Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy

The aim of this meditation is to introduce doubt as the method of achieving indubitable certainty regarding the possibility of discovering what is true in the world. Descartes says we must begin by doubting our senses and any knowledge we take to be true that we have acquired from sensuous experience. We must do so because the senses are as reliable as they are deceiving, and if what Descartes is after is truth—defined as knowledge of something that is beyond all question and doubt—then the senses fail to serve as a guarantee in this attempt to discover what is absolutely true, beyond all doubt.

Hence, Descartes writes:

Whatever I have up till now accepted as most true I have acquired either from the senses or through the sense. But from time to time I have found that the senses deceive, and it is prudent never to trust completely those who have deceived us even once (95).

However, says Descartes, to deny such basic and self-evident facts such as his holding the piece of paper in his hands, his sitting in a room by a fire and wearing winter clothes, and so on, would orient this search for indubitable truth in the direction of madness:

Yet although the senses occasionally deceive us […] there are many other beliefs about which doubt is quite impossible […] for example, that I am here, sitting by the fire, wearing a winter dressing-gown, holding this piece of paper in my hands, and so on. Again, how could it be denied that these hands or this whole body are mine? Unless perhaps I were to liken myself to madmen, whose brains are so damaged […] that they firmly maintain they are kings when they are paupers, or say they are dressed in purple when they are naked […] such people are insane, and I would be thought equally mad if I took anything from them as a model for myself (96).

That is to say, if this method of doubting sensory experience and the knowledge we acquire through our senses is to have any relationship to truth, it must be a method distinct from, and opposed to, the methods used by those suffering from schizophrenia, psychosis, and so on.

So, in order for doubt to retain the rational promise of objective truth, it cannot mean a questioning of anything and everything; rather, it means deconstructing what is given in our experience of reality in order to uncover the reality of our experiences.

A rational use of this method of doubt would then mean that if we cannot ground our knowledge on what is immediate and given in our everyday experience of the world, then it also means that we must doubt our very capacity for differentiating experiences had while we are awake and experiences had while we are asleep and dreaming.

This is because waking life and dreams, while being qualitative different phenomena, are ultimately things we know from the experience we have of them. So, not only should we not trust our senses, but we must not trust what we take to be real and what we consider to be fantasy or dreamlike hallucinations as well. In other words, even our experience of an illusion is some experience of reality for the very reason that the truth is just as real as the illusions under which we operate. However, even if we can distinguish between waking life and our dream states, what we still lack is the ability to discern which of the two experience is “more” real, of the two experiences.

Because we cannot trust our senses, and because we cannot trust our own ability to distinguish between something experienced during sleeping states (which are products of the mind and do not reveal any truth about reality) and those things experienced during states of wakefulness (which, despite their possible falsity, at least maintain some relationship to reality), we must also doubt the validity of the truths that science and mathematics have taken as being self-evident.

This is because the laws of nature and of scientific knowledge could very well be just another illusion we have been subjected to; an illusion whose cause, says Descartes, is not a benevolent and omnipotent God but an all-powerful and evil “demon.”

If all this doubting implies a putting into question the fundamental ideas we have about the natural order of things, it is due to the fact that insofar as the human intellect or understanding is fallible, finite, and prone to error, even its highest or most perfect idea (for Descartes, the idea of God) is rendered equally suspect, and thus must be treated with suspicion.

What began with a seemingly innocent search for a truth so true that it puts any and all possible doubts to rest (i.e. absolute truth or knowledge defined by its indubitable certainty), and has led to a rejection of what we have taken to be true from our subjective experiences, this search has, then, led us to question the very notion and existence of God as that infinite creator who is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent towards all of his creations.

Descartes, having concluded that upon utilizing doubt as the method of disabusing himself of all the fallible and/or potentially erroneous opinions he has taken to be real and true, finds himself in a state of fear, a “fear that [his] peaceful sleep may be followed by hard labour when [he] wake[s], and that [he] shall have to toil not in the light, but amid the inextricable darkness of the problems [he has] now raised” (95).

