In Descartes’ Fourth Meditation, he attempts to reconcile human fallibility with the perfection of God. Having proven God’s existence in the Third Meditation, Descartes faces the contradiction of God’s perfection and the human potential to err. The answer, Descartes contends, lies in between the concurrence of two faculties of the human mind, the intellect and the will. Error arises when the will assents beyond what the intellect clearly and distinctly perceives. This essay will show how Descartes defines each faculty, how their misalignment produces error, and why this explanation preserves both divine perfection and human responsibility.
After affirming that God is the source of all truth, “who is supremely perfect,” is also the creator of the human mind, Descartes asks then “how can anything produced by the supreme creator of all things not be complete and perfect in all respects?” (7:55). Descartes recognizes that humans are limited and imperfect, yet error cannot be attributed directly to God, since “the will to deceive is undoubtedly evidence of malice or weakness” (7:53). The issue, therefore, is to explain how error exists in a world created by a non-deceptive, perfect being.
Descartes’ solution begins with describing himself as a being “intermediate between God and nothingness,” such that “in so far as I was created by the supreme being, there is nothing in me to enable me to go wrong… but in so far as I participate in nothingness or non-being… it is no wonder that I make mistakes” (7:54). He explains that “error is not a pure negation, but rather a privation or lack of some knowledge which somehow should be in me.” (7:54) A man who cannot see is called blind because he ought to have sight, but it would be inappropriate to refer to a stone as blind. Similarly, God’s decision to allow humans to err is not wrong by privation, but merely because the limited and imperfect human capacity ought not inherit all knowledge and potential owned by God.
Having ruled out God as the source of falsity, Descartes turns to the human faculties themselves. “They depend on two concurrent causes,” he writes, “namely on the faculty of knowledge which is in me, and on the faculty of choice or freedom of the will” (7:56). The intellect, in Descartes’ view, is the faculty that merely perceives ideas; it “does no more than enable me to perceive the ideas which are subjects for possible judgements” (7:56). Because it is purely receptive, it cannot in itself be the source of error: “when regarded strictly in this light, it turns out to contain no error in the proper sense of that term” (7:56). The intellect presents ideas to the mind, but it does not affirm or deny them; the will, by contrast, is the active faculty of affirmation or denial. Descartes defines it as “our ability to do or not do something (that is, to affirm or deny, to pursue or avoid)” (7:57). It would be equally wrong to assume falsity comes from the will, since one could not consider a particular preference to be factually false. Instead, he marvels that the will, unlike the intellect, appears infinite: “It is only the will, or freedom of choice, which I experience within me to be so great that the idea of any greater faculty is beyond my grasp” (7:57). In this, humans resemble God, whose will is likewise unlimited.
Yet while God’s will is always guided by infinite knowledge, the human intellect is finite. Descartes locates error precisely in the misuse of this disproportion between the intellect and the will. “The scope of the will is wider than that of the intellect… but instead of restricting it within the same limits, I extend its use to matters which I do not understand” (7:59). The intellect may clearly and distinctly perceive only a limited range of truths, but the will, being free, can affirm or deny any proposition whatsoever. When the will assents to something not clearly understood, it exceeds the bounds of the intellect and thereby risks error.
An example clarifies this mechanism. Descartes recalls his own cogito argument in M2. Because this proposition was clearly and distinctly perceived, his will naturally followed: “a great light in the intellect was followed by a great inclination in the will, and thus the spontaneity and freedom of my belief was all the greater in proportion to my lack of indifference” (7:59). In such cases, error is impossible because the intellect fully determines the will.
In contrast, when he considers whether the mind and body are distinct, he confesses that his intellect “has not yet come upon any persuasive reason in favor of one alternative rather than the other.” If, in this state of ignorance, he chooses to affirm or deny without clear understanding, the result is error. He claims instead that the will should be indifferent, “I am indifferent as to whether I should assert or deny either alternative” (7:59). Thus, “if I simply refrain from making a judgement in cases where I do not perceive the truth with sufficient clarity and distinctness, then it is clear that I am behaving correctly and avoiding error” (7:60). By distinguishing between the faculties and their use, Descartes preserves both divine perfection and human freedom. God endowed humans with perfect faculties of their kind; error, therefore, “does not require me to have a faculty specially bestowed on me by God; it simply happens as a result of the fact that the faculty of true judgement… is in my case not infinite” (p. 54). The blame for error lies with human misuse of freedom. In conclusion, in M4, Descartes resolves the problem of error without undermining divine perfection by explaining it as a byproduct of the will’s freedom exceeding the intellect’s limited scope.
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