by Henry Piper (all rights reserved)
Meditation III: The Existence of God
Whereas Descartes was uncertain of whether any knowledge was possible at the end of Meditation I, at the end of Meditation II he has established that he can know something—that “I exist”; however, as we observed above, this is not as great an accomplishment as it may seem, since Descartes knows only that I exist and not what “I” am. So, Descartes’s question becomes, what is this “I?” Though in Meditation II he goes on to explore the powers of this “I,” finding it to be essentially nothing but a “thinking thing,” which he refers to as a “mind,” still he is effectively stuck within the confines of his own thought. Thus on the one hand Meditation II constitutes a great advance in establishing that knowledge is in principle possible; however, what can be known seems still to be severely limited.
In Meditation III, Descartes sets out further to explore the nature and powers of his thought. His first move is to observe that, based on his derivation of the truth of “I exist,” he has effectively established a two-part criterion for metaphysically certain knowledge: he can now “posit as a general rule that anything I very clearly and distinctly perceive is true.” A perception that is “clear” is evidently one that is not obscure, something known immediately and self-evidently—something that, when observed closely and single-mindedly, cannot fail to be true. But such clarity can only reasonably be expected of something that is also “distinct”—that is, simple and undivided and apart from other things. Thus we could not hope to keep clearly before our mind a matter of composite parts, for we couldn’t take it all in at once; something simple and distinct unto itself, however, we could in principle perceive so clearly as to be able to affirm its self-evident truth.
However, the only thing thus far satisfying this standard of “clear and distinct” truth is the one truth of “I think therefore I exist”; as to all else, doubt seems inevitable, even, perhaps, as to matters as apparently self-evident as mathematical truths, as long as it is not absolutely inconceivable that an evil genius is deceiving us. Descartes reiterates that there is “no reason” for thinking positively that this is actually so, and thus his supposition of the evil genius is “very tenuous and, so to speak, metaphysical”; nonetheless, in the pursuit of “metaphysical certainty,” as we have seen in Meditation I, we must respect such a “metaphysical” doubt until we have positive and indubitable reason to rule it out.
How to Rule Out the Evil Genius: Prove that God Exists and that God is Not an Evil Genius
This brings Descartes inexorably to the consideration of the existence of God. It is important to note that Descartes does not take up the subject of God arbitrarily or simply out of personal or religious interest; rather, in pursuing his epistemological project—the quest for certain knowledge—Descartes now sees that the proof of the existence of God has become the obligatory next step, for until he establishes that God exists and that God cannot be a deceiver he will remain stuck in doubt of everything except his own existence as a thinking thing. However great the power of thinking itself may be, until the possibility of an evil genius is ruled out the content of his thought will always carry the possibility of illusion and falsity since what he is thinking might not exist at all.
The Nature and Variety of Ideas
He begins by considering the nature of that content and notes that it consists of ideas, which are “images of things”; in addition, thought contains various modifications of these ideas—that is, things he thinks about the ideas, such as volitions, affects and judgments. The ideas themselves, he observes, “cannot, properly speaking, be false,” meaning that it is always true that I think what I think; what can be false is only what I think about the idea, such as that it represents a thing that exists physically, since I now realize that, as exemplified by my dreams, this is not necessarily so—I think I see a physical dragon in my dream, but the dragon I “see” is only a thought. Thus, falsity occurs in the case of judgment, when I judge, for example, that what I think I see is not merely an idea but actually exists physically, which, as in the dream, it does not, and falsity can also occur when I judge that what I think I see exists as I see it, as in the case when a small object that is near appears larger than a distant object.
Descartes then wonders about the origin of ideas, and he observes that they are of three kinds—either “innate,” “adventitious” or “produced by me.” “Innate” means “inborn”—that is, built into one’s nature. “Adventitious” means roughly the opposite—that is, something external, coming from without. And “produced by me” is obviously something that is neither born in me, nor comes from without, but something that I invent on my own.
It is adventitious ideas that have most bedeviled us thus far, as they present the clearest possibility of deception; specifically, so far we have no way of being certain that the ideas in our minds of the things we think we see in a world external to us are in fact physically real and external, or not. So Descartes now turns to the issue of whether there is reason to believe that the ideas in my head resemble things outside my head, which is clearly the assumption we all make as we look about the world, but an assumption, as we have become aware, that could be entirely false. So why do I think that what I see refers to physical things outside me? First, observes Descartes, I seem to “have been so taught by nature”—that is, “I am driven by a spontaneous impulse”; in other words, I just automatically assume that my senses are accurately registering the outside world. I do not, however, have any firm reason to believe so, since I make this assumption precisely without any thinking or reasoning at all; more specifically, I am not guided in this by a “light of nature”—a phrase referring to the sort of self-evident, clear and distinct perceptions that we are able to accept, after careful consideration, as true. Again, here there is no consideration at all, and clearly such thoughtless judgments cannot be relied on to produce reliable truth. Moreover, second, even if there is nothing intrinsically false about given ideas, “it does not follow that they necessarily proceed from things existing outside me.” Rather than originating outside of me, in other words, “perhaps there is also in me some other faculty… which produces these ideas,” analogous to the ideas of my dreams. Finally, says Descartes, “even if these ideas did proceed from things other than myself, it does not therefore follow that they must resemble those things.” Thus, for example, I have in my mind
two distinct ideas of the sun. One idea is drawn, as it were, from the senses…. By means of this idea the sun appears to me to be quite small. But there is another idea, one derived from astronomical reasoning…. Through this idea the sun is shown to be several times larger than the earth… and reason convinces me that the idea that seems to have emanated from the sun itself from so close is the very one that least resembles the sun.
