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A stat­ue of René Descartes in Den Haag, Nether­lands. I once sat below it, eat­ing a lunch of Patat­je Jop­pie (fries with Jop­piesaus) and pick­led herring.

Descarte’s chief impor­tance to us now lies in his men­tal atti­tude, and his approach to solv­ing prob­lems. He did not always come to con­clu­sions that I can accept, and some­times did not live up to his own meth­ods, but the sig­nif­i­cant thing is that he tried to look at the world in a way that would be famil­iar to a sci­en­tist in our time, or to any schol­ar, lawyer, doc­tor, or tech­ni­cian try­ing to main­tain an objec­tive, ratio­nal discipline.

For­mally, the Med­i­ta­tions are writ­ten in the “dialec­tic” style that was the her­itage of medieval and renais­sance phi­los­o­phy. But Descartes was not inter­ested in the medieval tech­nique of com­par­ing author­i­ties and mak­ing an “argu­ment”. He was more inter­ested in the ques­tions: “What can I claim to know?” “How shall I dis­tin­guish between what I believe, and what I can claim as proven?”

Every sci­en­tist and lawyer is now famil­iar with the impor­tance of these ques­tions. I can step out­side and see a man rob­bing anoth­er man at gun­point. After the event, I can give tes­ti­mony to this, but oth­er peo­ple need not believe me if I can­not cor­rob­o­rate it. I myself might not be cer­tain, for instance, that it was not a vivid dream, which I mis­took for expe­ri­ence. A chemist might see a sig­nif­i­cant reac­tion in a test-tube. Yet, he expects oth­er sci­en­tists to sus­pend judg­ment on his report until it can be dupli­cated. The phras­ing of his report will be care­fully thought out to reflect the epis­te­mo­log­i­cal and judi­cial con­sid­er­a­tions that sci­ence depends on. There are hints and pre­mo­ni­tions of this atti­tude in ear­lier thinkers, like Aris­to­tle, Euclid, Ibn Sin­na, and Aquinas, but it is Descartes who brings them to the fore­front, and con­cen­trates on them.

In the Med­i­ta­tions , Descartes works from the premise that he shouldn’t claim any­thing as true unless he is cer­tain that is true. In oth­er words, he works in a pro­ce­dure that assumes the false­hood of a state­ment until it is proven. He rec­og­nizes that mind is habit­u­ated to “jump to con­clu­sions”, to accept the evi­dence of the sens­es auto­mat­i­cally. He con­sid­ers the pos­si­bil­ity that the sens­es might lie, and med­i­tates on the nature of dreams, and the pos­si­bil­ity of demon­ic influ­ence [by which he seems to mean what we would call insan­ity]. Descartes con­cludes that dreams, hal­lu­ci­na­tions and demon­ic influ­ence can be dis­tin­guished from false­hood by their lack of “clear­ness and con­sis­tency” [“lumière et de dis­tinc­tion” [ Médi­ta­tion sec­onde , para.10]. He asserts that, if we accept the premise that we are think­ing the thought in ques­tion, and thus must exist [“ …j’ai recon­nu que j’étais, et je cherche quel je suis, moi que j’ai recon­nu être. ” Médi­ta­tion sec­onde , para.7] , then we have a begin­ning point (knowl­edge of exis­tence) and a process (rea­son­ing from the con­sis­tency or incon­sis­tency of the evi­dence of the sens­es) for mak­ing judge­ments and asser­tions about the world.

How­ever, while Descartes’ method­ol­ogy strikes us as “mod­ern”, the sub­jects which he wish­es to apply them to do not. His pri­mary con­cern is with using these ratio­nal tech­niques to form opin­ions con­cern­ing the exis­tence of God, nature of mind and soul, and oth­er spir­i­tual issues. These issues still occu­py many peo­ple, but they are not with­in the purview of the sci­en­tific dis­ci­plines that Descartes inspired. Appeal­ing to the clear­ness and dis­tinct­ness” notion, Descartes sees the exis­tence of God as con­tin­gent on one’s knowl­edge of one’s exis­tence and iden­tity. Exact­ly how this is so, is not made very clear. He appears to be say­ing that God must exist because he is imag­ined, and noth­ing can be imag­ined unless there is some­how a ref­er­ent which exists, albeit it could be a com­pos­ite of such ref­er­ents. He does not address the issue that “God” in almost everyone’s con­cep­tion incor­po­rates incon­sis­ten­cies and con­tra­dic­tions [e.g. omnipo­tence and all know­ing­ness, tran­scend­ing time and space, etc. In the words of Homer Simp­son, “Can God cre­ate a bur­rito that is too hot for him­self to eat?”] and thus would not pass his own test of “clear­ness and consistency”.

