Descartes' Meditation II: A Paraphrase

Here is an AI-assisted paraphrase of Descartes' second Meditation. The first Meditation is here.
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The Human Mind: Why It’s Easier to Know Than the Body

1. Yesterday’s meditation left me drowning in doubt. I can’t forget how much I can doubt, and I can’t see any way to certainty. It’s like I’ve fallen into deep water. I can’t touch the bottom, and I can’t keep myself floating on the surface either.

But I’m going to keep going. I’ll take the same approach I took yesterday. I’ll set aside anything I have even the slightest reason to doubt and treat it as if it were completely false.

And I’ll keep going until one of two things happens. Either I will find something that I can be completely certain about, or I will establish with certainty that nothing is certain at all.

Here’s what is keeping me going. You may have heard of Archimedes—the great ancient Greek mathematician and physicist. He once said that if you gave him a single firm, fixed point to stand on, he could move the entire earth.

(He was talking about levers and leverage. If you have a long enough lever and a fixed fulcrum, you can move any weight. He is often quoted as saying, “Give me a place to stand, and I can move the world.”)

I feel the same way about this project. I don’t need to find a hundred certain things, or even ten. I just need one thing. One single thing I can know with complete certainty. If I can find that, I can build everything else from there.

2. So, let’s do this. I’m going to assume that everything I see is just made up. I’m going to assume that nothing my memory tells me ever actually existed. I’m going to act like I have no senses. I’m going to assume that my body, my shape, the space around me, movement, my location—I’m going to act like all of it is just some fiction my mind has invented.

If so, what’s left? What then can I actually hold onto as true?

Could it be just this one thing: that there is absolutely nothing certain?

3. But wait. Just because I’ve stripped everything away doesn’t mean there’s nothing left. Let me think about this more carefully. Is there something—anything—that I can’t doubt?

What about God (or some kind of being, whatever we want to call it), who is causing all these thoughts to happen in my mind? Maybe there’s a being out there that is causing all my thinking.

Then again, maybe I am causing my own thoughts. Maybe I don’t need to bring God into it at all.

But if I am causing my own thoughts, then I must exist. Am I at least something?

And here is where I hesitate. I just doubted that I have a body and that I have senses. So, if I were nothing but body and senses, then I wouldn’t exist either. Right?

Hold on. I was just now convinced that there was absolutely nothing in the world—no sky, no earth, no minds, no bodies. Was I therefore convinced that I didn’t exist either?

No. Absolutely not. Because I was the one being convinced of all this. Something was doing the convincing. Something was doing the thinking. And that something was me.

So, even if there is an evil demon, a massively powerful, endlessly cunning demon doing everything he can to deceive me, even he can’t make me nothing. Because as long as I am being deceived, I must be something. You can’t deceive nothing.

Therefore, I come to this conclusion after this careful consideration. It seems impossible to escape:

I am. I exist.

That is to say, “I think, therefore, I am.” [1] This “proposition” (pronunciatum) is necessarily true every single time I think it or say it.

As long as I am thinking, I cannot doubt that I exist.

4. But knowing that I exist isn’t enough. I still don’t know clearly what I am. And I need to be careful here. I’ve established one certain thing: that I exist. But now I don’t want to accidentally smuggle in assumptions about what kind of thing I am. That would contaminate the one piece of solid ground that I’ve found: that I exist.

So, let’s go back to basics. What did I think I was, before I started all this doubting? Then let me apply the same filter I’ve been using throughout. Let’s strip away everything that can be doubted, until only what is completely certain remains.

5. So, what did I think I was when we started all this doubting? A man, obviously. But what is a man?

The traditional answer from the time of the Greek Aristotle (384-22 BCE) is “a rational animal.” But that answer just opens up more questions. What exactly is an animal? What exactly is rational? I’d end up chasing definitions down an endless rabbit hole, which is not what I want to do right now. Instead let me think about what naturally came to mind when I asked myself what I was—before I started all this philosophical questioning.

First, I thought I had a face, hands, and arms. In fact, I thought I had a whole physical body. Mind you, it’s also what you’d see if you looked at a corpse. That’s what I call my “body.”

