Read-Along—Meditations on First Philosophy (3 of 6)

Third Meditation: The Existence of God

Some things to help you tackle Meditation Three

Take a deep breath. This is the longest, most difficult, and least plausible of all the meditations. But it’s also pivotal. Here, indeed, is that step in the proof, “and then a miracle occurs.”

At the conclusion of the Second Meditation, Descartes has gone as far as his method can take him. He knows that (1) he exists, (2) he is a thinking thing (substance), and (3) he has a whole bunch of thoughts, like ideas, images, memories, sensations, and so forth. What he doesn’t know is if there are also things in some “external” world that “correspond” to any of these thoughts. You should also be in the same situation. Look around you. What do you see?

Is this a bird, a photograph of a bird, or an AI-generated image of a bird?

A hummingbird at the window? So you have a perception (or idea) of a hummingbird in your mind. That much you know with certainty, because it is immediately present to your awareness. But, above and beyond the perception, is there also a material thing other than yourself that is causing that perception? And if so, does that cause of the bird-perception also resemble it? Your bird-perception is green, for instance, is the thing that causes your green perception also green? Maybe the cause of your perception is actually an orange, tentacled biology student in the year 3000 stimulating some electrodes in a human brain that it’s keeping alive in a tank for a senior project. And your conscious awareness is just a secretion of impulses from that brain. You know you have thoughts; but you don’t have a way of comparing them with the real world to see if those thoughts and the world are anything alike. To do that, you would need to have access both to your bird-thought and to the thing causing the bird-thought so you could compare them. But all you’ve got is the bird-thought.

This is where God comes to the rescue. If there were some powerful being that could put a hummingbird-thought in your mind while there is also hummingbird-thing in a physical world, then maybe, just maybe, the thought and the thing resemble each other.

In this meditation, Descartes tries to escape the box he’s doubted himself into by proving that there is a godlike something that could possibly certify our knowledge. He’ll have to postpone showing that this big powerful being is also trustworthy till another meditation.

About a third of the way into this Meditation, he sets up the big proof by dredging up some principles and concepts from medieval philosophers. He talks about two types of reality, or being, usually translated as “formal reality” and “objective reality.” A thing’s formal reality is the reality of the thing itself, and there is a hierarchy of formal reality, so different things can have different levels of formal reality. At the lowest level are impossible objects like circles that have right angles. They would have no formal reality at all. Properties of substances, like colors (physical) or thoughts (mental) have more reality than impossible objects. However, they can’t exist on their own: They have to be properties of some substance. Next level up on the hierarchy are finite substances like bodies or minds. Finally, perfect beings (infinite substances) would have the greatest level of formal reality, greater even than finite substances.

Did you get all that? The next concept is a little harder. When Descartes speaks of something’s objective reality, he doesn’t mean anything like what you think he means. The only things that have objective reality are things like images, paintings, or thoughts that represent something else. The objective reality of a representational painting is the formal reality of the thing painted, if it existed. So, two thoughts, since they are both properties of a mind, have the same formal reality as each other, but they can have different levels of objective reality. A thought about King Henry VIII has a greater objective reality than a thought about a color.

Those are key notions that Descartes introduces for his proof of the existence of God. One other important notion is that nothing of a lower level of reality can cause something of a higher level of reality. Hummingbirds can cause their colors (by supporting them) but green cannot cause hummingbirds.

There’s a lot more in this meditation to grasp, and a lot more vocabulary to master, but most of it is in the service of heading off potential objections. This argument for God’s existence is by far the biggest hurdle to get past. Go ahead and give it a try.

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