#121 John Cottingham - The Father of Modern Philosophy: René Descartes

32:15Like living out the thought rather than just, as you say, writing it on a blackboard. Yeah. No, I think that's quite true. And although he goes on this sort of military adventure, really, in the course of those travels, he ends up in this stove-heated room in Bavaria in southern Germany. and that's where we think this first idea occurred to him of founding a whole new system of philosophy, a marvelous new system, which would be based on the innate ideas, what he called the clear and distinct ideas of mathematics. Okay, so, well, put us out of our misery here. Where's this God coming from? So, we've got as far as saying that Descartes has thought to himself, okay, I exist and I'm aware that I have this conception of perfection, even if just because I realize I'm imperfect.

33:16And I don't mean like morally or something like that. I just mean that there are things I don't know, there are things I can't do, which implies that I'm limited. But this idea of limitation and imperfection only makes sense in the context of knowing what perfection means. So we have this idea of perfection and this perfection of the infinite, We sort of know what that means, even if we can't quite grasp it. Okay, so someone listening, what's that got to do with God? Well, God, of course, is traditionally defined in terms of perfections, omnipotence, omniscience, and indeed benevolence. So God is, as Descartes was later to put it in the fifth meditation, the sum of all perfections.

34:01and if he's the sum of all perfections, supreme perfection, then he must, Descartes' reasons, exist. This is a slightly different argument, the so-called ontological argument. And that raises questions of its own. But I think from the standpoint of the earlier meditation, the third meditation, the point is that I couldn't have constructed this idea from my own resources, therefore it must correspond to something real. Now the question is, why couldn't he have come up with the idea of infinity for himself? Why isn't that something that could just be the invention of Descartes' own mind? I think it hinges, I mean, this is the crucial question which will distinguish those who can accept the argument from those who just don't find it convincing.

34:52and as often in philosophy, I think there's no definitive way to establish which position is right. But from Descartes' point of view, he's encountered this notion of infinity, which is beyond him. He's encountered something in a certain way beyond his grasp, and therefore it must be real, because it can't have come from inside. Yeah. So this is something which in the modern era, looking back at Descartes, we try to put into argumentative form, and it's broadly known as the trademark argument. This so-called trademark argument called the trademark because there's this thing inside of Descartes, which is perfection, which seems to have the trademark of God.

35:40It's got this nature about it which shows that it's from somewhere else. It's got this trademark of God within him. And it relies on something which also has come to be called the causal adequacy principle. Can you tell us what that is? Yes. Well, the trademark, just starting with that, he recognizes the idea of God like the mark of the craftsman stamped on his work. It's a bit like the Alfred Hitchcock movies. Alfred Hitchcock always put himself in his movie. He's the man at the bus stop or the man in the lounge of the hotel reading a newspaper. That's his trademark. Exactly. That shows the origin of the film.

36:30It's an authentic Hitchcock film. So similarly, the thought is that God planted this idea of infinite perfection in the mind of the meditator to be, as it were, the trademark, the mark of the craftsman stamped on the work.

36:49Now, I don't know if you want me to go into the details of the formal presentation of the argument, but the idea is that there is, very crudely, there's nothing in the effect which was not present in the cause. So if you have an effect, then the cause must be somehow adequate to producing that effect. So for example, if something causes something else to be hot, that cause also has to be hot. A cold thing can't cause something to be hot. Exactly. And there are probably all kinds of examples we can think of, but in order for an effect to get something from a cause, the cause must have that thing.

37:33Precisely. And Descartes uses himself the idea of heat. So your cup of coffee there, has a certain amount of heat. It can't have got it from nowhere, so it must have got it from a kettle or an urn or a stove, which was at least as hot as the heat in the coffee in that cup. It's got to be as hot or more hot, roughly. Now, that applies to physical things and seems plausible. But Descartes is going to go on to say it also applies to the content of ideas. And this is something very tricky, which is highly controversial. But the thought is, it's not just going to apply to physical objects, it's going to apply...

38:22Here's an analogy. Supposing you find a five-year-old child who's drawn a very intricate diagram of a computer circuit or something of that nature, you can reason, well, with the mental age of five, he or she just couldn't have produced that. So it must have got it from somewhere else, perhaps from a diagram in a book. Where did that come from? The content, the richness, the intricacy must have come from somewhere. Answer from the author, from someone who had in his mind at least as much intricacy as you see in the diagram or in the chart. So rather neatly Descartes saying, I mean, the idea being analogous to the diagram or the drawing, that the content of the drawing has still, even though it's just a drawing, not a real thing, it's got to have a cause.

39:21So similarly, even though your idea of perfection is just an idea in your mind, something has got to put it. Yeah, that's awesome. Okay, so because the child just draws a picture of the computer. The computer doesn't exist. It's literally just a cartoon. But even though it's only a representation of a thing, it still has to have a cause which really has the complexity that's represented in that idea. Precisely. And just as we look at the child and think, okay, you're a child, you don't know what a computer is, that must have come from somewhere else. Descartes looks at us and goes, you're just a limited human.

40:00You've got this idea of perfection, that must have come from somewhere else. You can say, well, that's just an idea of perfection. Well, it's just a drawing of a computer. It must have come from real complexity. And this idea of perfection must have come from real perfection too. So this is what, as I say, has been called the causal adequacy principle, that the cause must have an adequate amount of the relevant stuff to bring about the effect. Yes. And that's going to apply not just to physical properties, but to representative properties. The properties represented in a drawing or a diagram, or in this case, in an idea.

40:39So you're very felt that you're able to represent to yourself in some form, albeit in a rudimentary form, because we can never fully represent the infinite. But the very fact that we have some grasp of that notion shows that there must be, well, we can reason that there must be a cause which is adequate to the complexity of that idea. And if the complexity of the idea is perfection, then it must come from something perfect. And And like you say, it's important to note with a lot of these kinds of arguments that I think one response people come up with is often to say, okay, but why does that have to be God?

