Philosophical Essay

The word meditation in the title suggests how Descartes intended his book to be read—not as a philosophical treatise but as a spiritual exercise (spiritual in terms of subjective experience not necessarily religious). 

Descartes’s Meditations are intended to initiate the meditator into philosophical practice. 

· Just as Plato’s dialogues were training manuals in how to think rather than in what to think, so also Descartes’s Meditations are exercises in philosophical thinking, with an emphasis on the priority of reason rather than imagination. 

· Descartes’s aim in the Meditations is to help the reader discover reality for themselves rather than simply telling the reader what reality is. This reality will be turn out to be substance.

Descartes understood reality in terms of substance.

For Aristotle, there were many different kinds of substances in the world with a plurality of attributes; Descartes revised this view, and suggested that underlying each of the Aristotelian substances was a essential property: extension (the way a material thing extends in space).But there were also immaterial substances: minds that had the essential property of thinking. Beyond the substances of bodies and minds, there was a independent, self-causing, and necessary substance: God.

Descartes held that a substance was that which exists in itself and bears properties. Only God is a substance in this strict sense, but Descartes believed there were two other kinds of substances that had a contingent existence--minds and bodies--whose essential properties were extension and thinking, respectively.

"I have always thought that two issues—namely, God and the soul—are chief among those that ought to be demonstrated with the aid of philosophy rather than theology" (Descartes, "Letter of Dedication," Meditations on First Philosophy, AT1).

"In the First Meditation the reasons are given why we can doubt all things, especially material things, so long, that is, of course, we have no other foundations for the sciences than the ones which we have had up until now. Although the utility of so extensive a doubt is not readily apparent, nevertheless its greatest utility lies in freeing us of all prejudices, in preparing the easiest way for us to withdraw the mind from the senses, and finally, in making it impossible for us to doubt any further those things that we later discover to be true" (Descartes, "Synopsis of the Following Six Meditation," Meditations, AT12).

"Several years have now passed since I first realized how numerous were the false opinions that in my youth I had taken to be true, and thus how doubtful were all those that I had subsequently built upon them” (Descartes, Meditations, I, AT 17). 

Beliefs are formed within a larger network of other beliefs—each one depending on the other. The realization that our most fundamental beliefs about the world are false strikes a devastating blow to the foundations of our knowledge. The only way to resolve this problem is to disabuse ourselves of every opinion that admits of any doubt, so that we can discover what we know beyond any doubt, or as Descartes puts it, we have to “raze everything to the ground and begin again from the original foundations” (Descartes, Meditations, I, AT 17). The only way to avoid false beliefs or opinions is to discover what we can know for certain, and build everything we know on those certain foundations.

"In the Second Meditation the mind, through the exercise of its own freedom, supposes the nonexistence of all those things about whose existence it can have even the least doubt. In so doing the mind realizes that it is impossible for it not to exist during this time. This too is of the greatest utility, since by means of it the mind easily distinguishes what things belong to it, that is, to an intellectual nature, from what things belong to the body" ("Synopsis," AT12).

The doubt employed in the first meditation exercise was so destructive and disorienting that the meditator is left feeling as if he has “suddenly fallen into a deep whirlpool” and unable to reach its bottom or emerge from its surface—the meditator is drowning in doubt (Descartes, Meditations, II, AT.24). 

· Having doubted the external world, all information received from the senses, all images produced the imagination, and raising the possibility of evil genius simulating everything he perceives, the meditator is left without any foundations for his knowledge. 

P1: Existence is necessary to think.

P2: I think

C: Therefore, I exist.

1.The Cogito springs from Descartes' methodological doubt, which is possible only because he is a thinking being who asks questions.

2. Although Descartes views the senses as unreliable and incapable of arriving at clear and distinct ideas, the Cogito is impossible without the sensory impression of otherness over against which the "I think" is distinguished.

3. The Cogito is put forward as an analytic proposition (the predicate is contained in the subject).

4. The Cogito encompasses the entire field of awareness in which everything appears, e.g. sensing, feeling, imagining, understanding, judging, and choosing.

