1 The Reasons for Doubting
Like all the great classics of philosophy, the Meditations never grow old: they have always been read and reread, stubbornly resisting definitive interpretation. That would not have pleased Descartes, since he was convinced that he had finally fulfilled the task of establishing the fundamental metaphysical truths.1 But the extraordinary richness of the text authorises and indeed invites ever closer critical analysis. Nearly every word raises questions, debates, analyses of various kinds, not to mention the evocative force of certain salient moments: the deceiving God, the cogito, the demonstrations of God’s existence, the foundation of so-called (but not by Descartes) “dualism,” and thus the problem of the union of mind and body. The title alone – slightly different in the two editions of 1641 and 1642 – could provoke a long commentary: Meditations on First Philosophy, in which are demonstrated the existence of God and the distinction of the soul from the body.2
Why “meditations”? The term at that time was foreign to philosophical jargon, belonging rather to religious vocabulary: meditation is an ascetic step towards holiness (as in Ignace of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises).3 But Descartes requires from the reader – in the very preface of the work – a genuine ascetic retreat, that is, a flight from the world of the senses and of prejudices, similar to his “first meditations” in Holland described in the Discourse on the Method, “so metaphysical and so uncommon that perhaps they will not appeal to everyone”.4 The Meditations correspond to that definition above all because
And why “first philosophy”? At the time of the Meditations, Descartes chooses this expression – in itself, genuinely Aristotelian – because he wants to convey that the object of his work diverges from what Scholastics referred to as “metaphysics”. Descartes’s first philosophy is “first” not because it deals with being per se (according to the definition in Aristotle’s Metaphysics), and not only because it will include a treatment of God and of the human soul, immaterial substances – according to the other traditional sense of the term – but because it has as its object “all the first things that can be known by philosophizing in order”.7 That is, all those notions that, as the rule of “order” prescribes, are precisely the “first” and “easiest to know”: among them, the essence of material things and the union of mind and body, which fell outside the scope of metaphysics as it was generally understood.8
Certainly, the traditional objects of metaphysics – and in particular of its “special” part, according to the division established in late Scholasticism – appear fully in the subtitle: God and the soul. But the subtitle is, in all likelihood, an invention of Mersenne’s, to whom Descartes had granted “the power to baptise” his work, himself suggesting only the main title.9 This would explain why, in the first edition, released in August of 1641, the subtitle refers
The Letter to the Dean and Doctors of the Sorbonne opens the volume of the Meditations and reveals its official motivation: the battle against atheism and impiety. However, this letter, part of a careful publicity campaign,13 carries
The project of the Meditations, highly innovative despite the inevitable traditional legacies, is translated into an equally unprecedented and fascinating literary form. Though now writing for the learned, and thus in the philosophical Latin still dominant, Descartes does not abandon the first person of the Discourse on the Method, dictated not so much by stylistic constraints as by the very structure of the argumentation. Here, however, he passes from autobiography to monologue, from the recounting of a past experience to the recording of a live chronicle: the meditating “I” enters into a dialogue with itself and reports its reflections in a sort of metaphysical diary, raising objections to itself and responding to them. The questions and difficulties follow one another
The beginning of the Meditations cannot have been pleasing to the doctors of the Sorbonne – if the work ever reached them: Descartes’s metaphysics begins with doubt and, literally, with a “general destruction” (generalis eversio) of established knowledge. This beginning, overwhelming as such, makes plain Descartes’s break with the scholastic tradition: it is almost a punch on the nose for readers raised in the colleges and accustomed to being introduced to the study of metaphysics with a placid discussion of the various possible opinions on the “object” of this science (as was the case in Suárez’s Disputationes). Descartes, instead, wants to start again from zero, doing without any opinion or authority. His is a radical doubt, exhibited as the guiding thread in the very title of the First Meditation: “Of the things that may be called into doubt”. But it is a doubt founded in reason – philosophical or “methodical”20 – not a vague and instinctive scepticism: doubt must be motivated by very solid reasons, which may be far from obvious. Now, for Descartes, there is good reason to call many things into doubt. At times, as in the initial “Synopsis” of the work, he even claims that one must doubt “about all things” (de rebus omnibus).21 The latter expression was to enjoy great success because of its simplicity and immediacy, even if, as will later become clearer, it should rather be attributed to a surge
It is important to understand what Descartes doubts and why he doubts it in order then to appreciate the solutions he proposes for the doubts initially raised. The Meditations are composed in a circular structure: the same questions are raised in the course of the text and again at the end, when a way out of the labyrinth is finally found. We must first distinguish between two types of doubt, often inextricably intertwined: (1) an epistemological doubt about the correspondence between our representations and the objects to which they refer,22 and (2) an ontological doubt about the real existence of the objects conceived by the mind.23 Descartes passes from one to the other, often without indicating that the object of his reflection has changed. In the First Meditation he claims that the senses deceive us (1) by making us believe that an object is different from what it is – to which the most common human experience bears witness – but that they could also deceive us in making us believe that (2) our body really exists, while our entire existential experience could be a dream, or the expression of delirious madness. The result of this double doubt is the rejection of knowledge gained through the senses, insofar as, at best, it is plausible, but lacking self-evidence: if it is not possible to distinguish sleep from wakefulness using “sure signs” (certis indiciis), all our knowledge derived from the senses will be subject to doubt, and thus must be rejected all at once.24
This first stage of doubt is followed by a further critical analysis, which arises from an objection that the meditating subject raises for himself: certainly, my life could be a dream, but what are dreams made of? They are made of images, figures, and forms. Now, are these phantastic materials not themselves “true”, like the colours that a painter uses for his paintings, however fanciful and invented the subjects represented may be? But what are the fundamental components of our imaginations, whether dreamlike or real? The point is crucial, because here one witnesses a momentary resurgence of those notions which, like the material “simple natures” in the Regulae, constitute the mathematical fabric of reality. Descartes talks here of a “corporeal nature in general (in communi),25 and its extension; the shape of extended things; the quantity, or
The dramatic twist comes in the following paragraph, a real watershed for all the Meditations and for Descartes’s thought in general. A “long-held opinion” enters the scene: that there exists a “God who can do everything” and by whom man has been created. The conception of God as it occurs in these lines constitutes a kind of spontaneous theology, not rationally articulated but enclosed in the vague reference to the attribute of omnipotence. Now, could this God – still unknown but all-powerful – not deceive me, and deceive me on both the levels on which doubt has been exercised: (1) about the real existence of things outside us and of their essential constituents, “so that there is no earth, no sky, no extended body, no figure, no size, no place,” but also (2) about the actual validity of our knowledge, and even of self-evident propositions, as those which result from mathematical operations? In other words: how can I know that God has not willed that “I go wrong every time I add two and three or count the sides of a square, or in some even simpler matter, if that is imaginable?”28
This is the famous argument known as the “deceiving God”, which Descartes, moreover, did not invent, but rather borrowed from scholastic tradition and probably from Suárez,29 bending it, however, to his own ends. And his principal aim here is to show – contrary to what he had argued in the Regulae – that arithmetic and geometry are not exempt from doubt and therefore cannot claim to constitute the criterion of truth. This is the scandal of the First Meditation, which breaks a taboo of the entire Western tradition: philosophers debated whether mathematics constituted the essence of things or merely a
There has been much discussion – and probably always will be – about the relationship between the hypothesis of the deceiving God and the thesis of the divine creation of eternal truths.32 The thesis of the creation of truths, which postulates God’s power over mathematical knowledge, would seem to be the ideal metaphysical backdrop for the doubt of the First Meditation. What God, if not one who has power even over eternal truths, could make 2 + 3 not equal 5, as men believe? But there are also indications to the contrary. Above all, the metaphysical situation in which the hypothesis of the deceiving God takes shape is important: we are in the First Meditation, therefore in a context that is still epistemologically confused, and in the framework of a pre-philosophical conception of God, in which the question of the origin of truths and essences is not even raised. A supposedly deceiving God would not necessarily need to dispose at will of mathematical truths: it would suffice for him to mould the human mind that thinks them, creating a kind of systematic and continuous – and thus irremediable – deception. It is above all from the nightmare of this deception – and not from a possible alteration of essences and truths – that the rest of the Meditations seeks to liberate human knowledge. This is the object of the following sections of the work, where the question of the origin of eternal truths will not even be raised.
