Descartes’ Philosophy: Reality, Cogito, and Society
Reality
Methodical Doubt
One must doubt everything that is not based on clear and distinct ideas, everything that does not obviously present itself to the natural light of reason. Methodical doubt is required by the final method of not accepting as true anything that might have the slightest hint of falsity. Descartes’s doubt is not skeptical; it is a question that seeks to lay the foundation for all knowledge that intends to pass as true in the future.
Descartes will doubt anything that does not submit to reason in a clear and distinct manner. This will certainly be articulated around four reasons:
- Deception of the Senses: The senses often deceive us, and we see things that are not as they appear to us. He will doubt the certainty of all those truths which are based on the testimony of the senses.
- Confusion Between Sleep and Wakefulness: There are some truths captured by the senses which cannot be doubted, such as the existence of the body. However, we sometimes feel certain things while asleep with the same vitality as if we were awake. This leads to the conclusion that there is nothing that assures me I am not asleep when I feel my body, and this body I feel may be nothing more than a figment of my dream.
- Deceiver God: There are certain truths, such as mathematical truths, that are always true. However, even mathematical truths can be questioned, since there is nothing that assures me that God does not take pleasure in deceiving me, making me believe that these mathematical truths are valid when, in fact, some are not.
- If God Exists, He Cannot Deceive Us: Because one of his qualities would be to be quite good. We cannot be sure that there is an evil genius so powerful as to make us believe that certain truths are true when, in fact, they are not.
The Cogito
Throughout this process, there is certainly something obvious, something that it is not possible to doubt, and this is the fact that one is doubting. Descartes cannot doubt that he is hesitating. If I doubt, if I can be deceived, it is because I think, therefore, I am.
Firstly, the existence of the self is an intuition. The inclusion of “ergo,” the “therefore,” is not to infer the existence from thought, but rather that existence and thought are given simultaneously in the mind and intuition.
Secondly, existence, in this first phase of the construction of knowledge, comes down to thinking. The cogito appears as the center of all activity and is formed as a substance. I call res cogitans thinking, the thinking substance, from which a clear and distinct idea of the other two is achieved.
Deduction from the Cogito
Thought contains ideas; every thought is of ideas, and all knowledge is of ideas: this is one of the basic premises of rationalism. The existence of any other substance shall be deducted by the constituent ideas of thought.
- Adventitious Ideas: The way the mind is based on information received from the external world.
- Factitious Ideas: Ideas that the human mind forms from other ideas, using imagination.
- Innate Ideas: Ideas that human reason forms from itself, ideas not derived from any other place than reason itself. Innate ideas will appear in the mind as clear and distinct, and based on these innate ideas, Descartes will deduce the existence of reality other than the self.
From these innate ideas, Descartes deduces, in the first place, the existence of God, using a formulation of the ontological argument. The existence of the world is deduced from the existence of God, who is infinitely good and therefore cannot deceive. This methodical doubt ends here.
Society
Descartes did not expose a developed social and political thought in any of his texts. We can assume that his conception of the subject was based on a consideration of a proto-capitalist society, being the basis of bourgeois individualism. Descartes is an advocate of radical democracy, which is the position later held by the Cartesian Spinoza and other prominent figures.