Metapost: Tagging

As you are dying to know, the results of the poll were:

author: 6
book: 4
reading: 3

Unless someone feels strongly about this for some reason, I guess we'll use "author" "group #" and "book" for the tags. Again, I'll maintain them, but if you want to put them in like that that's great.

There is no poll now; if you want to make one, go to the Layout tab and add a gadget; poll is a choice.

Be that as it may,  have previously admitted many things as wholly certain and evident that nevertheless I later discovered to be doubtful.  What sort of things where these?  Why, the earth, the sky, the stars, and all the other things I perceived by means of the senses.  But what was it about these things that I clearly perceived?  Surely the fact that the ideas of thoughts of these things were hovering before my mind.  But even now I do not deny that these ideas are in me.

Meditations 35

Descartes makes a very profound distinction here between a thing and an idea of a thing.  Previously, we have read people (Cervantes, for example) who have distinguished between appearance and reality, but I think this is the first time someone has effectively severed particular things from the thought of them.

What are the implications of this?

Descartes seems to proceed along the same lines as Plato's character Timaeus, in positing different corresponding things for each kind of thought.  For thoughts of mutable things, there are uncertain objects.  For thoughts of entirely immutable things (or God), there must correspond an entirely certain object.

Is this Neoplatonic?  Does perfection generate (or "emanate") imperfection?  If so, why?  So far, God has no desire or impulse, only infinite qualities.  Why would such a philosophical God make an uncertain and imperfect world? 

So, I don't have a quote, but thinking along the lines of the principle of charity as Professor Affeldt encouraged us to do last class I'm wondering about Descartes' belief in God being based on his thought conception of God.  As I'm learning in my theology class Aquinas defines theology as faith seeking understanding.  It seems to require a great leap of faith that God exists in our understanding therefore an even more perfect God exists in reality, and I admire Descartes' trust both in his own faculties and in the possibility of a more perfect God than can exist in his own understanding.  We are also studying in my theology class how faith is rooted in experience and how one cannot assume universal experience of faith because each person's experience is different.  Learning about Descartes' experience is one way of understanding faith.  It may not be the same as my experience but it may be the same as others' and it certainly worked for him.  Is this all the validity a faith argument needs?

Christian Influence

Thus there remains only the idea of God. I must consider whether there is anything in this idea that cold not have originated from me I understand by the name "God" a certain substance that is infinite, independent, supremely intelligent and supremely powerful, and that created me along with everything else that exists--if anything else exists. Indeed all these are such that, the more carefully I focus my attention on them, the less possible it seems they could have arisen from myself alone. This from what has been said, I must conclude that God necessarily exists...76:45

Given that Decartes discusses at length his conception of the true power and capabilities of God, would we go about saying that he believes in a Christian God? He states that God is infinite and that "nothing can be added to his perfection." Does Descartes adopt a Christian attitude toward God, or does he create his own understanding? Under what notion does Descartes think that God is an actual existing thing, and how could we break down this argument? It seems that he might jump to quickly, or rather, that he simply assumes that since he is a thinking thing, that God must be a thinking thing. How does he get to this point? And how does he back it up?

Doubtful Analogies?

"But then were I perchance to look out my window and observe men crossing the square, I would ordinarily say I see the men themselves just as I say I see the wax. But what do I see aside from hats and clothes, which could conceal automata? Yet I judge them to be men. Thus what I thought I had seen with my eyes, I actually grasped solely with the faculty of judgment, which is in my mind (Meditation 2, 32)."

Descartes often uses fascinating, brief analogies to illustrate his points. I wonder to what degree they work as well as to what degree he intends them to work. This particular analogy picks up on a question I have lingering from last class.

I will treat the question first. Basically, last class I got hung up on how (as it appeared to me) Descartes switched methods when he got to the superspecific fields of dioptrics and meteors (Discourse, 77). When the object of his inquiry got overly messy or practical or minute, I think that he (knowingly) started to rely on a posteriori effects to prove causes, rather than his standard use of a priori reasoning from causes to effects. To me, this reversal seems important precisely because it is not his main point--it seems to challenge his established method of finding certainties without empirical evidence.

What the quote is supposed to illustrate is how the apriori reasoning is what gives the certainty of what the thing is. In other words, Descartes knows the man is a man by a judgment of his mind, not because he saw their clothes. Similarly, he knows the wax is wax (whatever that is) by a judgment of his mind, and not because he touched, saw, felt, or smelt it. Is it actually possible to know what the wax is by thought alone? That is my question.

I will now examine the analogy. The first hurdle is that he sees the clothes. The clothes seem to be signs of the man that lies within. Are the qualities of the wax signs that point to the quantities that make up the essence of the wax, and which are only known by thought? From what Descartes has been saying all along about his method, it seems that the mind would have no need for signs. Should he be able to know that there are men crossing the street without even looking?

