Disconnecting the Cogito from the Aufklarung
In Leviticus 19 God speaks to Moses:
Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy for I the Lord your God am holy. (19:1)
Next comes a list of laws designed to direct the individual listener to orient him/herself to a larger community. “You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; and you shall not lie to one another.” The list goes on until we arrive at “love your neighbor as yourself.” When I deeply think about these lines, I find it extremely difficult to imagine this kind of relationship to God. Moses is not undergoing personal transformation: he is a mere transmitter of a message that is not his, or is it directly to him and for him. The message is about the salvation of a people as a people. Yet there is something very personal in what is being asked of the listener: you are a member of a community and your behavior within that community matters to its overall well-being and therefore your overall well-being. There is a reciprocal relationship between you and the community. God is simply revealing, through Moses, expectations about what each member of the community owes to the others. Individuality gets its meaning from being an Israelite and aligning one’s behavior with its moral vision. This is all that is revealed here.
When I try to connect myself with this kind of spiritual practice — meditating on God as a connection to an existing community — I struggle to envision myself as part of a broader group seeking collective salvation. I struggle to imagine how I should react to Moses’ message today. How do I attach this message to myself when I don’t see myself as attached to a community that is providing me with purpose and meaning in the same way Moses is doing for the Israelites? I imagine the Roman Stoics (Seneca and Epictetus in particular) experiencing something similar as the Republic was transforming into an increasingly militarized Empire. It lead them to increasingly rely on an abstract concept of community often translated as “the commonwealth of humanity.”
I don’t think that I’m alone in this wilderness. The Old Testament God’s message, channeled through Moses, is a collective message. The context of the people of Israel is given, and God’s relationship is with them as a people. If there is a personal message, it derives from the collective message. All of the commandments in Leviticus are about how to relate harmoniously to the others with whom you live. If one meditates on Moses’ teaching — this is clearly required of the listener — one’s interiority derives from an outside. This outside is the relationship between oneself and a well-defined community of others who are part of a providential relationship with a powerful God. The values and moral standards of this community are given by its God, but they are not otherworldly standards. Anachoresis as permanent monkish withdrawal is not required or even encouraged. God offers, through Moses, guidelines for dealing with the here and now so that the people can be saved as a people. The notion of a pact between a people and its meaning-giving God is an essential act of faith that makes it possible to undertake the personal transformation required of each member of the community.
My inability to connect back to a people in this way is not merely a defect within myself. This inability results from a long history that has decommissioned God from any collective role and made matters of spirituality into a purely personal undertaking disconnected from a pre-existing community. When I truly listen to Moses’ message in Leviticus, I get the outside-in flow of seeking to internalize and understand the values and standards he delivers. But I struggle to flow back from inside to outside because I’m not sure what the communal outside is today or if it even exists. What community am I apart of and what salvation is it seeking that would allow Moses’ message to land home? I acutely feel this absence of a communal outside when I try to meditate on Old Testament passages like Leviticus 19.
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Side Note: This is not to say that I don’t have communities where I find comfort and purpose. I have plenty of them and many friends that I deeply appreciate. I would even say that I have a sense of purpose, but this purpose does not derive from membership in a community. It derives from going out and creating community. This is different than the kind of community that Moses was addressing, which impacts the way in which the idea of God as a source of meaning and purpose can be transposed from one kind of community to the other. Within Modernity, community is not given and is not the source of values. Humanity must create community out of its own resources. But this leaves us always seeking a sense of home as we seem to have to constantly make it up.
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This brings me, somewhat circuitously, to Descartes’ Meditations. My own meditations over the last couple of years have taken me through ancient philosophy — Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics — and a re-engagement with Augustine’s Confessions. It seems inevitable that I would arrive at Descartes, and particularly the Meditations. Descartes is generally seen as the pivotal figure of an emerging modernity as the triumph of reason over the superstitions of religion. This has often been seen as the process of putting humanity back in charge — back at the center of the universe — using only the power of its own rationality. Rather than the providential outside as given and human interiority (our souls) shaped through the striving to remain connected with that outside, Descartes brings us the isolated individual reliant only on his/her own cogito as the only thing that can be trusted to actually exist. The soul is reduced to a possession of the cogito, or the cogito itself is the soul. In either case, the soul is demoted from its privileged place in ancient philosophy as those animating aspects of ourselves that connect us into a greater cosmos. Our souls, if they exist, are existentially cut off from any outside that may not even exist.
