Overview

Descartes takes on the most ambitious philosophical project since Genesis, here, through a series of careful meditations, and starting with a deep skepticism concerning the possibility of knowledge, Descartes (and the reader who shares his “I”) will establish the possibility of knowledge. Along the way, he will prove the existence of himself, God, and certain things in the world, in that order.

Note: I noticed that I sometimes slip into the Cartesian/Scholastic usage of “objective/formal reality”. Objective reality = representational content. Formal reality = intrinsic reality.

Outline

  1. Preface and Synopsis of the Six Meditations
    1. Preface: From Descartes’ request for objections to his discussion of God and mind in the Discourse came only two he found worth mentioning.
      1. Objection 1: If the mind does not comprehend itself as anything but a thinking thing, this does not actually entail that the mind is nothing but a thinking thing.
      2. Response 1: In the passage, he was concerned with mind as an object of his knowledge, not necessarily the mind as it was. In short, the only thing Descartes was aware of about himself essentially was that he was a thinking thing.
      3. Objection 2: Just because Descartes can think of something more perfect than himself, this (a) doesn’t entail that his idea is in fact more perfect than himself, (b) much less that the object of the idea exists.
      4. Response 2: Descartes wants to appeal to a concept of “idea” here that does not just mean an operation of the intellect, but some object represented by that operation. So much for (a). As to (b), if there is within Descartes an idea-object that is more perfect than himself, then the thing exists.
      5. The rest of Descartes’ interlocuters he considers “silly and weak.” Generally, he says, arguments that attack the existence of God rely either on anthropomorphizing God or on our ability to somehow limit what God can do.
      6. Here Descartes introduces the Meditations, and urges anyone unwilling to “meditate with [him]” to quit while they’re ahead. Onward, intrepid meditators!
      7. In outline, he will: (1) Set out the thoughts which have enabled him to arrive at his “certain and evident knowledge of the truth,” after which (2) he will reply to all worthy objections, which he solicited and received pre-press.
    2. Synopsis of the following six meditations
      1. In the first meditation, he will give reasonable grounds for doubting all things. This initial doubt will prevent us from later having to doubt our subsequent findings.
      2. In the second meditation, he will suppose the non-existence of all things about which the mind (note again that the “I” of the Meditations is always written as an indexical) can find any reason to doubt. This will be useful in distinguishing between those things which are properly of the mind and those properly of the body.
        1. He anticipates some concern about why he doesn’t prove herein the immortality of the soul. He then suggests that this will be impossible until the sixth meditation. Fair enough.
        2. Additionally he notes here that since we can easily conceive of half a body, but never of half a mind, these things are not only constitutionally different, but in fact opposed. That will be enough to prove that the decay of the body does not imply the destruction of the mind, which should give us hope for an afterlife, and, this established, the topic will not be further discussed herein.
        3. Preview of the rest of the immortality of the soul argument: Once we recognize that all substances are created by god and hence incorruptable, and we recognize that while the human body is composed of substances which are themselves incorruptable, it itself will decay, and that this is not the case with the mind, which is pure substance, the mind/soul will be immortal.
      3. In the third meditation, he will prove the existence of God. (Notice that he is proving this stuff on basically the same schedule that the Bible has God making the universe. Six days, and the one to rest.
        1. This will take place along the lines of Object/Response 2 (1.a.iii(b)-iv(b)) above: “the idea of God which is [perfect and] in us must have God himself as its cause.”
      4. In the fourth meditation, he will prove that everything we clearly perceive is true, and also the nature of falsity.
      5. In the fifth meditation, he will not only give an account of corporeal nature in general, he wil give a second argument demonstrating the existence of God.
        1. This second argument will hinge on the idea that certainty of anything (even geometry) depends on the knowledge of God.
      6. Finally, in the sixth meditation, he will finally prove that the mind is “really distinct” from the body, and also make an argument about the existence of material things (aka. that there really is a world).
        1. His special point here, which he notes is actually the point of the entire Meditations, is that actually knowing that there really is a world is much harder than knowing one’s own mind or God, and that the latter are indeed the most certain principles of human intellection.
