Descartes’ Meditations 1 and 2 (and a bit of 3) by Mark ...



Descartes’ Meditations 1 and 2 (and a bit of 3) by Mark PursleyDescartes earned the title, the father of modern philosophy. The style of philosophy that he was trained in, Scholasticism, which was based on the writings of Thomas Aquinas, had dominated the universities of Europe for 400 years. But a new intellectual movement was building with the advent of the scientific method. Thinkers like Francis Bacon (1561-1626) were arguing that knowledge is based on observation, a view called empiricism. Aristotle’s brilliant theories of nature (which were thought to be correct for nearly 2,00 years) were found to be completely false. Descartes understood that the old ways of doing philosophy were no longer viable. The new scientific method demanded a new approach to philosophy. One that understand that natural laws govern the behavior of natural objects in a mechanistic way. Nevertheless, Descartes still manages to find room for the concerns of traditional metaphysics (God, the soul, and immortality) in his scientific system.The most intriguing feature of Descartes’ philosophy is his “method of doubt.” To be sure we know anything, we must first doubt everything. Our common sense assumptions about the reliability of our senses are seriously flawed. When we go thorough life with an unreflective acceptance of the world as is seems to be, we miss out on the most important realities. Namely, the reality of God and the immortality of the soul, which are completely beyond the grasp of our senses. Only by traveling down the road of universal skepticism can be break the hold of our comforting illusions and find the path to absolute certainty.Meditation 1 takes us down that path. Here we find a sequence of four skeptical scenarios that lead us deeper and deeper into the abyss of doubt. The first scenario is fairly mild:Scenario 1: Several years have now passed since I first realized how many were the false opinions that in my youth I took to be true, and thus how doubtful were all the things that I subsequently built upon these opinions.Here Descartes’ makes a relatively tame observation that we can all identify with. Who doesn’t remember some things that they believed in their youth, that they later discovered to be false? Many of us are brought up with the fable of Santa Claus. As December drew near, we began to watch our behavior, so as not to negatively impact the number and quality of the presents he was supposed to bring. One I used to hear a lot growing up was that we only use 10% of our brain. It made it seem that if we only concentrate harder, we could attain genius levels of intellect. But the claim is completely false. We all use 100% of our brain, just not all at once. So. we are in the peculiar situation where we know that some of the beliefs we now have are probably false, we just don’t know which of the things we now believe to be true, we will later realize are false. The second scenario takes a little deeper into the realms of doubt. Scenario 2: Whatever I had admitted...as most true I took in from the senses...; however, I noticed that they sometimes deceived me. Here Descartes reminds us that we can’t trust our sense 100% of the time, because we know they sometimes get things wrong. We can fall for an optical illusion or misjudge the size of things seen from a distance. There are plenty of real things we can’t see, and sometimes we think we see something that is not really there. It is in our survival interest to detect agents that might do us harm, so often are brain tricked into thinking there is a malevolent agent behind a sound or an ambiguous shadowy figure. Even though we can doubt our senses sometimes, he reasons, surely, I cannot doubt my belief that I am here, sitting by the fire, wearing a winter dressing-gown, holding this piece of paper in my hands, and so on. It seems to be quite impossible to doubt beliefs like these, which come from the senses.But then he recalls the following:Scenario 3: This all seems as if I do not recall having been deceived by similar thoughts in my dreams. As I consider these cases I see there are no definite signs to distinguish being awake from being asleep. This is the famous dream argument. Let me illustrate this argument with a crude diagram:In an ordinary act of perception, in this case, looking at a tree, there is the object in the world (objective reality) and an image of that object in our mind (the subjective experience). Without thinking about it much, we assume that the image of the tree in our mind is pretty much like the objective reality that is causing us to see that image. The tree, we might say, is the causal ground of the tree image. What the dream argument shows is that you could have exactly the same image in the mind even when the causal ground is different, when you are having a vivid dream about that tree. As Descartes puts it “there are no definite signs” that distinguish the dream image