Theological Origins of Modernity

the contradictions of enlightenment 267
Descartes by contrast, we reason not about words but about the objects
that they signify, and mathesis universalis aims not merely at probable
knowledge that gives us an eff ective mastery of nature at this time and
place but at apodictic knowledge that can guarantee our mastery everywhere
and always.
If Hobbes is correct about the nature of reasoning, then as Descartes
well knows, we can never be certain that our ideas correspond to the
things themselves. For Descartes, the guarantee of such a correspondence
is provided by God, but only if God is not a deceiver. Mathesis universalis
thus depends on the demonstration of this fact, but such a demonstration
itself depends on our being able to know God, on having an idea of God
in us. Hobbes considers this impossible because God is infi nite, and all of
our ideas are drawn from the imagination of fi nite bodies. We can thus
know of God’s existence only inferentially by the logical necessity of a fi rst
cause.
Here we see a great divide. For Descartes there is a pure thinking separate
from the imagination. Our capacity for such pure thinking is in fact
something that we share with God. Descartes explains in the fi ft h Reply
that our true “ideas” are the same as those in the divine mind that has no
corporeal imagination. Implicitly, Descartes thus argues here that man as
res cogitans is divine or at least participates in some aspects of the divine.
As we have seen, this is a point he makes explicitly in the body of the Meditations
where he identifi es man’s infi nite will with the will of God. 21 For
Hobbes, by contrast, we can have no idea of an incorporeal thing. Even
things like emotions, which Descartes educes to support his point, are in
Hobbes’ view nothing other than the thing that evokes the emotion plus its
eff ect on our body. Hobbes thus concludes that since we have no idea of our
self or of God except as body, Descartes’ whole argument collapses. Descartes
argues, on the contrary, since we do have an idea of God, Hobbes’
objection collapses. Argument at this point can go no further, since the
parties fundamentally disagree about the nature of man, his capacities,
and his relation to God.
Hobbes bolsters his argument in the next four objections. He fi rst argues
that there is no distinction between the imagination of things and
the astronomical or mathematical idea of them. Both images or words and
mathematical symbols are tools that we use to grasp and manipulate bodies.
Mathematics thus does not give us access to a trans-corporeal reality
as Descartes suggests. In a similar vein, Hobbes denies that there are different
levels of being of the sort that Descartes employs to identify divine
infi nity with perfection. Th ere is no sense in which some being has more