Descartes' Meditation I: A Paraphrase

I'm hoping this fall to slowly paraphrase Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy, with Claude helping. After several months, here is finally a paraphrase of his first meditation. (I have the Synopsis paraphrased already too.)
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Meditation 1
Things We Can Doubt

1. It has been several years now since I first realized something unsettling. From the time I was young, I had been accepting all kinds of opinions as true without ever really checking whether they were. And if the foundations were wrong, then everything I built on top of them was probably wrong too.

So, I made a decision. At some point in my life, I was going to have to tear the whole thing down and start over. Not just fix a few mistakes here and there—that would be like patching a rotten wall instead of rebuilding it. I needed to go all the way down to the foundation and start fresh, if I ever wanted to build something I could actually trust.

But that’s a big project. So, I waited. I kept waiting until I was old enough and mature enough that I couldn’t keep telling myself I’d be better prepared later. That time is now. Today, I find myself with a quiet mind, free from distractions, with the time and the peace to actually do this. (Descartes was living in peaceful retirement when he wrote this—deliberately setting aside time for serious philosophical work.)

So, today I begin. I am going to systematically set aside every opinion I have ever held. All of it goes.

2. Now, I want to be clear about something. I’m not going to try to prove that all my former opinions are completely false. That might actually be impossible—and it isn’t necessary anyway.

Here’s why. If I find even one good reason to doubt something, that’s enough to set it aside. I don’t need to prove it’s wrong. I just need to show it isn’t completely certain. (Think of it this way: if you’re not sure whether the milk is bad, you don’t drink it. You don’t need to prove it’s definitely sour.)

And I’m not going to go through every single opinion one by one either. That would take forever. Instead, I’m going to do something much more efficient. I’m going to attack the foundations. If the foundations crumble, everything built on top of them crumbles too. So, the question is: what are my most basic beliefs built on?

3. Everything I have ever believed with complete confidence came to me through my senses—through seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling. My senses have always felt like my most reliable guide to what's real.

But here’s the problem. My senses have deceived me before. And if something has deceived you even once, it’s not wise to trust it completely.

4. But wait—someone might object here. Sure, our senses can mislead us about small things or distant things. Maybe I misjudge the size of something far away or miss a detail too tiny to see clearly. But what about the obvious stuff? Surely I can’t doubt that I am sitting here right now, by the fire, wearing my dressing gown, holding this piece of paper in my hands. Some things (“presentations”) are just too immediate and obvious to doubt.

And honestly, that’s a fair point. How could I seriously deny that I have hands? That I have a body? That I’m sitting exactly where I think I’m sitting? Only a madman would doubt something that obvious. (Descartes is thinking here of people who suffer from serious delusions.) I’m thinking of people who sincerely believe they are kings when they are penniless. Perhaps they think they are dressed in royal robes when they have no clothes at all or that their bodies are made of glass or clay. Or maybe they think they are a squash. (These weren’t just hypothetical examples to Descartes. Such delusions were documented in his day.)

To doubt something as obvious as my own hands would put me in the same category as those poor souls.

5. But here’s the thing. Even if doubting my own hands would make me sound like a madman, don’t I sleep? I am a human being, and human beings dream. Think about it. When I’m dreaming, I often experience things just as vividly as I do right now. Maybe I’m sitting by the fire, wearing my clothes, holding this paper. Dreams can feel completely real while they’re happening. How many times have I dreamed I was sitting exactly where I'm sitting now, only to wake up and find myself lying in bed?

Right now, in this moment, everything feels obviously real. My eyes are open. I’m moving my head. I’m consciously extending my hand and watching it move. Surely this is different from a dream. Dreams aren’t this clear and vivid, are they?

But wait. I’ve thought that before. And I was dreaming.

The more carefully I think about this, the more unsettling it becomes. I cannot find a single reliable test—not one—that would definitively prove I’m awake right now rather than dreaming. And that realization is genuinely shocking. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I start to wonder... Am I dreaming right now?