It nevertheless remains difficult to deny any relationship between the thesis of the creation of truths and the hypothesis of the deceiving God. Upon closer inspection, their role within Descartes’s foundation of knowledge is analogous: to show that mathematics is not a true science in itself and that it
The hypothesis of the deceiving God constitutes the strongest “reason for doubting” in the Meditations and absorbs all the preceding ones. But it is also the most abstract and least easy to conceive. For this reason, in the final part of the First Meditation, Descartes introduces another character: the “evil genius”,34 a weakened version of the deceiving God with a similar function: to make conceivable the possibility of cognitive deception, this time limited to sensory perceptions and not to mathematical self-evidence. This is because, obviously, an evil genius, i.e. an intelligence superior to the human intelligence but still finite, could have no power over the human mind in general: it could not make me conceive with self-evidence a false notion, even if it could, by its artifices, illusorily persuade me of the existence of things (“the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds”) which “are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgement”.35 It is, in short, a kind of strategic step backward, necessary to facilitate the metaphysical journey of the
2 The Discovery of the Subject
In all philosophy textbooks the name of Descartes is inevitably associated with the cogito ergo sum, a slogan that has always been considered as the trademark of Cartesianism – even if in this exact formulation it is not to be found in the Meditations but rather in the Discourse on the Method (in the French version: je pense, donc je suis) and in some later texts.36 After an anxious account of the conclusions of the previous day, the Second Meditation opens precisely with the discovery that only one certainty is exempt from doubt: that since I am thinking, I must exist. This argument, as such, is not an invention of Descartes, as was immediately pointed out to him: Saint Augustine had already followed a similar line of reasoning and made it one of his weapons against the sceptics. But Descartes – for once – did not care to claim originality: the novelty does not lie in the proposition as such, in itself anything but profound, but rather in its analysis, in its implications and in the consequences that he can draw from it.37 The Second Meditation is expressly devoted to these topics.
Despite the ergo, which generally introduces the conclusion of a chain of reasoning, the cogito does not intend to be discursive knowledge, much less a syllogism, but an intuitive certainty (as Descartes will later avow, first in his replies to Mersenne’s Second Objections and later in his 1648 letter to Silhon).38 The cogito is an incontrovertible experience: I know that I exist while I am thinking and nothing in the world can make me change my mind. The cogito has that peculiar characteristic of not being falsifiable and not even dubitable.
With this, an element of knowledge that resists every doubt is finally found, in the form of a rational self-evidence that gives immediate access to truth. Thus Descartes has acquired – as he had already written in the Discourse on the Method – the “first principle” of philosophy.41 But in what sense?
Not in the sense that all other truths can be logically deduced from it; on the contrary, there are axioms more general than the cogito, from which the cogito can be deduced. This makes one understand why, in certain cases, Descartes presents the cogito as a consequence of the axiom “to think one must exist” (or “everything that thinks exists”), which in turn depends on the more general statement “nothing comes from nothing” (ex nihilo nihil fit). Descartes will later specify that the cogito presupposes many other elements of knowledge: I must already know what it is “to exist”, what it is “to think”, before affirming that “I am thinking, therefore I exist”.42 But once again this does not diminish the intuitive and immediate character of the cogito and, above all, its existential value: whereas an axiom like “nothing comes from nothing”, although indubitable, does not imply that something exists, the cogito constitutes an immediate existential experience, which reunites thought and being in an inseparable connection.43
Nevertheless, the cogito is not the “first principle” even in the sense that it reveals my ontological independence as a thinking being. On the contrary, as will be discovered in the Third Meditation, my existence, like that of every other created being, depends on God at every instant. Moreover, my very awareness
It is in another sense, then, that the cogito is the first principle of philosophy. The cogito is first precisely in the sense in which Descartes spoke of a “first philosophy”: that which begins with the simplest notions and “easiest to know”,44 rising gradually to those more complex. The cogito is the first truth in the order of knowledge, because we must start from it in order to come to know anything else. With the cogito both aspects of the doubt of the First Meditation are overcome: that of the correspondence of our perceptions with reality and that of the real existence of a thing represented by my idea. The cogito, in fact, attests to me without any possibility of doubt that I am thinking (I thus truly have the property of thinking and I cannot not have it) and that I exist (I am something real, not a dream or an illusion). The cogito is epistemologically unique: there are no other propositions that enjoy the same privilege of being unassailable by doubt from every side. This is explained only by the fact that the cogito belongs to a dimension different from that of the material objects about which the doubt of the First Meditation had been conceived. The cogito belongs to the dimension of the thinking subject, which cannot be transcended as such: before or without it, nothing can be thought.
The cogito therefore also clarifies, negatively and retrospectively, the doubt of the First Meditation, and determines its extent. It is confirmed, in particular, that Descartes does not doubt “everything.” A possible absolute doubt would be inoperative, clashing at least with the self-evidence of the cogito. In the First Meditation the “meditator” doubted above all about corporeal things, regarding their existence and their essence (the doubt about God was only subordinate). This is why, in order to meditate, it is necessary to exclude everything that comes through the senses, calling into doubt even the existence of one’s own body. In the lexicon of the Regulae, the doubt of the First Meditation thus concerns the “material” simple natures,45 leaving intact the “intellectual” simple natures (and also some “common” ones, as we will see). In the lexicon of the Meditations, on the other hand, Descartes’s discovery is that the mind has a privileged access to its existence as the subject of acts of thought, and that
The cogito therefore demonstrates that I am, i.e. I exist, while I am thinking. But does it also tell me what I am? In the Fourth Part of the Discourse on the Method, Descartes had claimed that it does: I am a “a substance whose whole essence or nature is simply to think,” and as such “entirely distinct from the body”.46 The argumentative path of the Meditations is much more sinuous and complex. The meditator, at the moment of the Second Meditation, does not yet have any clear and distinct notion of bodies; indeed, he does not even know whether bodies exist. He must therefore proceed according to the methodological precepts that he has imposed on himself: that is, to deny what is subject to doubt. He will deny, therefore, everything in him that depends on the body; he will deny being a “rational animal”, according to the scholastic definition of man, because the notion of “animal” is confused, depending on that of “soul” (anima) – a term by which is generally indicated the principle by virtue of which man walks and nourishes himself.47 However, as the Treatise on Man had clearly demonstrated, such functions are entirely dependent on bodily motions. What, then, is inseparable from the cogito, what is it that remains intact even supposing that one has no body or limbs? Only the fact that I am thinking: “thought, this alone is inseparable from me.”48 Hence Descartes’s conclusion: “I am precisely only (praecise tantum) a thinking thing,” that is, a mind, “that doubts, that conceives, that affirms, that denies, that wills, that does not will, that also imagines, and that feels”.49
However, even if the distinction may seem subtle, the “thinking thing” (res cogitans) of the Second Meditation cannot yet be equated with the “substance whose whole essence or nature is simply to think”50 mentioned in the Fourth Part of the Discourse on the Method (the equivalence will occur only in the Sixth Meditation and will be contested, as we will see, by almost all the first readers). In the Second Meditation, Descartes specifies that, knowing nothing of the body, he still cannot exclude that bodies may be substantially identical to minds (AT VII, 27; CSM II, 18). From the epistemic point of view of the Second Meditation, immaterialism (I am only a mind and no “body” exists) and materialism (I am a mind but my mind is nothing other than a modification of my body) are hypotheses still open, given the absolute ignorance of the meditator
The last part of the Second Meditation includes the famous analysis of the “piece of wax,” which allows Descartes to offer a further description of the functions of the mind. He seeks to show once again, to those who are not yet convinced by the cogito, how illusory it is to believe that corporeal things are “easier to know” than thought. The adversary here is the scholastic philosopher, who believes that knowledge necessarily depends on the senses. For Descartes, external objects do not have, as such, a special representative power that allows them to be known by human cognitive faculties (as in the Scholastic theory of species). According to him, “objects” are in some way intellectual constructions. Consider, says Descartes, a piece of wax: at first it is solid, it has the smell of flowers, then it liquefies, changes colour, expands; and yet we are always disposed to believe that it is still the same wax. What gives us such certainty? Certainly not our senses, which in fact provide us with diverse and changing representations. We say we “see” the wax, but in reality we carry out an intellectual operation that makes us recognize, beyond our sensory perception, an extended “something” that occupies a certain place and continually changes its state due to infinite movements of its particles, for the most part not even perceptible. Not the senses, therefore, and not even the imagination (which is unable to comprehend the infinity of corporeal movements), but the intellect allows us to “know” external objects – always assuming that they exist. Further on in the Meditations it will also be discovered how this is possible: thanks to the innate idea of extension. For the moment, Descartes is content to restate the epistemological priority of the mind over the body. Not only does the mind know itself through direct consciousness of its own operations, as attested by the cogito, but it is also the source by which we acquire knowledge of bodily objects.
