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This is interesting. I'd be interested to hear from historians of early modern philosophy about this. Has Professor Mercer's analysis won wide acceptance? Links to other articles/books on this welcome of course.
The basic idea of Descartes's *cogito* is at least a 1000 years older than Teresa of Avila. Here's Augustine from De trinitate, Book 10, chapter 10:
"But since we treat of the nature of the mind, let us remove from our consideration all knowledge which is received from without, through the senses of the body; and attend more carefully to the position which we have laid down, that all minds know and are certain concerning themselves. For men certainly have doubted whether the power of living, of remembering, of understanding, of willing, of thinking, of knowing, of judging, be of air, or of fire, or of the brain, or of the blood, or of atoms, or besides the usual four elements of a fifth kind of body, I know not what; or,whether the combining or tempering together of this our flesh itself has power to accomplish these things. And one has attempted to establish this, and another to establish that. Yet who ever doubts that he himself lives, and remembers, and understands, and wills, and thinks, and knows, and judges? Seeing that even if he doubts, he lives; if he doubts, he remembers why he doubts; if he doubts, he understands that he doubts; if he doubts, he wishes to be certain; if he doubts, he thinks; if he doubts, he knows that he does not know; if he doubts, he judges that he ought not to assent rashly. Whosoever therefore doubts about anything else, ought not to doubt of all these things; which if they were not, he would not be able to doubt of anything."
Further, a number of late medieval scholastics returned to Augustine's basic position here. For instance, William Crathorn (middle decades of the 14th cent.) has a long discussion about how God, by his omnipotent power, could deceive us in various ways, before arguing that not even omnipotent God could deceive me about the fact that I exist, for the same reasons Augustine has already given. Moreover, Nicholas of Autrecourt would eventually take the even more radical position that an omnipotent God could very well make it such that I doubt the existence of my own mind. (See the references in Charles Bolyard's excellent SEP article on Medieval Skepticism).
Now it may be that Teresa is the first person to make the deceiver entity a *demon* rather than God, but that doesn't really seem like that important a contribution to the history of this idea to me. Just my $0.02.
My sense has always been that Descartes' modern argument style and accessibility was more relevant to his lasting impact than any profound originality. Even if Teresa can't plausibly replace Descartes as the paradigm modern philosopher[*], she should be alongside Augustine and Avicenna as great thinkers that beat Descartes to the punch on a number of issues.
[*] I'll quote from Teresa as a point of comparison (to Descartes' style of meditation). Am I wrong to think that this is a difference that makes a difference when measuring for the Mother/Father of modernity?
"Perhaps God will be pleased to let me use it to explain something to you about the favors He is happy to grant souls and the differences between these favors. I shall explain them according to what I have understood as possible. For it is impossible that anyone understand them all since there are many; how much more so for someone as wretched as I. It will be a great consolation when the Lord grants them to you if you know that they are possible; and for anyone to whom He doesn't, it will be a great consolation to praise His wonderful goodness. Just as it doesn't do us any harm to reflect upon the things there are in heaven and what the blessed enjoy — but rather we rejoice and strive to attain what they enjoy — it doesn't do us any harm to see that it is possible in this exile for so great a God to commune with such foul-smelling worms; and, upon seeing this, come to love a goodness so perfect and a mercy so immeasurable. I hold as certain that anyone who might be harmed by knowing that God can grant this favor in this exile would be very much lacking in humility and love of neighbor. Otherwise, how could we fail to be happy that God grants these favors to our brother? His doing so is no impediment toward His granting them to us, and His Majesty can reveal His grandeurs to whomever He wants. Sometimes He does so merely to show forth His glory, as He said of the blind man whose sight He restored when His apostles asked Him if the blindness resulted from the man's sins or those of his parents.
Descartes' originality was in taking "thought" to be the essence of mind. This, together with the idea that extension is the essence of matter, gave the mind-body problem is peculiarly modern form. Part of that involves taking "doubt" to be but a special case of this broader thing, "thought." There are a couple of extra steps involved here that don't seem to have convincing precursors.
Not that novelty is always a good thing, or that these special novelties have been unproblematic….
Sure, Saint Theresa—and the meditative tradition she was a part of—ought to be better known by philosophers. And yes, many potted grad school 101 epistemology courses don't put Descartes in an illuminating historical context. But the game of "who got there first" for some slice pulled out of the quirky, idiosyncratic context of an individual person's whole philosophical perspective is always going to be a matter of "sort of, but…".
