Meditations on First Philosophy, in which the existence of God and the immortality of the soul are demonstrated (), often simply called Meditations on First Philosophy or the Meditations, is a philosophical treatise by René Descartes first published in Latin in 1641. The French translation (by the Duke of Luynes with Descartes' supervision) was published in 1647 as Méditations Métaphysiques. The title may contain a misreading by the printer, mistaking animae immaterialitas for animae immortalitas, as suspected by A. Baillet.Adrien Baillet: La Vie de Mr. Descartes Paris 1692 p. 176. Cf. Theodor Ebert, Immortalitas oder Immaterialitas? Zum Untertitel von Descartes' Meditationen in: Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 74 (1992) 180–202.
The book is made up of six meditations, in which Descartes first discards all belief in things that are not absolutely certain, and then tries to establish what can be known for sure. He wrote the Meditations as if he had meditated for six days: each meditation refers to the last one as "yesterday". (In fact, Descartes began work on the Meditations in 1639.) One of the most influential philosophical texts ever written, it is widely read to this day.
The book consists of the presentation of Descartes' metaphysical system at its most detailed level and in the expanding of his philosophical system, first introduced in the fourth part of his Discourse on Method (1637). Descartes' metaphysical thought is also found in the Principles of Philosophy (1644), which the author intended to be a philosophical guidebook.
Letter of Dedication and Preface
Letter of dedication To the most wise and illustrious the Dean and Doctors of the Sacred Faculty of Theology in Paris
Descartes writes the above dedication to ask for the protection of the Faculty for his work.
His first consideration is that the existence of God has to be demonstrated philosophically, besides the theological reasons for belief, particularly if we consider to make a demonstration for the non-believers. Moreover, the believers could be accused of making a circular reasoning, when saying that we must believe in God because of the Scriptures, and in the authority of the Scriptures because they have been inspired by God. He further indicates how the very Scriptures say that the mind of man is sufficient to discover God. NRSV
His aim is to apply a method to demonstrate these two truths, in a so clear and evident manner that result to be evident. This method he has developed for the Sciences.René Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy in Focus. Edited by Stanley Tweyman. Routledge. 34–40. London and New York. 1993.
Preface to the reader Descartes explains how he made a mention of the two questions, the existence of God, and the soul, in his Discourse on Method. Following this, he received objections, and two of them he considers are of importance. The first is how he concludes that the essence of the soul is a thing that thinks, excluding all other nature. To this he says that he has a clear perception that he is a thinking thing, and has no other clear perception, and from this he concludes that there is nothing else in the essence of the self.
The second is that from the idea I have of something that is more perfect than myself, it cannot be concluded that it exists. In the treatise we will see that in fact from the idea that there is something more perfect than myself, it follows that this exists.
It goes on to comment that on a general level the reasoning used by the atheists for denying the existence of God is based in the fact that "we ascribe to God affections that are human, or we attribute so much strength and wisdom to our minds" that we presume to understand that which God can and ought to do. He says that we have to consider God as incomprehensible and infinite, and our minds as limited and finite.
Finally, he says that the treatise was submitted to some men of learning to know their difficulties and objections, and are answered at the end of it.
Structure Descartes does not outline the text with a systematic structure. He writes the meditations in a first-person point-of-view, intending for the readers to meditate with him. Thus, the text serves as a handbook of meditative practices—it does not only convey a message, but an experience, too.
Summary and analysis The Meditations is written in the first person, so many authors refer to the arguments as simply spoken by René Descartes, but others consider that he is speaking in the person of an alter ego who they call "the meditator", as is done here sometimes. (Wikipedia is collaboratively edited, so no consistency has been enforced on this.)
I. What Can Be Called into Doubt The First Meditation, subtitled "What can be called into doubt", opens with the Meditator reflecting on the number of falsehoods he has believed during his life and on the subsequent faultiness of the body of knowledge he has built up from these falsehoods. He has resolved to sweep away all he thinks he knows and to start again from the foundations, building up his knowledge once more on more certain grounds. He has seated himself alone, by the fire, free of all worries so that he can demolish his former opinions with care.
The Meditator reasons that he need only find some reason to doubt his present opinions in order to prompt him to seek sturdier foundations for knowledge. Rather than doubt every one of his opinions individually, he reasons that he might cast them all into doubt if he can doubt the foundations and basic principles on which the opinions are founded.
Everything that the Meditator has accepted as most true he has come to learn from or through his senses. He acknowledges that sometimes the senses can deceive, but only with respect to objects that are very small or far away, and that our sensory knowledge on the whole is quite sturdy. The Meditator acknowledges that insane people might be more deceived, but that he is clearly not one of them and needn't worry himself about that.