In other words, the sense image of the sun shows it to be a bright ball in the sky almost exactly the size of the moon and much smaller, obviously, than the earth; but simple astronomical calculations present another idea, namely that the sun is in fact much larger than the earth, and with but little reflection, based on a long experience of observation, I can be sure that the latter idea is closer to the truth of the sun and thus better “resembles” the sun itself. Thus I easily perceive that the immediate sense image, or sense-object, in my mind, clearly resembles the true sun but little and in fact is tremendously deceptive; by contrast, when I engage in a course of formal reasoning, I arrive at an idea of the sun much closer to the truth.
So here we have observed two kinds of ideas, one “objective”—that is, based on the immediate object presented to my senses and existing as sense-object in my imagination—the other “formal”—that is, the result of a course of reason following certain well-established rules, by which I go beyond the immediate appearance of the thing to investigate what causes it to appear as it does.
The Idea of God
Following this distinction between ways of perceiving a given idea, such as the sun, Descartes next observes that, though they are alike in their all being “merely modes of thought,” there is a great difference among the kinds of things that he might have an idea of. For example, there is a great difference between the idea of a substance and the idea of an accident of a substance, though as ideas they are both simply mental entities. Specifically, there is a greater “objective reality” to the idea of a substance than to that of an accident of it, since the substance has to exist first in order for any accidental quality to subsist in it; moreover, a substance persists even after a given accident is modified or eliminated, whereas with the elimination of a substance all its accidents are eliminated too. For example, the substance of “desk” has more “objective reality” than the accident “wooden,” since the reality of the desk would remain even if its woodenness were replaced by metal or glass. And there is one idea, in particular, that clearly seems to have a unique kind of objective reality, which places it in a class alone, namely the idea of “a supreme deity, eternal, infinite, omniscient, omnipotent, and creator of all things other than himself,” that is, of course, God. But given the transcendent supremacy of the idea of God relative to all other ideas, is it reasonable to assert that I really have or think this idea in any meaningful way? In fact, according to Descartes, this idea is the most real to me of all, but how can this be?
Do We Really Have an Idea of God?
Let us consider what we have learned so far, from Meditations I and II, as well as from the other philosophers we have considered previously. Things are not always as they seem, in fact it is fair to say that reality is frequently very different from appearance if not downright contrary to it; isn’t this pretty clear by now? In this regard, consider Descartes’s discussion of physical, corporeal reality. As he has emphasized repeatedly, bodies seem very real to us, almost invariably and on a constant, daily basis; indeed, it is ideas that are the difficult things to grasp, or so it would seem. But haven’t we learned that, in some ways, bodies are the things we grasp and know least of all? After all, it is indisputable that what we immediately perceive are only our own perceptions, and perceptions are by definition mental entities, not physical: if we experience the physical world, which we certainly seem to do, it can only be through mental perceptions that we do so. Thus, as Descartes has shown us, bodies that seem to us very real indeed may not exist physically at all, or their physical existence may be radically different from their appearance as represented by our physical vision.
In this light, consider Descartes’s claim that I actually do perceive the infinite idea of God. Since I myself am clearly finite, it would seem on the face of it that the opposite would be true—that I could clearly perceive the finite, but not the infinite, and that the term “infinite” is simply one I derive from my perception of the finite, and more specifically that “infinite” is simply a designation of the negation of the finite. In other words, it seems obvious that I perceive the finite directly, and then coin the term “infinite” for everything the finite is not and thus for everything that I do not perceive. According to Descartes, however, I would be making the same mistake here as I made with my perception of bodies: what seems to be most clear before I’ve really thought about it turns out to be exactly backwards, since, as in the case of bodies, what seems most clear and true is actually perhaps the most obscure and even false. Thus Descartes can reasonably say, “I clearly understand that there is more reality in an infinite substance than there is in a finite one. Thus the perception of the infinite is somehow prior in me to the perception of the finite, that is, my perception of God is prior to my perception of myself.” In other words, because there is “more reality” in the infinite than in the finite, my idea of the infinite is the more real idea, since there is more to have an idea of—there is more reality to grasp, more to hold on to, so to speak. We may recall that we have rehearsed this argument before in Anselm when we considered whether we could grasp the immortality of God. There, as here, we observed that we use the positive linguistic formulation for “mortal” and the negation “immortal”—that is, not mortal—for its opposite; we do this, presumably, since we are thinking of our own mortality, as if to be mortal is somehow more real than to be immortal. But the genuinely positive reality is clearly immortal, whereas to be mortal is precisely not to be immortal—to perish rather than to persist. So these terms—“mortal” and “immortal,” just like “finite” and “infinite”—reflect the opposite of the genuine reality of what the terms refer to, the negative terms referring to the positive reality and vice versa. Finally, we ought to recall that this line of argument goes all the way back to Plato, from whom we learned that what we don’t see—the eternal, unchanging ideas and mathematical truths of Being—is arguably more real than what we do see—the changing and illusory physical world where everything is merely becoming. And can we doubt that we perceive the reality of eternal Being?: do we not perceive, beyond doubt, that 2+3=5?
Recall, by the way, that Anselm’s point about immortality was raised to support the idea that we can think about the existence of God without being able directly to comprehend God’s nature; and the same is essentially true of Descartes. Thus to say, with Anselm, that we perceive the greatness of immortality is not to say that we perceive God directly; similarly, to perceive the reality of the infinite as against the relative obscurity of the finite is not to assert that we can fully grasp the infinite, for we are still ourselves finite. But what we are talking about here is ideas, and clearly the idea of the infinite is an idea that possesses an “objective reality” far greater than that of the finite; that is, again, simply to say that the idea of the infinite is clearly the idea of a thing greater than the idea of the finite. Even if we cannot grasp God Itself, here we are only expected to grasp the idea of God and the relative greatness, or reality, of that idea.
