Visual Perception and the Cartesian Concept of Mind: Descartes and the Camera obscura (original) (raw)

2015, In Tamás Demeter – Kathryn Murphy – Claus Zittel eds. Conflicting Values of Inquiry: Ideologies of Epistemology in Early Modern Europe. Leiden, Brill Publishers. 69–91.

https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004282551_005

In the second book of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke famously described the human mind as 'a closet wholly shut from light, with only some little openings left, to let in external visible resemblances, or ideas of things without'. Locke's simile, based on a well-known optical device, the camera obscura, proved to be a highly influential metaphor of what has been called by many commentators 'the Cartesian paradigm of cognition'. What is meant by this term is an indirect realist view of the human cognition. In the last decades, however, this line of interpretation has been challenged by scholars attributing to Descartes, Arnauld, and Locke direct realist, exter-nalist, or more sophisticated internalist accounts of the mind-world relation. Though these claims, I assume, are basically sound, they are weakened by the fact that the camera obscura unquestionably dates back to the seventeenth century as a cognitive metaphor. Since, to the best of my knowledge, no attempt has been made to explain away this latent contradiction, in this paper I intend to make up for this lack by reconstructing the historical role of the camera obscura in cognitive contexts. My conclusion will be that far from undermining a more balanced view, a closer look at the way in which this optical device entered the philosophical stage may provide good reasons to doubt the myth of the 'camera obscura-model'. My understanding of the issue rests on three considerations. (1) The power of the metaphor stems from the fact that any perceptual acquaintance with the world requires a set of modifications (limitations, replacements or substitutions etc.) much in the same way as scientific instruments transform physical data. (2) These modifications do not rule out a direct cognitive contact with the environment. (3) Consequently, what seems to be highlighted by the metaphor is not so much the enclosed nature of the mind, as the manner in which our cognitive machinery comes into contact with external reality by setting up conditions under which external objects can present themselves to a finite being.