In Descartes Discourse
on the Method, he not only writes one of the most famous lines in all of
philosophy, but also soon after has an ontological proof for God. Briefly
summed up, his proof is that since we are flawed, there must be a perfect thing
that created us and be the source of perfection. For Descartes, God is that
perfection. He lists that God is the source of perfections such as infiniteness,
omniscience, omnipotence, and many others. God is free from all perfections.
Descartes lists some examples of perfections, but what is a perfection and
imperfection? At one point, he gives examples of sadness, doubt, and
inconsistency as examples of imperfections not found in God, but it seems
because he “would have been happy to be free from them” is the reason they are
imperfections. This seems that imperfection then is a subjective thing? How do
we know what perfections are? If they are from God, how do we find/identify
those perfections without our own biases on what we would like or not like to
have in our lives?
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