41:18And I think it's important to point out that someone like Descartes could say, okay, forget the word God. Let's not talk about God. Let's just now admit that we've established the existence of a perfect being. If you don't want to call that God, you don't have to. But what we're establishing here is that there must exist this perfect being. Okay. Now, we want to sort of do an overview of Descartes here, but I think people will be screaming at the screens and they'll want to know like, okay, that sounds kind of sensible, but there are a few problems that jump out. And I suppose, let me give you two, just because this is the third meditation.

41:49Like we say, we've got to the point where Descartes has established that he exists. He now thinks that a perfect being exists and then we're going to move on. But people are going to say, well, okay, two problems. Firstly, this causal adequacy principle. Is it really true that what's in the effect has to be in the cause? For example, what about emergent properties? A cake is spongy, right? And all of the things that made that cake, the flour, the eggs, the hands that move, the motion, all of that, none of those things are spongy. And yet all of those causes produce this effect of sponginess. So if the causal adequacy principle is correct, there must be sponginess in the cause, but there's no sponginess in the cause.

42:36Likewise with temperature. We now know temperature is just the excitation of atoms, and yet an atom on its own vibrating is not hot. It's an emergent property. And so it seems like we do have these effects which are not present in their causes. Yes, you're throwing back at me the sponge cake example, which I think I - From your very own book. And of course, it would be very crude to think that any given property, P, must be present in that form in the causes of it. But I think we can reason that there must be, if you take, for example, the conservation of energy, the energy principle in physics, there must be at least as much energy in the cause of a given energetic phenomenon as you find in the phenomenon.

43:28It kind of got it from nowhere. And physicists will accept that happily today. They might want to quibble with the terminology, because Descartes wouldn't have been thinking in terms of atomic physics, right? but there is a reworked conception of the same argument. Yes. And I think the thought is that in some form, either literally or in a higher form, whatever you find in the effect will be present in the cause. But as I say, I think although this can be structured as a logical argument, demonstration, and Descartes was always attracted by the clarity of geometry, where you have absolute rigid demonstration.

44:10You know, you have axioms, definitions, and then certain theorems follow. And he was asked to present this proof in geometrical form by some of his interlocutors. And he did. But whether it really makes it more convincing, personally, I'm not sure. To my mind, the most convincing way of thinking of it is as a process, as the meditator going through this process of doubt, finding his own imperfection, and then encountering something which exceeds his imperfect mind. And it's that encounter which, I think, delivers the goods for Descartes, although he was adept at producing elaborate formal proofs.

45:01But I think it delivers more persuasiveness than just presenting it as a quasi-deductive process. And that's so often the case with philosophy. I talk all the time about coming to belief in God, for example. There are syllogisms and arguments, but most people in their actual personal life, the way that they come to profound philosophical changes is through profound philosophical realizations, which are not of the kind, oh, wow, gosh, that third premise really does follow from the second one. It's more like an intuition or something hits you, or the penny drops, as they say. And something about reflecting on this nature of perfection for Descartes, it's like, oh, this comes from outside of me.

45:50The light bulb goes on. And I think actually there are very few arguments in philosophy, if any, where you can start with self-evident premises that every rational person must agree to, and then step by step force them to conclusions. If that was true, then all the great problems of philosophy about determinism, free will gone, so could be settled. But it clearly isn't like that. There's an interesting question as to what Descartes' project is here, because like you said earlier, most people associate him with epistemology, the philosophy of how you know things, right? Because it seems like he's not even necessarily trying to establish what is true, but rather what you can be certain of, or at the very least, what it's impossible to doubt, which might not quite be the same thing.

46:40I think it's true that the two are different. But I think the importance of God for him, and we haven't yet come on to this, is that once he has to his satisfaction established such a God, the perfections of God mean that God is not a deceiver. So the creator God of the Judeo-Christian tradition cannot be malicious. Why not? Because malice, deception is a sign of weakness. Why would you lie to someone? Because you're frightened, or because there's something you want which you can't get. Now, none of that can apply to a supremely perfect being. Yeah, God is sort of the anti-evil demon. Precisely.

47:28Where Descartes imagines the evil demon is this epistemic problem, which is if there might be this evil demon who's deceiving me and the table doesn't exist. The epistemic solution is God, who because he is good, cannot deceive. Importantly, it's not as clear as like, because God exists, I know that the table exists. There's still a few more steps. No, but at least I can have a hope of achieving the truth. I think truth now does come in. Yes. Because, as Descartes put it in an interview to a young Dutchman, Franz Boerman, in 1648, a reliable mind was God's gift to me. So, in creating me, this perfect being would not have given me mental equipment that's fundamentally flawed.

48:17Now, that doesn't mean I have a hot line to the truth. Obviously, we all make mistakes in logic, in mathematics, in science all the time. but in principle when we focus on the clearest and simplest propositions of logic and mathematics descartes reasons we can't be wrong because and i think actually that may sound a bit sort of weird and faith rather than philosophical reason but actually i think we couldn't be having this conversation now unless we felt that, to some extent at least, our minds are configured in such a way that we can track the truth. Yeah, that's an important argument that comes up in other contexts, like the argument from reason and our ability to trust reason.

49:06I want to ask a question about that, but just beforehand I wanted to give our listeners a taste of this. The way you talk about Descartes going on a journey and having sort of an experience. I think this is embodied in the second meditation where in the first meditation, Descartes realizes all of these doubts, thinks about the evil demon and all of this kind of stuff. And he opens the second meditation in this state of doubt. And it's so interesting that in a philosophical text, you can read a sentence like this. He says, so serious are the doubts into which I've been thrown as a result of yesterday's meditation, that I can neither put them out of my mind nor see any way of resolving them.