6. OK, let’s go with it. Suppose we’re actually dreaming right now. Let’s suppose that opening my eyes, moving my head, extending my hands— it’s all just part of the dream. Let’s even imagine that I don’t even really have a body or hands at all.

Even if that’s all true, here’s the interesting thing. Dreams have to be made of something. When we dream, we dream of things—faces, hands, rooms, fire. Those dream images had to come from somewhere.

They’re like paintings. And here’s the thing about paintings. Even the most imaginative painting—like a siren, a dragon, or a creature that has never existed—is still made up of parts taken from real things. A painter can combine a woman’s face with a fish’s tail, but she can’t invent something from absolutely nothing. Even if every element is rearranged into something new and fantastical, the colors themselves are real.

(Think of it this way. Even the most bizarre dream you’ve ever had was made up of things you’ve actually seen or experienced. Your mind doesn’t create from nothing. It recombines things you’ve experienced.)

So even if everything in my dreams is imaginary and unreal, the basic building blocks must be real. The simple, universal elements that dreams are constructed from are real, things like eyes, hands, and bodies.

And even more basically than that, there are things so fundamental that they are the assumptions that make all these other images in our minds possible. These are simple, universal concepts like shape, size, quantity, and the fact that things exist at all in space and time. This is true whether we are talking about real or imaginary things, whether we are awake or dreaming.

7. So, what kinds of concepts belong to this most basic level of reality? These are ideas like physical existence in general. The idea that things take up space, have shape and size. We can count them. We can locate them somewhere in space and time.

8. This leads to a surprising conclusion about the sciences. Take sciences like physics, astronomy, or medicine. They study complex, “composite” things (things made up of parts, not “simple” things). Our train of thought puts them on shaky ground. They depend on assumptions about the physical world that we’ve just called into question. If we are dreaming, we can’t fully trust what our senses tell us about the physical world. And those sciences overwhelmingly depend on our senses.

But subjects (Descartes calls them “sciences” too, as the people of his day did) that deal only with these simple, universal concepts are on much firmer ground. These are sciences like arithmetic and geometry. In fact, they might be the most certain knowledge we have!

Here’s why. Whether I’m awake or dreaming, two and three still make five. Whether I’m awake or dreaming, a square still has four sides. These truths don’t depend on whether the physical world is real or not. They don’t depend on our senses at all. They just are true, no matter what.

9. But wait. There’s something I’ve believed for a long time that complicates everything we just said about mathematics.

I believe in God. And not just any god. I believe in an all-powerful God who created me and everything about me. And if that’s true, it raises an uncomfortable question. What if God arranged things so that there is no earth, no sky, nothing that takes up space, no shapes or sizes or locations? What if he has only made me think those things are real? What if my entire experience of reality is just God feeding false perceptions directly into my mind?

And here’s where it gets even more unsettling. I sometimes notice that other people are completely confident they know something—when they’re completely wrong! What if that happens to me with math? What if every time I add two and three and get five, I’m actually wrong? What if I’m actually wrong to think a square has four sides? What if God is allowing me to be deceived even about something that simple?

Here’s where someone might object, “But God is supposed to be supremely good. Surely a good God wouldn’t deceive me like that?”

But think about it. If God’s goodness means he wouldn’t let me be deceived at all, then why does he allow me to get things wrong sometimes? Yet, clearly, he does.

Apparently, God’s goodness doesn’t protect me from being deceived or wrong. That means it might not protect me from being deceived on these basic things either.

10. Now, some people might try to escape this problem by simply denying that God exists. If there is no all-powerful God, then there’s no all-powerful deceiver either. Problem solved, right?

But let’s not get sidetracked by that debate right now. Let’s just grant it for the sake of argument. Let’s suppose that God doesn’t exist. Let’s suppose I got here by pure chance, or fate, or just an endless chain of causes and effects. Say one thing has led to another all the way back for eternity.