Thus Descartes observes of the idea of the being of God, “although I could perhaps pretend that such a being does not exist, nevertheless I could not pretend that the idea of such a being discloses nothing real.” In other words, like Anselm’s fool, who “says in his heart, there is no god,” though we can assert the non-existence of God Itself, yet even a fool cannot deny that he possesses in his understanding a real idea of God. So even if we do not acknowledge that God exists, much less grasp the being of God Itself, still we cannot deny that we can think the idea of God as a hypothetical and potentially real entity. Though the approaches of the two philosophers differ greatly, for both Anselm and Descartes the close consideration of the idea of God leads to the logical conclusion that God must necessarily exist. As for Anselm, once we sufficiently examine the very idea itself, we are driven to the inevitable logical conclusion that it can only refer to a being that actually exists; by contrast, Descartes’s approach is to ask where this idea comes from, ultimately to conclude that it can only come from God.
Though I will consider this further later on, we might now observe Descartes as combining the approaches of Anselm and Aquinas, taking from Anselm the very idea of God as his starting point, but turning to Aquinas to consider the chain of causation that leads back, inevitably, to the necessary existence of God.
Where Does the Infinite Idea of God Come From?
Now we can consider Descartes’s proof of God’s existence. It begins with the idea of God, which we clearly perceive, even if it is only an idea, just as we perceive that 2+3=5 even though it too is “only” an idea. Where does this idea come from, asks Descartes? Everything comes from something, nothing comes from nothing, for every effect there must be a cause; so what causes the idea of God in me? Descartes asserts that the cause of something must be at least as real, or have as much being, as the effect it causes. Thus, for example, if a moving billiard ball hits another one at rest, clearly the resting ball will be moved by the energy of the impact; but clearly the resting ball cannot move with any greater energy than whatever had been previously contained in the first ball: there must be at least as much reality—or power or force—in the cause as in the effect. When the moving ball hits the resting ball, the resting ball cannot move faster than the speed of the first ball, and will probably receive only part of the energy contained in the first and thus move more slowly than the first was moving.
In the same way, whatever idea I might have in my head can have no more reality in it than what causes it, and it will likely be more obscure and less real than the thing it is an idea of, since the idea is only a mental representation of the thing that causes it. Whatever “objective reality” my idea has―that is, whatever the mental reality is of the object that my idea is an idea of—must come from some cause. As we noted above with respect to the two ideas I have of the sun, the more real idea (of a large sun) is “formal” in that it explains the cause of a thing—the “form” or design or actuality of a thing or what causes the thing to be the way it is; by contrast, the image in my head (of a small sun) is simply an object in my mind, and far removed from the actual reality of the sun itself. Thus the form of the sun, a large sun, furnished by astronomical reasoning is more real and actual than the immediate sense object, of a small sun, in my mind; both are ideas in my mind, but the formal reality of the one is greater than the objective reality of the other.
Analogously, the form or design of a house is the cause that gives the way for the house to be built according to the exacting specifications of the architect; but when and if the house is eventually built, the design will likely be more perfect or real than the finished building, since the builder may cut corners or not follow directions precisely. This is what Descartes means when he says that the fact “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.” In other words, the formal reality of the design or cause is at least as real or actual as the object it causes; and the object it causes can be no greater than it. Just as the form, or design, must precede, and be as great or greater than, the object it is a design of, so the reality of the cause of an idea must precede and be as great as or greater than the idea that it causes.
It is worth recalling Aristotle on this point, for whom the material cause of an object was associated with mere potentiality, whereas the formal cause was closer to realizing the actuality of the thing. Here, the formal reality of an idea constitutes the actuality of what the idea is an idea of, without which there could be no idea, just as there could be no desk without the form or design of the desk; by contrast, for a particular wooden desk we could substitute innumerable types of matter and still have a desk. So the formal reality necessary to make a desk is prior to or more vital to the being of a desk than the objective reality of a particular wooden desk, just as the form of the desk is prior to and greater, or more perfect than, the objective desk.
Could the Idea of God Be Produced by Me?
Clearly I have an idea of an infinite, eternal and all-powerful God, but where could this idea have come from? As we consider ideas and their origins, it is vital to keep in mind that we are dealing with real things, as the dragon in my dream is a real idea though it is an idea that derives not from a physical thing outside me but exists simply as a thought in my own mind. In addition to ideas of corporeal, or “extended” things, like the dragon, there is another idea we have come across, such as the idea of myself—namely the “I” that necessarily exists—which is an idea not of extension but of thought; and now in Meditation III we add a totally different kind of idea—the idea of God. So, as to these three kinds of ideas—thought, extension and God—where have they come from, what is their cause, what must exist in order to make them possible?
The reality of thought, specifically the thought of and by myself, we covered in Meditation II, and that, it seems, is essentially self-evident: I think therefore I am, and I need not look beyond myself to know myself as simply the “I” that exists. As for the ideas of corporeal things, Descartes takes considerable and technical pains to argue that the ideas of corporeal things can or might be produced within his own thought: they too, argues Descartes, like the idea of “I,” could be derived from me, for I am a substance, which is “a thing suitable for existing in itself,” and though I am a thinking substance rather than an extended substance, as a substance my self contains the same reality as a bodily substance—I am self-subsistent. Thus, there is nothing in corporeal things as such that essentially exceeds my own reality as “thinking thing.” Some aspects of bodies are part my own immediate being, such as duration and number, and thus can be said to belong to me “formally” since I can bring them about from myself. Other things are merely the accidental attributes of bodies, such as hot or cold, and these may be “materially false”—that is, not materially real, as such qualities are not real in themselves but only relative to each other and thus not independently real at all, such that it is not even clear whether cold is merely the privation of heat or the other way around. But other things, such as “extension, shape, position and motion,” which are attributes lacking in me as a thinking thing, are nonetheless simply “modes of a substance” and therefore may well exist in me “eminently” if not “formally—that is, I may not be able to create actual bodily existence from my own thought, since I am not myself a body, but I can, in principle, fully grasp the idea of bodies and therefore the essence of all things bodily, including their possible modifications, since a body is like me in its being a simple, finite substance. In brief, we can readily acknowledge that I dream of the dragon, the reality of which is actually a very simple composite of everyday, corporeal things or idea—lizard, very large, fire—and I can conjure up from pure thought, within myself, the idea of this physical thing though this actual dream dragon is not and never has been physical.