Perhaps a solution is to carry over the word see as a metaphor for the insight of the mind that grasps the wax's quantifiable essence. If we do this, then perhaps the mind "sees" the quantitative essence of the wax by adding up qualitative sensory information, a sort of mental equation, done (astoundingly) "silently and without words" (32).

But then where does the sensory information come from, if not the world? But he "has supposed [the world] to be nothing" (27). Yet he has also supposed the world to be mechanical and quantitative matter (20). I am confused. The point is that by relocating the analogy of the clothed men into the mind does not seem to have eliminated the need for some impact from the outside world.

Perhaps he simply means, "I judge them to be men" in spite of the possible deception of the appearence (i.e. that they could be robots. By the way, he probably meant the irony that is obvious with his conception of the mechanical body). But even so, how else could he judge them to be men unless he had the possibly deceptive appearance?

Unless some others of you "see" it better, it seems this analogy does not carry through far enough to be a help. It illustrates what can happen when one tries to use sensory processes to make an analogy to a process of the mind. Descartes seems to see the danger of this move; speaking in the synopsis of the third meditation, he writes, "Since my intent was to draw the minds of readers as far as possible from the senses, I had no desire to draw upon comparisons based upon corporeal things" (14). Is this one example simply a consequence of his brief laxity of the "reins" of the "confines of truth" (29-30)? Do any of you interpret this analogy in a different way that sheds better light upon my original question, or are there other analogies at key moments that should be called into question? How much is he relying on them and for what purpose? Do they help us beyond making us feel as if we understand something he said better? If so, how should we read them so as to get the truth without being mislead?

The Idea of God

"The whole force of the argument rests on the fact that I recognize that it would be impossible for me to exist, being of such a nature as I am (namely, having in me the idea of God), unless God did in fact exist." Meditation 3, A&T 52

I'm not sure that I understand how Descartes can say that God's existence is based on him having the idea of God. In the first meditation, Descartes says,

"For indeed when painters themselves wish to represent sirens and satyrs by means of especially bizarre forms, they surely cannot assign to them utterly new natures. Rather, they simply fuse together the members of various animals. Or if perhaps they concoct something so utterly novel that nothing like it has ever been seen before (and thus is something utterly fictitious and false), yet certainly at the very least the colors from which they fashion it ought to be true." etc. Meditation 1, A&T 20

So basically I do not understand how the idea of God has to mean that there is a God. Why couldn't the idea of God come from a combination of ideas, or be something "utterly novel?" Maybe I missed a big part of his explanation, but this is what stood out to me when I finished.

Descartes' Method

The first [rule] was never to accept anything as true that I did not plainly know to be such. (18)

I formulated a provisional code of morals . . . to obey the laws and customs of my country, constantly holding on to the religion which, by God's grace, I had been instructed from my childhood, and governing myself in everything else according to the most moderate opinions and htose furthest from excess. (22-23)

As I think several of my fellow posters have pointed out, Descartes claim of taking nothing for granted is perhaps not very strong. While he doubts a considerable amount, he leaves out at least one essential: his ability to reason logically and accurately. If indeed there were an "evil deceiver," wouldn't this deceiver be capable of twisting Descartes' mind so that what he believes to be logical is in fact a fallacy? "Je pense donc je suis" appears to be logical, both to Descartes and to us. But how do we know our perception of "logical" is not skewed? We can't know this, and neither can Descartes.

Therefore, Descartes does not doubt everything; he keeps faith in his reason. This would certainly appear to negate all his further claims (if his original premise - je pense donc je suis - is incorrect, all further conclusions must also be incorrect). However, I wonder if his method is nevertheless effective. I think that Descartes realizes that if he doubts his reason, he will never be able to know anything, and by studying the way in which he devises a "provisional code of morals" we can see more clearly his response to this difficulty. He decides that it is better to have faith in something than to doubt everything and accomplish nothing (this goes back to Dante, or Eliot, who argued that "the way up is the way down" and any movement is better than none). This may lead him to error, but at least he has a chance of discovering the truth. So, once again, he has placed that faith in his reason. How else could he choose the criteria for his morals? By what standards does he judge this provisional code?

Descartes’ method cannot give him complete or perfect knowledge, but it does provide a better basis for his beliefs. It helps him to apprehend more fully God, himself, and the created world, and this apprehension helps him live and strive productively. Although he does not state it as such, as long as he does not doubt his mind, this then must be his goal. Whether the world he senses is real is finally unimportant; Descartes cares not whether it is real, but how best to deal with it.