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Descartes Discourse on Method and Meditation

Introduction

Generally, Rene Descartes is considered the father of modern philosophy. He is the maiden figure of rationalism, a philosophical movement, and a way of understanding the world using reason as a way of attaining knowledge. Rationalism and empiricism, which insist on using sense perception as opposed to reason, were at the center of Enlightenment. The idea of enlightenment is a cultural movement that revolutionalized Western worlds during the 17th and 18th centuries. In conjunction with icons such as John Hobbes, Voltaire, and John Hobbes, Descartes managed to spur society and re-examine its institutions and traditions which led to a huge social disruption. The French and American revolutions were founded on the theory of enlightenment and how we approach philosophy, science, and mathematics, and the notion of self became radically transformed at the time. Descartes’s work, Discourse on Method and Mediation, cemented his fame as it addressed some concerns and attempted refutations sent to him by various readers. The theories discussed here-in were meant to change how individuals viewed their bodies and minds. The text follows principles of philosophy that attempt to diminish the universe to a mathematical foundation. Discourse on Method and Meditation attempts to explain Descartes’s reasoning and thoughts even at a time when he had most difficulties. The work was not written in Latin but rather in French so that all people with a good sense including women could read the work and train themselves to think for themselves. In Descartes’s view, every person was capable of telling truth for false by employing the natural light of reason. He used reason to search for the truth in the sciences. For instance, in Meteorology, he explained the rainbow, developed the formula for retraction in Dioptrics, and gave an exposition for analytic geometry. Furthermore, Descartes devised a system for representing known numerical quantities including unknowns with cubes, squares, and numerical superscript powers making algebraic problems easier to solve. Worth noting, Descartes developed a provisional moral code while seeking truth. The moral code exuded Descartes’s dedication, stoicism, conservatism, and decisiveness.

While there are various issues that Descartes addresses in his book, the main problem is how he suspends all judgment that pertains to beliefs that show even the slightest signs of doubtfulness. The scenarios in the text depict that all Descartes’s beliefs in his meditation at the very least that have to do with the physical world are all doubtful. Descartes’s objective was to propose a new school of thought that combines mathematical truths with the truths and intuition of human senses. In addition to having doubts about suggestions that his physical senses make, Descartes only claims to have trust only for his capacity for thought. One part of the text includes considerations about people in the sciences. This is the notion that individuals have a good sense which is their ability to tell truth from fiction. As such, people are mostly obstructed not by lack of ability but rather by their failure to heed to the correct school of thought. According to Descartes, his use of the correct path of thinking helped improved him to the typical thinker he was. Further, Descartes contemplated the various subjects and science he learned while he was a boy and concluded that it was flawed because they were ideas of men from many different eras. It is for this reason that he came up with his own set of rules keeping in mind the things he has learned about geometry, algebra, and logic. Among the lessons were that one should not believe anything unless they can prove it themselves, one should diminish each problem to its simplest parts, and as regards a person’s thinking, their thoughts should be orderly and must begin with the most simple going to the most difficult. His final rule was that it is always imperative to develop a long list of reasoning and to avoid leaving anything out when solving a particular problem. The purpose of this essay is to highlight the problem of judgment, and doubtfulness in beliefs as presented in the text by Rene Descartes. This essay discusses this problem alongside the thinkers that also agree on this notion. More specifically, the text discusses Descartes’s arguments on method and mediation including reason as a vital part of humanity, the attainability of knowledge, science that is based on reason, and how unreliable sense of perception can become. I agree with Descartes on the notion of the mind, the body, and God. Without a doubt, ideas can be innate, they can be external as with perceptions or they can be a product of our inventions.

