Descartes Fourth Meditation

Descartes is concerned with the nature of human free will and understanding this in the context of his understanding of God. In his Meditations, Descartes concludes that God could never trick or deceive him, but he also understands that human beings are often prone to error. This creates something of a conundrum for Descartes that he seeks to explain in his Fourth Meditation. Namely, how can one reconcile the idea of human error with the concepts of the perfections of God? “If everything that is in me I got from God, and he gave me no faculty for making mistakes, it seems I am incapable of ever erring.” Basically, if one believes God is this perfect non-deceiver and since the faculty of judgment is received from this perfect God, then one

However, unlike will, human judgment and intellect is finite. It is bounded and limited by one’s perspective, and one necessarily cannot take into account all of the different elements that a person must take into account in order to properly make good decisions. As Descartes explains in his work, because the intellect of a person is bounded and the free will of a person is infinite, there are bound to be situations in which a person makes an error because his intellect cannot calculate all that needs to be calculated in order to make the right decision (Fourth Meditation, 58). This can be explained in some ways by the fact that people are not meant to be God. God is the only being with perfect intellect and fully wide perspective. If human beings are just made by God and are not God, then they must have deficits in their perspective and thinking. This, Descartes explains, is why people are sometimes not able to make the right choices. They are given the full range of options by God as a part of the plan that God has laid out, but they are not gifted the full ability to consider the consequences and implications of those decisions (Fourth Meditation, 59-60). If they had this full body of intellect, then people would be like God. People cannot be God, though, so they necessarily must find themselves in a position of

Namely, those situations in which situations outstrip intellect can cause people to have confusion. The sole purpose of the intellect is merely to perceive ideas and present ideas to the will to render judgment. However, “. . . it is an imperfection in me that I do not use my freedom well and that I make judgments about things I do not properly understand.” People are always operating with incomplete information and incomplete understanding. It is the nature of the beast that people will have these problems and difficulties. Descartes theorizes that these confused perceptions lead people to make errors. They believe they are making the right choice, and being humans that were created by God, they are making the best decision they could with the perspective they have. However, their perspectives are so necessarily limited that many individuals find themselves in a difficult position in this regard. Confused perceptions can account for fallible beings exercising poor judgment, leading to long-term human error. It is in a person’s nature to attempt to judge things that exceed the scope of human understanding. One may better understand Descartes in the situation where a person who is incompetent perceives himself to be competent because he does not even know enough to know that he is incompetent. In short, people have such limited understanding and intellect; they do not even know that their intellect is short.