Maryland Institute College of Art MOD4 Descartes’s Meditations 1 and 2 Paper

Descartes’s Meditations 1 and 2Meditation One: Descartes’s Arguments for Universal Doubt
The overall plan of the Meditations is to prove that the immortal soul is real, and
that God really exists. How can Descartes prove these things, using only philosophy?
Philosophy is notorious for endless arguments that poke holes in every argument.
So, Descartes starts with doubt instead. Descartes explains skepticism. His
skepticism is based on this definition of knowledge:
The Cartesian criterion for knowledge:
A person can know something – call it ‘P’ – only if there is no
conceivable way that P could be incorrect. If there is some conceivable
way that a person could be mistaken about P, then this person must
admit that P is doubtful, and P can’t (yet) be known.
Stages of skepticism
A. doubt the senses and experience
B. use dreaming as an example
C. God could deceive us
D. If God wouldn’t, an “Evil Genius” could deceive us about anything
E. If we could be deceived about anything, then we must doubt everything.
The Details for A, B, C, D, E
A. Doubt the Senses and Experience
1. I am often mistaken about things that I hear, see, taste, touch, smell, etc.
2. I could be mistaken about anything that I am sensing, right now, for all I
know.
3. There isn’t anything in my experience that I receive with perfect clarity and
truth, as far as I can tell.
4. Comparing what I sense now with what I remember doesn’t help, because
anything in my memory could be slightly (or greatly) warped and mistaken.
B. Use Dreaming as an Example
1. I often have experiences while I am dreaming that closely resemble
experiences I have while awake.
2. Sometimes I can’t even tell when I am dreaming, because a dream is so
realistic.
3. What I am experiencing right now could actually be a dream, as far I can tell.
4. There is no guaranteed way to distinguish dreaming experience from waking
experience.
5. So, I have to doubt whether I am really awake, right now, so all my
experience is deceptive.
C. God Could Deceive Us
1. An all-powerful God would be able to influence our minds to get us to believe
all sorts of things which are not actually true.
2. God could even make us believe false mathematical ideas, which we think we
know perfectly.
3. So, it is possible that we are wrong even about our mathematical knowledge.
4. Since science is based on evidence and math, science could be quite wrong,
too, for all we can tell.
D. If God wouldn’t, an “Evil Genius” could deceive us about everything we think we
know
1. It would be great if we could know that God exists, but that requires either
experience or reasoning, which are both fallible (could be mistaken), so we
don’t know God exists.
2. For all we know, other powerful beings could be influencing us.
3. Descartes imagines that there exists a powerful evil demon – the Evil Genius
– who likes to deceive our minds.
4. Unless I can know that no evil genius is controlling my mind, I can’t know
anything.
5. Since I can’t prove that there is no evil genius, I have to be skeptical about
everything.
E. If we could be deceived about anything we know, then we have doubt everything.
1. No matter what I contemplate about what seems to be real and true, there
are valid ways to conceive how it could be mistaken.
2. I can’t know if science gets anything right, or even if there is a real world
around me.
3. I can’t know if anything mathematical is really true.
4. I can’t even be sure that I have a body, since my senses do not give me
knowledge.
FINAL CONCLUSION OF SKEPTICISM: I must doubt everything that I might think I
could know.
Meditation Two: Descartes’s Arguments for the Existence of the Mind
Descartes begins from Skepticism:
I must doubt everything that I might think I could know.
He then constructs arguments to prove that there actually are a few things that can
be known. Descartes attempts to prove this most important truth:
I know that I exist as a Mind.
Descartes offers his Argument for the Mind’s Existence (the “Cogito” Argument –
“cogito” is a Latin word for “I think”)
Stage One:
1. Because of the arguments for universal skepticism, I am doubting everything.
2. I am thinking, “I am doubting everything.” Let this thought be labeled as D.
3. I thinking D. Could I be wrong that I am thinking D?
4. Is there any possible way that I could be wrong about D? In other words, is
there any conceivable way that I am wrong about how I am doubting
everything?
5. Suppose that Evil Deceiver is controlling my mind to make me only think that
I am doubting everything – I am actually wrong about D.
6. If the Evil Deceiver is fooling me, then I must doubt D.
7. I am doubting D. But D means “I am doubting everything.” If I am doubting D,
then I am still doubting something – D! So no matter what is going on, no
matter how much the Evil Deceiver succeeds in fooling my mind, D is always
true.
8. There is no conceivable way for D to be wrong. By Descartes’s criteria for
knowledge, D is therefore knowledge. I can know D.
Stage Two. I can know that I am doubting everything. Now what?
1. I know that I am doubting.
2. Doubting is a kind of thinking.
3. Therefore, I know that I am thinking.
4. There is plenty of thinking going on.
5. Something is doing all this thinking – there must be a thing that thinks.
6. What is a thinking thing? We call that kind of thing a Mind.
7. A Mind exists. Whose mind?
8. This thinking Mind is simply Descartes’s own mind, of course.
9. Therefore, Descartes concludes, “I am a Mind” and “I know that I am a Mind.”
After Stage One and Stage Two, Descartes concludes:
I know that I am a Mind.
Next, Descartes wants to prove that the Mind is always better known than any
physical body.