Second, I thought I did things. I ate, I walked, I perceived things, I thought. I attributed all of that to my soul.

But what exactly the soul was I never really stopped to think about carefully. If I tried to picture it at all, I imagined something extremely light and airy. Maybe it was like wind, or flame, or some kind of invisible gas spread throughout my body. Vague, in other words.

As for the body, I thought I understood that perfectly well. Here’s how I would have described it back then:

“A body is something that has a definite shape. It takes up space and fills that space so completely that no other body can occupy the same space at the same time. It can be perceived by senses like touch, sight, hearing, taste, smell. And it can be moved, though not by itself. It moves if something external acts on it.”

What a body cannot do—or so I thought—is move itself, perceive things, or think. Those abilities seemed like something else entirely. In fact, I was genuinely puzzled when I encountered living things that seemed to have both body and these other mysterious abilities.

6. But here’s the problem. Remember I was exploring what would happen if there were an extremely powerful, malicious being dedicated entirely to deceiving me. I was asking, “What can I actually claim about myself right now in that light?”

Let’s go through the list. Can I claim that any of those physical attributes I just described are real? My shape, space, movement, senses? No. None of them. If the evil demon is deceiving me about everything physical, then I can’t claim that any of those things are true about me with certainty. So, let’s set the body aside entirely.

What about the various attributes (characteristics) of my alleged soul? I mentioned nutrition and walking. But if I have no body, I can’t walk and I can’t be nourished. Those go out the window too.

What about perception? What about my seeing, hearing, and feeling? Perception requires a body. And besides, I’ve had plenty of experiences in dreams where I thought I was perceiving things that turned out not to be real at all. So, perception goes too.

But wait. What about thinking?

Here’s where everything changes. Thinking is different from all the others. I cannot doubt that I am thinking right now. Even if the demon is deceiving me, the deception itself requires that I exist as something being deceived. And existing as something being deceived requires thinking. Thinking is the one thing that is completely inseparable from me.

So here is what I can say with complete certainty: I am. I exist. And I exist precisely as long as I am thinking. If I were to stop thinking entirely, I might cease to exist altogether.

So, what am I? Stripped of everything else, I am one thing and one thing only: a thinking thing.

It is a real thing. It is a truly existing thing. I am “a thinking thing.” [2]

7. But wait. Am I anything more than just a thinking thing? Let me push further and see if I can discover something more.

Could I be my physical body? Could I be the collection of arms, legs, organs, and members?

No. I already imagined that all of that might not exist, and yet I would still know I exist. So, I am not my body. [3]

Could I be something like air, or wind, or flame, or vapor? Could I be some kind of invisible physical substance spread throughout my body?

No. I could imagine that all of those things didn’t exist either, and I would still exist. So, I’m none of those things either.

Now, here’s an interesting wrinkle. Maybe those things that I’m imagining don’t exist are actually more connected to me than I realize. Maybe they’re not as different from me as I think.

But I honestly can’t figure that out right now, so I’m going to set that question aside.

Here’s what I can say. I know I exist. And I’m trying to figure out what kind of thing I am. And importantly, I’ve realized that, no matter what I actually am, it doesn’t depend on any of the physical things I’ve been doubting. My existence as a thinking thing is completely independent of my body. [4]

Now here’s something else important. I might be tempted to use my imagination to figure out what I am. But that would be a mistake. Imagination only works with physical things like images, shapes, and bodies. When I imagine something, I’m always picturing something physical.

But I already know that everything physical might be a dream or an illusion. So, using my imagination to understand my mind would be like trying to see something more clearly by going to sleep and dreaming about it. That’s completely backwards.

The conclusion is this: imagination is useless for understanding the mind. The mind can only be understood by the mind itself. That is, it can only be understood by pure thinking, not by picturing anything.

8. So, I’m a thinking thing. But what exactly does that mean? What is a thinking thing?

A thinking thing is something that:

• Doubts
• Understands
• Conceives ideas
• Affirms things (says yes)
• Denies things (says no)
• Wills—wants things, makes choices
• Refuses—doesn’t want things, rejects choices
• Imagines
• Perceives

That’s what I am. All those activities are forms of thinking. And all of them are happening in me right now.