To add to the comments above re: Augustine and the striking differences in matters of style, assumptions, goals, etc between Descartes and Saint Theresa in describing an act of contemplation (not to mention…the whole Cartesian metaphysics), what about the concept of knowledge by presence in the Islamic tradition? Avicenna's floating man argument is a well known example. But really there's a whole metaphysics linking a kind of knowledge and the self (as I recall, something like the pineal gland even makes an appearance in their physiology!) This had influenced European scholastics for hundreds of years before Descartes, and was surely another ingredient in the soup. Reconstructing the exact ratios of influence seems like a boring game to me, but to each their own! 🙂
the author of the story to which you link sets things up as if everyone thinks that descartes is "entirely original", and, to my knowledge, no scholar of early-modern philosophy has thought *that* (ever?).
as for the origin of the cogito, the evidence that descartes 'mirrors' teresa, while incredibly interesting, is not very strong. same goes for the mersenne connection: mersenne was at the center of the paris philosophical scene, and he knew *everyone* and had an insane library, which he made available.
it is more likely that descartes 'borrowed' it from augustine's 'si fallor, sum', as the previous comment mentions. however, even that is sticky. after all, the cogito is found in the discourse (1637) (though in that work, it is the 'ie pense, donc ie suis'), and it is not certain that descartes would have been familiar with the relevant parts of augustine's work at that time. mersenne points out the relevant part of augustine to descartes in 1638, 3 years before the meditations, but a letter to colvius in 1640, descartes claims that he had just, that day, gone to the local library to check out the stuff by augustine.
now, it is quite possible that descartes is not being entirely honest about this.
there is lots more to say about this, but i'm excited to see more and more written about early-modern women philosophers.
Re Theresa of Avila as anticipatory of Descartes.
While the comparison and speculations advanced by Christia Mercer are interesting there are two things to be said about the fashion for recovering neglected figures, or discovering ‘unknown’ ones: one methodological or perhaps sociological, and one substantive.
It has long been common in historical studies to claim that something associated with a given figure or period was previously manifest in earlier ones. In the area of philosophical scholarship among Anglophone academics this sort of thing is more recent because of the relative ignorance among that constituency of pre-modern thought, much of which remained linguistically inaccessible to it and intellectually and culturally alien (both remain significant factors).
The two main points of opening of the past to the present were 1) later-ancient, and 2) early-modern thought, assisted by translations. In recent times a couple of other factors have intruded, one a market phenomenon, the other a political one.
Scholars have to distinguish themselves for reasons of employment, peer-recognition, esteem, garnt applications, etc., and there are broadly two ways of doing that. First, intensify: do the existing thing better than it is already being done; second, diversify: do different things thereby avoiding the competition.
Alongside and sometimes intertwined with this are socio-ideological interests, on account of which scholars aim to show that creativity, innovation, virtue, etc., lie in areas not hitherto acknowledged by the establishment. This is to be found on both the ‘left’: ‘enlightened’/’progressive’/ and ‘right’: ‘traditionalist’ ‘conservative’ wings. One side seeking to show that the established order appropriated and or suppressed non-westerns, women, etc, the other that it did much the same to religious thinkers and ideas.
Such claims have to be judged on their scholarly evidential interpretative merits, but it is also worth observing an escalatory dynamic not unlike that on display in the Monty Python ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ sketch (performance here:
/ script here http://www.montypython.net/scripts/4york.php).
This amounts to a claims-bidding war, which in the case of philosophy might go something like this: A: ‘Putnam introduced such and such an argument’, B: ‘Quine had given a version of that argument long before’, ‘C: ‘Quine’s argument is just a version of Wittgenstein’s’, D: ‘That argument appears in Leibniz’; E: ‘You can find an earlier version in Nicholas of Cusa’; F: ‘Cusa must (or would have done well to) have read Herman the German (Hermannus Alemannus) who gives a brief version of the argument in his translation of the introduction of Alfarabi’s commentary on Aristotle’s Rhetoric’.’ etc. Note the obvious additional escalation into the obscure: most can consult and have a shot at interpreting Wittgenstein, fewer Cusa, fewer still Herman, which in turn makes the escalatory claims harder to verify.
Turning to matters of substance. St Theresa of Avila (strictly, St Teresa of Jesús) was a reforming figure within the Carmelite order, in which task she was joined by St John of the Cross. Between them they authored six of the best known works of Western spirituality: she The Life, The Interior Castle, and The way of Perfection, and he Dark Night of the Soul, Ascent of Mount Carmel, and Spiritual Canticle of the Soul. The traditional designation of this kind of work is ‘Mystical Theology’ (on which see the unsurpassed study by Adolphe Tanquery, The Spiritual Life: A Treatise on Ascetical and Mystical Theology (1930).
Theresa’s approach though highly distinctive is not without precedents and these tend to stand in a tradition that is relevant to the issue of Descartes’s methods and arguments. At various points she was directed by the Jesuit (St) Francis Borgia, founder of the Collegio Romano (subsequently the Gregorian University); and by Peter of Alcantara a Franciscan. Both, but especially the latter, were versed in Augustinian theology which in turn, like that of Pseudo-Dioysius, is indebted to neo-Platonism. One of the themes of this is a bifurcation into material and spiritual reality the former a cause of externally oriented sense-experience, the latter of internally oriented reflection. Cutting to matters of immediate relevance there is a recurrent tendency to entertain skepticism about perception and find certainly through introspection.