  2. First Meditation: What can be called into doubt
    1. Descartes noticed a while ago that a lot of what he believed was dubious, and based on dubious premises. He’s been wanting to take some time, sit at his desk, and really think things out from the ground up. He’s going to start doing that today, right now.
    2. He’s going to start by attempting to let go of any of his opinions that are not completely certain and indubitable; in other words, if he can find a reason to doubt something, he will.
    3. His knowledge has been given thus far to him by the senses, but he knows that the senses are likely to deceive him.
      1. While this happens from time to time with small things, it seems rather unlikely that he’s being duped tout court by his senses, aka. that he is not sitting by the fire, etc.
      2. But then again, what about his dreams? In his dreams, he experiences things that are a lot like what he’s experiencing now, which turn out to be false. He’s not sure that he could really tell whether he’s awake or asleep.
      3. But dreams, as he experiences them, are representations - they are modeled at least in some distant way on real things. This seems to imply that certainly some things are real.
      4. It further seems that this class would include corporeal things in general: bodies with extensions, qualtiites, sizes and numbers.
      5. He concludes that there are certain kinds of truths (analytic truths) that are about absolutely general things. So if physics and astronomy can be objects of doubt, arithmetic and geometry seem quite certain.
    4. From there, he wonders if God is trying to trick him with his certainty about these things.
      1. If God is supremely good, however, there’s no reason to believe he’d want to trick us.
      2. But if we can say that God’s not tricking us all the time, you’d think it follows that he would never trick us. Yet this is patently not the case. I am sometimes wrong about the nature of things.
      3. Contrarily, if there is no omnicient God, and we arrived here by accidents or causality or something else non-teleological, God can’t to lend his credibility to our perceptions, and all the more likely that we’re constantly decieved.
      4. In the end, Descartes realizes that he can’t say that he is without doubt about his belief in God, so he’s going to have to start somewhere else.
    5. In order to deal with this, Descartes will attempt a reductio ad absurdum using the contradictory (rather than the contrary) position: That there is some malicious demon of the utmost power trying to decieve him.
      1. Descartes is going to have to steel himself to his new doubts, and figure out a way to not fall under the sway of his demon.
  3. Second Meditation: The nature of the human mind, and how it is better known than the body
    1. Assuming now that all his sense-data is spurious, it seems that the only certain thing is that nothing is certain.
    2. Ipseity
      1. But in order for me even to doubt, does not this require that I, at least, am something? But I have no senses and no body.
      2. Further, if I’ve convinced myself that there’s no world as such either, doesn’t that preclude my existence? I had to do the convincing, so I must have existed.
      3. But what if (3.b.i-ii) are just products of the deceiver: but indeed, who is he deceiving? But deceive me as he might, “he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I think that I am something.”
      4. Hence, necessarily: I exist.
    3. Res cogitans
      1. But what is, exactly, that exists? Descartes now needs to practice his method of doubt on what it is that his “I” is.
      2. Descartes used to think he was a man. But what does this mean? To define man “rational animal” replaces one vague term with two.
      3. How about this: Descartes thinks that he is a body-soul complex. His body moved around, and his soul engaged in sense-perception and thinking.
        1. He doubts his body, though, insofar at least as it is a think with a definable location and shape, and that it takes up space at the exclusion of other bodies.
        2. He also doubts his soul at least insofar as it concerns his body, that is, viz. nutrition, movement, and sense-perception. But wait. What about thinking? He can’t seem to doubt that his “I” is “thinking”.
        3. Hence, he is, he exists as long as he is thinking. He is certain - without relying on his imagination (as would be required for him to have a shape, an image, a self-representation) - a res cogitans.
      4. A res cogitans, Descartes doubts, understands, affirms, denies, is willing, is unwilling, imagines, and has sensory perceptions.
        1. Namely, he doubts almost everything, but who nonetheless understands something, which he affirms to be true, and hence denies everything else, desires to know more, is unwilling to be deceived, imagines many things, and is aware of many things which apparently come from the senses.
        2. Note that sensory perception and imagination are included precisely insofar as they are simply modes of thinking, regardless of the actuality of their content.
    4. Res extensa
      1. Despite all this certainty, it’s nagging him that the corporeal things which he doubts seem to be much more distinct than the “puzzling ‘I’” of which he is now certain. He’s going to now attempt to see if he can be certain about anything out in the world.