49:42It feels as if I've fallen unexpectedly into a deep whirlpool, which tumbles me around so that I can neither stand on the bottom nor swim up to the top. And then he says, nevertheless, nevertheless, I will make an effort and once more attempt the same path I sat on yesterday. So he literally describes in this, again, this is like a foundational philosophical text. It's not premise one, premise two conclusion. He's saying, I've thought about this and I feel like I'm at a complete loss. I feel like I'm in a whirlpool. My feet can't find the ground. It's clearly like a deeply experiential thing for Descartes.

50:15I think that's very important. And I think, although, as you know, I'm trained in the analytic tradition, I have great admiration for the methods of precision and clarity that is so important in anglophone analytic philosophy. Nonetheless, I think we often ignore that dimension, the dimension of the experiential. And if I can just quote another passage which is, I think, similar to that, this is at the end of the third meditation, where he says, before examining all this more carefully, I should like to pause for a while and spend some time in the contemplation of God to reflect on his attributes and gaze with wonder and adoration, the beauty of this immense light.

51:10So that is not Descartes the analytic reasoner, doubting it, that is a kind of submissive contemplation of the immense light of truth and goodness, which he thinks he's discovered. So yes, we start in the whirlpool, we're absolutely lost, tumbled around, we end up in a moment of calm contemplation. And these are both intensely personal, and I think intensely emotional, experiences. Those words, you know, in the original text, it's almost like a litany, adore, admire, wonder at. And wonder, of course, is an Yeah, I mean, it's crucial and interesting to think that that exists at the foundation of this Western philosophical thought tradition.

52:02And yet it is still worth remembering that this is a philosophical text that people analyze as making a contribution to knowledge. And one important thing that we just sort of mentioned is this idea that Descartes' establishing of God's existence is in part part of his epistemological project to ground knowledge. In fact, Blaise Pascal in the Ponce says, I will never forgive Descartes because Descartes sort of establishes God's existence to get his epistemology off the ground and then just has no need for him ever again. She's like, all right, thanks. See you later. I'm not sure if that's actually true in Descartes' personal life, but that's what Pascal thought.

52:41The question that will spring to mind for people is, okay, let's just grant for a moment that Descartes has established with the light of reason that a perfect God exists. You've already indicated that this somehow gives us hope that God won't be a deceiver so the evil demon doesn't exist. But as you say, our minds still go wrong every now and again. We do things incorrectly. So how can Descartes use this as a way to justify our apprehension of truth if it's still the case that even though God exists, we still go wrong? Right. Yes, the problem of error. You know, in theology, there's the problem of evil.

53:19If there's a good God, how come all the suffering? In Descartes, we have sort of epistemological analog of that, the problem of error. If God is the source of all truth, this perfect being, how come we go wrong? And Descartes' answer briefly is that, of course, we do go wrong, but we can't go wrong in the very simple and clear propositions. So as long as I am thinking I must exist, I couldn't be wrong about that. Similarly, and he ranks this almost equally with the cogito, two plus three equals five. Now, of course, the malicious demon could muck about with the symbols. But as long as you and I are actually focusing on that composition, as long as we're there, attending to it, it can't be wrong.

54:14And Descartes has this crucial term of the clear and distinct perceptions, which he uses to delineate these particular kinds of perceptions. And for Descartes, perceptions are the things that are in the mind, ideas and stuff like that. Yes, the apprehensions of the intellect. And they're clear insofar as they're present, directly present to the mind. They're distinct insofar as they contain nothing except what is clear. And this is why mathematics, the simple axioms of mathematics appeal to him. I mean, if I say that table is solid, all sorts of questions about that. What do I mean by solid? Will it be solid under the micro?

54:57So it's clear in that the idea is in front of you, but it's not distinct because it doesn't consist only in clarity. It's got all of this other fuzzy stuff as well. What do these words mean? Does the external world exist? What is wood? Are atoms mostly empty? All of this kind of nonsense floating around. Whereas two plus three equals five, there it is on its own. There it stands. It implies nothing except what is present. And this really leads on to physics for Descartes, because he thinks, rather like Galileo, his near-contemporary, that mathematics is the key to science. This was something revolutionary and new in the 17th century, which has proved to be substantially correct.

55:39Descartes had these mathematical laws of physics, which were all wrong. Newton, a few decades later, much better ones, but they both agreed on the mathematical principles, which for Descartes are, in their simplest form, are guaranteed by the benevolence of God. So here's something really important then, right? So Descartes has established, through the light of pure reason, clearly and distinctly, that God exists. Because the idea of God as a perfect being and therefore a trademark within us is clear and distinct, and therefore I know that God exists. And because God exists, I know that I can trust my clear and distinct perceptions.

56:25But if you need to believe in God to trust your clear and distinct perceptions, but Descartes has proved the existence of God as a clear and distinct perception, isn't he arguing in a circle? This is what's known as the Cartesian circle. Yes. Yes, Cartesian from Cartesius, the Latin version of Descartes. Which is such a cooler version of his name, don't you think? Cartesius. Cartesius. Might start calling him that instead. Yes. Well, in Italian, he's called Cartesio. So, yeah. Whether the circle can ultimately be broken out of, I don't know. But I think it's so far as Descartes does it, it's by this idea of immediate focus, as long as I'm actually here and now focusing.

57:14So the certainty is very limited, very temporary. And actually, you mentioned Pascal earlier. I think actually that comment is unfair to Descartes, although much of what Pascal says I think is fascinating. But in this point, Descartes doesn't make a distinction between creation and conservation. that's to say God recreates anew every second, every moment every split second of time and without that conserving power of God things wouldn't exist at all so I can know I exist as long as I'm thinking but unless God conserves me from moment to moment and the same with the whole cosmos it would not exist so the God Descartes discovers is very similar to Thomas Aquinas' god.

