Ez swoosh’s Weblog

Descartes – First Meditation

The reason that Descartes embarks into his first meditation is because he wants to know if there is anything that can be proven to exist for certain. He wants to know something that is a certain and indubitable truth. To do this he must challenge all of his opinions and ideas and if he finds one reason for doubt then he can eliminate that certain opinion as an indubitable certainty. It would be impossible to try and disprove all of his opinions separately so he must go to the source that has supported everything that he once believed. This is his senses. All the truths he has come to know have been proven to him by the use of his senses, however, he has come to realize that his senses can sometimes be deceptive, and anything that has deceived you once cannot be fully trusted because you never know when it will deceive you again.

But then there are the little things that the senses do not deceive us of such as knowing he is sitting next to a fire, that he is wearing his night gown and he has hands and other similar things. But then how can he prove that the hands or even the entire body are his. With this he says I would only make such a mistake if he were to liken himself with the insane who believe different things at different times when it is not the actuality.

Then he says how can one distinguish that he is not dreaming. When we experience dreams it is true that we genuinely feel that the events taking place are real and only notice that it was a dream after we awaken. How can we be sure that we are not always dreaming and are waiting to be awakened? But then he justifies this problem by saying that in dreams we see, like painted images, things that have been produced in the likeness of true things and therefore these general things such as eyes, head body must are not imaginary and must exist.

Then he questions weather there is some kind of external force that is devoted to always deceiving him, some kind of evil genius. With this thought in mind he cannot prove anything he uses his senses to observe to be real because he can never know when this evil genius is deceiving him and when he is not.

In the end Descartes comes to an accomplishment. He has found out that everything he knows can have reason for doubt and therefore cannot be entirely certain. Even though he has not come to any concrete knowledge of any indubitable truths at least he will avoid any error in thinking that something can be certain when it cannot because he will not think something to be true when it can have reason to doubt.