“Thus,” continues Descartes—having determined at least in principle that the ideas of extension and of thought can come strictly from me, “there remains only the idea of God,” and we must “investigate whether there is anything in this idea that could not have originated in me.” We have already observed, above, that the idea of God, as an idea, is a real thing, even if we can “pretend,” like Anselm’s fool, that this idea is only an idea and refers to no real, independent entity; we may not be able fully to grasp the reality to which the idea refers, since it is an idea of an infinite and immortal thing, but we can still grasp what it must mean. So the question now becomes, could I have come up with this idea on my own—could it have originated, independently, in me? Maybe, suggests Descartes, “I am something greater than I myself understand. Perhaps all these perfections that I am attributing to God are in me potentially, although they do not yet assert themselves and are not yet actualized.” But Descartes promptly rejects this possibility, for three reasons. First, harkening back to Aristotle’s Prime Mover, God, as the creator of all that is, must be pure and perfect actuality, thus in God “there is nothing whatever that is potential”—i.e., God can only be necessary. Second, my own knowledge gradually increases, as we have observed during the preceding Meditations, and it could, in principle, so increase indefinitely; but that means that it will always be limited and never “actually infinite, because it will never reach a point at which it is incapable of greater increase,” whereas “nothing can be added” to the perfection of God. “Finally,” says Descartes, “I perceive that the objective being of an idea cannot be produced by a merely potential being (which, strictly speaking, is nothing) but only by an actual or formal being.” In other words, whatever potential I might have, in order to make that potential actual some preexisting motive power must exist to cause the movement from potentiality to actuality; as in the case of Aquinas’s argument from motion, there must be some ultimate, actual mover in order that things only potentially in motion might actually move. Indeed, furthermore, if such a motive power existed autonomously within me, making me responsible for my own existence, then all that I am potentially I would already be actually: observes Descartes, “I would have given myself all the perfections of which I have some idea; in so doing, I myself would be God!” We might say, in other words, that if I could create myself from nothing, then I could create myself as anything.
In short, the idea of God is not one I am responsible for; for that to be the case, I would have to possess the actual, formal reality sufficient to cause such an idea, but I am clearly not even responsible for my own existence. Yet I do exist, and though I am in principle capable of deriving from my own being any other kind of idea, says Descartes, the idea of God is the one, unique idea that clearly cannot have derived from me; as for Anselm, the idea of God is one-of-a-kind, in a class by itself. I do comprehend this idea, but, like any idea, what causes it must have at least as much reality as the thought itself—that is, this idea can only have been caused by a reality that is as great as its idea; moreover, since I am obviously not equal to the idea of God—that is, I am not God myself—the idea of God can only have come from a reality at least as great as God, which can only be God, so God must necessarily exist.
Echoes of Anselm and Aquinas
In case you got bogged down in the previous section, let me sum up the essence of it. There are three possible kinds of ideas—ideas of pure thought such as “I think,” ideas of corporeal things such as the dragon and the ball of wax, and the idea of God. It is reasonable to conclude that these first two kind of ideas could be produced purely by my own thinking—“I think” seems clearly to be strictly my own idea, and in my dreams I think of physical things like the dragon even though there is no actual, physical dragon, and I came to realize that I identify the being of the wax strictly by “the mind alone,” so in principle even ideas of corporeal things could conceivably originate in my own thought. The idea of God, however, is different, because ideas obviously don’t come from nowhere, and an idea can’t have any more reality than the thing that it’s an idea of. As just noted, I am at least equal to the idea of “I think,” and the reality of a dreamed dragon is simply a thought like any other, and my thought of it is obviously just in me, which could be true of any corporeal thing since, for all I know, there is no corporeal thing beyond my own ideas. There is no shame in having trouble with this part of the argument: I do, though I do think it is plausible. But it should not be difficult to grasp that the idea of God is an idea of something, if it exists, that is unfathomably greater than I, and thus an idea of a thing that could not have been produced by me in the same way as the ideas of “I exist” and my dreamed dragon. So, to cut right to Descartes’s conclusion, the idea of God must have come from a being at least as great as what the idea is an idea of, which can only be God.
Thus, Descartes’s proof of the existence of God, like that of Anselm, takes its point of departure from the idea of God, and both proofs, moreover, proceed from the mere examination of that idea to the conclusion that God must necessarily exist. However, as similar in principle as Descartes may be to Anselm, although differing in execution, Descartes also draws on elements of Aquinas; indeed, in Descartes’s proof we can see echoes, perhaps, of Aquinas’s “five ways” of proving God’s existence.
First, it is the essence of Descartes’s proof to rely on the principle of causation, which is also fundamental to the approach of Aquinas, following Aristotle. Thus, after establishing the nature and existence of the idea of God that is within him, Descartes does not follow Anselm to examine the idea itself; rather, Descartes turns to the question of what caused him to have the idea in the first place. What he finds is that, just as his own existence can only be explained by some ultimate, actual cause that contains formally—or causally or actually—all the reality that he observes objectively in himself (observing himself, that is, as his object), so too the idea of God must derive formally from some entity possessing all the reality contained in the object that he has an idea of, which in this case is God. Moreover, as to his own existence, “because I am a thinking thing and have within me a certain idea of God, it must be granted that what caused me is also a thinking thing and it too has an idea of all the perfections which I attribute to God.” Moreover, this cannot be another being just like him—for example his parents—for that would lead him to the question of who produced them and so into an infinite regress, leaving him with no actual explanation of his origin. Finally, it is clear that even if a being just like him might have set him off into the world, it is clear that such a being cannot preserve and sustain his being, moment by moment, through time, any more than he can claim to be sustaining himself; indeed, as noted in Meditation II, were he to stop thinking, presumably he would stop existing. Moreover, were he to possess such power of self-subsistence, he would surely be aware of it, and moreover he would presumably equally possess the power of self-creation, which, as we have noted, he clearly does not.