3 From the Cogito to God
“I am, therefore God exists” (Sum, ergo Deus est). Descartes had already offered this inference in the Regulae without providing further details.52 The arduous task of transforming it into a demonstration – indeed into two distinct arguments – falls to the Third Meditation, one of Descartes’s most studied texts. The path is in some way mandatory: to demonstrate that God exists, one must start from the only thing of which one is certain, that is, from one’s own existence while thinking (the temporal reference is necessary for the cogito). There was no other way available, since Descartes, in the First Meditation, had already made a clean slate of all the knowledge held by most to be indubitable, thus forbidding himself access, by a single blow, to all five “ways” proposed by Thomas Aquinas to prove the existence of God: all five, indeed, started from things in the world, or from nature in general, in order to infer the existence of their creator.53 But the meditator, subject and object of the Meditations, does not yet know whether the world exists or not, and indeed methodologically denies that it exists. The only possible starting point is then the cogito, which
The beginning of the Third Meditation is almost a summary of the first two: the various stages of doubt are retraced: doubt regarding the reliability of the senses, doubt regarding the real existence of things outside the thinking subject, and finally doubt regarding mathematics, with a return to the foreground of the deceiving God and, correlatively, of the atheist hypothesis: “I do not yet even know for sure whether there is a God at all”.54 All this, in order to reiterate what is at stake: not a generic demonstration of the existence of a God, but the affirmation of the validity of human knowledge, and in particular of self-evident knowledge, through the response to the most insidious objection, founded on the possibility of a systematic deception. Even at this point, when he comes closest to the traditional mission of metaphysics and rational theology – to demonstrate the existence of God – Descartes claims the fundamentally epistemological character of his research: it is above all a question of founding and justifying clear and distinct knowledge. Indeed, until I know that God exists and that he does not deceive me, “it seems that I can never be quite certain about anything else” (with the sole exception, one must suppose, of the cogito).55
To start from the cogito means to start from all those mental states, already listed in the Second Meditation, which are typical of the “thinking thing”: all indubitable as such, being all dependent on the cogito itself (every act of thought attests to me my existence). Since The World, Descartes had called “ideas” all the various perceptions of the mind, with a patent (and conscious) terminological innovation. In the Platonic-Augustinian tradition, and then scholastic, the term “ideas” designated the models of created things present in the intellect of God.56 However, in the Third Meditation, the term “idea” is used in a much more restricted sense, limiting it to those mental acts that are “images” (that is, representations) of an object – “a man, or a chimera, or the sky, or an angel, or God” – and excluding therefore wills, judgments, affections, passions, and other internal sensations (this new sense of “idea,” however, will also reveal itself to be unstable).57 Descartes’s choice is dictated by the
It is sometimes said that, in order to proceed to the demonstration of the existence of God, Descartes distinguishes between adventitious, factitious, and innate ideas, and then, having found among innate ideas that of God, concludes that God himself exists. However, if such a procedure were really adopted in the Meditations, it would be begging the question. In fact, the meditator does not yet know whether anything exists besides his mind that thinks and that knows itself to exist while thinking. Impossible, therefore, to distinguish between “adventitious” ideas, i.e., coming from outside (it is not known whether there is an “outside” of the mind, and whether the supposedly adventitious ideas resemble the things they are supposed to represent), factitious ideas, i.e., produced by the mind (nothing is known of the powers and faculties of the mind, of which only the act of thinking is known), and innate ideas, i.e., present in the mind itself by its very nature (again, this “nature” remains as yet unknown and on whom or on what it ultimately depends). For this reason, Descartes specifies that, as far as is known at this stage of the meditation, “all my ideas may be thought of as adventitious, or they may all be innate, or all made up”.58
It is not with such classifications that we can even begin to find a clue as to the existence of other things besides the “thinking thing”. We must thus start with something else: from the objects of ideas; that is, precisely, with what ideas represent. And this is the decisive move in the Third Meditation. A move carefully prepared and presented from the beginning with a scholastic terminology. Descartes distinguishes between the “objective reality” and the “formal reality” of ideas: objective reality is precisely the representative content of an idea, while formal reality is the type of existence that an idea, like any being, possesses. As to formal reality, ideas are simply “modes” of the mind, and as such, trivially, belong to the mind like all its modifications. From this stand point, all ideas are equivalent, and there is no distinction between the idea of God and that of a stone. The case of “objective reality” is different: an idea
Descartes’s second move, equally important, consists in the sudden introduction of an axiom known “by natural light,” according to which, in a cause, there must be “at least as much reality as there is in its effect”. This is another formulation of the general axiom, already active in the cogito, according to which “nothing comes from nothing”: if in the effect there were something more than in the cause, this “something” would have no cause, which contradicts the general axiom. This move is crucial since it reveals a hidden secret of the Meditations: from the doubt of the First Meditation are excluded not only the cogito and all the cognitive states of the mind depending on it, but also some general axioms of knowledge, and in particular the principle that “nothing comes from nothing” (other axioms, or “common notions,” guaranteed by natural light, will be mentioned in the Sixth Meditation and in later works).60 If these axioms were not valid in themselves, Descartes could not escape from doubt, especially in its “hyperbolic” version, and the itinerary of the Meditations would be blocked from the start.
The axiom “nothing comes from nothing” (which is in fact a negative formulation of the principle of causality, already applied by Descartes in the first rule, or law, of physics in The World) supports both arguments for the existence of God that are to be found in the Third Meditation. Both are a posteriori arguments: they start from an effect and seek its cause. In this, Descartes’s proofs do not differ from those of Aquinas. The substantial difference lies in the fact that the effect from which Descartes starts is neither an event in the world, nor an object of sensory experience, nor even nature in its entirety: the effect of which the cause is sought is the very idea of God, considered in its representative content, that is, its objective reality. The “idea of God”, in its “formal reality”, is simply a modification of the mind and therefore finite like the mind; but that idea has a content that exceeds the finite capacity of the mind that conceives it, since its “objective reality” represents the infinite. Now, for Descartes,
I am thinking, therefore I exist (cogito ergo sum);
Among the various ideas that I can think of there is that of an infinitely perfect being;
I cannot be the cause of this idea insofar as its “objective reality” is concerned, that is, inasmuch as it represents an infinite being, given that I am finite and imperfect;
Only an infinitely perfect being can be the cause of an idea that represents it as such (according to the principle “nothing comes from nothing”); therefore,
God, the infinitely perfect being, exists.
The crux of the proof lies in the thesis according to which the human mind, though finite, can have an adequate and positive representation of divine infinity. If it were not so, if the idea of God were confused and obscure, it could very well be an artificial product of the mind, and the whole argument would collapse. However, for Descartes, the idea of God is clear and distinct (indeed “the truest and most clear and distinct of all my ideas”),61 and it is precisely the clarity with which we conceive the infinite that is incompatible with the finitude of the mind – and which allows us to conclude that God exists as the only possible cause of the idea of infinity in the human mind.
The idea of God can now be qualified as “innate” (in the Latin original of the Meditations), that is, “born and produced with me, from the moment I was created” (in the French 1647 version).62 This conclusion paves the way to a more accurate analysis of the relationship between the idea of God and the cogito. For Descartes, the perception of the infinite is original and precedes that of the finite. Not, of course, in the sense that every man thinks of God before his own existence: the cogito remains the first conscious act of the thinking subject; but the cogito itself is only possible against the background of infinity offered
The second argument proposed in the Third Meditation is not structurally different from the first. It starts from the cogito and the decisive step is made when the principle of causality appears (“nothing comes from nothing”). The main difference is that now the effect of which the meditator seeks the cause is no longer the idea of God as such, but the existence of a thinking mind which has the idea of God. This argument is not a mere reformulation of the first, although Descartes did not take care to distinguish between them.64 The second argument includes a few theological novelties, destined to provoke a vast debate. God is here not only the cause of the idea I have of Him, but is fundamentally the cause of being, of every being and even of his own being (as will be made explicit in the Objections and Replies). Descartes still uses the scholastic thesis of continuous creation, on which the laws of physics of The World were founded. He shows that my existence would fall back into nothingness if it were not continuously recreated by a cause capable of giving me existence. And this cause certainly cannot be myself, because I am not at all conscious of this supposed faculty. Then, from whom do I receive existence? Certainly not from my parents nor from other creatures. The point in question is not to determine the chain of past causes on which I depend, perhaps reconstructing my genealogical lineage, but to ask what is the cause that “preserves me at the present moment” and at every instant.65 And this cause can only be God, because only God can create and maintain in existence a being such as man, that is, a being capable of thinking the infinite. This last specification would seem to render indispensable – as in the first argument – the reference to the idea of God present in the mind of the meditating subject. However, the appeal to the causality of God for every existence renders such a reference potentially
In the last part of the Third Meditation, the “veracity” of God is finally asserted. In a few lines, the most important conclusion of all the Meditations is drawn, at least as far as the principal goal of the work is concerned: God cannot be a deceiver. To reach this result Descartes invokes another maxim recognized as true thanks to natural light: “all fraud and deception depend on some defect.”67 It follows that the infinite perfection of God, which has just been demonstrated, directly implies the impossibility that he might deceive us. And even if, in the remaining Meditations, the spectre of the deceiving God will continue to manifest itself, it will now only be a bogey to scare the adversaries of Descartes’s metaphysics. Indeed, in his eyes, his argumentation constitutes the only possible way to exorcise it.
