But it is not enough merely to have noticed this; I must make an effort to remember it. My habitual opinions keep coming back, and, despite my wishes, they capture my belief, which is as it were bound over to them as a result of long occupation and the law of custom. I shall never get out of the habit of confidently assenting to these opinions, so long as I suppose them to be what in fact that they are, namely highly probable opinions – opinions which, despite the fact that they are in a sense doubtful, as has just been shown, it is still much more reasonable to believe than to deny. In view of this, I think it will be a good plan to turn my will in completely the opposite direction and deceive myself, by pretending for a time that these former opinions are utterly false and imaginary. I shall do this until the weight of preconceived opinion is counterbalanced and the distorting influence of habit no longer prevents my judgement from perceiving things correctly. In the meantime, I know that no danger or error will result from my plan, and that I cannot possibly go too far in my distrustful attitude. This is because the task now in hand does not involve action but merely the acquisition of knowledge.
I will suppose therefore that not God, who is supremely good and the source of truth, but rather some malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me. I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgement. I shall consider myself as not having hands or eyes, or flesh, or blood or senses, but as falsely believing that I have all these things. I shall stubbornly and firmly persist in this meditation; and, even if it is not in my power to know any truth, I shall at least do what is in my power, that is, resolutely guard against assenting to any falsehoods, so that the deceiver, however powerful and cunning he may be, will be unable to impose 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