Descartes 3 arguments 1- A posteriori substantia infinitas; rests on a fundamental asymmetry between object reality of ideas and formal reality

y of causes. Some indeterminate God is posited which I know exists because the thought of it is too overwhelming an idea to have come from me. Such a being can be understood [intellegere] but not comprehended [comprehendere]. Which suggests that such a God can be encountered, but not contextualized in terms of an antecedent explanatory principle, and not necessary set into a coherent systematic context. 2- A priori ens summe perfectum; this established after the initial proof on the basis of clear and distinct ideas, in this case the analytical truth that for a being possessing all perfections in the highest degree, existence would figure into its essence. Is perfection contradictory to the privative construction of infinite? Descartes does not address this question here, but several hints are given first, it must be noted, at the end of Meditation III, Descartes qualifies perfections of God in the same way that he qualifies the infinity of God as understandable but not comprehensible (AT.vii.52). Secondly, in the Fifth Replies, Descartes makes clear that the meaning of infinite is not a privation of finitude, but, per contra, that finitude is a negation of the infinite (AT.vii.365). These two exegetical marks seem to suggest that Descartes takes perfection and infinity to be roughly compatible, though the a posteriori proofs initial claim of incomprehensibility seems to absolve him from the need to set these definitions within a systematic perspective which accounts for their logical compossibility, which, after all, would be to make the revelation of the infinite into something comprehended. 3- Dictat causa sui; this rests on an analogical understanding of efficient causality as being adequate to provide a rough schematic to the way in which Gods infinity and perfection could be understood from the view point of reason. For anything that exists, Descartes claims, we can inquire as to its efficient causes or, lacking efficient causes, why it does not need one. (AT.vii.109-110) Causa sui is thus a limit case whereby reason balances its accounts by attempting to appropriate its inability to account for the possibility of revelation in the form of a reason. The argument could be reconstructed thusly: God (whom, recall, was first encountered in the form of the idea of an substantia infinitas whose objective features outstripped the productive formal features of intentionality) does not require an efficient cause. However, in allowing reason to proceed by analogy to finite causes, we may say that he does not need an efficient cause for the reason that he exists in such a way as that we could say it is as if he were his own efficient cause. Thus, Descartes interprets Gods essence as the power of self-identical persistence in the present instant.