Meditation I: Overall Summary

Descartes begins the Meditations by asking the simple question, 'What can we doubt?' In answering this, he first doubts the information that he receives through the senses, for, he reasons, having deceived him at times in the past, they may do so again.

He then considers whether it is possible to doubt the existence of the real world without being considered insane, whether he may be dreaming, and whether he may be deceived by a 'malignant demon'.

The process that Descartes adopts here is often known as his method of doubt, whereby he attempts to doubt all that he thought to be true up to that point in his life. The successive arguments he uses are often termed the waves of doubt, as each one represents a stronger and more extreme doubt than the last. These three arguments will therefore play key roles throughout the whole Meditations, and his overall sucess will depend on whether he can find answers to them.

The Arguments:

The Argument from Illusion

The argument that the senses cannot be trusted, because they sometimes deceive us, is the beginning of Descartes's attempt to subject all his beliefs and experiences to doubt. The argument recurs at other points throughout the Meditations and provides him with one of his main sources of worry.

The argument from illusion, as it is known, can be traced back to ancient Greek philosophy, and proposes that the senses distort the way things actually are. So, for instance, a stick placed in water will appear bent; the sun will appear to 'rise above', and 'sink below', the horizon; a hot day may give the illusion that there is a puddle of water on the road (whereas it is actually a 'mirage'). We all know, through experience and reasoning, that these things are not actually true, but before that we have - at least initially - allowed our senses to mislead us.

However, he concludes that he would indeed be insane if he considered that his senses misled him to the extent that he thought he had a body when he did not, or that he thought he saw a table or a chair when there was actually none there.

The Dreaming Argument

The argument that we may be dreaming and not know it is used by Descartes to further undermine his faith in his former beliefs. Having concluded that he would have to be mad to consider that his senses mislead him completely, he considers whether it is possible that he is currently dreaming.

Although at first he doubts it, he is forced to admit that the scene that he sees before him at this moment - the table, the chair, the fire - could easily be reproduced in a dream. To make matters worse, it could also be possible that he is dreaming that he is questioning that he is dreaming (i.e. dreaming that he is awake), which sometimes happens.

However, because his dreams contain objects which have shape, colour, etc., it is reasonable to assume that the ideas they represent are real in some sense, even if the overall picture that they make is not a true one. He reinforces this argument by comparing it to the process of drawing a non-existent, mythical animal such as a centaur (from Greek mythology: half man, half horse) where two existing elements (a horse and a man) combine to make a non-existent one. So, even though a centaur may not actually exist, the parts of which it is made up (man, horse) must come from somewhere, and refer to something - or at least, have some reality of their own (they may only be ideas, but those ideas may be real in some sense).

For this reason, he concludes, such sciences as maths and geometry, which do not assume that something actually exists (but only the laws and principles that govern its nature), are more pure, and may therefore provide us with certain knowledge. After all, 2 plus 2 will always equal 4, even if it may not be true that there are actually four apples placed on a table in front of me.

The Malignant Demon Argument

The final argument of the first Meditation concerns the most powerful reason for doubting our beliefs about the world: we may be deceived by some supernatural, all-powerful being.

The argument begins by seeking to use God as a guarantor of knowledge; for surely God, being good, would not create us in order for us to be deceived? However, we are sometimes wrong in our judgements - which God seems to allow - so why should he not allow deception on a grander scale (such as the illusion that a physical world exists independently of us)?

Descartes goes on to argue that the more power we attribute to our cause (the thing which created us - whether God, fate, or ourselves), the less likelihood there is of such a power making us easily capable of being mistaken or deceived. This is because, he claims, any being capable of being mistaken would be less perfect, and therefore, accordingly, would its creator be less powerful (for a perfect and all-powerful being would not create an imperfect thing).

Finally, not wishing to attribute anything but goodness to God, Descartes imagines all possible deception to originate with a 'malignant demon', whose sole purpose is to mislead us. Having arrived at the final and most extreme form of doubt, Descartes is therefore left with a clear objective: if he can prove that God exists, and has not created him to be constantly mistaken, then he can prove that the malignant demon argument is false, that his senses are more or less trustworthy, and that the physical world exists.

Easy.

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