Philosophy and the History of Ideas

Series of Lectures within Curriculum of International Design School, Georgian Technical University

Lecture 4: Rene Descartes, and the Method of Doubt. Pascal, Spinoza and God

Seminar 4: Essay on Machiavelli. Descartes’ “Discourse on the Method” discussed

For the French thinker of the same, seventeenth century, René Descartes philosophy was among his
many intellectual interests: an outstanding mathematician, perhaps he became best known for inventing
‘Cartesian co-ordinates’ – allegedly after watching a fly walking across the ceiling and wondering how he
could describe its position at various points. He was also an astronomer and a biologist.

His reputation as a philosopher rests largely on his Meditations and his Discourse on Method. Like
most philosophers, Descartes didn’t like to believe anything without examining why he believed it; he
also liked asking awkward questions, questions which other people didn’t get round to asking. To come
to what he could know for certain, he had developed the Method of Cartesian Doubt: don’t accept
anything as true if there is the slightest possibility that it isn’t. There was a risk that he might end up
realizing that nothing at all was certain, but Descartes differed from the skepticism of Pyrrho and his
followers because he wanted to show that some beliefs are immune from even the strongest forms of
skepticism.

Descartes sets out in his quest for certainty by thinking first about the evidence that comes through the
senses: seeing, touching, smelling, tasting and hearing. Can we trust our senses? Not really, he concluded.
So he rejected the senses as a possible source of certainty. You can illustrate this on your own example:
the belief ‘I am awake because I am reading this now ’ probably seems fairly certain to you. You are
awake, I hope, and you are reading. How could you possibly doubt it? But we’ve already mentioned that
you can think you are awake in your dreams. How do you know you aren’t dreaming now? Even if you
think the experiences you are having are too realistic, too detailed to be dream, there are plenty of people
who have very realistic dreams. Even if you pinch yourself, you could have dreamt that you pinched
yourself.

We can’t be absolutely sure we’re not dreaming. But surely, Descartes says, even in dreams, 2+3=5. This
is where Descartes uses a thought experiment, an imaginary story to make his point. He says, imagine
there is a demon who is incredibly powerful and clever. This demon, if it existed, could make it seem
that 2+3= 5 every time you did the sum, even though it really equals, say, six. You wouldn’t know the
demon was doing this to you. You’d just be adding numbers up innocently.

Or perhaps this fiendishly clever demon is giving me the illusion of sitting at IDS typing at my laptop,
or giving you this lecture, when in fact I’m lying on a beach in the south of France. Or perhaps I’m just a
brain in a jar of liquid on a shelf in the evil demon’s laboratory. Perhaps the demon is making me think
that I’m typing words that make sense, when in fact I am just typing the same letter over and over again.
There’s no way of knowing. You couldn’t prove that that isn’t happening. But Descartes said that if the
demon existed and was tricking him, there must be something that the demon was tricking. As long as he
was having a thought at all, he, Descartes, must exist. The demon couldn’t make him believe that he
existed if he didn’t. That’s because something that doesn’t exist can’t have thoughts. ‘ I think; therefore, I

1
am’ (cogito ergo sum in Latin) was Descartes’ conclusion. I’m thinking, so I must exist. Try it for yourself.
As long as you have some thought or sensation, it is impossible to doubt that you exist.

You can doubt whether you have a body that you can see and touch but you can’t doubt that you exist
as some kind of thinking thing. That thought would be self-refuting: as soon as you start to doubt your
own existence, the act of doubting proves that you exist as a thinking thing.

The certainty of his own existence showed Descartes that those who doubted everything – the
Pyrrhonist Sceptics – were wrong. It was also the start of what is known as Cartesian Dualism: the idea
that your mind is separate from the body and interacts with it. But his dualism has a real problem: how
to explain a non-physical thing, the soul or mind, producing changes in a physical one - the body?

Descartes was more certain about the existence of his mind than his body. He could imagine not having
a body, but he couldn’t imagine not having a mind. If he imagined not having a mind, he’d still be
thinking, and so that would prove that he had a mind because he couldn’t have thoughts at all if he
didn’t have a mind. This idea that body and mind can be separated, and that the mind or the spirit is
non-physical, not made of blood, flesh and bones, is very common amongst religious people. Many
believers hope the mind or spirit will live on after the death of the body.

But Descartes needed further certainties to escape from the skepticism. He convinced himself that the
idea of God proves God’s existence: God wouldn’t be perfect unless he was good and existed, just as a
triangle wouldn’t be a triangle without interior angles adding up to 180 degrees. Another of his
arguments, the Trademark Argument, suggested that we know God exists because he has left an idea
implanted in our minds – we wouldn’t have an idea of God, if God didn’t exist.