"...I was a substance the whole essence or nature of which is simply to think, and which, in order to exist, has no need of any place nor depends on any material thing. Thus this 'I,' that is to say, the soul through which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from the body and is even easier to know than the body, and even if there were no body at all, it would not cease to be all that it is" (Descartes, Discourse on Method, 3.33).

In the 6th Meditation, Descartes rejects the "sailor in a ship" analogy for the relationship of the soul and body, and argues that the soul is "commingled" with the body, "so that I and the body constitute one single thing [unum quid]" (AT 6:81).

Given that the mind is the seat of the "I Think," distinct and separable from the body, an enduring personal identity must be rooted in the mind, not the body. Consequently, the "I Think" is immune from the vicissitudes of the world.

Soul=Thinking Substance (immaterial)

Body=Extended Substance (material)

"Since I understand that the wax's shape can change in innumerable ways, and since I can't run through all the changes in my imagination, my comprehension of the wax's flexibility and changeability cannot have been produced by my ability to have mental images. And what the thing that is extended? Are we also ignorant of its extension? Since the extension of the wax increases when the wax melts, increases again when the wax boils, and increases still more when the wax gets hotter, I will be mistaken about what the wax is unless I believe that it can undergo more changes in extension than I can over encompass with mental images. I must therefore admit that I do not have an image of what the wax is—that I grasp what it is with only my mind" (Descartes, Meditation 2, 326).

"I see that without any effort I have now finally got back to where I wanted. I now know that even bodies are not strictly perceived by the senses or the faculty of imagination but by the intellect alone, and that this perception derives not from their being touched or seen but from their being understood; and in view of this I know plainly that I can achieve an easier and more evident perception of my own mind than of anything else. But since the habit of holding on to old opinions cannot be set aside so quickly, I should like to stop here and meditate for some time on this new knowledge I have gained, so as to fix it more deeply in my memory" (Descartes, Meditation II, 391).

Descartes concludes that neither the sense nor the imagination are capable of grasping the essence or nature of the wax, but the mind alone is capable of grasping the essence of the wax clearly and distinctly.

Descartes also concludes that we know our own mind more clearly and distinctly than we know bodies.

"In the Third Meditation, I have explained at sufficient length, it seems to me, my principal argument for proving the existence of God. Nevertheless, since my intent was to draw the minds of readers as far as possible from the senses, I had no desire to draw upon comparisons based upon corporeal things" ("Synopsis," AT 14).

The discovery in the second mediation that one cannot doubt one’s existence is a powerful insight—it appears to provide a solid foundation knowledge—but it has two problems:

· it leaves the meditator locked inside his own subjectivity (philosophers call this the Cartesian Ego) with no way to explain the reality of his own existence,

· it leaves the meditator without any means to objectively verify his experience because he cannot escape his subjectivity and the senses are unreliable. 

Descartes has essentially painted the meditator into a corner, so that any explanation of existence must be derived from his own mental experience alone. The meditator is like a person who has been locked in a room since birth with no knowledge of anything outside the room. Any knowledge he gains about the world outside the room must then be deduced from clues he discovers from within the room itself. For the meditator, this means that any inquiry into the origin of his existence must begin within his experience as a thinking substance—he will have to begin by examining his own thoughts; but to do this, he will need a criterion for determining whether a thought is true or false.

"The very nature of an idea is such that of itself it needs no formal reality other than what it borrows from my thought, of which it is a mode. But that a particular idea contains this as opposed to that objective reality is surely owing to some cause in which there is at least as much formal reality as there is objective reality contained in the idea" (AT 3:41).

According to Descartes, every idea can have either formal or objective reality, or both (Descartes, Meditations, III, AT 41). 

· The formal reality of an idea is the actual reality of something in the world

· The objective reality of an idea is what the idea directs our mind to—its content. 

"If the objective reality of any of my ideas is found to be so great that I am certain that the same reality was not in me, either formally or eminently, and that therefore I myself cannot be the cause of the idea, then it necessarily follows that I am not alone in the world, but that something else, which is the cause of this idea, also exists" (AT42).

Descartes delineates a three-level hierarchy of reality that includes modes, finite substances, and infinite substances. Each level possesses more reality than the one that precedes it.

