Descartes’s Method of Doubt, Essay Example

Descartes’ basic project is to find secure foundations for human knowledge. In other words, Descartes wants to find a starting-point for human thought that cannot be questioned: by doing this he will secure a basis for all thought, thus justifying the truth of human knowledge. It for this reason that Descartes uses doubt as a methodology. Descartes first has to eliminate all potentially questionable statements of fact and knowledge: this is the method of doubt. Descartes cannot merely accept, for example, answers such as God is the reason for the creation of the universe, since this concept can be placed in doubt. This leads Descartes to doubt almost everything: the only statement that seems to be beyond doubt is his formula “I think, therefore I am”, as Descartes believes that thought itself, regardless of what thought itself is thinking about, cannot be questioned. Hence, this forms the foundation for his project.

Descartes invents a doubt about an evil god since it conforms to his project of questioning everything. For example, one cannot believe that the individual’s perceptions of some exterior existing world is beyond doubt. This is where the Evil God appears: Descartes imagines the possibility that an omnipotent being could have created the exterior world as an illusion to deceive thought. Hence, the Evil God is invented to show how even our most fundamental beliefs may not be real.

With his example of a piece of wax, Descartes wants to show the limits of belief we can entrust to our perceptions and senses. For example, the piece of wax seems to possess certain qualities. However, these qualities can change over time, for example, when, as Descartes writes, the wax encounters fire. The wax seems to be the same as before, but its qualities have changed. From this we learn that an object is not merely reducible to what we perceive to be its basic qualities. Accordingly, our senses are limited in what they can tell us about an object: I cannot say because this substance is soft it is necessarily wax, because the substance can change under certain conditions.