41 pages • 1 hour read
René DescartesDiscourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1637A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Meditations 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Meditation 4 Summary
Descartes further investigates the sources of truth and error. While Descartes proved in his previous meditation that God cannot be an evil deceiver and thus the source of our errors, it still remains to be clarified as to how mistakes in our thinking arise:
I find myself exposed to an infinite of deficiencies, so that I must not be surprised if I make mistakes. Thus I discern that error, as such, is not something real which depends on God, but that it is simply a defect; and accordingly, that in order to fall into error I do not need some power given me specially by God […] but that my being mistaken arises from the fact that the power which God has given me to discerning the true from the false is not infinite in me (133).
According to Descartes, the way in which we form true or correct judgments about the world involves the interplay of our intellect and our will.
Regarding the intellect, its role is to consider the perceptual content of our experiences; that is, it is the power by which we can say that something seems to be a certain way to me.
Regarding the will, its role is to give assent or dissent regarding whether or not that which seems to be a certain way is in fact that way (e.g. the intellect will tell us that the ball seems red while the will confirms that the ball is in fact red).
Thus, because the formation of judgments depends on our intellect and our will, and our intellect only provides tentative assessments of our experience while the will verifies its reality, Descartes will conclude that mistakes in thinking and errors of judgement arise from an illegitimate use of our will:
Whence, then, arise my errors? From this fact alone, that the will being much more ample and extended than the understanding, I do not contain it within the same limits, but extend it also to things I do not understand, and the will being of itself indifferent to such things, very easily goes astray and chooses the bad instead of good, or the false instead of the true, which results in my falling into error or sinning (137).
Meditation 5 Summary
In the Fifth Meditation, Descartes sets out to provide a further argument for the proof of the existence of God. While we saw in the Third Meditation Descartes’s proof for the existence of the idea of God as an immortal, eternal, benevolent, and perfect being, Descartes offers, here, a further argument.
The reason for this additional argument is that what was previously proven was simply an inferential proof of God’s existence; that is, one can infer from the existence of the idea of a perfect being that its cause and reason for existence must be independent from that of the imperfect being of the human mind or soul. Thus, Descartes will argue that what is needed to render the existence of God as a self-evident truth is an understanding of the relation between his essence and his existence.
For example, we can say that the essence of a human being is to be rational, capable of language, and to be social. Not included in this definition is the particular quantity or number of human beings that exist. In other words, particularity and quantity are irrelevant to the essence of human beings. Therefore, the essence of human beings is distinct from their concrete existence.
By contrast, says Descartes, the idea of God, defined by Descartes as a perfect being, necessarily entails God’s existence, since to not exist would be an imperfection or degradation of God’s perfection. Therefore, the essence of God is inseparable from the existence of God.
Thus, and with respect to material things, Descartes writes:
But after I have discovered that God exists, recognizing at the same time that all things depend on him, and that he is no deceiver, and consequently judged that everything I perceive clearly and distinctly cannot fail to be true, although I no longer have present in my mind the reasons for my judgement, no contrary reason can be adduced which could ever make me doubt its truth, provided that I remember that I once clearly and distinctly comprehended it. Thus I have a true and certain knowledge of it. And this same knowledge also extends to all the other things I remember having formerly proved as the truths of geometry and the like (149).
Meditation 6 Summary
Here, Descartes sets himself the task of proving the existence of the material world. For Descartes, this can be proven in a twofold manner: 1) by demonstrating the externality of the causes of our sense experiences, and 2) by demonstrating the materiality of these causes. In other words, we can be certain as to the existence of the material world and its objects insofar as we can show that what causes us to experience the world is located outside of the mind, and thus not subject to personal whim, insofar as we can show that those causes are in fact materially, and not ideally, real.
It is for this reason that Descartes dedicates the remaining portion of his text to the examination of “what sense perception and is, and to see if, from the ideas I receive by this mode of thinking which I call sensing, I may extract any certain proof of the existence of corporeal things” (152).
Descartes says that we realize that the material world exists precisely because the causes of our sense experiences lay outside of our will:
For I was conscious that these ideas were presented to my mind, without my consent being required, so that I could perceive no object, however much I wished to, if it were not present to the organ of one of my senses; and it was in no way in my power not to perceive it, when it was so present (153).
In other words, we can be sure as to the existence of the world because it is the world that causes us to have particular experiences such as sight, smell, touch, pain, heat, and so on. Because we cannot simply experience these upon our own volition, it means that our experiences depend upon the existence of an external world, which is the cause of our experiences.
Moreover, says Descartes, these external causes can only be from two distinct beings: God, or corporeal substances. If the cause of a person’s experiences is from God, these would not find any particular corresponding finite object, since God is infinite. Thus, says Descartes, the temporary and ephemeral experiences of pain, heat, cold, and the like must be caused by other finite, corporeal substances. Hence, the causes of our sensations are both external to ourselves and material in nature.
Meditations 4-6 Analysis
In Meditations 4-6, Descartes sets out to identify the source of our errors and lay out a further proof for the existence of God and the existence of the material world. Regarding the source of our errors, Descartes distinguishes between our intellect and our will—the former being our capacity to apprehend objects as they appear to us, and the latter being our capacity to affirm or deny the fact that their appearance is identical to their essence.
For Descartes, error arises from a misuse of our will; we make errors when our will wishes to affirm something that does not exist. Consequently, Descartes also refutes the idea that God could possibly be the source of our errors. In the Fifth Meditation, Descartes sets out to provide an argument about the self-evident nature of God’s existence. As he writes, we can take God’s existence to be self-evident because his essence necessarily entails his existence (unlike that of human beings, where their essences do not necessitate their existence).
In the Sixth Meditation, Descartes reestablishes his certainty as to the existence of the material world by recalling the faculty of our will to argue the following: insofar as there are certain experiences such as heat, cold, pain, etc.—experiences that we have involuntarily—we must say that these are experiences caused by something external to ourselves. Additionally, these external causes are material insofar as they arise from particular and finite beings, and not from an eternal and infinite being such as God.
