Descartes: A Biography

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 Descartes: A Biography

weak minds, principally because I was writing in the vernacular....Most intelligent

people, if they take the trouble not only to read but also to meditate in an orderly way

onthe same topics on which I claim to have meditated myself...will draw the same

conclusions as I did. I shall be glad, the first time I have an opportunity, to try to

explain this matter further. (i.–)

These letters introduce some of the key features of theMeditations. They

acknowledge the special difficulties involved even in acquiring an idea of

God, and the extra challenges that arise in proving God’s existence.

Many of Descartes’ contemporaries assumed that we acquire our ideas

byobserving things in the world around us and that we refashion some of

those ideas by adding or subtracting various features in our imagination.

Forexample, we might see a tree and then imagine one that is not resistant

to other bodies – something like the shadow of a tree that we could walk

through. If we were to think of God along those lines, we might refer to

paintings of Christ and assume that God is some kind of ghostly man,

with a shadowy halo about his head, and so on. Descartes was suggesting a

radically different approach. He thought that we could get an idea of God

only by reflecting on our own experience of thinking. If we could form

some idea of what thinking is, we might then manipulate that idea to form

what is still an obviously inadequate idea of God.

The other suggestion in these letters is that we might exploit the argu-

ments of sceptics to show how uncertain is all knowledge of the natural

world. Descartes does not have to endorse those sceptical doubts. He

can simply acknowledge that they are used effectively by many thinkers

to undermine unfounded claims about the certainty of empirical knowl-

edge, and he can contrast that with the certainty we experience when we

reflect on our own thoughts. Therefore, if people think that, despite scep-

tical arguments, our knowledge of the natural world is certain, they must

accept that we are even more certain of our own inner experiences. Unfor-

tunately, this approach requires some discussion of scepticism. Given the

fact that he had written theDiscoursein French, Descartes was concerned

that people who were not trained in philosophy might be so persuaded by

sceptical arguments that they would fail to understand their subsequent

refutation. There was an unresolved tension, then, between discussing

scepticism at the risk of seeming to endorse it (because it is a necessary

step on the road to proving God’s existence), and failing to answer the

arguments of sceptics and leaving one’s readers worse off than when they

started. Finally, Descartes mentions at least twice in the letter to Silhon