Translated from: Verein zur Förderung des marx Pressewesens, Munich, 1990
René Descartes’ “Meditations”
In dubio pro deo
René Descartes wrote a treatise on basic analytic geometry. His true scientific achievement, though, was his theory of refraction, which explains the phenomenon of the rainbow. In addition, several philosophical writings have been passed down – these, by the way, are the reason for his fame – in which he presents reflections, “meditations,” such as might have overcome a scientist even back then when, after a day’s work, he relaxes, indulges his yearning for meaning, and thinks really deep thoughts about God and the world. He also looks back on his own youth and makes a philosophically interesting discovery:
“It is some years now since I realized how many false opinions I had accepted as true from childhood onwards, and that, whatever I had since built on such shaky foundations, could only be highly doubtful.” (First Meditation, p. 13)
Well, you might think, that’s just how it is with thinking: that you can deceive oneself is part of it – you just have to make an effort to stick to views that not only support your own beliefs, but that you can prove. But instead of saying that we are now finally tackling the matter properly, Descartes makes a different life decision: that this should never happen to him again.
“Hence I saw that at some stage in my life the whole structure would have to be utterly demolished, and that I should have to begin again from the bottom up if I wished to construct something lasting and unshakeable in the sciences.” (First Meditation, p. 13)
Let’s then look at his demolition job:
“Of philosophy I will say nothing, except that when I saw that it had been cultivated for many ages by the most distinguished men, and that yet there is not a single matter within its sphere which is not still in dispute, and nothing, therefore, which is above doubt...” (A Discourse on Method, Part One)
It may well be that medieval philosophy didn’t produce any valid insights. However, Descartes doesn’t go beyond the sorry state of this discipline to the mistakes in thinking that were obviously made there. And right away he forbids himself from drawing any conclusions about the unscientific or anti-scientific motives of those “most distinguished men” – a quite obvious suspicion of an academic field that openly professed to function as an “ancilla theologiae.” No, Descartes actually refers to these men as key witnesses for his skeptical perpective: no piece of knowledge is above doubt. It is clear, after all, that when philosophers argue about “a matter,” not everyone can be right. Consequently, it is possible to determine who is mistaken, lying, or otherwise wrong and where. Descartes, however, says that an idea can be worthless simply because someone else has a different one. It’s as if a correct idea could have the irresistible power to automatically silence any contrary opinion.
1. The methodological doubt: question everything!
Descartes pursues precisely this ideal of truth as irrefutable certainty, thus distancing himself from the object of his concern – the sciences – right from the start of his meditations in order to provide them with a “firm foundation” in precisely this way. As soon as he stumble on the fact that subjective certainty isn’t a criteria for truth he insists it surely must be such a criteria. The verification of the truth or falsehood of existing ideas is no longer up for debate – they have, after all, already been eliminated in the preliminary round. Instead, Descartes devotes himself to the absurd undertaking of finding an idea that is subjectively certain and therefore true.
“Archimedes claimed, that if only he had a point [1] that was firm and immovable, he would move the whole earth; and great things are likewise to be hoped, if I can find just one little thing that is certain and unshakeable.” (Second Mediation, p. 17)
The search for such unshakeable certainty is a radical process, indeed – radically unreasonable. At this point at the latest, the contradiction in his concern with finding a criterion of truth to judge thoughts without judging them finally takes its rvenge – first and foremost in the stupidity of its execution. Doubting on principle, which Descartes considers the ideal approach to the royal road to absolute truth, does not reveal a single such truth. Instead of sorting true and false thoughts, it merely serves to exclude them without reason. Even Descartes has some inkling of this. That is why, or rather despite this, he once again justifies his radical method of doubt, which he considers indispensable to, of all things, the cause of knowledge:
“Hence, it seems to me, I shall not be acting unwisely if, willing myself to believe the contrary, I deceive myself, and make believe, for some considerable time, that they are altogether false and imaginary, until, once the prior judgements on each side have been evenly balanced in the scales, no evil custom can any longer twist my judgement away from the correct perception of things. For I know for sure that no danger or error will ensue as a result of this, and that there is no risk that I shall be giving too free a rein to my distrustfulness, since my concern at the moment is not with action but only with the attainment of knowledge.”(First Meditation, p. 16)
It is, however, very much indeed an “error” that two prejudices – believing everything vs. doubting everything – cancel each other out to zero, so only the middle ground remains. The opposite of belief is also not unfounded doubt, but knowledge. Therefore, it is not only belief, but thought, no matter how correct, that doesn’t stand a chance against doubt as a matter of principle. The doubter counts the possibility that he could imagine everything completely differently as an argument. In this procedure, the burden of proof has been reversed: a thought no longer has to prove its correctness, but must refute the doubter. As difficult as this may be for any thought, it makes it easy for the sceptic. He simply pursues the intention of doubting everything for no reason and any bullshit will do. It therefore depends solely on the unscrupulousness of the doubter which thought can withstand him. And in this respect, Descartes spares neither himself nor his readers.
