Meditations on First Philosophy

Overview

The Meditations is about eighty pages long and shaped like a spiritual exercise. Descartes borrowed the form from religious meditation manuals, where a reader spends a set period each day on a single subject and is expected to be changed by the practice. He wants you to do the doubting yourself rather than watch him do it, which is why the book is written in the first person and why it keeps addressing the reader’s likely resistance.

It was published in Latin in 1641 with a dedication to the theologians of the Sorbonne and an accompanying set of objections from named critics, along with Descartes’ replies. Those replies are part of the work as he conceived it, and the best editions print a selection of them. Hobbes, Gassendi and Arnauld are among the objectors, and Arnauld’s charge of circular reasoning is still the standard criticism of the book.

Two things trip up new readers. First, the sceptical arguments of Meditation I are not Descartes’ own view; he raises them to destroy them. Second, God is doing structural work. Without a non-deceiving God, the certainties reached by clear and distinct perception cannot be trusted once the mind stops attending to them. Whether that move succeeds is the central question a seminar will spend its time on.

The argument

Meditation I clears the ground in three waves. Sense perception sometimes misleads, so it is not a secure foundation. The dreaming argument goes further: nothing in experience marks waking off from dreaming, so the existence of an external world is in doubt. The deceiving-spirit hypothesis goes furthest, putting even arithmetic and geometry in question, since a sufficiently powerful deceiver could make two and three seem to make five when they do not.

Meditation II finds the fixed point. Whatever else is false, the deceiving would need someone deceived. So long as I am thinking, I am. Descartes then asks what this “I” is and answers that it is a thing that thinks: doubting, affirming, willing, imagining and sensing are all modes of thought and all belong to it. The wax example follows, arguing that even in the case of an ordinary physical body, what we grasp is grasped by intellect rather than by sight or touch.

Meditation III introduces God. Descartes sorts his ideas and notes that the idea of an infinite, perfect being contains more reality than he himself possesses, and so cannot have originated in him. A cause must have at least as much reality as its effect. Therefore such a being exists. Since deception is a defect, this being is no deceiver, and the general reliability of clear and distinct perception is secured.

Meditation IV explains error. God gave us a finite intellect and an unrestricted will, and we go wrong when we assent to what we have not clearly understood. Error is thus our responsibility, and the remedy is to withhold judgement. Meditation V gives a second argument for God, from the idea of a supremely perfect being to that being’s existence, and argues that mathematical truths about extension are discovered rather than invented.

Meditation VI returns to the world. Because God is no deceiver and because I have a strong inclination to believe that bodies exist and no way to correct it, the material world is real. Mind and body are really distinct, since one is thinking and unextended and the other extended and unthinking. Yet Descartes insists we are not merely pilots in our vessels. Pain and hunger show a union closer than that, and he leaves the nature of that union unresolved.

How to read it

Read it twice in one week. The first pass should be fast, start to finish, so you can see the arc: demolition, foundation, reconstruction. The second pass should be slow and take Meditations II and III apart argument by argument, because those are where the work is done and where the trouble is.

Write the arguments out in numbered premises. This sounds like homework and it is the only way to have a real opinion about them. Do the same for the causal argument in III and the perfection argument in V, then compare them.

Then read Arnauld’s objection and Descartes’ reply. The circle problem runs like this: clear and distinct perceptions are certified by God, but God’s existence was established by clear and distinct perception. Decide for yourself whether Descartes has an answer or only a distinction.

Common misreadings to avoid. “I think, therefore I am” is not an inference from a general premise about thinkers; in this book it is closer to something noticed in the act. Descartes is not claiming that mind and body do not interact, only that they are two kinds of thing. And the demon is not a metaphor for anything modern, so resist the temptation to make it a brain in a vat until you have understood it on its own terms.

Cottingham for the classroom, with the Objections and Replies. Cress if you want it bound with the Discourse. Veitch’s older version is free and still readable, and is quoted above for that reason.

Questions it raises

• Does the cogito establish that there is a thinker, or only that thinking is occurring?
• Is Arnauld’s circle a genuine defect, or does Descartes distinguish two grades of certainty in a way that escapes it?
• Descartes says the idea of perfection could not come from an imperfect mind. Could we not arrive at it by negating our own limits?
• If judgement belongs to the will, is believing something we do rather than something that happens to us?
• What is left of a person once the body is subtracted? Is the thinking thing of Meditation II recognisably you?
• Descartes ends by admitting that mind and body form a unity he cannot explain. Does that admission undo the distinction he has just drawn?