In short, the first two Meditations bring an end to any notion of a soul that is woven into a providentially ordered cosmos. When Socrates implored his fellow citizens to “take care of your souls” through philosophia (love of wisdom), he envisioned a soul harmoniously interwoven with the larger cosmos. As such, philosophia was a way of living (to borrow Pierre Hadot’s phrase) and not just systematic knowing. Descartes’ Meditations effectively devalue this vision of philosophy as delusional because it is not grounded on prior certainties. The Third and Fourth Meditations will attempt to reconnect the cogito to God and an outside world, but this effort will yield a profoundly different vision of the soul that bears little resemblance to the Greek and Hellenistic vision, let alone that of Moses and a people.
In the Cartesian-inspired world, as the story goes, the interwoveness of cosmos and soul is definitely brought to an end. The immaterial mind stands against a material universe that is mathematically knowable. On the face of it, this sounds like Plato. Both share a belief in the geometrical and mathematical nature of the universe and the immaterial soul/mind, but their moral dispositions are very different. The Cartesian challenge is to know the world and to be absolutely certain about what you know. The Platonic (and Stoic) challenge is to be in tune with it. The difference between an ethics of certainty and an ethics of harmony is paramount. To be sure, Plato’s ethics requires knowledge, but it is a far more sophisticated understanding of knowledge than we find in Descartes. For Plato, knowledge can be techne (knowing how to do something like build a house), episteme (being able to provide a clear definition of something like justice or courage), and gnosis (experiential understanding of something beyond definition like beauty and “the good”). Thus in Platonism there is an aesthetic experience of the universe (as cosmos) that is absent in Descartes, who sees a material world whose aesthetic qualities are merely incidental. In fact, aesthetics gets in the way of certainty. The only path to certainty is through procedural reasoning — what Descartes called “method.” Aesthetics is anti-method and therefore inferior as a kind of knowledge, if it even could be considered a kind of knowledge for Descartes.
The Cartesian body is part of that material universe and is absolutely severed from the mind. There is a hard boundary between the two such that the body’s existence can be doubted whereas the mind’s existence is established as certain. In this worldview, meaning flows out from “the subject” as it uses its instrumental reason to shape the mechanized world in its own image. Religion becomes permanently separated from philosophy, and philosophy becomes aligned with “science” as the relentless search for certainties on which civilization can be built. In his Letter of Dedication to the Meditations, Descartes acknowledges the separation of theology from philosophy. This separation has already occurred. He is not inventing it. Rather, he is consciously, if reluctantly, embracing it, and this embrace is what I want to try to understand in this first of my meditations on his Meditations.
Here is what I’d like to say about this separation: Descartes sees the untethering of philosophy from theology as nihilistic, and he wants to walk right into this implication to see if he can find a way out. Put in terms of John Vervaeke and the meaning crisis, he creates his own meaning crisis by releasing his meditational exercise from any explicit beliefs received through revealed religion, specifically the Jesuit Catholicism of his day. In the first three Meditations, he consciously and deliberately lets go of this source of meaning to see if he can find it again by relying only on his own method of scientific thought. (Meditations One and Two are the letting go; Meditations Three and Four are the reconnecting.) In the process, he reveals the nihilistic dangers of this separation of theology from philosophy, which we are living with today and that many are trying to reconnect, including myself. This revelation is a lesson worth re-learning and re-activating frequently.
What is the lesson? It is this: the I as cogito is spread across a nihilistic chasm bounded on one side by nothingness and on the other by unattainable perfection (explicitly stated in Meditation Four, 54). Insofar as this existential condition relies on procedural reason (method) and the demand for certainty (expressed as a profound fear of “error”), we will always find nothingness far more credible than perfection. The reason is this: to believe in perfection is to believe in a providential source that tells us what perfection is. In the absence of God as this external source, we will seek his replacement. This will require us to fundamentally believe in a source of perfection that will always outstrip our ability to be certain about it. The more we strive for it, the more its lack of certainty is revealed. Communism collapsed, Fukyama’s End of History that was taken for granted in the Clinton years collapsed with the Twin Towers, even Einstein’s theories are under pressure, and many are still waiting for the Messianic apocalypse.
As these certainties are revealed as illusory, the alliance between certainty and perfection is weakened. We either go back to the drawing board or we start to think that the nothingness side of Descartes’ vision of the self looks more and more certain. Of course, Lyotard pointed out this alliance between meta-narratives and scientific modernity and how it had been weakening throughout the twentieth century. The Postmodern Condition arises from within this alliance as it weakens under the increasing march of procedural rationality that can only treat grand narratives of perfection as forms of myth, and therefore as inferior forms of knowledge. Our sources of perfection will always be battling with each other because none of them will ever attain certainty.
