Descartes: Meditations 1 and 2

Below is an excellent commentary by Chris Lawrence, who has served as the facilitator of the group's discussions since I stepped down from that role last spring, about this past Monday's selection, Meditations 1 and 2 by the French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes.  --Tom Cohn

"In “Meditations 1 and 2”, despite Descartes’ hyperbolic skepticism, he never questions the existence of God. As part of his exercise in logic, he tries to imagine that God could be an evil genius and might be deliberately trying to deceive him, but he never even once considers a world that lacks a divine creator. From a modern perspective, one has to ask: why? He begins his exercise by questioning EVERYTHING, including his own existence, in order to eliminate anything that could be an illusion and sets out to find the one, objective truth from which to deduce all other truths. That said, why wouldn’t he start with nothingness, at least as a concept? The answer as far as I can see seems to be that he has already found his foundational truth: God. His subsequent thoughts on the subject seem to constitute little more than a search for his own identity; i.e.; who he is as a 16th c. fideist. Descartes wrote at a time when the authority of the Catholic Church was being challenged on all sides by free-thinking men, men who were willing to use the human faculty of reason to question religious dogma. To his credit, Descartes participates in that search for truth, yet ironically, the way in which he “proves” his own existence- and that of God- demonstrates more than anything else not just the persistence of his own faith but the limitations of logic as well. Starting with the irrational, a priori assumption of a divine creator, he reasons that even if God intended to deceive him about his own existence, he still is thinking about his situation: therefore, he exists. “Cogito ergo sum”, arguably the 3 most famous words in the history of philosophy, were written long before psychology had developed as a social science. Accordingly, Descartes can be pardoned for not appreciating the inherent solipsism of his conclusion. On the one hand, he brilliantly places the individual as the ultimate arbiter of any system of truth, but regrettably, he doesn’t seem to appreciate the inherent illogic of basing his one “objective” truth on a subjective realization. This error is compounded in Meditation 3 when he “reasons” that the idea of a Perfect God could not have originated in his own, admittedly imperfect mind, but could have only come from a God who really exists! The obvious flaws in Descartes’ argument seem to stem from an unwillingness to transcend certain, long-held religious convictions, and also, from a misapplication of the principles of logic. His argument for the existence of God is virtually the same argument made by Anselm of Canterbury almost 500 years before; moreover, as a mathematician, he seems more than willing to decide a matter of faith by the logical process of deduction, a fool’s errand at best. Faith, as most of us realize from our lofty position of 21c. knowledge, is essentially the persistence of belief in the absence of proof; in fact, it could be argued that the absence of proof is precisely what gives faith any meaning. Projects like Descartes’, and Aquinas’ before him, that have ignored the inherent differences between faith and reason and that have attempted to subject one to the constraints of the other, have all too often resulted in the tangled arguments of religious scholasticism or worse, religious persecution. Rather than regarding them as competing systems of truth, as is the temptation even today, I think we as human beings would be far better served if instead, we look at them as complementary systems of belief, each providing a needed perspective for the other."

Portrait of Descartes (1596-1650) by Franz Hals