      2. It seems basic to everyone that we can understand something about particular bodies. Descartes contemplates a piece of wax.
        1. This piece of wax has some properties: it tastes faintly of honey, smells faintly of flowers, it is cold, hard, and of a certain color, shape and size.
        2. Then he puts the piece of wax in the fire. Suddenly, all its properties change. Despite this, though, the wax remains.
        3. Taking all the properties away, Descartes realizes that the essence of the piece of wax is simply that it is a body with extension, flexibility, and changeability.
          1. Alarmed by his tendency to conflate perceptions with intellectual judgement, Descartes pontificates that he does not actually see the men walking outside the window, he sees hats and coats and judges them to be men.
          2. Descartes is glad now that even though his judgement may still contain errors, his knowledge requires a human mind, rather than simple animal perception.
    5. The new character of perception
      1. Descartes realizes now that while the fact that he can judge that the wax to exist does not necessarily entail the wax’s actual existence, it seems to entail his own. Further, his knowledge of the wax seems to actually establish more firmly the nature of his own mind.
      2. And with this, he now knows that even bodies are not strictly perceived by the senses or imagination, but by the intellect which judges them. Given that, it is clear that it is easier and more evident to perceive one’s own mind than anything else.
  4. Third Meditation: The existence of God
    1. The third meditation begins with Descartes “casting about” for what other things he might be able to know with certainty.
      1. He realizes that insofar as he knows with certainty that he is the thinking thing, he must also know what it is for him to be certain about something: he must perceive (conceive is probably more accurate) it clearly and dinstinctly.
      2. To put a finer point on it, even if the sky, the earth and the stars do not exist, he can be certain that his ideas of them do. The source of his initial mistake was in thinknig that there were things outside of him which were the sources of and resembled his ideas.
    2. Now he recalls that when he previously opened things like arithmetic and geometry to doubt, he did so because it occurred to him that perhaps God was trying to trick him about even those things which seemed most evident to him.
      1. Clearly, the only way to handle this kind of a situation will be “to examine whether there is a God, and, if there is, whether he can be a deceiver.”
    3. Before we can begin such an investigation, however, Descartes will need to classify his thoughts into the kind that bear truth, and the kind that bear falsity.
      1. First sub-classification: picture-thinking/representation (think of a man, a chimera, the sky, an angel, God) [D calls these “ideas”] and another class - which seem to have another kind of conceptual content - exemplified by things like volitions, emotions, judgements.
        1. The former class, ideas, considered soley in themselves, canoot be false; Descartes imagining a chimera is just as true as Descartes imagining a goat (regardless of whether a chimera exists).
        2. To the latter class applies a similar logic: Whether or not Descartes desires something wicked or nonexistent, it is nonetheless true that he desires it.
        3. So the class of thoughts to really be wary of are judgements, and again, the most common mistake is to judge that your mental representations conform to the world.
      2. Second sub-classification: The first element of the previous classification (representations/ideas) can further be divided into three classes.
        1. Innate ideas from which truth seems to come.
        2. Accidental ideas: Representations from sensory experience (seeing the sun, feeling the fire).
        3. Invented ideas: Hippogriffs, sirens, chimeras.
    4. Now as to (4.c.ii.ii), why does Descartes incline to think that those resemble things?
      1. First of all, because “Nature taught [him] to think this”, and secondly because Descartes has these ideas whether he wants to or not: the fire just makes him feel hot. So the obvious explanation is that the thing in question transmits its likeness to Descartes.
      2. What it means when he says that Nature taught him to think that is that he had a spontaneous impulse which lead him to believe it. This is not nearly such solid ground as the “natural light” by which, say, the cogito was revealed to him.
      3. Secondly, just because his ideas don’t depend on his will doesn’t necessarly entail that they come from outside him. He could have some faculty inside him that produces them (e.g. the faculty that produces dreams).
      4. Finally, if these ideas did in fact come from things outside him, this doesn’t guarantee that the ideas will resemble the things. (For example, the sun looks quite small, and yet we know it is quite large. Both of these cannot resemble the sun itself.)
      5. Hence it was just some “blind impulse” that has led Descartes to believe up until now that there is some correspondence between his perceptions of things and the things themselves.