Given this, nothingness provides a much more solid foundation for certainty. It is easier to be certain about nothingness than it is to be certain about attaining a utopian End of History or even about open-ended human progress. When the meta-narratives of perfection are weakened, our only recourse is nothingness, which increasingly appears to be far more certain. Atheism, which features prominently in Descartes’ prefaces, becomes a new form of doctrinal belief in nothingness.
It seems to me that Descartes saw the emergence of this existential nihilism rather vividly, and he captured it in the Meditations. If Nietzsche saw it late in the game, Descartes’ Meditations testifies to its beginning. Far from being the vanguard of Aufklarung and modernity, Descartes, for me, ends up being a fairly prescient proto-Nietzschean who showed us, early on, why modernity would live within a nihilistic pendulum swing between a desire for perfection on the one side and the real possibility of nothingness as the certain basis of our existence on the other. His Meditations deliberately stare into the face of this brand of nihilism where the demand for certainty and the belief in perfection will have an uneasy alliance leading to the eternal recurrence of nothingness as our reality.
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Obviously, we shouldn’t see the Meditations as a spontaneous human endeavor disconnected from its moment in history. This is a historically determined moment of nihilistic confrontation. Descartes was particularly well suited to provide a testimony for it. To put it as succinctly as possible, the institutions that provided life with meaning were crumbling around him. He stood within the crumbling institutions of religion (raised as a Jesuit), yet he was more than sympathetic with the “scientific revolution” already underway. He was seeking to put it all back together with a systematic philosophy that would explain everything through mathematical and mechanical reasoning. In this quest, he arrives at the need for the Meditations because at the basis for his desire for system is a need for the human mind to be able to free itself from error and achieve certainty using only its own inherent capabilities. This, of course, is well known, but the story is often told as a tale of modernity’s inevitability, not a tale of a new form of nihilistic confrontation that will be modernity’s inheritance.
A digression through Kant is in order here. He stands directly between Descartes and Nietzsche. Standing in-between them, Kant codified this narrative in his opening line to “What is Enlightenment?”: “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.” History thus became a story of philosophy throwing off the baggage of religion, which is now understood as an inferior form of knowledge, and aligning itself with science as the quest for certainty. This is the birth of reason as instrumental rationality, to borrow a phrase from the Frankfurt School. Religion is explicitly demoted and condescended to as myth-making and superstition. It is not even considered legitimate knowledge so much as delusion.
For Kant, the separation of reason from religion was the hallmark of the Enlightenment (Auflkarung), but, again, it wasn’t an active casting off of religion so much as a demotion: “Men will of their own accord gradually work their way out of barbarism so long as artificial measures are not deliberately adopted to keep them in it.” Of these artificial measures, “religious immaturity is the most pernicious of all.” Religion, at least in Kant’s essay, didn’t need to be abandoned so much as realigned and reformed through the public use of reason — just like everything else. This story is, of course, a look backward that imposes its own religious myth of mankind’s progress. Freedom is explicitly an unleashing and untethering of mankind’s inherent capacity for reason from institutional constraints that place fetters on that natural capacity. This is explicitly a tale of salvation, but one where God is unnecessary. Salvation now looks like Aufklarung as “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.” Man is to blame for his deluded institutions, and only man, through the “public use of reason,” can save himself.
This is the ascetic ideal turned on its head and set free from religion, which used to be the bearer of the nihilistic denigration of this world and the way to redemption. Kant’s Aufklarung makes religion responsible for the fallen world. It has created the fallen world while thinking that it was redeeming it. To be clear, the world is still in need of saving: “As things are at present, we still have a long way to go before men as a whole can be in a position (or can even be put into a position) of using their own understanding confidently and well in religious matters, without outside guidance.” The religiously inclined, immature world needs to be saved from traditional religion, not by religion. No external God or Savior as “outside guidance” is coming. Moses’ address to the people of Israel makes no sense in Kant’s cosmopolitan and rigorously nationalized world order. Man must do it himself using his own capacity for “thinking freely” — a capacity that has always been there. Reason is the redemptive God embedded in mankind, which has now become its own Messiah.