"In the Fourth Meditation it is proved that all that we clearly and distinctly perceive is true, and it is also explained what constitutes the nature of falsity. These things necessarily need to be known both to confirm what has preceded as well as to help readers understand what remains" ("Synopsis," AT 15).

“All modes of thinking that we experience within ourselves can be brought under two general headings: perception, or the operation of the intellect, and volition, or the operation of the will. Sensory perception, imagination and pure understanding are simply various modes of perception; desire, aversion, assertion, denial and doubt are various modes of willing” (Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, I, art. 32, AT 18).

The faculty of judgment, according to Descartes, is given to us by God, and given that it has already been established that God cannot deceive us, the meditator is forced to conclude, that the faculty of judgment, when it is used correctly, will lead us to truth instead of error (Descartes, Meditations, IV, AT 54, 58). 

For Descartes, the two operations of the mind—intellect and will—are passive and active functions of the mind, respectively. In order to understand anything we have to will (intend) the object we want to understand, and we cannot will this object without understanding it (Descartes, “Letter To Regius, May 1641,” AT III, 371, 182). The intellect and will are intertwined operations of the mind. The problem is that while the understanding is limited to finite objects like ideas, the will is unlimited—it is infinite.

· There seems to be no limit to what we can desire, and as soon as we quench one desire, another desire takes hold of us. The will, it would seem, is capable of wanting more than it can obtain, and this is why we make errors in our judgments, which Descartes understands as a mode of the will.

In the fourth meditation, Descartes eliminates the possibility that God could deceive him with a simple argument: If God is perfect, and the will to deceive is an indication of imperfection, then it is impossible for God to deceive anyone. 

"In the Fifth Meditation, in addition to an explanation of corporeal nature in general, the existence of God is also demonstrated by means of a new proof. But again several difficulties may arise here; however, these are resolved later in my Replies and Objections. Finally, it is shown how it is true that the certainty of even geometrical demonstrations depends upon the knowledge of God" ("Synopsis," AT 15).

The point of this exercise is to see whether the meditator, who as a thinking substance has been locked inside her own subjectivity since the second meditation exercise, can establish a connection with the world again. To do this, Descartes recommends that she begin with the ideas in her mind.

Descartes guides the meditator through a medieval argument for the existence of God: the ontological argument. The argument was first formulated by St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033 CE-1109 CE) in a little book called the Proslogion (Latin for “proposition” or “statement”) which attempts to convince an atheist of God’s existence from reason alone. 

Descartes thinks if we think about God the same way we think about triangles, we will conclude that just as triangles exist, so also does God exist (Descartes, Meditations, V, AT 65). Descartes’ formulation of the argument is as follows:

Premise 1: God has all perfections.

Premise 2: Existence is one of these perfections.

Premise 3: Perfection entails existence.

Conclusion: Therefore, God exists.

For Descartes, the proposition “God exists” is just as certain and true as the proposition “a triangle has three equal sides.” And the idea of God in our minds cannot be a product of the imagination or the will because, as has already been established in the third meditation, an idea of an infinite God cannot be produced by a finite human mind because every cause must be greater than its effect. This puts the meditator in a strong position regarding the reality of the world. If we have innate ideas that are clearly and distinctly perceived, and one of these ideas is God, and God cannot deceive us, and he has given us a faculty of judgment that, when used properly, can lead us to the truth about reality, then we now have a bridge that we can walk from the inside of our minds into the reality of the external world.

Can we know whether material things exist independently of the mind?

P1: Ideas of material things exist in thought (AT 5:63)

P2: I clearly and distinctly perceive the ideas of extension, movement, and duration (AT 5:63)

P3: Extension, movement, and duration can be treated geometrically or mathematically (AT 5:65).

P4: Geometrical and mathematical ideas have natures that are immutable and eternal and are not products of the mind (AT 5:64)

P5: Geometrical and mathematical ideas are innate and certain (At 5:64).

C: Therefore, the essence of material things are innate and can be known with certitude (At 5:65).

P1: I clearly and distinctly perceive that God exists (AT 5:70).

P2: Everything depends upon God for its existence (AT 5:70).

P3: It is impossible for God to deceive me (AT 5:70).

