Meditation Six Analysis

René Descartes believed that the mind and body are separate; that the senses could not always be trusted, but that because we as humans are able to think about our existence, we possess some sort of entity separate than our fleshly body. I believe this separate entity to be a soul”an immaterial and

For Descartes, this means that a substance is really distinct from anything else other than God whom Descartes credits as the creator of such an object. The ramification of such a principle leads Descartes to believe that the mind and body could exist completely separately of one another, allowing that God chose to create them in this particular way. Despite this, the possibility that the two could exist separately does not mean they actually do. This is an issue of its own entirely.

In the Sixth Meditation, Descartes makes a point that there is a distinction between mind and body. It is in Meditation Two when Descartes believes he has shown the mind to be better known than the body. In Meditation Six, however, he goes on to claim that, as he knows his mind and knows clearly and distinctly that its essence consists purely of thought. Also, that bodies' essences consist purely of extension, and that he can conceive of his mind and body as existing separately. By the power of God, anything that can be clearly and distinctly conceived of as existing separately from something else can be created as existing separately. However, Descartes claims that the mind and body have been created separated without good reason. This

Meditation is very difficult to describe and can only truly be explained once experienced. It is the practice of mental concentration leading ultimately through a sequence of stages to the final goal of spiritual freedom, nirvana. The purpose of Buddhist meditation is to free ourselves from the delusion and thereby put an end to both ignorance and craving. The Buddhists describe the culminating trance-like state as transient; final Nirvana requires the insight of wisdom. The exercises that are meant to develop wisdom involve meditation on the true nature of reality or the conditioned and unconditioned elements that make up all phenomena. The goal of meditation is to develop a concept in the mind.

     This is where the wax argument comes into play. All the properties of the piece of wax that we perceive with the senses change as the wax melts. This is true as well of its primary properties, such as shape, extension and size. Yet the wax remains the same piece of wax as it melts. We know the wax through our mind and judgement, not through our senses or imagination. Therefore, every act of clear and distinct knowledge of corporeal matter also provides even more certain evidence for the existence of Descartes as a thinking thing. Therefore his mind is much clearer and more distinctly know to him than his body. At this

Firstly in the second meditation, Descartes provides reasoning that the mind and body are two clearly distinct substances,

Descartes then goes on to explain the notion of 'heaviness' and says that believes it has been misused when it is supposed as a real quality, and that it was given to us for the purpose of regarding the way in which the soul moves the body. Princess Elizabeth's then replies, and Descartes writes another letter back in order to answer more of her questions regarding the mind-body interaction and help her more understand his reasoning. He begins by saying that even though she may want to perceive the soul as material (in order to understand its union with the body), she should still recognize that it is separate from the body. He regards that if it is easier for Princess Elizabeth to "attribute matter and extension to the soul than to attribute to it the capacity to move a body and to be moved by one without having matter" (Page 228), then she should do that, and then by doing that eventually she will be able to comprehend and visualize the union of the body and soul that he mentioned in the first

Edward Taylor’s “Meditation Six” uses a coin-based conceit to explore the ambivalence of the persona; using the coin, Taylor describes his spiritual value to God in material terms. The first stanza reflects an uncertainty within Taylor about his worth to God. He equates himself to gold, asking if he is “thy gold” (1) or merely a vessel for God’s wealth—the congregation. The speaker worries he may only appear to be worthful to God, but he is worthless underneath and “brass in heart,” alluding to the Brazen Serpent of the Bible. Working through his ambivalence, the speaker compares the impression of the grace of God to the stamp on a coin, and he asks if God has left such an impression on him, stamping value onto worthless metal. Taylor writes that he is “a golden angel” in God’s hand, meaning he is valuable to God, which ends his ambivalence as he concludes that he is worthful as a man. In the final stanza, the speaker asks God to make his soul the plate, a blank coin, onto which God stamps value with his “superscription in a holy style” (16). The speaker then becomes a coin with value to God, part of God’s hoard, whereby Taylor acknowledges that he is one of many. A surrender ends the conceit and poem, the speaker asks if he may be an angel, period slang for an English coin, in God’s eyes and if God may be his Lord.

Descartes talked about the true and the false, and how we make mistakes in Meditation Four. Descartes believed that error as such is not something real that depends upon God, but rather is merely a defect. And thus there is no need to account for my errors by positing a faculty given to me by God for this purpose(546). He thought that the reason why we make mistakes is that the faculty of judging the truth, which we got from God, is not infinite(546). When Descartes focused more closely on more closely on himself and inquired into the nature of his errors, he noted that errors depend on the simultaneous concurrence of two causes:

"The first precept was never to accept a thing as true until I knew it as such without a single doubt."

come to the conclusion that there is a limit to what they can do. A conscious

Descartes’ Meditation 6 explains the distinction between the mind and body. He explains that he is confused as to why his mind is attached to a particular body to which he calls his own. He questions why pain or tickling happens in his own body but does not occur in any body outside of his own and why a tugging feeling in his stomach tells him that he is hungry and that he should eat. From this, he perceives that he is only a thinking thing. The idea of a body is merely extended and the mind is

and this quantity of motion is “the product of its speed and its size” (Descartes, 1644/2012, p.33), but the conception of speed used by Descartes is an scalar rather than considered as a vector like velocity (as modern development shows (Gerald Holton and Stephen G. Brush , 2001, p. 210)), nonetheless Descartes suggests that “the mind does not directly move the external limbs, but simply controls the animal spirits which flow from the heart via the brain into the muscles, and sets up certain motions in them..” (Descartes, 1641/1985, p. 161), and this allow the interaction of substances in Cartesian terms, in other words, according to Descartes, the soul only change the direction of the body, but cannot add motion to the physical bodies; however, this is the problem of the interaction in Cartesian terms: as Dennett explain “any change in the trajectory of any physical entity is an acceleration requiring the expenditure of energy” (Dennett, 1991, p. 35), thus, the Cartesian explanation should violate the laws of physics, in other words as Dennett asks “…where is this energy to come from?” (Dennett, 1990, p.35), and this energy cannot come from a

After seeing this, he then attempts to see if the body truly does exist. He explains the beliefs he has about the outside world. He understands his body and such experiences it goes though, and through that he realizes that they must be present, and if they were not it would be impossible for him to feel them. He distinguishes the body from other things because the body must always be present, while other things could be merely different feelings. He here uses premises that he developed in Meditations three and four to help state that mind and body both exist, but separately. He says that his mind is different from his body, so therefore it must be separate from it. He then comes back to his Truth Rule from Meditation Four. “Every judgment that I make concerning matters that are “clear and distinct” to me is most assuredly true.” He says that god has made him think that his mind and body at distinctly separate, so they must be. He argues that his body and mind are

In Meditation Six entitled “Concerning the Existence of Material Things, and Real Distinction between the Mind and Body”, one important thing Descartes explores is the relationship between the mind and body. Descartes believes the mind and body are separated and they are two difference substances. He believes this to be clearly and distinctly true which is a Cartesian quality for true knowledge. I, on the other hand, disagree that the mind and body are separate and that the mind can exist without the body. First, I will present Descartes position on mind/body dualism and his proof for such ideas. Secondly, I will discuss why I think his argument is weak and offer my own ideas that dispute his reasoning while I keep in mind how he might