The Argument that the Mind is far better known than the Body:
1. It is possible that all knowledge of external bodies, including my own
human body, could be mistaken or illusory. The argument that my Mind
exists didn’t help with bodies around me. I have to keep doubting them.
2. Physical bodies around me, such as my body, are known much more
distinctly through the mind than by any bodily means, such as the senses.
Premise 1 is true. Why is premise 2 true?
Descartes’s argument for 2 based on the Wax Example.
Descartes picks a piece of wax he has on his writing table (300 years ago, people
kept beeswax around for candles or to seal envelopes closed).
1. All the properties of the piece of wax that we perceive with the senses (the
“secondary” properties”) change as the wax melts: its color, smell, and so on.
2. All of the properties of the piece of wax that we expect a body to keep when
we aren’t sensing it can also change as the wax melts: the shape, the size, and
so on.
3. Yet the wax is still “the same” wax after it has melted into a puddle. Our
intelligence understands this, despite the changing information from the
senses.
4. Therefore, whatever we can understand about the wax mostly depends on
our intelligence and reasoning, not just the senses or imagination.
5. Whatever can be best understood about physical bodies really depends on
the Mind’s thinking, which we already know very well.
6. Therefore, our own Mind is much more clearly and distinctly known to us
than anything that is a physical body.
Descartes’s conclusion by the end of Meditation Two is that (1) My Mind is known,
and (2) anything bodily is only known through the Mind, and the Mind is always
known better than anything bodily is known.
Descartes’s Meditations 3 and 4
Meditation Three: Descartes’s Arguments that God is Real
Descartes proves that God exists and that God is not a deceiver. In later Meditations,
the way that God can be trusted will be used to establish other things that we can
know about the world.
After Meditation Two, here is what we know:
I know that I exist as a thinking thing. I am a Mind.
I must doubt my senses, and my intuitions about math, because something powerful
may be deceiving me.
If there really is a God, this God is Good, and wouldn’t be deceiving me about
everything.
Therefore, in order to know anything beyond my Mind, I need to see if I can know
that God exists.
DEFINITION OF GOD
God is the most perfect being. (Yes, this vague, but it is a place to start. At least
anyone could agree with this definition, regardless of whether one agrees that God
really exists.)
An Argument for God
1. I am thinking about the idea of God = the most perfect being.
2. How did this idea get into my head?
3. This idea came from inside me, or from outside of me.
4. Inside me, I have information from my senses, my imagination, my math
intuitions, and my reasonings from evidence, imagination, and math.
5. My inner information is fallible: I haven’t proven that I can truly know any of
it (that’s the whole problem we are stuck with so far).
6. Also, a perfect being is infinite, but my senses, my intuitions, etc. don’t have
the property of being infinite. I have never seen anything infinitely large, or
imagined anything with infinite duration, etc.
7. A perfect idea must have a perfect source. Anything less than perfect cannot
create something perfect.
8. This idea of God had to come from outside of me.
9. People tell me about gods, but they are imperfect, fallible, and unreliable just
like me.
10. Who else could communicate with me? Maybe angels, the Evil Deceiver, or
God (if any of these things actually exist).
11. Angels are messengers from God, so we need to prove God exists first.
12. That leave the Evil Deceiver – but he would never tell us the truth about God
(because he is imperfect and evil, after all).
13. Well, that finally leaves God. Only a perfect God is left to explain how a
perfect idea of God got into my Mind.
Conclusion: It is not possible that we could be wrong that a perfect being really
exists. We know God exists.
A Counter-Argument to Descartes’s argument for God
Every deep philosophical argument has at least one good counter-argument. Here is
one example.
Descartes relies on his claim that “I have a perfect idea of a perfect God.”
He has to make this precise claim.
If he only said, “I have a less-than-perfect idea of a perfect God” then nothing perfect
is required to explain how he got that idea. His idea of God would be vague, fuzzy, or
pretty empty, or just left to his own imagination to fill in. He could be just
contemplating the idea of God taught to him by his Catholic teachers. But then we’d
see where his idea of God came from – other people who might not really know any
better than he.
Or, if he said, “I have a perfect idea of a God” then he leaves out the perfect aspect to
God. Leaving that out, we could agree that he has a perfect idea of whatever God he
feels like thinking about. Anyone could do this. A Catholic thinks about the Catholic
God. A Protestant thinks about the Protestant God. A Jew, a Hindu, etc etc thinks
about just their own religion’s specific God. Do all those different Gods really exist?
Presumably not, unless polytheism turns out to be right. But we aren’t trying to
prove polytheism. Can Descartes prove that his God exists if he only says, “I have a
perfect idea of a God”? NO – we’d be able to point to his religious upbringing to
explain how his idea of that God got into his mind. Indeed, we might say, “Each
person who has an idea of a God simply learned it from one’s religion.” This is no
way to prove that an actually existing God is required to explain all these religions.
In fact, the way that there so many different religions, and so many different gods,