In these arguments based on the cause of the idea of God and the cause of himself, we see echoes of Aquinas’s first and second ways of proving the existence of God—the way of motion and the way of efficient cause. The way of motion is analogous to Aristotle’s argument for the necessity of a prime mover—an ultimate, self-moved yet unmoved mover—who embodies in complete actuality the origin and indeed the very being of motion itself. And this ultimate mover is responsible too for the perfect continuity of all discrete movements, from one moment to the next, as a cause is needed to bring the links of the chain together just as for the creation of the individual links, or motions, themselves. Thus the idea of God as not only the beginning of all motion but also as the sustainer of the continuity of all motion—and the continuity of my thought and thus my own existence—echoes Aquinas’s argument from efficient cause, according to which the chain of causation requires some force that connects together its individual links.
Aquinas’s third way of proving that God exists is worth recounting. Aquinas argues that if everything were merely possible and nothing necessary, then, by definition, it would be possible for everything not to be at the same time, since to be possible simply means that something can both be and not be; and if we speculate ourselves into the infinite past, we would eventually encounter even the remotest of possibilities (like all of our 100 pennies coming up not-tails at the same time), including the possibility of all things not-being at the same time. Therefore, since the assumption that all things are merely possible means that at some time in the past all things must have been not-being at the same time, we would be forced to conclude that nothing could exist now, since from nothing, nothing could have come. But this is demonstrably false, since things do exist now, so our premise must be false, therefore something must be necessary and that necessary being can only be identified as God.
Descartes echoes this absolute distinction between possibility and necessity in his recognition that our own finitude separates us absolutely from what can only be the “actually infinite” being of God: despite our capacity to extend our knowledge indefinitely, this means merely that I have indefinite potential to increase my knowledge, whereas, as we noted above, “in God there is nothing whatever that is potential.” Thus, in absolute distinction to the “actually infinite” nature of God, the very fact that I can indefinitely extend my knowledge “is itself a most certain proof of imperfection,” since by definition my knowledge “will never reach a point where it is incapable of greater increase.” Thus while I, a finite being, might go on forever gaining greater and greater knowledge and power, I will always be able to increase further, since continual increase can never achieve infinitude; I can indefinitely engage in the perfecting of myself, but that simply confirms that I can never thereby achieve perfection, just as there is no infinite number, since I can indefinitely continue increasing the number I can count to, but I can always increase it further by adding one to it. Thus there is an echo of necessity in the “actually infinite” nature of God as compared to the mere potentiality to which our own finite being is bound.
We see an echo of Aquinas’s fourth way, perhaps, in Descartes’s discussion of our grasp of an infinite idea: Aquinas’s fourth way concerns the notion of gradation, according to which we grasp, if only indirectly, the ideal reality of a “maximum” of every kind of thing, such as being and goodness; thus, though we may not grasp directly the perfect actuality of the good or being itself, we grasp them indirectly by what we do directly experience, namely the various gradations of being and goodness we experience in the world, which we can only experience by reference to an idea of the ultimate reality to which they refer. So for Descartes, though bound by finitude, we nonetheless observe our potential to achieve greater and greater gradations of being and reality in our continuing quest for knowledge and so approach the infinite, even while being forced to acknowledge that it must forever elude us. In other words, though not infinite ourselves, and thus incapable of grasping fully the actuality of infinity, the ideal reality of the infinite is fully cognizable to us in reference to our own finitude, indeed, as we have previously noted, the idea of the infinite is the more real idea, and “the perception of the infinite is somehow prior in me to the perception of the finite.” In other words, in truth I perceive the finite by reference to the infinite and not the other way around.
Finally, as to Aquinas’s argument from governance, there is a sense in which Descartes’s entire argument presupposes at least the divine guidance of himself. Descartes sees the presence of the idea of God within his mind as “the mark of the craftsman impressed upon his work”; it is thus that the idea of God, being neither adventitious nor produced by him, must be an innate idea, part of his very being. He goes on to observe, “The whole force of the argument rests on the fact that I recognize that it would be impossible for me to exist, being of such a nature as I am (namely, having in me the idea of God), unless God did in fact exist.” Thus, the essence of Descartes’s entire argument is that there is a force moving him for which he cannot be responsible, and that, specifically, it is precisely the idea of God that alerts him to the proposition that “I am not alone in the world, but that something else, which is the cause of this idea, also exists.” Moreover, this idea, and the nature of his own mind, which seems uniquely to reflect the likeness of God within him, however imperfectly, is also the motivation for his own striving for the greater perfection of his own knowledge and being.
Conclusion of Meditation III: God is Not a Deceiver, Thus We Can Rule Out the Evil Genius!
Recall that the reason that Descartes takes up the question of God’s existence is that, at the end of Meditation II, he still had no way to be certain that there was not an evil genius deceiving him: he didn’t positively think that there was an evil genius, but it was still not beyond all doubt. So, to be able to gain any knowledge beyond that of “I exist,” he had to see if he could logically rule out the evil genius—to put this possibility behind him, to “rule it out.” At the beginning of Meditation III, he reasons that if he can prove that God exists—a being perfect in every way and a being thus that must be perfectly true and incapable of deception—then the possibility of an evil genius would be eliminated by the perfection of an all-good God. God’s perfection—his total lack of any “defect”—makes the deception of the evil genius impossible, says Descartes, since God “cannot be a deceiver, for it is manifest by the light of nature that all fraud and deception depend on some defect.” So it is only upon proof that God exists that we can proclaim ourselves free of the “metaphysical hypothesis” of the evil genius, and thus free ourselves to progress in the pursuit of knowledge, remaining ever vigilant, of course, in the awareness that any future deception will be our own.
