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Descartes’ Fourth Meditation On human error Descartes begins the fourth Meditation with a review of what he has learned so far. He began his search for certainty by questioning the veracity of his own senses. In the second Meditation , he established that he could not doubt his own existence as a thinking, conscious being. While he could doubt the existence of a world beyond his mind that might be causing his ideas, he was certain at least that it consciously seemed to him that there was such a world of objects. Error, Descartes claimed in the third Meditation , does not arise in our ideas (that is, in our conscious states) themselves, but rather in the “judgment” or inference we make that there is something distinct from our conscious ideas that causes these ideas to exist in our conscious minds. In the third Meditation , Descartes make his first step in “breaking out” of his own mind. He claims to prove the existence of at least one thing that exists outside of and independently of his conscious mind, namely, the existence of a supremely perfect God. Descartes is aware of himself as a being with limitations, and, from this awareness, he finds that he can at least conceive of a being without any such limitations or imperfections. By a complex and fascinating chain of reasoning, Descartes argues that this idea which he has discovered in his mind could only be there if caused to exist by a being that possessed at least as much reality as is represented in this idea. That is, only the existence of a completely perfect being could explain this idea that exists in his mind. But, having already established that he himself is not completely perfect, Descartes concludes that at least one thing must exist outside and independently of his conscious mind, an infinitely perfect being that is the source (i.e., cause or creator) of everything containing any degree of reality whatsoever. So Descartes begins the fourth Meditation having argued that he can know with certainty the existence of at least one thing outside of his own existence and his own conscious states. While there are plenty of questions we could ask about his reasoning in the third Meditation , we will set those aside and look at how Descartes continues in the
fourth Meditation. Descartes now finds himself with a new problem: how is it possible for him to make errors of judgment? Descartes speaks of his “faculty of judgment.” By this he means only that he recognizes that he has the ability to form beliefs about the truth or falsity of various claims. Since he was created by an all powerful and all good God, it would seem that this faculty of judgment, if used correctly, should never lead him into error. (An all powerful God would be able to give him a faculty of judgment that would never, if used correctly, lead him to make mistaken judgements, and all all good God would not want to “deceive” him by giving him such a misleading faculty.) And so it would seem that, being created by an all good and all powerful God, Descartes should never make errors of judgment. And yet clearly he does. Descartes task in the fourth Meditation is to explain the possibility of human error in a way that does not call the perfection of God into doubt. If Descartes can locate the source of human error (and if, as it turns out, this is source is within himself), then perhaps he can find a method for avoiding error. The first move Descartes makes is to clarify the problem before him: what he must explain is why he makes errors of judgment, not why it is that there are many things that he does not know. God, for Descartes is an “infinite” being, and there are infinitely many truths that God knows. But Descartes is a finite being, and consequently, there are only finitely many true beliefs that it is possible for such a finite being to acquire. This fact--that he is merely a finite being--is not, Descartes thinks, sufficient reason to question the perfection of God. The problem is not that he does not, like God, possess infinitely many true beliefs, but rather that he has some number of false beliefs. Error is not merely the lack of all possible true beliefs, but the presence of false beliefs. If God is the source of all truth, where does this “falseness” come from? Descartes’ question here is not only epistemological (he wants to know how to avoid error), but metaphysical --if the world is created by an all good and all powerful God, where does falsity come from? How did it get into the world to begin with?