58:08Sustain, that's what I was just thinking. Who was the sustainer as well as the creator. Yeah, quite, quite. Okay, so this problem of the Cartesian circle, to be clear, we talked about two and three equals five, but if I'm not mistaken, when Descartes is considering all the things he can doubt, he starts with the external world and then he thinks about maths. And as far as I'm aware, he does think to himself, the evil demon could even make me go wrong every time I add two and three. This evil demon that exists, even with something as obvious to me as two and three equals five, it's possible that every time I do that calculation, the evil demon just prods my brain and makes me go wrong every single time.

58:49And so weirdly, before we've established the existence of God, Descartes thinks he can't even trust those most clear and distinct perceptions. But he then establishes God's existence through a clear and distinct perception. So is this a functional criticism of Descartes? Is it something he addresses? He does, I think. And the answer he offers, I think, depends really on, if you like, the difference between a first order and a second order doubt. The doubts you've just raised are, oh, maybe I could go wrong about my simplest mathematical intuitions. But then the first order question is, what I'm now focusing on when I say 2 plus 3 equals 5, could I be wrong about that?

59:38And Descartes' answer is no. As he puts it in the third meditation, I've raised the doubt of the demon, but when I turn to the truths themselves, which I think I perceive so clearly, I'm so convinced that I declare, I'm quoting from memory. Let him who will deceive me, he can never make it that I'm nothing as long as I think I'm something, or that two and three are more or less. Which, by the way, out of context is a wonderfully motivational quote, isn't it? Like, let any demon try as hard as he can, he will never convince me that I am nothing. I remember underlining that when I first came across it, thinking that would look good on a poster.

1:00:18But okay, so, and really important here is like the immediacy, right? Descartes is not saying, at least in this first stage, here are these mathematical truths, and here's my thinking, and here's God's perfection. All right, that's all settled, put that on the shelf. I've proved that God exists. And for the rest of my life, I can say, oh, I know that God exists. And if someone asks me why, I go, oh, well, because there's this proof. It's only when you've got it in your mind that you can have the certainty, only in that moment. And what Descartes wants to do is transition from the certainty he can hold in the moment of clearly and distinctly perceiving God's existence.

1:00:57Right there and then, I know that God exists. But now, five seconds later, I remember that I thought God exists, but I can't be certain of it until it's actually in the brain. But Descartes wants to move from that immediacy to a more broad epistemology. And he does that through, well, the knowledge of God is immediate, which establishes the trustworthiness of my clear and distinct perceptions. And so then I can take God out of my mind and now trust my clear and distinct perceptions. Yes. It's as if this tiny flicker of this candle of certainty, my own existence, and then I can reach to God's existence.

1:01:38Then the candle has, as it were, lit the bonfire, and now the whole room is illuminated. Right. And you need that candle to light the building. You do. To light the building. The candle needs to be there and then while you're holding it, but once you've lit the room, then the candle can go out. And if we sort of relate this to our modern ideas, I think we do have an idea of the world as it really is, the truth as it really is. Bernard Williams described this as the absolute conception, the conception of the cosmos as it would be agreed on by any rational inhabitant of the galaxy or the cosmos, something objectively and absolutely true.

1:02:24The question he raised is, because he strongly criticized Descartes' proofs, whether we can get there without God, whether without this metaphysical bridge we can reach absolute conception of truth. And it's doubtful. It's doubtful that we can. In other words, if we delete the whole idea of the reliability of the mind…

1:02:53The God-given reliability of the human mind in its most basic logical and mathematical intuitions, then do we have any principled hope that we are creatures who might be able to reach the truth? So the whole enterprise of philosophy and of science is then not exactly thrown into doubt, but there are worries there about why we should think that this randomly evolved creature, Homo sapiens, should somehow be equipped to discover authentic, objective truths about the universe. Yeah, that's why I think it's also important to distinguish between. I mean, one of my criticisms of Descartes has always been, and not to say that I disagree with him, the criticism that comes to mind that may or may not have an answer, is to say that, of course, conceptually, if I'm certain of something, then I think it's true.

1:03:56And it's impossible to know something unless it's true. But in this epistemological project of trying to doubt everything that's possible, I think that all Descartes is really establishing here is what he cannot doubt. What are the things which it's impossible for a person to doubt? If it's impossible to doubt it, obviously we're going to think that thing is true. But I'm not sure that Descartes has established truth. I think he's established what it's impossible to doubt, what you can be certain of, which as I said earlier, I don't think is quite the same thing. I don't know if Descartes reflected heavily on this distinction, whether he thought he was doing one or the other.

1:04:34I don't know if you have a view on that, but I think it's an important undertone. It is. And the distinction you're drawing is very important, because we don't want science, knowledge, to be based just on a psychological fact. Exactly, yeah. That we are strongly inclined to believe X. Yeah. We want—I think Descartes does offer an answer, namely that when I am convinced, spontaneously convinced of the truth of, let's say, 2 plus 3 equals 5. It's not that my feeling makes it true or makes it certain. It's rather the nature of the thing itself, as he puts it. Because in a way, the certainty that Descartes has established is not just exactly a certainty that 2 plus 3 is 5, but if you like, the certainty that that is true.

1:05:30And so he has sort of established a certainty in truth. Yes. And I mean, I think we'd say that it's the nature of the mathematical properties themselves that means that two and two have got to make four. Yes. So, and this very much connects with his later proof of God's existence in the fifth meditation, when he says that it's not my wanting it to be the case when, for example, I say the angles of a triangle equal 180. It's not that I make it so or that I dream it up. Rather, it's when I contemplate this triangle, I say, yes, it's got to be the nature of the triangle itself. In essence, how the triangle is defined means this property has got to follow.

