Descartes’ roller coaster ride of epistemological mental gymnastics, A.K.A Meditations, is like grappling with the old question, ‘If a tree falls in a forest and no is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Much of Descartes’ perspective appears to involve what he perceives versus what is reality, and whether God is truly the reason he has such heavily existential questions in the first place. Throughout his work, he often uses words such as perception, imagination, senses, infinite versus finite, corporeal and substance. And while Descartes deserves major props for spending several days analyzing the roots of belief and how to rationalize its components, many of his points can be boiled down to a few of his analogies. I line up with them, for the most part, and cover a couple in this post.
In the Second Meditation, for example, and after Descartes sums up his perception about his perception of himself — that he is a “thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, is willing, is unwilling, and also imagines and has sensory perceptions (493) — one of his better analogies, which distinguishes what we know to be certain versus how we derive something to be certain, involves wax from a honeycomb. A honeycomb objectively exists whether we see it or even choose to imagine it. And though Descartes does not entirely rely on the senses to help communicate the reality of something (495), he shows that the properties of the wax, however they change or remain the same, it is still wax (493, 494). (Also, ironically enough, he uses his own sensory experiences to describe non-sensory, or intellect directed, concepts. But more on that another time).
Now, when pulling in the ‘house’ analogy (Saint Leo Slide 9) to describe Cartesian foundationalism, the wax example fulfills a couple of key points about basic belief and deriving higher level beliefs from the basic belief: Wax is a material item that exists in objective reality. If you have ten people on the ‘first floor’ (so to speak), and each takes a bit of wax from a honeycomb, and they all choose what is common to all as wax (how it has been commonly identified), then they all have a foundational, proper belief that they are each holding a bit of wax. They can understand it through their senses, and each individual’s intellect can also process the wax as being objectively true to the entire group.
Then, when the group goes to the ‘second floor’ in the house, they each manipulate the wax in different ways — one person tears the bit of wax in half, another person paints the wax blue, yet another person combines it with another bit of wax — they can still conclude that the wax is still inherently the same. Some of the group may even imagine the wax in other scenarios — one person may imagine using the wax to make a lip balm (Burt’s Bees!) — yet the wax still exists in reality.
From there, and using the above analogy to make a major leap to God, each subsequent level in the house (or perhaps it should be a high-rise building?), reveals a new layer of thought that can still comport with reality. Moreover, if God is in fact infinite and pure goodness, and we are certainly finite, we can still achieve an understanding of God as infinite because we have an intrinsic idea of God as infinite. Further, when we look at *how* we discern our thoughts and the world around us, including how we reconcile errors in our thoughts, perhaps Descartes is correct in stating that “For how I could understand that I was not wholly perfect unless there in me some idea of a more perfect being which enabled me to recognize my own beliefs by comparison?” (499).
Another good example is the ‘phantom limb’ analogy that Descartes uses in his Sixth Meditation: Using sensory information, I can see that I have two arms and two legs. I have a properly basic belief that I exist in my body, and not because I am inventing it in my imagination, as Descartes points out in the Second Meditation (492). But what if my left arm is amputated? What if I think that I feel pain in my left arm, even though it does not physically exist? Here is where I have to separate what my senses believe from what my intellect knows to be true (Descartes 511).
Again, using the ‘house’ example, I must move up to a higher level of thought to understand the reality of my situation. I must use a higher level of reasoning to comport with reality. From there, I have a better knowledge of myself and how I can work through an illusion of something versus its actual existence (Descartes 511). Once again, how this pertains to God, or how to form a rationally warranted reason for God’s existence, involves continually balancing my reasoning with my perception.
Or something like that…
Works Cited
Descartes, Rene. Meditations on First Philosophy. Edited by Pojman, Louis, and Lewis Vaughn, Classics of Philosophy. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Saint Leo University. Module 6 Lecture Slides. PHI-502. 2024.