To be clear, religion has a place, but only if it is reformed by reason as man’s natural capacity to emerge from barbarism. Such a reformation untethers religion from the state and makes it a purely personal and private matter: “So long as he [the monarch] sees to it that all true or imagined improvements are compatible with the civil order, he can otherwise leave his subjects to do whatever they find necessary to their salvation, which is none of his business” (emphasis added). The business of the state is the business of progress. Civil order is aligned with economics and politics as the sciences of progress. The salvation of the people comes from embracing its own instrumental capacity to make the world conform to its vision of freedom. Religion has little to do with any of this other than perhaps as a source of private morality for those in power or a consolation for those left behind, or, as the Civil Rights Movement shows us, a powerful collective moral force for making the community live up to its promises to all of its members.
There is an interesting movement here that I want to focus on for a moment. Specifically, Kant’s vision of history puts mankind back at the center after a 150 year wandering in the wilderness. I want to unpack this a bit. Before Copernicus, so the story goes, mankind found itself as the primary beneficiary of a providentially arranged cosmos. Existence was never an obsessive philosophical question. Rather, philosophy was mainly about how we orient ourselves to the cosmos. For Plato and neoplatonic Christianity, the individual’s moral development depended on finding ways to participate in the providence of the cosmos. The orientation is outward and participatory. If there is an interiority of “the subject,” it is an interiority that is trying to connect with a providential outside. For Plato’s Socrates, this meant breaking free of one’s false beliefs and aligning those beliefs with universal ideas of justice, temperance, courage, and wisdom.
This is often discussed in terms of a cosmos that is understood qualitatively as opposed to quantitatively. Plato and Aristotle are the primary spokespeople for the qualitative cosmos: things have essences, and to have true knowledge means to understand how those essences are woven together to further the eudaemonia of human life. Human reason and what we would call aesthetic experience are not fully differentiated, at least in how I read them. Reason is not this purely calculated, cause-and-effect-driven procedural capacity as it is for Descartes. The qualitative view of the cosmos, particularly for Plato, expresses goodness as a beautiful harmony that flows through everything, which includes one’s soul. In such a worldview, to “be just” is to participate in the eternal Form of justice. To be courageous is participate in eternal Courage. To be a triangle is to participate in the beauty and proportion of eternal geometry. We shouldn’t underestimate the importance of participation as a kind of tapping into these essences as the basis for keeping one’s soul properly connected to the beautiful and harmonious cosmos.
Humanity isn’t so much at the center here as it is a participant woven into the cosmos. Harmonious participation manifests itself at the micro level as well-ordered souls at harmony with themselves because they are at harmony with the cosmos. At the macro level, harmony and beauty are expressed as well-ordered cities that remain in balance — not too much wealth at the top, and never overstepping one’s authority. To be sure, this can be an oppressive regime. Everyone has their place and should never stray from it — women, children, slaves and foreigners come in for some pretty rough treatment in ancient Athens. The cynical vision of a Thrasymachus or the emergence of a domineering priestly class are never very far off in such a worldview. But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. The point for me is to come to an appreciation and understanding of a soul envisioned as woven into a cosmos through an open, two-way channel that connects outside and inside on equal but fluid terms. If there is a subjective interiority in Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, it is an interiority that is stretching out of itself to participate in a providential cosmos. This stretching out is simultaneously a drawing in of “the Good” that comes from the outside. Another way to think of it is this: human interiority is something to be overcome by breaking free of one’s false beliefs. This happens most explicitly in Plato’s Socratic dialogs by orienting the interlocutors (and the readers) to universal understandings of the values they live by. This self-overcoming happens by letting the outside make its way inside.
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Side Note: When I do my morning meditations, I’m working on trying to experience the outside as a drawing into myself of love or beauty or temperance or justice. My meditations are in this way more neoplatonic than Cartesian. For example, when I do breathing exercises, I try to imaging the Stoic soul at work through pneuma, and that I am breathing in my connection to the cosmos, and breathing back out becomes giving back that same energy. This is very different than a breathing meditation that is more Cartesian in that it is a breaking down of the self into pure internal experience. This type of attention can be beneficial, but for me right now, it feels more atomizing than I want it to be for now.
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The soul, in this view of the cosmos, is not a possession that needs to be saved. It is better understood as a channel that is constantly connecting the particular with the universal. This channel is two-way: the philosopher must return to the cave. In Book 6 of The Republic, Plato’s Socrates insists on this two-way orientation of the philosopher-ruler:
SOCRATES: And I suppose that, as they work, they would look often in each direction: on the one hand, toward what is in it is nature just, beautiful, temperate, and all the rest; and, on the other, toward what they are trying to put into human beings, mixing and blending pursuits to produce a human likeness, based on the one that Homer too called divine and godly when it appeared among human beings. (501b)
The emphasis is on how one looks in each direction at once. One must connect one’s soul to eternal Forms like justice, beauty, temperance, and wisdom while simultaneously trying to instill those virtues in the particular human beings one is governing. There is an open, two-way channel between the universal and particular, but what is crucial to understand is this: the universal virtues of beauty, the good, justice, temperance and the rest have no value unless they are channeled into this world here and now among the living. This is the force of Plato’s Socrates’ insistence that the philosopher cannot stay outside of the cave but must return, otherwise the wisdom he attains is of absolutely no value to the world.