Reason as the Core of Humanity

Firstly, Renes Descartes believed in and lived by the slogan “Cogito ergo sum” which loosely translates into thinking for existing. In his viewpoint, the proof behind the existence of human beings is the very fact that we are capable of thinking. Thoughts come from something; they have a source and a source is definitely a person. Without the existence of a person that does the thinking, thoughts cannot exist. In his argument, Descartes theorizes that although he is not sure he can prove anything that concerns the existence, for example proving beyond reasonable doubt that he possesses a body, hair, and hands, he is sure that he possesses thoughts and the ability to reason (Descartes, 18). According to Descartes, thoughts and facts are clear to him. They come as distinct and clear perceptions. He argues that all things can be observed using unique and clear perceptions and that anything observed using clear perception becomes a part of the importance of that what is being observed. Because reason and thought are perceived clearly, they are at the center of humanity. Therefore, Descartes opines that even without their hands, faces, or hair, people would still be deemed human. Additionally, Descartes opines that even other things that cannot be categorized as human beings do not have a face, hands, or hair. He also notes that while this is true, people would barely be human if they were without reason and that only human beings possess thins unique ability to reason.

Attainability of Knowledge

Secondly, Descartes strongly believed in the fact that reason is a native gift for human beings. He also maintained that real knowledge is not only gained directly from books but also from methodological application of reasoning. In this text, and most of his other others, Descartes aimed at presenting complex philosophical and scientific matters in a manner that enables his least sophisticated readers would manage to understand them. Since Descartes strongly believed that each human being has the natural gift of reason, his ideology was that if he provided his arguments in a logical fashion of thought, then any person would be capable of understanding them well and as such, people would not help being swayed in this direction. In the original edition of the text on the Discourse on Method and Mediation Descartes actually writes his declaration pointing his aim using the title “In which the Author…. Explains the most abstruse topics he could choose and does so in such a way even the persons who have never studies can understand them. This was in a bid to get to wider audience. Descartes also occasionally uses the French language in his writings, a language that his countrymen understood rather well. He avoided as much as possible writing the text in Latin, a language that was mostly used and understood by scholars to ensure that the people that did not have formal education could access the text, read what he was saying and interpret it for themselves.

The Sense Perception and its Unreliability

Thirdly, Renes Descartes did not trust the information we gather from our senses to be necessarily accurate. Descartes had a revelation following his November 10th experience which made him undertake his own personal intellectual rebirth. The first step was to get rid of every single thing he thought he knew. He refused to trust in even the most fundamental premise before he determined to himself that they were satisfactory to him. As he was demolishing and reconstructing, Descartes felt that tearing down each idea one by one would be a waste of time. As such, he opted to attack the things he felt that were at the core; the notion that sense perception communicates information that is accurate and he had developed various arguments to illustrate this notion. As regards the dream argument, Descartes maintained that on many occasions, he had dreamt of things which seemed rather real as he was asleep. He continued to talk about one of his dreams. He sat in a room with fire and he could feel the heat from the fire and that it felt as if he was waking up in his normal life although there was no fire. The mere fact that he could feel the fire did not allow him to differentiate between when he was awake and when he was dreaming. Additionally, if his senses could manage to convey to him a message about the heat from the fire at a time when he could barely feel it, it means that he could not trust the existence of the fire when he is feeling it in his normal life. Similarly, in the argument that has to do with deceiving God and Evil, Descartes notes that in his knowledge, there is the possibility that he was being controlled by an all powerful and supernatural being that is hell-bent on lying and deceiving him. In this situation, his body is completely non-existent and his brain was feeding on the illusions and information of beings that are all-powerful. Worth noting, it was not Descartes’s intention that his arguments be taken literally. He came up with the concept to prove a point; that even senses can be deceived. If as human beings we cannot trust our senses to give correct information concerning the world we live in and the world that surrounds us, then we have no business trusting and believing in the deductions that he arrived at from the grounds of our sense perception. Noteworthy, during the times when Descartes doubted the reliability of the sense perception, the position was mainly radical. He was of the opinion that scientific observation was an interpretive act which required to be monitored carefully. Descartes and his followers believed that true knowledge emanated from the use and application of reasoning.