9. That’s actually quite a lot. Think about it. Right now, I am a being who:

• Doubts almost everything?
• And yet understands and conceives certain things?
• Affirms one thing as true and denies others?
• Wants to know more and doesn’t want to be deceived?
• Imagines things, sometimes even when I’d rather not?
• Perceives things, as if through the senses?

Yes. All of that is me. Right now. In this moment.

And here’s the crucial question. Could any of that be false? Even if I’m dreaming? Even if the evil demon is using every trick in the book to deceive me?

No. Because even if everything that I am perceiving is false, the perceiving itself is real. Even if everything I am imagining is false, the imagining itself is real. Even if I am wrong about what I am doubting, the doubting itself is real.

Think about it this way. Right now, I seem to see light. I seem to hear a noise. I seem to feel heat. Maybe I’m dreaming. Maybe the demon is feeding me false impressions. Fine. Let’s grant all of that.

But this one thing cannot be false: that I seem to see, seem to hear, seem to feel. All of that “seeming,” that experiencing, is real. It’s happening. And that experiencing is itself a form of thinking.

Therefore, even my perceptions, even my imaginations—even if their content is completely false—they are still forms of thinking. And thinking is what I am.

10. I am starting to get a clearer picture of what I am. But I have to be honest about something. Even now, after everything I’ve just worked through, physical things still feel more real and more clearly known to me than my own mind does.

I know. That’s strange. Think about what I’m saying. Think about the things I have just called into doubt—the physical world, my body, external objects. Those things probably still feel more vivid and more “real” to me than the thing I’ve just proven actually exists: my own mind.

The doubtful stuff feels more real than the certain stuff. That seems exactly backwards. And yet I can’t seem to help it.

Here’s why this is happening. My mind keeps wandering back to the physical world. I’ve been programmed my whole life to pay attention to things I can see and touch and imagine. Asking my mind to focus on something invisible and non-physical—like itself—is genuinely difficult.

So, here’s what I’m going to do. Rather than forcing my mind to stay focused on itself right now, I’m going to let it wander for a moment. I’m going to let my mind look at the physical world that it is so comfortable with.

But I’m going to do this strategically. In this way, afterward, when I gently pull my mind back to thinking about itself, it will be more settled and more ready to focus.

Think of it like letting a restless child run around for a bit before asking them to sit still and concentrate.

11. OK. Let’s look at physical things, the kinds of things we normally think we know best. Not physical things in general, but one specific physical thing. Let’s do a little experiment.

Take a piece of wax. Say it just came from a beehive. [5] Say that it’s completely fresh. It still smells like honey and flowers.

You can see its color and shape. It is hard and cold. You can easily pick it up and hold it. Tap it with your finger and it makes a sound.

In other words, it ticks every box. It can be known by every single one of our senses. If anything can be clearly and distinctly known through the senses, it is this piece of wax right in front of us.

Now let’s put it near a fire.

Watch what happens. The taste disappears. The smell evaporates. The color changes. The shape melts away. It gets bigger as it melts. It becomes liquid. It gets hot. You can barely touch it now. And if you tap it? No sound at all.

So, here’s the question. Is this still the same wax?

Of course it is. Nobody would seriously argue otherwise. We all know perfectly well that it is the same wax. It’s just in a different state.

But wait. If it’s the same wax, what exactly did I know about it? Everything I knew through my senses has completely changed. The smell, the taste, the color, the shape, the texture, the sound—it’s all different. And yet the same wax remains.

Think about it. Whatever I knew about the wax, it wasn’t anything my senses told me. Something else is going on here.

12. Now let’s ask, “What exactly did I know about the wax?” Let me think about this carefully.

The wax wasn’t the sweetness, or the smell, or the color, or the shape, or the sound. All of those changed. What I knew was something more basic. There was a thing that was presenting itself to me in one set of forms before the fire and in a different set of forms after. The same thing, different appearances.

But what exactly is that thing? Let me strip away everything that changed and see what’s left.