of the tree from the waking image of the tree.The great American philosopher, Margaret Dauler Wilson (whose book, Descartes, is the main source for this lecture) puts the point like this, the dream image is “qualitatively indistinguishable” from the waking image. Consider the possibility, for example, that all dreams were in black and white and never in color. In that case, it would be easy to tell when it is “just a dream.” But some dreams can seem quite real. So, how can we get certain knowledge about the nature of objects by looking at them? Observation only provides images in our head that may or may not accurately represent the causal grounds of that subjective experience. Even if we concede that me may now be dreaming, the images we are seeing must have come from somewhere. An as Descartes points out: For whether I am awake or asleep, 2 and 3 together will always make the number 5, and the square will never have more than four sides, and it does not seem possible that truths so clear and so apparent can ever be suspected of any falsity and any uncertainty.But now consider the fourth and final skeptical scenario.Scenario 4: Suppose an evil genius has directed his entire effort to misleading me. The heavens, the air, the earth, the colors, shapes, sounds, and all external things would be nothing but deceptive games of my dreams. Now we find ourselves unable to know anything. The evil genius thought experiment, which imagines that a Satan like character that has devoted itself to confusing us about the nature of reality, can even makes us think a square might have five sides. The demon is now a third possible causal ground of our subjective experiences, showing that even what seems most certain could be an illusion. Another great American philosopher, Gilbert Harman, has provided an updated version of Descartes’ evil demon argument. Suppose two evil graduate students from Stanford University kidnap you in the middle of the night. They take you to their lab where they carefully remove your brain and put it in a vat of nutrients to keep it alive. Then they hook-up all of your sensory input nerves to their powerful computer. From the computer, they can stimulate sensory and auditory receptors in such a way as to create a virtual experience that is indistinguishable from the experiences received during ordinary perceptual experience. It appears that, if you are a brain in a vat, there is no way you can know it. Harman’s thought experiment is similar to (and likely the inspiration for) the scenario presented in the Matrix movies. Arriving at global skepticism, Descartes muses:At length I am forced to admit that there is nothing among the things I once believed to be true, which it is not possible to doubt, not for reasons of frivolity...but because of valid and considered arguments.Meditation 2Descartes is fairly freaked out as Meditation 2 begins:Yesterday’s meditation raised doubts—ones that are too serious to be ignored—which I can see no way of resolving. I feel like someone who is suddenly dropped into a deep whirlpool that tumbles him around so that he can neither stand on the bottom nor swim to the top.Surprisingly, it does not take him long to reach solid ground. Suppose the evil demon is controlling my perceptions, could he trick me into thinking I exist when I don’t exist? No! As soon as I begin to doubt my existence, there is proof that I do exist. For anyone who doubts must exist. Even if a demon deceives me, “I am, I exist,” is true whenever I doubt it. In his book, Discourse on Method, Descartes expresses this point with the famous line, Cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore, I am.Now Descartes has finally reached certain knowledge of something, his own existence. Even the most radical skeptical scenario imaginable cannot shake that conviction. And notice, he did not reach that knowledge by observing the world, but by a process of rational reflection. Having established his own existence, he next wonders, “what am I?” Am I this physical body that I perceive when I look in the mirror? I can’t be sure about that, all knowledge based on perception remains subject to the skeptical doubts raised in Meditation 1. So, I don’t know if I really walk, run, or perceive. I also think, and this does not seem to require my physical body. Thought is an attribute that belongs to me; it alone is inseparable from my nature…I am therefore, to speak precisely, only a thinking being, that is to say, a mind, an understanding, or a reasoning being…a thing which thinks. Descartes has now established two claims that are known with certainty, I exist, and I am a thinking thing. If the existence of the body can only be known with probability, and the existence of the mind is known with certainty, then we may also infer that I am not my body. Here we have an epistemological argument for the dualist view he wishes to defend. (Dualism is the belief that each person is a combination of two distinct substances, a