Counterarguments

Moore’s Arguments About Knowledge

As opposed to Rene Descartes who believed that knowledge comes from reason, other philosophers such as Moore contended that something can only be certain if it is known. In essence, Moore believed that we cannot be certain about the unknown. In Moore’s viewpoint, knowledge has nothing to do with reason. Many philosophers have varied explanations and they disagreed on the relationship that exists between the concept of certainty and knowledge. Moore tried as much as possible to address the question of whether it is possible for a person to know about x without completely being certain about it. The main question he tried to answer is if knowing about y was possible without necessarily knowing about someone. Moore Wrote a paper in 1942 titled Certainty where he noted that the word certain was mainly used with four common types of idiom. The four idioms include I am certain that, I feel certain that, It is certain that and I know certain that. In his view, at least one use of it is certain that y…and I know for certain that y… is not true unless one is sure that y is true. Taking the example of the sentence, “I knew for certain that he would visit, he didn’t” and the statement “I felt certain he would come, but he didn’t”, the former statement is self-contradictory while the latter is not. Taking these considerations into context, Moore came up with the theory that something cannot be certain unless they are known. It is this fact that helps in distinguishing between the concepts of truth and certainty. As such, nobody might know that something is true unless they are certain. Because of this notion, Moore came up with the conclusion that for something to be true, the preliquisite was that someone must know it as true. Moore is therefore among the philosophers that dared respond negatively to the question of if it is possible to be certain about something without it necessarily being known.

Additionally, Moore also contended that saying “Person X knows that y is true” is not enough condition for being certain for y to be true. If the latter were true, it would be such that in all cases where a minimum of 1 person was aware that y was true, it would be a lie for anyone to say that ” It is uncertain that p” yet it is so evident that is not the case. If a person says that it is uncertain that Michael is alive, the person is not committing to the statement that nobody is sure is Michael is alive or not. As such, Moore is among the philosophers that are likely to answer and affirm the question of if it is possible to know y without being certain. We can refute Moore’s claim and argue that y is merely occurrent and not dispositional which implies the certainty of y. I tend to agree with the reasoning of Descartes more than with that Moore. This is because I am of the opinion that reason is the driver of knowledge and that without reason, people would never come across knowledge about life or the society that we live in general that would be of help to them.

Wittgenstein also maintained a rather radical position on the matter of certainty. He maintained that certitude and knowledge are radically different from each other and none of the concepts is linked to the other. As such, it is, therefore, possible that a person can be knowledgeable without being certain and that one can also be certain without being knowledgeable. For Wittgenstein, certainty should be associated with apprehension or seeing and without acting. Propositions can be certain meaning that they are true and presupposed within various social activities in a community. He said that giving grounds to justify evidence might come to an end but the end is uncertain and propositions come off as true. This is not a kind of seeing but rather it is the acting that lies at the bottom of the game of language.

Conclusion

While Descartes’s work Discourse on Method and Mediation highlights various problems as regards reasoning and thought, at the center of this discussion are his beliefs as regards mediation and the physical world. In addition to having doubts about suggestions that his physical senses make, Descartes only claims to have trust only for his capacity for thought. In his arguments, Descartes believes that reason is a vital ingredient for the attainment of knowledge, science and humanity in general. In Descartes’s view, without the existence of a person to engage in thinking, thoughts cannot exist. Descartes strongly believed in the fact that reason is a native gift for human beings and maintained that real knowledge is not only gained directly from books but also from methodological application of reasoning. Notably, Renes Descartes did not trust the information we gather from our senses to be necessarily accurate. Owing to the above-discussed arguments, as human beings, we now have a clear understanding of the ideologies that lie behind knowledge and reason. As human beings, we are now best placed to choose which ideology we would like to abide by and believe in. One might end up not trusting their physical senses as a result of this knowledge while other people’s minds end believing that reason is the ultimate native gift. All in all, this is rather evident; human reason is at the center of knowledge.

Works Cited

Descartes, R. (2020). Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. Broadview Press.