Med­i­ta­tion VI is con­cerned with the rela­tion­ship between the mind and the world out­side the self. Hav­ing accept­ed the exis­tence of both him­self and of God, he wants to know if he can prove the exis­tence of objects aside from these two. He con­sid­ers both mate­r­ial objects sug­gested by the sens­es and abstrac­tions, such as math­e­mat­ics, which are expe­ri­enced with­in the mind. Giv­en the exis­tence of God, and of him­self, he finds it self-evi­dent that God has the pow­er to cre­ate a mind exist­ing inde­pen­dent of a body, and to cre­ate mate­r­ial objects out­side of, and dis­tinct from, both his mind and his body. The ques­tion remains, can he assert that this is in fact the case, with­out vio­lat­ing his method­ol­ogy of assert­ing only the prov­able. Much of this med­i­ta­tion is devot­ed to the ini­tial step of describ­ing the nature of imag­i­na­tion. He describes the imag­in­ing of a three-sided fig­ure (a tri­an­gle) as an act of imag­i­na­tion, then com­pares it to the imag­in­ing of a “chil­i­o­gon” — a thou­sand-sided fig­ure. The first he clas­si­fies as “imag­i­na­tion”, because it cre­ates an actu­al image in the mind, and the sec­ond as “pure intel­lect” [“l’intellection ou con­cep­tion pure ”]. At this stage, he gives no proof that exter­nal objects exist, but only asserts that these process­es of imag­i­na­tion and intel­lect, and the dis­tinc­tion between them, make sense only if there is a world of objects to apply them to.

It is here that Descartes appeals to the sens­es, which, in the ear­lier Med­i­ta­tions, he has cast doubt on as being able to pro­vide con­vinc­ing proof. Giv­en that God exists, that he him­self exists, and that he has men­tal process­es that can imag­ine and con­ceive of mate­r­ial objects with con­sis­tency, then there can be only two pos­si­bil­i­ties. Either the objects sug­gested by the sens­es and con­ceived by imag­i­na­tion actu­ally exist, or God is a liar, or con-man, [“trompeur ”] who is cre­at­ing a huge fab­ric of delu­sion. Descartes flat­ly asserts that God can not be a liar, and there­fore, con­sid­ers it proven that mate­r­ial objects exist in a con­sis­tent, real world.

After con­sid­er­ing the impli­ca­tions of a num­ber of devi­a­tions from con­sis­tency — dreams, hal­lu­ci­na­tions and the curi­ous phe­nom­e­non of “phan­tom limbs” [where an amputee feels the exis­tence of a limb that is miss­ing], he comes to the con­clu­sion that all fit into a “real” world of which per­cep­tion and sen­sory expe­ri­ence are not per­fect rep­re­sen­ta­tions, but which can­not be a total delu­sion with­out ques­tion­ing the moral cre­den­tials of God.

Descartes view of the world attempt­ed to build up a log­i­cal struc­ture based on sim­ple premis­es that would allow the mind to explore the world with­out con­stantly depend­ing on the arbi­trary and mirac­u­lous. In this, he was a pre­cur­sor of the meth­ods of sci­ence, and his atti­tude inspired what would lat­er come to be known as “The Age of Rea­son”. Carte­sian think­ing led to aston­ish­ing progress in math­e­mat­ics and science.

How­ever, in the Sixth Med­i­ta­tion, Descartes’ rea­son­ing does not live up to the intent or promise behind the entire trea­tise. Descartes does not seem to rec­og­nize that his state­ment that “Dieu n’étant point trompeur [para.10]”, that God can­not deceive, is every bit as much an irre­ducible premise as the ini­tial step “I think, there­fore I Am”. One can actu­ally imag­ine, with total con­sis­tency, a uni­verse that con­sists of God and Descartes’ mind alone, in which God (capa­ble, after all, of any­thing) has cre­ated a com­plete illu­sion of mate­r­ial exis­tence. It is with­in the rules that Descartes has set up for himself.

I would con­clude that, while Descartes has cre­ated a fas­ci­nat­ing struc­ture, and any­one with an incli­na­tion to sci­en­tific rea­son­ing would approach it with warm feel­ings and respect, the Médi­ta­tions fail to accom­plish their pur­pose. Descartes did not cre­ate a firm struc­ture of proven phys­i­cal real­ism based entire­ly on the iden­tity of the thinker and the premise of God’s existence.