What remains is something that takes up space, that is flexible, and that can move and change. That’s it. That’s the wax underneath all the appearances.

But here’s where it gets interesting. When I say the wax is “flexible,” what do I mean? Do I mean I can imagine it changing from round to square?

Well, yes. But it can change into an infinite number of shapes, not just those two. And I can’t picture an infinite number of shapes in my imagination. So, my imagination isn’t what’s grasping the wax here.

And what about the space it takes up—its “extension” in space? That changes too. It gets bigger as it melts, bigger still as it boils. The wax can expand in ways I have never even imagined.

So again, my imagination isn’t capturing what the wax really is.

Here’s the conclusion: I cannot understand what the wax is through my imagination at all. Only my mind, my pure thinking, can grasp it. [6]

And here is the really fascinating part. What about the wax that I know through pure thinking? Is it a different wax from the one I see and touch and imagine? No. It is exactly the same wax. It always was. I just didn’t realize that what I was actually knowing all along was not coming through my senses. It was coming through my mind.

When I perceive the wax, I’m not really seeing it or touching it or imagining it. I’m doing something called “intuition” (inspectio). It is a direct mental grasp of what the thing is. And that mental grasp can be fuzzy and confused, as it was before I started thinking carefully, or it can be clear and distinct, as it is now.

13. But here is something that genuinely surprises me about my own mind. Even when I am thinking all of this through carefully, language keeps tripping me up.

Here’s what I mean. We say things like “I see the wax.” Not “I judge the wax to be there” or “my mind perceives the wax.” Just “I see it.” And that casual way of talking makes it sound like sight is what is doing the knowing. Like my eyes are the thing in charge.

But think about this. Say I am sitting by a window, and I look down at people passing in the street below. What do I actually see? Hats. Coats. That’s it. I see hats and coats moving along the street.

And yet I say, “I see people.” Without even thinking about it.

But what if those hats and coats were covering robots? Machines controlled by springs and gears, moving around in human clothing? My eyes couldn’t tell the difference. What I actually see is hats and coats. What I know is that there are people underneath them. And that knowing—that judgment—isn’t coming from my eyes at all. It’s coming from my mind.

So, when I say, “I see the wax,” I’m doing the same thing. What my eyes actually give me is a set of colors and shapes. What I know is that there is a piece of wax in front of me. And that knowing is a judgment of the mind, not a report from the senses.

Language hides this from us. But the mind is doing far more work than we give it credit for.

14. But I shouldn’t get too distracted by the way ordinary language misleads us. Someone who is seriously pursuing knowledge shouldn’t need to keep tripping over the way everyday people talk. Let’s get back to the main point.

Here’s the real question. Did I know the wax better when I first encountered it, when I was smelling it, touching it, and seeing it with my own eyes? Or do I know it better now, after thinking carefully about what it actually is and how it can be known?

That’s not even a close call.

When I first perceived the wax, what did I actually have? A set of sensory impressions. I had smell, color, texture, sound. But honestly? Any animal could have that. A dog can smell the wax. A cat can feel its texture. There’s nothing distinctly human about perceiving the wax through the senses.

But when I strip away all those surface appearances, I realize something different is going on. When I mentally undress the wax, so to speak, and look at what it actually is underneath, I get to real insight. I might still make mistakes in my judgment. But one thing is certain: this kind of knowing, this grasping of what the wax really is beneath its appearances, requires a human mind. An animal can’t do this. A machine can’t do this. [7]

15. Now, let me turn this whole argument back on myself. Remember, I have not allowed that I am anything other than a mind right now. Accordingly, what can I say about my own mind?

I have just spent all this time figuring out that I know the wax better through my mind than through my senses. But if that’s true, then I must know my own mind even better than I know the wax.

Think about it this way. Say I decide that the wax exists because I see it. Well, it’s at least possible that what I’m seeing isn’t really wax. Maybe my eyes are deceiving me. Maybe I don’t even have eyes.

But here’s what’s not possible. It’s not possible that I don’t exist while I’m seeing the wax (or even just thinking that I’m seeing it). The seeing (or the thinking that I’m-seeing) proves I exist. Every time.