Picking up from where he left off in the previous meditation, Descartes restates the method of doubting all the knowledge he has acquired through lived experience developed in Meditation 1. Descartes started out by doubting everything known from experience and our senses. This then led him to putting into question his ability to distinguish between our experiences of things when we are awake and our experiences while we are asleep, which then led him to doubt the very notion of God as that all powerful and benevolent creator of both himself and of all that exists. And once we have doubted the existence of God, what is left for us to question?

This is precisely where the Second Meditation begins and founds its argument. Doubting the existence of God does not foreclose any future possibility of discovering those truths which are certain and beyond all doubt; rather, it is only by doubting God himself, says Descartes, that we may have our first experience of something that is true.

What is this experience? It is the experience of doubting. It is the fact that insofar as our minds continually doubt and question all of our pre-existing assumptions and opinions we have long held to be true that, at the very least, we can be certain that we exist. Thus, to embark on a search for truth by doubting everything is how we arrive at the objective fact that even if we cannot trust our senses or the standard idea we may have of God, we can still say with certainty is that we exist.

However, as soon as Descartes establishes his existence as something objectively true, he immediately subjects this truth to scrutiny and suspicion. Why? Because while it may be the case that we exist, this statement remains vague and unclear for who is the “I” that exists, and what is its nature?

For Descartes, absent any clarity and distinctness regarding this notion of an “I” that undoubtedly exists, the truth of our existence cannot be said to have been fully established. And it is precisely in the hopes of clarifying the nature of the “I” that exists that Descartes proposes his distinction between the soul (or mind) and the body:

What then did I formerly think I was? A man. But what is a man? Shall I say ‘a rational animal’? No; for then I should have to inquire what an animal is, what rationality is, and in this way one question would lead me down the slope to other harder ones […] Instead I propose to concentrate on what came into my thoughts spontaneously […] the first thought to come to mind was that I had a face, hands, arms and the whole mechanical structure of limbs which can be seen in a corpse, and which I called the body. The next thought was that I was nourished, that I moved about, and that I engaged in sense-perception and thinking; and these actions I attributed to the soul (103).

For Descartes, to have a body means to have a determinable shape, specific location, and to occupy a space such that no other body can occupy that space at the same time. Additionally, bodies can be defined by any of the five senses and thus have as their properties a certain feel, a certain look, particular sounds it makes, and a finite and specific range of taste and scent.That is, to have a body means to be definable by a shape, size, weight, appearance, and so on.

However, Descartes adds the following caveat: bodies move or change location in space “by whatever else comes into contact with” (103) them, and not of their own volition. In other words, while bodies can be said to have the properties we just mentioned, one property that bodies do not possess is will, or the power of self-movement. Thus, if we are to attribute properties of will, or volition, or intention, it is not to bodies but to souls/minds.

In Descartes’s Third Meditation, he gives himself the task of inquiring into the existence and nature of God:

I must inquire whether there is a God […] and if I find that there is one, I must also inquire whether he can be deceitful; for without the knowledge of these two truths, I do not see that I can ever be certain of anything (114-15).

Descartes proceeds by defining what he understands by the term God:

By the name God I understand an infinite substance, eternal, immutable, independent, omniscient, omnipotent, and by which I had all the other things which exist (if it be true that any such exist) have been created and produced (123).

The significance of this definition is the following: if it is true that God is an all-powerful, perfect, and infinite being, then the question arises as to whether or not deception can be part of God’s nature. In other words, is it contrary to the nature of an infinite and perfect being to engage in the deception of finite and imperfect beings, such as the human mind?

For Descartes, the answer is decidedly no. As he argues, to conceive of a higher power that perpetually deceives our ways of knowing the world is contrary to the nature of God, because to deceive is to cause us to err and errors are an imperfection of the human mind. Therefore, God cannot be an evil deceiver precisely because it is contrary to the nature of an infinitely perfect being to simultaneously be the cause and source of imperfection or error.