Meditations on First Philosophy

Meditations on First Philosophy, in which the existence of God and the immortality of the soul are demonstrated (), often simply called Meditations on First Philosophy or the Meditations,

The book is made up of six meditations, in which Descartes first discards all belief in things that are not absolutely certain, and then tries to establish what can be known for sure. He wrote the Meditations as if he had meditated for six days: each meditation refers to the last one as "yesterday". (In fact, Descartes began work on the Meditations in 1639.) One of the most influential philosophical texts ever written, it is widely read to this day.

The book consists of the presentation of Descartes' metaphysical system at its most detailed level and in the expanding of his philosophical system, first introduced in the fourth part of his Discourse on Method (1637). Descartes' metaphysical thought is also found in the Principles of Philosophy (1644), which the author intended to be a philosophical guidebook.

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. 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.

Analysis

Descartes saw his Meditations as providing the metaphysical underpinning of his new physics. Like Galileo, he sought to overturn what he saw as two-thousand-year-old prejudices injected into the Western tradition by Aristotle. The Aristotelian thought of Descartes' day placed great weight on the testimony of the senses, suggesting that all knowledge comes from the senses. The Meditator's suggestion that all of one's most certain knowledge comes from the senses is meant to appeal directly to the Aristotelian philosophers who will be reading the Meditations. The motivation, then, behind the First Meditation is to start in a position the Aristotelian philosophers would agree with and then, subtly, to seduce them away from it. Descartes is aware of how revolutionary his ideas are, and must pay lip service to the orthodox opinions of the day in order to be heeded.

Reading the First Meditation as an effort to coax Aristotelians away from their customary opinions allows us to read different interpretations into the different stages of doubt. For instance, there is some debate as to whether Descartes intended his famous "Dream Argument" to suggest the universal possibility of dreaming—that though there is waking experience, I can never know which moments are dreams and which are waking—or the possibility of a universal dream—that my whole life is a dream and that there is no waking world. If we read Descartes as suggesting the universal possibility of dreaming, we can explain an important distinction between the Dream Argument and the later "Evil Demon" argument. The latter suggests that all we know is false and that we cannot trust the senses one bit. The Dream Argument, if meant to suggest the universal possibility of dreaming, suggests only that the senses are not always and wholly reliable. The Dream Argument questions Aristotelian epistemology, while the Evil Demon Argument does away with it altogether. The Painter's Analogy, which draws on the Dream Argument, concludes that mathematics and other purely cerebral studies are far more certain than astronomy or physics, which is an important step away from the Aristotelian reliance on the senses and toward Cartesian rationalism.

Read on its own, the First Meditation can be seen as presenting skeptical doubts as a subject of study in their own right. Descartes raised the mystifying question of how we can claim to know with certainty anything about the world around us. The idea is not that these doubts are probable, but that their possibility can never be entirely ruled out. And if we can never be certain, how can we claim to know anything? Skepticism cuts straight to the heart of the Western philosophical enterprise and its attempt to provide a certain foundation for our knowledge and understanding of the world. It can even be pushed so far as to be read as a challenge to our very notion of rationality.

It is difficult to justify a dismissal of skepticism. Western philosophy since Descartes has been largely marked and motivated by an effort to overcome this problem.

Descartes' doubt is a methodological and rational doubt. That is, the Meditator is not just doubting everything at random, but is providing solid reasons for his doubt at each stage. For instance, he rejects the possibility that he might be mad since that would undercut the rationality that motivates his doubt. Descartes is trying to set up this doubt within a rational framework and needs to maintain a claim to rationality for his arguments to proceed.

He goes on to suggest more powerful reasons to doubt that his beliefs are true. In general, his method is that of forming skeptical hypotheses—methodic doubt. In the first meditation, he considers whether he is mad, dreaming, or deceived by an evil demon.

The general form of these arguments is:

If I am dreaming/deceived, then my beliefs are unreliable

Descartes' goal, as stated at the beginning of the meditation, is to suspend judgment about any belief that is even slightly doubtful. The skeptical scenarios show that all of the beliefs he considers in the first meditation—including, at the very least, all his beliefs about the physical world, are doubtful. So he decides to suspend judgment. He will henceforth give up all of his beliefs about the physical world. He also decides to continually remind himself to avoid habitually falling into accepting beliefs without support, a habit to which he is susceptible.

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.

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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, 'Ithink therefore I am.'

