Descartes - Lecture 8
8. Descartes on God and Mind
Some Questions concerning Descartes' Views on God
Did Descartes profess to believe in God only because he feared retaliation from the Church?
It’s true that he did suppress some of his personal opinions in order to avoid trouble with the Church authorities. Thus he refrained from publishing Le Monde because the condemnation of Galileo’s views issued by the Inquisition in Rome in June 1633 had implied that the heliocentric view could not be put forward as even instrumentally useful. However there is no evidence from any of Descartes’ contemporaries or his own personal correspondence that he was not a sincere Catholic. Religious beliefs are rarely founded on conviction induced by arguments: if one adopted the rule that no one could plausibly be viewed as a sincere Christian unless that person could put forward compelling arguments in support of the existence of the Christian deity, one would find oneself concluding that there are remarkably few sincere Christians in the world.
Is Descartes’ God necessarily personal and Christian? Could he be an impersonal force? If so, need he be benevolent?
Descartes is not undertaking to prove the truth of every Christian claim about the existence of God. Instead he is restricting himself to proving the existence of a being with the fundamental metaphysical properties attributed to such a God, properties that also happen to be attributed to God by the adherents of such faiths as Islam and Judaism. Descartes however plainly supposes that these fundamental properties include such things as intelligence and wisdom, and it is certainly difficult to see what would motivate one to refrain from thinking of an entity with those properties as some kind of person. The question of God’s benevolence is more problematic: Descartes’ formal argument here is not terribly convincing. In Meditation III he claims that God as a supremely perfect being cannot be a deceiver, since it is manifest by the natural light that all fraud and deception depend upon some defect. And in the Principles Descartes says ‘although the ability to deceive may perhaps be regarded among us men as a sign of intelligence, the will to deceive must undoubtedly always come from malice, or from fear and weakness, and so cannot belong to God’ I 29. However it seems that it could still be argued that even a perfectly good and omnipotent being might engage in benevolent deception in order to simplify things for beings of our limited capacities. Moreover it is not clear that Descartes is entitled to assess God in terms of human morality. We think of malice as an imperfection, but things might look very different if we were able to enter more intimately into the perspective of the creator of the entire universe. After all, we would normally suppose that someone who permitted another person to die painfully of cancer while possessing the ability to cure him or her would not be behaving in an appropriate manner. Yet Descartes is presumably committed to the supposition that God’s failure to prevent people from dying in that way is entirely compatible with God being a wholly perfect being.
Did Descartes believe that the causal adequacy and the ontological argument work together to prove that God exists or that one backs up the other or that they are both completely separate?
Descartes presents these arguments as two independent arguments that both possess the property of being individually sufficient to prove the existence of a supremely perfect divine being. However in last week’s lecture I argued that if Descartes hopes to argue that my obviously fallacious argument about the existence of sabre-tooth ultra-tigers does not exemplify the same pattern of argument as his version of the ontological argument because my argument makes use of an arbitrarily constructed compound idea whereas his argument makes use of an innate idea, then he will need an argument to establish that the idea of a supremely perfect divine being is indeed an innate idea. And this it seems to me is likely to force him into saying that it has to be innate because no finite being could possibly have the power to create such an idea for itself. And this contention is, of course, the contention that lies at the heart of the causal adequacy argument.
How can God, whom Descartes has no a posteriori experience of, be analogised to a triangle to a triangle, a purely geometrically justified object? It doesn’t make sense!! Help!!!
The simplest answer to this question is that Descartes does not believe that our insight into the truths of geometry intrinsically depends on our sensory experience of the world. Just as we can know allegedly that 25 + 27 = 52 in all possible worlds without ever having observed the properties of groups containing 25 or 27 objects, so too we have the capacity to know that a plane figure bounded by three perfectly straight lines must have its longest side opposite its largest interior angle even if we have never set eyes on a perfectly straight line. It is quite true that most of us are so bound up with sensory experience that we find it convenient to explore such topics with the aid of mental images and diagrams on pieces of paper. However what we are supposed to gain from our geometrical investigations, if these are conducted properly, is a purely intellectual insight into what must be true of anything to which certain concepts apply. Descartes attempts to clarify matters here with his example of a thousand-sided regular polygon. We have never seen one. We cannot even form a distinct mental image of one. Nevertheless a competent geometer can demonstrate truths about the size of its and the ratio of its area to the length of its sides as readily as he can in the case of triangles.
Why study the later meditations when they are so obviously flawed? Surely when an argument is so bad it constitutes a waste of time to study it?