    5. Why a cause must be more perfect than its effect
      1. So, if a representation has both a subjective (mental) content and an objective content, then, regardless of the parity between the objective content as-represented and in-itself, a representation of something substantial seems to have more “objective reality” (more representational verisimilitude) than a representation of something “accidental.”
      2. By this same logic, a representation of God would have more “objective reality” than a representation of a given finite substance.
      3. Additionally, (this is sort of the Aristotelian argument) there must be as much of this “objective reality”/perfection in the total cause of effect n as in n itself.
      4. And hence, something cannot arise from nothing and the cause must be more perfect than the effect. This also holds for ideas.
      5. This entails that to have an idea of heat, it must be put there by a thing - heat - which is more perfectly “heat” than my mental representation of it.
      6. So, while a representation itself may require no formal reality except that which it derives from thought, in order for a /representation/ to contain some of this “objective reality” (representational verisimilitude), it must derive from a cause with at least as much formal/intrinsic reality as there is represented in my idea of the thing (insofar at least as something cannot emerge from nothing).
      7. “For just as the objective mode of being belongs to ideas by their very nature, so the formal mode of being belongs to the causes of ideas…by their very nature.”
      8. Further, as there cannot be an infinite regress, we’re going to require a “primary idea”, which will provide the “reality” for the subsequent chain of causal ideas.
    6. Isolating the primary causes of certain effects, and how we find out that Descartes is not alone.
      1. Now, let’s say Descartes has an idea whose objective reality turns out to be so great, that he can be sure that the same reality does not formally or immanently reside inside himself. Well, we know by the chain of reasoning above that Descartes is incapable of causing this idea. This means: Descartes is not alone.
      2. Examining the catalog of his ideas, Descartes finds ideas of himself, God, corporeal and inanimate things, angels, animals, and other men like himself.
        1. Of these, ideas which represent men, animals, and angels can be constructed from the ideas he has which represent himself, corporeal things, and God.
        2. Of the remaining, he can find nothing in his representations of corporaeal things that entails anything too great to have originated in himself. (Remember, all he can really say that he knows are that bodies have extention, motion, substance, duration, number.) Other properties: light, color, sound, smell, taste, temperature, he finds muddled and hence dubious, material falsities in which he may be representing non-things as things.
          1. In short, if his ideas about corporeal things are false, they are in fact only effects of a deficiency in his representational apparatus, whereas if they are true, the reality they represent is so slight that he can’t even distinguish them from non-things. Further all of the properties he can know about anything, he also finds in himself.
        3. All that remains now is the idea of God. And since his idea of god contains things like infinitude, omnicience, omnipresence, etc. it becomes increasingly hard to believe that ideas of these things could have possibly originated in him, who is finite, of limited intelligence, and localized in space.
          1. Further, since there is more (formal/perfect) reality in an infinite substance than in a finite one, it must be that his concept of the infinite preceded or caused his concept of the finite.
          2. How, he asks, could he have understood his own imperfections except by comparison to an idea of perfection?
          3. Descartes anticipates an objection here by suggesting that his concept of God is “utterly clear and distinct, and contains in itself more objective reality than any other idea…” and hence is less liable to be “suspected of falsehood.”
          4. The clarity of his concept of god then, relies not on his ability to grasp the manifold qualities of the infinite, but rather on his very ability to grasp “infinitude” as such. (One has to break impartial character here to ponder how Descartes could possibly imagine that he comprehended infinitude more clearly than coldness. Selah.)
      3. Descartes, in his weaker moments, however, still seems to find himself pondering the validity of the causal relationship between his idea of god and the actual god. He thinks he can close this nagging doubt down by working to prove that without such a being, he himself could not exist.
        1. If Descartes was the cause of his own existence, how would he desire anything?
        2. Given that it is much easier for him to acquire knowledge than it would been for him to emerge out of nothingness, it seems like if he could do the latter, he would have just given himself the former, and we wouldn’t need the meditations.
        3. As he imagines would be clear to anyone who considers the nature of time, there is no actual difference between creating something and preserving it from moment to moment.
          1. And if this is the case, by what power is Descartes preserved? How does it come about that I who exist now will exist a little while from now? Descartes experiences no such power in himself. Hence, again, Descartes is certain that he is not alone.
