Descartes’ Discourse on Method, Term Paper Example

Rene Descartes was a prominent philosopher of the Middle Ages, the one who conducted an overwhelming portion of work on challenging the whole system of conventional beliefs by employing his technique of Cartesian doubt, and on reconstructing it anew with the application of Cartesian standards of reasoning regarding every point of the surrounding reality. His work Discourse on Method is a varied tractate consisting of six parts related to Descartes’ contemplations over sciences, explicating the rules of Descartes’ method, deriving moral rules, the argumentation for existence of God and human soul, explanation of medical issues, the analysis of human soul’s difference from lower animals, and the reasoning behind the initiative to write the discourse. Discourse on Method is a large-scale philosophical writing of high significance even in the modern philosophical thought, and one of the key arguments considered by Descartes involves the reasoning towards the proof of truth and the existence of God laid out in part 4 of the work.

As it becomes evident from reading the Discourse on Method, Descartes laid out the basis of a completely new philosophy of being by challenging every human belief and certainty about something being true. By constructing his argument that “the things we conceive very vividly and very clearly are all true”, Descartes departed from his self-perception as the most immediate truth to prove (Descartes 15). The philosopher assumed that nothing in the human world is similar to what people consider it to be (that is, perceived through human senses), and declared that all arguments considered by all people demonstrative proofs were unsound (Descartes 14). This way, Descartes rejected the idea that anything he thought about was true because his mind, similarly to the minds of all other people, could not tell the difference between the truth observed in reality and the illusions delivered by his mind in his dreams.

These arguments established the firm basis for further construction of argumentation by Descartes. By stating so, the philosopher admitted that people have nothing to be sure about; hence, they can conceive nothing clearly and distinctly. However, Descartes further shared an observation that “while I was trying in this way to think everything to be false it had to be the case that I, who was thinking this, was something” (Descartes 15). From this standpoint, Descartes admitted the reality of his own existence – the first surest truth that every person can arrive at through inductive reasoning – here the eternal truth of Aristotle was proven: “I am thinking, therefore I exist” (cogito ergo sum). The present fact was so undoubted for Descartes that he accepted it as the first philosophical principle of his approach – all human beings were real and truly existed because they could comprehend their existence through the range of continuous mental states and processes in which they were involved when contemplating over the world and reality surrounding them.

As it follows from the argumentation of Descartes, he saw a direct connection between the first principle he elicited, “I think, therefore I am”, with the postulate of reality existing only under the condition of being conceived very clearly and distinctly. As he noted in his analysis,

“I observed that the proposition ‘I am thinking, therefore I exist’ has nothing about it to assure me that I am speaking the truth when I assert it except that I see very clearly that in order to think it is necessary to exist” (Descartes 15).

As it comes from the present quotation, Descartes drew a line between truth and human certainty. However, he further continued that in case the fact about the connection of thinking and existence stands so much beyond reasonable doubt for him, and he saw clearly that it was a fact, then it could be accepted with enough certainty to be true. Here, the problem was not with identifying truths, but with clarifying which ones were indeed clear, and which were not. A fact may possess a certain extent of clarity for one person, but it may at the same time be not as easily recognizable by another person, which creates a dilemma about truth in its objective sense, and the subjective, individualized perception of truth.

Since existence of his personality, the unity of his body and soul, represented the indisputable truth for Descartes that he as a thinker challenging the whole world could not doubt, the sources of conceiving that truth, as well as the facts about the surrounding reality, were of particular interest for Descartes. Stating that his mental states and processes derived from his very existence in itself would be irrational and easily debatable for the reason that the argumentation would be subjective and personally biased. However, Descartes did not assume that all his beliefs were only the immediate product of his existence and thinking; hence, he had to find the objective source of his ideas, as well as the ideas about the surrounding physical reality, even if they did not reveal the truth. Hence, he embarked on the proof of God’s existence to explain the source of his ideas about himself and the world.

As Descartes indicated in his Discourse on Method,

“the only possibility left was that the idea had been put into me by something that truly was more perfect than I was, something indeed having every perfection of which I could have any idea, that it – to explain myself in one word – by God” (Descartes 16).

The present argumentation is a strong link to the existence of an objective physical reality because explaining thinking by existence is a good onset of a logical argumentation that nevertheless fails to explain the concept of existence itself. Since the absence of this starting point presents a gap in the argument about seeing something clearly and vividly, disabling the philosopher to see clearly why he exists, and having an explanation only to why he thinks, there is a need to introduce a perfect entity of God. The arguments of Descartes in support for the existence of God are very strong, since the philosopher insisted that people could never know about things more perfect than they are and have in case they did not exist, and they can be possessed only by God.