However, the Meditator realizes that he is often convinced when he is dreaming that he is sensing real objects. He feels certain that he is awake and sitting by the fire, but reflects that often he has dreamed this very sort of thing and been wholly convinced by it. Though his present sensations may be dream images, he suggests that even dream images are drawn from waking experience, much like paintings in that respect. Even when a painter creates an imaginary creature, like a mermaid, the composite parts are drawn from real things—women and fish, in the case of a mermaid. And even when a painter creates something entirely new, at least the colors in the painting are drawn from real experience. Thus, the Meditator concludes, though he can doubt composite things, he cannot doubt the simple and universal parts from which they are constructed like shape, quantity, size, time, etc. While we can doubt studies based on composite things, like medicine, astronomy, or physics, he concludes that we cannot doubt studies based on simple things, like arithmetic and geometry.
On further reflection, the Meditator realizes that even simple things can be doubted. Omnipotent God could make even our conception of mathematics false. One might argue that God is supremely good and would not lead him to believe falsely all these things. But by this reasoning we should think that God would not deceive him with regard to anything, and yet this is clearly not true. If we suppose there is no God, then there is even greater likelihood of being deceived, since our imperfect senses would not have been created by a perfect being.
The Meditator finds it almost impossible to keep his habitual opinions and assumptions out of his head, try as he might. He resolves to pretend that these opinions are totally false and imaginary in order to counterbalance his habitual way of thinking. The Meditator wishes to avoid an excess of skepticism and instead uses a skeptical method, an important distinction. He supposes that not God, but some evil demon has committed itself to deceiving him so that everything he thinks he knows is false. By doubting everything, he can at least be sure not to be misled into falsehood by this demon.
Before retiring for the night, the Meditator indulges in his old beliefs, afraid to awake to a life of confusion. As a result, he allows for the tempting falsehoods to continue unabridged.
Analysis
Descartes saw his Meditations as providing the metaphysical underpinning of his new physics. Like Galileo, he sought to overturn what he saw as two-thousand-year-old prejudices injected into the Western tradition by Aristotle. The Aristotelian thought of Descartes' day placed great weight on the testimony of the senses, suggesting that all knowledge comes from the senses. The Meditator's suggestion that all of one's most certain knowledge comes from the senses is meant to appeal directly to the Aristotelian philosophers who will be reading the Meditations. The motivation, then, behind the First Meditation is to start in a position the Aristotelian philosophers would agree with and then, subtly, to seduce them away from it. Descartes is aware of how revolutionary his ideas are, and must pay lip service to the orthodox opinions of the day in order to be heeded.
Reading the First Meditation as an effort to coax Aristotelians away from their customary opinions allows us to read different interpretations into the different stages of doubt. For instance, there is some debate as to whether Descartes intended his famous "Dream Argument" to suggest the universal possibility of dreaming—that though there is waking experience, I can never know which moments are dreams and which are waking—or the possibility of a universal dream—that my whole life is a dream and that there is no waking world. If we read Descartes as suggesting the universal possibility of dreaming, we can explain an important distinction between the Dream Argument and the later "Evil Demon" argument. The latter suggests that all we know is false and that we cannot trust the senses one bit. The Dream Argument, if meant to suggest the universal possibility of dreaming, suggests only that the senses are not always and wholly reliable. The Dream Argument questions Aristotelian epistemology, while the Evil Demon Argument does away with it altogether. The Painter's Analogy, which draws on the Dream Argument, concludes that mathematics and other purely cerebral studies are far more certain than astronomy or physics, which is an important step away from the Aristotelian reliance on the senses and toward Cartesian rationalism.
Read on its own, the First Meditation can be seen as presenting skeptical doubts as a subject of study in their own right. Descartes raised the mystifying question of how we can claim to know with certainty anything about the world around us. The idea is not that these doubts are probable, but that their possibility can never be entirely ruled out. And if we can never be certain, how can we claim to know anything? Skepticism cuts straight to the heart of the Western philosophical enterprise and its attempt to provide a certain foundation for our knowledge and understanding of the world. It can even be pushed so far as to be read as a challenge to our very notion of rationality.
It is difficult to justify a dismissal of skepticism. Western philosophy since Descartes has been largely marked and motivated by an effort to overcome this problem. Descartes' doubt is a methodological and rational doubt. That is, the Meditator is not just doubting everything at random, but is providing solid reasons for his doubt at each stage. For instance, he rejects the possibility that he might be mad since that would undercut the rationality that motivates his doubt. Descartes is trying to set up this doubt within a rational framework and needs to maintain a claim to rationality for his arguments to proceed.