Kant’s vision is not simply a reversal of this, but an undoing of it. The channel of Aufklarung is one-way. Human reason busts free of barbarism by arranging the world in its own image. The flow of energy and power is outward from human reason to civil order as progress. If “participation” has any relevance in this worldview, it too is one-way: the world must participate in human reason by conforming itself or be punished for non-compliance. This punishment includes other human and non-human animals of which the last two centuries provides plenty of sad evidence. Human interiority is a will to power that stretches out from a newly re-energized center and arranges everything as it wishes. It has become its own God.
This is no merely abstract lamentation. This is how our reality works. Everything around us seeks to make reality hospitable and conformable to instrumental reason. An example: social media offers us daily examples of identities that we can buy into, literally buy into. For example, apparel manufacturers have learned that it is far easier to sell clothing if it is shown in action and not as a simple image of itself. This allows us to imagine ourselves in a new way and to identify with the brand image. Thus our social media feeds make us into the reality that it needs to keep going as an advertising medium. Our identities are made conformable and amenable to this mechanism as consumers looking for new identities. The fact that people are looking at the conversion data behind these images and making adjustments in favor of the images that work and jettison the ones that don’t should give us a clear indication that reality is shaped to fit the needs of Capitalism.
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Descartes’ Meditations precede Kant’s certainty about Aufklarung by 150 years, yet the Meditations are commonly read as very nearly the beginning of Kant’s Aufklarung. Putting humanity back at the center of the cosmos definitely happens in the Meditations. Open-ended progress through procedural reason definitely is present, particularly in the fourth Meditation. But laying all of modernity’s ills at Descartes’ doorstep is to read the Meditations through Kant’s Aufklarung-colored lenses. I’m hesitant to make Descartes responsible for ushering in the rise of reason and the demotion of theology. Kant’s view of his own time — which we live with today as our Enlightenment inheritance — is a look back that sees an ought within the is. He was, of course, praising Frederick the Great, and in this way “What Is Aufklarung?” fits within the long-standing genre of heaping praise on a sitting monarch. But his vision of history as a tale of mankind’s self-salvation through the “public use of reason” has certainly stuck.
I’d rather read Descartes as a man of his time, not Kant’s. Descartes and his philosophical interlocutors weren’t the precient vanguards of a modernity on the rise. They were not, as Peter Sloterdijk reminds us, spokesmen for the bourgeoisie as the vanguards of a nascent modernity: “Descartes’ world, of course, is not that of the bourgeois revolution, but that of the wars of religion” (Philosophical Temperaments, 28). The Thirty Years War encompassed nearly the whole of Descartes adult life (28). In this context, how could religious faith be a refuge? How could it provide any kind of meaning? It was fundamentally broken as Protestants defenestrated Catholics in Prague proclaiming, “You are enemies of us and of our religion.” And all this alongside the house-arrest of Galileo for demonstrating, among other things, that the moons of Jupiter are revolving around something other than humanity’s earth.
No, Descartes is not to blame for modernity and its ills. We do him a disservice if that is the historical baggage we force him to carry. Within this context, how could a mind like his not seek refuge by turning inward to seek, before all else, a ground of certainty — and from that ground, to seek to reintroduce God as a guarantor of that certainty. God in Descartes worldview has a role to play as that guarantor — he refuses to deceive us because he is perfect. In this sense, God is more of a minor demon than an all powerful deity. This minor role for God, of course, will be insufficient for Descartes as a good Jesuit. The Third and Fourth Meditations will do the work of restoring God as both the guarantor of certainty and the source of human perfection. But more on that in a different meditation. For the moment, I want to explore a bit more this separation of philosophy from religion as Descartes presents it to us in the prefaces because it helps to better understand why the Meditations is a prescient confrontation with modern nihilism rather than the inaugural text of the Enlightenment.
