Descartes’ Second Meditation: Certainty and Existence
Second Meditation: Certainty and Existence
Second Meditation
- Conceive high hopes if I find one thing certain and indubitable, as Archimedes asked for one firm foothold to move the earth.
- I’m convinced that there is nothing in the world, neither heaven nor earth, nor body, nor spirit. Should I also be convinced that I am not? No. If I have to persuade or think something exists, no doubt because it does. If there is a trickster who deceives me, as much as I am deceived, for this very reason, I am something.
- Completion of Cartesian skepticism. Proposition necessarily true while I am speaking or conceiving in my mind: “I am, I exist.”
Descartes vs. Hume on the Existence of Reason
When Descartes states the first truth, “I think, therefore I am,” he believes that this knowledge will also guarantee that he is a thinking substance. His thesis is not simply “there is a thought” but “there is a substance that thinks.” The existence of a self, of a substance other than knowing their actions, had been considered not only undoubted by Descartes but also by Locke and Berkeley. Hume applied his critique of the idea of cause, since the existence of the self was considered by his predecessors as a result of causal inference, but as a result of an immediate intuition (“I think, therefore I am”). However, Hume’s criticism also applies to me as a reality distinct from the impressions and ideas. The existence of the self as substance, as a permanent subject of our mental acts, cannot be justified by appealing to an alleged intuition. We only have our ideas and impressions, and no impression is permanent; some happen to others without interruption. Hume explains how consciousness gives us the sense of our own personal identity by using memory. Through memory, we recognize the connection between the different impressions that occur; the error is that succession is confused with identity.
Critical points regarding the Cartesian existence of self:
- We have no insight into the thinking substance, but a continual succession of ideas.
- The intuition of an idea should lead to the conclusion that there is only an idea and not a thinker who thinks it, but we are doomed to think or express causally.
- Although it is true that the existence of an idea would require the existence of a thinker, a thinker could be different for each idea.
- We should not support the existence of a single thinker who thinks different ideas based on a memory that can be confusing sequence with identity, because only we can be sure of what is intuited in the moment.
- Moreover, even accepting the truth of the “cogito,” we could not find new truths or legitimize the validity of our reason without prior and unlawful use of it.
What am I?
One thing I think. What is one thing you think? One thing that doubts, understands, conceives, affirms, denies, wills, does not want, and also imagines and feels.
But I still believe I know and understand more distinctly some things whose existence seems doubtful, and for me to know, and I belong to those others of which I am truly convinced, and I am known and belong to my own nature, in a word, than myself. The example of a warm piece of wax allows us to discover that bodies are not known by the senses or the faculty of imagination but by the understanding that you understand. I can only find the bodies by means of reason, and the existence of reason is a necessary condition for knowledge of those bodies. On the other hand, is there something that is as real as it is true that I am and I exist, even though we were always asleep and even if you gave me to be employed full deceive industry, and why I can meet my soul before my body?
The reason clearly and distinctly conceives his own existence, and it may seem that no doubt about the existence of a reality outside – the existence of my body in particular – could be wrong. The existence of my mind is a necessary condition to safely establish the existence of my body, and also is not enough because to do so, you must show that he is wrong.