1:06:22Similarly, he says, is not that I'm putting existence into God, rather the very nature of the essence of God, how he's defined, if you like, means that his perfections have got to include the perfection of existence. Yeah, crucially, and we'll talk about this, the dreaded ontological argument in Cartesian form. I'm glad we're doing this first rather than afterwards, is to point out that there is a really important difference between an epistemic tool and metaphysics, the truth of the matter. It may be the case that the way we establish certainty is through a mental exercise. We might think P is certainly true because I've used some mental exercise that establishes the truth of P.

1:07:07That does not mean that P is true because I think it's true. That's not the same thing. So crucially, I mean, if you think about a triangle and you think about the fact that it's got three sides, if you reflect on that in your mind, yeah, that's true. triangles have three sides. Why is that? You think it just does. Well, those angles add up to 180 degrees if you don't like the definition problem of triangles. Okay. It just does. And it's not that I've invented that in a way that I'm sort of arrested by the truth of it when I reflect on it. You know, it's the same thing. Why can't something be true and false at the same time?

1:07:42Laws of logic. They just can't be. Why not? Because when I reflect on it, I'm just arrested by its truth. That doesn't mean that I have thought the law of logic into existence. It just means the way that I've established my certainty in it is through my inability to think of the opposite. So with that caveat, and I just want to really stress for our listeners, to say that my inability to conceive of something means it's impossible does not mean it's impossible because I can't conceive of it. It means that I can't conceive of it because it's impossible. That in mind, Descartes' ontological argument.

1:08:23Why does he revisit the question of God in Meditation 5? It's an interesting question why he thinks he needs a second proof if the first one has done the job. But I think the point is, at this stage, he's entitled to be sure, he thinks, that he will have the kind of knowledge that's founded on clear and distinct perceptions. So it's going to be the kind of knowledge we see in mathematics, his favored model for knowledge, where, as we were just saying in the case of 2 plus 3 equals 5, the nature of the thing itself is so clear that it forces my ascent, really. And so, he's now going to produce a proof of God that has that same quality.

1:09:14As he puts it in the fourth meditation, from a great light in the intellect, there follows a great propensity of the will. And when I see something, a mathematical theorem, so clearly, I've just got to say, yes, it's true. Because the clarity attaches to the thing itself, not to my subjective inability to doubt. Now, in the case of God, he's reasoning God is defined as the sum of all perfections, existence is a perfection, therefore God exists. So you can no more prize existence off the concept of God than you can prize angles equal 180 away from the concept of the triangle. Well, not just personally, but few people, I think, have been wholly convinced.

1:10:06Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century rejected the ontological argument, and I think he got it right. Roughly, he's saying, yes, existence, you can define God as that than which nothing greater can be conceived. That was Anselm's definition in his earlier version of the ontological argument. And existence will seem to follow from that. But all you've shown is that existence is linked to that concept of that than which nothing greater can be conceived, perfection. You haven't shown that anything actually qualifies for that title in the first place. And I think as far as my own view is concerned, that criticism is ultimately right.

1:11:03Yeah. Well, my listeners will know that I place a lot of stock in the ontological argument. I think it's great fun. And I think it's got a lot, at the very least, it's got more plausibility than people give it credit for. But I never talk about Descartes' version, because I find it to be the weakest. I mean, you just said that God is defined by Descartes as the sum of all perfections. People will immediately say, that might not be a great definition of God. But okay, back to what we said earlier, forget the word God. Let's just prove that there exists this being who is the sum of all perfections.

1:11:34Call it God if you like, up to you. Okay, so what is a perfection? I guess one way we could define it would be like doesn't have any limitation. So unlimited in knowledge, unlimited in power, unlimited in love. And Descartes wants to say, therefore, also unlimited in existence. And importantly for Descartes, there are levels of existence. And for the scholastics before him who would have dominated the schooling that he had, for Aristotle, the redness of a telephone box exists, and the telephone box also exists. But the redness has less existence because it relies on the telephone box, whereas the telephone box has existence in itself.

1:12:17So there are degrees of existence. So for Descartes, we're just imagining this being of all perfections, which is to say no limits. So no limit in power, no limit in love, and no limit in existence, which means he exists. and that means that if you're imagining this being which everyone at home should be doing by now just picturing this being in your head well you're picturing a being that has maximal existence which means that that being exists so you've just established the existence of god and the first thing people always say is you can't just think god into existence yeah you can't just have a thought and therefore god exists but remember what we said a moment ago it's not that my thinking makes God exist.

1:13:01It's that the sort of clarity of the thought establishes the truth which arrests me when I reflect on it. And the truth that a being which exists, exists, arrests me when I think of a God, a perfect being who must possess existence. Indeed, I think that's a very fair way of putting what Descartes himself would say. He actually says in the fifth meditation, my thought imposes no necessity on things. Rather, it's the nature of the thing itself that means that whenever I focus on this concept of supreme perfection, I'm obliged to acknowledge that existence must be part of that.

1:13:48John Cottingham:Mm-hmm. Well, it may be an inseparable part of it, but we also want to know, I think this is what the critic's going to say, whether in actuality there is any being who qualifies for this title. Yes. Once you grant him the title, then he'd have to exist, put it crudely. But there may be nothing that so qualifies. And of course, it makes sense to think, it almost feels like a bit of a trick, but I think people say the ontological argument is sort of circular, just defining God. And in a way, the advocate wants to say, well, yeah, because all deductive syllogisms are, in a sense, circular, they're tautological.