4 Freedom and Error
Having reached the demonstration of God’s veracity, the path of the Meditations would now seem definitively clear. But an objection arises spontaneously, and indeed Descartes had raised it himself already at the beginning of the work: if God cannot endow his creatures with deceptive faculties, why nonetheless is the human being subject to error?68 That man sometimes errs is all too well known. It therefore remains to be understood how this is possible: at first glance, it would seem that, being the offspring of a truthful God, man ought never to err in his judgments. The Fourth Meditation is written in order to resolve this question. It is positioned between the assurance achieved of the validity of clear and distinct ideas and their concrete application “to the knowledge of other things” – that is to say, beyond the thinking me revealed through the cogito, and God, whose existence has now been demonstrated.69 The Fourth Meditation interweaves traditional doctrines with others that are quite innovative, faithful in that respect to Descartes’s characteristic style. In certain respects, indeed, it is the least original part of the Meditations, yet it vehicles several theses that are disruptive with respect to scholastic metaphysics.
Descartes’s first step is an ontology of error. For him, “error” – like “sin” for Augustine – is not something real, but rather a “defect,” that is, a lack of reality, and thus cannot have God as its cause, since God is the cause only of real things.70 “Error” thus depends on the necessary imperfection of the human being, that is, on the negativity inherent in the fact of his being a creature: the human intellect is not infinite and is therefore subject to fail from time to time. But this doctrine is not sufficient in itself: “error”, however much it may appear to be a human imperfection and defect, nevertheless denotes a malfunction of one of the faculties that God gave to man. Technically, that imperfection is a “privation,” not a simple “negation”,71 since it must be admitted that God could have created man imperfect and limited, and yet free from any possibility of error. Descartes gives no examples, but one might think of the condition of the blessed in Paradise according to Christian theology: finite spirits, imperfect, and yet constitutionally incapable of sinning. Could God not have created us from the beginning with that same nature?
The objection is weighty. Descartes takes care to deflect it with a first counter-argument, familiar to theologians: God is incomprehensible, and it is presumptuous to question his choices. However, while the latter argument is certainly coherent with the theology of divine omnipotence that is an undercurrent throughout Descartes’s thought – at least since his 1630 crisis – it seems to be ill-suited for the purpose of the meditator, which is to clarify matters in the metaphysical realm and, most importantly, establish a foundation for human knowledge. Such an appeal to the divine incomprehensibility could perhaps have pleased to the Sorbonne theologians. However, this conciliatory move towards theology is accompanied by a far more daring thrust, which is
However, in the context of the Fourth Meditation, even the argument based on the incomprehensibility of God’s ends appears immediately inadequate. And that the meditator is conscious of its inadequacy is shown by the very fact that Descartes’s reasoning does not stop there. In the end, Descartes’s most original response to his own objection – if God is truthful, why is man fallible? – is another argument, one which is wholly independent of scholastic sources and which constitutes the philosophical core of the Fourth Meditation. He introduces a new conception of the relationship, within the human mind, between the intellect and the will. It is there, he claims, that we find both the source of error and the method by which it can be surmounted.
For most scholastic philosophers, including Aquinas, theoretical judgments (by which one assents to this or that proposition, considering it to be true) belong to the intellect, whereas the will has an eminently moral function: that of guiding human actions in relation to the good. For Descartes, however, the will has a much broader jurisdiction: it is the source of all choices, including purely theoretical judgements. Such a thesis appears for the first time in the Fourth Meditation: in the Regulae, theoretical judgments still depended on the intellect.74 Knowledge is for Descartes a signally voluntary act, insofar as
The point is far from negligible. In Christian theology, discussions on free will had always been on the agenda, at least since Augustine, and they had reached paroxysmal intensity between the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the next, when the Counter-Reformation was in full swing. The two extremes to be avoided, within the Catholic sphere, were those of Pelagianism (salvation depends on the free initiative of human beings, independently of divine grace)75 and of the Lutheran and Calvinist “enslaved will” (the actions of human beings are determined by the grace that God freely bestows – or does not bestow – on them). Between these two extremes, the two main schools of Catholic theology at the time offered their solutions: the Dominican “Thomists” – so called even if their link with Thomas Aquinas was not always very close – and the Jesuits, led by the Spanish doctors Molina and Suárez.76 The Thomists emphasized an idea of freedom as spontaneous adherence to the good and rejection of sensory impulses: the more a human being follows the divine commandments, the more he (or she) is free, and he (or she) is most free when under the influence of divine grace, which determines him (or her) to the good without constraint. The Jesuits, on the other hand, defined human freedom as a choice, granting to the will the power to determine itself with “indifference”, that is, without being necessitated by the motives acting upon it, toward one or other alternative presented to it. This latter doctrine, within a generally humanistic framework, was more inclined to accept the possibility that every human being may contribute in some measure by his/her merit to his/her own salvation.
This philosophical scaffolding supports the conclusion that Descartes aims to reach in his theodicy: the origin of error is not to be sought in God, nor in the human will as such, because the will naturally assents with maximal spontaneity precisely in the face of self-evidence, with respect to which one cannot be deceived. However, an error may arise because the will, by definition infinite, is associated with a necessarily finite intellect, which sometimes presents it with obscure and confused perceptions. Faced with these, the will is indifferent and thus risks giving its assent to false notions: “it easily turns aside from what is true and good, and this is the source of my error and sin” (where once
Error, then, depends exclusively on an improper use of one’s faculties: it consists in regarding certain confused perceptions as true, without suspending judgment as one ought to do in the absence of rational self-evidence. Such improper use – or rather abuse – of free will thus constitutes a “privation.” But it is a “privation” with respect to human beings, certainly not with respect to God, who nevertheless concurs with – and indeed causes, through his continuous creation – every human volition.81 With respect to God, human errors are merely “negations,” that is, necessary limitations of the creature’s condition (God remains infinitely perfect even if His creatures are finite and subject to error).82 Certainly, Descartes had admitted that God could have created man in such a way that he would never err: true, but man is not isolated from the rest of nature and must be seen within the totality of creation, in which he is to fulfil the role assigned to him. All degrees of being are represented in the universe, and this variety contributes to the general perfection of the created order, without giving man the right to lament this or that imperfection. This response (which is an obvious echo of Augustine) now sounds definitive: the apparent defects of man are considered necessary in order to give greater emphasis to the perfection of the universe. A thoroughly traditional solution, in short, to which even Leibniz would eventually entrust his ambitions for a Christian theodicy.
What matters, for the itinerary of the Meditations, is nonetheless that error is avoidable – and that it is avoidable thanks to free will. The Fourth Meditation thus has the dual function of defending the dogma just established concerning divine veracity, and of opening the path forward, showing how human freedom is the source of all epistemic enrichment. In some later letters, and in particular in the correspondence with the Jesuit Father Mesland, Descartes will move a step further: he will also admit, besides the freedom of spontaneity in the face of intellectual clarity and the freedom of indifference in the face of obscurity, also the existence of a freedom to “test” one’s “positive power” of choice by denying even truths attested by “very self-evident” reasons.83 But this
5 The Essence of Bodies and the “Ontological” Proof
The universal fame of Descartes as a philosopher rests largely on the cogito, and perhaps on the rules of method and the demonstration of the existence of God, but equally original is his conception of matter, which provoked a vast and prolonged debate. First of all, for Descartes, “matter” exists in itself as a “substance”, without requiring any “form”; secondly, its essence can be known by a clear and distinct idea. These two theses overturn two pillars of Aristotelian scholasticism: respectively, the idea that matter cannot, by its nature, exist autonomously but is the indistinct substratum of things, and the idea that it is something obscure that only “form” can organize and make intelligible to human minds.84 On the first point, however, Descartes avoids expressing his position with precision in the Fifth Meditation, since the meditator does not yet know whether bodies, including his own, exist or not. He says a great deal, however, on the second question – that is, on the essence of matter. For him, the question “what is matter?” can indeed be addressed even without knowing whether matter has a real existence or not – elsewhere, he writes that of everything, including God, one must first ask what it is (quid sit) and then whether it truly exists (an sit).85
To determine the essence of matter, Descartes starts as usual with the cognitive aspect of the question, asking in what way a human mind comes to know material things. The only distinct knowledge that one can have of them is that provided by geometry, which bears exclusively on “extension in length, breadth, and depth,” with respect to which my mind is capable of demonstrating innumerable theorems. But what is the origin of the notion of extension? To answer this question, the meditator embarks on a path analogous to that of the Third Meditation regarding the idea of God. He excludes that one has a factitious idea of extension – that is, an artificial one (given that geometric ideas elude our control and indeed impose themselves on the mind with necessity) – or an adventitious one, that is, deriving from things outside us (since there exist figures that are constructible in geometric space but do not exist in nature). Thus, being neither derived from experience nor arbitrarily constructed by the intellect of a thinking mind, the idea of geometric space can then be nothing other than innate.
