Spirituality – René Descartes – Cartesian Doubt

Descartes’ Method

René Descartes, the originator of Cartesian doubt, put all beliefs, ideas, thoughts, and matter in doubt. He showed that his grounds, or reasoning, for any knowledge could just as well be false. Sensory experience, the primary mode of knowledge, is often erroneous and therefore must be doubted. For instance, what one is seeing may very well be a hallucination. There is nothing that proves it cannot be. In short, if there is any way a belief can be disproved, then its grounds are insufficient. From this, Descartes proposed two arguments, the dream and the demon.

The Dream Argument

Descartes, knowing that the context of our dreams, while possibly unbelievable, are often lifelike, hypothesized that humans can only believe that they are awake. There are no sufficient grounds by which to distinguish a dream experience from a waking experience. For instance, subject a sits at the computer, typing this article. Just as much evidence exists to indicate that the act of composing this article is reality, as there is evidence to demonstrate the opposite. Descartes conceded that we live in a world that can create such ideas as dreams. However, by the end of The Meditations, he concludes that we can distinguish dream from reality at least in retrospect.

The Evil Demon

Descartes reasoned that our very own experience may very well be controlled by an evil demon of sorts. This genius is as clever and deceitful as he is powerful. He could have created a superficial world that we may think we live in.

In Meditation I, Descartes stated that if one were mad, even briefly, the insanity might have driven man into believing that what we thought was true could be merely our minds deceiving us. He also stated that there could be ‘some malicious, powerful, cunning demon’ that had deceived us, preventing us from judging correctly.

Descartes argued that all his senses were lying and since your senses can easily fool you, his idea of an infinitely powerful being must be true as that idea could have only been put there by an infinitely powerful being which would have no reason to be deceitful to him.

Luc Paquin