Why descartes is right

Similarly, it is easy to explain away near death experiences. Sure, religious people and atheists alike have them.

But might near death experiences be nothing more than what happens when the brain shuts down? Scepticism made perfect sense. But we were wrong. You watched me die. I did too. Initially I felt as though I was floating above my body. I took it to be a dream. No more pain, just lightness and brightness. The tunnel appeared, as irresistible as sleep can be in the morning.

But I resisted its pull. I watched you cry, tried to console you. That was the most frustrating aspect of the whole experience. I tried shaking you. My hands just passed through your body. I realized eventually what I was: a soul, a ghost. How odd, when materialism made so much sense! I can do all the stuff ghosts do: I can pass through walls and see through things. First, there are those who, believing themselves more capable than they are, are unable to avoid being hasty in their judgments or have enough patience to conduct all their thoughts in an orderly manner; as a result, if they have once taken the liberty of doubting the principles they had accepted and of straying from the common path, they could never keep to the path one must take in order to go in a more straightforward direction, and they would remain lost all their lives.

Second, there are those who have enough reason or modesty to judge that they are less capable of distinguishing the true from the false than certain others by whom they can be instructed; such people should content themselves more with following the opinions of these others than with looking for better ones themselves. He returns to the question of what gives rise to divergent opinions and how irrelevant opinions are, at bottom, in the conquest of truth:.

I had recognized in my travels that all those who have sentiments quite contrary to our own are not for that reason barbarians or savages, but that many of them use their reason as much as or more than we do… One and the same man with the very same mind, were he brought up from infancy among the French or the Germans, would become different from what he would be had he always lived among the Chinese or the cannibals.

Thus it is more custom and example that persuades us than any certain knowledge; and yet the majority opinion is worthless as a proof of truths that are at all difficult to discover, since it is much more likely that one man would have found them than a whole multitude of people. In the remainder of the treatise, Descartes goes on to outline the four rules he devised for himself to help him efficiently and lucidly evaluate what he encounters, and emerge with truth. Complement his Philosophical Essays and Correspondence with his reflections on the relationship between fear and hope , the cure for indecision , and how to acquire nobility of spirit , then revisit Hegel on the peril of fixed opinions and Karl Popper on the vital difference between truth and certainty.

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It will then be clear that necessary existence is one of the attributes included in the idea of a supremely perfect being.

While such considerations might suffice to induce the requisite clear and distinct perception in the meditator, Descartes is aiming a deeper point, namely that there is a conceptual link between necessary existence and each of the other divine perfections. It is important to recall that in the Third Meditation, in the midst of the causal argument for the existence of God, the meditator already discovered many of these perfections — omnipotence, omniscience, immutability, eternality, simplicity, etc.

To illustrate this point Descartes appeals to divine omnipotence. He thinks that we cannot conceive an omnipotent being except as existing. Since such a being does not depend on anything else for its existence, he has neither a beginning nor an end, but is eternal.

Returning to the discussion in the First Replies, one can see how omnipotence is linked conceptually to necessary existence in this traditional sense. An omnipotent or all-powerful being does not depend ontologically on anything for if it did then it would not be omnipotent. It exists by its own power:. Some readers have thought that Descartes offers yet a third version of the ontological argument in this passage Wilson, , —76 , but whether or not that was his intention is unimportant, since his primary aim, as indicated in the last line, is to enable his meditator to intuit that necessary existence is included in the idea of God.

Since there is a conceptual link between the divine attributes, a clear and distinct perception of one provides a cognitive route to any of the others. The formal versions of the argument are merely heuristic devices, to be jettisoned once one has attained the requisite intuition of a supremely perfect being.

Descartes stresses this point explicitly in the Fifth Meditation, immediately after presenting the two versions of the argument considered above:. Here Descartes develops his earlier analogy between the so-called ontological argument and a geometric demonstration. But other meditators, whose minds are confused and mired in sensory images, must work much harder, and might even require a proof to attain the requisite clear and distinct perception.

Some commentators have thought that Descartes is committed to a species of Platonic realism. According to this view, some objects that fall short of actual existence nevertheless subsist as abstract, logical entities outside the mind and beyond the physical world Kenny, ; Wilson, Another commentator places Cartesian essences in God Schmaltz , while two recent revisionist interpretations Chappell, ; Nolan, read Descartes as a conceptualist who takes essences to be ideas in human minds.

In claiming that necessary existence cannot be excluded from the essence of God, Descartes is drawing on the traditional medieval distinction between essence and existence. According to this distinction, one can say what something is i. So, for example, one can define what a horse is — enumerating all of its essential properties — before knowing whether there are any horses in the world.

The only exception to this distinction was thought to be God himself, whose essence just is to exist. It is easy to see how this traditional distinction could be exploited by a defender of the ontological argument. Existence is included in the essence of a supremely perfect being, but not in the essence of any finite thing. Thus it follows solely from the essence of the former that such a being actually exists. At times, Descartes appears to support this interpretation of the ontological argument.

Understanding this view requires a more careful investigation of the distinction between essence and existence as it appears in medieval sources. The distinction between essence and existence can be traced back as far as Boethius in the fifth century. It was later developed by Islamic thinkers such as Avicenna. But the issue did not become a major philosophical problem until it was taken up by Aquinas in the thirteenth century.

