Descartes’ Philosophy: Innate Ideas and the Existence of God
Analysis and Explanation (rating 0-5 points)
The immutable truth, the basis of all philosophy for Descartes, is the existence of the self as a thinking subject. In principle, this truth does not imply the existence of any other reality. Therefore, the problem posed is how to achieve certainty that there is something other than your own thinking. To reply, Descartes makes a kind of balance of what is true: thought as activity, and the ideas you think. Thinking, says Descartes, is always thinking ideas. The concept of idea changed from previous philosophy: for Descartes, thought is not directly attributed to things, but to ideas. The claim that the object of thought is ideas leads Descartes to distinguish two aspects in them: ideas as mental acts (“modes of thought”) and ideas as objective content. As for mental acts, all have the same reality. In terms of content, the reality is different.
In analyzing ideas, Descartes distinguishes the following types:
- Adventitious ideas are those that appear to come from our external experience (e.g., idea of a man, a tree).
- Factitious ideas are those that the mind constructs from other ideas; they come from our imagination or will, or other ideas.
None of these ideas can serve as a starting point for demonstrating the existence of extra-mental reality. The first, because they come from abroad, and their validity depends on the problematic existence of external reality. The latter, because being built by thought, can also be questioned. But Descartes claims that there is a third type of ideas that come neither from outside nor are constructed from other ideas. They are what thought has in itself; they are innate, such as the ideas of thought and existence, which do not come from external experience and are not built by us, but we find them in the very perception of “I think, therefore I am.”
Among innate ideas, Descartes discovered the idea of infinity, which he immediately identifies with the idea of God. He argues that this idea is not adventitious (we do not have direct experience of God) and attempts to show that it is not factitious either. The notion of God implies the idea of infinity, so this idea (the infinite) is not derived from that (the finite), and therefore is not artificial. The finite is, for Descartes, the negation of the infinite; therefore, it is not possible to have the concept of the finite without the idea of infinity. This argument is known as the “finiteness of the self”: individual beings are finite (only thought is absolute). “I have not been able to produce… [it] has had to produce a being having all perfections.” Whence then the idea of infinity? “Not come from nothing” (from nothing comes nothing). “Can not come either from myself because I am finite and the finite can not originate the idea of infinity, so the idea of God, the infinite, is innate.”
For Descartes, the idea of infinity, as reflected in the text, “has been made by a nature more perfect than I… can only come from the same infinite being, God, then God exists.” Thus, Descartes proves the existence of God from the idea of God. A similar argument is found in St. Augustine: “in our understanding are necessary truths, immutable, eternal… the foundation of these truths can not be the human mind is imperfect… therefore, [they] receive their eternal value of truth which is God.” Descartes also supports the ontological argument of Anselm, a proof of the existence of God from the idea of God: “all men have an idea of God, understand God a being such that it is impossible to think one greater than Him… a being must exist not only in our thoughts but also in reality as otherwise it would be possible to think of one greater than Him and therefore fall into contradiction, then God exists not only in thought but in reality.” In these arguments, there is a leap from the plane of knowledge to the plane of existence, of reality. Finally, God appears as a guarantee of the criterion of truth: in God is the ultimate foundation of clear knowledge: “God is absolute, perfect, good… and can not permit that I’m mistaken…”
3. Contextualization (rating 0-3 points)
With Descartes, modern philosophy begins. He is the philosopher who inaugurated a new era characterized by the absolute autonomy of philosophy and reason. This implies that the exercise of reason should not be restricted or regulated by any authority or by religious faith.
This period, the seventeenth century, is characterized as the era of absolutism, the Counter-Reformation, and the final triumph of the new science. The absolutist mentality embodies despotism and servility as basic forms of human behavior: the king, the lord, may exercise the right of any subordinate. It is this mentality that created the best and unique. Imbued also by this way of thinking, Descartes sought to establish absolute knowledge, a unique philosophy of universal and universally accepted value.
The emergence of modern philosophy, beginning with Descartes, is intimately connected with the triumph of modern science and the foundations laid by Kepler, Copernicus, and Galileo. Scientific discoveries were the fruit of reason and mathematics, and mathematical principles are the basis for all scientific and philosophical thinking; they will be the model for knowing. The ideal of modern science is a deductive system in which laws are deduced from certain first principles and concepts. The fundamental problem is to determine where those ideas and principles come from, from which we derive the theorems of science. The response of rationalism is that the origin lies in the understanding, which has it in itself and for itself.
The first step in his philosophizing is given to disabuse himself of studies; he feels tortured by having accepted a certain number of truths without having checked them personally. Therefore, what characterizes Descartes’ ideal is deducing from certain clear and undeniable principles a system of truths that provide accurate information on what the world is. And also, the need for a specific method for making philosophy a science rather than a field of discussion, since the variety of views was, for him, a depressing spectacle. So, it was necessary to find a single true philosophy. He claimed that he had not come to that philosophy because he had not used the proper method. Thus, he sets himself on the mathematical model, a method based on intuition and deduction, as reflected in the proposed text. Rationalism provides valid and true knowledge about reality, which comes not from the senses but from reason, from understanding itself. According to rationalism, the senses give us information about the universe, but this information is confusing and often uncertain. So, the last of the elements to be used in scientific knowledge are clear and precise ideas, not from experience but from understanding. This rationalist theory about the origin of ideas is called nativism, as it maintains that there are innate ideas, innate understanding, which are not generalizations from sensory experience.
Thus, we can say that the characteristics of rationalism are total confidence in rational knowledge, the underestimation of sensitive knowledge, affirming the existence of innate ideas, and the affirmation of the need for necessary and universal science: mathematics are constructed, and hence a priori judgments are universal and necessary. Science is not valid unless it has that universality and necessity. Rationalism also defends the rationality of the world: everything is justified, nothing is accidental or incidental; everything may be known and justified by reason.