Gassendi’s Fifth Objections are long. Descartes would later remark on their length in a notice for the French edition. But the most conspicuous feature of this exchange is not its scale. It is what the men call each other.

A name borrowed from the argument

In the Second Meditation, Descartes arrives at a description of himself: strictly speaking, he is a thinking thing—a mind. He adds that he had not previously understood what such words meant.

Gassendi quotes the passage back at him and confesses, with some irony, that he had misunderstood his interlocutor. He thought he was addressing a human soul: that by which a person lives, feels, moves and understands. Apparently he is speaking to a mind that has discarded not only the body but the soul as well.

He takes to addressing his opponent as “Mind,” sometimes “good Mind.” The manner need not be openly coarse; he can still call Descartes a distinguished man in the same passage. The point is plain enough: if you insist that you are nothing but a mind, that is whom I shall address.

The name that comes back

Descartes begins by complimenting the personification. Gassendi has treated him not as a whole person but as a separated soul. In doing so, Descartes suggests, Gassendi almost seems to imply that these objections come not from a subtle philosopher’s mind but from flesh alone.

Then he returns the address: tell me, “Flesh”—or whatever name you prefer—are you really so unfamiliar with the mind? He repeats the designation through the reply, at one point addressing “most excellent Flesh.”

The two names have different origins. Gassendi borrows Descartes’ account of himself: you call yourself a mind, so I call you Mind. Descartes takes the opponent’s framing and turns it against the speaker: if I am the separated mind, perhaps these objections are coming from the other side of that division.

Excellent!

One of the exchanges deserves a closer look. To challenge the reliability of clear and distinct perception, Gassendi invokes ancient thinkers. Great minds ought to have understood a great deal, yet some located truth with the gods or at the bottom of a well.

Descartes opens his answer with an extravagant compliment: excellent—here at last is an argument against me, something I have not seen you produce before.

He grants that it is an argument from authority, then reminds “Flesh” of the person it is addressing. This is a mind withdrawn so far from bodily things that it does not even know whether other people existed before it. The authority of earlier thinkers therefore cannot move it.

Something has happened to the joke. Gassendi’s name for his opponent becomes part of the opponent’s defence. Descartes does not reject the role. He steps into it and lets it answer an objection.

Calling him a disembodied mind was meant to expose an implausible position. For the purposes of this reply, that very distance from the world becomes a reason why an appeal to worldly authorities cannot settle the question.

Taking the costumes off

At the end of the exchange, Descartes names what has been happening: up to this point, Mind has been debating Flesh, and has rightly disagreed with it on many things. Now, with the discussion concluded, he recognizes the real Gassendi.

He honours Gassendi as an outstanding philosopher and embraces him as a man known for candour and integrity, whose friendship he hopes to earn. Mind and Flesh are retrospectively identified as roles. The person beyond the role has a name.

An apology follows, but the apology does not end where we might expect. Descartes asks Gassendi not to resent the philosophical freedom of his replies and says he welcomes the objections sincerely. Among the things he welcomes is this: so eminent a man, in so long and carefully worked an account, has produced no argument that strikes his reasoning and no challenge to his conclusions that he cannot easily answer.

Apology, acceptance and a report of victory share a sentence. The victory is offered as one of the benefits received from the critic.

The qualifications—so eminent, so lengthy, so carefully prepared—are doing work. The more imposing the opponent, the more impressive it becomes, on Descartes’ assessment, that the attack has failed. Praise closes the exchange, but also adds weight to that assessment.

We encountered a related move in Essay One. There, the critic’s strength supported an inference from what had not been challenged. Here it supports a judgment about what was challenged. Whether nothing landed is Descartes’ judgment. The objections remain available in the preceding pages.

After the match

A winning player stands at a microphone and calls the opponent the strongest they have ever faced.

The admiration may be entirely sincere. It also makes the victory worth more. The speaker need not have calculated that second effect for it to exist.

We need not infer hypocrisy. Genuine respect and a wish to have one’s achievement recognized can inhabit the same sentence. The interesting question is what the sentence is doing, not which single motive we can assign to its speaker.

Bound into each other’s books

Gassendi did not leave matters there. He wrote further responses to Descartes’ answers, at first circulating them among friends. Samuel Sorbière obtained the manuscript, and in 1644 it was published in Amsterdam.

The volume interleaved objections, replies and renewed objections. It also included a separately paginated reprint of the Meditations. Descartes later referred to it as Gassendi’s large book.

The arrangement had turned back on itself. Descartes’ book contained Gassendi’s objections. Gassendi’s book contained Descartes’ meditations. Mind and Flesh had argued at length, and each ended up bound into the other’s volume.