Because it seems to me very clear the distinction between the faculties by which one grasps the essential qualities of a triangle (that the hypotenuse always faces its widest angle, for instance) and the one by which one invents or concocts concepts or mental images. The latter is how mankind has invented god. I cannot intuit god in the same manner i contemplate a triangle.Intellection and imagination. It's a useful dichotomy, this one that he draws. Yet he keeps making this category mistake whereby the former is ascribed to our apprehension of god, whereas to me, the idea of god clearly belongs to latter.I can't quite tell whether this inversion he keeps making should be attributed to his falling victim to the dogma of his own historical period, or just sophistry. I'm inclined toward the latter.
It's kind of a cliché to use à priori intellect to pull metaphysical truth out of the hat, and Descartes doesn't really expand upon it further in the way you want. You can find more in-depth analysis of this kind in Kant or the analytics, who would say that "intellection" of this kind doesn't exist, and that "the hypotenuse faces the widest angle" is just a complicated tautology.
>>25353233>I cannot intuit god in the same manner i contemplate a triangle.Skill issue, unironically
>>25353233“God” to a deist like Descartes is merely the necessary means by which cogito must be connected to extension. In substance dualism you have the cogito, you have the physical world of extension and then you have this force which unites them to one another somehow. When you view it like this you can see how by his reasoning “cogito must of necessity be attached to extension via another outside force” is as necessary a tautology as “the triangle has three sides.” I am not a substance dualist but his reasoning isn’t what you are getting at.
>>25353233> Because it seems to me very clear the distinction between the faculties by which one grasps the essential qualities of a triangle (that the hypotenuse always faces its widest angle, for instance) and the one by which one invents or concocts concepts or mental images. The latter is how mankind has invented god. I cannot intuit god in the same manner i contemplate a triangle.You have cognition? Check. You have the physical world - res extensa? Check. You must have some possible way of combining these two together in a way which guarantees you coherently have rational faculties. > I cannot intuit god in the same manner i contemplate a triangle.The triangle MUST have three sides. You must exist right now in a way so as not to be tricked.
>>25353368>>25353377So god is necessary for mind & matter to remain attached to one another. I see. I mean, sure, his system needs this one axiom in order to work. My objection was only about the way by which he tries to justify the dogma, not that he is dogmatic.When he says "it is of the essence of god that he be unified and undivided, therefore he cannot be a chimera of concepts put together by the mind, and likewise to deprive 'existence' from his essence cannot be done" Sure, you can't deprive the 3 angles of a triangle from making half a circle. Nor can you bring it about that they make a quarter, nor a full circle. But there's a world of difference between this and a being that you just came up with, and conveniently added 'existence' to its essence.>>25353255>It's kind of a cliché to use à priori intellect to pull metaphysical truth out of the hatYeah, Plato's Meno immediately came to mind as I was reading. Only plato leaps into the soul's ability to recollect data from realms it has visited because it is immortal. Not unlike descartes himself leaping straight to god. Though I suppose later thinkers acknowledge that they're leaping huge lengths here, based on what you said.
>>25353419Many of his arguments especially the Cartesian circle famously, are very fallacious. It’s not his arguments that you should focus on but substance dualism as an idea. As I said in the earlier post Im not a substance dualist anyways so I don’t mind if you bash Descartes. There’s me. There’s the sensory world before me. There must be some way that these two interact somehow. Some way these two opposing forces are bridged.