          2. But why can’t we just say that Mr. and Mrs. Descartes (or some other mundane, existential cause) produced Descartes? Well, we might be able to, but what caused them? At the end of the chain, no matter how you slice it, whatever is responsible for the effect Descartes is a cause that actually contained within it those ideas which are the mental-genetic inheritance of Descartes.
          3. And further, if there is no difference between creation and preservation, and no one can we say that Mr. and Mrs. Descartes are responsible for preserving Descartes at the present moment.
        4. But what if all these ideas (infinitude, omniscience, omnipresence, etc) actually derive from a variety of disparate causes, and have no unified locale? Ah, Descartes tells us, but the unity of these causes is the most important idea I have about God’s perfection.
      4. Finally, given a “very clear proof that God exists”, Descartes sets out to determine how exactly he received this idea of God.
        1. It wasn’t from his senses: It didn’t come to him unexpectedly.
        2. It wasn’t invented by him: He can’t add or take away perfections from it at will.
        3. All that remains is that the concept of god is innate in him, right alongside with the concept of himself.
      5. To recapitulate: “I recognize that it would be impossible for me to exist with the kind of nature I have - that is, having within me the idea of God - were it not the case that God really existed.” (51-52)
      6. Finally, since God has after all necessarily turned out to be the thing with all the perfections, as opposed to Descartes’ posited demon, we can throw away the idea that God is out to trick Descartes. But why then is Descartes sometimes wrong?
  5. Fourth Meditation: Truth and falsity
    1. Given Descartes’ clear knowledge of himself, and of God, and of the fact that God is not trying to trick him, Descartes thinks that he can see a way forward to knowledge of the things in the world.
    2. Certainly, Descartes received his faculty of judgement - like all of his faculties - from God, which implies that as long as he’s using the faculty correctly, it shouldn’t deceive him.
      1. Nonetheless, Descartes is indeed prone to countless errors. He also believes that this is because his ontological status is decidedly in between pure positivity/being/God, and pure negativity/nothingness, and it is exactly insofar as he participates in this nothingness that he is himself lacking, and hence capable of wrongness.
      2. However, this can’t be the whole story, since error is not a pure ontological negation, but rather an epistemic lack or privation.
    3. But this doesn’t really gel with Descartes’ idea of a God, who would inevitably see no reason to give him an imperfect faculty of judgement.
      1. First, Descartes has to humbly admit that he doesn’t understand the reasons for all of God’s actions, and further, based on knowing his own finite nature, Descartes finds the search for such first causes useless.
      2. Second, when we look at the works of God, perhaps we should be considering the perfection of the totality rather than the assumed imperfection of a part. In short, perhaps the imperfection of Descartes’ judgements is simply a distortion of his limited perspective.
    4. On further reflection, Descartes notices that all of his errors stem from both his faculty of knowledge or his faculty of choice/free will simultaneously.
      1. Again, Descartes appeals to the fact that, ultimately, how much knowledge God chose to give him was up to God.
      2. On the other hand, he knows from experience that his free will is perfectly free or unrestricted (his free will is in fact the most extreme case of his internal infinitude Descartes can unearth).
      3. So, if Descartes can imagine a greater intellect, but not a greater faculty of free will. This leads him to believe that the source of his mistakes is not in fact his perfect (although limited) understanding, and certainly not his perfect freedom of choice, but rather, his inability to correctly scope the use of his intellection. Namely, his problem is that he tries to extend his intellect to matters he does not understand.
        1. On free will, Descartes notes that the more one inclines in one direction, the more one experiences freedom of will; indifference, he says, is the lowest grade of freedom.
      4. Hence his indifference about, say, matters of corporeal existence.
    5. For Descartes, then, the ethical choice is to refrain from judgement concerning all matters about which he cannot perceive the truth with sufficient clarity and distinctness. (He terms this “incorrect use of the free will.”)
      1. At the end of the day, he then decides that in those instances in which he errs, it is his own fault for overextending the finite intellect which is his lot as a finite, created being.
      2. The fact that his free will (which has longer arms than his intellect) allows him to overextend his intellect, further, certainly can’t be blamed on God.
        1. Despite this, Descartes can’t help noting that God /could have/ given him a perfectly clear intellect, or else the perfect ability to refrain from judgement when his knowledge was imperfect.
