Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Meditations on First Philosophy, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Knowledge, Doubt, and Science
God and the World
Mind and Body
Intellectual Discipline
Summary
Analysis
The Meditator resolves to stop trusting his senses and imagination. Instead, using reason alone, he will ask what else he can deduce from the knowledge that he is a thinking thing. First, the Meditator is certain that he’s a thinking thing only because he has “a clear and distinct perception” of the fact. This suggests that all clear and distinct perceptions are true. Yet the Meditator has already pointed out that God could deceive him about such perceptions, so first, it’s important to figure out whether God exists (and whether God can deceive people).
The meditator continues piecing back together his worldview, making sure only to accept beliefs that he can be absolutely certain about. His analysis here foreshadows the end of the Fourth Meditation, in which he concludes that the existence of God does make all clear and distinct perceptions true, but it also raises serious questions about his logic—including the objection often called the “Cartesian Circle.” If Descartes can’t trust his clear and distinct perceptions until he knows that God exists, this objection goes, then he would have to prove God’s existence without using clear and distinct perceptions as evidence. But he already seems to be using them, which would make his argument circular—after all, this is how he concluded that he’s “a thinking thing” in the first place.
Themes
The Meditator argues that he can’t doubt the existence of his own ideas and emotions—even when they’re wrong, they’re still definitely there. Some ideas are innate, whereas others come from the imagination, and others still, like the idea of heat, come from external sources besides the thinker’s mind. Yet many ideas of this last type just come from “natural impulses” (feelings and instincts), which are untrustworthy. In contrast, the natural light of reason does yield perfect certainty.
The Meditator distinguishes among these different sources of ideas because, later in his proof for the existence of God, he has to determine where his idea of God comes from. Here, he emphasizes that ideas that come from feelings, instincts, or the imagination cannot be certain. But he doesn’t yet explore innate ideas, nor ideas that originate in external sources besides feelings or instincts. The “natural light” is a new, often confusing term, the meaning of which scholars are still debating today. For all intents and purposes, it is similar to the concept of clear and distinct perception: when we understand something clearly and distinctly, we’re seeing it through the natural light. Readers can imagine this by thinking of a principle that just naturally has to be true (like that a square has four sides). Yet this definition of the natural light appears to raise the Cartesian Circle problem, which is why scholars continue to debate its intricacies.
Themes
Something is objectively real if it represents reality, but formally real if it actually exists. The idea of God—who is an infinite substance—has more objective reality than ideas about finite substances (the essences of things). In turn, these ideas about finite substances have more objective reality than ideas of particular things.
The Meditator’s hierarchy of different substances is essentially a complex way of saying that, if God exists, then He is infinite and the nature of the whole universe is contained within Him. In Descartes’s time, most philosophers would have been familiar with the difference between objective and formal reality, but these terms are likely to confuse readers today, particularly because they actually mean the opposite of what they initially sound like. To take an example, a map’s formal reality is that it’s a physical object made of paper, while its objective reality is the territory it represents. To prove that God exists, Descartes applies this distinction to ideas. Ideas have formal reality because they exist, as ideas, in someone’s mind. But they have objective reality because they are ideas about something—even if the thing they represent doesn’t actually exist.
Themes
The natural light indicates that causes always have “at least as much reality” as their effects, since it’s impossible for something to come from nothing. An idea’s formal reality comes from the formal reality of the mind that created it: an idea exists because it came from someone’s mind (which also exists). But an idea’s objective reality, or its ability to represent reality, cannot come from the mind’s objective reality (which is to be a thinking thing). For instance, the mind alone can’t produce the idea of a stone. Instead, the true cause of this idea must be something with the formal reality of a stone—meaning an actual stone.
The “at least as much reality” principle effectively means that everything comes from something greater than itself. Just as a large object can’t fit inside a much smaller object, a large concept can’t fit inside a smaller concept. For instance, the idea of a foot cannot contain the idea of a whole human body—we cannot know everything about the human body just based on a perfect understanding of the foot. This principle is a key part of the Meditator’s argument about God, but it’s also a basic principle of logical deduction: for a proof to be valid, the axioms at the beginning of it must implicitly contain its conclusion within them.
Themes
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The Meditator concludes that the original cause of any idea must have at least as much formal reality as the idea has objective reality. It’s true that one idea can cause another, but there has to be an original cause with formal reality. In other words, ideas are like pictures (or even pictures of other pictures). They can never be more perfect than the original thing they represent. This means that, if any of the Meditator’s ideas have more objective reality than the Meditator has formal reality—meaning he can think of something more perfect than himself—then something with that greater level of perfection must really exist.
The basic idea here is that the kinds of things that actually exist determine the kinds of ideas we can have; it’s impossible to think of a thing that has absolutely nothing to do with reality. The Meditator isn’t denying that we can imagine fictional things—instead, he’s saying that reality provides the building blocks for our ideas, and we cannot have an idea with more parts than we have building blocks. Even the wildest fantasies are just new combinations of things that already exist: for instance, one-legged tie-dye unicorns don’t exist, but the idea of them is made up of ideas about elements that do exist, like legs, colors, horns, and so on. In contrast, it is truly impossible to imagine a color that does not exist (and is not just a combination of other colors that do). This is why the meditator concludes that the cause(s) of an idea must be more perfect than the idea itself. In this context, perfection means that it belongs to a deeper level in the taxonomy that Descartes has laid out: an infinite substance is more perfect than a finite substance, which is more perfect than a specific object.
