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René DescartesA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Descartes relies on a key scholastic distinction between Formal reality and Objective reality. He writes:
I must not doubt either that it is necessary that reality be formally in the causes of my ideas, although the reality which I consider in these ideas be only objective, nor think it sufficient that this reality be found objectively in their causes (Meditation 3, 120).
By objective reality, Descartes understands the ideas we have regarding certain phenomena in the world. Moreover, Descartes subverts the original meaning of this term given to it by Plato, who used Form and Idea interchangeably to speak about the true essence or nature of things.
Thus, the implication of this line of thinking is that things that are considered objectively real are said to be so because they are products of cognition. By contrast, formal reality denotes the mind independent existence of the world. That is to say, to know the formal reality of things is to know a given phenomenon in such a way that we understand what it is, regardless of what one may think or feel about it, hence the mind-independent character of formal reality, in contrast to the mind-dependent nature of objective reality, insofar as they are products of human cognition and can only exist insofar as human cognition exists.
The theme of what Descartes interchangeably calls “soul” or “mind” follows from the Aristotelian tradition. Aristotle’s De Anima (translated as “On the Soul”) was a short text that set out to identify the locus of individual agency, or the principle that moved and guided bodies in the world. Thus was set a certain relation between the terms of “soul” and what is more typically called the “mind.”
As seen in the work of Descartes, when he speaks of the soul or the mind, he is ultimately referring to this aspect of individuals that constitute the power of their individual agency. Additionally, the overtly theological connotations of the soul, while absent in the time of Aristotle, is not accidental in Descartes’s texts. This is mostly due to the fact that, at the time of its writing, Descartes found himself working within a historical context where the Church still wielded a significant amount of political power over the lives of individuals. Thus, there is room to believe that while Descartes himself was an atheist, or did not believe in the existence of the Judeo-Christian god, he still retained the usage of theological language in order to ensure the publication and distribution of his writings, and avoid heresy.