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What Can Be Called Into Doubt - Descartes


Okay so I've been obsessed with philosophy long enough for me not to actually dive deeper into it academically so that is exactly what I am going to do; from now I will be writing about my personal understanding and opinions and rebuttals to the works of prominent philosophers that have contributed to the never ending arena of philosophy and we are going to start with the 6 meditations of Descartes - a french philosopher and mathematician. And hopefully during my journey of acquiring a deeper understanding, you can get something out of it too but reading a very less dense breakdown of what philosophy is and the various schools of thought. 


Here I am going to be talking about the first of the six meditations: what can be called into doubt.


Descartes basically sits down to tackle this task which he had in mind to do for a very long time but was prevented in doing so due to a few factors: Laziness and the belief that he had not acquired the maturity to do so.


Essentially, what he wanted to do was deconstruct the building, which consisted of his perceptions of reality, his views on right and wrong etc which was built by the info attained through his senses or from within him, and start anew.


His whole motivation in undertaking this endeavor was because he experienced times in life where he felt that his senses deceived him and of course it would be utterly ludicrous to trust something or someone that has deceived you once. His main belief was that you could never trust the things you acquired through your sense and perception as it was inconsistent.


His justification as to why he believed the senses could deceive was because it could impart a false reality especially of things that are too small from perception. Let's say you look at a star at night, to the naked eye and to logical sense (before you knew what stars were) they looked like tiny dots; one could never have imagined that it was a huge ball of fire floating through endless space. An even more interesting example would be of a color blind person's understanding of colors,  he could go his whole life calling the color green, green when in actuality he sees the color which we call red. Locke called them primary and secondary qualities - the incontrovertible facts that can be unbiasedly true belong in the primary, whereas the subjective aspects are termed secondary (we’ll definitely get into Locke in later posts)


But Descartes also pondered about the implications of the question of whether the larger things in life also were duplicitous in nature. What if the hands with which I'm typing this out right now aren't real? What if my body is actually made up of glass but I believe it's of flesh? All this sounds insane, I know, and this is what Descartes thought too. But a valid justification of this would be our understanding of reality whilst we are asleep and dreaming; how is it that the dream of me living in a whole new universe with the ability of flight and the supernatural seems so real when in reality I am fast asleep in bed? 


Going in depth into the world of dreaming - the things we see in our dreams may not exist in real life but they are indeed reconstructions of things we see in reality like copy in pasting stuff that exists in the real world in unthinkable ways to create something in our head but sometimes we also manage to bring to life seemingly impossible and novel things too but at a molecular level they are all based off of the primary things that are extant in the world we live in. Actually now that I'm writing this it brings me back to Hume who also believed that ideas are reconstructions of existing reality.


I did mention Descartes was a mathematician as well; he believed that subjects of mathematics and geometry hold true no matter what because they are the study of abstract things. 2*2 will always be 4 whether you are dreaming or not; they are indubitable unlike the study of astronomy and physics which study objects perceived through the senses.


He wanted to completely vanquish all his beliefs so he also questioned whether or not god was deceiving his senses. We know of God to be omnipotent and omnibenevolent and the creator of all so if such deception is possible within the creatures He made then there do exist discrepancies in His power of creation and control. Descartes makes a complete 90* just to accomplish the goal of “completely ruining his belief” by also acknowledging the existence of a devil, a malicious being that is in control of his actions and thoughts just to make a point.


That is all for the 1st meditation from the First Meditations of Modern Philosophy. I’ll for sure be delving into the remaining 5 in the upcoming posts. Stay tuned!!

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