Here’s the problem with that. If a powerful, intelligent God didn’t create me, then whatever did create me was less perfect, less intelligent, less capable. And the less capable my creator, the more likely it is that I came out flawed—including flawed in my thinking.

In other words, ditching God doesn’t actually help my certainty. It makes things worse. The less impressive the cause of my existence, the more reason I have to doubt whether my mind works reliably at all.

So, here’s where I’ve landed. I cannot find a single thing I formerly believed with complete certainty that I can’t now find some reason to doubt. I’m not saying this carelessly or rashly. We have found some serious, carefully considered reasons to doubt everything.

From this point forward, if I want to find anything truly certain, I need to treat every belief I have with suspicion, including all the beliefs I was previously very confident about. I should give them exactly the same suspicion I would give to something I knew was completely false.

11. But recognizing all this isn’t enough. I also have to make sure I don’t slip back into my old ways of thinking.

Here’s the problem. Those old familiar beliefs don’t just sit quietly in the corner once I’ve decided to doubt them. They keep coming back. They’ve been with me my whole life. They feel natural and comfortable and reasonable—far more reasonable than doubting everything. And as long as I keep thinking of them as “probably true but slightly doubtful,” they’ll keep sneaking back in and taking over my thinking almost without my noticing.

So, I need a different strategy. Instead of just telling myself these beliefs are doubtful, I’m going to deliberately treat them as if they are completely false. Not because I actually think they’re false, but because that’s the only way to counteract the powerful pull they have on my mind. I’ll fight the old prejudices with a new, deliberate one going in the opposite direction. Only then will my judgment have a fighting chance of finding its way to actual truth.

And before anyone panics, this isn't dangerous. I’m not about to go out and act as if the world doesn’t exist. (That really would be madness.) I’m doing this purely as a thinking exercise. I’m not looking for a guide to action right now. I’m looking for knowledge. And in the search for knowledge, you can’t be too suspicious.

12. So here is my plan. Instead of worrying about whether God might be deceiving me, I’m going to imagine something even more extreme. I’m going to suppose that there exists an evil demon, one massively powerful and completely dedicated to deceiving me in every possible way.

This demon has constructed the entire world I experience as an elaborate illusion. The sky, the air, the earth, colors, shapes, sounds—all of it is just a trap he has set for my mind. I don’t actually have hands, eyes, flesh, or blood. I just think I do because the demon is feeding these false impressions directly into my mind.

I’m going to hold onto this assumption as firmly as I can. And even if this exercise doesn’t lead me to truth, it will at least accomplish something important. It will keep me from being fooled. As long as I maintain this radical suspicion, the demon—whatever his power—cannot get me to agree to something false.

But I’ll be honest. This is hard. There’s a part of me that just wants to go back to my comfortable old beliefs. It’s like being a prisoner who is having a wonderful dream about being free. When he starts to suspect it might just be a dream, he doesn’t want to wake up. He’d rather stay in the comfortable illusion than face the cold reality of his cell.

That’s me right now. I can feel myself wanting to slip back into my old familiar way of seeing the world. Waking up from this comfortable sleep is going to be hard work. And I’m not even sure the effort will pay off. But I have to try.

Enlightenment Epistemology

Dave Ward was kind enough to let me teach an evening philosophy class this semester. My long worked on philosophy textbook, by the way, is almost out in electronic form. Whether it ever takes on print form depends on the market. Times, they are a changing.

In any case, below is 30 minute video I did overviewing Enlightenment epistemology. Although we're meeting for class on Adobe Connect tonight, most Thursday nights you could follow some of our banter by the Twitter hashtag #180cphilosophy. Tonight, though, we're online in a more private environment.

