Knowledge in the Meditations can be taken to mean ‘conclusions of whose validity Descartes feels he can be certain’. There are a variety of areas of which Descartes believes himself to have attained knowledge through his meditations: his own existence, and the nature/essence of this existence; God, and that he exists; error and falsity, and how to avoid them; and sense perceptions and external reality. The overall knowledge he establishes is that things are much as they seem, and that a good God exists. The major foundations for this are his certainty of his self and of the existence of God. This knowledge is based on a variety of premises and assumptions which he considers indisputable, but ultimately everything rests upon his faith in the ratiocinative process, and specifically the ‘natural light’ by which perceptions’ clarity and distinctness are discerned.
Although the idea of a malicious and cunning demon determinedly deceiving him proves an invaluable aid in forming the habit of questioning everything he perceives, it consequently renders defunct any conclusions he draws. For, even though he is satisfied that his certainty of God as the guarantor of the validity of his knowledge allows him immunity against the wiles of this demon, his proof of the existence of such a God is subject to the danger of being deceived by the demon. His escape from this paradox is to attribute a higher strength to the positive understanding achieved through the natural light than the power of the demon; however, again he devolves circularly faith in this natural light from the existence of a deceitless divine being, itself proved using the natural light. Hence, his recognition of the remote possibility of a deceitful demon to which may be attributed the power to pervert the course of reason undermines all consequent rational proof and knowledge, including that which he regards as a failsafe against this demon.
The idea of a natural light seems at first to disrupt all Descartes’ careful preparations and avowals of rigour. However, it requires further examination before being wholly dismissed. Terms like ‘reason’ and ‘logic’ are the intellections which Descartes employs in his maths and geometry, subjects with whose certainty he is comfortable. It is his intention to make similar use of this faculty in his philosophising, simply by altering the focus of his deliberations. However, the process by which he thinks and reasons is a mystery, and there is no guarantee that even if his prized certainty can be reached within the restricted, strictly-regulated and verifiable limits of mathematics and pure abstraction, it may not be accessible to hazy metaphysical speculation, with its inherent incomprehensibility and lack of verifiable evidence.
It becomes apparent that the ‘natural light’ is Descartes’ label for our faculty of judgement, which is our guide and measure through this conceptual vacuum barren of landmarks. ‘Clarity and distinctness’ have echoes of Plato’s Simile of the Sun, and Hume’s “force and liveliness”, all of which are expressions of the power in us to assess a concept’s verisimilitude. That he still professes to be following his natural light even when straying from the path of truth would seem to indicate that when conclusions seem clear and distinct, it may be that they seem so as a result of being in accordance with our preconceptions. Descartes is aware of this sense of scepticism about the reliability of the ‘natural light’ as a guide, which is why he needs to introduce a higher being which embodies and reveals the truth to us. The fallacies he commits could be ascribed to human fallibility: through faulty reason, bias or even a political motive. This is a possibility, given his suspicious piousness, and if true, would rock the foundations of his work.
The Meditations begs a discussion of rationalism and its methods, with regard to the manner of human cognition. It seems evident that despite his professed method of progressing forward step by reasoned step, Descartes thinks in a typical, human fashion. By this, I mean that meditative thought is a deeply mysterious and irrational process, which involves sudden intuitive leaps forwards which are then semi-automatically rationalised. Descartes was unwilling to concede that we cannot reason forwards freely and creatively, and that logical deduction can only be a verification procedure, and that consequently, the direction our thoughts take is subconscious, as with all creativity. This explains why his eventual resolutions are so akin to his preconceived beliefs, and why the natural light can only be a means of assessing thoughts which have presented themselves to him, rather than a forward-looking guide mechanism. Interestingly, the natural light would seem to shine in various directions, judging from the plethora of different systems of knowledge built by philosophers, all with similar stated aims.