And it’s not just sight. If I determine that the wax exists because I touch it, I exist. If my imagination convinces me the wax is there, I exist. Whatever “faculty” I use or reason I give that leads me to believe anything about the wax, the same reasoning proves that I exist. Every single time. And what is true of the wax is true of every external thing I perceive.

Here’s something worth pausing on. The more faculties I brought to bear on the wax, the more clearly I knew it. These were faculties like sight, touch, imagination, and reasoning. But every one of those faculties derived from my mind. Every time I knew the wax more clearly, my mind was simultaneously revealing itself as the thing doing the knowing.

This fact means that my mind must actually be more clearly known than the wax. And on top of that, the mind has additional ways of knowing itself that have nothing to do with bodies at all. [8]

In the end, what the body contributes to our knowledge of the mind is barely worth mentioning.

16. And just like that, I’ve arrived exactly where I wanted to be.

Here’s what the wax experiment has shown me. Physical things like bodies are not actually known through the senses or through imagination. They are known through the intellect alone. Through pure thinking. We don’t know the wax because we see it or touch it. We know it because we understand it.

And if that is true of physical things, then it follows immediately that my own mind—the thing that does the understanding itself—must be the most clearly and easily known thing of all. It is more clearly known than any physical object. It is more clearly known than the wax. More clearly known than anything.

But I’m not going to rush past this point. I have just overturned something I have believed my whole life: that the physical world is the most real and most clearly known thing there is. It is such a deeply ingrained habit of thought. It won’t just disappear because I have proven it wrong.

So, I’m going to sit here for a while. I’m going to let this new understanding sink in. I’m going to keep thinking about it until it becomes as natural and automatic as the old assumption used to be.

The mind is what knows. And what it knows with absolute certainty is that it exists.

[1] Descartes coined this phrase earlier in his Discourse on Method (1637), but he does not actually use it here in the Meditations. In Latin, it is cogito ergo sum.

I personally agree with the German philosopher Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-99), who argued that Descartes’ argument only implied that “thinking” was happening, not that I was thinking. The concept of a unified “I” requires much further argument.

[2] Descartes uses several Latin terms in this section: mens (mind), animus (soul). These terms are sometimes also translated as understanding or reason. Descartes is not yet sure which term is exactly right. But whatever we call it, his answer is the same: I am a “thinking thing.”

The Latin for “thinking thing” or “thinking substance” is res cogitans. It is one of his most important technical terms. He pairs it with res extensa or “extended thing.” He uses that term to refer to everything physical that takes up space.

The distinction between these two kinds of substance is the foundation of what philosophers call “Cartesian Dualism.” This is the view that mind and matter are two completely different kinds of thing. This idea has been debated by philosophers ever since.

[3] The philosopher Gilbert Ryle famously attacked this conclusion in his book The Concept of Mind (1949). He called Descartes’s picture of the mind a “ghost in the machine.”

Ryle argued that Descartes’s argument was like being shown all the buildings, faculty, and students at a university and then asking, “Where’s the university?” For Ryle, mind wasn’t a separate thing that inhabits the body. It was just what we call the body doing certain things.

[4] The conclusion that the mind is a completely separate substance from the body was famously challenged by Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618-1680), one of Descartes’s most brilliant correspondents. In letters to Descartes, she pressed him on a problem he never fully solved: if mind and body are completely separate substances, how do they interact? When I decide to move my arm, how does an immaterial mind cause a physical arm to rise? This is called the mind-body interaction problem, and philosophers are still debating it today.

[5] If you have never had any experience with wax, you might do a quick search to get a little background.

[6] Descartes uses the Latin mens (mind) and French entendement (understanding) here. Both of them can mean mind or understanding. This is the faculty of pure rational thinking, distinct from imagination or the senses.

[7] Descartes mentions “common sense” (sensus communis). He doesn’t mean common sense in the way we think of it. He means our mental ability to combine and integrate all our different sense impressions into a single unified experience.

[8] Examples might include pure reasoning, self-reflection, or introspection.

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.