Meditations on First Philosophy

Letter of Dedication and Preface

Letter of dedication

To the most wise and illustrious the Dean and Doctors of the Sacred Faculty of Theology in Paris

Descartes writes the above dedication to ask for the protection of the Faculty for his work.

His first consideration is that the existence of God has to be demonstrated philosophically, besides the theological reasons for belief, particularly if we consider to make a demonstration for the non-believers. Moreover, the believers could be accused of making a circular reasoning, when saying that we must believe in God because of the Scriptures, and in the authority of the Scriptures because they have been inspired by God. He further indicates how the very Scriptures say that the mind of man is sufficient to discover God.

His aim is to apply a method to demonstrate these two truths, in a so clear and evident manner that result to be evident. This method he has developed for the Sciences.

Preface to the reader

Descartes explains how he made a mention of the two questions, the existence of God, and the soul, in his Discourse on Method. Following this, he received objections, and two of them he considers are of importance. The first is how he concludes that the essence of the soul is a thing that thinks, excluding all other nature. To this he says that he has a clear perception that he is a thinking thing, and has no other clear perception, and from this he concludes that there is nothing else in the essence of the self.

The second is that from the idea I have of something that is more perfect than myself, it cannot be concluded that it exists. In the treatise we will see that in fact from the idea that there is something more perfect than myself, it follows that this exists.

It goes on to comment that on a general level the reasoning used by the atheists for denying the existence of God is based in the fact that "we ascribe to God affections that are human, or we attribute so much strength and wisdom to our minds" that we presume to understand that which God can and ought to do. He says that we have to consider God as incomprehensible and infinite, and our minds as limited and finite.

Finally, he says that the treatise was submitted to some men of learning to know their difficulties and objections, and are answered at the end of it.

Structure

Descartes does not outline the text with a systematic structure. He writes the meditations in a first-person point-of-view, intending for the readers to meditate with him. Thus, the text serves as a handbook of meditative practices—it does not only convey a message, but an experience, too.

Summary and analysis

The Meditations is written in the first person, so many authors refer to the arguments as simply spoken by René Descartes, but others consider that he is speaking in the person of an alter ego who they call "the meditator", as is done here sometimes. (Wikipedia is collaboratively edited, so no consistency has been enforced on this.)

I. What Can Be Called into Doubt

The First Meditation, subtitled "What can be called into doubt", opens with the Meditator reflecting on the number of falsehoods he has believed during his life and on the subsequent faultiness of the body of knowledge he has built up from these falsehoods. He has resolved to sweep away all he thinks he knows and to start again from the foundations, building up his knowledge once more on more certain grounds. He has seated himself alone, by the fire, free of all worries so that he can demolish his former opinions with care.

The Meditator reasons that he need only find some reason to doubt his present opinions in order to prompt him to seek sturdier foundations for knowledge. Rather than doubt every one of his opinions individually, he reasons that he might cast them all into doubt if he can doubt the foundations and basic principles on which the opinions are founded.

Everything that the Meditator has accepted as most true he has come to learn from or through his senses. He acknowledges that sometimes the senses can deceive, but only with respect to objects that are very small or far away, and that our sensory knowledge on the whole is quite sturdy. The Meditator acknowledges that insane people might be more deceived, but that he is clearly not one of them and needn't worry himself about that.

However, the Meditator realizes that he is often convinced when he is dreaming that he is sensing real objects. He feels certain that he is awake and sitting by the fire, but reflects that often he has dreamed this very sort of thing and been wholly convinced by it. Though his present sensations may be dream images, he suggests that even dream images are drawn from waking experience, much like paintings in that respect. Even when a painter creates an imaginary creature, like a mermaid, the composite parts are drawn from real things—women and fish, in the case of a mermaid. And even when a painter creates something entirely new, at least the colors in the painting are drawn from real experience. Thus, the Meditator concludes, though he can doubt composite things, he cannot doubt the simple and universal parts from which they are constructed like shape, quantity, size, time, etc. While we can doubt studies based on composite things, like medicine, astronomy, or physics, he concludes that we cannot doubt studies based on simple things, like arithmetic and geometry.

II. The Nature of the Human Mind

In Meditation II: Concerning the Nature of the Human Mind: That the mind is more known than the body, Descartes lays out a pattern of thought, sometimes called representationalism, in response to the doubts forwarded in Meditation I. He identifies five steps in this theory:

We have access to only the world of our ideas; things in the world are accessed only indirectly.

These ideas are understood to include all of the contents of the mind, including perceptions, images, memories, concepts, beliefs, intentions, decisions, etc.

Ideas and the things they represent are separate from each other.

These represented things are many times "external" to the mind.

It is possible for these ideas to constitute either accurate or false representations.