He doubts everything that can be doubted – even if for no reason, even with the help of erroneous conclusions, even with the help of mere inventions of the imagination – so be it! The observation that there are sometimes the “illusions of our dreams” is enough reason to declare all sensory impressions, as well as the thoughts based on them, dubious, and even to question “all external things” as such. And yet the fact that the deception is noticed is already the whole proof to the contrary. A victim of involuntary deception my ass! The same argument applies to the idea that it could be a mere dream that “I am now here, sitting by the fire, wrapped in a warm winter gown.” And Descartes also has to invent his famous “genius malignus” so that, with the help of this fiction, even the simplest children's calculations – such as “2 + 3 = 5” – may seem highly questionable to him.
For Descartes, these are all serious arguments because he is searching for absolute undeniability. He himself admits (as if it would make it any better!) that his doubts go against his better judgment. In retrospect, after achieving the proof he intended, he will declare all the arguments with which he wanted his methodological doubts to have proceeded “strictly scientifically” to be objectively unfounded and will himself expose them to ridicule...
II. Eureka: Ego cogito, ego sum
In his search for the unquestionably secure foundation for his thinking – a search guided by the motto: What can I imagine is not there if I want to doubt everything? – Descartes
“can finally decide that this proposition, ‘I am, I exist’, whenever it is uttered by me, or conceived in the mind, is necessarily true.” (Second Meditation, p. 18)
What the doubting I with its method can’t think without is – itself. Despite all its doubts, it doesn’t get rid of itself. This beautiful “necessary truth” stands at the end of the whole endeavor and is rather bleak: the existence of the I in the act of doubting is proved because it won’t allow itself to be rubbed out. Even the evil spirit that deceives me in everything cannot escape the fact that it must deceive me – so it cannot take away my self-certainty as a thinking I. This certainty has indeed left behind the standpoint of Christian scholasticism, for which it has appropriated solemn terms such as “rational autonomy” and “subject constitution of all knowledge.” However, Descartes himself poses the inevitable question:
“I know that I exist; I am trying to find out what this ‘I’ is, whom I know.” (Second Meditation, p. 20)
– and thus admits how pitifully empty that finally certain ‘knowledge’ is; ‘this I’ is a chimera of self-consciousness. It only ‘knows’ that it exists – that is, nothing about what it is.[2]
Descartes’ ideal of a convergence between objective truth and subjective certainty is thus very one-sidedly resolved. The only “truth” that coincides with subjective certainty is the certainty of subjectivity – that is, itself.
This “I” stands polemically against any awareness of anything, against everything that would only be knowledge about ... and therefore no longer itself. Not at all surprisingly, the result of the search for the secure foundation of knowledge is certainty instead of knowledge!
III. A divine idea
Descartes, through his method of doubt, sought a single certain truth that could not be undermined by any doubt. But no sommer has he found this truth in the doubting “I” itself than, instead of overturning the old science and building a new one à la Archimedes, he asks: what has actually been gained finding? The absolute truth, the infallible certainty that Descartes sought and finally found, is therefore insufficient for him as a universal key to science; and this is hardly surprising given its content. A way out of this black hole ought to exist. But there is simply no way out within it. The certainty that I am thinking my thoughts, allowing it to rub off somewhat on what I think, is not possible without cheating.
Descartes tries the following approach: he considers whether a method can be derived from the “cogito” that would also allow other objects to be grasped with certainty. How did he arrive at this first firm insight?
“For in this first act of knowledge there is nothing other than a clear and distinct perception of what I affirm to be the case.” (Third Meditation, p. 25)
Can we therefore conclude that ‘clarity and distinctness of perception’ is a criterion of truth? Here Descartes finds himself in a dilemma. On the one hand, he is forced to answer his question in the affirmative – for nothing other than being conscious of the evidence that the thinking I can't be thought without itself served as proof of its existence. On the other hand, if he were to admit that, he also have to declare other statements that are perceived “clearly and distinctly” (such as the aforementioned “2 + 3 = 5”) to be proven; yet precisely all these other certainties had to be called into question by a programmatic doubt in order to obtain the “cogito” as the sole fixed point of certain thinking. He must therefore simultaneously answer his question in the negative.