We obtain useful practice in analysing arguments and stating precisely where their inadequacies lie. These skills will come in extremely useful when we are confronted by more complicated arguments. It is all very well having some vague sense that an argument is fallacious or possesses dubious premisses. But if we cannot give an exact diagnosis of where the problem lies, we will remain vulnerable to being taken in when we are confronted by a slightly modified version of the argument or the same pattern of argument is presented to us in a different context.
It might also be thought that it is unlikely that Descartes’ positive arguments are unlikely to be significantly worse than the arguments employed by other metaphysicians. Thus the discovery of just how problematic Descartes’ arguments are might persuade us to rethink our views on what philosophy can genuine achieve. Perhaps the moral of our investigations is that philosophy cannot function as some kind of super-science that seeks to understand the most basic and fundamental features of reality. Perhaps its proper function is confined to the exploration of the contingent conceptual schemes we use to understand the world, an exploration that results not in the discovery of profound truths about the necessary properties of the world but in the eradication of the kind of intellectual confusion that arises when we misunderstand the way in which our concepts interconnect.
A Real Distinction between Mind and Body
What is a real distinction?
In the Sixth Meditation Descartes finally sets out the arguments that are intended to put beyond doubt the contention that physical objects exist. However he also tries to prove that there is a real distinction between the human mind and the physical system that constitutes the human body: in fact the subtitle of this concluding Meditation in the Latin version is ‘The existence of material things, and the real distinction between mind and body’. Once again, then, we are confronted with a piece of terminology that Descartes has appropriated from Scholastic philosophy. As twentieth-first century readers of the Meditations, the meaning of the phrase ‘real distinction’ is scarcely luminously self-evident. However in the Principles of Philosophy, Part 1 Section 60 Descartes explains that strictly speaking a real distinction exists only between two or more substances. Moreover you will recall from earlier lectures that a finite substance is something that is logically capable of existing independently of everything else other than God – the one infinite substance. So Descartes’ claim that there is real distinction between the human mind and the human body amounts to the claim that a human mind and a human body are entirely different substances and hence it is logically possible for them to exist apart from each other. Descartes’ position is also known as Cartesian dualism because of the two different kinds of substances involved.
Note the contrast between a real distinction and a modal distinction. When we distinguish between a material substance and its particular shape, we are concerned with a modal rather than a real distinction because the shape could not exist apart from the substance in which it inheres.
The Two Substances Involved
Physical matter. Essential feature - extended in space: any instance of this kind of substance has length, breadth and height, and occupies a determinate position in space.
Mind – a substance that has no spatial extension or position whatever, a substance whose essential feature is the activity of thinking
Intuitive considerations in favour of substance dualism
Religion – the postulation of an immortal soul. This is sometimes seen as necessary in order that people may be judged for the sins and crimes they have committed in this life. Again it is sometimes argued that everything we do in this life would be entirely meaningless if our ultimate fate were simply one of complete annihilation.
In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates is presented as saying that ‘soul is most similar to what is divine, immortal, intelligible, uniform, indissoluble, unvarying , and constant in relation to itself; whereas body, in its turn, is most similar to what is human, moral, multiform, non-intelligible, dissoluble, and never constant in relation to itself.’ And ‘being dead is this: the body’s having come to be apart, separated from the soul, alone by itself, and the soul’s being apart, alone by itself, separated from the body.’
Introspection. When a people concentrate their attention on the contents of their consciousness they do not clearly a neural network pulsing with electrochemical activity: they apprehend a flux of thoughts, sensations, desires, and emotions. Moreover the particular properties of these things seem radically unlike the properties possessed by physical things – they are not open to public observation, and they have no weight, no spatial position and no extension (not even the kind of indeterminate position possessed by an electron). They do, however, often have representational content, in specifying the content of a thought one needs to specify what the thought is about, and, in the case of beliefs at least, truth values. Yet it might be thought that it is difficult to see how a brain state could be true or false, or indeed how any physical system could be about some other physical thing.
Possible response: introspection, like our other modes of observation, is not necessarily a terribly reliable guide to the true or underlying nature of things. The red surface of an apple does not look like a matrix of molecules reflecting photons at certain critical wavelengths but that is what it is. The warmth of the summer air does not feel like the kinetic energy of millions of invisible molecules, but that is what is.
The argument from irreducibility. How could a merely physical system do maths, utter meaningful words in a wide variety of situations, solve complex problems, fall in love, write poetry, be conscious of the world around us.
Possible response: What do we know about the ultimate capacities of physical systems? After all, computers can now do things that would once have been the preserve of biological intelligences. And if the force of the word ‘merely’ is to direct our attention to very simple physical systems, perhaps the response should be that we are exceptionally complicated physical systems. The brain contains ten billion neurons, each one connected to as many as ten thousand others; and the number of potential configurations for a human brain vastly exceeds the number of atoms in the known universe.
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