Themes
The Meditator starts looking for an idea more perfect than himself. Ideas about things like hot and cold, colors, and sounds aren’t clear or distinct—it’s impossible to know if they really exist at all, and if they do, they could come from the Meditator’s mind because they have a very low grade of perfection. Meanwhile, ideas about size, shape, and movement could also come from the Meditator’s mind—even if the mind is immaterial, it can count and recognize the passage of time, which means it can independently conceive of three-dimensional space and objects located within it that move or change over time.
The Meditator merges his analysis of levels of perfection with his taxonomy of the levels of science. Ideas based on sensory perceptions (like ideas of temperature, color, sound, size, and motion) are untrustworthy and imperfect because they tell us about particular things in particular forms, and not about those things’ essences. All the building blocks for these perceptions are already contained within the human mind (which appears to have sense perceptions, even if these perceptions aren’t actually real). Of course, this implies that simply collecting observations about these kinds of characteristics is a less perfect kind of science than trying to understand the fundamental essence of things—which is the purpose of Descartes’s philosophy.
Themes
Yet the idea of God—the all-knowing, all-powerful, eternal, infinite substance that created everything—is more perfect than the Meditator’s mind. So it could only come from one source: God. As a finite substance, the Meditator’s mind could never imagine an infinite substance unless it actually existed. Just imagining the opposite of a finite substance wouldn’t be enough—rather, infinite substance is altogether different. In fact, the idea of God has the most objective reality of any idea—even if minds like the Meditator’s can never fully comprehend what it means to be infinite, the idea of God’s infiniteness is so striking that it’s easily the most clear and distinct idea in existence. Finally, the Meditator can never become infinite, which further proves that he could not have come up with the idea of God on his own.
The Meditator concludes that God exists based on his principle that an idea cannot be caused by something with less perfection than it has. This means that finite substances (like the human mind) cannot create ideas of infinite substances (like God) all on their own. Put differently, since everything that humans can ever encounter in the world is finite, they couldn’t understand infinity unless something truly infinite gave them that idea. To take an analogy, people could never develop a perfect idea of what a zebra is if the only information they were ever given was the shape of its tail—either they would need to perceive the whole zebra (which has the formal reality of being a zebra), or someone would have to teach them what a zebra is (or present them with an idea with the objective reality of representing a zebra).
Themes
Next, the Meditator asks whether he could exist without God. If he created himself, he would have chosen to make himself perfect. He could not have simply always existed, because preserving something’s existence requires just as much power as creating it in the first place—and if the Meditator had that power, he would know it by now. His parents also don’t have this power. A being less perfect than God could not have created the Meditator, because this could not explain why he has an idea of God. And because unity is part of perfection, multiple beings that each represent a different part of perfection could not have worked together to create the idea of perfection in the Meditator.
Having shown that God exists, the Meditator now argues that God is his own creator. Something has to have created him and kept him alive, and God clearly seems like the best candidate. Through this argument, Descartes completes a rational case for the basic principles of Catholic doctrine. This is a crucial point: Descartes believed that his philosophy was entirely compatible with the church’s teachings—in fact, he thought that he offered the church a way to definitively prove its doctrines to outsiders. In this sense, like the generations of Scholastic thinkers who preceded him, Descartes saw no conflict between faith and reason—rather, he thought that science would vindicate religion by proving that faith in God is justified.
Themes
Finally, the Meditator asks where his idea of God came from. He concludes that he couldn’t imagine it or receive it through the senses, so it must be innate. This makes sense: like an artisan marking his work, God would logically plant the idea of His existence in the beings He created. To summarize his argument, the Meditator states that he could not have the idea of God if God didn’t exist. And God “cannot be a deceiver” since God is perfect, and deception is a kind of imperfection. Before his next meditation, the Meditator takes some time to contemplate the beauty, power, and wonder of God.
The Meditator reaches several other important conclusions about the nature of God. His point about God being a “deceiver” is crucial because it speaks to the thought experiment he presented at the beginning of the book, in which his perceptions were really illusions planted in his mind by God or an evil demon. Now that he knows that God is perfect and would not deceive him, he can say with certainty that this thought experiment is not really true—which means that his perceptions really are trustworthy, as he will explain in the next Meditation. Finally, the Meditator’s comment about taking time for contemplation might seem like nothing more than a transition, but it also speaks volumes about Descartes’s method and view of philosophy. Specifically, Descartes thought that truly knowing something requires not just reaching a conclusion about it once but also reflecting on that conclusion until it’s like second nature. This is similar to the difference between learning an idea once in class and actually studying it in enough depth to understand and retain it over the long term. Because he saw time as the crucial ingredient for learning, Descartes intended for his readers to approach this book slowly, reading a chapter at a time, just like his Meditator.
Themes