But why not see this as a half step forward? And a way out is already at hand:
“And certainly, since I have no grounds for thinking that any deceitful God exists – in fact, I do not yet sufficiently know whether there is any God at all – then a reason for doubting that depends wholly on the belief in a deceitful God is very slight, and, so to speak, metaphysical. In order to remove it, then, at the first opportunity, I must examine whether there is a God, and, if there is, whether he can be a deceiver; since, as long as I remain ignorant of this matter, I seem unable ever to be certain of any other at all.” (Third Meditation, p. 26)
Not bad: the “deceitful God” was a weak, “metaphysical” argument, which is why it is now all the more crucial to prove God’s existence and truthfulness in order to obtain a guarantee for the almost ready-made method of knowledge – and the fact that a truth-guaranteeing method must itself be guaranteed in its truth-establishing potential is simply the flawed dialectic of this false ideal. Without this metaphysical “ground,” things would look bleak indeed, according to Descartes, for the “rational autonomy” of thinking humanity...
And lo and behold: seek and ye shall find.
The hitherto empty “I” finds all kinds of “ideas” when in(tro)specting its mental storehouse: the sun, moon, and stars, animals, winged horses, and angels... But none of them – although they are ideas of something – point to the existence of anything other than myself, because the “reality content” they represent is no greater than that of my “thinking substance.” In contrast, the idea, also contained within me, of a “supreme being” on whom I, like everything else that might exist, depend, is of such a nature that it cannot have its “origin” within me, the “imperfect” being, and therefore can only have been ‘implanted’ in me by an actually existing “perfect” being: God lives! Q.E.D.
We really don't want to dwell too much on the fact that this whole “proof,” with its subtle scholastic lines of secondary argumentation, is a classic petitio principii, or, more simply, spins around in a carousel.[3] For those who set out to reject subjective certainty as proof of truth, and then fall back on, of all things, faith and God as the ultimate truth authority and thereby claim to have proven the existence of the Supreme Being, we offer the following: a “proof of existence” is, one way of another, proof of its own groundlessness. If “something” is to be proved, then it is a question of the necessity of the “what” – the “that,” the pure existence, is presupposed; a “what” without a “that” is nothing – or a figment of the imagination whose “that” refers to the “what” of its creator. And everything has already been said about this with regard to Descartes: he needs God as security for his principle of thought, which in turn ... (see above), and therefore must in turn provide God with a security, his existence. And he has now proven it. Let’s grant him that. The question remains, however, what has he actually gained?
IV. To science with God
First of all, Descartes, with his proof of God’s existence, took – in the eyes of the guardians of the faith – the blasphemous pose of someone who theoretically calls into question the “supreme being” as an autonomous rational thinker (“investigating whether there is a God”) and made it depend on his own powers of insight (which did him little good with his Christian censors, at least during his lifetime). Although the positive proof of God’s existence – a proof in which “everything I very clearly and distinctly perceive is true” (Third Mediation, p. 25) – still depends on the “I’s” awareness of the evidence, it is the reversal of this relationship that matters to Descartes – contradiction or no contradiction.
Under the surface, Descartes' need for proof has shifted somewhat: now he is no longer desperately searching for something certain amidst doubt, but rather, conversely, he must explain how something like "error," "false" thinking, is even possible. Because the back and forth between will and intellect, God and nothingness, or the problem of the "connection" between res cogitans and res extensa in man – Descartes repeatedly cannot resist the heretical thought that God could have spared man the possibility of error if He had only wanted to (he then quickly brings himself back to reason: "God's plan is inscrutable!") – is considered "outdated" today anyway, we will omit this (for those interested: see IV, 14, 15, 21: VI, 29) and ask again: What is all this good for?“And now I seem to glimpse a path by which, from this contemplation of the true God, in whom indeed all the treasures of the sciences and wisdom lie hidden, we can pass to the knowledge of other things. First of all, I recognize that it cannot happen that he should ever deceive me; for in all deceit and trickery some element of imperfection is to be found... Besides, I know by experience that there is within me a faculty of judging, which I certainly received from God, along with everything else that is in me; and since he does not wish to deceive me, this God-given faculty must be such that I shall never go astray, as long as I use it correctly.” (Fourth Meditation, p. 38)
So much for “rational autonomy”: in the – intended – result of meditation, all rational power in humans is a gift from God, and only as such is it of any value (this, of course, retrospectively includes all the indubitable certainties of truth that paved the way to God – and, if one wants to be pedantic, there were a few more things at play than just the “cogito”: a bit of substance theory, a veritable hierarchical model of degrees of reality, etc., in short, a scholastic metaphysics...). On the other hand – and this is precisely what mattered to Descartes – human thought is thus attested to possess a divine capacity for knowledge, a potential for guaranteeing truth, provided only that it is used “correctly.” Underhandedly, Descartes’ has subtly shifted the proof he needs: he is no longer desperately searching for certainty, but must instead explain how such things as “error” and “false” thinking are even possible. Because the back-and-forth between will and reason, God and nothingness, or the problem of the “connectedness” of res cogitans and res extensa in humans, which he developed to solve the riddle – in several places, Descartes can’t resist the heretical thought that God could have spared humanity the possibility of error if He had only wanted to (he then quickly beings himself back to reason: “God is no deceiver!”) – is now considered “outdated” anyway, we will leave it out (for those who are interested: see Fourth Meditation, pp. 38, 39, 43; Sixth Meditation, p. 56) and again ask: What’s the point of all this?