This untethering of religion from philosophy feels to me more like an abandonment, or a walking out on a long-term relationship. This is not the rise of philosophy as a narrative of progress and maturity. It is the abandoning of philosophy by its spiritual and metaphysical partner as the terms of a messy divorce were worked out on the battlefield and in an increasingly fragmented and intolerant Protestantism desperately trying to be certain about what Christianity is. In other words, what if I treat this separation as a failure of theology rather than the rise of reason? Theology released philosophy to go it alone while it occupied itself with a Thirty Years War, Protestant factionalism, and Catholicism’s obsession with tracking down and rooting out heresies. With theology mired in these violent squabbles, philosophy was left without its spiritual and metaphysical partner. This is why, I think, the Dedication Letter assumes that theology and philosophy are already separate undertakings. Philosophy didn’t free itself from religion as mankind’s natural self-realization. Religion got busy with the bloody politics of empire-building and doctrinal fueds while philosophy tried to find a way to make the world meaningful again.
This is the nihilism of modernity that Descartes faces in the Meditations. His answer is to try to save God from religion using only the procedural rationality of his method. This is, for me, the interesting experiment of the Meditations. With doctrinal battles waging around him all claiming ownership of God’s identity, Descartes seeks a place for God that doesn’t start from faith and doesn’t try to found a new religion. Rather, he needs and wants to start by proving God’s existence as a certainty of reason. If religious institutions had turned their backs on philosophy, Descartes takes up the challenge and seeks to find a new home for God within a newly independent philosophy trying to find its way in the world. This is Decartes challenge and innovation: Can he restore dignity to God without introducing yet an another Protestant faction or risking Catholicism labeling him a heretic? His starting point must be the existence of God and not faith in God. The cost is, of course, making procedural rationality (a.k.a. Descartes definition of philosophy) into a new religion without theology. This is where we can legitimately read Descartes as Kant’s Aufklarung predecessor. But I don’t think that is exactly what Descartes set out to do in the Meditations. Again, if this is the rise of reason it is inseparable from the failure of theology.
Rather, I read his intentions in a more nuanced fashion: if God can be made into an object of philosophical reasoning separated from theological doctrines of faith, God can be rescued and reborn as a blank slate. God gets a new lease on life. Perhaps it will be possible to start over again using new thought processes, but this can only happen if philosophical reasoning can provide the self-sufficient certainty that God exists — self-sufficient in that philosophy will not rely on theology. This is why Descartes makes clear in the prefaces that “atheists” and “nonbelievers” are his audience. If he can convince them, then he has succeeded. They have no truck with theology, but they do, if they are serious, respect philosophical reasoning:
Moreover, I know that since there are many irreligious people who refuse to believe that God exists and that the human mind is distinct from the body — for no other reason than their claim that up until now no one has been able to demonstrate these two things…. Nevertheless, I judge that there is no greater task to perform in philosophy than assiduously to seek out, once and for all, the best of all these arguments and to lay them out so precisely and plainly that henceforth all will take them to be true demonstrations. And finally, I was strongly urged to do this by some people who knew that I had developed a method for solving all sorts of problems in the sciences — not a new one, mind you, since nothing is more ancient than the truth, but one they had seen me use with some success in other areas. Accordingly, I took it to be my task to attempt something on this subject. (Letter of Dedication, 3)
Descartes is often ridiculed today for trying to prove God’s existence, but we have to remember that religious institutional battles had reduced Christianity to competing doctrinal belief systems aligned with competing monarchical powers. Personal salvation and political power depended on which one you were aligned with. Trying to find a way to wrest God from this situation and not embrace a nihilistic atheism was an admirable and necessary undertaking given the circumstances in which Descartes lived. Whether or not he was successful will be the subject of further meditations.
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End Note: We can see Descartes’ challenge in the very form of the Meditations themselves. We have to remember that he modeled his Meditations on a Jesuit practice exemplified by St. Ignatius of Loyola. This practice consisted of daily meditations on Bible passages to try to internalize their lessons. Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations are a Stoic instance of a well-worn practice 1300 years earlier than St. Ignatius. Meditations are thus a spiritual exercise (to use Pierre Hadot’s phrase) that has a long history. St. Ignatius’ modification of them for the purposes of Jesuit spirituality was well understood by Descartes and his fellow Jesuits. Thus the Meditations occupy this strange ground where scientific reason meets spiritual practice. We do a disservice to ourselves and to Descartes if we read the Meditations as only a scientific statement and not as a spiritual practice derived from centuries of predecessors. To read the Meditations as meditations is part of disconnecting Descartes from our knee-jerk Enlightenment-inspired reading of this strange work.