After Descartes concludes with certainty that he must exist, he also concludes that he must be a thinking thing. For while the entire physical world could be doubted, the fact that he is thinking cannot. Because his physical body could be doubted but his mind could not, Descartes reasons that the mind must be separate from the body.
Descartes reasons that there are things more perfect than himself. He is doubting so many things, and it is better and more perfect to know than to doubt. Since his mind has ideas of things more perfect than he has (such as perfect knowledge), he must have gotten these ideas from a being more perfect than himself. In fact, this being must have all of the perfections which Descartes lacks yet can still conceive of. This perfect being is God. This argument was not novel, even in Descartes' time, for hundreds of years before him a philosopher/theologian named St. Anselm had already come up with a similar argument. This argument, reasoning from "that then of which no greater thing can be conceived" is called the ontological argument for the existence of God.
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3 comments:
You did an awesome job at summarizing this so it could actually be understood. Descartes seems to go in such circles in his arguments that I have trouble understanding what he is trying to get at. Personally, I don't agree with him on this...I think that just because the mind has ideas that are more perfect than what he has doesn't mean that there must exist a perfect mind. Perhaps our minds are just capable of abstract thoughts.
I don't know if knowing is better then doubting, because if i know everything then what do i have to do, i guess i would be able to answer that if i knew everything but, oh well. I also think its quite a leap for descartes to say his ideas come from a more perfect being. If they did then they aren't really your idea are they. But, you still have them so they had to have come from somewhere. Isn't it also fessible for them to be self actualizing, i think that would be less of a leap of reason. Also would god be able to be a more perfect descartes?
Maute S- in reference to your comment on my blog about the discourse part 4- "The mind/body distinction and God": Philosophy uses methodological doubt as a tool to advance towards knowledge, so its of no use to us to retain doubt for sentimental value- simply because we are philosophers. We must not confuse the means for the end. The end of all philosophy is knowledge, and doubt is a mere means to knowledge. If we knew everything then we would know the best way to do everything and also the best way to go about living, so I don't think we'd be left wondering what to do. We would just live fulfilling and happier lives. And about "self actualized" thoughts- what does that mean? That thoughts come from nowhere? Descartes argument may be a weak one, but it is important to see what strength it does have. Descartes is showing that there must be a cause of the ideas that he has (and when he says ideas, he means that they belong to him insofar as he has access to them, not that the idea is an idea of him, because he clearly says that the idea is of God), and if they are not an idea of himself, they could not have been caused by himself, so they must have been caused from something else. His point is that ideas don't spring up from nothingness, but rather that they have a source, and that the source of this idea of perection is outside of him.
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