As an aside, it is worth noting that nowhere is Descartes aware of modern questions concerning ‘absolute truth’ and the implications of existentialism. He can hardly be blamed for this, but a treatise which attempts to establish anything with complete certainty must at least consider its stance on the most underlying assumptions we make about the universe.
The first major conclusion that Descartes reaches in the Meditations is a refined version of his Cogito argument used in the Discourses. However, both are similarly flawed. He uses the statement ‘I am, I exist’ almost like a mantra, reassuring himself that as long as he doubts, whatever it might be that he is doubting, his doubt is absolutely indubitable evidence of his own existence. Indeed, his doubt is obviously irrefutable evidence that the doubting thoughts exist. From this, it might then be argued that he is some sort of passive receptacle which records and is aware of these thoughts, but instead Descartes jumps fallaciously to an idea of agency, expressed in the first-person ‘I’. He elaborates upon the theme of the nature of his own existence to describe himself eventually as a conscious, proactive being, essentially a ‘thinking thing’. He could perhaps have taken a different, more introspective direction. William James made the distinction between the ‘I’ that knows the ‘me’. Descartes combines our consciousness, memories and mental processes into one ‘thinking thing’, when all he can really be certain of is the existence of thoughts. Moreover, it is these thoughts that are seemingly possessed of agency, since they spring unbidden into the chambers of consciousness, and so he is forced to admit the possibility of subconscious areas of our inner world inaccessible to our attention.
The existence of a God as described in the Meditations underlies all his subsequent conclusions, and overall security of his knowledge depends largely upon the proofs of God he provides. Descartes feels convinced of his proofs of God, and of their security against public scrutiny. However, despite his efforts to maintain their incontrovertible veracity, they are open to various objections.
The first premise is that the ‘cause’ must always be “greater” and more “perfect” than the ‘effect’. This is a disturbing point from which to begin, since it is by no means indisputable. This theory that the object of origin must be superior to its product ties in with his unfounded belief that our ideas stem ultimately from sense experience, and that any thoughts in our head concerning an object must be inferior to the object itself, in terms of perfection and reality. Thus, the idea that he professes to feel most clearly and distinctly of all, that of a being infinitely superior to himself in every respect, must be a mental echo of just such a being. This is God, the First Cause which contains everything and from which all else derives. He believes this idea of God that is so deeply rooted inside him to be akin to a workman’s mark, the brand by which the created knows its creator. Although the notion of causes being greater than effects makes sense intuitively, it is not sufficiently certain for a bedrock premise.
I believe that I too can conceive of such an infinite being, but without Descartes’ accompanying assumptions, I am unconvinced of the existence of such a being. It seems rather fanciful to say that my idea of an infinite being is implanted in me by God, my creator. However, the idea I have of an infinite being is an intellectual one, produced by the operation of magnifying and extending the properties of known finite ideas. Descartes tries to dismiss objections that his God is a negation of nothing or that He is an extension along a continuum. Yet, we can produce an idea of the infinite, as we can in mathematics, by comparing ourselves to a ‘lesser’ being, and positively extrapolating ad infinitum. Such a God would display the same properties Descartes describes. He returns later to add that existence must also be a quality possessed by this being, in order to stave off the objection that this infinite being may only be real as a concept. Somehow though, it is impossible to shake oneself of the notion that by attributing the quality of existence to our conception of such a deity, we are empowering it with reality, although Descartes tries unconvincingly to explain that this is not what he is suggesting.
Strictly, an infinite being is ‘greater’ than us only in terms of degree. Yet Descartes’ God is qualitatively different somehow: subtly, the distinction between an ‘infinite’ and a ‘perfect’ being has been blurred through misleading terminology. Descartes has asserted the existence of an infinite being, the First Cause, from which all else stems. Such a being would be totally inconceivable in human terms, and would be akin to some sort of pantheistic ‘entity’ or even the universe itself. Terms such as ‘perfect’, ‘good’, ‘divine’, ‘supreme’ and ‘deceitful’ would have no meaning with reference to such a being. And yet the divinity that Descartes envisions is the Christian God in all His glory: an omnipotent, omniscient anthropomorphic god. Words like ‘good’ and ‘perfect’ connotate human values straight out of the Bible and are totally inappropriate for an infinite being, but very necessary as descriptions for a deceitless, loving morally prescriptive God. For indeed, Descartes appears to have in mind exactly which direction this is leading in, and what will be necessary for him to have proved before he can reach his destination.