Descartes argues that this representational theory disconnects the world from the mind, leading to the need for some sort of bridge to span the separation and provide good reasons to believe that the ideas accurately represent the outside world. The first plank he uses in constructing this bridge can be found in the following excerpt:

I have convinced myself that there is nothing in the world — no sky, no earth, no minds, no bodies. Doesn't it follow that I don't exist? No, surely I must exist if it's me who is convinced of something. But there is a deceiver, supremely powerful and cunning whose aim is to see that I am always deceived. But surely I exist, if I am deceived. Let him deceive me all he can, he will never make it the case that I am nothing while I think that I am something. Thus having fully weighed every consideration, I must finally conclude that the statement "I am, I exist" must be true whenever I state it or mentally consider it.

In other words, one's consciousness implies one's existence. In one of Descartes' replies to objections to the book, he summed this up in the phrase cogito, ergo sum, 'I think therefore I am.'

III. Concerning God, That He Exists

Descartes proposed that there are three types of ideas:

Innate: ideas that are, and have always been, within us;

Fictitious (or Invented): ideas that come from our imagination; and

Adventitious: ideas that come from experiences of the world.

Descartes argues that the idea of God is innate and placed in us by God, and rejects the possibility of such being invented or adventitious.

Argument 1

Something cannot come from nothing.

The cause of an idea must have at least as much formal reality as the idea has objective reality. (Formal as in actually existent, objective as in they can be represented to the mind.)

I have in me an idea of God. This idea has infinite objective reality.

I cannot be the cause of this idea, since I am not an infinite and perfect being. I don't have enough formal reality. Only an infinite and perfect being could cause such an idea.

So God—a being with infinite formal reality—must exist (and be the source of my idea of God).

An absolutely perfect being is a good, benevolent being.

So God is benevolent...

So God would not deceive me, and would not permit me to err without giving me a way to correct my errors.

IV. Concerning the True and the False

The conclusions of the previous Meditations that "I" and "God" both exist lead to another problem: If God is perfectly good and the source of all that is, how is there room for error or falsehood? Descartes attempts to answer this question in Meditation IV: On Truth and Falsity:

If I've got everything in me from God and He hasn't given me the ability to make errors, it doesn't seem possible for me ever to be in error.

The framework of his arguments centers on the great chain of being, in which God's perfect goodness is relative to His perfect being. On the extreme opposite end of the scale is complete nothingness, which is also the most evil state possible. Thus, humans are an intermediary between these two extremes, being less "real" or "good" than God, but more "real" and "good" than nothingness. Thus, error (as a part of evil) is not a positive reality, it is only the absence of what is correct. In this way, its existence is allowed within the context of a perfectly inerrant God.

I find that I am "intermediate" between God and nothingness, between the supreme entity and nonentity. Insofar as I am the creation of the supreme entity, there's nothing in me to account for my being deceived or led into error, but, inasmuch as I somehow participate in nothing or nonentity — that is, insofar as I am distinct from the supreme entity itself and lack many things — it's not surprising that I go wrong. I thus understand that, in itself, error is a lack, rather than a real thing dependent on God. Hence, I understand that I can err without God's having given me a special ability to do so. Rather, I fall into error because my God-given ability to judge the truth is not infinite.

Descartes also concedes two points that might allow for the possibility of his ability to make errors. First, he notes that it is very possible that his limited knowledge prevents him from understanding why God chose to create him so he could make mistakes. If he could see the things that God could see, with a complete and infinite scope, perhaps he would judge his ability to err as the best option. He uses this point to attack the Aristotelian structure of causes. The final cause described by Aristotle are the "what for" of an object, but Descartes claims that because he is unable to comprehend completely the mind of God, it is impossible to understand completely the "why" through science—only the "how."

V. The Essence of Material Things, and Again Concerning God, That He Exists

Meditation V: Concerning the Essence of Material Things, and Again Concerning God, That He Exists begins with the stated purpose of expanding the "known items" of God and self to include outside material objects; but Descartes saves that for Meditation VI in lieu of something he deems more fundamental but in the same direction: a discussion concerning the ideas of those external items. Along the way, he advances another logical proof of God's existence.

Before asking whether any such objects exist outside me, I ought to consider the ideas of these objects as they exist in my thoughts and see which are clear and which confused.

Descartes separates external objects into those that are clear and distinct and those that are confused and obscure. The former group consists of the ideas of extension, duration and movement. These geometrical ideas cannot be misconstrued or combined in a way that makes them false. For example, if the idea of a creature with the head of a giraffe, the body of a lion and tail of a beaver was constructed and the question asked if the creature had a large intestine, the answer would have to be invented. But, no mathematical re-arrangement of a triangle could allow its three internal angles to sum to anything but 180 degrees. Thus, Descartes perceived that truths may have a nature or essence of themselves, independent of the thinker. In Descartes' formulation, this is a mathematical truth only pragmatically related to nature; the properties of triangles in Euclidean geometry remain mathematically certain.

I find in myself innumerable ideas of things which, though they may not exist outside me, can't be said to be nothing. While I have some control over my thoughts of these things, I do not make the things up: they have their own real and immutable natures. Suppose, for example, that I have a mental image of a triangle. While it may be that no figure of this sort does exist or ever has existed outside my thought, the figure has a fixed nature (essence or form), immutable and eternal, which hasn't been produced by me and isn't dependent of my mind.