Once he was certain that God existed, the constructive phase of Descartes’ thought became much
easier, and he concludes: the world exists, and is more or less as it appears, even though we sometimes
make mistakes about what we perceive. Without the certainty of a good God’s existence, Descartes
would not have been able to move beyond his knowledge that he was a thinking thing. Descartes
believed that he had shown a way out of complete skepticism.

But his fellow countryman and contemporary Blaise Pascal had a very different approach to the
question of what we should believe. If you aren’t sure whether or not God exists, what should you do?
Should you gamble on God not existing, and live your life as you please? Or would it be more rational to
act as if God does exist, even if it is very difficult to prove the God’s existence empirically? Pascal was a
devout Catholic but had an extremely bleak view of humanity, believed that human beings are driven by
sexual desire, and are unreliable and easily bored. Everyone is wretched. Yet, at the same time, Pascal
believed that humanity has some potential if we don’t lose sight of God. Pascal’s best-known book, his
Pensées (‘Thoughts’), is a defense of his version of Christianity.

In 1642, Pascal, also a mathematician and scientist, like Descartes, invented a mechanical calculating
machine that could add and subtract by using a stylus to turn dials attached to complicated gears, to help
his father with business calculations. About the size of a shoebox, it was known as the Pascaline – a
predecessor of modern computer. Descartes, also a devout Christian, scientist and a mathematician like
Pascal, believed that you could prove God’s existence by logic. Pascal thought otherwise. But despite this,
in his Pensées he came up with a clever argument to persuade those who are unsure whether or not God
2
exists that they should believe in God, an argument that has come to be known as Pascal’s Wager. It
draws on his interest in probability. Gamblers calculate odds and, in principle, bet accordingly.

If you don’t believe in God, but God does actually turn out to exist, not only might you lose your
chance of bliss in heaven, but you might end up in hell where you will be tortured for the whole of
eternity. That is the worst imaginable outcome for anybody. Alternatively, Pascal suggests, you can
choose to live your life as if God does exist. If it turns out that God does indeed exist, you win the best
possible prize: the serious chance of eternal bliss. If you choose to believe in God, but it turns out that
you are wrong, you won’t have made a substantial sacrifice: ‘ If you win you win everything; if you lose
you lose nothing.’

But how does the non-believer who doubts God’s existence get to have faith in God? Pascal said that
non-believer should imitate people who already believe in God. Spend time in church and very soon
you’ll end up actually having the beliefs and feelings they do. But the risk is that God would make sure
that no one who used this gambler’s argument ever got into heaven, plus the Pascal’s gamble doesn’t take
into account the possibility that you might have opted for the wrong religion, the wrong God.

Baruch Spinoza, born in Amsterdam later in the same seventeenth century, the son of Portuguese Jews,
had a very different view of the deity. Most religions teach that God exists somewhere outside the world,
perhaps in heaven. Baruch Spinoza was thought that God is the world. He wrote about ‘God or Nature’ ,
reducing himself to a form of pantheism – the belief that God is everything. Spinoza was
excommunicated and cursed by the rabbis in his synagogue in 1656 when he was just 24 years old, and
left Amsterdam. From this point he was known as Benedict de Spinoza rather than Baruch, his Jewish
name.

Philosophers admire geometry because it moves by careful logical steps from agreed starting points to
surprising conclusions. Spinoza did not just admire geometry; he wrote philosophy as if it were
geometry. The ‘proofs’ in his book Ethics look like geometrical proofs and include axioms and definitions
but instead of dealing with topics like the angles of triangles, they are about God, nature, freedom and
emotion. There is an underlying structural logic to the world and our place in it that reason can reveal.
Nothing is as it is by chance, there is a purpose and principle to it all. Everything fits together in one
huge system and the best way to understand this is by the power of thought. This approach to
philosophy, emphasizing reason rather than experiment and observation, is often labelled Rationalism.

The German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was one of those who
discussed with Spinoza his ideas. If God is infinite, Spinoza reasoned to him, it follows that there cannot
be anything that is not God. If you discover something in the universe that is not God, then God can’t be
infinite, because God could have in principle been that thing as well as everything else. We are all parts
of God.

Traditional religious believers preached anthropomorphism: that God loves humanity and responds to
personal prayers, thus projecting human qualities, such as compassion, on to a non-human being, God.
But Spinoza’s God was completely impersonal and did not care about anything or anyone. You can and
should love God, but don’t expect any love back in return, says Spinoza. That would be like a nature
lover expecting nature to love him back. In fact, Spinoza’s God is completely indifferent to human
beings.
3
 Spinoza’s was a determinist. Human beings imagine that they are choosing freely what they do and
have control over their lives. But that’s because they don’t understand the ways in which their choices
and actions have been brought about. In fact, free will is an illusion. There is no spontaneous free action
at all. Spinoza’s belief that God is nature prompted the twentieth-century physicist Albert Einstein to
state that although he couldn’t bring himself to believe in a personal God, he did believe in Spinoza’s
God.