material body and an immaterial mind.)In spite of this progress, Descartes still finds it easy to slip back in to that old, unreflective way of thinking about the world:But nevertheless, it still seems to me, and I cannot keep myself from believing that corporeal things, images of which are formed by thought and which the senses themselves examine, are much more distinctly known than that indescribable part of myself which cannot be pictured by imagination…my mind is a vagabond who likes to wander and is not able to stay within the strict bounds of truth. Therefore, let us give it the reins once more….So, he gives his wandering mind the reins, and asks it to consider a simple physical object, “this bit of wax.” Examine a piece of bee’s wax, and ask your senses to report what they can discover. It smells flowery, it tastes sweet, it has a grayish color, it feels hard and cold, it makes a sound when you tap it, and it squeezes when pressed. But then take that piece of wax near the fire, and observe as all of those qualities change. The smell and taste are different now, so are the smell and taste, the shape and feel are also different and it makes no sound when tapped. Does the same wax remain after this change? We must admit that it does, no one denies it, no one judges otherwise. What is it then in this bit of wax that we recognize with such distinctness? Certainly, it cannot be anything that I observed by means of the senses, since everything in the field of taste, smell, sight, touch, and hearing are changed, and since the same wax nevertheless remains. These considerations lead him to conclude that the truth of the matter…is that this wax was neither that sweetness of honey, nor that pleasant odor of flowers, not that whiteness, nor that whiteness, nor that shape, nor that sound, but only a body which a little while ago appeared to my senses under these forms and which now makes itself felt under others.When we abstract from all of the qualities revealed by perception, all that is left is something “extended, flexible, and movable.” It is clear, he argues, that it is not my ability to imagine the wax forming multiple shapes is not a source of knowledge, since I know it could take on an infinite number of shapes and I cannot imagine an infinite number of shapes. It is the mind that distinguishes the actual wax (as an object that takes up space, what Descartes calls, “extension”) from the qualities perceived by the senses, “its superficial appearances.” And so, Descartes concludes, it is at present manifest to me that even bodies are not properly known by senses nor by the faculty of imagination but by the understanding alone. Here, Descartes takes himself to have refuted the empiricist claim that knowledge comes from the senses, and proven the rationalist idea that true knowledge is based on reason, not on sensation. Notice that the initial skepticism of Meditation 1 has receded just a bit here, as he appears to claim that the fact that “no one denies it” and “no one judges otherwise” are reasons to believe that “the same wax remains” after the observed changes. Meditation 3The skepticism recedes even further in meditation three when he argues for the existence of God. Here is the argument: [T]hat by which I conceive a supreme God, eternal, infinite, immutable, omniscient, omnipotent, and the universal creator of all things, that idea…certainly contains in itself more reality than do those by which finite substances are represented. There must be as much reality in the total efficient cause as in its effect.I cannot myself be its cause. It necessarily follows that I am not alone in this world…. For even though the idea of substance exists in me from the very fact that I am a substance, I would nevertheless have no idea of an infinite substance, I who am a finite substance, unless the idea had been place in me by some substance which was in fact infinite….And truly it must not be thought strange that God, in creating me, put this idea in my nature in much the same way as an artisan imprints his mark on his work.Simon Blackburn calls this the trademark argument, God plants the idea of himself in our souls like Nike puts the “swoosh” symbol on its garments. Blackburn rightly wonders what happen to the evil demon at this point? Why is it not possible to have doubts about the origin of this idea? The skeptical arguments of Meditation 1 raise serious epistemological problems concerning our knowledge of the world. Subsequent philosophers were not so impressed with Descartes solution to the problems he raised; but they each struggled to find a better resolution to his skeptical doubts. We will review their responses in our lecture on Continental Rationalism and British Empiricism.In addition to Margaret Wilson’s classic work on Descartes, I also highly recommend, Descartes’s Method of Doubt, by Janet Broughton (who was Wilson’s student at Princeton). ................
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