P4: Everything I clearly and distinctly perceive is true and could exist(AT 5:70).

P5: I clearly and distinctly perceive the essence of material things (extension).

C: Therefore, material things can exist independently of the mind (AT 5:71).

If material things exist independently of the mind, their existence depends on the existence of God.

"Finally, in the Sixth Meditation the understanding is distinguished from the imagination and the marks of this distinction are described. The mind is proved to be really distinct from the body, even though the mind is shown to be so closely joined to the body that it forms a single unit with it. All the errors commonly arising from the senses are reviewed; an account of the ways in which these errors can be avoided is provided. Finally, all the arguments on the basis of which we may infer the existence of material things are presented—not because I believed them to be very useful for proving what they prove, namely, that there really is a world, that men have bodies, and the like (things which no one of sound mind has ever seriously doubted), but rather because, through a consideration of these arguments, one realizes that they are neither so firm nor so evident as the arguments leading us to the knowledge of our mind and of God, so that, of all the things that can be known by the human mind, these latter are the most certain and the most evident" ("Synopsis," AT 15-16).

“By means of these sensations of pain, hunger, thirst and so on, nature also teaches that I am present not merely to my body in the way a sailor is present in a ship, but that I am most tightly joined and, so to speak, commingled with it, so much so that I and the body constitute one single thing. For if this were not the case, then I, who am only a thinking thing, would not sense pain when the body is injured; rather I would perceive the wound by means of a pure intellect, just as a sailor perceives by sight whether anything in his ship is broken” (Descartes, Meditations, VI, AT 81).

If we are simply a mind in a body the way a sailor is in a ship, he argues, then the pains and pleasures we experience in life would never be our pain or our pleasure—they would be simply be a pain or a pleasure. But we get hungry, and accidently shut our fingers in doors, or drink sour milk, feel the warmth of an embrace by a lover or friend. These experiences suggest to us that we are an embodied mind the world. 

The key to establishing the existence of the external world for Descartes is to clearly distinguish between the operations of the imagination and sensation. While the imagination actively envisages objects as if they were present, the senses are merely passive to the objects they report on (Descartes, Meditations, VI, AT 79). 

“Now there clearly is in me a passive faculty of sensing, that is, a faculty for receiving and knowing the ideas of sensible things; but I could not use it unless there also existed, either in me or in something else, a certain active faculty of producing or bringing about these ideas. But this faculty surely cannot be in me, since it clearly presupposes no act of understanding, and these ideas are produced without my cooperation and often even against my will.” (Descartes, Meditations, VI, AT 79).

What the careful meditator discovers is that there must be a world external to the mind that acts upon our bodies in such a way to produce sensations that we like (pleasure) and don’t like (pain). And given that it has already been established that God exists and cannot deceive us, we must conclude that the ideas produced in us by objects in the external world are not illusions but reality. 

Descartes contended that his Meditations demonstrated the following:

· God exists (defeating atheism).

· The soul (conceived of as mind) exists independently of the body (defending the immortality of the soul).

· The external world exists (defeating Skepticism)

René Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy

The Substance of Reality

Meditation 6

Meditation 1

The Reality of the External World

P1: "Nature" teaches me that bodies exist external to my body (AT 6:81).

P2: I sense secondary qualities with my body (e.g., colors, sounds, odors, tastes, heat, roughness, etc.) (AT 6:81).

P3: These sensations are either painful or pleasurable and indicate either harm or benefit (AT 6:81).

P4: I am inclined to avoid pain and pursue pleasure (AT 6:82).

P5: God is the creator of the nature that teaches me that bodies exist external to my body (AT 6:82).

P6: It is impossible for God to deceive me (AT 6:84). 

C: Therefore, bodies exist external to the mind.

The Defense of the Soul (Immaterial Mind)

P1: God is able to create everything that I clearly and distinctly conceive (AT 6: 78).

P2: God is able to create one thing independently from another (AT 6:78).

P3: Things created independently of one another are distinct from from one another (AT 6:78).

P4: God can create the mind independently of the body (AT 6:78).

P5: I have a clear and distinct idea of the essence of myself as a thinking substance (AT 6:78).