Like many scholastic philosophers, Aquinas believed that God is perfectly simple and that created beings, in contrast, have a composite character that accounts for their finitude and imperfection. Earthly creatures are composites of matter and form the doctrine of hylomorphism , but since purely spiritual beings are immaterial, Aquinas located their composite character in the distinction between essence and existence.

The primary interest of his theory for our purposes, however, is that it led to a lively debate among his successors both as to how to interpret the master and about the true nature of the relation between essence and existence in created things.

This debate produced three main positions:. Proponents of the first view conceived the distinction between essence and existence as obtaining between two separate things.

The theory of real distinction was also considered objectionable for philosophical reasons. On the theory of real distinction, this view leads to an infinite regress. If an essence becomes actual only in virtue of something else — viz. Wippel, , f. In response to these difficulties some scholastic philosophers developed a position at the polar extreme from the theory of real distinction. As the term suggests, this theory held that essence and existence of a creature are identical in reality and distinguished only within our thought by means of reason.

Needless to say, proponents of this theory were forced to distinguish purely spiritual entities from God on grounds other than real composition. Giving up the doctrine of real composition seemed too much for another group of thinkers who were also critical of the theory of real distinction. Articulating this theory in an important passage in the Principles of Philosophy , Descartes claims that there is merely a distinction of reason between a substance and any one of its attributes or between any two attributes of a single substance , AT 8A; CSM Since thought and extension constitute the essence of mind and body, respectively, a mind is merely rationally distinct from its thinking and a body is merely rationally distinct from its extension , AT 8A; CSM But Descartes insists that a rational distinction also obtains between any two attributes of a substance.

Since existence qualifies as an attribute in this technical sense, the essence and existence of a substance are also distinct merely by reason , AT 8A; CSM Descartes reaffirms this conclusion in a letter intended to elucidate his account of the relation between essence and existence:.

Indications are given here as to how a rational distinction is produced in our thought. Descartes explains that we regard a single thing in different abstract ways. Case in point, we can regard a thing as existing, or we can abstract from its existence and attend to its other aspects. In so doing, we have distinguished the existence of a substance from its essence within our thought. Like scholastic proponents of the theory of rational distinction, however, Descartes is keen to emphasize that this distinction is purely conceptual.

In reality they are identical. He extends the theory of rational distinction from created substances to God. In general, the essence and the existence of a substance are merely rationally distinct, and hence identical in reality. One of the most important objections to the argument is that if it were valid, one could proliferate such arguments for all sorts of things, including beings whose existence is merely contingent. By supposing that there is merely a rational distinction between essence and existence abroad in all things, Descartes seems to confirm this objection.

In general, a substance is to be identified with its existence, whether it is God or a finite created thing. The problem with this objection, in this instance, is that it assumes that Descartes locates the difference between God and creatures in the relation each of these things bears to its existence. This is not the case. In a few important passages, Descartes affirms that existence is contained in the clear and distinct idea of every single thing, but he also insists that there are different grades of existence:.

In light of this passage and others like it, we can refine the theory of rational distinction. What one should say, strictly speaking, is that God is merely rationally distinct from his necessary existence, while every finite created thing is merely rationally distinct from its possible or contingent existence. The distinction between possible or contingent existence on the one hand, and necessary existence on the other, allows Descartes to account for the theological difference between God and his creatures.

Now, when Descartes says that a substance be it finite or infinite is merely rationally distinct from its existence, he always means an actually existing substance. So how are we to understand the claim that a finite substance is merely rationally distinct from its possible existence?

It is tempting to suppose that this term means non-actual existence. But as we saw already with the case of necessary existence, Descartes does not intend these terms in their logical or modal senses. After all, Descartes contrasts possible existence not with actual existence but with necessary existence in the traditional sense.

Even my most private and personal reflections are entangled with the perspectives and voices of different people, be it those who agree with me, those who criticise, or those who praise me. Yet the notion of a fluctuating and ambiguous self can be disconcerting. The 17th-century French philosopher believed that a human being was essentially self-contained and self-sufficient; an inherently rational, mind-bound subject, who ought to encounter the world outside her head with skepticism.

Descartes had set himself a very particular puzzle to solve. He wanted to find a stable point of view from which to look on the world without relying on God-decreed wisdoms; a place from which he could discern the permanent structures beneath the changeable phenomena of nature.

But Descartes believed that there was a trade-off between certainty and a kind of social, worldly richness. The only thing you can be certain of is your own cogito — the fact that you are thinking. Other people and other things are inherently fickle and erratic. So they must have nothing to do with the basic constitution of the knowing self, which is a necessarily detached, coherent and contemplative whole.

Few respected philosophers and psychologists would identify as strict Cartesian dualists, in the sense of believing that mind and matter are completely separate. But the Cartesian cogito is still everywhere you look.

A person is considered a standalone entity, irrespective of her surroundings, inscribed in the brain as a series of cognitive processes. Memory must be simply something you have , not something you do within a certain context.

Social psychology purports to examine the relationship between cognition and society.