While thinking about the independence of these ideas of external objects, Descartes realizes that he is just as certain about God as he is about these mathematical ideas. He asserts that this is natural as the ideas of God are the only ideas that imply God's existence. He uses the example of a mountain and a valley. While one cannot picture a mountain without a valley, it's possible that these do not exist. However, the fact that one cannot conceive of God without existence inherently rules out the possibility of God's non-existence. Simply put, the argument is framed as follows:

VI. The Existence of Material Things, and the Real Distinction between Mind and Body

In Meditation VI: Concerning the Existence of Material Things, and the Real Distinction between Mind and Body, Descartes addresses the potential existence of material outside of the self and God. First, he asserts that such objects can exist simply because God is able to make them.

Insofar as they are the subject of pure mathematics, I now know at least that they can exist, because I grasp them clearly and distinctly. For God can undoubtedly make whatever I can grasp in this way, and I never judge that something is impossible for Him to make unless there would be a contradiction in my grasping the thing distinctly.

Knowing that the existence of such objects is possible, Descartes then turns to the prevalence of mental images as proof. To do this, he draws a distinction between imagination and understanding—imagination being a non-linguistic "faculty of knowledge to the body which is immediately present to it…without intellection or conception," which therefore exists like a mental photograph; and understanding (or apprehending) being something that is not necessarily pictured. He uses an example of this to clarify:

When I have a mental image of a triangle, for example, I don't just understand that it is a figure bounded by three lines; I also "look at" the lines as though they were present to my mind's eye. And this is what I call having a mental image. When I want to think of a chiliagon, I understand that it is a figure with a thousand sides as well as I understand that a triangle is a figure with three, but I can't imagine its sides or "look" at them as though they were present.… Thus I observe that a special effort of mind is necessary to the act of imagination, which is not required to conceiving or understanding (ad intelligendum); and this special exertion of mind clearly shows the difference between imagination and pure intellection (imaginatio et intellectio pura).

Descartes has still not given proof that such external objects exist. At this point, he has only shown that their existence could conveniently explain this mental process. To obtain this proof, he first reviews his premises for the Meditations—that the senses cannot be trusted and what he is taught "by nature" does not have much credence. However, he views these arguments within a new context; after writing Meditation I, he has proved the existence of himself and of a perfect God. Thus, Descartes jumps quickly to proofs of the division between the body and mind and that material things exist:

Objections and replies

Before publishing the Meditations, Descartes submitted his manuscript to many philosophers, theologians and a logician, encouraging them to criticize the work. He explained this purpose in a letter to a friend: "I will be very glad if people put to me many objections, the strongest they can find, for I hope that the truth will stand out all the better." The objections which he gathered, and his own replies (many of which are quite extensive), were included in the first publication of the Meditations.

The seven objectors were, in order (of the sets as they were published):

The Dutch theologian Johannes Caterus (Johan de Kater).

Various "theologians and philosophers" gathered by Descartes' friend and principal correspondent, Friar Marin Mersenne.

The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes.

The theologian and logician Antoine Arnauld.

The philosopher Pierre Gassendi — Descartes wrote that this set of objections could be easily dismissed.

Another miscellany gathered by Mersenne.

The Jesuit Pierre Bourdin.

Some of the most powerful objections include the following:

Objections to proof(s) of God's existence:

Objections to the epistemology:

Objections to philosophy of mind:

Elisabeth of Bohemia also corresponded with Descartes on the Meditations. She objected both to his description of the union between mind and body, and that virtue and moral truths seem to need to be grasped by something other than the intellect (despite Descartes' assertion that all truths must be grasped intellectually).

Influence and legacy

The historical impact of the six meditations has been divided. The first two meditations, which employed the skeptical methodic doubt and concluded that only the ego and its thoughts are indubitable, have had a huge impact in the history of philosophy. They are often considered as epoch-making for modernity, and an unavoidable first step for any modern philosophical thinking.

Arthur David Smith, author of the Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Husserl, claims that since Edmund Husserl usually refers only to "the first two" of the Meditations, therefore Husserl must have thought that they are the only part of Descartes' work with any philosophical importance at all.

Republications

Collected works in French and Latin

Oeuvres de Descartes, edited by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, Paris: Léopold Cerf, 1897–1913, 13 volumes; new revised edition, Paris: Vrin-CNRS, 1964–1974, 11 volumes (the first 5 volumes contains the correspondence).

English translations

The Philosophical Writings Of Descartes, 3 vols., translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

The Philosophical Works of Descartes, 2 vols, translated by Elizabeth S. Haldane, and G.R.T. Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).

The Method, Meditations and Philosophy of Descartes, translated by John Veitch (1901)

Single works

Cottingham, John, ed. (April 1996) [1986]. Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies (revised ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-55818-1.

Six Metaphysical Meditations ..., translated by William Molyneux (1680)

Méditations Métaphysiques, translated to French from Latin by Michelle Beyssade (Paris: GF, 1993), accompanied by Descartes' original Latin text and the French translation by the Duke of Luynes (1647).