Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept (11 page)

But all of these presuppose the God who reveals. What happens when establishing the foundation for knowledge precedes confidence in Being itself? What happens when epistemology preempts ontology? The story can be told historically. We will begin with Descartes.
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The seventeenth century was plagued with skepticism. Religious diversity was beginning to run rampant: Luther’s tribe was increasing across Europe, rivaled by Calvin’s tribe, and both were answered by the Counter Reformation. The basic intellectual unity of the Christian worldview was being shattered from within with contending parties willing to do battle for their version of truth. It is no wonder that thoughtful people wondered if there was any way to get to a truth that could be held with final certainty. Enter Descartes.

René Descartes (1596–1650), a fully orthodox Catholic philosopher, made a stellar attempt to find a way to knowledge that could not possibly be false. His concept of God was identical to that of Aquinas.
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What he was searching for was a way to show that this concept was certainly true. So he devised a method of radical doubt in order to find the certain truth.
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In brief, the argument is this: God might not exist; the external world might not exist; but at least I must exist because I think. To wit:
I think; therefore I am
. After all, even if the content of what I think is not itself so, I am something because I am aware. Even if I doubt that I am, I must be or I wouldn’t be doubting.

On this rests the case Descartes made for the certainty that at least he—a thinking thing—exists. He went on to analyze what made this conclusion valid, concluding that its clearness and distinctness and the impossibility to conclude otherwise guaranteed its truth. The certitude of this knowledge rests not on any revelation either directly from God or indirectly from a book, but solely on human reason (the consciousness of thinking) itself. One can know this on one’s own. Hence the autonomy of human reason.

That there are a variety of ways to understand Descartes’s argument is evident from the vast literature that has grown up around it.
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I will cut to the chase. First, if
I think; therefore I am
is taken as an argument, it is circular and therefore invalid. The conclusion (“I”) is already in the premise. But there is good reason to think that Descartes did not mean the statement to be an argument, but rather the description of an intuition.
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If it is an intuition, what is it that is intuited? Descartes would seem to say the “I” or ego, the seat of consciousness. Put another way,
Consciousness is; therefore a conscious one (I) exists
. This does not, of course, mean that everything the I is conscious of exists. I may have a consciousness of the other—the world in general—but the world may not exist. I may have a rich imaginative life including not just a seeming experience of the world around but mathematical systems, philosophic ideas, memories of music and so forth. But none of them may be outside my mind. Descartes realizes this, and so he constructs an argument to demonstrate that under certain circumstances what one is conscious of necessarily exists.

He reflects on what makes him so certain that thinking is going on. He concludes that it is the
clearness
and
distinctness
of the idea. It is so clear and distinct, so unable to be thought otherwise, that there must be a reality to sustain it. Of course, Descartes has other clear and distinct ideas, the most significant of which is an idea of God: “By the name God I understand a substance that is infinite [eternal, immutable], independent, all-knowing, all-powerful, and by which I myself and everything else, if anything else does exist, have been created.”
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This notion, Descartes argues, could not have been solely a product of his own fallible mind; the finite cannot from itself form a concept of the infinite. Rather it has to have a concept of the infinite in order to grasp the finite, and that must have derived from the infinite. Therefore the idea of God as an infinite being must have been given him by God. In short, God as such a being must exist.

In a second line of argument, Descartes considers whether he who has the idea of God can exist if God does not exist. He concludes that he himself would have to have the perfections of God (such as infinity) to have been able to cause himself to have the idea of God. He obviously does not possess those perfections. Since he does have ideas of those perfections, God must have caused them. Therefore God exists.
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I exist and God exists, concludes Descartes, but what about the material world? Since such a God exists, he would not deceive. And since I have a clear and distinct sense that there is such a world (even though I may make errors about just what that material world is), the existence of that world is certain. The very strong conviction that there is an objective world proves that an external world exists.

What I have summarized, very briefly to be sure, is the argument in Descartes’s first four meditations. From the autonomy of the self (the thinker) comes the certitude first of one’s own existence. Based on that, God’s existence is certain. And based on that, the existence of the external world is certain. Epistemology precedes ontology.

In “Meditation V,” Descartes returns to the issue of God’s existence, this time giving his own version of the ontological argument—an argument asserting the inherent necessity for there to be a single being whose essence is existence, from whom derive all other beings in the universe. This argument leads him to conclude that unless such a being exists, his own reasoning has no reason to be considered certain:

Descartes has moved a very long way from his radical doubt that anything at all exists, including himself. He has moved, one could say, from existential angst to intellectual arrogance.
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Here in tone as well as substance is the core of the modern mind: the declaration that human reason (while known and experienced to be fallible), resting on the existence of God, whose existence is proved by that human reason, has the ability to acquire “perfect knowledge of an infinitude of things.” The Enlightenment confidence in the capacity and power of the human mind does not stem directly from the specifics of Descartes’s argument, but it certainly was a major impetus to that end.