suggests that there is no God behind them all.
So, Descartes MUST only start from the claim, “I have a perfect idea of a perfect
God.”
We must ask now: by what right does Descartes make this claim? How does
Descartes, or any of us, really KNOW that we have a PERFECT idea of a PERFECT
god? None of us can sure of this, not even Descartes. We are only human, after all. Of
course, if you first assume that there is a God, then it could make sense that this God
would communicate with us. But we philosophers can’t just assume that God exists
in the first place. Can it be proven? Apparently not.
Meditation Four: Descartes explains Error
Descartes thinks that he has proven that a perfect God really exists. So we continue
on, letting him take God for granted, to see what else he can prove using God. But
remember: nothing Descartes claims in the rest of the Meditations is valid without
God’s existence.
Descartes knows that God exists, and God is perfect, so God is Good. God is not a
deceiver. On the other hand, God created my Mind. I know God created my Mind
because nothing else could have done this.
I also know that I am often in error. In a way, this is God’s fault, because God created
limited human Minds. However, God would not give my Mind an intelligence that is
broken and flawed. My Intellect (my intelligent ability to reason etc) works fine, but
it has limited information to work with.
Descartes must explain how it is possible that I can err even though I am created by
a Good God.
First, no error is found in the intellect when it works by itself. Left to itself, the
intellect understands the pure mental realms of mathematics (and geometry and
logic). The intellect can know math geometry, and logic perfectly without error
(once the Mind is educated correctly about what those things are – babies aren’t
born knowing math and so on). Descartes agree with Plato about how we know
these realms of the pure intellect.
But we also want to learn about the world around us. That is much harder. Our
tools are the evidence from the senses, our imagination, and our reasoning. If we
only used these three mental powers, we would enjoy limited but fairly good facts
about the world. But humans also try to believe much more. (We can’t live on simple
bare facts alone!) That is where we drift into error.
There is an additional feature of the human Mind – our Will.
For Descartes: “Error consists in the will, in its judgments, going beyond what the
intellect clearly and distinctly perceives to be the case.”
Our Will was made by God to be Free – we can voluntarily decide to believe what we
want to believe, even when little solid evidence supports it.
God cannot be faulted for giving us Free Will – humanity needs free will to be
morally responsible creatures and not machines.
How do we avoid error? Try to withhold judgment – don’t believe either way, until
more reliable information arrives. This is what scientific method requires.
Descartes’s Meditations 5 and 6
Meditation Five: Everything We Know Ultimately depends on God
Let’s list everything that exists that depends on God, according to Descartes.
1. My Mind
2. The Intellect within my Mind
3. My knowledge that I exist as a Mind (from intellectual philosophy)
4. My proof that a perfect God exists (from intellectual philosophy)
5. The natural world that this God created
6. My body
7. My senses, imagination, Free Will, etc.
8. My ability to intelligently learn about the world around me.
9. My confidence that my reasonings about the world (so long as I don’t let my
Will stray into error) are fairly reliable.
10. My ability to use science to intellectually discover what nature is like
Descartes admires science – he is a scientist himself! But he has shown that all
intellectual reasoning about the world depends on knowing that God exists.
Only philosophy can prove that God exists. Therefore, science (along with all
theology) depends on philosophy.
This is one of Descartes’s primary objectives: to show why philosophy alone is
capable of proving what theology only promises: there is one God and all human
knowledge requires philosophy to back it up.
Both science and theology are in the same position: they are both ultimately
dependent on philosophy.
Meditation Six: The Dualism of Mind and Body
Descartes returns to his overall philosophy that all reality is divided into Minds and
Bodies. This philosophy is called Dualism. ‘Duo’ = Two. Dualism says that there are
two kinds of realities which have nothing in common with each other. You can say
“Mind and Body” or “Mind and Matter” etc.
Minds have these features: they think, they sense, they imagine, they will, and so on.
Minds are filled with ideas. Descartes is a mind. You are a Mind. God is a Mind.
Bodies have these features: they exist outside of minds; they have the properties
that science says they have: mass, motion, size, and shape.
Proof of Dualism: there is no feature that gets listed on both the Mind list and the
Body list.
Descartes gives an argument for the difference between Mind and Body.
1. I know that I exist as a thinking Mind, but I am never certain of the existence
of my body. (Thanks to God, I can have a body, but my understanding of my
body is always less than perfect knowledge.)
2. So far as I can tell, I am a thinking Mind, and perhaps nothing else.
3. My Mind is distinct from my body.
4. My Mind is something that thinks (by definition) and my Mind does not have
a size, shape, mass, or motion.
5. Bodies have a size, shape, mass, and motion.
Therefore,
My Mind is not the same as my body, or any physical body.
Descartes gives an argument for the Existence of the External World
The “external world” is anything that is a physical body and exists outside of a mind.
Examples of things in the external world:

