ABSTRACT
The chapter provides a new interpretation of Descartes’s account of the experience of seeing and sensory perception in general, at the stage of the Meditations at which the meditator is in denial of having a body. In the then traditional theories of vision, vision was taken to be an essentially bodily activity, which could not take place without a body. Descartes accepts this approach. Thus, the meditator is not in the Second meditation claiming to be certain of seeing, because there is no certainty of anything bodily. There is certainty, however, on an appearance of seeing, of “seeming to see”, in which the corporeal world and the body is experientially present to the meditator. In skeptical doubt, the meditator just voluntarily refrains from all judgments based on this aspect of experience. The chapter shows that Descartes’s core attitude to sensory perception is that we must retain voluntary control over what we judge on the basis of actual sensory experience, remaining independent from what it suggests to be the case. Even in relation to sensory perception, Descartes thus sees us as active persons who make responsible judgments. To have a mind is not primarily to be capable of passive experience, but to have voluntary agency.