1:14:33And all we're really doing is reflecting on the nature of God. And by definition, he exists. So yeah, in a way, we are just defining God into existence. And so it sort of seems a little bit plausible, but then people start thinking, okay, well, then can't I just define all kinds of objects? So let me just conceive of the unicorn which exists. Everybody just imagine the concept of the unicorn which exists. Well, if you're imagining the concept of the unicorn which exists, then it must exist. So this unicorn you're imagining must exist, right? This is an important criticism of Descartes' ontological argument.

1:15:06How might Descartes respond to that that i think is a matter of distinguishing between concepts which you just cobble together i've got the existing unicorn or even the unicorn actually horse plus or i can yeah cobble them together but then i can take them apart again whereas in the case of the triangle um which is a genuine geometrical entity and ends verum as descar puts it a true entity not meaning it exists, but just it's a true mathematical object. I can't decide for myself what to add and what to subtract. Again, as you were saying earlier, the nature of the thing itself requires me to draw certain.

1:15:55The 180 degrees of a triangle is not something that you can just add to it. Oh, let's make it 190. You can't do that. You're forced into doing it. But with the unicorn, I can say the unicorn that's blue, the unicorn that's got three legs, the unicorn that exists. I'm just making stuff up. It's not like forced by the concept. And I think importantly here, we also need to distinguish between something's essence and something's existence. And we'll try to do this as briefly as possible, but as far as I understand it, something's essence is what makes it what it is. So say this chair, for example, what makes this a chair?

1:16:34Well, the fact that it holds things up, the fact that it's got legs, the fact that all of this kind of stuff. Once I've established the essence of the chair, I can then separately consider the question, does it exist? Same with the unicorn. The unicorn has an essence, and whether or not it exists, the essence of the unicorn doesn't change. It can be added or subtracted to the essence. Exactly. Whereas in the case of God alone, this is the exception. In the case of this supreme perfection alone, according to Descartes, you don't have the choice of whether to add or subtract existence. It's got to be there.

1:17:11And of course, Aquinas in the 13th century had defined God as ipsum esse, existence itself. So there is something there, I think, which perhaps retains an appeal, this idea of pure actuality.

1:17:32It's indefinable, almost incomprehensible notion actually being here, actually existing. I think it's not a bad defense to say, like, say, this table or this book or the unicorn. All of these things are things which have essences. They have things which make them a table. Even the thing that doesn't exist, like the unicorn or the imaginary table, a different table that we're imagining, it has an essence. It's got legs, it holds things up in the mind. And adding existence to it doesn't change its essence. Whereas this conceptual being that we're being asked to imagine by Descartes, the sum of all perfections, because it has existence as part of its essence, it's not the kind of thing that you can say, I'm imagining the essence of this perfect being, and then there's an open question whether it exists or not, because its existence is part of its essence.

1:18:25Whereas I can imagine the table or the unicorn or anything else at all, and then I can ask whether or not it exists. This is the one thing that you can't do that for, because its existence is part of its essence. And in fact, for many people, a good definition of God is he or that which has existence as part of or as its essence. That's kind of what God is for people like Jacob. That's what I was suggesting, really, with the Thomistic definition of existence itself. Yes, I think that it's nice to find someone who finds something to be said for the ontological argument, because it's not found many adherents.

1:19:06But there is something about the thought, I think, that once you have a concept of God, you're dealing with something that couldn't just happen to be around. It might not. Once you reach the concept of God, you reach something that is the source of all reality, source of all existence, source of all goodness. And therefore, as it were, I think this is the essence argument, by its very nature, it's not something which happens to be here. Yes. And also consider the context in which this argument comes up. As we said, this is Meditation 5. Descartes has already, in Meditation 3, established God's existence through what to me, although obviously it's an argument with its problems is a lot less of a sort of, you're playing a little trick on us.

1:19:57Oh, it's a circular word game. It's an argument that stands or fails. And so in a way I could say, look, Descartes already established God's existence. He already knows God exists. So now by the time it's Meditation 5, yeah, he is just reflecting on the definition and arguing in a circle, but what's the problem? He knows he exists. So now he's just sort of reflecting on God's nature In the same way that Anselm's original ontological argument, in scare quotes, comes from his proslogion, which was not a work of philosophy. It's a prayer. Anselm is just reflecting on God's nature, and that's where these ontological arguments come up.

1:20:33That's true. I mean, that's more apparent, I think, in Anselm than it is in Descartes. I think so, too. As you rightly say, Anselm begins by expressing his puniness, his humility before this greatness of God, and asks from a position of faith, he seeks understanding. Whereas Descartes is the definition of starting with ego. Right, yes. Although, yeah, although he did say that although in the order of discovery he comes first, in the order of reality God comes first. So I don't think he's quite turning the tables on the future. It's a beautiful way of putting it. And where is it that Descartes, you quoted earlier Descartes saying, you know, let's just pause for a moment to reflect on the…

1:21:23Yeah, that's the final paragraph of the third meditation. Yeah. So at that point, he's already thinking in terms of maybe we just need to take a moment to just reflect on the majesty of this. I think he's almost in Anselmian mode, actually. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I just wonder, even if it's not entirely clear, or maybe even if he wasn't doing this quite on purpose, I wondered the extent to which that might be present in Meditation 5 as well. I mean, I can't remember the syntax. I can't remember how it's put forward. But For a lot of people, the reason why they don't like the ontological argument is because they're like, I'm not convinced by that.

1:21:59But as Plantinga says of his modal ontological argument, it's not for you. It's not for people who don't believe in God to convince you. It's for people who do believe in God to justify that belief. Yes. I think there's elements of that in Descartes, But I think he also wanted to say that he was doing the kind of philosophy that would carry conviction anywhere, irrespective of whether you're a believer or not. And certainly, as he put it in the interview with Berman, would appeal to anyone, even the Turks, that's to say those who weren't in the Christian tradition. Yeah. Okay, so we've done a bit of a tour de force of the meditations.