The pen I am holding

My hand

My nose

My dog

Cleveland

Mount Everest

Electrons, Protons, and Neutrons

The Milky Way Galaxy
Well, you get the idea. If it isn’t a Mind or in a Mind, then it is a physical thing in the
external world.
Descartes has an argument to show that the external world and things in it are real.
A dualist like Descartes has to prove this, because there are two kinds of reality:
Minds (which he has already proven are real) and Bodies. Each kind of reality has to
proven separately.
Here is Descartes’s argument:
1. In my Mind I have ideas about physical things around me that make them
seem quite real.
2. These ideas require an explanation for why they have gotten into my mind.
3. These ideas of external bodies cannot come from my intellect alone (only
math etc come from the intellect working by itself).
4. These ideas cannot come from my imagination, since I can tell when
imagined ideas are created by me.
5. These ideas come to me against my Will – I sense objects whether I want to
or not.
6. Nothing inside me is responsible for causing ideas of bodies to enter my
mind, so something outside me is responsible.
7. The Evil Deceiver would gladly fool us completely about whether there really
is an external world, but God is real and would prevent this.
8. God would not deceive us about an external world.
9. Therefore, the simple explanation must be the true one: there really is an
external world of physical bodies that cause my senses to deliver ideas into
my mind.
WARNING: Descartes has proven that there is an external physical world that
activates our senses. However, it also remains true that God did not build our bodies
to deliver perfect information about the world. We can still willfully make mistakes
about the world.
Four Kinds of Reality
SPIRITUAL & EXTERNAL
GOD
SPIRITUAL & INTERNAL
MIND: Intellect, Reasoning
Evil Genius
MATERIAL & EXTERNAL
COSMOS: The physical world of bodies
– bodies have size,
shape,
mass, &
motion
MATERIAL & INTERNAL
BODY: what animal bodies are like
Imagination
Senses
Memory
Will
Descartes on the Mind-Body Relationship
We really do have bodies. Why? Why aren’t we just disembodied Minds, like ghosts,
floating around? Well, God simply thought it best to make us human: Mind and Body
connected together.
Descartes’s Dualism has remained a powerfully persuasive view of what is like to be
human.
Mind is not the same as Brain, because nothing mental can be the same as
something physical.
Mind is affected by the brain, which explains how we learn about the external
world.
Mind can in turn influence the brain, which explains how our minds can
control our bodies.
Because Mind is not the same as brain, it is possible that the brain can stop working
but the Mind does not also have to stop.
DUALISM: Mind probably is IMMORTAL and survives the death of the Body.
The Assignment:
Write a 200 word Observation by telling us about something that you find people believing
about the world just because they really, really want to believe it. Maybe they are right,
maybe they are wrong – the philosophical question is this: Do they really have enough
information to back up that belief? Tell us about something that you hear people saying
about the world but you realize how they couldn’t really justify it.
MEKHI WILLIAMS
3
My Observation #4
In today’s society and generation, I find that people tend to think and feel that the world is against them when things do not go
how they might have planned it or when bad things happen to them. People with this mindset do not tend to make it far in life
because they cannot comprehend that everything is not always going to go the way that you may have planned it from the start.
You can work really hard at something your whole life and still fall short of your goals. That does not mean the world is
against you. There is growth in failure and disappointment depending on how you deal with it. People who give up and blame
the world for their failed endeavours ar not destined to succeed. No matter how hard things may get or how many times you
fail, you can never give up if you want to be successful.
In life, everyone has failed at some point or bad things have happened to them to set them back. Pushing through the tough
times builds character and thick skin. There is no way to justify giving up on something you are working towards. If you give
up, that just means that you did not want it as bad as you thought you did. Having this mindset can and will ultimately delay
success.