Meditation IV: Finite Understanding but Infinite Will
In Meditation IV, Descartes first reconfirms that God, being the perfect being, cannot be a deceiver, as deception is inherently inconsistent with perfection. This, as we have observed, opens the way forward for the pursuit of knowledge. Why, however, can I be deceived in the first place? Descartes concludes that there is no error in the understanding, for it simply understands what it understands, and is, moreover, clearly finite in the extent of what it understands; however, Descartes perceives no limit to the range of the will, so the will is able to exceed the understanding, thus it is the will that is responsible for error and deception when it makes judgments—when it chooses or decides to believe something—beyond what the understanding is capable of. In other words, my will is responsible for judgments, and when my will exceeds the understanding by judging something to exist that is not clearly and distinctly perceived by the understanding, then error results. Thus, for example, if I use my understanding—my power of reason—properly, then it will tell me that 2+3=5; however, I can still use my will to choose to believe that 2+3=6, and more generally I can know the truth and still lie. Clearly God could have made us incapable of error and deception, but that would mean the elimination of free will (see the chapter on Augustine); moreover, God is not responsible for my deception, for, as Descartes’s Meditations themselves attest, God has given us the capacity to detect our own deception and so the power to avoid it if we use the will rightly. Thus we are fully capable of extending our understanding indefinitely, through the use of the will’s power of judgment, as long as we remain ever vigilant to avoid error by refraining from judgments that exceed the capacity of our understanding.
Thus at the end of Meditation IV Descartes has learned not only “what I should avoid in order that I may not err, but also how I should act in order that I may arrive at a knowledge of the truth; for without doubt I shall arrive at this end if I devote my attention sufficiently to those things which I perfectly understand; and if I separate from these that which I only understand confusedly and with obscurity.” In short, as he proceeds, Descartes will maintain the discipline already developed in the preceding meditations by doubting everything that he cannot “clearly and distinctly perceive” to be true, thereby assuring himself that, though his knowledge may well be limited, yet he will not fall into error and therefore he might expect to be able to extend his knowledge indefinitely.
Meditation V: How Knowledge of Complex Things Might be Possible
In addition to reconfirming that God is not a deceiver, at the beginning of Meditation IV Descartes also reconfirms that he thus far knows only two things with certainty, first that “I exist” and second that God exists; both these things are simple, distinct entities that, on reflection, cannot possibly be false and thus are known “clearly and distinctly.” In Meditation V, Descartes progresses to determine that further and more complex things, notably including corporeal things, may, in principle at least, be known as well.
Descartes first determines to limit himself to the observation of the operations of his own mind, ignoring the possibility of the existence of anything external to him, and he observes that there are certain truths of a mathematical character “whose truth is so manifest, and so well accords with my nature, that when I begin to discover them, it seems to me that I learn nothing new, or recollect what I formerly knew—that is to say, that I for the first time perceive things which were already present to my mind, although I had not yet applied my mind to them.” There is a clear echo here of Plato’s epistemological theory of Recollection, indeed Descartes makes reference to precisely the sort of eternal and immutable truths that constituted the only possible objects of knowledge for Plato. Thus, for example, Descartes observes that when he thinks of a triangle, he can only reasonably be thinking of a figure whose three angles total 180 degrees; moreover, this knowledge of the triangle is clearly utterly independent of the senses “because I can form in my mind an infinitude of other figures regarding which I cannot have the least conception of their ever having been objects of sense, and I can nevertheless demonstrate various properties pertaining to their nature as well as to that of the triangle.” Again, there is no reason necessarily why I should ever think of a triangle, but once I turn my mind to it, certain truths about its nature (such as the Pythagorean Theorem) are clearly and distinctly true and thus beyond doubt.
Descartes now turns his attention to the existence of God, noting that, just as the quality of having three sides pertains to the triangle, so does the quality of necessary existence pertain to God, since the idea of God is precisely the idea of a “supremely perfect Being” to the nature of which clearly “eternal existence pertains”: “I clearly see that existence can no more be separated from the essence of God than can having its three angles equal to two right angles be separated from the essence of a triangle, or the idea of a mountain from the idea of a valley.” Descartes here borrows a sense of the argument of Anselm, for whom, as we have seen, the idea of God, even to one who does not believe in the existence of God, can only be a being “than which a greater cannot be thought” and thus a being that cannot even be thought not to exist. On the other hand, clearly there is no logical inconsistency in thinking of a mountain as not existing, and, in fact, we might well say the same of a triangle; thus, it is true only that if a mountain exists, then the valley must exist also, and if a three-sided plane figure exists, then its three angles must total 180 degrees. Descartes does suggest that existence pertains to God in the same way that 180 degrees pertains to a triangle, but, to avoid any suggestion of the “Lost Island” objection that Gaunilo makes to Anselm—which we saw to involve an ill-founded comparison of God to anything else—we must recall Anselm’s insistence that the idea of God is a unique, truly one-of-a-kind idea and the only idea to which it can be said that existence necessarily pertains, since, as a matter of self-evident logic, only one thing can be “supremely perfect”—so great, that is, that no greater thing than it can even be conceived. So again, a triangle’s existence, like that of the mountain or the lost island, is hypothetical—we can say no more than that if the triangle exists, then its angles total 180 degrees; by contrast, according to Anselm’s reasoning there is nothing hypothetical about the one-of-a-kind reality that the idea of God represents, since even to think of the idea of God, once we attend to the matter carefully, is to perceive that we can only be thinking of something that must exist. We should note finally, as an indication of the absolute distinctiveness of the idea of God, that we can know something about the essence of mountains and triangles—that they must have valleys or angles totaling 180 degrees—whereas God is the one and only thing we can know nothing about precisely because of its transcendent perfection—a transcendence that indicates both the impossibility of our knowledge of it and the impossibility of its non-existence.