Descartes Summary

René Descartes (1596-1650; pronounced “day-CART”) is rightly considered the “father” of modern philosophy. But he also had a massive impact on mathematics, inventing the Cartesian coordinate system of x’s and y’s that every high school student learns. He was a devout Roman Catholic, although the church of his day condemned his physics and philosophy. He was French but did most of his work in the Netherlands, most importantly a work called, Discourse on Method. At the time of his death he was a tutor to Queen Christina of Sweden.

Every philosopher to some extent gives expression to the struggles and spirit (Zeitgeist) of their time. The most famous thinkers are those whose expressions and solutions most resonate with their age or some later one. That to which Descartes gave expression was a sense of uncertainty and a thirst for something solid and true. The Protestant Reformation and the Renaissance had generally eroded the assumptions of a thousand years; in particular, that the things Christians had heard and believed through the Church were correct. Those who were convinced that charismatic leaders like Martin Luther, John Calvin, or Huldrych Zwingli had correctly interpreted the Bible might simply switch the source of their certainty. But what had been an unquestioned assumption (Christian belief is self-evident and universally agreed) now had to be argued for.

The beginnings of the scientific revolution would become yet another source of questioning assumptions. We discussed Francis Bacon (1561-1626) in chapter 8 and his attempts to place the quest for knowledge on an experimental basis. One gathers evidence and tabulates the data, eventually drawing the conclusion that best fits the evidence. Again, he represents a move from assumption of truth to the need to justify it.

In this context, Descartes begins to look for a place of absolute certainty from which to establish a firm basis for truth. Unlike Bacon, he is a rationalist (see chapter 4). He searches for truth first in reason. He questions everything he can question and finds he can doubt everything except for the fact that he is doubting. His conclusion is, cogito ergo sum, “I think; therefore, I am.” From this point of certainty, he then proceeds to try to reconstruct certainty on all the things people of his day took for granted, including the existence of God.

Despite how certain Descartes himself might be of his conclusions, he has sowed a doubt that had not been there before, much as the Reformation did. All the ordinary truths about the world—that I am really sitting somewhere reading this book—now have a question mark over them that was not there before. He creates a new sort of human identity. “I” am the most certain thing I can know, and the rest of the world is the object of my knowledge. I may still believe in God, but it is I who is doing the deciding and believing. The order of the world, all the truths that I had once assumed without question, are now truth claims that I am forced to make decisions about. Even faith becomes an inevitable choice I have to make as an individual, instead of an assumption. The shift seems inevitable. I can still believe everything I believed before about God, faith, and the world, and I can believe them ferociously. But I am now keenly aware that I am the one doing the believing.

The impact of this shift, this turn of focus of truth from something “out there” inherent in the world to something I have to make judgments on inside my head, has been far beyond massive. This sense of a human individual as a rational being that makes decisions about what is true has empowered everything from the scientific revolution to the birth of capitalism to the notion of social contracts between individuals, the basis for the United States system of government. Descartes inadvertently gives birth to the “autonomous individual,” a sense of a human person as someone who can make objective decisions about the quite distinct world outside of herself.

Descartes’ sense of nature and of the soul fit hand in glove with his other ideas. He makes a sharp distinction between the natural world and now the super-natural world. Nature is no longer everything that God created, but only now the physical, material part of it. Descartes does not include things of God, angels, or spirits, or things having to do with the mind in what he calls "nature." These now "immaterial" things are far more certain to him than what would become the world of science. He thus inadvertently prepared the way for Deism, which saw the world as a machine God created but with which He need no longer be involved.

Descartes also shifts the soul from being the life principle of a person to become the immaterial container in which the human self resides. It is where the “I” can think about the world in a detached and objective fashion. It is where the human will is located. It is the part of the person that survives death, like an escape pod.

The current climate is rather negative toward Descartes, and clearly we can point out any number of extremes in his thinking. Martin Heidegger (1886-1976), more than anyone, has shown that we cannot detach ourselves from the world around us. Almost everyone today would recognize the impossibility of complete objectivity. Nevertheless, we should not forget that most of the greatest cultural developments in the Western world these last few centuries can be traced back to Descartes more than to any other single individual.

