“Suppose you are Hume. Suppose that you have been asked
to write a six-page essay critically assessing Descartes’ philosophical
project as he describes it in the Discourse and Meditations, and his treatment
of his own nature, the God question, and human knowledge. Write it.”
Hello, my name is David Hume. I’ve recently been asked to write
a short essay critiquing some of Rene Descartes’ ideas and presenting
my own ideas in contrast, and this essay is the result. Our ideas
differ quite a bit, and I hope to convince you in this essay that Descartes
doesn’t have all the “answers,” and that without empirical evidence all
of his theories are just that—theories—and nothing more.
Rene Descartes, simply put, believes he’s right—about everything.
He truly believes that by starting literally “from scratch” (as he puts
it, “I rejected as false all the reasonings that I had previously taken
for demonstrations” (Discourse 18)) he can discover who and what he is—human
nature—as well as everything about God, the laws of nature, and virtually
everything else…in short, life, the universe, and everything.
His first step is to prove that he himself exists. His simple
argument: “I think, therefore I am.” (Discourse 18) Soon after,
he shows a belief in the substance of man—that our “soul,” the part of
us that thinks and interprets information, is a separate entity from our
corporeal bodies.
First of all, I emphatically disagree with the notion that all of the
universe can be explained by philosophy—Descartes can postulate and conjecture
all he wants, but there will always be things that will be beyond our comprehension.
As I’ve stated in my writings, “All the objects of human reason or inquiry
may naturally be divided into two kinds, to wit, Relations of Ideas, and
Matters of Fact.” (Packet 59) Thus, Descartes is flawed in believing
he can explain everything by starting at nothing because he cannot start
at nothing—if he throws out all his relations ideas and matters of fact
that he has discovered or experienced throughout his life, he would be
unable to reason effectively. Cutting down the weed by the roots:
Proclaiming “I think, therefore I am” solely on the grounds that he knows
he’s thinking can’t stand because if he truly is starting at zero, he doesn’t
know what thinking is.
Now, onto Descartes’ assertion that the mind is separate from the body:
Descartes claims that “in order to exist, one has no need of any place
nor depends on any material thing” (Discourse 19). To this I say,
“Prove it!” Is there anyone out there existing without a body?
Descartes claims that the soul is neither born nor destroyed along with
the body, but can he remember anything of the period before he was born?
Has his (or any other) spirit come back to the world after the death of
its body to show that the soul is, indeed, immortal? Of course not,
or at the very least no instances of such events have occurred that have
proved to be more than a hoax or urban legend. With regards
to this notion of the transplantation of the soul, “Judging by the usual
analogy of nature, no form can continue, when transferred to a condition
of life very different from the original one, in which it was placed.”
(Packet 95) Why then, should we assume the same shouldn’t be true
for the soul, if there is such a thing as a soul at all?
Myself, I believe that the “self” Descartes perceived to be a soul is
simply the bundle or aggregate of experiences one has acquired since birth.
This establishes our personal identity—my sum total of experiences is
different from the readers, and thus we have different thought processes
and can come to different conclusions on the same matters. As I succinctly
state in my Treatise of Human Nature, “the objects in the bundle, which
are variable or interrupted, and yet are suppos’d to continue the same,
are such only as consist of a succession of parts, connected together by
resemblance, contiguity, or causation.” (Packet 81) Consciousness
can thus simply be thought of as the “theatre” upon which our experiences
and passions collide. We therefore conclude that “the identity, which
we ascribe to the mind of a man is only a fictitious one, and of a like
kind with that which we ascribe to vegetables and animal bodies.
It cannot, therefore, have a different origin, but must proceed from a
like operation of the imagination upon like objects.” (Packet 83)
I do admit that there is a line where the brain ends and consciousness
(or soul, for that matter) begins, but as I say in Of the Immortality
of the Soul, “Matter, therefore, and spirit, are at bottom equally unknown,
and we cannot determine what qualities may inhere in the one or the other.”
(Packet 93)
Returning to Descartes’ arguments, he next attempts to prove that there
is a supreme being—God. He uses three separate arguments (ideotheological,
egological, ontotheological) to do this. For the sake of brevity,
I shall just restate the ideotheological argument here: We have the concept
of God, and it’s impossible that we came up with the idea ourselves.
As Descartes states, “I decided to search for the source from which I had
learned to think of something more perfect than I was, and I plainly knew
that this had to be from some nature that was in fact more perfect.” (Discourse
19)
Consider the definition of a circle: the set of points equidistant
from a single point in space. We can conceive of a perfect circle
in our minds simply by closing our eyes and imagining it. However,
no such circle exists in the world! Any circle drawn by a man will
have its flaws, no matter how steady the hand. The paper the circle
is drawn on has its flaws as well, with microscopic bumps and ridges to
further contaminate our perfect circle. The pen or stylus with which
the circle was drawn also has its own defects. A clever sort might
argue that a computer can display a perfect circle on the screen, but,
alas, even a computer is limited by the resolution of the monitor—if we
were to examine a computerized circle on a pixel level, we would see that
the circle has rough edges caused by a series of finite points (pixels,
in this case) being necessarily unable to produce a perfect curved line.
