Descartes, Sixth Meditation: The External World, 'Nature' and Human Experience JOHN COTTINGHAM The Sixth Meditation deals, as its title proclaims, with 'the existence of material things, and the real distinction between the mind and body of man'. 1 In this paper, I want to start by examining Descartes' argument for the existence of material things—for the existence of an 'external', physical world around us. Next, in section two, I shall use this argu- ment concerning the external world to bring out an important general point about the 'dialectical' way in which Descartes presents his reason- ing in the Meditations. This will lead me on to the third section of the paper, which will analyse the concept of 'nature' and the role it plays in Descartes' reasoning, particularly in the Sixth Meditation. And this in turn will bring me to the fourth and final part of the paper, which will focus on what is by general consensus the most fascinating part of the Sixth Meditation—Descartes' account of the relation between mind and body. What I shall try to do in this final section is to highlight a curious tension between Descartes' recognition of the facts of human experience on the one hand, and on the other hand his doctrine that we are essentially incorporeal or non-physical substances. 1 E 127 (AT VII 71; CSM II 50). References to 'E' are to page numbers of the Everyman edition of Descartes which is the prescribed A-level text: Descartes, A Discourse on Method, Meditations and Principles, trans. J. Veitch (London: Dent, 1912). All quotations are taken from this edition. For the reader's convenience, I have added, in brackets, cross-references to the standard twelve-volume edition of Descartes known as 'AT'—Oeuvres de Descartes, C. Adam and P. Tannery (eds), rev. edn (Paris: Vrin, 1964— 76), and to the new two volume English translation 'CSM'—The Philosophi- cal Writings of Descartes, trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D. Mur- doch, (Cambridge University Press, 1985). Veitch's translations, though first issued by Everyman in 1912, originally appeared in 1850-53; they are tolerably accurate, if sometimes rather stilted. Readers should, however, be warned that Veitch sometimes follows Descartes' original Latin text, of the Meditations (1641) and sometimes (often without indication) follows the later French version of 1647 which was not by Descartes. Thus in the title of the Sixth Meditation quoted above, the phrase 'of man' is not in the original Latin. 73 terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0957042X0000403X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 54.70.40.11, on 01 Sep 2019 at 20:12:11, subject to the Cambridge Core