Abstract :
[en] At the beginning of Meditation IV the meditator triumphantly announces that he has “now no difficulty in turning away (convertam) from imaginable things and toward things which are objects of the intellect alone” (AT, VII, 53). Meditation VI thereafter confirms that pure intellection, as opposed to imagination, consists only in turning towards oneself (convertat) and demands no “peculiar effort of the mind” (73).
However efforts of attention are required throughout the Meditations and Meditations IV, V and VI are no exceptions in this respect. Descartes’ Second Set of Replies (156-159) confirms that attention is needed as a mental support for metaphysical analysis in order to embrace different ideas and connect different parts of a demonstration. A thorough examination of the Meditations shows something even more interesting: attention is conceived by Descartes as a varying force that can be diminished or relaxed but also, and most importantly, increased as comparative forms like “attentius” (19; 55; 66; 71) or “diligentius” (32; 35; 45) suggest. For sure, it is an original aspect of Cartesian meditative exercise: we are not only invited to maintain our attention but also to make it more intense at a certain point. Such an increase is crucial for the development of the dream argument (55) and also for the achievement of both proofs of the existence of God (45; 66). But is it not a kind of deus ex machina that the meditator puts forward in order to overcome otherwise unsolvable difficulties?
A posterior work, The Passions of the Soul, can help us understand such a strategy. In article 72, Descartes distinguishes between two kinds of attention; the first one stems from wonder and is “at its full strength from the start” (XI, 382); it is contrasted with a second type “which, being weak at first and growing only gradually, can be easily diverted” (Ibid.) Further on Descartes says that passion is useful in “strengthening thoughts… and causing them to endure into the soul” (383) but that “the application of our understanding” has the same effect when “our will fixes [it] in a particular attention or reflection” (384). This last case applies to the Meditations: the meditator who is constantly exposed to misleading influences would be easily “diverted” and even stopped if he was not pushed by his own will to go further in his metaphysical inquiry. “Peaks” of attention occurring in the Meditations are caused by volitions originating in the meditator’s resolution to attain truth and certainty and, as we shall see, they are used against three types of harmful influence: sensitive in Meditation I, imaginative in Meditation II and III, and intellectual in Meditation IV and V where old philosophical habits stand in the way of Cartesian theology.