Descartes thus officially and consciously embraces a Platonic conception of mathematics, alluding clearly to the doctrine of anamnesis in Meno (where Socrates has a slave “recall” the Pythagorean theorem).87 With his innatist choice, however, Descartes also reconnects with his early metaphysical explorations in the 1630s. Mathematical truths, he had written to Mersenne, are “inborn in our minds” – mentibus nostris ingenitae.88 The difference is that it is now no longer specified whether mathematical truths, although innate, are themselves created or not: the doctrine of the creation of eternal truths once again remains behind the scenes, without playing any perceptible role.
The full intelligibility of matter as such (that is, without the need of any “form”), which Descartes claims against the scholastic tradition, is an immediate consequence of the identification of matter with geometric space. The innate idea of matter-as-extension is in fact the domain of “pure mathematics” (pura mathesis – “pure”, insofar as it is devoid of any sensory element and, therefore, valid as such, independently of the real existence of the objects to which it refers). Mathematical theorems, for Descartes, would remain equally true even if our entire bodily life were a dream (according to the doubt formulated in the First Meditation and still in force). Mathematics thus becomes the skeleton of physics and indeed constitutes the field of inquiry within which a true physics can be developed. As Descartes will later specify, physics is “a part of mathematics” in the sense that it investigates, among all the possible relations between mathematical entities, those that actually exist.91 With the idea of matter-as-extension, Descartes thus provides the metaphysical and epistemological foundation for the basic dogma of the scientific revolution: that nature is “written in mathematical characters” (Galileo) and that the human mind possesses the cognitive tools necessary to investigate it. Freed from the doubt of the deceiving God, mathematical self-evidence now constitutes the criterion of intelligibility of the entire material world.
It is at this point that Descartes inserts – apparently as an aside – a further argument for the existence of God. This time, an a priori argument. Descartes’s line of reasoning does not proceed from an effect to infer the existence of its cause, as in the a posteriori proofs of the Third Meditation. It starts instead from the definition of God in order to deduce directly the existence of God Himself. Descartes’s argument faithfully follows the one invented by Anselm of Canterbury (or of Aosta), that had been virtually eclipsed by Aquinas’s
In the Fifth Meditation, the proof inherited from Anselm appears in a peculiar form. It is in fact equated with the simple deduction of a property of a mathematical entity – for example, a triangle – from its definition (hence the connection with the rest of the Meditation). The equation between mathematical theorems and the “ontological” proof is to be understood in an epistemological sense: the existence of God, thus demonstrated, has “at the very least” (ad minimum – AT VII, 65) the same degree of certainty as mathematical truths. Now, these words “at the very least” inevitably raise suspicion: had Descartes not always declared – starting from 1630 – that the existence of God is “more certain”, and even “more self-evident” than mathematical truths? Why, then, this partial retraction, already anticipated and confirmed in the Discourse on the Method, where it is stated that existence is included in the idea of God “in the same way as the idea of a triangle includes the equality of its three angles to two right angles”.92 If the equation were to be taken literally, a significant question would inevitably arise: since mathematical theorems depend, for their certainty, on the truthfulness of God, then the “ontological” proof – once equated with them – should also depend on it, with the consequence that the a priori proof of the Fifth Meditation would logically depend on the a posteriori proofs of the Third, by which divine veracity was demonstrated. And this would open up an indefensible paradox.93
The fact that, in the Fifth Meditation, Descartes addresses a specific adversary does not imply, however, that he himself does not consider the “ontological” argument to be valid. If he were not convinced that in God, and only in God, existence is an essential attribute, he would not repeat this argument in all his expositions of metaphysics, from the Discourse on the Method to the Principles of Philosophy, where indeed the a priori proof will appear first in order of presentation. For Descartes, in God, essence necessarily implies existence, and the deduction by which this conclusion is drawn can certainly be considered “the most perfect way of demonstrating”.96 However, the human mind, in order to reach it, “require[s] careful reflection” – a reflection, one
In the final part of the Fifth Meditation, Descartes resumes a theme already touched upon earlier: that of the sense in which divine veracity must be understood. Descartes takes the opportunity to reinforce once more the principle of clear and distinct ideas: everything that can be conceived with self-evidence – that is, clearly and distinctly – is true. Thus, self-evidence – and not only mathematical self-evidence – is definitively elevated to the status of criterion of truth, under the guarantee of divine veracity. But it also becomes clear at this point that the divine guarantee has a purely epistemological function and adds nothing to the intrinsic self-evidence of clear and distinct ideas. These cannot be doubted in the moment they are conceived by the intellect; they can only be doubted when, forgetting the self-evidence that had previously led one to accept them, one allows oneself to be distracted (more or less voluntarily or freely) by erroneous ideas about God, such as the hypothesis of the deceiving God. This psychological dubitability is, however, nothing but the symptom of an epistemological dubitability,100 far more dangerous, which the hypothesis of the deceiving God has allowed to be analysed in depth. Only now that I know God, and that His existence as an infinitely perfect being is fully demonstrated, can I be certain that everything that is clear and distinct is true. Based on this certainty, the meditator may now turn to what remains of his former doubts.
6
If the Meditations were only, or mainly, an apologetic work against atheism, they ought to conclude with the resolution of all doubts concerning man, the world, and God, with the demonstration of the immortality of the soul and a general happy ending. But despite Descartes’s efforts to make them palatable to the Sorbonne theologians (who, however, did not grant them official patronage),101 the Meditations remain above all a work of philosophy, with all the related risks. The Sixth Meditation amply demonstrates how Descartes’s text is written without shortcuts or concessions to common sense: the problems addressed are numerous, so too the solutions proposed, but perhaps still more numerous are the new questions raised and left as a legacy to Cartesian and non-Cartesian posterity. The principal themes of the Sixth Meditation, often interwoven, are:
the existence of “material things”;
the “real distinction” between mind and body;
the “union” of mind and body;
the function of sensory perceptions;
the errors of the senses and their compatibility with God’s goodness.
The meditator begins with the question of the real existence of “material things”, that is, of bodies, including his own. He already knows, from the Fifth Meditation, that the existence of bodies is “possible”, as attested by the fact that we have clear and distinct ideas of bodies themselves – and “God is capable of creating everything that I am capable of perceiving in this manner”.102 The difficulty lies in the passage from possibility to reality. The intellect, from this point of view, is powerless, since it limits itself to the clear and distinct idea of the essence of material things and can in no way prove their existence. The best candidates for this mission would therefore seem to be the non-intellectual faculties of the human mind. Imagination is considered first – and indeed introduced explicitly for the first time in the Meditations.
This move is somewhat contrived, its principal aim being precisely to clarify the difference between imagination and intellect. The distinction is illustrated by an illuminating example: a figure such as a triangle or a pentagon can be easily conceived both by the imagination and by the intellect; on the contrary, it is not possible to have a clear image of a “chiliagon,” that is, a polygon with a thousand sides (it is impossible to distinguish it in one’s imagination from one with ten thousand sides), whereas its properties will always be determinable
The only path open in order to demonstrate that bodies – and my body in particular – exist (an unusual task for a philosopher, and even more so in a metaphysical treatise, but one imposed by the doubts of the First Meditation) is thus the one that starts from the senses. The senses present me with knowledge over which I have not the slightest control and which in fact imposes itself upon me with great vividness, to the point of making me think that it comes from an external cause which is different from me as a thinking being. Certainly, the senses deceive me with regard to many things. They deceive me above all by presenting to my mind things that are false or non-existent: colours, smells, tastes have nothing to do with external objects, which consist only in parts of extension (in this sense Descartes had previously spoken of the “material falsity” of the ideas that represent the so-called “qualities” of bodies, such as heat and cold, which in reality lack any true external counterpart).104 But the senses also deceive me with regard to those sensations that would seem to originate from our own body: someone who has had a limb amputated continues to localize pain in a part of the body that he no longer possesses.105
We thus return to a question of theodicy analogous to that in the Fourth Meditation, but even more problematic: there, the question was how it is possible that man be mistaken at times, and how such a thing is compatible with God’s veracity. However, Descartes’s definitive conclusion on the senses is that man is always deceived by them, which hardly seems compatible with divine veracity. How is it possible that one of my faculties always deceives me?
Bodies therefore exist and, in particular, this body exists which I feel to be mine. However, Descartes must at this point raise the question – hitherto postponed – of the relation between the body and the mind (of which, so far, we know only that it is defined by its acts of thought). This is why the meditator,
By contrast, that geometrical extension is the essence of matter in general – and of my body in particular – had already been intimated in the Second Meditation with the analysis of the piece of wax, and then definitively established in the Fifth. Hence Descartes’s conclusion in the Sixth Meditation: the very fact that one can have a clear and distinct idea of these two things (mind and body), each idea independently of the other, demonstrates that the things represented by these two ideas are really distinct and that God can make the one exist without the other. The latter assertion is based on the same principle already invoked preliminarily in the course of the demonstration of the existence of bodies: God can produce everything that we conceive clearly and distinctly. Otherwise, once again, God would deceive us – this being the major premise of all Descartes’s most important conclusions in the Sixth Meditation.