        2. And again, had God done so, Descartes feels that he would have been a more perfect man, which doesn’t necessarily imply a more perfect universe.
        3. And we end up with Descartes’ important ethical maxim: “…if, whenever I have to make a judgement, I restrain my will so that it extends to what the intellect clearly and distinctly reveals, and no further, then it is quite impossible for me to go wrong.” (62)
  6. Fifth Meditation: The essence of material things, and the existence of God considered a second time
    1. Descartes first sets for the inventory his thoughts, and see which thoughts of material things are clear and distinct.
      1. (1) Extension in space, (2) the number of parts of a thing, and (3) the sizes, shapes, positions, and motions of the parts all seem to fit the bill.
        1. Even more than that, when Descartes imagines geometrical figures, even if they have never existed outside of him, he is convinced that these figures have a determinate, immutable nature independent of his mind.
        2. Now, remembering that whatever is true must be (a) something, and that (b) Descartes must be clearly and distinctly aware of it. He has always imagined that abstract mathematical truths are among this class.
      2. Another thing which meets these two critera (6.a.i.ii.a-b) for truthiness is God.
        1. Descartes is clearly and distinctly aware of his idea of God, and part of his idea of God is that God exists (in other words, without existing, God would certainly be imperfect).
        2. However, just because Descartes can picture a mountain and a valley, that don’t necessarily make a mountain and a valley exist in the world. However, this actually ends up working in God’s favor; in the same way mountain-valley is a logical entailment, so is God-existence. So, while Descartes is free to picture a horse with or without wings, he is not free to picture a God without the property of existence (God exists essentially).
    2. After his longish second proof of God’s existence, Descartes quickly concludes that he can no longer be persuaded by the argument he set forth before (viz. dreaming: cf. 2.c.ii).
      1. Given that (1) the certainty and truth of all his knowledge depends on his certainty of God, and particularly now that (2) he has a criterion for separating the true from the false - namely, when he understands something to be clear and evident - Descartes can no plainly see that knowledge is possible on countless matters, including elusive matters of corporeal nature.
  7. Sixth Meditation: The existence of material things, and the real distinction between the mind and the body
    1. Now what remains is to determine that material things exist. At least they are capable of existing, insofar as they are the subject of pure mathematics.
    2. Imagination, it occurs to Descartes, seems to be nothing more than the application of cognition to a body which - in being “intimately present to it” - must exist.
      1. There is a distinction to be drawn between imaginging (a triangle, which entails a mental picture) with a thousand-sided figure (which entails no mental picture); it is the effort which is entailed in drawing a mental picture which clues Descartes to this difference.
      2. Further, he thinks that his power of imagining is not essential to himself, unlike his power of understanding.
      3. This can be described as such: When the mind understands, it turns toward itself, and when it imagines, it turns outward, toward a body.
      4. Given this, it seems probable that since we can be sure of our faculty of imagination, we can be sure of the body which enables it. Although this is still only a probable conjecture.
    3. Now we turn to sensory perception:
      1. What the pre-Meditations Descartes thought about the objects of sensory perception.
        1. He thought that he had a body: head, hands, feet, etc. and that this was himself.
        2. He also gauged that his body could be affected by other bodies to feel sensations.
        3. Among these sensations was one, sight, that seemed to allow him to distinguish other bodies out there in the world.
        4. He also figured that these things were real things and not part of his mind, and that his ideas resembled these things.
        5. Further he figured that one of these bodies was his, and that this one seemed to be able to provide some sensations that corresponded with his mental states.
        6. All this he believed de facto, without ever really sitting down at his desk and figuring out whether it was true or not.
      2. Why he doubted (7.c.i)
        1. His faith in the senses was undermined. Things that looked round from a distance appeared square closer up, etc.
        2. Not only his external sense either. Here he appeals to phantom limb syndrome; he couldn’t even be sure that when he was feeling pain, the pain was true.
        3. No sensory experience he has ever had seems to be exclusive to waking or to dreaming, and hence, he couldn’t find a compelling reason to believe his waking experiences were caused in any way different than his sleeping ones (that is, by his mind).