Having established that God exists, Descartes is now in a position to consider the conditions under which further knowledge, of corporeal things in particular, might be achieved. Prior to the establishment of the existence of a non-deceiving God, Descartes was incapable of knowledge beyond what he could clearly and distinctly perceive as immediately present to the mind; specifically, clearly his memory could never be trusted, since it could in principle be the handiwork of the evil genius or of his own feebleness of will. Thus, in Meditation II he could know only that “I exist,” though even this is certain only, as Descartes observes, “when I think; for it might possibly be the case that if I ceased entirely to think, that I should likewise cease altogether to exist.” But now he has added to this the knowledge of the existence of a God that cannot be deceiving him, and a God, moreover, that has evidently furnished the tools by which we might avoid deceiving ourselves by limiting ourselves in our exercise of the judgment of the will to those things within the proper bounds of the understanding—that is, things perceived clearly and distinctly. Descartes can thus now conclude that “I cannot be deceived in the judgment whose grounds I know clearly”; in other words, because there is no evil genius deceiving him, and further because he has discovered within himself the ability to restrain his will from errors in judgment, he can now trust his memory to retain the certainty of knowledge that he has once clearly and distinctly perceived, without having to revisit every step of the proofs that support it: “after I have recognized that there is a God… and that He is not a deceiver..., provided that I recollect having clearly and distinctly perceived it no contrary reason could be brought forward which would ever cause me to doubt of its truth.” Moreover, “this same knowledge extends likewise to all other things which I recollect having formerly demonstrated, such as the truths of geometry and the like; for what can be alleged against them to cause me to place them in doubt?” In other words, now that Descartes has mastered “the rule whereby I assure myself of the truth”—that is, as long as he restrains his will within the bounds of reason—then “I have the means of acquiring a perfect knowledge of an infinitude of things.”
Meditation VI: The Physical World Does Exist After All!
The focus of Meditation VI is on the presence in our minds of two distinct faculties, namely understanding and imagination. Our focus throughout the Meditations has thus far been primarily on the understanding, or intellect—that is, the faculty of knowledge. In Meditation IV we added to this the consideration of the faculty of will, which, we discovered, is the source of error, but also makes possible the judgment of what is true. As to the imagination, our primary attitude thus far has been one of suspicion, as we have discovered that what appears to our senses and registers as mental images in our imagination can easily be the source of error if we permit our judgment to mistake such appearance for truth. Thus, for example, our consideration of the ball of wax informed us that, whereas our imagination would have us believe that the opaque substance and the transparent substance were two utterly different and distinct entities—as in my example of the wall and the window—clearly it was a judgment of the mind alone, of pure understanding, that informs us that one and the same wax remains throughout. Further, our spontaneous inclination to judge that the sense images that appear in our imagination derive from physical bodies external to us can either be utterly false, as the example of dreams attests, or at least highly misleading, since what appears to sense of physical objects can be radically different than what we subsequently observe to be true, as when (using my own example) an object near to us appears larger than one at a distance.
So where now do we stand with respect to the supposed existence of the physical world, external to us, including the existence of our own bodies? This is where the faculty of imagination comes in, for here in Meditation VI Descartes observes that this faculty is one that is uniquely dedicated to the perception of bodies, in distinction to the understanding, or intellect, which is uniquely dedicated to the perception of ideas. It should be recalled that both these faculties, along with the will, are mental faculties, or modes of thought, indeed that everything that we perceive is mental, by definition; the question now is whether the sense images of the imagination, which we have in our minds along with the ideas of intellect and the volitions of will, have their origin in physical bodies external to us.
So Descartes turns to the imagination to consider what essential role it plays in our own being, and he observes that, in fact, I could, in principle, get along perfectly well without it; as we have noted, I am essentially nothing but a thinking thing, and the mind can exist altogether as it appears to us now without the necessary existence of a body or any external physical world. Moreover, though I do imagine that there are bodies external to my mind including my own, which I perceive with my bodily senses, nonetheless I am aware that the ideas I have of such bodies are merely that—namely ideas of the mind—and thus they depend entirely on the thought of my mind, whereas my mind does not in the least depend upon them. Thus, I can think of the properties of a triangle, and at the same time have in my mind the image of a physical triangle, whether purely in my mind or written on paper before me, and the sense image does nothing to assist in my actual understanding of those properties and may well deceive me if my drawing or imagination itself are weak. This is the clearer when I consider the thousand-sided chiliagon, as Descartes suggests, which I clearly cannot at all have a mental image of or draw on the page, yet I can perfectly well understand, by pure intellect, its existence and properties. Again, this simply reminds us of a persistent theme throughout these meditations—that the mind is independent of the body and in every way prior in reality to the body, whatever reality the body does, or does not, have.
Still, when thinking about bodies, as I invariably and constantly do, I observe now in them certain qualities that are functions of what Descartes refers to as “extension” and which have nothing whatever to do with “intellection.” That is, bodies are such that they can only be conceived as being entirely different from, and independent of, the mind. We already observed, in Meditation II, how the “I” that necessarily exists contains none of the essential qualities or “faculties” that we attribute to bodies, such as boundaries and shape, motion and rest and sensibility; now we see as well, and as we might have assumed, that bodies are as unlike to minds as the mind is to bodies. Again, this realization reflects the distinction we have made, since Meditation II, between “thought,” or “intellection,” and “extension.”
Now the question becomes, why, or how, do I perceive these things; that is, since I clearly perceive these bodily “faculties,” and these bodily faculties cannot be produced by me, since I am nothing but a thinking thing, what causes me to perceive them? We have long observed that we have the spontaneous inclination to assume that it is bodies themselves, existing external to us, that cause these perceptions, but our meditations have thus far obliged us to recognize that such inclinations might be deceptive. But now Descartes observes that these perceptions must be caused either by the bodies, from whose existence we have thus far withheld our assent, or from God; again, the perception of spatial extension can not come from me, because I am nothing but a thinking thing, thus it remains to bodies, or to God, to explain them. Moreover, since there can be no reason why a non-deceiving God would cause in us the spontaneous inclination to assume the existence of non-existent bodies, thus “we must allow that corporeal things exist.” This does not mean, of course, that they exist exactly as we perceive them, for we should by now be acutely attentive to how our senses render us only the appearances of sense images, thus they ever remain substantially removed from “reality” or truth; but there can be no reason for our natural possession of the faculty of imagination but as a faculty for the perception of external bodies, since it is uniquely suited to their perception only, whereas our minds otherwise are perfectly capable of independent thought. Thus, whatever we may know of bodies, or however distracting or misleading they might be if we let ourselves be betrayed by them or by our own wayward wills, nonetheless they must clearly at least exist external to us.