1:22:48I mean, we've been talking about Descartes more broadly, but we've roughly gone through the sort of meditations. The first is the skeptical method, the second is the cogito, the third is the trademark argument. What's the fourth? The fourth is about the relation between the intellect and the will, which I think connects with what we are talking about, the idea that a great light in the intellect leads to a spontaneous ascent of the will. Then we get number five, which is this ontological argument as well as material existence. There's one more meditation in this text, the sixth, which is about the mind and the body.

1:23:32Descartes is probably second most famous for his so-called Cartesian dualism, this mind-body distinction. I wonder if since we're doing an intro to Descartes, whether it might be worth just touching on that before we round up. Yes. Well, we've left to the end what's possibly the part of Descartes' philosophy that attracts the most attention nowadays. He's a dualist, that's to say he divides reality into two fundamental categories, Ray's cogitans, thinking stuff, and Ray's extensor, whatever can be measured or quantified, whatever has length, breadth, and height. The second category is the basis of his whole of physics, his mathematical physics.

1:24:16So it's a world of measurable particles, whose size, shape, motion, speed you can assess. That's the world of physics, and I think we still have that conception. And then we have the world of conscious thought, which for Descartes consists of intellect and will, in the way we've been discussing in connection with the cogito. it. And so what's the relation between those two very distinct things? Descartes is a dualist. That's to say he thinks these are two really incompatible notions. You can quantify any physical object, the table, the chair, atoms, particles. You can't quantify the mind. You can't measure it.

1:25:06But his view that the mind is an immaterial substance is one which I think it's hard for us to accept these days, because we seem to be so clearly aware that what's doing the thinking is a human being possessed of a very complex nervous system and brain, a brain consisting of millions and millions of neural connections. So the idea that thought could be the property of an immaterial substance or soul is, I think, lost a lot of its appeal for us. But since we've got on to Descartes' dualism, let me just add a point which I think is not sufficiently adverted to by those who studied Descartes now, namely that although he says that mind and the body are two distinct things, he also, in the sixth meditation, says that they're united.

1:26:08And when they are united, very interesting things happen. We have emergent properties, namely feelings, emotions, sensations, which are not really pure thoughts, they're not pure cogitations, but nor are they mere physical, physiological reactions. They somehow straddle that category. And so my view on this is that although Descartes has only two substances, mind and body, he has three kinds of attribute or qualities. Purely mental attributes, like thinking and willing, purely physical attributes like your stomach rumbling or your blood pressure or whatever. But then there's this third category of attributes, thoughts and feelings, sensations, feelings, passions, which are psychophysical.

1:27:06They involve conscious awareness, but they also involve physical stun, as we say, being churned up about something, which is an interesting phrase because it implies it's not just a pure abstract thought. There's a bodily component too, which has a particular kind of urgency. Am I right in thinking that Descartes connected the mind to the pineal gland in the brain? Is that like an urban legend? Is that something that he really did? No, he did. That's what Daniel Dennett, the American philosopher who just died recently, called the fax machine to the soul. It's where all the physical neural impulses come, and then in the pineal gland in the middle of the brain, they somehow are perceived or transmitted to the soul.

1:27:57How much did Descartes know about the science of the brain as we would consider it today? It's very crude by today's standards. He thought of the nerves as little pipes filled with gas, which he called the animal spirits. So he had no conception of the staggering. He was very interested in physiology and in the nervous system, but no real conception of the staggering complexity of the cerebral cortex. But he had some idea of how the brain worked to the extent that he knew that this pineal gland was... He sort of knew roughly what its function was in the brain. I mean, I really don't know where the science of the brain was at that point.

1:28:35I think it's pretty crude. He just wants a single point where the images from the two eyes come together. I think it doesn't really cut much eyes with us now. What I think is an interesting argument is that he says that a mechanism, a physical mechanism, always has a finite number of inputs and outputs. But thought, he says, is open-ended. It's not based on one-one correlations, input-output, input-output. Today, you've uttered sentences you've never uttered before. You've had thoughts which you've never had before in exactly that form. So the mind is creative, innovative, and he thought, therefore, it can't be produced by a physical organ, however complicated.

1:29:30And actually, he has a sort of empirical argument for that. He says, you just couldn't fit in enough mechanisms into that space. But of course, it's an interesting question, had he known that there were hundreds of millions of neural... Yeah, would he have thought that that was enough? And Woody still had this argument. But I think he comes out as in pretty good shape, I think, by today's standards, because that's still quite a compelling argument for the creativity of the mind, and how physical mechanisms don't seem to have that capacity. Yeah. Okay, so then two questions to round up this mind-body stuff.

1:30:10First, we've just talked at length about Descartes believing that there's a mind that's separate from a body, but we didn't talk about why he believes that. I mean, in the sixth meditation, he gives a relatively straightforward, again, sort of, remember, we're on the skeptical journey of things that we can doubt, like, what does our reason reveal to us? Why does Descartes land on this idea that the mind and the body are distinct things? The basic argument which occurs in the discourse on the method, written a few years before the meditations, is that, to put it crudely, I can think of myself without the body.

1:30:46I can conceive of myself waking up without my body in the next world, perhaps. I can imagine, or think at least, it's logically possible that I could still be me, this thinking being, even though there was no body. Some people still, by that argument. Richard Swinburne, who I think you've interviewed on your program, thinks it's a good argument and has a very sophisticated modern version of it. My view is that it doesn't work. The fact that I think I can conceive of myself without my body existing doesn't, I think, prove that I could really continue to be me and to think and to discuss and to meditate without my body, which would include without my brain.