Once he secures his existence, however, Descartes seeks to find out what "I" is. He rejects the typical method, which looks for a definition (e.g., Rational Animal), because the words used in the definition would then need to be defined. He seeks simple terms that do not need to be defined in this way, but whose meaning can just be "seen." From these self-evident truths, complex terms can be built up.

The first of these self-evident truths is Descartes' proof of existence turned on its head:

But what then am I? A thinking thing. And what is that? Something that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, and also senses and has mental images.

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To define himself further, Descartes turns to the example of wax. He determines that wax is not wax because of its color, texture or shape, as all of these things can change and the substance still be wax. He believes that wax is perceived "by the intellect alone." Therefore, he distinguishes between ordinary perception and judgment. When one understands the mathematical principles of the substance, such as its expansion under heat, figure and motion, the knowledge of the wax can be clear and distinct.

If a substance such as wax can be known in this fashion, then the same must be of ourselves. The self, then, is not determined by what we sense of ourselves—these hands, this head, these eyes—but by simply the things one thinks. Thus, one "can't grasp anything more easily or plainly than [his] mind."

Descartes concludes that he exists because he is a "thinking thing." If he is the thing that can be deceived and can think and have thoughts, then he must exist.

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.

Argument 2

I exist.
My existence must have a cause.
The only possible ultimate causes are:
Not a.: If I had created myself, I would have made myself perfect.
Not b.: This does not solve the problem. If I am a dependent being, I need to be continually sustained by another.
Not c.: This leads to an infinite regress.
Not d.: The idea of perfection that exists in me cannot have originated from a non-perfect being.
Therefore, e. God exists.

Descartes argued that he had a clear and distinct idea of God. In the same way that the cogito was self-evident, so too is the existence of God, as his perfect idea of a perfect being could not have been caused by anything less than a perfect being.

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:

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.

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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.

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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:

God is defined as an infinitely perfect being.
Perfection includes existence.
So God exists.

This ontological argument originated in the work of St. Anselm, the medieval Scholastic philosopher and theologian. While Descartes had already claimed to have confirmed God's existence through previous arguments, this one allows him to put to rest any discontent he might have had with his "distinct and clear" criteria for truth. With a confirmed existence of God, all doubt that what one previously thought was real and not a dream can be removed. Having made this realization, Descartes asserts that without this sure knowledge in the existence of a supreme and perfect being, assurance of any truth is impossible:

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 (); and this special exertion of mind clearly shows the difference between imagination and pure intellection (').

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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:

Proof of the body being distinct from the mind (mind–body dualism)

It is possible for God to create anything I can clearly and distinctly perceive.
If God creates something to be independent of another, they are distinct from each other.
I clearly and distinctly understand my existence as a thinking thing (which does not require the existence of a body).
So God can create a thinking thing independently of a body.
I clearly and distinctly understand my body as an extended thing (which does not require a mind).
So God can create a body independently of a mind.
So my mind is a reality distinct from my body.
So I (a thinking thing) can exist without a body.

Proof of the reality of external material things

I have a "strong inclination" to believe in the reality of external material things due to my senses.
God must have created me with this nature.
If independent material things do not exist, God is a deceiver.
But God is not a deceiver.
So material things exist and contain the properties essential to them.

After using these two arguments to dispel solipsism and skepticism, Descartes seems to have succeeded in defining reality as being in three parts: God (infinite), minds, and material things (both finite). He closes by addressing natural phenomena that might appear to challenge his philosophy, such as phantom limbs, dreams, and dropsy.

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).

Descartes' philosophy of solipsism involves the assumption that a given individual will know their own mind best. However, the establishment of behaviorism revealed introspection to be a problematic method. Developments in psychology, based on studies focusing on the relationship between the mind and brain make it difficult to accept Descartes' contention that the mind can exist without the body. Further, empirical and philosophical work has shown that the mind, or consciousness, develops as a result of social, linguistic, and cultural influence.

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

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).

References

External links

Text of 1641 Latin edition at Project Gutenberg (with German foreword and footnotes)
Text of 1647 French edition at Athena
English translation by Elizabeth S. Haldane at Internet Sacred Text Archive
English translation by Jonathan Bennett at early modern Texts (slightly modified for easier reading; audio available)

Meditations on First Philosophy

Letter of Dedication and Preface

Letter of dedication

Preface to the reader

I. What Can Be Called into Doubt

Analysis

II. The Nature of the Human Mind

III. Concerning God, That He Exists

IV. Concerning the True and the False

Objections and replies

Republications

Collected works in French and Latin

English translations

Single works

See also

References

Further reading

External links