The epistemological significance of dreaming in the philosophy of Descartes

FERREIRO, HÉCTOR

Berlín

Jornada; XVI. Jahrestagung des Forschungsnetzwerks Transzendentalphilosophie / Deutscher Idealismus; 2018

Technische Universität Berlin

Although dreams have been the object of countless interpretations since ancient times it is Descartes the first author to see in them the premiss of a key argument for epistemology. What seems to predominate in Descartes´ approach to dreaming is its role for a skeptical argument against the reach of knowledge in general: dreaming, says Descartes, does not allow us to affirm with ?metaphysical certainty? (certitude métaphysique) that what we know is real. ?For how do we know ? asks Descartes in the Part Four of the Discourse de la Méthode ? that the thoughts which come to us in dreams are any more false than the others, seeing that they are often no less lively and distinct?? The immediate background of this approach to dreaming is the problem of certainty, which is the central issue for skepticism. However, the problem of how to be sure that the contents that we think in the belief to be knowing through them real things are, indeed, real things and not merely mental contents is in the last analysis a secondary aspect in Descartes´ thought ? and it is definitely a secondary aspect in its later Wirkungsgeschichte. The theoretically relevant aspect of dreaming in the philosophy of Descartes relies in that dreaming eliminates perceptual evidence as a criterion of the reality of the contents of perception; that is to say, it invalidates empirical intuicionism. Dreaming shows that, since we retroactively deny real existence to the contents that we have dreamt, what grounds that we think that the objects of which we are conscious while we are awake are real things cannot be that we feel that they are real, precisely because that same feeling accompanies the contents that we think when we are awake not less than the contents that we think when we dream. To feel that something is real and that that something is real are thus two completely different issues. Perception loses with Descartes the epistemic privilege that it had been attributed to it before and it becomes one thought more. The now explicit ideality of the activity of knowledge sheds a complete different light on the relation between thought and reality, since from now on there is no particular act of thinking whose object is a real thing just by the fact of being the content of that act. By analysing Descartes´ treatment of dreams, in my talk I will try to show the epistemological implications of dreaming that Descartes made explicit with his philosophy.