In her article Mercia quotes Augustine from the Confessions ‘Under your guidance I entered into the depths of my soul…and with the eye of my soul…I saw the Light that never changes casting its rays over the same eye of my soul, over my mind’ but this is related to passages in Plotinus’s First Ennead, which involves the soul ‘interior journey’, and this is a trope of neo-Platonism, transmitted via Pseudo-Dionysus and Augustine into orthodox Christian mystical theology of a kind which flourished in the 16th and 17th centuries. There were also less mystico-theological parallels as in the interior turning of skeptical doubt.
In the fourth set of Objections to the Meditations, the Augustinian himself associated with the quietist spiritual movement Antoine Arnauld writes: ‘The first thing that I find remarkable is that our distinguished author has laid down as the basis for his entire philosophy exactly the same principle as that laid down by St Augustine’. Arnauld cites a passage in On Free Will but the more famous source is the passage in the City of God (XI, 26) where Augustine writes as follows:
‘But, without any delusive representation of images or phantasms, I am most certain that I am, and that I know and delight in this. In respect of these truths, I am not at all afraid of the arguments of the Academicians, who say, What if you are deceived? For if I am deceived, I am. For he who is not, cannot be deceived; and if I am deceived, by this same token I am. And since I am if I am deceived, how am I deceived in believing that I am? For it is certain that I am if I am deceived. Since, therefore, I, the person deceived, should be, even if I were deceived, certainly I am not deceived in this knowledge that I am. And, consequently, neither am I deceived in knowing that I know. For, as I know that I am, so I know this also, that I know.’
Others, Mersenne and Clovius, were also to point out anticiaptions of Descartes arguments in Augustine, a fact for which wrote (ironically?) to thank them.
In conclusion, four points:
1. The tracing of influences and the detection of little known, or hitherto unknown ones is of interest but it easily slides into the service of other ends.
2. One might do better to focus on the underlying ideas of a broad neo-Platonism that winds through late-ancient, medieval and early modern thought.
3. More significant than the question of any influence of Theresa on Descartes is that of the influence on both of Christian neo-Platonic methods popularized by Augustine.
3. That tradition is a mystical one that becomes and remains Christianised through to relatively recent times which raises a question of how it can be related to philosophical enquiry as that is now generally practiced – this cuts both ways.
Wilhelm Risse discusses the prehistory of Descartes' method in some detail in "Zur Vorschischte der Cartesischen Methodenlehre" (https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/agph.1963.45.issue-3/agph.1963.45.1.269/agph.1963.45.1.269.xml).
I think that Professor Mercer's thesis is not that Teresa of Avila was the first to arrive at or highlight the import of the result "I am, I exist." Augustine did both of those, of course, and the emphasis in Professor Mercer's paper is instead on the specifics of the inward and introspective turn that Descartes takes in the "Meditations," and on how that introspective turn is quite similar to what we find in Teresa's "Interior Castle." Descartes himself writes that "All our ideas of what belongs to the mind have up till now been very confused and mixed up with the ideas of things that can be perceived by the senses. This is the first and most important reason for our inability to understand with sufficient clarity the customary assertions about the soul and God. So I thought I would be doing something worthwhile if I explained how the properties or qualities of the mind are to be distinguished from the qualities of the body. Admittedly, many people have previously said that in order to understand metaphysical matters the mind must be drawn away from the senses; but no one, so far as I know, had shown how this could be done. The correct, and in my view unique, method of achieving this is contained in my Second Meditation. But the nature of the method is such that scrutinizing it just once is not enough. Protracted and repeated study is required to eradicate the lifelong habit of confusing things related to the intellect with corporeal things, and to replace it with the opposite habit of distinguishing the two…" (Second Replies, CSM 2:94). Descartes goes on to say in Principles of Philosophy I.12 that if we are in the habit of thinking in terms of sensory pictures and images, and he supposes that we are, then when we report that we are thinking "I am, I exist," we are in fact thinking of a sensory body, and there is an important sense in which are not thinking "I am, I exist" at all. In Fifth Replies he says the same thing about a person who reports that they are thinking of God when in fact they have in mind a sensory image; that person is not in fact thinking of God (CSM 2:264). So Descartes appears to hold that a very special and targeted kind of reflection/meditation is required to converge on ideas that are actually of mind and God; if a person doesn't do that work, then there is a sense in which they are not arriving at "I am, I exist" or "God exists," even if they report that that is what they are thinking. I think that Professor Mercer's theses include that Teresa provides such a method in "Interior Castle," that Descartes is modeling a very similar method in the Meditations, that Descartes takes that method to contribute to a lot of the innovation surrounding the result "I am, I exist," and that Descartes himself (in Second Replies) identified the method as unique. There is also a speculative question about whether Descartes might have gone so far as to say that Augustine himself didn't even arrive at "I am, I exist," though that seems like a stretch.
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