Only a computer monitor with infinite pixels would be able to depict a
true perfect circle, not to mention the infinite processing time needed
to render such an object. Both infinities are impossible in our universe—or
at the very least, well beyond the capacity of anything that has existed
or currently exists to create.
Now comes the philosophical part of the argument: Descartes freely admits
that man is an imperfect being. Man errs, man stumbles, and man makes
mistakes. How, then, is man able to conceive of a perfect circle?
No man has ever seen one, drawn one, or stumbled upon one in any place
other than in his or her own mind.
Descartes argues that man could not conceive of perfection unless there
was such a thing. Since man is flawed, this means that there must
be something more perfect than man in order to place the notion of perfection
into man’s mind.
Another clever sort might point out that perhaps an entity more perfect
than man exists, but that this being is not all perfect. By the same logic
he used earlier, Descartes postulates that some being more perfect than
that less-flawed-but-still-flawed being would need to exist to put the
idea of total perfection into its mind, and by recursively repeating that
idea, Descartes arrives at the hypothesis that there must therefore be
a supreme, perfect being: God.
Responding to this ideotheological argument for God…chipping away first
at the claim that God must be utterly perfect (merely the thought that
this was not so would reduce Descartes to confusion, as he states himself
when theorizing that God might not be omnibenevolent: “…as if I had suddenly
fallen into a deep whirlpool, I am so disturbed that I can neither touch
my foot to the bottom nor swim up to the top.” (Note Packet, 54)), I wonder
first how God could possibly be omnibenevolent after seeing all the horrors
and atrocities of the world we occupy! After all, “we must acknowledge
the reality of that evil and disorder with which the world so much abounds.”
(Packet 70) Descartes asserts that God must be all-powerful and all-intelligent
simply because we have notions of such things, and to this I reply that
assuming that God did in fact create the universe, and basing our conclusions
as to what God must be like solely on the product of God’s work (the universe),
“it follows that they possess that precise degree of power, intelligence,
and benevolence which appears in their workmanship, but nothing further
can ever be proved, except we call in the assistance of exaggeration and
flattery to supply the defects of argument and reasoning.” (Packet 69)
And, since God has never shown up to provide empirical proof of his existence,
that’s the best we can do—“The experienced train of events is the great
standard by which we all regulate our conduct. Nothing else can be
appealed to in the field or in the senate.” (Packet 71)
Once Descartes has sufficiently proven (in his opinion) God to exist,
he basically skims over the rest of his proofs for the laws of nature—basically,
how and why the universe works in the fashion it does—by saying that those
laws are what they are simply because God wanted an ordered universe and
made it that way: “Moreover, I showed what the laws of nature were, and,
without supporting my reasons on any other principle but the infinite perfections
of God, I tried to demonstrate that concerning all those laws…even if God
had created many worlds, there could not be any of them in which these
laws failed to be observed.” (Discourse, 24)
The main problem I see with this argument is that an imperfect God could
have created our universe, and thus created the laws of nature as well.
As I stated previously when discussing God’s omnipotence, assuming that
God is perfect rather than just supremely powerful simply for creating
the universe is imagining a cause that is bigger than the effect, when
the two must be irrevocably intertwined: “The knowledge of the cause being
derived solely from the effect, they must be exactly adjusted to each other,
and the one can never refer to anything further or be the foundation of
any new inference and conclusion.” (Packet 69) Thus, the only thing
we can absolutely ascribe to God for creating the universe (assuming he
did such a thing) is that he has just enough power to do exactly that,
and not a drop more. He might be omnipotent and all the other things
that Descartes claims, but, again, “nothing further can ever be proved.”
(Packet 69)
Things are meaningful to us only as insofar as we can point out experiences
that give them meaning and content. While Rene Descartes has some
beautiful theories about human nature and the existence of a supreme
being, he has little empirical proof to back him up. While I cannot
conclusively disprove Descartes’ philosophical theories themselves (after
all, I can no more prove a negative to be true than Descartes could—especially
in the field of philosophy, where full answers are few and far between),
the reasonings he uses to explain those theories are suspect. To
paraphrase a famous saying of mine, do Descartes’ proofs contain any abstract
reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Do they contain
any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence?
No. Commit it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but
sophistry and illusion. (Packet 65)
References
Descartes, Rene. (ed. Cress, Donald) Discourse on Method and
Meditations on First Philosophy. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing
Company, 1998.
Philosophy 101 Note Packet (Schacht). University of Illinois,
Fall Semester 2000.