Hosts of subsequent philosophers have poked holes both in Descartes’s three arguments for the existence of God and in his argument for the certitude of his own existence. The weaker of the arguments are clearly those for the existence of God.

First, the first two arguments for the existence of God assume the notion of sufficient reason (causality)—that for any given thing, idea or event there must be a reason sufficient to bring it about. While there are both common-sense and sophisticated reasons that lend credibility to the principle, Descartes does not subject it to his method of radical doubt. Of course the notion of sufficient reason can be doubted; perhaps the world is chaotic or indeterminate (e.g., one reading of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle). The principle of sufficient reason does not have to be untrue in order for the conclusion of the argument to be less than certain; it only needs to be able to be doubted, and like the existence of the external world, it can be. Descartes’s radical doubt is not so radical as he seems to believe.

Second, these two arguments require that the idea of God be clear and distinct. Is that the case with the notion of God as “a substance that is infinite [eternal, immutable], independent, all-knowing, all-powerful, and by which I myself and everything else, if anything else does exist, have been created”? If it is not clear and distinct (and it may not be), that disqualifies it as a part of the argument. Besides, what is a
clear
and
distinct
idea? The notion has, so far as I know, never been clarified sufficiently. That is, the notion itself does not seem to be clear and distinct. My idea of a pink elephant or a unicorn actually seems more clear and distinct than my idea of such a complex being as is necessary for the argument. But unicorns and pink elephants—so far as I know—do not exist.

Third, Descartes’s ontological argument in “Meditation V” seems to come out of the blue. It does not depend on any of the arguments in the first four meditations. And what he draws from it is that only if God exists can he trust his own reasoning. That would have to include the foundational arguments he gives for the certitude of his own existence.

John Cottingham is correct: “The importance of God in the Cartesian system can scarcely be overstressed.”
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While he began from certain self-knowledge, Descartes realized that he could not sustain his philosophy solely on the self-certainty of his own existence—that is, the autonomy of his human reason. God needed to exist in order for Descartes to trust his own reasoning. At the same time, making the certainty of God’s existence rest on the certainty of his own existence was the first step toward the undermining of trust in human reason. For if the initial argument or intuition is in error, or if it yields too weak a plank on which to erect a case for God’s existence, then the certitude of God’s existence is undermined and skepticism results. At this point, one also has no case for the certainty of the existence of the natural world.
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It appears then that Descartes has not made his case for the existence of God. And with that goes his case for the certitude of human knowledge. But the problem goes deeper than that. The very notion that
I think; therefore I am
makes a case for the existence of an ego certain enough to sustain an epistemology that justifies certain knowledge is itself suspect. Let us see why.

Cogito, Ergo Sum

On the surface,
I think; therefore I am
seems to be a valid argument. Centuries before, Augustine used it in both his dialogue on free will and his handbook on Christian doctrine.

That, then, settles the matter for Augustine. He does not examine just what it is that constitutes the “I” that knows it is alive. Nor does he do so in his handbook of Christian doctrine:

The first part of Augustine’s argument seems fair enough. Surely if I ask the question “Do I exist?” then I exist. But I do not yet know who or what I am. What characterizes the asker? All that can be established by the argument taken strictly is that an asker has asked a question about his or her own existence, the answer to which must be yes. This asker could be dreaming, in which case anything else that the asker might wish to know would be suspect. The asker could be the only conscious being in existence. The asker’s reasoning could on all other issues be utterly disconnected from reality.

Descartes needs to establish the ability of the “I” (ego, self) to reason from certain self-awareness to the existence of that which is other than himself—the world and God. Through self-reflection Descartes observes that his self-awareness is characterized by being
clear
and
distinct
. It is this, he says, that gives him the intellectual certainty that he seeks. But surely, even if we know what it is to have a clear and distinct idea (something I am unwilling to grant), there is no particular reason to think that is what guarantees the existence of that which is so clear and distinct. Descartes might reply that God would not deceive us by allowing us to have a clear and distinct idea that did not comport with reality, but that would be to assume what Descartes is trying to prove—the existence of a God who would not deceive. The argument would be circular.

John Cottingham puts it this way:

There would seem to be no way for Descartes to escape from the lonely confines of an ego with no boundaries and therefore no definition.

Nietzsche sees this and much more in his devastating critique of Descartes’s
cogito
: