Franz Brentano_The True and the Evident.pdf

III
DESCARTES’ CLASSIFICATION
OF MENTAL PHENOMENA
(From the notes to Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis, 1889)
Descartes writes in the third Meditation: “It is requisite that I should here divide my
thoughts (all mental acts) into certain kinds…. Of my thoughts some are, so to speak,
images of the things, and to these alone is the title ‘idea’ properly applied; examples are
my thought of a man or of a chimera, of heaven, of an angel, or of God. But other thoughts
possess other forms as well. For example, in willing, fearing, approving, denying, though
I always perceive something as the subject of the action of my mind, yet by this action I
always add something else to the idea which I have of that thing; and of the thoughts of this
kind some are called volitions or affections, and others judgements.”*
Despite this clear statement, we find Windelband saying that, according to Descartes, to
judge is to will.† What misled him is Descartes’ treatment, in the fourth Meditation, of the
influence of the will in the formation of our judgements. After all, scholastic philosophers—
Suarez, for example—have attributed too much to this influence, and Descartes himself
exaggerates it to the point of considering every judgement, even those which are evident,
as the product of an act of will. But it is one thing to produce the judgement and quite
another thing to be that judgement. The view that judgement is a product of the act of will
does appear in the passage cited above, and it is probably what led Descartes to assign
judgement to the third place in his classification of psychological phenomena. And yet he
can add, quite consistently, concerning such phenomena, “Some are called volitions and
others are called judgements”.
There are two passages in Descartes’ later writings which are more likely to lead us astray.
One of these appeared in the Principles of Philosophy (Part I, Principle 32), written three
years after the Meditations, and the other three years after that, in the Notae in Programma*
It is strange that Windelband did not appeal to the passage from the Principles, instead of to
* Nunc autem ordo videtur exigere, ut prius omnes meas cogitationes in certa genera distribuam….
Quaedam ex his tanquam rerum imagines sunt, quibus solis proprie convenit ideae nomen, ut
cum hominem, vel chimaeram, vel coelum, vel angelum, vel Deum cogito; aliae vero alias
quasdam praeterea formas habent, ut cum volo, cum timeo, cum affirmo, cum nego, semper
quidem aliquam rem ut subjectum meae cogitationis apprehendo, sed aliquid etiam amplius
quam istius rei similitudinem cogitatione complector; et ex his aliae voluntates sive affectus,
aliae autem judicia appellantur. [English trans. from the Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans.
E.S.Haldane and G.R.T.Ross, Vol. I, p. 159.]
† Strassburger Abhandlungen zur Philosophie, (1884), p. 171.
* ”Notes directed against a Certain Programme, published in Belgium at the end of the year 1647,
under the title ‘An Explanation of the Human Mind or Rational Soul: What it is and What it May
be’.”