Descartes and the Soul 2

I seem insufferably unable to write something on Descartes and the soul. I don't know what's wrong with me.

Here is an attempt.
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Our current understanding of the soul probably has as much to do with René Descartes, the “father” of modern philosophy, as with the Bible or historic Christianity. Prior to Descartes, the soul was principally the seat of life, the life force. However, after Descartes the soul principally becomes the center of our thinking. The soul becomes the part of us where my “I” most truly resides. It becomes like a little escape pod with the real me in it, the part of me that detaches from my body at death and survives with my personality and memories intact.

We mentioned back in chapter 7 that people in the sixteen hundreds increasingly viewed the world as a machine that ran on its own according to natural laws. Before this time, people often saw the spiritual world as a material world like the physical world—only made up of much thinner material like ether or fire. So Descartes practically invented the distinction between the natural and the supernatural when he wrote the following:

"I am talking about 'nature' in a narrower sense than when it means the total of everything God has given me. In that meaning, nature includes things that only have to do with the mind (and I am not including those things when I use the word 'nature'). Descartes, Meditations 4 (2nd ed.)

Nature for him did not include the things of the mind or the soul, only the “narrower” sense of the machine of the world, governed by laws God had built into the world. The supernatural thus referred not to these sorts of material things but to immaterial things like God, angels, and the soul.

The core elements of Descartes’ understanding of the soul probably look very familiar, even though they are largely foreign to the Bible. For him the soul is the part of me that is truly me, the part that thinks, has my personality, holds my memories, and that survives death. Other aspects of Descartes’ view will seem a little more bizarre. For example, he thought the soul largely engaged the body at a little gland in the brain called the pineal gland. It was not truly attached there and Descartes struggled to figure out how it could so influence the body when it was not really connected.

However, as our understanding of the brain has advanced, we have found a physical basis for every element in Descartes’ soul. Anyone who has known someone with Alzheimer’s disease has witnessed how closely connected memory is with the physical ganglia of our brains. Tangle those neurons and the memory goes away. Most psychology courses at some time also mention Phineas Gage (1823-60) as an example of how closely related the front part of our brain is related to our personalities. Gage was apparently a hardworking and responsible individual prior to an accident in which a rod blew through the front of his brain. Afterwards, he was rude and used profanity, showing little self-control.

In other words, brain research can identify various parts of the brain involved in everything from emotions, to choices, to memories, to thinking, indeed to religious experiences. Of course the fact that these parts of the brain are involved in such things does not necessarily mean that we do not have a soul. It is simply to say that it is not clear that we need to resort to a soul to explain these things. Further, we know that messing with the brain also messes with our thinking, feeling, choosing and so forth. What role a soul might play in these functions is unclear. In the final section of this chapter we will discuss what a Christian perspective on a human being might look like with and without recourse to us having a soul.

Descartes and the Soul 1

I don't want to take the time to write it up this morning but maybe I can at least get my juices going by jotting down some thoughts on Descartes and the soul.

1. First, there is the shift from viewing the soul as material to viewing it as immaterial. This shift goes along with the invention, so to speak, of nature by Descartes. This is the dividing up of the world into natural and supernatural, the material and the immaterial. Before creation was more of a continuous spectrum from embodied to thin, disembodied material (cf. Dale Martin).

2. Descartes letters to the princess of Holland, where she takes him to task--how can the immaterial have an effect on the material? He suggests maybe it is something like gravity. He locates the soul in the pineal gland. The body is a machine (Treatise of Man, Passions of the Soul). Thoughts are formed in the pineal gland:

Even though the soul is joined to the whole body, "nevertheless there is a certain part of the body where it exercises its functions more particularly than in all the others... The part of the body in which the soul directly exercises its functions is not the heart at all, or the whole of the brain. It is rather the innermost part of the brain, which is a certain very small gland situated in the middle of the brain's substance and suspended above the passage through which the spirits in the brain's anterior cavities communicate with those in its posterior cavities. The slightest movements on the part of this gland may alter very greatly the course of these spirits, and conversely any change, however slight, taking place in the course of the spirits may do much to change the movements of the gland" (Passions of the Soul).

