Descartes and God, Essay Example

“If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things?”

I think that I can totally agree with this statement of Rene Descartes. If one hopes and states to be a thinking person and seeker after truth, one must be able to critically perceive and analyze not only what one sees and hears from others, but also what one feels, one’s own emotions and judgments.

In his works Descartes emphasized the necessity of an individual’s own reasoning ability and he rejected that knowledge which is solely based on others’ authority or thinking. As we grow up we receive most of our knowledge from others, firstly it is our parents and other relatives, and then it is our teachers and friends. But there should always be a room for doubt, nothing can be taken for granted, because other people also received most of their knowledge from others. Descartes classified all the ideas that people may have in three groups – those that are innate (inborn or known from one’s own nature), those that are adventitious (come from outside me) or those that are made by me.

But there also should be doubt about that knowledge that we form with the help of our observations and perceptions. Descartes claimed that we can know for certain that we are seeing a particular idea (of the sun or the stars or this room or that tree), what we don’t know for certain is if there is a sun or stars or a room or tree causing our ideas. There is always a possibility that we can be misled by our own perceptions, that’s why we should always doubt that what we see, hear or comprehend with the help of our senses may simply be a trick of our imagination. In such a case we may see what we want to see, hear what we want to hear, and so on – all our perceptions are projections. At first Descartes stated that whatever we perceive clearly and distinctly is true, but then he made an objection to his own statement by saying that what we perceive are not the objects themselves, but our idea of those objects. So once again these ideas can’t be completely trusted, because we are never to be sure of what have caused these ideas to appear in our mind.

In his further critical analysis Descartes came to the conclusion that the ideas of things that we have in our minds are not false in their origin, what really can be the cause of falsehood is our judgments. So there always should be a doubt that our judgments of the external things may not absolutely conform to true meaning of these external things.

In his works Descartes discovered and logically proved not only that he exists, but also that he exists as a thinking thing (“I think, therefore I am”).  For him there was a great difference in knowing that you simply exist and in knowing that you exist as a thinking creature, that the whole essence of your living is based on the process of reasoning and finding and obtaining the truth. And I think that the best prove of a person’s reasoning is an ability to doubt. For me a person who takes everything for granted and never in his/her whole life has a doubt that the knowledge that one possesses may be false is not truly living, but simply existing, in the same way that animals do. Descartes also stated that human beings are imperfect and with this statement of his I also agree. Because of the fact that we are imperfect we have to think critically and to doubt as far as possibly all things in our attempts to find the truth. From the very beginning the ultimate truth is only known to those who are perfect.