It is important to remember that, in the Cartesian “order of reasons”, the entire demonstration of the “real distinction” between mind and body precedes that of the existence of bodies, from which it is in fact independent: the demonstration of the “real distinction” is founded solely on the separate conceivability of two essences, which demonstrates – in the light of God’s veracity – the separation of the “things” corresponding to them, namely (1) my mind, a “thinking thing” (res cogitans), and (2) my body, an “extended thing” (res extensa) – if indeed it exists. Also for this reason, Descartes does not even touch upon the question of the
Once the real distinction between mind and body has finally been demonstrated, and the actual existence of bodies established, Descartes moves on to another issue, to which he is necessarily led by the analysis of human sensory perception just undertaken. Mind and body, although two different “things,” are united in man, as is attested precisely by the fact that we receive sensations on the occasion of the contact of other bodies with our own: since we are now certain that the latter exists, we also now know that it is capable of acting upon the mind, with which it seems intimately united. But what is the ultimate reason for such a union? And how is it possible for there to be an interaction between two “things” that are defined precisely by their diametric opposition? Thus arises, suddenly and unexpectedly, the necessity for a further meditative effort, also unprecedented in the history of philosophy. No philosopher had ever laboured so much to know whether and how it is possible for the mind and the body to be united; and this is because no philosopher had ever distinguished them in such a rigorous manner: in the Aristotelian tradition, dominant for centuries, body and soul formed a single substance – namely, the human being – of which they constituted respectively the “matter” and the “form”, and their union did not need to be explained – even less justified – in any way.
By contrast, in Descartes’s thought, the question of the union constitutes a real enigma, which begins to manifest itself in all its complexity only in the Sixth Meditation: Descartes had never previously raised it, except in passing and without ever problematizing it. Now, he asserts that the machine of the body is intimately linked to the mind, and that this union gives rise, no longer to a machine, but to a “composite” (compositum), sensitive and sentient – namely, the human being – in which the parts contribute organically to the preservation of the whole. Thus, any human being, insofar as he is corporeal, follows the immutable laws of physics like all other material things, including animals and plants; and insofar as he is a thinking being, he possesses innate ideas of the essences of things, and in this he is like an angel who contemplates truth. But “man” also has a “nature” of his own – and his alone – which derives precisely from the fact that he is a composite of an “extended thing”, infinitely divisible, and a “thinking thing,” simple and indivisible. In this opposition
The “union” between mind and body is thus the peculiar element of human nature, understood in this way, and can be explained – insofar as it can be explained – through reference to the pineal gland, not named but clearly indicated as the seat of the “common sense” in human brain.111 On this point, the Sixth Meditation reconnects with the Treatise on Man, where, however, the issue – far from being discussed – had been resolved in all haste by declaring that the mind, acting on the gland, moves the body like a “plumber” dealing with the pipes of a hydraulic system.112 In the Sixth Meditation, Descartes makes use of a similar comparison – but in order to deny it. The mind, he writes, does not relate to the body as the sailor (or the “pilot”, in the French version) to the ship, but in a much closer way:113 whereas the sailor and the pilot feel no pain if a part of the ship is damaged, the mind feels the body’s material alterations. The union between mind and body is therefore almost a fusion, or a “mixture” (permixtio), even if the meaning of this expression – intricate in itself – remains entirely undefined.114 Descartes limits himself to affirming that God has organised the mind-body composite by making certain movements of the pineal gland correspond to certain sensations, and this in a wholly arbitrary way. But it is an arbitrariness quite different from that which presides over the creation of truths, because it corresponds to teleological criteria; and these are not in the least incomprehensible – contrary to the declaration in the Fourth Meditation on “final causes”115 – indeed, they are entirely transparent. Descartes no longer maintains that in physics one must not investigate the ends of God, and even less that God establishes the essences of things freely without being bound by anything. Instead, he now maintains that God has assembled the clockwork of the body in order to make it function in accord with the mind
However, this novel teleological perspective inevitably raises a novel question of theodicy: if sensory perception has been placed in us by God for a precise purpose – namely, to preserve the mind-body composite – it cannot be fallacious. But then how can we explain the cases in which the senses fail to fulfil their function properly? Such cases do indeed appear to exist. What is at stake is not only the corruption and illness of the body, which are entailed by the necessary imperfection and finitude of human beings: illnesses are, in this sense, natural (insofar as “nature” is everything that is created by God). But, at times, a human being is deceived by his very own “nature,” now taken in the stricter and newly defined sense of the term – namely, his “nature” as a composite of mind and body. And what deceives him is precisely his mind, which, for example, makes him believe that a certain limb is giving him pain whereas it has been amputated, or urges a patient suffering from dropsy to drink even though it will be harmful to his health.117 In these cases, sensory perception appears to function against its natural end. And how is this to be reconciled with the veracity (and now also the goodness) of God?
Descartes addresses this further question of theodicy in the final pages of the Meditations, and places the emphasis on his mechanistic physiology, taking the opportunity to summarize it. He explains that the relation between bodily movements and sensations is a relation that follows general laws, established by God from the beginning and guaranteed (like all the laws of physics and even the eternal truths themselves) by His constancy and immutability.118 Each nervous filament mechanically generates in the pineal gland a certain movement, to which corresponds one and only one sensation, even in the case where the filament has been cut at some point. It is for this reason that, even if a limb has been amputated, the mind continues to feel it as if it still existed. The same holds for dropsy: thirst, in all human beings, depends on a certain material configuration of the throat that stimulates one to drink; it matters little, then, that in a given individual, this same configuration is caused by a bodily illness, and that the resulting impulse to drink is harmful to him: what matters is that it functions correctly in the vast majority of cases. Descartes invokes a statistical principle: the marginality of anomalies with respect to the situations in which the human composite functions perfectly, thanks to God’s wise design. This, however, does not prevent him from admitting that, in those
Thus, unexpectedly and even unbelievably, Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy – a hymn to divine veracity – conclude with the candid assertion that, in certain cases, “nature” – that is, God’s creation – is “deceptive” (fallax). This was a paradoxical, if not tragic, outcome for a work intended to find a firm foundation for all knowledge in God’s moral and metaphysical attributes. Paradoxical if not tragic, even though, at the time, the difficulty hardly drew attention: none of Descartes’s first opponents noticed it, and only some decades later would it begin to attract examination by his more or less faithful readers and disciples, first Malebranche and then Bayle. However, while the Oratorian would honestly acknowledge the seriousness of the issue and attempt to solve it with his Theory of General Laws, Bayle would show how both the problem and Malebranche’s solution constitute serious threats to Christian theology.120 As to the final resolution of the “dream doubt”, in the very last lines of the Meditations, it sounds more like an obligation fulfilled than a real effort of conceptualization. Once again, Descartes’s purported solution is based entirely on his dogma of God’s veracity: “from the fact that God is not a deceiver it follows that in cases like these I am completely free from error”.121
By then, everything that needed to be said had been said, and the Meditations could make their entrance into the world of philosophy – overturning it from top to bottom.
AT V, 165: “one should not exaggerate in applying oneself to the Meditations and to metaphysics in general, subjecting them to elaborate commentaries and the like […]; the author has dwelt sufficiently on metaphysical truths […] exempting others from committing themselves and toiling over them for a long time” (Conversation with Burman).
Meditationes de prima philosophia, in quibus Dei existentia et animae a corpore distinctio demonstrantur (title of the 2nd edition, 1642; the original title of 1641 will be discussed further below, note 8).
See, among others, Ivonne del Valle, “Loyola’s God and Descartes’s Method: the Role of the Spiritual Exercises in Modernity and Secularization”, Philosophy and Theology, 34/1–2 (2022). See also Jorge K. Secada, “The Scholastic and Meditational Traditions”, in J. Secada et al., The Cartesian Mind, London, Routledge, 2025, pp. 37–67.
AT VII, 9; CSM II, 8 (Preface to the reader) and AT VI, 31; CSM I, 126–127 (Discourse).
On the reason why Descartes wrote “meditations” rather than “disputes and questions, as philosophers do, or even theorems and problems, as geometers do,” see AT VII, 157 (2nd Replies). In 1639–40 Descartes still spoke of the Meditations as a “discourse” (AT II, 622) or an “essay” (AT II, 629; III, 35–36). The only extant manuscript copy of the Meditations – sent to Fermat in February 1641 and recently discovered – is simply entitled “Renati Des Cartes Prima Philosophia.” See Jeremy Hyman, “Un manuscrit des Meditationes retrouvé à la Bibliothèque Municipale de Toulouse”, Bulletin cartésien 47 (2016), pp. 174–179.
AT VII, 17; CSM II, 12. For the Regulae see above, p. 24, note 99.