3. Passions can affect the soul. Prior to him only the soul affected the body, not the other way as well.

4. Soul is simple and indivisible, potentially infallible in its detachment from the material world, able to look on objectively.

5. Descartes represents a shift from seeing the soul as the principal of life to the principal of thought. The soul becomes the seat of the "I." This leads to an introspective trajectory for Western culture.

I may add more notes today as thoughts occur...

Famous Rationalists

Here is the text box on famous rationalists. You can probably see why I've relegated these particulars to a text box. Any suggestions welcome.
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Plato (ca. 427-347): Plato famously suggested that the world around us that we experience with our senses is far less real than the world we can access with our minds (see chapter 7, What Is Reality?). The world of our senses is a world of shadows cast by the truest world, the world of ideas. The things we experience with our senses are like copies or images of the ideal patterns that we can only contemplate with our minds. Our minds know these ideas because our souls had access to them before they became imprisoned in our bodies. Learning is thus remembering this innate knowledge rather than a matter of gaining new knowledge.

René Descartes (1596-1650): Descartes is known as the founder of modern philosophy primarily for the way he drew attention to the question of certainty in what we know. He notoriously set out to doubt everything he could doubt and to accept as true only those things that he could conceive clearly and distinctly. The perceptions of his senses were the first to go, securing him his place among the rationalists. Descartes suggested that I could be dreaming what I think I am experiencing. Even in my thoughts, an evil demon could be manipulating me. What I cannot doubt, he famously suggested, is that I am thinking. “I think; therefore, I am.”

Thinking that he had established a point of certainty, he proceeded to argue that God existed, because any conception of God “clearly and distinctly” includes the idea that He is a necessary Being. And if God exists, he is not an evil demon who would try to deceive us by making us perceive the world outside our minds differently than it is. Thus I can trust my mind as it thinks about the world outside it.

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677): Spinoza took from Descartes the idea that truth is a matter of what we can conceive of clearly and distinctly. But whereas Descartes saw knowing as a matter of our souls understanding a material world outside our minds, Spinoza believed that everything was one basic thing, God. The truths we associate with our thought and the truths we associate with the world are both truths about “God” that we can discover through reason. Experience is not necessary to learn any truth. All such truth is predetermined, and understanding not least involves coming to accept it. In this Spinoza partially resembles the Stoics, although he did not oppose emotions to the extent they did. My emotions also involve truths that I must accept.

Gottfried W. Leibniz (1646-1716): The depth of Leibniz’ rationalism did not come through clearly until his unpublished writings became better known in the 1800’s. Leibniz’ two principles of reason were already known: his “law of contradiction” and “principle of sufficient reason.” Truths of reasoning are truths we can know apart from experience. The law of contradiction says that two contradictory claims cannot both be true, and we know this must be the case even before we have any relevant experiences. Truths of reasoning are thus necessary truths.

On the other hand, principles of sufficient reason relate to truths of fact. These truths are contingent rather than necessary truths—they did not have to be true but turn out to be. As human beings, we come to know these sorts of truths through our experiences. Leibniz’ unpublished writings have shed considerable light on what he was thinking here. For Leibniz, all the things that happen to us in life are dictated by reasons we will never fully know. Of all the possible things that could be, some cannot coexist because of the law of contradiction. Those things that do exist are the greatest number of possible things that could coexist.

In the end, Leibniz followed Spinoza in believing that all truths are already determined and known by God. Experience thus does not contribute to truth, even if we as humans seem to come to know truth by this path. In theory, all truth could be known through reason alone.