God’s vital role in Descartes’ entire system of knowledge is as an omnipotent and omniscient being who guarantees the truth of our beliefs and can be relied upon not to deceive us (or even permit us to be deceived). This was why it was necessary for Descartes to have vouchsafed God’s benevolence towards us and His desire to aid us in our quest for knowledge. This requires another assumption: that deceit is a ‘defect’ and since, in His perfection, God is free of all defects, it follows that God does not deceive. Descartes stresses that this divine deceitlessness is not itself a lack, but freedom from a privation. At this point, distinctions between an infinite amoral being and a Supreme Divinity become most apparent, since we could expect no such special treatment from an infinite being, who would be neither deceitful nor deceitless. Only a God would ‘love’ us and seek to shelter us from falsehood.
Having established his newly-proven God as the guarantor of the soundness of our faculties, Descartes proceeds to further entrench God in the role of our Protector. His first certainty was of his own being, but only while his whole attention was focused upon the act of thinking and thus existing. Now, he is able to provide a surety who conserves us and cements the permanence of our existence, and answers his own earlier worry (that he could only be sure of himself while focusing his attention on the certainty, ‘I am, I exist’), neatly binding the strands of his system.
Once God has been established as the anthropomorphic beneficer that Descartes believes and requires him to be, there is a need for him to address the evident evils that exist and the flaws to which we are nevertheless subject. He ascribes this largely to our limited human understanding being empowered beyond its means by the magnitude of our will. Some awkward issues external to us as individuals can be dismissed with the argument that God works with a larger picture that we are too microscopic to view as a whole, requiring Descartes to prematurely admit the likely existence of other beings. Where this blind fails or proves insufficient, he takes recourse behind cunning Christian veils by placing all that is inexplicable inside a black box, about which a finite being is insufficient to comprehend. He is thankful for the power of the will within us which gives us the capability to over-extend ourselves into speculation on matters concerning which we are prone to error. Thus, he is simultaneously able to gratefully justify our fallibility and affirm the natural light as a divine illumination. However, the fact remains that human nature is characterised by its imperfection, and it is difficult to comprehend how a God who so favours us has nevertheless ‘cursed’ us in so many respects.
Establishing an external reality populated by corporeal bodies (the objects of our sense perceptions and the basis of our ideas) is the last task remaining to Descartes. Because he is unable to devise a means of assuring himself of the conformity between the reality of the objects and how they appear to him, he adopts his now-standard stance of trusting in God not to overtly deceive us and endow us with the ratiocinative might to ward off erroneous beliefs. Therefore this final foundation, upon which rests the normalcy of our lives, is dependent upon what has been established earlier regarding God’s defence of us from deceit.
Despite his repeated pretensions of modesty, there is a repellent smugness in his manner which belies the deficiencies in his reasoning. It is a shame that so much of his intellect was brought to bear on rationalisation and ‘justifying the ways of God to men’[1]. Even so, in many ways, Descartes has been successful, at least insofar as he has contributed to the progress of philosophy. His intention of assembling our perceived universe rationally is laudable, and the Meditations demonstrates and represents an influential philosophical approach to this herculean task. However, as Nietzsche showed by abolishing God, without a rational and moral world order (usually embodied by a divine figure), we lose all claim on fundamental knowledge. Consequently, the knowledge Descartes believes he has certified rests insecurely on notions of his own and God’s nature. Given that he has not satisfied me regarding the indubitability of these crucial foundations, his concluded knowledge is thus unfortunately suspect.