Rene Descartes, Meditation 4 | Human Being, Supreme Being, and Non-Being | Philosophy Core Concepts

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This is a video in my new Core Concepts series -- designed to provide students and lifelong learners a brief discussion focused on one main concept from a classic philosophical text and thinker.
This Core Concept video focuses on Rene Descartes' work, The Meditations, specifically on meditation 4, in which Descartes situates human being in between the supreme being (or God, a being possessing all perfections) and non-being or nothingness. He also discusses how error is a participation on the part of the human being in nothingness or non-being.
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You can find a translation of the text I am using for this sequence on Descartes' Meditations - amzn.to/2SZv02N
#Descartes #Metaphysics #Meditation

[@kennyg03]

Thanks for this Dr. Sadler! I will be covering this meditation in particular tomorrow for my class and this is very helpful!

[@GregoryBSadler]

Glad it's useful for you

[@abdullahnasher7975]

You are a great KZbinrs' enlightenment leader.

[@GregoryBSadler]

Well, I don't know that I'm leading anyone, unless perhaps by bits of example

[@parkaahparkaah821]

Thank you professor

[@GregoryBSadler]

You're welcome!

[@theelderskatesman4417]

Enjoyed your presentation as always. one way of comprehending Descartes' logic here: we must be created imperfect precisely because we are created (a perfect being must be eternal, infinite and uncaused) Therefore, even though God creates us perfectly, according to his nature, we 'participate in nothingness' as a function of our finitude as created beings. Indeed, God created us 'from nothing: Everything God created in us is perfect, but we are imperfect because we are created. The imperfection lies in what we are not, not in what we are. The infinite perfection of God does not and cannot extend to creating uncreated beings🤔

[@theelderskatesman4417]

oh, a question. Which parts of Hegel's phenomenology would you take as responding to Descartes? Self-consciousness?

[@GregoryBSadler]

Glad you enjoyed the video

[@MrMarktrumble]

Describing the human as resting between neant on one side, and god on the other reminds me of Symposium 200 e where Socrates says where love is always the love of something, and two, that something is what he lacks. Socrates later at 203 b narrates the birth of love when crafty resource snuck into the party of the gods, and slept with Zeus.(sounds somewhat Promethian to me...stealing fire from the gods...) The story is to explain the nature of love (eros) as a synthesis of resource and need. When you flip the continuum of nothingingness to being from a horizontal relationship to a vertical relationship you are importing the hierarchy of being and its implicit evaluatory scheme (scales of goodness).Being does not exist at the bottom, there is only being from what is supported by and derived from the apex. The human being is set in between those, with no foot hold (poverty) (groundlessness, unhemlichkeit), and the fullness of being . IF you find yourself in this position, you would be needy, but ,if you have a good life, you would also have to be very resourceful and creative. Descartes finds within himself a certain capacity (power of judging) (this is his resourcefulness), but he can be deceived ( his groundlessness). For Descartes, the ontological proof for Gods existence is the truth of the apex, and it is "in his mind". (Perhaps we could go on some sort of gnostic journey and find this "seed of Zeus"). So the human which is "neant", can ascend up to the "real and positive idea of god" , which is in his mind. (why is Bonadventure starting to talk to me...) What relationship does Descartes "clear and distinct idea" of god ( the ontological argument) have to do with Iamblicus Theology of arithmetic? kzbin.info/www/bejne/nn-0qaKagamXnpI ( at 10:41 he explains the Pythagorean account of the One being both limited and unlimited).While I could go on and on, I choose to end here. Love returns to where he was conceived. IN the Ancient world, God was central and positive, and all things were understood in relation to that point. After the death of god, the world was...pointless.

[@GregoryBSadler]

Now I see what you meant

[@MrMarktrumble]

@@GregoryBSadler I am glad. "The North star is my staff and rudder" I must be confused, because I seem to think that North star can be understood as a spatial fixed centre point, by which all stars revolve around in a silent carousel that became the first clock of the seasons, and as monthly time was established by the revolving of the stars, the centre of the principle of calender time as well. I know that some have debated that light is the constant and thus measure of time, but in my confusion I understood that any process with fixed duration can be used as a clock, and I willfully choose something within the perceptual range of an unaided intelligent person. Maybe I will dream, and confuse the geometric point, the one, the north star, when "the self knows the self through the self" and apply the pythagorean catagories of peras and aperion to it. But that is ...a dream.

[@MrMarktrumble]

This reminds me of the Symposium, and the erotic love of the beautiful (kalon)

[@GregoryBSadler]

How so?

[@HalTuberman]

The beginning and end of the Meditations are quite thought-provoking. There, Descartes raises some good questions and skillfully explores possible solutions. But the creamy center just seems to rest on a bunch of assumptions about God... Meh. And the inclusion of an ontological argument for God's existence doesn't help.

[@GregoryBSadler]

If that's really your read - that it "just seems to rest on a bunch of assumptions about God" - you've misread it so far. You might want to take a closer look at what's going on in the text