on me in the slightest degree. But this is an arduous undertaking, and a kind of laziness brings me back to normal life. I am like a prisoner who is enjoying an imaginary freedom while asleep; as he begins to suspect that he is asleep, he dreads being woken up, and goes along with the pleasant illusion as long as he can. In the same way, I happily slide back into my old opinions and dread being shaken out of them, for fear that my peaceful sleep may be followed by hard labour when I wake, and that I shall have to toil not in the light, but amid the inextricable darkness of the problems I have now raised.
[So ends the First Meditation. In the opening of the Second Meditation, which follows, Descartes’s meditator struggles to escape from the morass of doubt into which he has fallen.]
So serious are the doubts into which I have been thrown as a result of yesterday’s meditation that I can neither put them out of my mind nor see any way of resolving them. It feels as if I have fallen unexpectedly into a deep whirlpool which tumbles me around so that I can neither stand on the bottom nor swim up to the top. Nevertheless I will make an effort and once more attempt the same path which I started on yesterday. Anything which admits of the slightest doubt I will set aside just as if I had found it to be wholly false; and I will proceed in this way until I recognize something certain, or, if nothing else, until I at least recognize for certain that there is no certainty. Archimedes used to demand just one firm and immovable point in order to shift the entire earth; so I too can hope for great things if I manage to find just one thing, however slight, that is certain and unshakeable.
I will suppose then, that everything I see is spurious. I will believe that my memory tells me lies, and that none of the things that it reports ever happened. I have no senses. Body, shape, extension, movement and place are chimeras. So what remains true? Perhaps just the one fact that nothing is certain.
Yet apart from everything I have just listed, how do I know that there is not something else which does not allow even the slightest occasion for doubt? Is there not a God, or whatever I may call him, who puts into me the thoughts I am now having? But why do I think this, since I myself may perhaps be the author of these thoughts? In that case am not I, at least, something? But I have just said that I have no senses and no body. This is the sticking point: what follows from this? Am I not so bound up with a body and with senses that I cannot exist without them? But I have convinced myself that there is absolutely nothing in the world, no sky, no earth, no minds, no bodies. Does it now follow that I too do not exist?
No: if I convinced myself of something then I certainly existed. But there is a deceiver of supreme power and cunning who is deliberately and constantly deceiving me. In that case I too undoubtedly exist, if he is deceiving me; and let him deceive me as much as he can, he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I think that I am something. So after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind.
Specimen Questions
1 What arguments does Descartes use to cast doubt on his previous beliefs? Is he right to claim that the proposition ‘I exist’ has a special kind of certainty?
2 What is the purpose of Descartes’s casting doubt on all of his beliefs? What is the ultimate aim behind the method of doubt?
3 We can conceive that a malicious demon has us ensnared to falsely believe that there is an external world around us. Does conceivability show that such a global illusion is indeed possible?
Suggestions for Further Reading (Including Internet Resources)
1 A general introduction to Descartes’s philosophy is J. Cottingham, Descartes (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). Also available are a number of basic introductory guides to Descartes. See, for example, J. Cottingham, How to Read Descartes (London: Granta Books, 2008); G. Southwell, A Beginner’s Guide to Descartes’ Meditations (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2007); G. Hatfield, Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Descartes (London: Routledge, 2002).
2 See also A. Kenny, Descartes (New York: Random House, 1968); B. Williams, Descartes: The Project of Pure Inquiry (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979); M. Wilson, Descartes (London: Routledge, 1978).
3 For a more detailed discussion of some of Descartes’s views on knowledge, see E. M. Curley, Descartes against the Sceptics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978) and J. Broughton, Descartes’s Method of Doubt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). A collection of essays on these and other aspects of Descartes’s philosophy is J. Cottingham (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Descartes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
4 For another collection of essays with chapters on the epistemological aspects in Descartes’ Meditations see S. Gaukroger (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Descartes’ Meditations (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006).
5 There are useful online overviews of Descartes’ epistemology in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes-epistemology/ (by L. Newman), and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy with its entry on Descartes’ scientific method, https://www.iep.utm.edu/desc-sci/ (by F. Wilson).
6 See also C. McGinn’s podcast on ‘Descartes on Innate Knowledge’ recorded for Philosophy Bites, compiled by N. Warburton, https://philosophybites.com/2013/02/colin-mcginn-on-descartes-on-innate-knowledge.html, and A. C. Grayling on Descartes’ cogito argument on the same site at https://philosophybites.com/2008/02/ac-grayling-on.html.
7 Cartesian themes of epistemic doubt and illusory realities can be seen to provide the frameworks for a number of prominent films: The Truman Show (1998), Dark City (1998), The Matrix (1999), Total Recall (1990), Paprika (2006), Stalker (2004), Moon (2009), Inception (2010) and others.
Notes
* René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy [Meditationes de prima philosophia, 1641], Meditation I and part of II. Trans. J. Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986; rev. edn 1996), pp. 12–17.
5 The Senses as the Basis of Knowledge: John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding*
One of the striking features of Descartes’s approach to knowledge was its ‘internal’ starting point. ‘I resolved one day to pursue my studies within myself’, he wrote in the Discourse; and in the above extract from the Meditations we see him carrying out the strategy of leading the mind away from the outside world, away from the external senses, and focusing on the meditator’s inner awareness of his own existence. This very private beginning may not seem a promising start for the construction of an objective system of knowledge. But what Descartes does in the subsequent Meditations is to rely on the innate ideas with which he claims the mind is furnished. Chief of these is the idea of infinite perfection, which Descartes uses as the basis for a (controversial) proof that an infinite and perfect being, God, must really exist. And having established the existence of God, he then uses the other innate ideas, especially those of mathematics, as the foundations for his new scientific system. As he put in the Discourse, ‘I noticed certain laws which God has so ordained in nature, and of which he has implanted such notions in our minds, that after adequate reflection we cannot doubt that they are exactly observed in everything that exists or occurs in the world’.
Descartes’s