P6: I have a clear and distinct idea of the essence of my body as a material and extended thing (AT 6:78)

P7: God can create a body indepedent of a mind (AT 6:78).

P8: My mind is distinct from the body (AT 6:78).

C: I, as a thinking substance, can exist independently of the body.

Descartes's Spiritual Exercises

Meditation 5

Meditation 2

The Escape from Doubt

Wax Example

The Cogito

The Ontological Argument

Descartes' Substance Dualism?

The Substance of Reality

Meditation 3

Meditation 4

Infinite Substance: God

Finite Substance: Bodies and Minds

Ideas and Reality

Objective Reality

Modifications of Substances: Qualities and Ideas

Formal Reality

Proofs of God's Existence

Causal Argument

Preservation Argument

· Every effect must have a cause.

· The idea of God as an infinitely perfect being is a mental effect that must have a cause which possesses more perfection than the effect (Causal Adequacy Principle).

· The mind that has this idea of an infinitely perfect God is not equal to the perfection of the God that the idea represents.

· The mind cannot be the cause of the idea of a infinitely perfect God.

· An infinitely perfect God must be the cause of the idea that represents this God.

· Therefore, an infinitely perfect being,

i.e., God, exists.

· I exist as a being who has an idea of God.

· Every existent has a cause

of its existence that preserves its existence. 

· Any existent capable of causing and preserving its own existence perpetually would have given itself every perfection and would lack nothing.

· Any existent that doubts or desire things that it lacks is imperfect.

· Therefore, I cannot be the cause of my own existence nor the agent of its preservation.

· A being which is the cause of my

existence and its preservation would also

be the cause of my idea of God.

· Only an infinitely perfect God is capable of causing and preserving my existence and causing the idea of God in me.

· Therefore, God exists.

Descartes had learned the value of meditative practice while enrolled at the Jesuit college of La Flèche in Anjou, France in the early sixteenth century, where he came into contact with the Spiritual Exercises of the Catholic saint Ignatius of Loyola. In these exercises, the meditator is asked to imagine himself in various events in the life of Jesus to cultivate a devotion to Jesus as well as the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. 

Aristotle held that understanding reality (metaphysics) was necessary to do science (physics). To do this, he began with the most basic category of reality: substance. For Aristotle, a substance is "that of which everything else is predicated, while it is itself not predicated of anything else" (Aristotle, Metaphysics, Z.III)--a substance is an individual thing that we can point to in the world that has qualities or attributes we can describe.

"All we can mean by ‘substance’ is‘thing that exists in such a way that it doesn’t depend on anything else for its existence’. Actually, there’s only one substance that can be understood to depend on nothing else, namely God. We can see that all the other substances can exist only with God’s help. So the term ‘substance’ doesn’t apply in the same sense to God and to other things—meaning that no clearly intelligible sense of the term is common to God and to things he has created" (Descartes, Priniciples of Philosophy, I.52).

The 3 Phases of Descartes's Methodological Doubt

· He doubts any information received from the senses because our senses do not always provide reliable information about reality.

· He doubts any information received from the imagination because—it makes use of the feelings and data delivered by the senses.

· Descartes entertains the possibility that his perception of reality is a simulation produced by an evil genius.

Formal Reality

Objective Reality

Descartes's Faculty Psychology

Descartes places the human being in the middle of what medieval theologians called The Great Chain of Being that extends from the absolute being of God to complete non-being (Descartes, Meditations, IV, AT 54). God is the most complete reality, and everything that extends below him (e.g., angels, human beings, animals, plants, rocks) has less and less reality. So, Descartes argues that “so long as I think exclusively about God and focus my attention exclusively on him, I discern no cause of error or falsity. But once I turn my attention back on myself, I nevertheless experience that I am subject to countless errors” (Descartes, Meditations, IV, AT 54). 

· If we consider the will, which Descartes defines as the power “to do or not do the same thing, that is, of being able to affirm or deny, to pursue or to shun,” and that this power is infinite, we will realize that “we bear a certain image and likeness of God” (Descartes, Meditations, IV, AT 57). But we are not God, and when we allow our will to reach beyond the boundaries of the clear and distinct ideas provided by the intellect we make errors (Descartes, Meditations, IV, AT 58).