The concept of certainty occupies a significant place in Descartes’ argumentation about conceiving anything clearly and distinctly, i.e., conceiving the truth. The arguments he presents in relation to uncertainty include the contemplation over the opposition of subject matter of geometry to its graphical representation in geometrical forms. Descartes spoke as follows about it:

“I took up the subject-matter of geometry, which I conceived of as a continuous body, or a space indefinitely extended in length, breadth, and height or depth, and divisible into different parts that can have various shapes and sizes, and can be moved and swapped around in all sorts of way…I went through some of their simpler proofs, and noted that it’s because we conceive them as evident that we all regard them as utterly certain” (Descartes 16-17).

This way, Descartes was trying to prove that believing in the need for the triangle’s angles to equal the size of two right angles did not prove the very existence of a triangle in the world. Similarly, there was no assurance of the existence of subject matter of geometry from the consideration of geometrical laws, which contradicted the idea about the existence of a perfect being that included its existence. By this argumentation, Descartes equaled the proof of certainty of a perfect being’s (i.e., God’s) existence to the certainty of connecting the geometrical shapes’ existence with the geometrical proof of the laws to which they have to subdue to exist. As one can see, this evidence in Descartes’ presentation looks rather loose, since it is based on the need to accept the existence of God (and any other creature or entity) based on the evident belief people share regarding its existence.

The tools Descartes advises people for gaining certainty about the existence of God and the human soul is to refuse from imagining or picturing them, and to apply thinking instead. The certainty at which people may arrive this way, in the opinion of Descartes, is of much sounder nature than the certainty acquired through the senses of sight, smell, and hearing can give to a person. The main reason for refusing from conventional senses in approaching the immaterial things such as a human soul or God is that the human being, in Descartes’ opinion, cannot comprehend the things not intended for conventional sensual comprehension with the help of lower-order senses such as eyesight, hearing, or imagination. The soul and God exist independently of the human ability to envision them, but in case people make an effort for envisioning, they should do that with the help of their reasoning and thought. As Descartes put it:

“Even the scholastic philosophers take it as a maxim that there is nothing in the intellect that wasn’t previously in the senses; which leads people to find God and the soul problematic, because it is certain that the ideas of God and of the soul have never been ‘in the senses’!” (Descartes 17).

By this statement, Descartes instills his distrust towards the human feelings and senses, and instills belief in the ability to derive certainty only from the common reason, logic, and thinking, which are perceived by him as higher-order abilities of human beings enabling them to perceive and understand higher-order concepts. The present vision is highly coherent with Descartes’ overall method of a philosophical inquiry presupposing the distrust to the organs of senses and the possibly deceitful image of the surrounding world they can provide for people, and keep them uninformed about the real state of affairs in the conditions of which they live. In this context, Descartes also attached the excessive reliance of people on their imagination in the issues they cannot physically see, touch, or smell, which means that Descartes greatly disapproved the aptness of people to rely on their imaginative power when thinking of abstract, intangible concepts:

“trying-to-understand-through-imagination is even more absurd than trying-to-smell-with-the-eyes”, because there is a difference: the sense of sight gives us as much assurance of the reality of its objects as do the senses of smell and hearing, whereas our imagination and our senses could never assure us of anything without the aid of our understanding” (Descartes 17).

Hence, Descartes drew his argumentation on the basis of claiming that the belief in the existence of God and the human soul is the starting point, the maximum of certainty from which all other beliefs have to be derived. The present vision of certainty is rather challengeable from the modern viewpoint, since the belief in God is taken as a sample of belief in certainty of some thing’s or concept’s existence. At the same time, Descartes undermines the credibility of the human senses and imagination in terms of verifying the truthfulness and certainty of their certain beliefs and assumptions, which makes it inaccessible for a number of people to observe one and the same concept through the senses they share. Understanding is a unique matter, and two persons cannot have a similar mechanism of reasoning and comprehension through philosophical contemplation.

Descartes’ Discourse on Method is a fundamental work laying out the principles of Descartes’ Cartesian method; there is much attention paid in the work to the truth, certainty, and the ways to comprehend them as credible in the world every bit of which is put into question and doubt. The arguments reasonably proven and taken as the basis for further analysis are the existence of a thinking identity, the existence of God, and the existence of the human soul. It is rather challenging to comprehend the way in which Descartes proves the certainty of these abstract concepts’ existence, at the same time denouncing the value of comprehending the immediately surrounding physical objects surrounding any person because of the deceitful nature of the human senses. However, it is obvious from the present analysis of Descartes’ Discourse that the present philosopher relied on reasoning and thinking exclusively, and assumed certainty to concepts that he could prove deriving from the indisputable fact of his own existence.

Works Cited

Descartes, Rene. ‘Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting one’s Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences’ (trans. by John Bennett). 2005. Web. 22 March 2013. <http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdf/descdisc.pdf >