Descartes to Mersenne, 11 November 1640 (AT III, 239).
Descartes explicitly distinguishes “metaphysics” from “first philosophy” in his letter to Mersenne of 11 November 1640 (AT III, 235, 239). He will later consider them to be synonymous terms (with the new meaning): cf. AT IX–2, 14 (preface to the French edition of the Principia philosophiae, 1647). The title of the French edition of the Meditations (translated by Louis-Charles d’Albert, 2nd Duke of Luynes) is an unsuccessful hybrid: Méditations métaphysiques touchant la première philosophie (1647).
Descartes to Mersenne, 11 November 1640 (AT III, 239).
Meditationes de prima philosophia, in qua Dei existentia et animae immortalitatis demonstratur, Paris, M. Soly, 1641. Mersenne will address again the question of immortality in his 2nd Objections, AT VII, 128, CSM II, 91, cf. Descartes’s reply, AT VII, 152, CSM II, 108–109. On the theme of immortality in Descartes, see C. F. Fowler, Descartes on the Human Soul: Philosophy and the Demands of Christian Doctrine, Dordrecht, Kluwer, 1999. See also Michael W. Hickson, “The Moral Certainty of Immortality in Descartes”, History of Philosophy Quarterly 28 (2011) 227–247; Lynda Gaudemard, Rethinking Descartes’s Substance Dualism, Springer Nature Switzerland, 2021, pp. 100–108.
AT VII, 12–4. Descartes also alludes to Aquinas’s position at the beginning of the dedicatory letter of the Meditations (AT VII, 1–2; CSM II, 3).
According to Edwin M. Curley, “The Immortality of the Soul in Descartes and Spinoza”, Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, 75 (2001), Person, Soul, and Immortality, pp. 27–41, Descartes’s “attempt to prove the immortality of the soul [is] extremely disappointing” (p. 36).
Descartes wanted to send the Meditations to each doctor, to have their opinion before the final printing (to Mersenne, 11 November 1640 – AT III, 239).
See respectively AT VII, 3 (CSM II, 4) and AT VII, 7 (CSM III, 8).
Descartes to Mersenne, 28 January 1641 (AT III, 298).
Descartes to Mersenne, 30 September 1640 (AT III, 192).
See in this regard Jean-Luc Marion, Sur le prisme métaphysique de Descartes [1986], Paris, PUF, 2004, pp. 1–8 (the whole volume aims to define Descartes’s relationship with the Western metaphysical tradition).
See Gueroult’s masterful study: Descartes selon l’ordre des raisons, Paris, Aubier, 1953, 2 vols. (English translation by R. Ariew, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1984, 2 vols.).
AT VII, 9; CSM II, 8. See also AT VII, 157 (2nd Replies).
Descartes never speaks of a “methodical doubt” (nor of a “method of doubt”), but these expressions have become widespread in Descartes literature.
AT VII, 12; CSM II, 9.
As Descartes will argue in his Replies to Arnauld’s 4th Objections, in the 1st Meditation he has doubted that things are “according to truth, such and such as we conceive them” (AT VII, 226).
“Epistemology” and “ontology” are obviously anachronistic terms unknown to Descartes, used here only for the sake of clarity.
AT VII, 19; CSM II, 13.
Descartes uses this expression here – for the first time – perhaps alluding to “common matter”, abstracted from sensory experience and considered by Thomists as the object of mathematics. See M.A. Olson, “Descartes’ First Meditation: Mathematics and the Laws of Logic”, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 1988, pp. 407–439.
AT VII, 20; CSM II, 14.
AT VII, 20; CSM II, 14.
AT VII, 21; CSM II, 14.
See Scribano, Angeli e beati, p. 175 ff., and F. Suárez, Disputationes metaphysicae, IX, “De falsitate”, II.
Cf. AT VII, 21; CSM II, 14: “the less powerful they [the atheists] make my original cause, the more likely it is that I am so imperfect as to be deceived all the time.”
AT VII, 89, 226, 460 (6th Meditation; 4th and 7th Replies).
The two extreme positions respectively in Martial Gueroult, Descartes selon l’ordre des raisons, I, pp. 42–9 (no direct relationship or implication), and Henri Gouhier, La Pensée métaphysique de Descartes, p. 258 (the hypothesis of the deceiving God is possible “only in reference to a God creator of eternal truths”).
AT VII, 21; CSM II, 14.
The nearest source could be found again in Suárez’s Disputationes, IX, II, 7, where a “bad angel” (angelus malus) is evoked.
AT VII, 22–23; CSM II, 15.
AT VI, 32; CSM I, 127 (Discourse on the Method); AT VII, 140; AT X, 523; CSM I, 417 (Search for Truth); AT VIII–1, 7; CSM I, 195 (Principles of Philosophy, 1st Part, § 7); AT V, 137 (Descartes to Silhon [?], 1648); AT V, 147 (Conversation with Burman, 1648).
See Descartes to Colvius, 14 Novembre 1640 (AT III, 247–248) and Augustine, De civitate Dei (XI, 26). See also AT VII, 197–198 (4th Objections).
See the passages of the 2nd Replies and of the letter to Silhon cited above, p. 64–65, n. 27.
AT VII, 25; CSM II,
AT X, 523; CSM II, 417 (Search for Truth).
After making that assertion in the Discourse on the Method (AT VI, 32; CSM I, 127), he will repeat it often, even if not in the Meditations: cf. AT X, 527; CSM II, 420 (Search for Truth); to Clerselier, June or July 1646 (AT IV, 444–445); and in the letter-preface to the French edition of the Principles, AT IX–2, 10.
Principles of Philosophy, 1st Pt., § 10. See also AT V, 147 (Conversation with Burman).
On the cogito as a “performative” speech, see the influential paper by Jaakko Hintikka, “Cogito ergo sum: inference or operation?” [1962].
AT IX, 26 (2nd Meditation, French version: “il n’y a rien qui me soit plus facile à connaître que mon esprit”).
Cf. Jean-Luc Marion, Questions cartésiennes, pp. 100–101 (within the framework, however, of his controversial thesis of a continuity between the Regulae and the Meditations).
AT VI, 33; CSM I, 127.
AT VII, 25; CSM II, 17. Cf. AT X, 515–516 (Search for Truth).
AT VII, 27–8; CSM II, 18.
Ibid.
AT VI, 33; CSM I, 127.
On the ambiguity of the word “soul”, and the need to replace it with “mind”, see AT VII, 355–356 (5th Replies).
AT X, 421; CSM I, 46 (Rule XII).
Thomas, Summa theologiae, I, q. 2, a. 3.
AT VII, 36; CSM II, 25.
AT VII, 36; CSM II, 25.
See AT VII, 181 (3rd Replies). On the context of Cartesian terminological innovation: Roger Ariew, Descartes among the Scholastics, Leiden-Boston, Brill, 2011, pp. 101–126 (“Ideas in and before Descartes”).
Descartes will in fact soon return to the idea-perception, see AT VII, 160, 181 (2nd and 3rd Replies) and even to his early conception (attested in the Regulae) of “ideas” as material configurations “impressed” in the brain (see Passions of the Soul, art. 103, 136). On the evolution of the term in Descartes and in European philosophy, see the various contributions to the volume Idea. VI International Colloquium of the European Intellectual Lessico, edited by Marta Fattori and M.L. Bianchi, Rome, Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1990.
AT VII, 38; CSM II, 26.
AT VII, 40; CSM II, 27–28.
Cf. H. Gouhier, La Pensée métaphysique de Descartes, pp. 265–285; P. Machamer and J.E. McGuire, Descartes’s Changing Mind, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2009, pp. 74–79.
AT VII, 46; CSM II, 32. From an epistemic point of view, all “clear and distinct” (or “self-evident”) ideas are equally “clear and distinct” (or “self-evident”). However, Descartes also thinks that, epistemologically, that is, from the point of view of their dependence on other propositions, some “clear and distinct” (or “self-evident”) truths are more “clear and distinct” (or more self-evident) than others. In this sense, as Descartes argues since his 1630 letters to Mersenne, the assertion of God’s existence is “more self-evident” than any mathematical theorem (see supra, pp. 38–39, and note 8).
AT VII, 51; CSM II, 35.
AT VII, 46–47; CSM II, 32. Later, in the 5th Replies, Descartes will argue that “every limitation contains in itself the negation of the infinite” (AT VII, 365); see also Descartes’s Conversation with Burman: “every defect or negation presupposes the thing of which it is a defect or negation” (AT V, 153). However, for Descartes, the originality of the idea of the infinite must be understood as a virtual capacity to conceive divine perfection, not as an effective possession of the idea of God: cf. AT XI, 655 (Notes to the Principles of Philosophy).
Descartes to Mesland, 2 May 1644 (AT IV, 112).
AT VII, 50; CSM II, 34.
See below, p. 134.
AT VII, 52; CSM II, 35.
AT VII, 21; CSM II, 14.