        4. He also simply couldn’t rule out that his natural constitution was prone to error, since he didn’t know his maker “(or at least was pretending not to).”
        5. Finally, he had no trouble refuting his old (7.c.i) beliefs.
      3. What he now believes about them
        1. Everything that he clearly and distinctly understands corresponds exactly with his understanding of it. (If he perceives two things to be distinct, they are distinct, since they are “capable of being separated, at least by God.”
        2. Given that, and that he is clearly and distinctly aware of himself as the res cogitans and also of (distinctly) a body, it is certain that he is distinct from his body, and can exist without it.
        3. Further, he can clearly and distinctly understand himself without appeal to his faculties of sensory perception and imagination, but not vice versa.
        4. The passive faculty of sensory perception requires another, active faculty to enabe its use and hence to produce his sense-perceptions. This faculty is clearly not in him, since he doesn’t have to be in any way active to active sensory perception. Therefore, it must have been created by another something.
        5. This other something, then, must be another substance that contains either formally (intrinsically) or immanently all the reality which exists objectively (as representational content) in the ideas produced by Descartes’ imagination (cf. 4.e).
        6. So, finally, the cause of these representations either has to be a body that intrinsically contains the reality which the representations represent it having, or else it’s God, in which case that reality is immanent.
        7. Which seems to finally lead us to the fact that if God isn’t deceiving us, why would we have ideas of corporeal things that are actually transmitted immanently by God.
        8. Hence, corporeal things exist, whether or not my representations reflect them perfectly. (Again the criterion for determining whether they do or not is a clear and dinstinct understanding).
    4. Hence, there is no doubt that everything Descartes is taught by nature contains some truth. Here are the things that nature seems to be most clearly teaching:
      1. Descartes has a body.
      2. Descartes is closely joined to his body (via pain, etc.)
      3. Other bodies besides Descartes’ exist, which are different from each other, and differently attractive to Descartes, and hence can affect him/his body.
    5. However, Descartes has also to use his infamous criterion to distinguish these things with things that are results of his history of ill-considered judgements. Examples of the latter:
      1. That space in which nothing is occurring to stimulate his senses is empty.
      2. That color, temperature, taste, etc. are present in bodies and not in Descartes.
    6. (7.d-e) has taught Descartes that while sense-perceptions may be inevitable, it was not “taught to him by nature” to just blindly trust them without the help of intellection.
      1. And hence, he can conclude, that sense-perception was given to him precisely to ward of those things that are harmful to the complex (body-mind) of which the mind is a part, and hence are only sufficiently clear and distinct with regards to this task.
      2. But what about when a man eats a poision cookie? Why is sense-perception capable of being tricked? Simply, we appeal again, because of its finitude.
      3. But what about a sick person who eats, and then pays the price? Well, says Descartes, a badly made clock observes the same laws of nature a well-made one does. But this doesn’t exactly justify God’s divine will that nature can trick us in this way.
        1. First, the body is divisible, and the mind is not.
        2. Second, the mind is not affected by all the parts of the body, just the brain (or even a small part of the brain).
        3. Third, Descartes notes that, e.g. the foot is connected to the brain by nerves. However, he says, you could cause the same sensation by pulling on that same nerve somewhere in the calf, or torso, or neck, or whatever.
        4. Finally, any movement in the part of the brain that immediately affects the mind can produce just one corresponding sensation. Hence, Descartes imagines that God has designed a system that chooses the statistically best possible sensation for a person’s continued health and well-being.
        5. Hence, when a sick person gets the signal to eat, this is just the most statistically probable signal to continue the good health of the body.
      4. Hence, “notwithstanding the immense goodness of God” the body-mind complex is bound to mislead us from time to time for purely mechanical reasons.
    7. Descartes now decides that since he can rely at least statistically on his senses, and with even greater reliability on a complex of senses-memory-intellect.
      1. Accordingly, the dream-reality confusion (2.c.ii) can now be dismissed in light of the fact that he’s just noticed that his dreams are not linked up in his memory in the same way his waking actions are.
      2. And finally, he can be sure that, using a sense-memory-intellect complex, and remembering that God’s not out to trick him, he should be completely free from error.
      3. Of course, he doesn’t have time to sit down and think about everything he does before he does it, so in practice he will continue to make errors, but that’s just life.