Conclusion: The Paradox of Cartesian Mind-Body Dualism
Finally, Descartes observes that, as to our own bodies, clearly these are not independent of us the way that other bodies in the external world are. If my own body were fully independent of me, then I would be to it like “a pilot in a vessel,” observing for example its course and any damage done to it with detachment and relative indifference—without, that is, the feeling and the intense interest that my own body clearly causes in me. Thus, clearly, as to my own body “I am very closely united to it, and so to speak so intermingled with it that I seem to compose with it one whole;” and yet, as we have seen, the mind and the body are for Descartes so radically different and distinct as to seem mutually exclusive in their respective essences. Indeed, Descartes observes that “bodies are by nature always divisible, and the mind is entirely indivisible.”
This is the paradox that Descartes has left us with—mind and body are one, and at the same time utterly distinct: they are utterly independent and yet “intermingled” and thus seemingly at the same time interdependent. Moreover, if Descartes’s dualism is correct, there seems no reasonable explanation for how there can be any intercourse between minds and bodies, since they are so utterly distinct from and independent of each other as to have nothing in common and thus to be incomprehensible and unperceivable to each other; yet we know that we directly experience them as united in us, as when we routinely move our body with our will. There is no clear solution to this paradox. The dominant attitude among philosophers today would dismiss Descartes’s dualism as clearly wrong, since evidently mind and body do communicate, while offering no alternative to dualism but the outright materialism, or “physicalism,” that asserts that there is only the one, physical reality and thus that we human beings are nothing but highly complex machines. Still, many philosophers are understandably unwilling to go quite so far and thus innumerable theories of “compatibilism” have been formulated to try to preserve some vestige of human freedom—even if only illusory—within a purely physical existence. Though the “compatibilists” pretend to protect human freedom, however, Kant calls this a “wretched subterfuge” that in fact makes free will, and thus any possibility of moral judgment (or human meaning, presumably) impossible and pointless as it effectively condemns us to the robotic mechanism of Hobbes (himself effectively a compatibilist; and see the discussion of freedom in the chapter on Hume). Another approach is that of the “naturalistic dualism” of contemporary philosopher David Chalmers, which accepts the modern bias that all reality is physical while also insisting that consciousness is not reducible to it—that is, that human feelings are independent of strict, physical determination; but it is not clear that such a view does anything to solve the problem of Descartes’s “substance dualism” since in both cases there is no evident way to account for the nature of the relation between what is determined by physical causes and what remains independent of them (see the discussion of Kant’s “two worlds” in the chapter on Kant’s ethics). As for scientists, who typically prefer simply not to tread this uncertain, philosophic ground, their problem is simply a profound inability to account for the unshakeable reality of one’s personal experience of choice and human personality and character, which materialism/physicalism would declare essentially to be falsehood and delusion.
In any event, let’s consider our current lives: our increasing reliance on our computers, to the point of connecting them directly to our bodies and brains, indicates that we are effectively moving toward an acceptance—a choice made by the operation of will—of the robotic mechanization of our selves. Under these circumstances, it would seem as if we are all effectively awaiting the day when our computers will begin to “plot” our destruction, since if we assume that we are only machines ourselves—and faulty, needy and neurotic machines at that—it must be only a matter of time before the machines that we make will surpass the machines that we are and render us obsolete and finally tire of our inefficiency. I, for one, am unwilling to accept the materialist propositions either that machines will equal and surpass us or, more to the point, that we ourselves are nothing but machines ourselves: it is absurd, I suggest, to consider that a machine could ever think, feel or be conscious, since we humans are totally responsible for building and programming each and every computer and thus we know that computers function as they do because, and only because, of our own design. Admittedly, our computers have become so complicated—and involve the contributions of so many people with so wide a range of diverse skills—that they have now been set upon the world to function indefinitely into the future and often end up doing things that we had not anticipated and so seem to be acting “on their own;” however, to repeat, in fact they only do what they do as a direct result—even if it turns out to be a result that we do not foresee—of what we have constructed them and programmed them to do. We might well ask why we would we at some point jump to the absurd conclusion that they are acting “freely,” and I can only suggest that it is a matter of what psychologists would refer to as “projection”: when the complexity of our computers becomes so great that we lose the ability to predict what effects will result from their hardware and software (even though we are the ones responsible for them), they start to look like people, who similarly act in unpredictable ways—in other words, we start to feel that they are “just like us”—and since we feel free ourselves, so we fall into the trap of feeling that our computers must be, too.
But I insist that we cannot reasonably accept that there is any danger that computers might intentionally plot our destruction; however, there is also absolutely no comfort to be taken in that, since our own faulty and short-sighted designs and programming might lead to machine-produced results that have the unintended effect to accomplish just that, and this makes the danger much greater, in fact, since that means that the force that would lead to our destruction is us! Looking at this another way—and what is perhaps more disturbing still—it seems clear that we are already actively and voluntarily engaging in the diminution of our own independence and spiritual being, for example through algorithmic manipulation: while it is clear that our machines can never be technologically “raised” to be thinking, feeling human beings—whether of good will or ill—it is clear that we humans are entirely capable, at times at least and increasingly it would seem, of lowering ourselves to the level of our machines by letting machines make our decisions for us and by our increasing valuation of efficiency over humanity.
For the moment, however, there may still be hope that we will still use our faculty of free will to decide against such lowering, and thus against our ultimate replacement and extinction.
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