AT VII, 53; CSM II, 37.
AT VII, 54; CSM II, 38.
In Scholastic terminology, “negation” means the lack of a property not included in the nature of an entity (human beings do not have wings), while “privation” is the absence of something that should be there. According to Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I, q. 48, a. 3, evil is the “privation of good” in the same sense as blindness is the privation of sight.
See above, p. 49.
AT VII, 55; CSM II, 39. See Francis Bacon, De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum, III, 5.
Cf. AT X, 420; CSM I, 45 (about “the faculty by which our intellect […] makes affirmative or negative judgements”). However, even after the Meditations, Descartes does occasionally affirm, taking the word “intellect” in a more general sense, that the intellect judges. cf. AT VII, 139 (2nd Replies); AT IV, 277, 356 (Descartes to Elizabeth, 18 August 1645 and January 1646); AT IX–2, 10 (Preface to the French edition of the Principles). Therefore, the presence of the traditional position on the intellect in Descartes’s unpublished Recherche de la vérité cannot be considered as a useful clue for the dating of this text (on which see below, pp. 170–171, note 168). In the metaphysical part of the Discourse on the Method, Descartes makes no declaration on this topic, which is addressed very briefly.
On a possible sympathy of Descartes for Pelagianism, see below, p. 151, note 84, and p. 233.
For the theological context of Descartes’s theses on free will, see especially Étienne Gilson, La Liberté chez Descartes et la théologie, [1913] Paris, Vrin, 1982.
Writing to Mersenne on 21 April 1641, Descartes declares that “I have not written anything that contradicts what Gibieuf argued in his book De Libertate.” (AT III, 360).
AT VII, 58; CSM II, 40: “[God’s Will] does not seem any greater than mine when considered as will in the essential and strict sense”. The (unheard-of) thesis of the infinity of the will, absent from Descartes’s writings prior to the Meditations, is foreshadowed in his letter to Mersenne of 25 December 1639 (AT II, 628).
AT VII, 58; CSM II, 40: “divine grace and natural knowledge, far from diminishing my freedom, rather increase and strengthen it”.
AT VII, 58; CSM II, 41.
On this point, see the text cited below, p. 217, note 50.
AT VII, 61; CSM II, 42.
Descartes to Father Mesland, 2 May 1644 (AT IV, 115–8) and especially 9 February 1645 [?] (AT IV, 173–175). On the questions opened by these texts, after Étienne Gilson, La Liberté chez Descartes et la théologie. Paris, F. Alcan, 1913, and Ferdinand Alquié, La Découverte métaphysique de l’homme chez Descartes, pp. 287–99, see Anthony Kenny, “Descartes on the Will”, in John Cottingham (ed.), Descartes, Oxford. OUP, 1998, pp. 132–159; Tad M. Schmaltz, Descartes on Causation, Oxford, OUP, 2008, pp. 178–216; Thomas M. Lennon, “Descartes’s Supposed Libertarianism: Letter to Mesland or Memorandum concerning Petau?” Journal of the History of Philosophy 51 (2013/2), pp. 223–248; C.P. Ragland, The Will to Reason: Theodicy and Freedom in Descartes, New York and Oxford, OUP, 2016.
On the scholastic context, which is very varied, see Roger Ariew, Descartes among the Scholastics, pp. 127–56.
On this point, see especially AT VII, 107–108 (1st Replies).
See above, p. 44.
AT VII, 64; CSM II, 64: it seems to me “that I remember what I already knew before, that is, I perceive things that were already in my mind, although I had not yet turned my thoughts to them”.
Descartes to Mersenne, 15 April 1630 (AT I, 145; CC I, 60).
AT VII, 65; CSM II, 45.
Descartes to Mersenne, 27 May 1630: “I know God is the author of all things, and these truths are something, and consequently he is their author” (AT I, 152; CC I, 62).
See AT XI, 315–6 (letter-preface to the Passions of the Soul, to which we will return below, pp. 220–221) and AT V, 160 (Conversation with Burman).
AT VI, 36 (cf. CSM I, 129, where a misleading addition is to be found, not attested in the original 1637 text nor in the 1644 Latin translation: “the idea I had of a perfect being […] included existence in the same way as – or even more evidently than – the idea of a triangle includes the equality of its three angles to two right angles”).
The question of the relationship between the two proofs has been the subject of a heated dispute, the main protagonists being M. Gueroult, Descartes selon l’ordre des raisons, I, pp. 22–29; 346–60; Nouvelles réflexions sur la preuve ontologique, Paris, Vrin, 1955, and Henri Gouhier, “La preuve ontologique de Descartes (à propos d’un livre récent)”, Revue internationale de philosophie, 1954, pp. 295–303; and Id., La Pensée métaphysique de Descartes, pp. 104–12; 143–77.
On this point, see Sergio Landucci, La mente in Cartesio, pp. 181–86.
Perhaps an allusion to Maurice of Nassau, under whom he had served in 1618–1619 and who is alleged (by Guez de Balzac, Socrate chrétien, 1652) to have said on his deathbed: “I believe that two plus two makes four”. See Mariafranca Spallanzani, “Bis bina qua-tuor”, Rivista di filosofia, 1991, pp. 301–117; Alain Mothu, “Mathématiques et libertinisme”, in Révolution scientifique et libertinage, ed. by A. Mothu, Turnhout, Brepols, 2000, pp. 209–249.
Descartes to Mersenne, 16 June 1641 (AT III, 383).
In the 1st Replies, Descartes will confirm that the ontological proof requires, as a “major premise”, the principle “everything that we intend or conceive clearly and distinctly is true” (AT VII, 115–16).
See AT VII, 14, 101, 238 (“Synopsis”, 1st and 4th Replies).
AT VII, 68; CSM II, 47 (5th Meditation).
On this opposition, cf. Edwin M. Curley, Descartes against the Skeptics, p. 111 ff., 118–23; P. Markie, Descartes’ Gambit, Ithaca, Cornell Univ. Press, 1986, with the reply of Curley, Certainty: Psychological, Moral and Metaphysical, in Essays on the Philosophy and Science of René Descartes, edited by S. Voss, Oxford Univ. Press, 1993, pp. 11–30.
Descartes to Gibieuf, 19 January 1642 (AT III, 473–4).
AT VII, 71; CSM II, 50.
AT VII, 73; CSM II, 51. See also AT V, 162–163 (Conversation with Burman).
AT VII, 43–44; CSM II, 30. See also AT VII, 232–234 (4th Replies).
AT VII, 77; CSM II, 53.
Compare AT VII, 59, CSM II, 41 (4th Meditation: “I could not but judge that something which I understood so clearly was true; but this was not because I was compelled so to judge by any external force, but because a great light in the intellect was followed by a great inclination [magna propensio] in the will”) with AT VII, 79–80; CSM II, 55 (6th Meditation: “God […] has given me a great inclination [magna propensio] to believe that [my sensory perceptions] are produced by corporeal things. So I do not see how God could be understood to be anything but a deceiver if [they] were transmitted from a source other than corporeal things. It follows that corporeal things exist”).
The distinction is “real” (realis) in the sense that it allows us to distinguish between two things (res), that is, two substances. See also Principles of Philosophy, 1st Part, § 60–62.
AT VII, 78; CSM I, 54.
For the “Synopsis”, see above, p. 91, note 10.
AT VII, 85–86; CSM II, 59: “there is a great difference between the mind and the body, inasmuch as the body is by its very nature always divisible, while the mind is utterly indivisible”.
AT VII, 86; CSM II, 59.
AT XI, 131. See above, p. 77.
AT VII, 81; CSM II, 56. For the sources of the simile (generally used against the Platonic doctrine of the soul), see F. Manzini, “‘Comme un pilote en son navire’”, Bullettin cartésien 31 (2003).
For an “emergentist” reading of Descartes’s theory of the mind, according to which the mind cannot subsist (or cannot be created by God) “without a certain configuration of physical components”, see Lynda Gaudemard, Rethinking Descartes’s Substance Dualism, Springer Nature Switzerland, 2021, p. 113.
See above, p. 111.
AT VII, 87; CSM II, 60.
AT VII, 86–89; CSM II, 59–61.
On this point see also Descartes’s Conversation with Burman (AT V, 164).
AT VII, 88–9; CSM II, 61 (where the passage is translated: “the nature of man […] is bound to mislead him from time to time”). Cf. also AT VII, 143 (2nd Replies): “we are really deceived by that natural instinct which has been given to us by God” (“ab ipso naturali instinctu, qui nobis a Deo tributus est, interdum nos realiter falli videmus”).
For Bayle’s anti-theological reappraisal of the hydropic case, see his Objections to Poiret [1679], in P. Bayle, Œuvres diverses, La Haye, 1727–31, vol. IV, p. 159. On the whole question, see especially Sergio Landucci, La teodicea nell’età cartesiana, Naples 1986.
AT VII, 90, CSM II, 62.