In part four, Discourse, Descartes describes the results of his meditations following the method he previously laid down. When he had earlier undertaken to act decisively even when he was unsure, he now takes the complete opposite course, and considers anything false that is doubtful. This way, he can be sure that he holds on only to things that are indubitably certain. He abandons all sensory knowledge, since the 5 senses can be deceiving, all demonstrative reasoning, since people often make errors in their reasoning, and imagines that everything that has ever entered his mind.
While it is possible that thoughts of outside objects like the sky, the earth, light, and so on are all delusions of the mind, Descartes thinks that the same is not of God. These other thoughts are of imperfect objects, so they could easily be invented by an imperfect mind set. However, it is inconceivable that Descartes’s imperfect mind could invent the idea of a perfect God, that would mean that the existence of a perfect being depended on an imperfect being,going against what he initially said . Descartes concludes that God is a perfect mind, and that all the perfections in himself and in other bodies are due to the lords excellence.
Every other thought that has entered his mind are just illusions/things trying to trick him are all brought on by dreams. Even in doubting all of this, he observes that he must be something in order to doubt. This doubt requires a large amount of thought, and this thought confirms his existence, so he adopts the idea of the principle “I am thinking, therefore I exist,” as the unquestionable foundation upon which he will build. Since his knowledge of his existence hinges exclusively on his thinking, he concludes that he is essentially a thinking substance, and that his soul is completely distinct, and easier to know than, the body it-self. Descartes starts to try and find more self- manifest truths. Descartes has discovered a piece of specific knowledge that he believes exists as a thinking kind of strategy.
He learns that he has quite a few of these manifest truths and thinking kind of strategies them, most prominent among these is the truths of mathematics and logic. He is confident about his chances for developing a system of certain knowledge. Abruptly, things do not look too good for his system of definite knowledge; if he needs to keep every truth perpetually before his mind, then he cannot expect too make much progress in disentangling the facts of nature. Then he realizes a mistake in his system. As soon as they fall out of awareness, the doubt of him not succeeding can creep back into his mind. An objections that Descartes’ philosophy talks about is God is used to authenticate clear and different discernments. The main objection, is what Descartes brings up that God to lays out what he wants to get across: that through god you can get truth of clear and distinct perceptions and vis versa.
Descartes has changed his system and came to the conclusion we don’t need anything to prove that God can prove clear and different discernments the only thing we need is to attend to our thoughts and allow them to grow into more knowledge through God. He not only fixes what he said before but tries to make it a fact, that in order to do things you must not use god but use yourself through god. Descartes has tried to prove that God exists, he has shown that God is the reason of our clear and Persis perceptions and that God does not deceive, he is not evil or a liar and that we can use him by putting out knowledge through him to our clear and distinct perceptions to build up a methodical of knowledge.
In the process of founding these entitlements, however, Descartes draws many other conclusions regarding the nature of God and the relations that connect back to him. Descartes moves on to intricate on the nature of God. Although we cannot know the complete nature of God, we do know that God is absolutely perfect. Only being able to use this piece of information regarding God’s nature, Descartes now has to disperse all doubts concerning clear and distinct perception. If God were to give us the capability which presented certain propositions as undoubtedly correct/true, when in fact they were not, then God would be a fraud. To be a deceiver implies being a cruel liar which is a flaw in the idea that God is perfect and a flaw in the system of knowledge Descartes has created.
Therefore, Descartes can finish with, we can trust our clear and distinct perceptions through good and by telling the truth..Before coming up with this important conclusion, Descartes takes the time to establish some other facts about God. To begin with Descartes points out, he is not physical but mental, because corporeality involves faultiness. Then he mentions that we must believe everything that God has revealed to us even if we do not understand it, we must still believe it no matter what. Lastly, he discusses the difference between the property of infiniteness, which is a positive/good conception, and inconclusiveness, which is a negative/bad conception.
Among our ideas and everything else, only God contains infiniteness and positives. Only with and through God do we know that there is no limit. All of our other ideas that conclude to limitlessness are merely representing the bad/negative. That is to say, in these cases, all that we perceive is that we cannot perceive a limit, and that through God is where our real and good thoughts come from and everything else is bad and negative.
