First Reader: Second Reader: Prof. Dr. Dina Emundts Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Spohn EXPOSITION OF The Cartesian Theory of Innate Ideas and its Historical Relations A man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it. (Johnson quoted in Porter 2000: xv.) THE FOUR DIFFERNENT CONTEXTS When Meno’s slave was asked to reason upon geometry and to find solutions to questions that he had not previously been exposed to, then it was by thinking on them that he solved the tasks set to him (Plato CD: 365-71 (82b-86c)). In Humean terms one could say that the boy tended to his ‘relations of ideas’ (Treatise: 70) or was illuminated by the ‘light of reason’ (e.g. Descartes CSM1: 14) to use the common 17 th century metaphor for ‘intuition’ 1 , or as Kant would apparently have called it ‘Anschauung’: a purely abstract matter. In Meno the notion of innate ideas is introduced in order to explain the possibility of a priori reasoning: we remember the correct answers from a previous existence in which we presumably learned that one and one always equal two, or e.g. that if AB and BC, then AC. For ‘the soul, since it has been born many times, and has seen all things both here and in the other world, has learned everything that is’ (Plato CD: 364 (81c)). 2 When Descartes turned to the innate it was in an entirely new scientific and hence also epistemological context, usually referred to as the ‘scientific revolution’ (e.g. Henry 2002: 1 ff). He simply could not accept the explanation of perception in terms of intentional forms somehow floating through the air from the object to subject (e.g Stich 1975: 75). Descartes’ World describes a mechanical one in which only corpuscles (or parcels of corpuscles, viz. matter) of various sizes and shapes were somehow bouncing around and thus affecting other corpuscles (or parcels thereof) according to the magnitude of their masses, and speed of motion, all in line with mathematically describable laws of movement and impact. Innate ideas were at this point needed as a convertibility chart, coordinating the impact of the various corpuscles on the senses with the mental representations or ideas that they cause, or put 1 Descartes, Locke, and Hume would all have agreed on a virtually verbatim definition of what is meant by ‘intuition’ or ‘intuiting’, i.e. ‘immediate mental apprehension’ (CSM1: 13 fn1. Cf: 13-4, Essay: 528 §9, Treatise: 70). Where they potentially differ is how the existence of these intuitions is to be explained. As I read it, to have an intuition (or to intuit) is the act of relating ideas in such a way that its result is self-justifying, i.e. a priori. Put differently it seems to involve ‘abstraction’, the act of going beyond particular occurrences and, through the use of ‘induction’, arrive at definite rules, that is. How this human capacity is possible I do not think anyone really knows, it is simply a fact that it is. The worrying possibility that the words ‘innate ideas’ and ‘abstraction’ are simply two different terms referring to the same unknown and unexplained phenomena – a simple disagreement concerning labels –, thus arises. 2 Very interesting in this context is the failed application of recollection of moral notions. No similar results to the ones reached by the slave boy in reasoning upon geometry are reached when Meno and Socrates discuss the notion of virtue. Instead Socrates sums it up by saying that ‘whoever has virtue gets it by divine dispensation. But we shall not understand the truth of the matter until (…) we try to discover what virtue is in and by itself.’ Given that it has apparently got late, Socrates, instead of proceeding with what could have turned out to be a fascinating account of the possibility of recollection of moral concepts simply says ‘Now it is time for me to go’ (384 (100b)), and he apparently leaves. I currently read this as a tacit admission that moral concepts and values are in fact not for Plato inborn in the sense that other a priori truths are, or formulated differently, that ethics, for Plato, is not an a priori branch of knowledge. 1