1:31:40After all, we often make mistakes about what could happen without what. I could perhaps imagine or think I can imagine this water without there being any hydrogen and oxygen. Quite right, yeah. But unbeknownst to me, if I'm ignorant of chemistry, it just can't be there without the hydrogen and the oxygen. That's what it is. Yeah. You can imagine somebody who didn't know that water was made of hydrogen and oxygen, even outside of the context of water itself, thinking to themselves, for some reason, they were like, imagine a possible world in which the only thing that existed was the ocean, but there was no hydrogen.

1:32:20you know, and they didn't even realize that those questions were connected. You can conceive of that. You can conceive of there being, oh, no hydrogen atoms at the center of stars and stuff, but that's just a bunch of water. But without realizing it, you have undermined the thing. I mean, I think the argument's powerful. And it's worth pointing out to people as well that Descartes isn't trying to say that the mind is distinct from the body because I'm sort of imagining them as being distinct. I just know that they're distinct. The point is that as long as you can conceive of them being separable, that means that in principle they are separable.

1:32:55Yes, it's at least logically possible that they're separable. And just that conceivability means that they can't, literally speaking, they can't be the same thing. Because if they were the same thing, you wouldn't be able to conceptually distinct them. Even if in practice they always come together, the conceptual distinctness is what makes Descartes think that they are actually distinct. Yes, but I would add that it's still an open question whether that conceivability is genuine, is to say whether my conception is coherent, whether I can coherently conceive. I just add one thing that there is some appeal, I think, to the idea that thought is abstract.

1:33:34You know, we're now discussing pretty abstract questions which don't appear to be connected with matter. Nonetheless, what is doing the thinking could still be a physical, you know, namely an animal, a rational animal, a human being. So although there's something to the thought that thought is an abstract process, the idea that the individual who's doing the thinking is an immaterial soul, I think, in my view, is not proven. Yeah. There are some important questions in that idea of abstracting ideas. For example, I can conceive of the brownness of this chair as separable from the chair. I can separate those concepts in my mind.

1:34:21But does that mean that the brownness could sort of exist on its own? Right. Yes. Well, I want to say no, but then maybe kind of, because it exists in my mind. It all gets a bit complicated. But at the very least, I think it's fair to say that even if it is the case, that if something is conceptually distinguishable, then it is really distinct. The problem is that we often just go wrong with what we think is conceptually distinguishable. Absolutely. And that's even granting that that is the case. It may also be the case that conceptual distinction doesn't guarantee real distinction. Yeah. So there are all sorts of problems, I think, with Descartes' central argument for dualism.

1:35:03And as I say, I think it's a view that's kind of lost its appeal for us today. And my own view would be that Aristotle got it right, that the attribute of thought may be a separate kind of attribute, but it's an attribute that inheres in a human being. And a human being is a creature of flesh and blood. It's a living organism which has many properties in virtue of the way the body is configured. So I can digest in virtue of the way my stomach is configured. I can think in virtue of the way my brain is configured. That's what's known as the hylomorphic view, which Descartes thought he was rejecting, and indeed, he did reject it.

1:35:52But arguably, the Aristotelian view is the common sense view. If you say, what are you? I think it'd be very odd to say, I'm a soul. It'd be equally odd to say, I'm a body. I think the right answer is neither. I'm not a soul as Descartes thought, I'm not a body as reductionist materialists think, rather I'm a human being. A creature of flesh and bad, a biological animal of a certain rather unusual kind, because we have the power of thought, but that's a power that's located in or inheres in the biological being that's a human being. Yeah, it's parts of a whole. I'm not my left side. I'm not my right side.

1:36:36I have to be both of them together. The only question that jumps out of that for me is another really important legacy of Descartes, which I think is worth an honorable mention at the end here, which is a few times there you said human being, rational animal, we are people. Descartes didn't extend this sort of charitable view of, you know, insolument far beyond the human species. Famously, Descartes Again, this might be an urban legend here, but I have a feeling that Descartes once attempted to prove the soullessness of other animals and humans by cutting open a dog. And I'm not sure if that actually happened or if that's an urban myth.

1:37:25He did do vivisection on rabbits and dogs.

1:37:33his view of animals, I think, is not as clear as is often supposed. He describes them as automata machines, but an automaton in the 17th century just meant a self-moving mechanism. Now, what he clearly and unequivocally denies of animals is thought, the power of thinking, cogitating, meditating, conceptual thought. And that seems to me is absolutely right. Animals don't have language, they don't have thought. As to whether they have feelings, he does talk about animal passions. He does use, says, for example, that when a sheep sees a wolf and runs away, it has the passion of fear. He talks about passion of anger as applying to some animals.

1:38:24So he's not, on the face of it, denying the possibility of genuine ascriptions of feelings to animals. And importantly, animal pain. Yes, indeed. He thinks that's explicable in terms of physiology, but to explain something in terms of physiological mechanisms is not to eliminate it. So I think Descartes' position, actually, perhaps we can end on this note, is rather more subtle and interesting than the crude denier of feelings to animals that he's often represented as being. As is so often the case in the history of philosophy, it's more complicated than it seems at first glance. And I'm so glad that this podcast gives us an opportunity to start unpacking things like that.

1:39:13John Coddingham, this has been a wonderful, wonderful introduction to Descartes. I've learned, even having thoroughly studied your works, during my university degree and afterwards, I've still learnt dozens of new things just from sitting talking to you now. So thank you so much for your time. Thank you very much. Enjoyed it. And thank you for your very interesting and apt questions, which I hope have produced some interesting thoughts for our viewers. We'll see what they think. Like and subscribe. Let us know in the comments. Limu, Limu! And Doug. Here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual.

1:39:58Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Uh, Limu? Is that guy with the binoculars watching us? Cut the camera! They see us! Only pay for what you need at LibertyMutual.com. Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. Savings vary. Underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.