Descartes’ Methodical Doubt: Stages, Truth, and the Cogito

Descartes’ Methodical Doubt

Stages of Methodical Doubt

The understanding must find fundamental truths within itself, truths that are absolutely certain and beyond any doubt. The search for this starting point requires a prior task: to remove all knowledge, ideas, and beliefs that do not possess absolute certainty. We must eliminate everything that can be doubted. Hence, Descartes begins with doubt.

The first reason to doubt our knowledge is the fallibility of the senses: the senses deceive us at times. Another reason is the inability to distinguish between waking and sleeping. Dreams show us vivid worlds that we later find are not real. This might not seem to affect certain truths, like mathematics. However, there is a hypothesis that perhaps an “evil spirit” strives to mislead us. This impossible hypothesis allows us to doubt all our knowledge.

The First Truth and the Criterion of Truth

Doubt has reached its peak: everything is uncertain, which seems to lead to skepticism. However, if I am thinking, then I exist. There is a proposition that cannot be doubted because doubt implies the existence of a doubter (or thinking being), and this cannot be doubted: “I am, I exist” is the first certainty, a true statement. No god or evil genius can make me doubt this because even to deceive, there must be someone to deceive. That person can doubt what they think, but not the very fact of thinking: “Cogito ergo sum”, “I think, therefore I am.”

The cogito is a truth that arises from one’s own mind. It is the beginning and the starting point we were looking for: the first prototype of certainty and unquestionable truth. We arrive at it directly; it is not an objective truth but a subjective one.

Method

In the beginning, philosophy is the question of whose natural development is the method. The method is seen as the only possible path to truth. In short, it is within oneself (moi-même) where one must place the sure foundation for the search for truth, following reason. Descartes discovered subjectivity. He gives a unified conception of the method based on the thesis of the unity of science, which shows that all sciences are nothing more than human wisdom. In the unity of reason, it is stated that reason is by nature equal in all men. Finally, the method must be unique; indeed, reason does not need another procedure, but rather rules for its proper management and performance. Science, the ideal of universal science, was achieved only based on a unique method.

Therefore, the method will be unique and valid for all sciences. But this is not a method but the method of any reason that is based on the structure or precedes the same reason and therefore is valid for all men and all the sciences. To find the ratio method will be required and then analyze why such an analysis Descartes concludes that his activity or conduct consists only of two basic operations.