distinct from its attributes or properties.

• Descartes is clear in his reply to Regius in 1648: ‘I did not say that these attributes [thought
and extension] are present in the substances as in subjects distinct from them’ (AT8B.348/
CSM1.297). The attribute, in ‘constituting the nature of a substance’ (AT8B.39/CSM1.298),
doesn’t inhere in it. it isn’t in it. It is it.

• Descartes does of course think that there is really a thinker, as well as thinking. It’s just
that he thinks that the thinker is ultimately the thinking. The view lies open to immediate
attack on linguistic grounds that sound like core metaphysical grounds although they are
really no such thing.

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• A fundamentally processual, Sein-ist-Sosein view of reality, expressed by means of

startling claims: ‘the rational soul consists solely in thinking’ i.e. actual live conscious
process (AT8B.347/CSM1.297) and more comfortable characterizations: ‘the rational
soul consists solely in thinking, that is, in the faculty of thinking or the internal principle by
means of which we think’.

• The problem seems to be this: a mind must have some property or mode of being other than
thinking if its ontic nature is not exhausted by, or wholly constituted by, thinking. But But
then either this other property is essential, in which case this is no longer Descartes’s view,
or it is not essential.

• The reason why a mind or self or subject in which no thinking is going on is as impossible
as a physical object without extension is simply, and again, that mind or self or subject is
thinking; it’s wholly and literally constituted of occurrent thinking.

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B.
• A serious difficulty: Mental faculties, potencies or powers also seem to need a place of
residence (a manner of real existence) of a sort that seems hard—impossible—to supply if
all one has to hand at any particular time—say t—is an individual human being’s current
conscious experiential process with the particular extremely limited (conscious) content that
it has at t.

• the process of thinking is not fully manifest to itself: anything that concretely exists at all,
and that therefore has categorical properties, ipso facto has powers. And plainly the
powers of a thing, considered specifically as such, i.e. as dispositional phenomena, need
not be manifest at all times in what one might call the overt being of the thing (the ‘overt
being’ of C , for C , is C’s having/being the conscious experience it has). Descartes makes
the point when replying to Arnauld: ‘although we are always actually aware of the acts or
 operations of our minds, we are not always aware of the mind's faculties or powers, except
potentially’.

• Still, how can the categorical being of C—which is, again, simply consciousness-process,
consciousness-process which appears at any particular time t to have only some very
particular and limited conscious content (right now I’m simply looking at a cow in a field
standing under a tree; the fact that I know French or Arabic is not manifest in any way)—
possibly wholly constitute what one might call the power being of C at t? Somehow
Descartes has to find room for a mind or self or subject with sufficient ‘ontic depth’—
sufficient capacitational depth, adequate ‘storage’.

• When it comes to finite minds like ours, the power being of a thing needn’t be—can’t be—
fully manifest in the way it currently appears to us in our conscious experience. This is so
even when the thing is ourselves, and is wholly constituted of consciousness.

• C = consciousness = thinking G /power of thinking G . The being of the power of the

consciousness-process at any given time has to be nothing over and above the being of the
actuality of the consciousness-process at that time, and the consciousness actuality may still
seem far too thin, at any given time, to be (or ‘ground’) the power.

• According to the thin inner conception of the subject of experience (by contrast to the
thick conception and the traditional inner conception), a subject of experience is
something that exists only if experience exists that it is the subject of. A thin subject is
something that is essentially experientially ‘live’. (consciousness) —we can express the
thin conception of the subject of experience as a biconditional: according to the thin
conception, a subject of experience exists if and only if experience/consciousness exists—
experience/consciousness that it is the subject of.

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• Cf. also the deep resemblance between Descartes’s conception of the nature of mind and
his conception of the nature of matter.

• On his view, it seems that there is strictly speaking only one material thing or substance,
the spatially extended universe, one big extended thing ‘with different nubbly
gradients of texture’ at different places that amount to trees, people, railway lines, and so
on.

• Descartes takes this view of matter to be compatible with ordinary talk of multiple
distinct material objects, and he never suggests that there is any sense in which there is
really only one mind—one res cogitans.

• A need for adjustment of our concepts: Descartes’ conception of the nature of experiential
process must be at least as rich and substantial (and power-full) as his conception of the
nature of concretely existing extension needs to be if it is to accommodate all the massy
phenomena of the non-mental physical world in the way he thinks it does.

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 • It seems, then, that we have to reject the thesis that the whole being of C’s mental
process at t is fully manifest (self-manifest) to C in consciousness at t, and allow that the
cogitans that constitutes C’s mind at t can after all include something of which C is not
conscious or of which C is only dimly conscious. This may still seem to be ruled out given
Descartes’s view of the self-transparency of mind.

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• ‘many people do not know what they believe, since believing something and knowing that
one believes it are different acts of thinking, and the one often occurs without the other’
(AT6.23/C1.122).

• Can we understand Descartes’s seeming endorsement of transparency and his actual denial
of it by distinguishing between percpetion and apperception?

• ‘Basic perceptions that are not themselves apperceived are, in Descartes’s terms,
“conscious”’. He ‘did not hold that we are reflectively aware of all our mental acts,
or even that we could become reflectively aware of all of them’

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• We can hold on to a) the existence of C is wholly a matter of the existence of conscious

mental goings-on—even as we think of C as intrinsically mentally powerful. What we can
no longer hold on to, it seems, is b) the thesis of the full self-transparency of mind.

• But we must then allow that there is conscious mental process which is part of what
constitutes one’s mind at a given time t, and constitutes in particular its needed ontic depth
at t, although—how to put it?—the conscious subject that one experiences oneself to be at t,
and experiences as having the experiences one has at t, isn’t conscious of it, or is (at best)
conscious of it only in a very dim way.

• Descartes’s crucial qualification of the self-transparency thesis: ‘there can be nothing in me

of which I am in no way [nullo modo] aware’ (AT7.107/C2.77).

• One’s mind, a stream of consciousness, consists of more than one ‘locus’ of awareness.

• Descartes takes it for granted, in accordance with Christian orthodoxy, that there are many
individual minds. That said, and strikingly, he never gives any account of the identity
conditions or individuation conditions of minds.