simply having an idea. Even if we picture flying horses, or imagine doing bad things to others, there is no error in simply having the idea. Error arises only when we choose to believe that the idea is true, or that the action is something we should pursue. So, our faculty of judgment, Descartes claims, is a combination of two distinct faculties, that of understanding (or “intellect”) and will (“volition”). Our faculty of understanding--our ability to form ideas--is finite, but contains no errors because it (in itself) makes no judgments. Our faculty of will likewise contains (in itself) no imperfections. In fact, Descartes says, our faculty of will is infinite. In and of itself, our faculty of will is no different than God’s. God has more power than us, and so is able to exercise his will on many more things than we are, but if having a free will is simply having the ability to “accept or reject a proposition, to pursue a goal or to avoid something,” then our free will is no different than God’s. A free will, Descartes is saying, is essentially something that one either has or does not have. It doesn’t come in degrees. So if we have one, then there is some part of us that is made “in the image and likeness” of God. What Descartes says about free will is interesting in many ways that go beyond what we can talk about here. But his goal here is simply to explain how we make mistakes of judgment in a way that is consistent with our being created by an all powerful and all good God. Our understanding is finite, but that is not inconsistent with God’s perfection. God didn’t have to create us, or to give us any understanding at all. Our understanding is finite, but contains no errors, so there is no error in what God has given us. Our will, on the other hand, is infinite. There is no error in our will, as such, and so no error in what we have been given by God. So, there is no error in either our understanding or our will. God created everything, and God is all good. We, his creatures, are not infinitely good (which simply means that we are not God), but there is no “badness” in what God created. Errors arises because of the fact that while our understanding is finite, our will is infinite. That is, we can freely choose to believe certain things to be true even when we lack sufficient evidence. This is the core of Descartes’ analysis of errors of judgment.
Errors of judgment are possible because judgment is the result of a combination of a finite understanding and an infinite will. We make errors of judgment when we misuse our free will to believe things without sufficient evidence. It is this misuse of our free wills that is the source of human “error and sin.” This is Descartes’ answer to the metaphysical question about where error comes from. (Whether or not it is a good answer, I will leave for you to ponder.) But that still leaves Descartes with the epistemological question: how is he to avoid error? If he makes mistakes in judgment because he willfully chooses to believe things without sufficient evidence, how is he supposed to keep his (sinful) will in check? More to the point, what actually counts as “sufficient evidence” for judging that some idea is, in fact, true? Descartes answer is that I should accept (affirm to be true) only those ideas that are “clear and distinct.” Descartes doesn’t do much here to tell us precisely what it is for an idea to be clear and distinct. Elsewhere he describes a clear and distinct idea as something that we can simply see “by the light of reason” to be manifestly true. If an idea is “clear,” it is not fuzzy or ambiguous. We can see that it simply cannot be false. If it is distinct, it is limited. We can see what it does and does not contain. It is, if you will, clear through and through (and so cannot, in itself, be mistaken), and has clear boundaries as to what it contains and what it doesn’t (and so cannot include anything outside of itself that might not be clear). If I had to give a plausible example of a clear and distinct idea, I could only appeal to mathematical truths. I have, I think Descartes would say, a clear and distinct idea that 1+1=2. This is not something I know on the basis of sense experience. Rather, it is something that I can simply see “by the light of reason” to be true. Descartes (and rationalists in general) seem to have in mind something like a pure intellectual perception. We seem to be able to “see” that 1+1=2, not through our physical senses, but by a pure act of mind or reason.
Meditation ) for the existence of God presupposed that he could trust his clear and distinct ideas. So, he knows there is a God because he knows he can trust his clear and distinct ideas, and he knows he can trust his clear and distinct ideas because he knows there is a God. If this is true (if this is really the structure of Descartes’ reasoning), then Descartes’ first positive step in reconstructing his system of beliefs is fatally flawed. And that seems to leave him (and us, if we are going through all this reasoning with him) back where he ended the second Meditation : stuck within his own mind and his own conscious experience. Welcome to solipsism! Descartes’s fifth Meditation contains some claims about the concept he has of material things, as well as another argument for the existence of God. (Maybe he had a sinking feeling that his first one didn’t quite work!) When we move on to the sixth Meditation , we will find his argument that there is indeed a world of material objects outside his mind. This argument will depend heavily on his claim that God is not a deceiver. So, if the arguments of the third and fourth Meditations are not convincing, that part of the sixth Meditation will be equally unsatisfying. But the sixth Meditation also contains more of Descartes’ arguments for mind/body dualism. So, if we put aside questions about whether or not we can really trust our senses that there even is any material world, we can look at Descartes’ argument that mind, or the subject of conscious experience, is essentially something non-material. And this is just what we will do.
