Descartes Conception Of The Existence Of God

In addition, these changes can be further distinguished in Descartes belief that he can develop assertions of existence from his conception of ‘I think.’ For Descartes, res cogitans is established to be a finite substance. However, he concludes that an infinite substance, God, could not have originated in himself and therefore must be the cause of this idea, which results in God necessarily existing - ‘the idea that enables me to understand a supreme deity, eternal, infinite, omniscient, omnipotent, and creator of all things other than himself.’ (Descartes, 1993, p.28) This means that for Descartes, the idea that God having far more objective reality than he has formal reality comes into realisation. Through Descartes argument he is trying
The mind and the soul are indistinguishable for Descartes, which was an idea that came into the picture by Locke. As described by Lawson, it was ‘the elevation of the soul over the idea.’ (Lawlor, 2012, p.27) Thus, both a body and a soul make human beings. Nevertheless, for Kant this idea is a fundamental error. Kant believes philosophers like Descartes have overlooked a basic fact about reason; that reason is finite. Due to reason being limited, human beings consequently cannot understand everything causing restrictions to what human beings can know. To demonstrate this, human reason cannot know transcendental objects, which means it cannot know God and immortality of the soul. They are both outside the confines of human reason so can never be confirmed true. It is only what can be given in time and space that can become an object of experience. Therefore, for Kant, arguments like Descartes, which attempt to develop inferences about the existence of God and immortality of the soul from the study of thinking, are
This idea can be further concurred through Nietzsche’s critique of Descartes and his radicalisation of the Kantian critique of the paralogism. Within Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche focuses on subjectivity and questions where human beings belief in ‘I’ comes from. For Nietzsche, the problems in metaphysics are epitomised by subjectivity. The notion of personal identity has been shaped by thousands of years of questioning what it means when human beings say ‘I’, which has caused great problem within the field of subjectivity. As previously discussed, Descartes creating the modern formulation of subjectivity puts him and other rationalists at the centre of this fault. Nietzsche makes this clear when he states, ‘there are still harmless self-observers who believe ‘immediate certainties’ exist, for example ‘I think.’ (Nietzsche, 2003, p.45) This relates immediately to Descartes conception of ‘I think’ and the convictions he believes he has proven from the res cogitans, such as existence of ‘I’, God and the soul. Similar to Kant, Nietzsche argues the proposition ‘I think’ to be considerably doubtful and more complicated than Descartes displays it to be. As Nietzsche challenges, ‘what gives me the right to speak of an ‘I’, and even of an ‘I’ as cause, and finally of an ‘I’ as cause