Analyzing Descartes, And His Arguments Regarding One's Self And One's Senses

Descartes’ Meditation I is the starting point into a very bold and intriguing set of arguments in which he attempts to answer some of life’s fundamental questions about the mind and life itself. His introductory paragraph describes his personal realization that many of his beliefs and assumptions he’d held for so long from his youth are false. He must look back and tear down all of the false foundations that led him to believe these things and start over. In order to do this, he says, he must free his mind of all dependence upon the senses, because he will soon argue that there is considerable reason to doubt the senses.

Descartes moves on to realize that to prove all of these previous foundations false would be impossible. Instead, he will find in each of them some reason for doubt, and will “withhold (his) assent no less carefully from opinions that are not completely certain and indubitable than (he) would from those that are patently false” (17, 18).

Descartes observes that the senses are sometimes deceiving, and this is evident from countless examples like the way things look far away versus close up, or seeing a break in a pencil held in a glass of water from the side when it really is not broken. Since the senses can be deceiving, there is reason to doubt everything that we perceive from the senses, and so Descartes has succeeded in his aim thus far.

Next, he observes that perhaps there is no way to tell whether you are awake or sleeping. When people are dreaming, they experience things in their dreams that they truly believe to be happening while they are dreaming. Perhaps what we think is consciousness is actually just a dream? Maybe our whole lives have been a dream. If we can no longer trust the senses, then how can we say we know we are awake because we “sense” that we are awake? Descartes forces the doubt that we can not, through his arguments. If we assume for the sake of argument that we are dreaming, than it is plausible to suggest that we may not have hands, or arms, or legs, or any of these things which we make the distinction of having when we are awake versus when we are asleep.

Descartes then moves on to discussing the subject of God, and his nature. He proposes the question that asks, how do we know that God did not perhaps bring it about that there is no external world as we think, but simply made us see the world as we do in our minds. He asks, if “others sometimes make mistakes in matters that they believe they know perfectly, may I not, in like fashion, be deceived every time I add two and three or count the sides of a square…?” (15, 21). Then Descartes states that God surely cannot be a deceiver in this way because he is said to be all-good. If, on the other hand, we suppose the worlds to have come into being through chance, or fate, or some other way, we must look at the mistakes made by people to represent imperfections in this system, which ultimately undermines whatever is the cause of our existence and makes it all the more believable that we are in fact always being deceived.

The last topic for discussion that Descartes takes in his first meditation is to consider the possibility that God is in fact a maliciously evil God who takes pleasure in deceiving us all the time. Descartes states, “I will remain resolute and steadfast in this meditation, and even if it is not within my power to know anything true, it certainly is within my power to take care resolutely to withhold my assent to what is false, lest this deceiver, however powerful, however clever he may be, have no effect on me” (17, 23). So Descartes makes the argument that if God actually is deceiving him about everything he senses in the world, he would want to keep from believing anything that he finds cause for doubt in, so that he will stay above his creator’s deception. But in the end, he realizes that he will fall back into his customary way of living, because it is too hard a life to live with all of these problems and doubts he has introduced. It is too arduous a task to live his life all the time doubting everything for the sake of satisfying one possibility in so many that he has given reason to consider. So Descartes concludes that, “(he) fall(s) back of my own accord into my old opinions, and dread begin awakened, lest the toilsome wakefulness…be spent thenceforward not in the light but among the inextricable shadows of the difficulties now brought forward” (17, 23). (c) Descartes goes into Meditation two, picking up from Meditation one and stating that he will follow in the steps of Archimedes in trying to find just one thing that can be absolutely certain. Descartes aims to prove that the mind and body are separate. He asks, “Am I so tied to a body and to the senses that I cannot exist without them?” (18, 25). If he is the same as his body, which uses the senses to detect the world, then it follows that we can assume we do not exist, if we accept Descartes’ earlier observations that we can not trust the senses, and that it is plausible that everything we once detected through the senses is non-existent. Later he comes to his first undoubtable conclusion which is that “I think, therefore I exist” (18, 25). He is a thinking thing.

Descartes uses his ability to free his mind of the senses in order to better meditate on what he knows about the nature of himself. He must be able to depend completely on his mind and intuition and get rid of all the assumptions he once had. He must be able to be completely open to anything and everything his mind brings forth for him to contemplate. Only after he has freed his mind of his mental dependency upon the senses is he capable of making undeniable and certain conclusions about the nature of himself. After freeing his mind like this, he is able to make decisions as to what he believes he is. By the middle of his second meditation, he is able to state, “I know now with certainty that I am and also that all these images – and, generally, everything belonging to the nature of the body – could turn out to be dreams” (20, 28).

Descartes uses an abstract train of thought to illustrate the distinction between mind and body with a piece of wax. We can observe that the wax is one form with our senses, but it is then able to change forms, yet we still believe it to be wax. “So what was there in the wax that was so distinctly grasped? Certainly none of the aspects that I reached by means of the senses. For whatever came under the senses…, has now changed; and yet the wax remains” (21, 30). Descartes concludes that it is our mind that grasps what the wax is, and not the imagination. Later he tells us that there is nothing greater than the mind. So as Descartes releases himself from the confines of what most people allow themselves to live by, namely, the senses, he is able to see and think beyond himself, to see where the core or his thought is, and where the soul is. This is a hard thing to do, and requires a thinker with a very open mind, but the rewards and results that can follow it, as we see through Descartes, can be very enlightening, and open doors to new realms of ideas and thoughts.

Article Source: http://www.content.onlypunjab.com

I am a second year English major at Wright State University. I am an honors student, studying creative writing. I have never previously published. I keep a portfolio of essays submitted to various classes that have earned a grade of "A".

Please Rate this Article

5 out of 54 out of 53 out of 52 out of 51 out of 5 

Not yet Rated