V. The God-pleasing method of knowledge is (self-)deception.
What Descartes has ‘proved’ – if one grants him his proof – is, first, the groundlessness of his doubt: even the “senses” that can deceive us are given to us by God – there are even several of them, so that we have corrective organs (Fourth Meditation, p. 57) – and, under the guidance of reason, all things between heaven and earth can in principle be correctly understood. And secondly, of all things, it was by means of ‘rational’ arguments in favor of the truths of faith that he derived his belief in reason, the God-given possibility and necessity of a scientific investigation of nature for the benefit of humankind. Even this absurd line of reasoning was in its times an attack on the narrow-mindedness of the intellectual authorities who, in support of faith, felt compelled to censor the early beginnings of scientific research (see the case of Galileo). For Descartes, it was important to derive God’s blessing, so to speak, for free thought (in doing so, he also helped ensure that belief in God did not have to openly discredit itself before the findings of science).
Only one thing could not on any account be accomplished in this way (even though Descartes firmly believed it could): the establishment of a method whose application could actually deliver valid science – how could that even be possible? After all, he claimed that in his meditations he had
“learned today not only what I should avoid in order not to be deceived, but at the same time what I must do in order to attain truth; for I certainly shall attain it, provided I pay sufficient attention to everything I perfectly understand, and keep it quite separate from everything else that I apprehend more confusedly and obscurely.” (Fourth Meditation, p. 45)
However, as much as Descartes here envisions God as a kind of “Aladdin’s magic lamp for true knowledge” – one need only observe one’s own judgment and reasoning as a researcher to see whether everything appears “clear and distinct” (which is then a kind of signal that one can trust the divine power of reason within oneself) or not – no one would seriously consider this a “method” of knowledge, let alone one that guarantees truth. Even the few specific hints in the Discourse – one must break down a problem into as many parts as possible, progress from simpler to more complex ideas, etc. – ultimately offer nothing more than recommendations to proceed carefully in science. It may be that Descartes’ own research in mathematics, physics, physiology, etc. – which, as is well known, also produced some findings still valid today (geometry) – suffered from crude metaphysical ideas (mind-body mechanism, etc.) that were based on his overall view of God and the world. Taken on their own, his “methodological” advice is not particularly harmful and, compared to today’s science-skeptical methodology obsession, represents a rather touchingky harmless prelude to the “Age of Method” that he is said to have ushered in.
[1] Modern Popperian scientific theory wrongly claims to have reduced Descartes’ ideal of a “fundamentum certum et inconcussum” to absurdity. It has not done so, if only because it does not criticize the ideal as such and its origin, but merely disputes the possibility of its realization. H. Albert can be quoted as representative of this view when he complains, “... there is no such Archimedean point unless one has produced it oneself. And then it is worthless.” (“Treatise on Critical Reason,” 1968). What bothers people like him – of all things! – is Descartes’s thunderous determination to pursue objective science despite all skepticism; and that is hybrid dogmatism! What does it matter that Albert’s/Popperian “principled fallibilism” continues the search for the Archimedean point—in a negative way: How can theories be “failed”? After all, this kind of scientific skepticism is the prevailing dogma today.
[2] Descartes’ characterization of the self as a “thinking thing” only roughly illustrates this contradiction: whatever thinking may be, it is supposed to be a thing; but incorporeal and immaterial par excellence. And this crude idea can be used in a number of ways: the res cogitans is a peg on which the ‘proof’ of the “immortality of the soul” can later be hung. It is already apparent here that proofs of existence seek to prove something unscientific – in this case, the Christian belief in life after death, that consoling idea for an apparently bleak life “on earth.”
[3]For friends of the idea of God, who should believe rather than question God by demanding proof, here is a little tip to make your head spin (serves them right, those heretics!): I am an imperfect thing that points to a perfect thing – why am I imperfect? Because God is perfect! – is this perfect thing also perfect? How else could I, an imperfect thing, come up with that! – Why is God perfect? ...
Source: René Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy. Trans. Michael Moriarty, Oxford University Press (2009).